(1971)
Washington questioner: An English writer who recently moved to the States said England was very nice, very calm, but he felt he had to leave England in order to live through the agonies in the United States… Do you feel you ought to leave Canada for the same reasons?
Self: We have a few agonies of our own at the moment.
Time’s man in London: Would you say there was anything, any dimension, growing up as a Canadian gave you that you wouldn’t have got, say, growing up in the United States?
Self: I guess one of the main things is that south of you you have Mexico and south of us we have you.
–October, 1970.
“So Robert Fulford has finally come round,” I said, putting down the recent copy of Saturday Night. “It took him long enough.”
“What do you mean?” asked my young friend. “He was one of the first to get the New Nationalism going.”
“That’s not what he says,” I replied, “and I remember those early Star columns, the ones that assumed everyone knew the Yanks always did it better.”
There followed a heated argument concerning the merits and demerits of the Fulford psyche. What I was thinking about, though, was what it had been like for me, what I and my so-called generation had been up to when Fulford was grooving on imported jazz. Were we so much better? Did I even have a generation? I doubted it through high school and university, where most of my contemporaries wanted nothing more from life than to be engineers or chartered accountants if male or married to them if female. But as I tally up now the writers of roughly my own age, I realize that in contrast to many members of the “generations” before them who sprinted for London or New York as soon as they could, convinced they could never create anything of value in dull, restrictive Canada (see Mordecai Richler, passim), all of them have either remained in Canada or returned to it, not from necessity but by choice. When they leave now it’s not because they find Canada too bland; it’s because they find it overstimulating and they need a rest.
Something changed, then, during the early 1960s. Canada ceased to be a kind of limbo you were stuck in if unlucky or not smart enough and became a real place. Whatever worked the change, it had little to do with the official educational experience, if mine was any example. In public school I remember singing Rule Britannia and drawing pictures of the Union Jack under the eyes of teachers who still believed in the Empire; but they wore bloomers in winter, they were a dying race. The truth about the universe was contained in comic books traded and re-traded till their covers fell off: Batman, Blackhawk, The Human Torch, Plastic Man, Captain Marvel. We knew these comic books were American, because occasionally a grey and white Canadian imitation of inferior quality would turn up. Canada for us was not-America, the place where popsicle bag offers didn’t apply and everything was ten cents extra; the comics were news bulletins of the action going on across the border which we could watch but not join.
In school, under the inaccurate heading of Social Studies, we were learning the Kings of England and the Explorers. The Kings were fun because they were red, blue and purple, but the Explorers, once they hit Canada and got into the woods, were tedious: they were mostly brown, with green trees or white snow. There was The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, of course, but whichever way you cut it Wolfe came off as sneaky and Montcalm as stupid; none of us could get too worked up over their deaths.
By the time we reached high school it was the mid-1950s. America came to us in the form of Life magazine and seemed to be populated by drum majorettes and spaniels. McCarthy was down there, it was true, but he wasn’t real to us: he and his caricature in Pogo were identical. Indoors we studied the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, Mediaeval Europe, the Elizabethan Age, the American Civil War. One year we got around to Canada and touched on such engrossing subjects as Wheat, The Beaver and Transportation Routes. The exciting parts were the World Wars, the most memorable experience a propaganda film about Fascism made to be shown to U.S. forces. We emerged knowing quite a lot about Pyramids, Henry VIII, Hitler, serfs, Winston Churchill, the Cotton Gin, and F. D. R.; something about The Beaver; very little about Louis Riel, W. L. Mackenzie and Quebec, except that they all lost; and not much about Ontario except The Family Compact, which I visualized as a large bowl of face powder, and the fact that copper refining produces slag, which I knew already.
Of the things I later discovered I wanted to know we were told next to nothing. Among these were the disadvantages of being a colony, political or economic, and the even greater disadvantages of being an Indian. On the cultural end, poetry was at first chiefly narrative; later it became chiefly nineteenth century. The general impression was that to be a poet you had to be English and dead. You could also be American and dead but this was less frequent. There was, to be sure, E. J. Pratt, who was Canadian and at the time still alive, but I despaired of ever being able to write long poems about shipwrecks; consequently my first poems all sounded like Byron or (even less happily) Edgar Allan Poe. Novels by Canadians were almost unheard of, for once a faithful reflection on the part of the high school curriculum of conditions in the outside world.
When I reached college I found out that these things had been kept from me. Again, the revelation did not take place through official channels: I was Specializing (you still did, then) and somehow there wasn’t any room in Eng. Lang and Lit. for Canadian Literature. But there was a small Periodicals Room in the library, and after I had stumbled upon it I spent many arcane hours reverently grubbying the pages of the handful of Little Magazines then in existence: Fiddlehead, Queen’s Quarterly, Delta and Canadian Forum, and the radiant Tamarack Review. The awe in which I held these oracles may seem strange, but they were the only ones. However, I did not think of them as especially “Canadian”: only as more accessible to me than their English or American counterparts. This was true also of the individual poets they led me to read: Reaney, Page, Macpherson, Avison, Klein, Mandel, Souster. It was not the Canadianness but the fact that actual published books were possible, here and now or rather there and then, that was exhilarating.
It wasn’t until I went as a graduate student to the United States that I started thinking much about Canada at all. Before, it was just an unexamined condition, like air; one lived in it but paid no attention to it. Suddenly, though, America was proving to be not what I had thought. It wasn’t full of Supermen, drum majorettes or even kindly F. D. R.’s, and I and the other Canadians that soon gathered in tiny exiled groups found ourselves engaged in an unhappy scramble for our own identities. Our background had given us such negligible amounts of help that we were often absurd in our search for differences. “Their subways are messier,” we would report to one another; “They call back bacon ’Canadian Bacon.’” One of us, returning from the men’s washroom, confided in the furtive tone of an espionage agent, “They have dirtier graffitti.” We could move amongst them, questioning, examining, listening in, mistaken for one of Them unless we ourselves made the disclosure, in which case their reaction was good-natured (we were no threat): “I’ve always thought of Canada as, I mean, sort of a grey country.” (Americans said, “I mean,” Canadians said, “you know;” though that too has changed.)
Our final, horrible discovery was that they thought differently. They weren’t groping for their identities; they had gone through all that, I found, back in the post-revolutionary decades, with symptoms very much like ours —the short-run, little-read magazines, the petty literary squabbles, the adulation of foreign writers, the conflict between “native” and “cosmopolitan” schools, the worry over cultural imperialism (don’t buy British fashions, why is there no great American writer, etc.). But they had identity now with a vengeance; it caused its own problems. My roommate was studying art history; she was terrified to learn that she was expected to have some knowledge of Europe and the Renaissance. Although her education had provided her with a ponderous amount of detail concerning her home state and a thorough grounding in American history at large, she had only the sketchiest notions about any of the rest of the world, past or present. Being from the South, she was somewhat atypical; but still, par for the high school course for Them was one year of American history, one year of World history which went swiftly from Mesopotamia to now, hitting the high points, and two years of “Civics” or “Citizenship:” local government and How To Be An American, though in practice it sometimes deteriorated into visits to the waterworks. “They” had been taught that they were the centre of the universe, a huge, healthy apple pie, with other countries and cultures sprinkled round the outside, like raisins. “We” on the other hand had been taught that we were one of the raisins, in fact, the raisin, and that the other parts of the universe were invariably larger and more interesting than we were. A distortion of the truth in both cases, let us hope.
There were several disturbing corollaries. One was that we knew more about them, much more, than they knew about us; another was that they knew a lot more about themselves than we knew about ourselves. Another, related to our growing consciousness of economic domination, was that we had let ourselves come under the control of a people who neither knew nor cared to know anything about us. The most disturbing of all was the realization that they were blundering around in the rest of the world with the same power, the same staggering lack of knowledge and the same lack of concern: the best thing for the raisins, in their opinion, was to be absorbed into the apple pie.
It’s of interest that many of the outspoken Canadian nationalists of the moment have done time, as it were, in the States. But a lot of those who went south to study never returned. In my second year I was contacted by an acquaintance then attending the Harvard Business School. (In Canada he had prided himself on being a right-wing conservative; to his dismay, he now found himself branded as a Socialist Pinko.) At the Business School there was an institution known as The Canadian Club; it threw parties at which amounts of Canadian Club mixed with Canada Dry were consumed and, on good nights, record players were hurled from the windows. To one of these parties I was duly taken. Mistaken by everyone for a nurse —they all went out with nurses —I quizzed and eavesdropped my way through the evening. What I wanted to find out was what they were going to do about it; they were the ones with the economic know-how. But the big topic was whether or not to “go back:” most of them wanted to stay in the States, where they could make more money. A few thought of going to Alberta, where there was money in oil. The only one displaying much patriotism was a short red-head from Newfoundland who kept trying to sing the Newfoundland National Anthem.
Towards the end, when most of the bottles of Canadian Club were gone, one of the members wobbled over to the record player, put on The Star Spangled Banner, and turned the volume up full blast. This roused the latent chauvinism in several of the onlookers. They tried to remove the record, but he kept replacing it, sadly, doggedly. Finally one of them said, “Cut that out, you bloody Yank.” This made him angry. “I’m not a Yank, I’m a Canadian!” he shouted, several times. Then he started the record over again from the beginning.
What was he trying to tell us? Probably nothing; or maybe that you can’t win, the Yanks do it better, and you have to admit The Star Spangled Banner is more successful as a piece of music—I mean, you know, all provincialism aside and on strictly objective cultural terms—than O Canada, now, don’t you? Pace my high school history courses; those early Fulford columns were not written by a villain but by a symptom. It was our own choices, our own judgements, that were defeating us.