(1971)
Now the young intellectual living in this country, having gone perhaps to a Wordsworth high school and a T. S. Eliot college, quite often ends up thinking he lives in a waste of surplus USA technology, a muskeg of indifference spotted with colonies of inherited, somehow stale, tradition. What our poets should be doing is to show us how to identify our society out of this depressing situation.
—James Reaney, “Editorial,” Alphabet #8.
Searchers for a Canadian identity have failed to realize that you can only have identification with something you can see or recognize. You need, if nothing else, an image in a mirror. No other country cares enough about us to give us back an image of ourselves that we can even resent. And apparently we can’t do it for ourselves, because so far our attempts to do so have resembled those of the three blind men to describe the elephant. Some of the descriptions have been worth something, but what they add up to is fragmented, indecipherable. With what are we to identify ourselves?
—Germaine Warkentin, “An Image in a Mirror,”
Alphabet #8.
All this is connected together, by the way.
—James Reaney, “Editorial,” Alphabet #16.
With the appearance this year of its combined eighteenth and nineteenth issues, Alphabet will be over, and its small but faithful audience can only mourn and collect back issues.1 While it lasted, it was perhaps the most remarkable little magazine Canada has yet produced. Many literary magazines are group or movement oriented: they publish certain people or certain styles. Others, if they have “professional” pretensions, are greyish collections of goodish writing. Alphabet was different; its editorial decisions were based not on last names or idiosyncracies of punctuation, or even on “literary” standards, but on a set of premises about literature —or rather art of any kind —and therefore about life that was in application all-inclusive.
The premises themselves were set forth in the initial issues. The first Alphabet was subtitled “A semiannual devoted to the iconography of the imagination.” Each issue was to concern itself with a “myth,” the first being Narcissus, the second the child Dionysos, the third Prometheus, and so forth. To those unfamiliar with Alphabet’s actual methods, the terms “iconography” and “myth” may suggest rigidity and a tendency to collect and categorize. But the editor’s faith in the correspondences between everyday reality (life, or what Alphabet calls “documentary”) and man-made symbolic patterns (art, or what Alphabet calls “myth”) was so strong that in practice he left interpretation and pattern-finding to the reader. He merely gathered the pieces of writing, both “literary” and “non-literary,” and other subjects (an article on Narcissus, a real-life account of what it was like to be a twin, the Tarot card of the Fool) and let the echoes speak for themselves; coincidences were there, he insisted, not because he put them there but because they occur. The “myth” provided for each issue was only a kind of key:
… Actually the same thing happens if you take the face cards out of a card deck; then put a circular piece of cardboard near them. Curves and circles appear even in the Queen of Diamonds and the Knave of Spades. But place a triangular shape close by and the eye picks up corners and angularities in even the Queen of Clubs. What every issue of Alphabet involves, then, is the placing of a definite geometric shape near some face cards.2
The reader never knew when he picked up an issue of Alphabet what would be inside. It might be anything, and the announced “myth” for the issue was not always an obvious clue. In eleven years and nineteen issues Alphabet published or mentioned, among other things, an article on Aztec poetry, a list of the Kings of England reaching back to the Old Testament, Indian rock paintings, an article on Christabel which identified Geraldine as Wordsworth, James Mclntyre the Mammoth Cheese poet, the Nihilist Spasm Band, an early review by Bill Bissett in the form of a poem, the music of the Doukhobors, schoolboy slang and hand puppetry, the Black Donnellys, and a cantata about Jonah. Academic and pop, “traditional” and “modern,” verbal and visual, “local” and “international:” Alphabet had no snobberies.
Because Reaney cheerfully acknowledged an interest in Frye, hasty codifiers stuck him in a Myth School of their own creation and accused him of the sin of “being influenced,” without pausing to consider that for an artist as original as Reaney “influence” is taking what you need because it corresponds to something already within you. Others, who preferred a glossier, more Cream-of-Wheat-like “professional” consistency of texture in their magazines, found it easy to sneer at Alphabet for being one man’s magazine (which it was), eccentric and eclectic (which it also was), and provincial, which it wasn’t. Surely it’s much more provincial to turn out second-rate copies of the art forms of another culture (what price a TV variety show with Canadian tap dancers instead of American ones), than it is to create an indigenous form, and Alphabet had something much more important than “Canadian Content;” though it was catholic in content, it was Canadian in form, in how the magazine was put together.
What follows is hypothetical generalization, but it is of such that national identities are composed. Saying that Alphabet is Canadian in form leads one also to say that there seem to be important differences between the way Canadians think—about literature, or anything—and the way Englishmen and Americans do. The English habit of mind, with its preoccupation with precedent and the system, might be called empirical; reality for it is the social hierarchy and its dominant literary forms are evaluative criticism and the social novel. It values “taste.” The American habit of mind, with its background of intricate Puritan theologizing, French Enlightenment political theory and German scholarship and its foreground of technology, is abstract and analytical; it values “technique,” and for it reality is how things work. The dominant mode of criticism for some years has been “New Criticism,” picking works of art apart into component wheels and springs; its “novel” is quite different from the English novel, which leans heavily towards comedy of manners and a dwindled George Eliot realism; the American novel, closer to the Romance, plays to a greater extent with symbolic characters and allegorical patterns. The Canadian habit of mind, for whatever reason —perhaps a history and a social geography which both seem to lack coherent shape —is synthetic. “Taste” and “technique” are both of less concern to it than is the ever-failing but ever-renewed attempt to pull all the pieces together, to discover the whole of which one can only trust one is a part. The most central Canadian literary products, then, tend to be large-scope works like the Anatomy of Criticism and The Gutenberg Galaxy which propose all-embracing systems within which any particular piece of data may be placed. Give the same poem to a model American, a model English and a model Canadian critic: the American will say “This is how it works;” the Englishman “How good, how true to Life” (or, “How boring, tasteless and trite”); the Canadian will say “This is where it fits into the entire universe.” It is in its love for synthesis that Alphabet shows itself peculiarly Canadian.
“Let us make a form out of this,” Reaney says in the Alphabet #1 Editoral. “Documentary on one side and myth on the other: Life & Art. In this form we can put anything and the magnet we have set up will arrange it for us.” The “documentary” aspects of Alphabet are as important as the “myth” ones, and equally Canadian. Canadian preoccupation with and sometimes excellence in documentaries of all kinds—film, TV, radio, poetic—is well known. Alphabet was addicted to publishing transcriptions from life: accounts of dreams, conversations overheard in buses, Curnoe’s Coke Book, a collage of letters from poets, known and unknown across the country. The documentarist’s (and Alphabet’s) stance towards such raw material, and thus towards everyday life, is that it is intrinsically meaningful but the meaning is hidden; it will only manifest itself if the observer makes the effort to connect. Give our model Englishman a hamburger and he will tell amusing anecdotes about it (his great aunt once tripped over a hamburger, hamburgers remind him of Winston Churchill); the American will make it into a symbol by encasing it in plastic or sculpting it in plaster. The Canadian will be puzzled by it. For a while he will say nothing. Then he will say: “I don’t know what this hamburger means or what it’s doing in this particular place—where is this, anyway?—but if I concentrate on it long enough the meaning of the hamburger, which is not in the hamburger exactly, nor in the hamburger’s history, nor in the mind of the onlooker, but in the exchange between the observing and the observed —the meaning of the hamburger will reveal itself to me.” The Canadian, one notes, is less sure of himself, and more verbose about it than the other two, but he is also more interested in the actual hamburger.
Such theories, like all theories, are questionable, but the joys and graces of Alphabet, luckily, are not: its variety, its enthusiasms, the innocent delight it took in almost everything. Above all, one is amazed by its uncanny ability to anticipate, sometimes by five or ten years, trends which will later become fashionable, Canadian cultural nationalism among them. “Who would have thought seven years ago,” says Reaney in Alphabet #14 (1967) “that pop culture would catch up to Alphabet?”
The reasons for Alphabet’s demise are partly personal —“In ten years,” comments Reaney, “you say what you have to say” —and partly financial. The first ten issues were handset by the editor who taught himself typesetting for this purpose; the last five needed grants to help pay the spiralling printing costs. But it’s ironic that Alphabet, never in any way commercial, should fold just when a potential market for it is appearing in the form of large Canadian Literature classes at universities. If every serious student of Canlit acquires (as he should) a set, Alphabet, like beavers and outlaws, may soon be worth more dead than alive. Searchers for the great Canadian identity might do well to divert time from studying what also occurs here, like Ford motor cars, and pay some attention to what, like Alphabet, occurs only here. Alphabet’s light is done; we can only hope that someone else with an equally powerful third eye, coupled with the desire to start a little magazine, will happen along soon.
NOTES
1 Back issues and facsimiles: Walter Johnson Reprint Company, 111 Fifth Avenue, New York 10003, New York, U.S.A.