The publication of Survival caused a certain flurry. Although Surfacing put me on the literary map in places like New York and London, it was Survival that put me on the rubber-chicken map in places like The Empire Club, Toronto. Canadians have traditionally been rather queasy about words such as “literature” and “art;” they would much rather talk about them than actually come to grips with them, though in defence of Canadians let me say at once that their per capita readership is very high, higher than that of the States and England. Maybe it’s businessmen I mean, rather than Canadians. They’d rather have a speech than a novel. Having written an expository work about Canadian literature, I was suddenly called upon to produce yet more expositions of my exposition. Which recalls the first Canadian joke I ever heard: the road to Heaven forks. The right branch has a sign on it that says To Heaven. The left branch has a sign that says Panel Discussion on Heaven. All the Canadians go to the left.
Survival was fun to attack. In fact, it still is; most self-respecting professors of Canlit begin their courses, I’m told, with a short ritual sneer at it. It’s true that it has no footnotes: the intended audience was not the footnote crowd, and it reached its intended audience, which was all those people whose highschool English teachers told them they weren’t studying Canadian literature because there wasn’t any. Responses to Survival are summed up in “Mathews and Misrepresentation.” “What’s So Funny” and “Canadian Monsters” contain material I would have included in Survival, had I thought of it at the time. “Canadian Monsters” also continues my interest in fantasy literature, which was to have been the subject of my temporarily unfinished PhD thesis.
This was also a period in which I was asked to review a number of books by women, and to speak and write about the same subject. I had of course reviewed books by women before, and written about women authors and female protagonists in books, but “women” had now become a subject. I began to get worried about the possibility of a new ghetto: women’s books reviewed only by women, men’s books reviewed only by men, with a corresponding split in the readership. It wasn’t what one had in mind as a desirable future for the species.
It’s in this period too that I began to get requests for reviews from publications other than Canadian ones. They too often wanted me to review women, but not always Canadian women. So a certain amount of cross-fertilization took place, and I found myself reviewing Canadians for Americans and Americans for Canadians and sometimes Canadians for English and English for Canadians…. Could this be internationalism?