Dennis Lee
Austin,
This can be in its way the most exciting story in the book; but it will have to become that. At the moment, candidly, it both revs you up a great deal and lands on its nose. What I suggest is not taking fewer chances in it, but taking more; accepting that you’re into a new kind of writing here, and going whole hog with it. You can write this way; and it takes as much skill & craft as a traditional story does; and the result will be good enough that you can afford to take the time over it.
I wonder if you would be willing to do one rewrite first, and then let us talk over that draft? The responses I have to this story are more intuitive and apply to the whole story: there is very little point—as there was with all the other stories—to making line-by-line comments at this stage. I have two general reactions:
(1) The situation. I read the book as a series of improvisations on a very simple theme or situation. I assume that, while it isn’t intended to be laid out clearly in the first paragraph, I am supposed to get the shape of the situation fairly clearly on the way through. I don’t, though. I make out a guy, A.C., who has hung around with the artists at the Pilot 5 years ago, back there having a drink with a poetess and her husband (maybe not him?) with whom she’s breaking up, or has broken up, A.C. and she nearly made it 5 years back? And he is comparing her now with Marian, and is glad he has Marian. Right? But . . . to toss out a few of my bewilderments . . . who did he spy on the “summerstreet”? Is Marian now in Toronto? Is his memory of her on Yonge Street of a time in the recent past? . . . And generally with the white girl, what’s the context of their getting together?
I also wonder whether more of the social scene mightn’t come out fragmentarily and indirectly—about his life 5 years ago, changes for him, for the artistic scene, the Pilot, the girl. You could fill in (impressionistically) a whole panorama of a man’s life and a city’s life and a subculture’s life, just by evoking things in straight phrases.
(2) The style. This is what I want you to take seriously most of all. You can do breathtaking things here—you have already done some of them. But there is also a lot of swoopy, breathless, throw-the-pieces-up-in-the-air-and-hope, good old-fashioned faking it. Re-read it; you’ll know what I mean every time you come to it. What I conjecture happened is that you wrote this in a burst; and, since it propels a long way farther technically than your other writing, most other people’s writing (I can imagine Hugh Garner tackling this one!), it may have seemed that since you were breaking all the rules, you might as well have the full binge. But—as the best passages indicate—you’ve scrapped one set up of rules and taken up another set. I don’t know what they are in doctrinal terms; but I do know that in impulsive, lyrical writing like this it is more important than in any other kind of writing not to fake it. Because the reader is looking for the purple, or the places where giddy phrase-making is being used to sneak by without feeling through the substance of the lines; and if he finds any of that he is going to dismiss the whole thing—not just notice a little slip in the tone.
I also wonder whether the really dithyrambic tone wouldn’t be best held mostly in check till the Marian passages. They paid a little because the whole story is written at virtually the same pitch and tempo. There might be more changes, arabesques, textures on the way through within this swirling stream of consciousness—basically, beginning in several more prosaic modes and accelerating into this beautiful celebration of a woman (though—again—gone thru ruthlessly by you now from this distance).
End of lecture. This is the only story in the whole collection where I blow the whistle and bid-and-beseech you to dig back into the first principles of what you’ve written—in all the other ones you’ve already realised that so thoroughly that we’ve basically been re-arranging final details on the surface, even where they were fairly important details. But I think this is the only story that is still in the process of getting born; listening to an editor-as-midwife is both harder and more useful than to an editor-as-mosaic-polisher—listen to Graeme on the score. But this is the only story in the lot where a midwife is relevant. So PUSH!
Dennis