Review
An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir
by John Metcalf
Thomas Allen, 352 pp.
The release of a new book of non-fiction by John Metcalf should be a Canadian national holiday – there should be drunkenness, jubilation, public nudity, mariachi bands, streamers and confetti. Instead? Blissful silence!
Metcalf is important for more reasons than I can list here. Suffice it to say that Canadian literature is richer for his contributions as a writer and as an editor, and above all for his uncompromising pot-stirring and boat-rocking.
An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir contains a cornucopia of the above-mentioned, plus a dose of shit-disturbing and not a little muckraking. It's a lopsided, skew-eyed, audacious, anecdotal and often gut-bustingly funny look at the last 40 years of Canadian literary history, with detours into jazz, collecting, painting, photography, food and many revealing and frequently elegiac portraits of Canadian writers.
Much of An Aesthetic Underground is reprinted verbatim from Metcalf's books of literary criticism, which may perturb those who've read Kicking against the Pricks and Freedom from Culture – all 12 of us. The vast remainder of Canadian readers and writers finding these stories here for the first time are in for a treat.
The main thrust is that Canadians – the reading public, book reviewers and academics alike – lack the ability to judge literature adequately. Readers are subject to hype, reviewers – mostly writers themselves – don't criticize because they fear repercussion, and academics perpetuate the cycle by subscribing to a nationalist myth that necessitates the elevation of the third-rate: "If we are blind and deaf to (Morley) Callaghan's cacophonies how can we genuinely respond to Alice Munro's glories? How can students trust us or our works of reference if we describe as 'distinguished' writing that is stumblebum?"
No doubt many people will be deeply incensed by this book. A short list might include teachers, supporters of the Writer's Union, everyone living in Cold Lake and Fredericton, and most writers, publishers and readers of Canadian literature. Academic feminists will be apoplectic. But An Aesthetic Underground is necessary reading, for whether you agree with Metcalf or not (and it's hard to imagine any sane person agreeing with everything he says), he raises issues that no one with a stake in Canadian culture can afford to ignore.
The best part of the book, for me, is the last section, wherein he lays bare the mysteries of his work in editing for the Porcupine's Quill – possibly (thanks in no small part to him) the best literary press in the country – and discusses the changes in Canadian literature over the past decade and a half. Page 279 sums up the trouble with the modern publishing industry more succinctly than anything I’ve ever read. It’s too long to quote here, so I leave you, dedicated reader, to read it, and judge it, yourself.
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