SOURCE: “John Metcalf,” in Canadian Writers and Their Works, edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley, ECW Press, 1985, pp. 155–207.

[In the following excerpt, Rollins surveys the critical reception to Metcalf's fiction and the defining characteristics of his work.]

Metcalf has expressed annoyance at attempts to artificially ascribe Canadian influences to his work:

Writing is an international business. There is no such thing as a national literature. … The influences are from whoever is good and whoever is being innovative anywhere. No culture is indigenous. The English language is not bound by national frontiers. I think that most Canadian criticism is just an unfounded and nonsensical extension of Canadian nationalism.¹

Metcalf and Clark Blaise, in an introduction clearly designed in anticipation of some hostile responses to their editorial choices for a collection of short stories entitled Here and Now (1977), stated:

There is no intrinsic reason why Canadian literature cannot satisfy our literary aspirations. If the literature is mature, it will provide all the references Canadians need to know the world, and, incidentally, all the images and personalities the world needs to understand Canada.

If it is mature. … For fiction-writers, there is no … domestic tradition. We need foreign models … foreign standards. That is the reason we have not sought to define a tradition. … We have not defined a literature because the literature is still defining itself.²

The models which influenced Metcalf are clear. He has said that in his early work he was probably trying to employ the imagistic technique of “a five-line H. D. lyric transferred to a 3000-word story but muddied by Hemingway mannerisms and totally contradicted by gobs of Dylan Thomas.”³ The original version of Metcalf's first written and first published story, “Early Morning Rabbits,” was “conceived as a pure Dylan Thomas short story” (Cameron, p. 411). After a number of years and many revisions, the story was published again, trimmed of many of its adjectives and adverbs, but Metcalf still found it “too lush” for his later taste (Cameron, p. 411).

Metcalf has stated that Cyril Connolly is “one critic who has influenced [him] more than anybody else, and not only influenced but also directly helped in [his] own writing and molded [his] taste” (Cameron, p. 407). Metcalf believes that it was not until he was in his late twenties, when he first read the criticism of Connolly, that he really understood how mannered and artificial Hemingway was in his use of language and in his structure. In a piece of his own criticism, a review of a story collection by Norman Levine, Metcalf expressed his rejection of much of the Hemingway influence when he complained that Levine “was trapped in a delicate but out-moded form”: “One is always aware of Hemingway's looming bulk and sadly aware that such stories in 1971 are a cliché; the pattern of their rhetoric is predictable. I know; I've written them myself.”⁴

Katherine Mansfield's influence led Metcalf “in the direction of being able to escape from plot” (Cameron, p. 411), but it is the early Joyce who set an enduring standard. Metcalf has stated:

The stories that I want to write I think of as chamber music and “high art” in the sense that the leftist critics use the term. I want to write elitist art. It's the austere that appeals to me more than anything else in art. I think that some, not all, of the stories in Dubliners are austere, cold, sculpted pieces of work that are brilliant and beautiful. That kind of austerity is what I'm aiming for.

(Cameron, pp. 411–12)

For Metcalf himself, however, prolonged or unrelieved exposure to such austerity is not possible. He may watch Bergman or Fellini films and listen to Bach's cello suites or Bessie Smith's blues out of a sense of both duty and appreciation, but it is not high art which he loves emotionally. He says that the type of art which nourishes him is found in the stories of W. W. Jacobs and H. E. Bates and in the comic stories of Kipling, which are “so wonderfully vulgar and funny that I could never write them” (Cameron, p. 412). With Hugh Hood, Metcalf shares a love of P. G. Wodehouse—“one of the world's great writers, although I could never write his inanities because there is a more somber side to my nature, but if I could cut loose with language, Wodehouse is the man that I would admire more than any other” (Cameron, p. 412). Metcalf is an avid reader of detective thrillers and especially admires the work of Raymond Chandler.

He claims to have only recently realized “how large a part radio and the spoken word played in forming the way [he] write[s] and wish[es] to write” (KAP, p. 68). From listening to two of his father's “full-blown, non-conformist” sermons every Sunday, he, even as a small child, “developed a grasp of rhetorical structures” (KAP, p. 68). His radio listening began with BBC children's programs and later turned to “all the fine comedy programmes which culminated in the most entrancing radio programme ever produced—The Goon Show. The Goons created worlds in which I have never ceased to believe …” (KAP, p. 69). The influence of the rough-and-ready surrealism of the English music-hall performers and their descendants can be found in much of Metcalf's writing. Other examples of radio and stage comedians in “the great tradition of low farce” to whom he was devoted were Frankie Howerd, Benny Hill, Jimmy Edwards, and Tony Hancock. That the affection is still alive can be seen in the use of a line from a Howerd routine “pinched” for General Ludd (KAP, p. 69).

Metcalf's writing of dialogue, which some critics have admired for its “naturalness,” is actually achieved through a highly skilled and literary manipulation which reflects his acknowledged debt to “P. G. [Wodehouse], Firbank, Waugh and Amis” (KAP, p. 67). Metcalf often uses dialogue rather than description to convey character and move action forward, employing a technique which can be traced back through Anthony Powell and Waugh to Firbank.

The influence of Amis can be detected in The Lady Who Sold Furniture and is undisguised in Going Down Slow. But the comedy in Metcalf's first novel was already darker than that in Lucky Jim, and in a 1979 interview he indicated a direction in which he has been developing for the last decade:

I want to move into a blacker kind of humour, a more farcical kind of humour, because I think the times are demanding it. Stylistically speaking, my favourite writer in the world in [sic] Evelyn Waugh. … I want to try and write, if I am spared, a few sentences, a few scenes as viciously funny as those that Evelyn Waugh wrote. I also happen to think, of course, that funny books are the most serious ones that there are.⁵

Because of his work as an editor of contemporary Canadian writing, Metcalf is unusually familiar with the work of both the established and newer writers in this country, and he has expressed an admiration for many of them; however, the only Canadian writers he has acknowledged as influences on his own work were his fellow members of the “Montreal Story Tellers.” Metcalf's early attempts at Imagism under the often astringent doctrines of Pound and T. E. Hulme had, by his own account, “induced literary constipation” (KAP, p. 79). Hugh Hood's influence had the dual effect of reassuring Metcalf “of the respectability of writing openly about a moral world—and of writing openly” (KAP, p. 78). Hood provided not a stylistic model but proof that relaxation in style was possible while maintaining artistic integrity. The “constructional and rhetorical ideas” that Clark Blaise presented “haven't worked themselves out in open or obvious ways,” but Metcalf cites stories like “The Teeth of My Father,” Private Parts: A Memoir, and the recent “The Eastmill Reception Centre” as having grown from seeds planted by Blaise in earth prepared by Ray Smith (KAP, p. 79). “… the first-person voice that speaks in [these stories] owes much to Hugh. And much in them is also my own. And Waugh's. And Roger Longrigg's. And Richard Yates's. … Influence does not work in obvious ways and it's probably impossible to trace unless one person has consciously copied another” (KAP, p. 79). Close personal relationships with other serious writers were important for Metcalf during the Montreal Story Tellers period (1971–76) because it coincided with the last phase of his apprenticeship. The full expression of the effects of this period on Metcalf's writing is probably yet to appear.

The first critical notice of Metcalf's work appeared in Saturday Night, where he was heralded as “a discovery” for his contribution to New Canadian Writing, 1969. The reviewer declared Metcalf “as brilliant a master of the short story form as Maugham or Chekhov or Erskine Caldwell” and stated that of all the stories published in the two-year history of the New Canadian Writing Series, “… none … was as gem-like as any of Metcalf's.”⁶ The handful of other reviewers were considerably more cautious; however, all but one⁷ were markedly enthusiastic. Most observed that while Metcalf's stories were traditional, they were superior examples of the genre in their “cogency” and careful control. Kent Thompson judged Metcalf “the best writer in the book” and “The Estuary,” which had won Metcalf the 1969 University of Western Ontario President's Medal for fiction, the best story. In praising Metcalf's attention to the “craft” of short-story writing, Thompson used what has become a catchword in Metcalf criticism.⁸

Metcalf's first book, The Lady Who Sold Furniture (1970), was very positively received but with varying degrees of perception. Comments on Metcalf's “Englishness,” “gift for characterization,”⁹ “delicate facility,”¹⁰ “neat, polished, controlled prose,” and “disciplined handling of the short story form”¹¹ were typical. Kent Thompson found The Lady Who Sold Furniture the “most impressive piece of work in the collection” but allowed that Metcalf's short stories “come by way of James Joyce and Chekhov, and … employ the familiar Joycean device of the epiphany.”¹² Leo Simpson saw “a writer of admirable talent … making the crossing from the literary short story—the form in a pure state, but perhaps insulated, and certainly a mild test of a writer's power and range—to the tough disciplines, and complexities, of mature work.”¹³

Only five of over thirty reviews of Going Down Slow (1972) were negative, and over half were highly positive. Patricia Morley published essentially the same review in Canadian Literature, the Ottawa Journal, and Queen's Quarterly;¹⁴ the spelling of Metcalf's name was consistently correct in the last publication. If Isaac Bickerstaff had paid as much attention to accurate detail in his reading of the novel as he did to the amusing cartoon he drew for Books in Canada, his laudatory review would have been less slipshod.¹⁵ A Montreal reviewer stated that “once shed of a sort of sophomoric wit, not to mention a fixation with gutter expletives, the author should be able to produce fiction of a challenging character.”¹⁶

Many critics noted echoes of Lucky Jim in Metcalf's novel, but while Kenneth Gibson's cautionary review complained that Metcalf paid up his debts to Amis “so honestly that one winces,”¹⁷ Robert Weaver pointed out that a comparison with the early novels by Amis, John Wain, and John Braine was not entirely fair, for Going Down Slow was “more sophisticated and more contemporary than their books were, even when they seemed to be bringing something modern into postwar English fiction.”¹⁸

“It's unusual to find a Canadian novel that manages to be trenchantly funny while making a devastating attack on a prominent element of our social structure. But Going Down Slow, a highly polished first novel … does just that,” wrote William French.¹⁹ Douglas Barbour agreed that it was “a very funny, genuinely comic novel” and placed it within the picaresque tradition.²⁰ J. R. Leitold also thought that the novel's episodic structure was effective and suitable; he saw an angry and mordant satire that contained “a brief but subtle scrutiny of compromise and betrayal.”²¹ David Helwig, in his wide-ranging and penetrating examination, found that “a major part of John Metcalf's inspiration is an angry dislike of much of what touches him.”²²

Aside from the usual references to Metcalf's fine craftsmanship, the most commonly used word to describe the collection of eight short stories entitled The Teeth of My Father (1975) was “disappointing,” with reviews in this vein usually lamenting Metcalf's evident lack of development²³ and failure “to deliver the material he once promised to produce.”²⁴ Kerry McSweeney found “a distinct amount of sentimentality in the presentation of the central male characters” as opposed to the depiction of other characters in the stories.²⁵ Brian Vintcent found “little evidence that [Metcalf] has come to terms with his anger” and sensed “a watershed in his writing career” in that he had not yet “extract[ed] any really significant and integrated meaning” from the “bits and pieces of experience” he had so well recorded;²⁶ however, Anthony Brennan welcomed Metcalf's “response to the imperfect world” and felt that, since perfection did not seem imminent, “… we can look forward to many years of Metcalf's brilliant observations of particular life.”²⁷

“Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones” was most often hailed as a triumph and the best piece in the collection—it “deserves anthologized immortality … [as] a definitive statement of both the artist's mentality and human isolation.”²⁸ Opinion was widely divided on the merits of the other stories. Barry Cameron provided, in both an extended study and its condensed version, a detailed examination of “a thematic and stylistic departure for Metcalf” in five stories dealing with different aspects of “the relationship between the artist and society or the relationship between the artist's execution or performance of his craft and his own personal life.”²⁹ In his longer essay, Cameron provided a close scrutiny of the sequence to support his contention that Metcalf's stories are “an approximation of poetry.”³⁰

The novella Private Parts: A Memoir, which was awarded the Canadian Fiction Magazine's “Annual Contributor's Prize” for 1977, was published in Girl in Gingham (1978) together with the title piece, also previously published. Although critics of the book were divided over the relative merits of the two novellas, praise was generally very high with only two or three totally negative reviews. Wayne Grady used an out-of-context quote from a Books in Canada interview to equate Metcalf with the narrator of Private Parts, who, according to Grady, exchanged the boyhood “joys and sorrows of self abuse … for the joys and sorrows of being a minor writer.” Having conjured Metcalf's work as literary masturbation, Grady wrote of Girl in Gingham, “Since neither story is really about anything of consequence (an occupational hazard among urban writers) their interest relies mainly on their style…” a style which Grady implied pandered to the debased values of “the times.”³¹

Comparisons were frequently made between Private Parts and Portnoy's Complaint with a reviewer in Canadian Literature going so far as to say the novella “uses the techniques of Jewish humour to explore the sexual difficulties of a Gentile world.”³² John Mills judged the piece far superior to Roth's novel: “… its comedy is in part created by a spare, understated, classical style beyond Roth.”³³ In his analysis, Robert Lecker wrote that “by the end of the story we realize that the ‘private parts’ referred to are not only sexual but spiritual, social, and aesthetic. …”³⁴ Many reviewers, such as William French³⁵ and Ken Adachi,³⁶ differed with Lecker's favourable assessment of the skill with which Metcalf managed the conclusion of Girl in Gingham, while joining in the general approbation of Metcalf's comic and narrative skills. Lee Briscoe Thompson wrote an important critique of Girl in Gingham,³⁷ and, for a “Special John Metcalf Section” published in The Fiddlehead, Barry Cameron offered “some directions for the way in which [he thought the novella] Girl in Gingham should be read.”³⁸ Metcalf's own “Notes on Writing a Story” in the same issue is not only a guide to the opening paragraphs of Private Parts but a condensed handbook on an approach to the reading of all Metcalf's work and by extension the work of any writer whose artistic concern is not “in raw timber but in carpentry.”³⁹

Metcalf's latest book of fiction, the satirical novel General Ludd (1980), has provoked more extreme division among the reviewers than any of his previous works, with some of the negative responses degenerating into personal attack on Metcalf himself. Cary Fagan moved from a survey of what were taken to be a number of the novel's weaknesses to an emotional objection to the use of a crippled Jew as “the central metaphor for all that [the narrator] sees as wrong in our society.”⁴⁰ In a less personal expression of rampant special interest, a reviewer in Quill & Quire found it “unfortunate” that Metcalf's “ferocious cynicism suggest[ed] a distorted vision that almost destroys credibility,” since Metcalf's creation “clarifies some serious problems in Canadian publishing.”⁴¹ J. L. Granatstein's widely syndicated review stated that much of the success of this “splendid novel” was based on “Metcalf's rage at the ideology of Canadian life.”⁴² Notwithstanding his feeling that Metcalf's anger got the better of him at the novel's end, William French said that “Canadians should feel privileged to be scourged by such a talented scourge-master.”⁴³ A wider perspective was evident in one of the few non-Canadian assessments of Metcalf's work: “Despite its bitterness, General Ludd hits the mark, with its comic, dramatic, stylistic, and philosophical felicities—especially for those who share John Metcalf's cultural views and Luddite tendencies.”⁴⁴

John Metcalf has written that for him stories begin with the memory of images from his past or with particular words or phrases which seem to stick in his mind. Through a process which he regards as “basically magical,” details gradually accumulate until he recognizes a general pattern; it is only then that he attempts to consciously manipulate the material which was “given” to him.⁴⁵ The success of the final work of art depends on his ability to capture in words his mental “pictures” and organize them into a meaningful pattern. Metcalf's position is that his writing attempts emotional autobiography rather than the faithful recording of actual events from his own life under the guise of fiction. He has cautioned readers that “to search for ‘autobiography’ is to be anti-literature; it is to avoid confrontation with the reality of the imagined world; it is to ignore the form, shape and purpose of the composed work in front of you” (“Author's Commentary,” p. 201). The impulses which move him to write are his “reactions to being alive. Anger, pleasure, the urge to record things before they are lost, the urge to celebrate, the desire to chart where [he has] been” (“Author's Commentary,” p. 199). Clearly the distinction and the interplay between fact and “the reality of the imagined world” are subtle and complex. By deliberately restricting most of his artistic exploration to his own interior landscape, Metcalf has defined one of his major tasks as a writer: to distance himself emotionally from his material while moving the reader to feel what he once felt. His past must be dispassionately examined and understood before being transmuted into an artistic expression which conveys the intensity of immediate experience. It is through the exercise of a highly developed technique that Metcalf attempts to mould his material to his artistic purpose.

Metcalf's early admiration of the Imagist poets and their principles established the base from which all his work has developed. His account of how his stories begin implies a natural affinity for the Imagist approach. Metcalf's concern for describing mental pictures and for writing prose that is “a progression, an accumulation, and a juxtaposition of images—a flow of imagery basically” (Cameron, p. 403)—reflects a regard for both the “ideogrammatic” method, which Ezra Pound adapted from his understanding of Chinese written characters and ancient oriental poetry, and the poetic principles of T. E. Hulme. Through the artistic realization of externals, the Imagists sought to express the modern sensibility as it experienced the commonplaces of life. The aim of their technique was to capture the essence of actual life. Abstract ideas were to be expressed only by the careful juxtaposition of concrete images, representations of particulars; if meaning emerged, it resulted from the accumulated and accurate rendering of particular objects and particular life.

Pound spoke for the Imagist group when he decreed: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase …” 4. To conform to the “‘Doctrine of the Image.’”⁴⁶ For Pound an image was “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”⁴⁷ Metcalf's rejection of abstraction (in an interview he echoed the cry “No ideas but in things” [Cameron, p. 422]), the precision and economy of his prose, and his sensitivity to the sound and rhythmic flow as well as the meaning of words illustrate the degree to which his practice squares with Imagist theory.

Language behaves differently in prose than it does in poetry; because Metcalf is a writer of prose who sees his mode of expression as primarily poetic, he must deal with these differences. If prose is a means whose end is the communication of meaning or idea, Metcalf attempts to shift the emphasis so that the selection of words, the manipulation of language, and the fusing of meaning and object become ends in themselves. Prose conventionally follows the order of logic; Metcalf's method is more directed to the isolation and illumination of moments, scenes, and episodes through the use of precise language and telling detail. His narrative frequently develops through the association of a series of “cinematic images” (“Author's Commentary,” p. 202) and the use of montage. The result is a forward movement without the obvious use of connective material between the elements. While symbols may emerge from the separate images, it is the juxtaposition of these elements which implies much of the psychological and emotional significance of Metcalf's work.

His early stories also evinced a strong Dylan Thomas influence, the most profound and lasting aspect of which has been in the matter of theme. Most of Metcalf's writing can be divided into four broad, but not mutually exclusive, thematic categories. As his oeuvre grows, the individual works can be seen as parts of a coherent and developing pattern of vision and expression.

Thomas' influence can be clearly seen in the celebrations of childhood and nature and the laments for lost youth and innocence.

Explorations of human isolation and loneliness often reveal the sadness of seemingly insurmountable barriers to communication. Differences in age, race, class, education, and sensibility can shut people off from one another as can, paradoxically, the artist's dedication to his craft. Associated themes are the damaging effects of Puritanism (usually linked to a mother figure), failed love, and the loss of a child.

Authoritarianism in modern society is seen to be a threat to personal freedom, and it is the individual's moral responsibility to resist absolutely. Given present conditions, anarchistic and subversive personal opposition is the best course open. Failure to meet the challenge, through compromise or acquiescence, results in the betrayal of self and others, and spiritual death.

The tyranny of middle-class values and soft-headed liberalism have resulted in the eschewing of excellence and the mindless elevation of the third-rate. Governed by expedience and profit, contemporary life is mechanistic and shoddy. It is inimical to art and artists and generally antihuman.

The first story that Metcalf ever wrote, “Early Morning Rabbits,” was among his first eight stories published in Prism International. It became one of a series written over a number of years dealing with “youths and children and the process of growing up” (“Author's Commentary,” p. 199). The central character's progress from dream to reality, illusion to disillusion, is commonplace, but Metcalf's control of mood and pacing is impressive, especially for an inexperienced writer. The creation of strong sensory detail underlines the boy's keen anticipation as he prepares to hunt rabbits and effectively conveys his feelings of revulsion at the ugliness and pain which results.

The boy expresses his identification with his uncle and his yearning for manhood by stabbing sacks of grain with his uncle's pig-slaughtering knife, but when he imagines his uncle killing the pig in the yard, he puts the knife back “because he fe[els] wrong.”⁴⁸ This ambivalence is further revealed in the twinges of guilt the boy experiences after smashing a frightening (and phallic) eel into a pulp. Despite his emotional reaction to the death of animals, the boy is coldly deliberate in his preparations for the rabbit hunt. He ensures that he has a special knife “for skinning things,” “string for tying through the legs to make them easier to carry,” and “newspapers on the bottom of the bag to prevent blood from staining the canvas.”⁴⁹ This careful orchestration of incident and detail prepares for the overwhelming horror and guilt the boy feels at the story's conclusion.

Metcalf reworked “Early Morning Rabbits” some twenty times between 1964 and 1970 and claimed to have rewritten it “every year as a sort of test-piece … to see how clean [he] could get.” Although not satisfied with the 1970 version, he decided to publish it for “almost sentimental reasons and leave it at that”⁵⁰ in his first book, The Lady Who Sold Furniture.

A comparison of the two versions is instructive. Part of the development away from the more overt Dylan Thomas influence was Metcalf's cutting down of “all the lush verbiage … all the adjectives and adverbs that [he] used to plaster everything with.”⁵¹ The revised version reflects a growing confidence and control in allowing fewer or more particular words to convey the intent. Figurative and clichéd language is trimmed; point of view is used more effectively.

Metcalf's usual practice in writing stories of childhood, unlike that of Margaret Laurence or Alice Munro, requires the reader to supply most of the ironic perception. “Early Morning Rabbits” is not a story told by an adult viewing events in retrospect but one told by an omniscient voice which approximates the child's as closely as possible, shifting almost imperceptibly from time to time to provide, as in the story's third-to-last paragraph, the objective context the work demands:

David stood staring. The seeping eye seemed to grow, spreading in a viscous pool, blotting out the fringe of trees and the stone wall and the crooked hawthorn tree, growing in its wounded brownness till it filled the world.⁵²

The world being described is both inside and outside the boy's consciousness. The reader is taken from an external view in the first sentence into the boy's mind in the second. But while the reaction to the situation is highly subjective, the vocabulary (e.g., “viscous”) and figurative constructions (e.g., “wounded brownness”) are beyond the boy. The pain of the moment, which for the boy “filled the world,” is subtly placed within a larger context for the reader. Other aspects of the revision also indicate the direction of much of Metcalf's development. As in most of his work, physical description is spare, characterization being achieved mainly through dialogue and action. The added richness in characterization and implication found in the revision is achieved despite the cutting of the story's original length by about a tenth. While the order of events remains essentially unchanged, an improved control of pacing and emphasis is accomplished by moving sentences within paragraphs and by dividing long paragraphs into shorter ones at the points of most tension and excitement. Although about a dozen words longer in total, the last three paragraphs of the original version become seven much shorter paragraphs, which gradually sharpen to the two one-sentence paragraphs that end the story on its point of climax:

The squealing, the sound of chalk on board or scraping fingernails.

And the running, running legs of the still body.

(LWSF, p.110)

The poetry of the lines concisely conveys both physical sensation and emotional response through the use of metaphor, onomatopoeia, and the repetition of harsh sibilants—“squealing … scraping”—and the apparent oxymoron—“running legs … still body.” The lines paraphrase Blake's “Each outcry of the hunted hare / A fibre from the brain does tear”; they underline an aspect of the story's theme, Metcalf's belief that “we are a part of the land and its animals—the quality of our relationship is the touchstone of our state of grace” (“Author's Commentary,” p. 202).

Two other stories published in Prism, “The Happiest Days” and “A Process of Time,” became the first of Metcalf's work to appear in book form when they were reprinted in Modern Canadian Stories. Taken together the two stories contain in embryo many of the thematic concerns and technical devices which are found throughout Metcalf's later work. Both stories deal with teachers at odds with the realities of their profession.

In “The Happiest Days,” a teacher who is alienated from his students and his colleagues daydreams regretfully about his lost youth and indulges in a masochistic fantasy with homosexual overtones. Told in the first person, the story is flawed by the clash of adopted and incompatible mannerisms; however, the many shifts of narrative focus from present to past to predictable future, from reality to imagination and fantasy, are smoothly handled and effective. The masterful control of an often complicated narrative focus is one of the hallmarks of Metcalf's narrative technique; it is well demonstrated in its early stage of development both here and in the companion story, “A Process of Time.”

While the narrator of “The Happiest Days” yearns for the vanished ideal of Plato's Academy, Mr. Adams, the narrator of “A Process of Time,” is bored with trying to teach poetry to unruly and uninterested students, most of whom would never “reach anything more complicated than ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’”⁵³ Adams finds a kindred spirit in Tony, an intelligent and creative student who pursues his own interests and ignores most of what the school requires of him. When “the Gnome” (the principal) pays one of his terrorizing visits to Adams' class, the teacher at first tries to protect Tony and the rest of the class from the Gnome's bullying, but when his own position is endangered, Adams betrays Tony, leading to his final expulsion from an already worm-eaten Eden. The story concludes with Adams commenting ironically on the “process of time,” the gradual erosion of his resolve and self-respect. He is guilty of the most serious kind of betrayal—that of his own conscience. His moral cowardice will ultimately lead to his becoming a part of the oppressive system he abhors.

“A Process of Time” is in many ways an early draft of Going Down Slow, Metcalf's first novel written almost a decade later. Throughout Metcalf's work, the modern school is seen as inimical to culture and real education. It stifles the best within students and teachers and misdirects their energies into mindless activities and struggles over discipline. A teacher at odds with the authoritarian and conventional values of the system is bound to be isolated and lonely. Acquiescence has its rewards, but the result of opting for security over principle can only lead to an unintelligent, subhuman existence (represented in “A Process of Time” by “Neanderthal” and “Peking Man”). In “The Happiest Days,” the failure to resist results in self-loathing and a wish for punishment, “for there is no defence.”⁵⁴

Metcalf uses humour to leaven the serious subject matter in both stories, and the flippant tone of “A Process of Time” is found in much of his later writing. The latter is perhaps the most impressive of the early stories in its control and economy of expression.

The sequence of stories published in Prism revealed Metcalf as a writer of promise who, it is clear in retrospect, was already developing some of the themes and technical devices which have been most central to his subsequent work. However, it was a year before his next story, “I've Got It Made,” was published.⁵⁵ Metcalf published no new material until 1967, but his work has appeared steadily ever since and all of his stories, subsequent to the strangely anomalous “One for Cupid,”⁵⁶ have eventually been published in book form.

New Canadian Writing, 1969 contained five stories by Metcalf. “The Children Green and Golden,” its title acknowledging its shared spirit with Dylan Thomas' “Fern Hill,” traces the activities of David and two playmates as they move on the hesitant but inexorable journey “out of grace.” The story uses many of the central images of “Fern Hill”—sun, sea, song, swallows—as points of reference and organization, but it is not merely a prose paraphrase; the portrayal of childhood is less idealized, more complex and particularized.

The limited omniscient point of view, with David as the centre of consciousness, is used to reflect in language and attitudes the world of bright ten- or eleven-year-olds. The almost imperceptible shift to a slightly more elevated and objective narrative is marred only by an obtrusive Thomas echo (“rattling a careless stick,”⁵⁷); the other derivative elements are effectively integrated. The pen which the boys smash as part of their rite of rejection is used here as a religious, sexual, and societal image; it is often used elsewhere in Metcalf's work for similar purposes.

It is not so much religion as the agents of religion that figure prominently in Metcalf's work. Uncle Michael and Auntie Mary might seem to be well meaning, but Metcalf shows that they are damaging in their treatment of the children whom they see as already burdened with “Sin.” The boys escape back to nature, but the twice-repeated image of the high cliff and “the black shapes of the swallows flicker[ing] like the blink of an eyelash” (NCW, p. 20) recall Thomas' “swallow thronged loft” and indicate the brevity of childhood and the inevitable loss which comes with growth.

In its organic design, dramatic tension, and accomplished handling of the first-person narrative voice, “The Estuary” indicates a significant development over Metcalf's earlier work. The story opens with David, an intelligent and disturbed twenty-year-old, recounting the details of a recent session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Cottle. The court-enforced visits to Cottle are the result of David's suspected suicide attempt in Wales. Cottle's efforts to have David tell the full story and “acknowledge” his actions, as a means of entering into “a period of adjustment” (NCW, p. 52), are frustrated by his patient's pretended amnesia. What David refuses to reveal is that his walking into the sea was not an attempt at suicide but the result of his attempt to maintain contact with a pair of porpoises whose natural beauty and freedom contrasted to the civilized ugliness and boredom of his own life.

David's tone in addressing the reader is arch and flippant as he tells of how he cleverly read up on the nondirective method and turned it back on Cottle. David knows that the psychiatrist's aim is to make him accept that his “world is necessarily as it is” (NCW, p. 54), to make him accommodate himself to the reality he refuses to accept. And so David, who insists, “I'm always happy in myself” (NCW, p. 51), protects his precious knowledge: “… behind my frank and honest eyes, quite safe from Dr. Maximillian Cottle, I treasured the gleaming sweep of the estuary; and louder than his questions the sound of the gulls” (NCW, p. 59). Near the sea in Wales, he discovered that, like the waters of the estuary, his life is united with the tides and primordial forces of nature, though his passage too is marked by barriers and “troubled water.” His hysterical cry “Don't go! Don't GO. You can't just leave me” (NCW, p. 59) was an attempt to call back the porpoises, who had seemed to signal to him and whom he believed he had instinctively understood. It was a desperate attempt to preserve the moment when he had felt and understood his oneness with nature and her creatures.

“The Estuary” is suffused with a rich complex of images, symbols, and allusions which also function naturally as narrative details and serve as organic links contributing to the unity of the story's design. David's early assertion that his emotions are “… partly seasonal. Like tides” (NCW, p. 50) seems frivolous in the context but clearly relates to his crucial experience. The images of sore and painful hands are part of David's perception of urban life, and even the city pigeons, separated from nature, have “horrid red feet—not pretty pink like coral—raw, red like sores. Like the hands of the girl in the bus queue” (NCW, p. 56). The steam-jetting train and its signal, symbols of mechanization, give way to the porpoises and their “whistles” and “signals”; their “warm huff and snort” are finally displaced by “people shouting and a car-horn honking” (NCW,.63). Although entirely Metcalf's own, the description of David's setting out at dawn in the Welsh fishing village is reminiscent of the picture of “the still sleeping town” in Dylan Thomas' “Poem in October”; and David's epiphany is similar in spirit to Stephen Dedalus' coming near to “the wild heart of life” on his seashore. David does not see his experience in Christian terms—a “religious ecstasy and a vision of Jesus in a white gown appearing over the bay to carry [him] off in His arms” (NCW, p. 58)—but the account of his epiphany is filled with Christian associations: the “pieces of bread” David wants to feed the gulls and his taste of the “salt gift” of the porpoises are both references to the communion sacrament; other details, such as David's cut side and bleeding hands and the role of the fishermen, underline the analogy and the religious nature of his experience. Although not fully explicable in rational terms, or perhaps “basically too simple … to understand” (NCW, p. 51), David's pastoral vision expresses a recurrent theme in Metcalf's fiction: “It is only the natural world which makes sense,” which can keep the “soul from care” (“Author's Commentary,” p. 202).

“Walking Round the City” is more obviously social in its anger than “The Estuary,” but again our state of grace is seen in our relationship with animals (“A dog starv'd at his master's gate / Predicts the ruin of the State”). The inhabitants of the modern city are measured by their reactions to a suffering dog injured in a hit-and-run accident. The owner's quest for help is neatly divided into a series of episodes which reveal some of the factors which have contributed to the numbing of human sensitivity and loss of contact with the natural basis of life. Running through the story and connecting its parts on a symbolic level are images of tackiness and artificiality: glass doors and windows from behind which “faces stared out” impassively (NCW, p. 29) prove to be as impenetrable as barriers of steel; events on television, though distorted in sound and picture, draw attention from and dull reactions to real life; artificial lights daze the senses; formerly important artefacts like eating utensils and religious objects are now stamped out of plastic; people eat from cardboard in the “Pizza Palace[s].” The “Kerb Kings, the Dairy Queens” (NCW, p. 29) have become the sovereigns of our democratic State.

“Robert, Standing” opens with a long, painful description of the severely crippled Robert Hardwick (the name has sexual implications) as he takes a morning bath and prepares for work at his desk amid the “unchanging landscape” (NCW, p. 34) of his room. As Kent Thompson has noted, “The very fact that he is crippled is invoked in the prose, which is at once careful, methodical, and full of close attention to detail.”⁵⁸ Metcalf uses the limited omniscient point of view to provide a totally objective observation of Robert's difficult manoeuvres; he then moves the centre of focus closer to reveal Robert's heightened sense of his mortality in a jerking vein or muscle and his pounding heart.

With his brother's help, Robert has a degree of self-sufficiency, but the life of a conventional male is impossible. His homemaker's role, his carriage, and the baby powder he dusts on his buttocks and groin indicate some aspects of his life which result from his physical condition. His suffering is Job-like, but there is no hint of complaint; however, he clutches at every opportunity for human contact, and when Mormon missionaries arrive he welcomes them despite his religious scepticism. His lightly ironic humour is wasted on the two women, but his interest is quickened when he notices that one has “absolutely enormous breasts” (NCW, p. 38). He politely listens to their presentation despite their insensitivity to the irony intrinsic in their routine arguments and quotations when applied to Robert.

Miss Stevens, one of the missionaries, quotes The Book of Mormon: “‘He who wishes to become a saint must become a child … Submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him …’” (NCW, p. 38). When the women are finished, Robert agrees to have them back. Out of loneliness, he has allowed himself to be patronized and demeaned by the missionaries, but a moment after they have left, his anger boils to the surface. “Suddenly he pulled the door open again and rammed his chair forward, bucking the wheels over the fibre mat” (NCW, p. 40). The illusion of his acquiescence in his state is shattered; Metcalf's use of “rammed,” “bucking,” and “bellowed” supports Robert's assertion of his maleness and manhood in his defiant shout, “If I was standing up … I'd be six foot three” (NCW, p. 40). Robert rejects the religious message of meek submission and the smug patronizing of the messengers. The reader is forced by the experience of the story into a recognition that Robert's humanity is undiminished despite his withered limbs.

The Lady Who Sold Furniture was Metcalf's first book; it contained five short stories, including the revised version of “Early Morning Rabbits,” and the novella of the title. Structurally the novella is divided into four sections (two long sections bracketing two short), each with a distinct function. The long first section introduces Jeanne, a forty-two-year-old hired housekeeper, and her lover, Peter, who is half her age and just preparing for his first teaching assignment. When the police show up looking for Jeanne at the boardinghouse where she works, she resumes the former pattern of her life. She calls in the Dickensian Mr. Arkle, a dealer in stolen furniture, sells all the movables in the house while the owner is away, and retreats for a holiday to her father's empty cottage near the sea with Peter and her young daughter Anna.

The record of Peter's thoughts and observations as he prepares to embark on his teaching career serves as a counterpoint to Jeanne's vision of ordinary life. His exact, and by implication, affectionate memory of the streets of his university days, with their distinctive humanity, ends with his realization that soon the old brick buildings will be reduced “to an uneven field of rubble” (LWSF, p. 17). The future presents itself to him on his first trip to his assigned school, part of a suburban estate whose concrete council houses line streets with picturesque arboreal names, although “there was not a tree in sight” (LWSF, p. 17). Human existence and the passage of time under such conditions is conveyed in a short series of bleak consecutive images. In contrast, Metcalf's consistent attachment to the unaggressive beauty of the English countryside and the judgements he implies concerning characters according to their relationship with that nature are expressed in the second section of the novella, with its idyllic pastoral setting. One of the central functions of Jeanne's five-year-old daughter, Anna, is to serve as an inquisitive audience for Peter's demonstration of his knowledge and love of nature. The lists of the popular names of such things as butterflies and sea shells are typical of Metcalf and his belief that “you can only know things when you know their names” (Cameron, p. 422). When Jeanne joins Peter and Anna on one of their jaunts, it is evident that she is relatively uncomfortable, ignorant of nature, and uninterested in their rustic activities; nevertheless, she is gradually drawn into the building of a small dam and soon displaces her daughter in a desperate attempt to divert the waters of a shallow stream. The actions of the adults take on symbolic significance; Peter's forgotten watch is stopped by the water, but time moves on. As they leave, with darkness engulfing the fields, it can be seen that their efforts to stem even this tiny force of nature cannot succeed for long.

The third section of the novella concerns Peter's first day at Gartree Comprehensive School. Despite Jeanne's taunting, Peter had earnestly held to his belief that teaching is “an important job” (LWSF, p. 54), but experience quickly proves disillusioning. As he is entering the school set amidst its bleak landscape, he is met by a parody of the nature he has just left: “On the wall facing him was a reproduction of some dim pastoral scene and flanking him two broad-leaved plants in wooden tubs” (LWSF, p. 57). Metcalf's picture of school life proceeds to unfold employing many of what have become his stock characters and situations: the authoritarian principal is eccentric to the point of lunacy; the teachers are boring and stupid, and their staff-room talk silly and trivial; the head of the English department is considered “a brilliant chap” for having built a twenty-foot-long papier-mâché model of the Globe Theatre.

The last section finds Peter, after a few weeks on the job, thoroughly bored and dispirited. With Jeanne's assistance, he manages to be released from a few days' teaching through the fabrication of a story concerning his mother catching her arm in a machine (a variation on the folk expression about a lady and a mangle). Metcalf integrated almost all of his early story “Just Two Old Men”⁵⁹ into the following transitional scene, in which Peter waits in a pub for a bus he will take to join Jeanne at the house where she has found a new job. The balance of the section is set in the spacious home of the absent Compton-Smythes after a large party Jeanne has given to secretly mark her birthday. At first Peter is as callous as Jeanne in violating the privacy of the owners, whom she has characterized as oppressive snobs, but as he gradually sobers up and sees the careless damage done to the expensive furnishings by Jeanne's guests, his basic respect for property asserts itself, and he tries to clean up the mess.

The novella's last section essentially mirrors the first in incident and character, but Metcalf manages to repeat his earlier comic set piece without diminishing its interest by introducing the overalled and bowler-hatted Henry, a less funny but more reflective extension of Mr. Arkle. Peter is forced into a more open confrontation with the moral questions posed but evaded in the first section. Peter's sensitivity is increased because many of the furnishings in the new house are expensive and tasteful objects of culture and beauty; Henry's memories of his “houseproud” aunt reinforce the human associations of the objects being stolen.

Metcalf's position with respect to modern urban life and its institutions is clear, but while there is sympathy for Jeanne in her anarchistic desire for liberty, she is shown to be inescapably tainted by the world she rejects. Metcalf seems to load the dice against the objectionable ex-RAF bore Jim Rawley, who may be the mean-spirited exploiter Jeanne paints him as, but Metcalf subtly clouds the issue by adding that she had worked for Jim for two and a half years and had intended to stay before the police appeared (LWSF, p. 27). Her breezy statement that Jim has insurance (LWSF, p. 34) may temporarily assuage Peter, who has already been accused of being stodgy, but it cannot divert the reader.

Jeanne would like to see herself as a “lily of the field,” but her carefree pose is belied by her preoccupation with her age and her body's ability to inspire sexual desire. Her determination not to be possessed prevents more than a superficial giving of herself, and that to a lover so young as to preclude the possibility of a permanent relationship. Because she rejects emotional possession, she will not allow emotional or material possession by those around her. A victim, she victimizes, and her actions smack unpleasantly of vindictiveness. The Compton-Smythes may be acquisitive examples of class privilege, and Peter may be too young and idealistic, but Jeanne's actions are morally indefensible as well as futile. However, Metcalf's central concern is with Peter, who is left, clutching his new document case, to work out his own destiny.

“The Tide Line” is an apprenticeship story which presents a child at one of the moments of choice which will gradually determine the direction of his life. At the tideline with its representative mixture of elements—“shrivelled seaweed and driftwood, the flotsam of paper, tar, refuse and sea shells” (LWSF, p. 115)—Charles is faced with the choice between the sterile security of his parents' world and the engagingly beautiful but uncertain world of nature. He is unable to overcome his fear and meet the challenging cry of a seabird and so flees back to his parents, clutching the fountain pen which is symbolic of their values.

“Keys and Watercress” (LWSF, pp. 118–29) is also one of the eight stories Metcalf specifically listed as being part of an apprenticeship series (“Author's Commentary,” p. 199). The fresh physical wound on his knee which David explores in the first paragraph leads directly to the hole in the old man's leg which is described in clearly sexual terms at the story's conclusion (the word “pit” is used in both instances). The bright red of David's blood is repeated in various suggestive associations throughout the story. The references combine with the phallic eels to strengthen the sexual atmosphere surrounding the encounter with the repellent and slightly unhinged old man, who expresses his sexuality through the possessions which are extensions of himself and which he wishes David to handle. When David is confused and frightened by the old man's orgasmic ritual with the keys, he is treated like an unappreciative lover. At the end of the story, David must feel, even if he does not fully understand, the nature of the experience the old man tried to force upon him.

The great strength of both “The Tide Line” and “Keys and Watercress” is in Metcalf's skilled narration, which seems to originate with very young children but which communicates scenes and emotional complexes far beyond the abilities of children to actually state.

Despite a few uncharacteristic technical problems, the delicately lyrical “Dandelions” (LWSF, pp. 143–50) is Metcalf's first successful exploration of middle age through a third-person centre of consciousness. George Kenway, bookseller, is uneasily settling into a life physically sustained by his trade in popular paperbacks and books on gardening and the care of budgies; his dream of antiquarian books and scholarly clients is only alive in an occasional fantasy. Metcalf's record of Kenway's thoughts as his mind gently wanders through the details of his day and the associations they call forth has a feeling of exactness which is sustained up to the point of most obvious significance; however, the transition to Kenway's recollection of an instant from his childhood is surprisingly artificial, and the effect of having him see himself as the figure in the “picture” is unconvincing. Metcalf quickly recovers the quality of the experience through the sure capturing of strong sensory impressions—the cool floor through stocking feet, the incandescent dandelions—but in the movement back into the present, he violates his carefully tended point of view. The narrative voice moves too far from Kenway in a single clause: “For a few moments, he stared at the glasses as though he did not know what they were for” (emphasis added, LWSF, p. 147). The missteps are unfortunate for “Dandelions” contains some of Metcalf's finest writing. The closing paragraphs especially are handled with an almost oriental lightness of touch as the rhythms of the story's measured conclusion reflect the gradual fading of Kenway's visionary gleam.

The decision to write Going Down Slow, Metcalf has said, was largely the result of external pressure on him to further his career by writing a novel. The book's widely praised episodic structure was, in large part, a result of Metcalf's impatience with “having to put connecting bits in and continuing the story. It was the set pieces of the book … that [he] really enjoyed because they were the closest to the short story form” (Cameron, p.403). Metcalf's relative lack of control of the larger form is seen in the sections of the novel which try to fill in character or move the plot forward. These often fail to function organically enough to appear as anything but authorial afterthoughts. However, Going Down Slow marks an important juncture in Metcalf's writing career for it integrates a number of strands from his earlier work within a witty and humorous expression of Metcalf's principle that “… all writing is political, all great writing subversive.”⁶⁰

In many ways, David Appleby is the sum of the many sensitive and intelligent boys and young men glimpsed at isolated moments in the short stories, with Peter Hendricks of The Lady Who Sold Furniture being his most immediate ancestor in both time and sensibility. The genesis of the novel's other basic elements is most obvious in the two Prism stories about teachers (“The Happiest Days” and “A Process of Time”) and the school section of The Lady Who Sold Furniture. In virtually all its important elements, “A Process of Time” is actually a highly condensed version of the novel, and the name of its central character, Mr. Adams, is used like Appleby's to denote his postlapsarian condition; however, the novel is cast in a new and important context. A few of Metcalf's stories had been specifically or implicitly set in Canada, but Going Down Slow is Metcalf's first attempt to deal with his experience as a British expatriate.

Kenneth Gibson identified Kingsley Amis as “the revenant” of Going Down Slow and was tempted to see Metcalf, “a ferocious anthologist, as putting together … a small anthology of styles to see what dominates and what fades out.”⁶¹ But in Going Down Slow, Metcalf's overt homages to many of his favourite writers are, aside from that to Amis, mere tippings of the hat, and David Appleby is not simply Lucky Jim in Canada. Although there are many parallels, Going Down Slow and Lucky Jim are quite different in spirit and intent. Metcalf's first novel appeared a generation after Lucky Jim. Part of the loss signified by David Appleby's name is the disillusionment inherited by educated Englishmen of his generation and class. Amis attributed the title of Lucky Jim to an “old song” (“Oh, lucky Jim, / How I envy him.”); the title Going Down Slow is from a blues of the same name:

I have had my fun; if I don't get well no more,
My health is failing me, and I'm going down slow.
Please write my mother; tell her the shape I'm in.
Tell her to pray for me; forgiveness of my sin.(62)

Even allowing for Amis' irony, the times had clearly changed, and the sin for which David pays is both society's and his own. Jim Dixon spoke for the honesty and decency of the average man; if defeated by the establishment, he could easily retreat to a life with fewer risks of humiliation. David has no such base. When it appears he might be sacked from his teaching position in a Montreal high school, a return to England is not an option he even considers. A provincial in England, David is considered a metropolitan in provincial Canada, where the values of the average man can be added to the sum of all he scorns. In a society of homogenized dullness without class divisions to help channel his anger, David is floating free, and his antagonism becomes generalized misanthropy.

Although Going Down Slow is told in the third person, the novel's narrative voice is so close to David's own that they are almost indistinguishable one from the other. The effect is principally achieved by using the cadences and junctures of David's speaking voice throughout the novel for description as well as dialogue. For example, David's habit of searching for the exact word creates the impression of an unmediated, self-conscious narrator addressing the reader:

David decided that he was probably ill. His head ached. His throat. His throat was definitely dry and sore. Doubtless infected. He pictured the inside of his throat as being like the neck of a guitar strung with red tendons. And now the tendons were studded with white and yellow lumps of infection. Lumps? Nodules. Studded with nodules of infection.

(p. 12)

Because the voice is felt to be David's, there is a temptation to assess him, rather than the objects of his mockery, and to see Metcalf as having weakened the impact of his argument by trusting it to a frequently obnoxious and unsympathetic character. But although Metcalf clearly supports David's denial of authority and his battle against it, he demonstrates, in David's eventual defeat, the results of foolishness, weakness, or ambivalence in conducting the campaign. As with Jeanne in The Lady Who Sold Furniture, Metcalf asks that we sympathize with the essential position, not David's methods or personality.

Central to the novel is the problem of David's values. His expressions of nostalgia for England are usually and understandably prompted by Montreal's weather, but he is not interested in returning even for a holiday. He would rather travel to the American South in search of a dream from his youth, “the fabulous, mythic world of the blues, the shining trumpets” (p. 134). His fond memories of his uncle's farm have more to do with Metcalf's usual pastoral associations than with England. At base David is a conservative, but his ambivalence is such that he derides to himself (“Swooning Swinburne / Tedious Tennyson” [p. 81]) the English literary tradition he praises to Susan. He doubts the value of his own education while deploring that which Merrymount dispenses. His rebellion is not in favour of the past but of an ideal of elemental individual freedom as symbolized by the crows he calls “rooks”:

He liked their wariness, their wildness. If they nested near houses, unlike swallows or pigeons, they remained independent. They graced inhabited areas with their presence, their gleaming blackness, but remained aloof, suspicious.

Tough, lordly birds.

(pp. 155–56)

The conflict between this ideal and the impulse for reconciliation with social reality is an important one in most of Metcalf's writing.

Metcalf's concept of individual responsibility and his libertarian insistence on a personal and independent attitude to the universe, including human institutions, probably owe as much to his Nonconformist religious upbringing as to his reading of the anarchist philosophers.⁶³ Through David, he demonstrates what happens when a character with views similar to his own is not up to the challenge. The betrayal of relationships and principles is the novel's central theme.

What does Metcalf hold up as the standard of conduct against which his characters are to be judged? The answer accounts for the novel's weakness in terms of both character and theme. The novel's epigraph, which Metcalf attributes to the blues singer Howling Wolf, states, “The men don't know what the little girls understand” (p. 9). The little girl in question is the unbelievably precocious Susan, who at one point is provided with “a mist of hair like a halo” (p. 61) to identify her as an object of veneration for the purity of her essential and instinctive knowledge. Part of the problem is that when she tries to express what she knows she speaks in vague adolescent platitudes. Metcalf intends David's opposition to her views to reflect his ruinous ambivalence; however, next to Susan, David emerges as a paragon of common sense. But common sense and realism are not what is being advocated, for Susan would “rather be a romantic” (p. 77).

It is difficult to admire Susan for her hedonism and discriminating sense of culture because Metcalf never dramatizes her in a manner which would sufficiently serve his purpose. We are told that she is beautiful and extremely intelligent. We must accept the former quality, but Susan's ambition to become a writer and her taste for Ingmar Bergman films and African masks smack of authorial projection. When she is physically present in the novel, the evidence argues against accepting David's (and Metcalf's) high estimation of her mental and spiritual capacities. As a repository of the ideals for which the individual should defy the world, Susan is unconvincing.

The collection of stories The Teeth of My Father returned Metcalf to his favoured genre but presented him with a problem common to many writers whose primary impulse is autobiographical and whose early work was mainly devoted to an exploration of the process of growing up: the lives of his various fictional personae had caught up to his own experience. In this collection, Metcalf dealt with the problem in a combination of ways. He introduced a new and major thematic concern for art and artists—especially writers; he attempted to deal artistically with his present reality—in one instance, through an overt summation of the past; he imaginatively examined his own future by portraying a writer in old age; he employed narrative points of view not found in his earlier work and expanded his use of the story form in ways which were for him experimental; he recycled earlier work in a way which would delight Mordecai Richler; and he continued to examine experiences of childhood and adolescence, but more often within the expressed context of an adult sensibility. In addition, the humour which he continued to use as an important means of expression was frequently darker and more bitterly ironic.

Five of the stories deal with art and artists. A pessimistic and bitterly funny picture of the artist's social role and his relationship to his audience is presented in “The Strange Aberration of Mr. Ken Smythe.” The story is told in the third person through an anonymous traveller, whose experiencing consciousness gradually gives way to a seemingly objective observation of the action. The story's allegorical quality is emphasized by its setting in Edinburgh's Pleasure Gardens, at the entrance of which stands a “massive War Memorial.”⁶⁴ The Gardens are situated below the statue of Robert Burns, poet of brotherhood and the common man, and the whole scene is brooded over by the national symbol, Edinburgh Castle. As night falls, the traveller symbolically descends into the Gardens to pass a few hours watching a variety show set in “the cave” of a bandshell.

The principal artist figures are a young trumpet player, Heine, and the director of the “Essen International Amity Boys Brass Band,” Herr Kunst (whose name literally means “art”). The essence of Kunst's total concern for his music and the effect of his efforts is conveyed in the precision of the following sentences:

Suddenly onto the stage strode a man in a black suit, halted, faced the silent band. The arm of Herr Kunst rose; the arm of Herr Kunst descended.

The burst of sound was crisp and perfect, the sections rising and sitting as one man, the soloists flawless. Herr Kunst stood rigid except for the metronome pump of his elbows.

(TMF, p. 13)

The initial references to “international goodwill” (TMF, p. 12) and subsequent allusions to friendship and brotherhood in the announced selection titles become more ironically significant as the story progresses, for Herr Kunst's controlled and austere manner in conducting his disciplined musicians draws attention to characteristics which his onstage “host,” Ken Smythe, terms “typically German.” The threefold purpose of the German titles announced at intervals throughout the story is to remind Smythe and his audience of the band's nationality, to provoke a response in both, and, frequently, to comment on the action.

RAF veteran Smythe is seen drinking at the rear of the stage, and, as he becomes more inebriated, his increasingly outrageous and racist behaviour draws more attention and approval than the band's performance. His announced memory of bombing Essen during the war stirs shouted support “from the darkness,” and when the band in a friendly but unwise gesture plays “Colonel Bogey,” there is an intimation of ignorant armies: “On the grass below the stage, a confusion of dark figures marched” (TMF, p. 20). The tune ignites the crowd's ugly nationalism and Heine is injured: “A stone, a bottle, something thrown from the darkness” (TMF, p. 21).

The story implies that the condition of the artist is one of isolation surrounded by hostility. He must practise his craft among mere entertainers and be presented by buffoons and charlatans to an audience unwilling and unable to appreciate the beauty he offers. Art cannot overcome the barriers of nationalism and race hatred, nor can the artist win over an insensitive audience. For an ignorant audience, when it pays any attention at all, the beauty of the work and the skill of the artist are too often obscured by an irrelevant and destructively morbid concern for the person of the artist himself. Ken Smythe's strange aberration is, of course, nothing of the sort. His name is only a variation on the ordinary, and his moments of unguarded speech are meant to reveal his working-class origins. Pretensions and inhibitions relaxed, the real Smythe emerges as a kind of everyman who is both a member of and a voice for the mob.

“Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones” records a day in the life of poet Jim Haine, whose seedy picaroon existence is the result of his dedication to an art which yields meagre financial returns. The success with which he has freed himself of physical impediments is reflected in the economy of the short paragraph used to describe them:

His possessions, by design, fitted into two large cardboard cartons. Kettle and mug. Sleeping-bag and inflatable mattress. Clothes. One picture. Writing materials. An alarm-clock. The few books he had not sold.

(TMF, p. 25)

Similarly, the seeking of an adequate design for a potentially sentimental expression of love for a dead child is his attempt to transmute his personal pain into a manageable objective form—a form as manageable as are the carved figures of the African Dogon tribe referred to in a later story, “The Years in Exile.”

The effort to adapt Martial's epigram on the death of a pet slave girl is Haine's attempt to deal with the physical and emotional loss of his living daughter, thoughts of whom make her an unburied presence. The complex value he places on the poem is paralleled in his concern for preserving the single picture among his possessions. Significantly, it is not a picture of his daughter, but her portrait of him. Because of the purity of its expression, the immortality it bestows on its creator as well as its object is independent of the people or circumstances surrounding its creation:

A potato-shape in black crayon. A single red eye near the top. Seven orange sprouts. He'd typed underneath:

“Daddy” by Anna Haine (age 2[frac12])

The newsprint was yellowing, the expensive non-glare glass dusty; the top edge of the frame was furred. He wiped it clean with his forefinger.

Orange arms and legs of course, silly Jim.

He tried to recall the name of the girl who'd got it framed for him. A painter sort of girl. Black hair, he remembered.

Frances?

Sonia?

But it was gone.

(TMF, p. 27)

Both the connections and the distancing strategy can be seen in Haine's expressing his sense of his daughter Anna's loss through a transposition of Martial's lament for his lost child. On one level, “Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones” deals with the emotional complex within which it is possible to assert both that the artist uses art to express his life and that his life is subservient to his art. On a different level, the story is a detailed and graphic description of one artist's experience of the mysterious forces which work within him and the psychological and technical manipulation he employs to translate these impulses into a concrete reality. The story dramatizes a process which Metcalf has described elsewhere as his own (“Author's Commentary,” pp. 198–203).

“The Teeth of My Father,” the third story written in the art-and-artist series, brings together a number of elements from Metcalf's earlier work and so serves as a partial summary. More importantly, the earlier work is incorporated into a new, or at least more deliberately explicit, thematic context and a more technically complicated formal design. The work is “in a way an attempt to write a short story about the difficulties of writing a short story.”⁶⁵ Metcalf has also said that the story is “really meant to play with these ideas of truth, nontruth, larger truths than autobiographical truths, lies, who's speaking, who ‘I’ is, whether you can believe what that person says or can't believe.”⁶⁶

“The Teeth of My Father” opens conventionally enough, but Metcalf soon appears to dissolve the distinction between the story's first-person narrator and the implied author. Ostensibly prompted by a new and deeper understanding of his dead father's essential nature, the narrator, in a parenthetic confession, declares that he has “decided to tell the truth” (TMF, p. 59) and admits to his past uses of artifice (both in addressing the reader and in spinning tales for his “friend”). This apparent promise of future reliability in fact introduces a more elaborately contrived structure which purports to be autobiography. If fiction is a lie told in the service of truth, Metcalf's story is artistic truth masquerading as deception in the guise of literal truth. Within a framework containing anecdotes, linking passages, and entire stories, “fact” is related in the voice of the now self-conscious first-person narrator; “fiction” is filtered through variously named third-person centres of consciousness.

Metcalf implicitly warns the reader that the whole performance is a conjuring trick by having a voice like that of a variety-show master of ceremonies address the audience over the head of the narrator and give directions as to how one of the segments is to be interpreted:

It is instructive, ladies and gentlemen, to examine the psychological implications of this sample of juvenilia if we may assume it to be autobiographical either in fact or impulse.

Yes, you can assume that. [This is the voice of the narrator.]

What activity is the child essentially engaged in? In nothing more or less than the act of defining his identity. Through which functions does the child perform this act? Through naming, drawing, and most importantly, writing. And with which parent does this suggest identification?

Exactly so. Exactly so. The father!

Who, who I may remind you, is, in the words of the text, “far away.” For the perceptive reader, the point requires no further elucidation.

(TMF, p. 63)

That the segment in question closed with a plagiarism from James Joyce underlines that the artist often uses highly artificial techniques to express “larger truths”; in addition, it reminds the reader that what is being presented is a miniature portrait of the artist.

What emerges, then, from the sum of the story's segments is not just an affecting picture of an eccentric father but, as the wording of the title implies, the mark he has left on his writer-son. The son's craft is illustrated by the story's final section, in which the father's lessons in the manipulation of language are reflected by the son's highly structured rhetoric. The section, an extended apostrophe, is constructed around four carefully placed declarative sentences, which, despite their surface flatness, pace the story to its emotional climax. Informed by his new and more profound recognition, the narrator expresses both his love for his father and his personal vision of loneliness and human isolation. The section concludes:

Now, ten years later in a life half done, a life distinctly lacking in probity, I use your pen, now twice-repaired, to write my stories, your pencil for corrections.

And I am crying now.

Drunken tears but tears for you. For you. For both of us. Standing on the sidewalk in the cold fall evening of another country, my tears are scalding.

(TMF, p. 79)

The rhetorical flourish of the repeated phrases beginning with “for” contributes to the heightened feeling of the chantlike lament which unites the son with his priest-father, while the ironic possibilities of the word “probity” serve as a partial counter to the sentimentality inherent in the scene. The return to the discredited narrative voice and to the physical and temporal setting of the opening section is a totally artificial device which is made to seem perfectly natural.

“The Practice of the Craft” (TMF, pp. 46–57) is a relative failure because it succumbs to the problem of distance so impressively solved in “Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones” and in the last story in the art-and-artist series, “The Years in Exile” (TMF, pp. 80–101), which employs as a first-person narrator a writer who shares many of Metcalf's expressed attitudes and artistic methods and concerns; however, distancing from the implied author is achieved by portraying the narrator as an old man. Like Margaret Laurence's Hagar Shipley, he is “rampant with memory,” and the depiction of his rambling thoughts allows Metcalf full use of his elliptical, imagistic, and juxtapositional techniques.

Much of the story's rich and subtle irony results from the interplay between the narrator's thoughts and the total compositional context within which Metcalf places them. The narrator reflects that he will not write again: “I am too old and tire too easily; I no longer have the strength to face the struggle with language, the loneliness, the certainty of failure” (TMF, p.81). But while the narrator seems to be left with only the resources to contemplate his principles concerning the artistic importance of “particular life” (TMF, p.98), Metcalf, in his actual realization of the work, demonstrates the efficacy of those principles. The old man disliked Wordsworth “because he could not do justice to the truth; no philosophical cast of mind can do justice to particularity” (TMF, pp.88–89). Metcalf's deliberate selection and accumulation of details and incidents under the guise of simply recording the old man's random and tenuously connected thoughts demonstrates an artistic alternative to Wordsworth's “abstraction” (TMF, p. 89).

The narrator loves objects and their uniquely distinguishing names (“… such a basket is called a ‘trug.’ I hug the word to myself” [TMF, p. 88]), and the poetry of his lists is typical of those found throughout Metcalf's work:

Scattered above and below the seaweed were the shells, limpet, mussel, periwinkle, whelk and cockle, painted top and piddock. Razor shells. The white shields of cuttlefish, whelks' egg cases like coarse sponge, mermaids' purses.

(TMF, p. 84)

Inherent in this stylistic concern for surface detail is a philosophic position which abjures a search for the transcendent in favour of a sensitive awareness of the material because there is nothing else in life but life.⁶⁷ Because he is dependent on others, an aspect of the old man's “exile” is his “crotchety” dislike for the “aluminum and plastic” (TMF, p. 80) which typify much of his physical environment and the modern values it reflects. His retreat into memory is both an escape from his present and an expression of what to him is “more real” (TMF, p. 82). Barry Cameron, in his important study of the art-and-artist series, “An Approximation of Poetry,” has stated:

The story focuses on the inherent psychic split in the novelist's mind simply because he is a novelist. Because he has “fictionalized” the past, because he has framed “its insistence” through the internal fictionalizing process of memory, the novelist's visions of his childhood at the age of nine or ten are more real to him than his present moment in Canada as a famous novelist. The fictionalizing operation of memory, as the novelist himself knows, is “‘the most basic form of creativity’” (p. 99). Memory, like fiction, edits, orders, and preserves experience. Memory shapes experience, giving it meaning, and ultimately yields through its mythologizing effects a sense of identity. Home is a psychic state of oneness, of identity, in which one's world is not an external environment but part of one. Consequently, the novelist's memories of his childhood past in England, because he has mythologized the past, are his internal home.

(pp. 31–32)

“Because the novelist's real home lies in his visions of the past,” writes Cameron, “his present moment becomes, as the title of the story implies, a metaphorical condition of exile and expatriation” (p. 32).

The material of art, then, is not life photographically reproduced but life closely observed and recast by the imagination and the memory. Like Joyce Cary's Wilcher, Metcalf's narrator had “wished immortal life” for that which had touched him deepest, and he had “thought [himself] a pilgrim, the books [his] milestones,” but the image which has become “always central in [the old man's] dream and reverie,” taking him back to “the years when [he] was nine and ten,” is that of “the spoiled mansion, Fortnell House” (TMF, pp. 81–83).

Fortnell House is associated not only with the period when the narrator was physically and emotionally most at one with the world of nature, but also with the time when he felt most forcefully his connection with the full range of natural and human history. During the time of the last Fortnell, Sir Charles, the mansion had become “the repository of collections of minerals, fossils, books, weapons, tribal regalia, paintings and carvings. On his retirement, Sir Charles had devoted his energies to Christchurch and the county collecting local records, books, memorabilia and the evidences of the prehistoric past” (TMF, p. 97). The significance of the house and its contents becomes more complex through the implied association with the primitive art of the Dogon and the fictionalizing art of the narrator: all are, to a degree, ritualized and public declarations of the wish to preserve. Like Sir Charles, the African Dogon (whose carvings “offer a fixed abode for spirits liberated by death” [TMF, p. 83]), and Cary's Wilcher, the writer too has felt the impulse to bestow a kind of immortality; however, honesty to his experience will not allow him to be consoled by ideas of the permanence of art, for he “has learned how easily things break” (TMF, p. 98).

The transience of particular life is seen in the destruction of its evidence; many of the treasures of Fortnell House are lost through chance, simple ignorance, public neglect, and wilful destruction. The evanescence of art itself is seen in the decay of the Dogon carvings and in the erosion by “time and the weather” (TMF, p. 96) of the carvings on the gate pillars of decrepit Fortnell House. The old writer does not want his papers to be “abandoned … in the damp to rot” like those in Fortnell House; however, he knows that they may be “consigned to some air-conditioned but equal oblivion” (TMF, p. 93). The final significance of Fortnell House is in the narrator's association of his impending death and its intrinsic mystery with the mansion's unexplored upper rooms. “Perhaps one night soon,” he will not awaken from his dream of childhood but will at last “reach the rooms above” (TMF, p. 100).

“The Years in Exile” closes appropriately with the narrator enjoying the pleasure of his imagination. The narrator may have been too old “to frame” the “insistence” of his mental pictures; but Metcalf, in his own working out of the total design of the story, fashioned an “adequate structure” for a work of art which examines the nature of art itself.

In contemplating one of his powerful imaginative “insistence[s],” the aged writer who narrates “The Years in Exile” naturally turned to a consideration of its possible artistic shape: “A short story could not encompass it; it has the weight and feel about it of a novella” (TMF, p. 82). Metcalf must have had similar feelings when he turned to the longer form in his next book, Girl in Gingham, the title work of which employs with a greater sophistication many of the techniques observed in Metcalf's first novella, The Lady Who Sold Furniture. Again, as in most of the short stories, the emphasis is on the exploration of a single central character whose consciousness is expressed through a third-person narrator. Metcalf has maintained a tightness of structure in the longer form by closely linking the various parts through an extensive use of foreshadowing and a relatively elaborate use of such recurring and associated images as nautical and marine references. While the texture of the work is as dense as that of the later short stories, the details are often made even more suggestive and resonant through an increased reliance on allusion and symbol. For example, Peter Thornton's first name associates him with a number of Metcalf's earlier characters as does his sensibility. The name also has Christian associations further strengthened by his surname, which implies something of Christ's suffering (a crucifix and the crown of thorns are explicitly mentioned by a minor character); the many references to fish and fishing are clearly a part of this and other complexes which contribute to the story's rich ambiguity.

Robert Lecker and Barry Cameron are the two critics who have most closely examined Metcalf's work, and one must agree with Lecker's observation that Cameron's thorough and “brilliant analysis” of Girl in Gingham leaves few new insights to be added by like-minded critics.⁶⁸ Cameron first defines Metcalf's general thematic concerns in terms of a series of “dialectics.” He goes on to state:

All these dialectics are implicit in Girl in Gingham, but the emphasis falls on art and life, fictional and factual truth, reality and fantasy, comedy and tragedy, and humour and pathos.

Girl in Gingham revolves thematically around the motive for—the necessity of and the pain resulting from—“inventing” people, shaping them to fit the contours of our needs and desires, and “inventing” or allowing ourselves to be “invented.”

(“Invention in Girl in Gingham,” p. 121)

Lecker states that Peter Thornton's “self-consciousness, the self-reflexive impulse,” is “granted to him by a narrator who turns Peter's story into a story about art” (p. 75). Lecker adds:

Because the search for an ideal girl in gingham is part of Peter's quest for aesthetic fulfillment, he becomes increasingly pre-occupied with Art as the story develops, a pre-occupation frustrated by what Cameron calls “the absurdity of the modern technological world.”

(pp. 76–77)

Cameron and Lecker provide extremely valuable insights into Metcalf's work, insights which cannot be adequately summarized here. Peter Thornton's idealism and penchant for “invention” do strengthen his impulse to turn life into art; however, it might be useful and not an oversimplification to also view Girl in Gingham as expressing one of the most basic and pervasive of Metcalf's themes, the concern for the loneliness and isolation of the individual, both in a cosmic sense and as exacerbated by “the absurdity of the modern technological world,” a world Metcalf views with an increasingly dark and sardonic humour.

The novella's opening words establish the cause of Peter Thornton's personal crisis. He is seen after his Fall, his expulsion from the false security of what used to be considered a conventional family life. Divorced by his wife, he is set adrift, deprived of the roles of husband and father on which he founded his identity. Significantly, his deep sense of grief, his feeling of “amputation,” results more from his perceived loss of context than from the loss of the particular persons of his wife and son. After the initial trauma of his divorce and his attempts at suicide (to complete the destruction of self), Peter, “with a large weariness and a settled habit of sadness,” attempted to start life over, but at thirty-five found himself among life's walking wounded, “active in the world of those whose world was broken.”⁶⁹ Much of the novella's humour and pathos arises from Peter's encounters with the “sad sisterhood” of unattached women and the eccentricities symptomatic of their dislocation:

He had learned to avoid women who took pottery courses and had come to recognize as danger signs: indoor plants, Alice in Wonderland posters, health food, stuffed toys, parents, menstrual cramps, and more than one cat.

(GG, p. 89)

Peter, a man with a rich and perhaps overactive imagination, is unable to visualize himself as a whole personality outside his former context; his quest is for a return to an idealized vision of that context and for the woman who will recreate it. In seeking her, Peter is attempting to reinvent his own sense of identity.

When more conventional means fail, Peter allows himself to be drawn into the world of “CompuMate.” Sensitive, intelligent, and well-educated, Peter is a man whose very qualities alienate him from the absurdity of a world where toothpicks are labelled “Inter-Dental Stimulators” and paper plates “Chi-Net.” As an appraiser of antiques and objets d'art, he is accustomed to discerning the genuine from the fake and ascribing worth to the objects which reflect the human and aesthetic values of a civilization. A sympathetic friend describes Peter himself as “an antique” (GG, p. 95); the essence of Peter's conservatism is expressed in his anachronistic ideal of “a girl in gingham.”

It is indicative of Peter's desperation and vulnerability (and a function of his barely controlled imagination) that he is willing to contemplate the possibilities of “personal growth through deep and meaningful long-term, male-female interaction” (GG, p. 94) allegedly offered by a computer, the quintessence of the technological age whose values both amuse and repel him. Metcalf frequently conveys the debasement of standards through the abuse of language, and Peter, after presumably having met “the computer's acceptance standards,” goes beyond merely acquiescing in a system which uses terms such as “CompuMatch,” “CompuMember,” and “Computer Compatible” (GG, pp. 94, 95). Metcalf's daring and skill are such that his controlling hand is unobtrusive in the manipulation of Peter to the point where he voluntarily participates in the system.

The successful realization of the complex character of Peter Thornton is one of Metcalf's major artistic accomplishments. When Peter is most prone to indulging his smug sense of cultural or emotional superiority, Metcalf reminds him (and us) of his essential kinship with those he does not admire. This is seen when Peter's detached and supercilious observation of two ladies, “a parody of affluent American middle-aged womanhood” (GG, p. 103), ends in a deflating recognition of their pain and loneliness. It is also seen when he identifies himself with the equally self-centred Elspeth McCleod (“Sad he; sad she” [GG, p. 115]).

Metcalf has often commented on his lack of interest in plot; Barry Cameron goes to some lengths to minimize the importance of “meaning” in Metcalf's work and asserts that in Girl in Gingham “Metcalf does not impose meaning on the story; the story generates meaning in the reader's mind through his experience of it” (“Invention in Girl in Gingham,” p. 120). However, it is precisely the areas of plot and meaning and their interrelationship which prevent Girl in Gingham from being an unqualified triumph. To the point in the story when Peter first telephones Anna Stevens, the tale of his “dismal adventure” has the flawless illusion of reality, but from that point on it moves gradually into the area of fantasy. It is as if Peter had finally crossed the line into a dimension where his imagination created his and the reader's reality. With Anna's appearance, Metcalf's plot and Peter-Pygmalion's imagination merge, and the novella's plot becomes fantasy itself, dominated by its fairy-tale motif. Having allowed Anna to become flesh, Metcalf must destroy her to serve his theme, for, contrary to Cameron's assertion, Metcalf does impose his meaning. Despite its fracturing of narrative convention, the deflation of Peter's dreams and the destruction of his hope for finding a psychic and emotional home must be seen as the inevitable conclusion for a fairy tale of “these untender times” (GG, p. 129).

Private Parts: A Memoir (GG, pp. 5–84) purports to be an autobiography in which the author, T. D. Moore, a university professor and fiction writer, lays bare his central anxieties and their cause. Whereas Peter Thornton, who shares Moore's approximate age and his artistic sensibility, used his imagination to escape his present and create his future, Moore attempts to control the functioning of his memory and imagination so that he can accurately capture the past which created his present. Moore's story begins in the literal and symbolic Eden of his uncle's farm, the site of his lost innocence, and moves slowly forward in time through “sequence[s] of anecdote and reflection” (GG, p. 17). Also contained within this structure, but moving to its own rhythm, is a sequence of swelling hopes and deflating disappointments. The narrator's war with his Puritan mother, “that battle of wills, a titanic struggle fought against the backdrop of Hell” (GG, p. 83), provides most of the story's substance; however, Metcalf makes clear in “Notes on Writing a Story,”⁷⁰ an essay on the novella's opening section, that he is more vitally interested in the story as process. It is probably for this reason that his narrator is made to remind the reader from time to time that what is being read is the product of conscious manipulation and that it is impossible for the writer in pursuit of truth to write anything but fiction. Moore interrupts his story for a parenthetical, and more direct, address to the reader: “This will not do. The paragraphs flow too evenly, the sequence of statements rounds off the subject too neatly … To re-read these last paragraphs nauseates me. … I have pictured my mother as a joyless puritan. But this is not the whole truth. The fault lies in my writing, feelings hidden behind humour, pain distanced by genteel irony. The truth is ugly and otherwise” (GG, p. 17). It should be recalled that the principal narrator of “The Teeth of My Father” began his similarly parenthetical intervention with the words “I have decided to tell the truth” (TMF, p. 59), which seemed to introduce a more direct telling of the authentic story. In using the same technique in Private Parts, Metcalf also added a refinement: instead of using incorporated stories and story fragments which used differing narrative voices and points of view and which the reader was to understand as being at once fictional and autobiographical, Metcalf returned to the uninterrupted narrative voice of T. D. Moore. Having shattered the illusion of Moore as a conventionally reliable first-person narrator, Metcalf paradoxically strengthened it by seeming to move Moore closer to the reader. Moore's complaints about his inability to overcome technique and get to the heart of the truth are designed to create the impression of a more direct and unmediated voice, a voice more capable of intimate confession.

As in Girl in Gingham, one of the central concerns of Private Parts is the question of identity, how it is formed and what sustains it. Structurally, the novella is divided into a long Part I with twelve subsections and a shorter Part II with three subsections. The importance of religion to the story is obvious, and those interested in Christian numerology will recognize the possibilities of Metcalf's divisions. (For example, the significance of the Trinity for the narrator is established early in the story [GG, p. 16]. In the final subsection, the narrator, who names himself for the first time, speaks of his mother and his unknowable father as still being “giant figures on a glaring stage, their lives the myth of my life” [GG, p. 75]. Moore finally unites pictures of his father and mother with those of himself as son, husband, father, and uncertain, isolated individual waiting for his own death.) The novella's structure, then, is organized around the narrator's “self-shaping” (GG, p. 22), his “building for [him]self a new identity” (GG, p. 36) in opposition to his mother and her religious fanaticism in Part I, and, in Part II, the narrator's picture of himself as the adult inheritor of that identity.

The importance of art to the defining and creating of the narrator's identity and the power of his Christian upbringing to affect the way he sees his own experience are revealed in the following:

At about the age of seven I had my first encounter with Art—an event central to this memoir and as dramatic as Paul's conversion on the Damascus Road.

Art played no part in the life of my parents or their society.

(GG, p. 18)

In the writing of his memoir, Moore is a monologuist whose art depends to a great extent on doing “different voices” convincingly. The sentence which introduces Mr. Montague is both a comic and meaningful parody of his mother's voice and a statement of fact: “I can remember the monologuist who brought the certainty of art into my life” (GG, p. 20). It is the narrator's ultimate substitution of art for religion as a way of dealing with the world and his perception of it that redeems him. That it also troubles him is revealed by the increasingly frequent interventions in which he expresses his dissatisfaction with the way art, through the functioning of memory, imagination, and technique, obscures truth. The problem, as it must, remains unresolved.

The sexually motivated journey towards art recounted in the novella's first part is often hilariously funny; but the disillusionment and growing awareness of decay and death modulate and darken the humour of the conclusion. Taken as a whole, Private Parts is a rich and comic tour de force which contains the “echoes, suggestions, allusions, [and] reverberations”⁷¹ Metcalf sought to achieve. It is not surprising that Robert Lecker states that “the private parts of the title are sexual, spiritual, emotional, temporal, spatial, and structural all at once” (p. 90). Clearly the work's surface naughtiness and scatological method are employed by the author in the service of a chaste and austere artistry.

With the writing of his second novel, General Ludd, Metcalf reversed the decision he had made after the publication of Going Down Slow not to return to the form; he also seemed to ignore his own cautionary dictum: “It is understandable but futile to take the 20th Century as a personal affront.”⁷² Metcalf's title is explained by historian J. L. Granatstein: “The Luddites were a nineteenth century British group that smashed machinery in protest both against working conditions and the way the world was progressing.” In Metcalf's novel, he saw “the tale of a new Luddite.”⁷³ The objects of Metcalf's satire are too numerous to encompass in a brief summary, but essentially he is concerned with what he sees as Canada's spiritual malaise and its attendant lack of taste and cultural values. The “communications media,” especially television, and the standards they express are both the cause and the result of our decline. In North America, the old European traditions of grace and elegance have collided with the twentieth century, and the most conspicuous casualty has been language. Metcalf's target in General Ludd is so broad and his attack so ferocious that his satire often eschews the rifle for the large-bore shotgun.

The problem of Jim Wells is a complicated one and, because it is central to the novel, bears close examination. Aside from the obvious reason that he wishes to draw on his own experience, Metcalf uses artists as central figures in his work because they examine life from a perspective which is individual if not eccentric. In this, Jim Wells resembles Metcalf's other artist-heroes (and quasi artist-heroes like Peter Thornton), the closest relative being Jim Haine of “Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones.” That Wells is really a stand-in for Haine is implied in the novel itself,⁷⁴ but while Haine is seen as an unsavoury character dealing with an ugly world, he is also seen doing what he does best, creating poetry—and in the third person. Wells, who is in a dry spell, is seldom seen doing anything but what he does worst, simply getting through the day—and through the less distancing first-person point of view. The result is a narrator who is used to convey the author's opinions but who, as a human being, has few apparent attractions (his unattractiveness results in major problems for the credibility of Kathy's character). The difficulties of establishing sympathy for the views of an unsympathetic narrator are not insurmountable, especially for a writer of Metcalf's talents, but because Metcalf allowed the insistence of his vision of modern society to take precedence over the satisfactory creation of his central character, Wells remains unrealized. Because he is a poet, Wells's despair over illiteracy and the lack of an audience is understandable, but the bitterness of his undifferentiated attack on Canadian society and the weakness of the fictional creation from which it flows create an impression of the implied author himself as a snob, one who sees himself as not being a part of the society he disdains. The result is a diverting of the reader's attention from the characters and issues within the fictional construct to the personality of the author, “a blurring between Jim Wells as character and [Metcalf] as writer.”⁷⁵ The illusion of reality is weakened, and the aesthetic value of the work suffers.

Metcalf's awareness of the problem is made painfully obvious within the novel itself through his often mechanical attempts to breathe life into Wells. Metcalf also uses commentary which seems to come more from the author than the characters. When Wells rambles boringly and compulsively on, Metcalf, instead of using his skill at compressed or elliptical expression, has Kathy fall asleep or say, “I can't stand much more.” The irony is not lost, but one wishes for more editing and less editorializing. Kathy herself plays Sancho Panza to Wells's Quixote. She is Peter Thornton's girl in gingham. Wells tells us, “… everything about her enchanted me. She seemed to me to have stepped into the real world of my life from the pages of a fairy tale” (p. 91). Unlike Anna Stevens, however, Kathy tragically survives the transition only to remain a figure of fantasy and plot manipulation.

Ironically, both Wells and Kathy become most alive in a brilliantly written section where they are least themselves. In an obvious attempt to give his two central characters, but especially Jim Wells, more depth, Metcalf moved them into the idyllic setting of Wells's decaying farmhouse and an impressively evoked winter landscape. The simple neighbouring farmers are accepted on their own terms, and Jim is seen for once within a context which does not rub him raw. Kathy and Jim begin to take on dimensions as human beings which unfortunately are not sustained by other parts of the novel. Chapter xii demonstrates Metcalf's total control of all the elements of his craft as Wells's brief pastoral idyll modulates almost imperceptibly into images of dissolution and violence.

If Metcalf's handling of his central characters did not adequately serve his purpose, his masterful and often hilariously funny caricatures redeem the work. The thumbnail sketches of university faculty and creative-writing students are accomplished with such a fine sense of precise detail that their living counterparts are pinned wriggling to Metcalf's specimen board. General Ludd may be a roman à clef, but its secondary characters certainly have counterparts everywhere. They are skewered by Metcalf because they are easily recognizable as personifications of the values and attitudes he is attacking. One of the novel's central concerns is with the abuse of language both as a disease and as a symptom of the larger malaise; it is through the characters' own words that Metcalf most often condemns them.

Among the novel's many memorable creations is Itzic Zemermann, a caricature of the victim who uses his suffering to buy dispensation in areas of life having nothing to do with his afflictions. The scene in which Wells denounces Itzic is superbly paced and loaded with delicately ironic counterpoint. Wells's quotation from Auden's poem as a statement of his credo is central to the novel for it establishes the foundation of Wells's value system and implies the standard on which Metcalf bases much of his satire:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

(p. 237)

Wells is able to dismiss the questionable quality of his own life on the grounds that he is redeemed by his worship of language. The irony of Auden's infelicitous phrases verging on doggerel is compounded by Wells's insensitivity to the words “beautiful physique” as they apply to Itzic. The scene, which culminates in Itzic's death, manages to combine seriousness and pathos with an underlying black humour.

In General Ludd, Metcalf appears to trust his readers less than in his previous works (perhaps because he assumed a wider audience) and is less likely to leave key elements without explanation or significant underlining. An opposing tendency, which stems more from intellectual honesty and artistic integrity, often introduces confusion and ambiguity into elements which at first appeared to be constants. Just when the reader feels that Wells has been comfortably classified, Metcalf shifts the ground. Wells reveals that Auden revised his poem in later life and excised the stanzas quoted, perhaps because the writing was poor, perhaps because “… he no longer believed in what he'd written.” Wells broods, “Where are we if they're not true? … If we're not pardoned?” (p. 263). Wells's feelings of guilt over Itzic's death, his pain and rage over the life and death of his friend Caverly, his burning and fearful obsession with television, and his conviction that the barbarians are well within the gate all contribute towards making his doubt in his own essential position too much to bear. He escapes more and more into alcohol and mad anarchistic gestures.

Wells sees himself as guerrilla fighter whose mission it is to oppose society, but Kathy refuses to take sides. Her betrayal of Wells is therefore inevitable; Metcalf's scheme allows no neutrals. In writing General Ludd, Metcalf relaxed the tight control of language, voice, and structure employed in his short stories for the more diffuse form of the novel. But it is in the episodes and set pieces that the novel is most impressive, demonstrating that at present his fundamental impulse as a writer is correct: his enormous talent is best expressed in the short-story form. The well-known Canadian critic John Moss has declared that “General Ludd is probably the finest comic novel ever published in Canada” and that Metcalf “follows comfortably in the wake of Cervantes, or Fielding, or Trollope, or Waugh at his very best.”⁷⁶ If this is accurate, then Metcalf's stature as a short-story writer must grow enormous in comparison. Metcalf's importance to the short-story genre in Canada is expressed with less hyperbole and more authority by the writer-critic Kent Thompson: “[John Metcalf] is setting a standard; he is an artistic conscience; he is the preventer of shoddy work. And that is very important to the development of the short story in this country, in this language.”⁷⁷

Notes

1. Barry Cameron, “The Practice of the Craft: A Conversation with John Metcalf,” Queen's Quarterly, 82 (Autumn 1975), 412–13. All further references to this work (Cameron) appear in the text.

2. Clark Blaise and John Metcalf, Introd., Here and Now, ed. Clark Blaise and John Metcalf (Ottawa: Oberon, 1977), pp.5–6.

3. John Metcalf, “Telling Tales,” in Kicking Against the Pricks (Downsview, Ont.: ECW., 1982), p.79. All further references to this work (KAP) appear in the text.

4. John Metcalf, rev. of I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, by Norman Levine, The Canadian Forum, June 1972, p.39.

5. Michael Smith, “Interview,” Books in Canada, Jan. 1979, p.24.

6. Anne Montagnes, “A Discovery: John Metcalf, a Newcomer and a Master of the Neat, Pointed Story,” rev. of New Canadian Writing, 1969, Saturday Night, Dec. 1969, pp.55–56.

7. Margaret Howard Blom, “The Charm of the Past,” rev. of New Canadian Writing, 1969, Canadian Literature, No. 44 (Spring 1970), pp.80–81.

8. Kent Thompson, rev. of New Canadian Writing, 1969, The Fiddlehead, No. 85 (May-June-July 1970), pp.102–04.

9. Peter Sypnowich, “Reverence for Life Is Still Found in English Writing,” rev. of The Lady Who Sold Furniture, Toronto Daily Star, 23 May 1970, p.59.

10. Leo Simpson, “Rabbits, Watercress Coming On Excitingly,” rev. of The Lady Who Sold Furniture, The Globe Magazine, 20 June 1970, p.16.

11. Eldon Garnet, rev. of The Lady Who Sold Furniture, The Telegram [Toronto], 6 June 1970, p.55.

12. Kent Thompson, rev. of. The Lady Who Sold Furniture, The Fiddlehead, No. 86 (Aug.-Sept.-Oct. 1970), pp.167–68.

13. Simpson, p.16.

14. Patricia Morley, rev. of Going Down Slow, Queen's Quarterly, 80 (Spring 1973), 138–40.

15. Isaac Bickerstaff [Don Evans], “Physical Education,” rev. of Going Down Slow, Books in Canada, Oct. 1972, pp.20–21.

16. David M. Legate, “First but Not a Winner,” rev. of Going Down Slow, The Montreal Star, 16 Sept. 1972, Sec. C, p.3.

17. Kenneth Gibson, rev. of Going Down Slow, The Canadian Forum, Sept. 1973, p.41.

18. Robert Weaver, rev. of Going Down Slow, by John Metcalf, and You Cant Get There From Here, by Hugh Hood, Saturday Night, Nov. 1972, p.51.

19. William French, “Crisp Satire with a Fine, Surreal Bent,” rev. of Going Down Slow, The Globe and Mail, 26 Aug. 1972, p.28.

20. Douglas Barbour, rev. of Going Down Slow, The Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 10 (Spring 1973), p.112.

21. J. R. Leitold, rev. of Going Down Slow, Dalhousie Review, 53 (Summer 1973), 367.

22. David Helwig, “Story Moves Quickly,” rev. of Going Down Slow, The Whig-Standard [Kingston], 4 Nov. 1972, p.17.

23. Roy MacSkimming, “Some Outstanding Stories Emerge from Author's Uneven Collection,” rev. of The Teeth of My Father, The Toronto Star, 29 March 1975, Sec. H, p.7.

24. Michael Smith, “Victims and Busier Bodies,” rev. of The Teeth of My Father, by John Metcalf, and A Private Place, by Joyce Marshall, Books in Canada, Aug. 1975, p.18.

25. Kerry McSweeney, “Shoddy on the Outside but Soft Hearts Within,” rev. of The Teeth of My Father, The Whig-Standard [Kingston], 22 May 1975, p.7.

26. Brian Vintcent, rev. of The Teeth of My Father, Quill & Quire, May 1975, p.40.

27. Anthony Brennan, rev. of The Teeth of My Father, The Fiddlehead, No. 105 (Spring 1975), p.126.

28. MacSkimming, p.7.

29. Barry Cameron, “In Praise of the Craft,” rev. of The Teeth of My Father, The Canadian Forum, Aug. 1975, p.36.

30. Barry Cameron, “An Approximation of Poetry: The Short Stories of John Metcalf,” Studies in Canadian Literature, 2 (Winter 1977), 35. All further references to this work appear in the text.

31. Wayne Grady, rev. of Girl in Gingham, The Tamarack Review, Nos. 77–78 (Summer 1979), pp.99–100.

32. Roderick W. Harvey, “Private Realities,” rev. of Girl in Gingham, by John Metcalf, The Italians, by Frank Paci, and Skevington's Daughter, by John Mills, Canadian Literature, No. 84 (Spring 1980), p.130.

33. John Mills, rev. of Girl in Gingham, The Fiddlehead, No. 118 (Summer 1978), p.175.

34. Robert Lecker, “Private Art,” rev. of Girl in Gingham, The Canadian Forum, Sept. 1978, p.28.

35. William French, “Metcalf Shouldn't Be Classified; Just Enjoyed,” rev. of Girl in Gingham, The Globe and Mail, 30 March 1978, p.15.

36. Ken Adachi, “Novella Reads like Portnoy's Complaint,” rev. of Girl in Gingham, The Toronto Star, 15 April 1978, Sec. D, p.7.

37. Lee Briscoe Thompson, “Guilt in Gingham,” rev. of Girl in Gingham, Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 16 (Fall-Winter 1979–80), pp.191–97.

38. Barry Cameron, “Invention in Girl in Gingham,” The Fiddlehead, No. 114 (Summer 1977), p.120. All further references to this work appear in the text.

39. John Metcalf, “Notes on Writing a Story,” The Fiddlehead, No. 114 (Summer 1977), p.72.

40. Cary Fagan, “Misguided Accuser,” rev. of General Ludd, The Canadian Forum, Dec. 1980-Jan. 1981, p.40.

41. Barbara Campbell, rev. of General Ludd, Quill & Quire, Oct. 1980, p.35.

42. J. L. Granatstein, “Modern Luddite Is Hero of Comic Novel with Bite,” rev. of General Ludd, Timmins Press, 20 Sept. 1980. This review was widely published across Canada in newspapers of the Thomson chain, 20–22 Sept. 1980.

43. William French, rev. of General Ludd, The Globe and Mail, 23 Aug. 1980, Sec. E, p.12.

44. Rev. of General Ludd, Choice, 18 (Feb. 1981), 797.

45. John Metcalf, “Author's Commentary,” in Sixteen by Twelve: Short Stories by Canadian Writers, ed. John Metcalf (Toronto: Ryerson, 1970), pp.198–99. All further references to this work appear in the text.

46. F. S. Flint, “Imagisme,” Poetry [Chicago], 1 (March 1913), 199.

47. Ezra Pound, “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry [Chicago], 1 (March 1913), 200.

48. John Metcalf, “Early Morning Rabbits,” Prism International, 4, No. 1 (Summer 1964), 8.

49. “Early Morning Rabbits,” p.10.

50. Marion McCormick, radio interview with John Metcalf, CBC Anthology, 19 Dec. 1970.

51. McCormick, radio interview.

52. The Lady Who Sold Furniture (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1970), p.110. All further references to this work (LWSF) appear in the text.

53. Prism International, 4, No. 1 (Summer 1964), 27.

54. Prism International, 4, No. 2 (Autumn 1964), 33.

55. The Canadian Forum, April 1965, pp.12–13.

56. Edge, No. 6 (Spring 1967), pp.19–24.

57. New Canadian Writing, 1969: Stories by John Metcalf, D. O. Spettigue and C. J. Newman (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1969), p.3. All further references to this work (NCW) appear in the text.

58. Thompson, rev. of New Canadian Writing, 1969, p.104.

59. Prism International, 4, No. 1 (Summer 1964), 21–25.

60. John Metcalf, “Soaping a Meditative Foot (Notes for a Young Writer),” in The Narrative Voice: Short Stories and Reflections by Canadian Authors, ed. John Metcalf (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), p.154.

61. Gibson, p.41.

62. St. Louis Jimmy [James Oden], “Going Down Slow,” Otis Spann: Walking the Blues, Candid, KZ 31290, 1960.

63. In England, Metcalf had read George Woodcock and found that many of his own ideas coincided with those of the anarchist philosophers. Letter received from John Metcalf, n.d. [ca. May 1966].

64. The Teeth of My Father (Ottawa: Oberon, 1975), p.7. All further references to this work (TMF) appear in the text.

65. John Metcalf, Public Reading with Alice Munro, Loyola College, Montreal, 10 Feb. 1975.

66. John Metcalf, Public Reading, Dawson College, Montreal, 14 April 1975.

67. See Herbert Gold, quoted by Metcalf in “Soaping a Meditative Foot,” p.154.

68. Robert Lecker, “John Metcalf: Unburdening the Mystery,” in On the Line: Readings in the Short Fiction of Clark Blaise, John Metcalf and Hugh Hood (Downsview, Ont.: ECW, 1982), p.75. All further references to this work appear in the text.

69. Girl in Gingham (Ottawa: Oberon, 1978), p.89. All further references to this work (GG) appear in the text.

70. See above, note 45.

71. Metcalf, “Notes on Writing a Story,” p.70.

72. Metcalf, “Soaping a Meditative Foot,” p.155.

73. Granatstein, “Modern Luddite Is Hero of Comic Novel with Bite.”

74. General Ludd (Downsview, Ont.: ECW, 1980), p.46. All further references to this work appear in the text.

75. Geoff Hancock, “An Interview with John Metcalf,” Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 39 (1981), p.122.

76. John Moss, “Metcalf, John,” in A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981), p.197.

77. Thompson, “John Metcalf: A Profile,” p.63.