Writing and Reading
Writing and Reading
By George Bowering
New Star Books, 2019; 176 pages; $18
Reviewed by Trevor Carolan
As Robinson Jeffers observed, “Courage never was compulsory.” This is what makes writers who actually say what’s on their mind so enjoyable. Whether it’s in newspaper op-ed columns, magazine essays, or reviews, we get to think about an author in a larger way when they step up and put their name to a point of view. Théophile Gautier served this role in Paris as poet, critic, novelist, traveller, and popularizer of talents like Baudelaire and Balzac. San Francisco had Rexroth, Romantic-era London had Hazlitt: for fifty years or so, Vancouver has had George Bowering.
This new collection addresses writing and reading. Naturally, related items glide in — Vancouver’s literary history, gossipy tales about writer pals and heroes who’ve been important to him, memories of his boyhood in Oliver, a complex auto-bibliography on his readings in ’67, and a kick-ass essay that melds scholarly flash with Bowering’s familiar, vernacular narrative style. Entitled “Apollinaire and Vancouver: A Story about our poetry,” it ruminates on Jack Spicer, Malcolm Lowry, Blaise Cendrars, Shelley, Charles Olson, W.C. Williams, Daphne Marlatt, Ryan Knighton, and George Stanley — a worthy squad by anyone’s lights. If you care about Vancouver literature, you’ll learn a lot. Add “My Heart in Hiding,” a fine appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover,” and you’ve got a crash-course mini-syllabus in real-world poetics that creative writing majors especially would benefit by reading.
A series of short five hundred word essays that read like newspaper columns gets the rhythm going, not always resoundingly. There’s spiritual conjecture, a little blarney. Then Bowering introduces The Battle of Algiers, saying Gillo Pontecorvo’s brilliant ’60s film is his favourite work of cinema. Coming at “a time when we were being trained to look at films in a different way,” he notes, it was difficult to tell whether you were watching a documentary in black and white or “actors on the screen.” If identifying the underdogs was easy, knowing who the heroes were remained cloudy — foreshadowing the never-ending Middle Eastern wars of recent decades.
In “Kroetsch Listens,” a felicitous portrait of one of the decentest fellows CanLit has ever thrown us, he recounts meeting “the smartest, funniest” boss writer in the land. Alas, hopes for a sparkling tête-à-tête are thwarted by Bowering’s wife at the time, “a very talkative woman,” who finds Bob Kroetsch only too-willing a listener. In time though, Bowering comes to understand him as a “great writer and a great teacher.” In a quiet way that’s more Zen than you might expect, he concludes in one of the book’s best lines, “when he sat there with a bit of a smile and listened, he was teaching you what you needed to know.”
Joe Rosenblatt, Alice Munro, the painter Greg Curnoe, John Ashbery, poets Judith Fitzgerald and David Bromige also receive Bowering’s portraiture, not to mention himself in an intriguing “self-interview.” What’s fun to read is the pleasure Bowering takes in writing as “an old coot” — after long years in the writing game, he can laugh at himself. But the poet-professor still has veteran chops and can use an offbeat, apparently unrelated story to suddenly crystallize his point. In “Hooray, Difficulty!” he turns an anecdote about Gertrude Stein’s watching a football game in 1934, into an improbable analogy about understanding eclectic, challenging art. It’s a gift of a tale.
There’s a writers’ adage that if you can’t handle sentiment, you’re not in the game. Bowering’s memoir about Tom Cone — of Herringbone fame, and out of Vancouver’s cornucopia of talented play-wrights in the ’70s — takes cancer, recollections of Cone’s “exact true details of the imaginative life in this place,” a little regret, and — what else? — some baseball talk, merging them into an admiring tribute. It’s artful writing about writing and reading from a guy who remains an indelible part-of-the-scene. »