“I” is easily used these days

A day with Helen Weinzweig

If you haven’t read Helen Weinzweig (1915-2010), you’re missing out on one of the best Canadian novels of the twentieth century – no, I take that back, one of the best novels period. I am talking about Basic Black with Pearls (1980), her second and final. It came out when she was in her 60s, garnered accolades at home and in the US, earned her the Toronto Book Award, and ten years later was already relegated to a historically important work for CanLit, instead of being something that people were still buying for one another. The line of Canadian modernists following in the BBwP footsteps did not quite happen. She lived till the age of 95, but no other novels materialized. The NYRB Classics reissued Basic Black in 2018, yet I still can’t find anybody who’s read her, and for most people the name doesn’t ring a bell.  

Her coming to writing was delayed. For most of her life it was her husband who was The Artist of the family, the serialist composer John Weinzweig. Her life was a life of what was then called a housewife, and what we now call a stay-at-home mom – mind, a Holt Renfrew haute bourgeoise by marriage kind -- until well into her forties, when a mental health crisis brought her to a psychiatrist who suggested writing as a way out of her existential impasse. She had read, she would later say, practically everything by that point, but had a definite preference for modernist, postmodern and experimental tradition in literature. “Personally, I feel the so-called ‘mirroring of life’ has been taken over completely by movies and television, so that a writer is hard put to be creative. I feel that today the ‘experimentalists’ have synthesized myth and fact, and the intellect and the emotion. The continental writers, in translation, have influenced me, because their approach to storytelling, I feel, is more subtle, intelligent, and certainly more abstract – a sort of ‘what is going on?’”

Basic Black with Pearls begins by looking like a story of a woman tracking down a lover who works for some super secret Agency, travels incessantly, and leaves her clues about their next meeting in old issues of National Geographic. Just as you start decoding that set-up, it changes into something else – she is certain that Coenraad directed her to meet him in her home town of Toronto which she wanders, towards a potential meeting spot, through layers of her past. Things and persons distract from her quest – a girl in a painting at the AGO involves her in her life, and Kensington Market is the Market where her mother lived, lives! as a seamstress. The figure of the husband appears… so Shirley’s married, then? Children are somewhere too in that house in upscale North Toronto? Has she left them all for good?. Further layers and dreamwork-like displacements elegantly transport you to an ending that is a thing of beauty. You close the book, and it keeps vibrating with myriad possibilities.

The entirety of HW papers, the 7+ meters of boxes of them, live inside the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the U of T. I originally joined the TF on an external card the unfortunate year of 2020, just before everything shut down. Various parts of the U of T libraries opened over time to various demographics, but the TF remained shuttered till literally a couple of weeks ago. It’s still a palaver to get in and use it. The main entrance is closed; they’re only open three days a week and they only admit four people at any time. You must book your visit in advance and choose one of the two time slots. I almost gave up but the reception and retrieval staff were merciful this morning so we sorted it out. So there they were, suddenly: the four boxes of the Weinzweig papers on a cart next to my desk.

There is so much in the HW archives, and the only search method is scrolling through a long PDF listing all the boxes and what each of the folders roughly contains. There are letters, hand written notes, half finished essays, records of edits, records of travels, diaries, press clippings, all the articles and quotes of interest that we now store on computers as bookmarked/favourites or screenshot. A good amount of gossip and judgement about other authors. Lists. Student papers on HW fiction. Scholarly papers on HW fiction. The reviews accompanied by reviews of reviews. Just a tremendous amount of stuff. 

And I wanted to go through some of this out of sheer pleasure. As a multi-part pilgrimage, if you will, in honour of her work.

Here are some gems from my first visit.

I had no sense of “I”

“The advent of feminism had a tremendous influence on me. It gave me courage in many directions. The reasons are complex. Suffice it that my “conventional” life kept me safe and acceptable, but I broke out in small enterprises (not commercial) in an effort to vary an existence that upon second sight was stultifying. A dissatisfaction with what was available to me in my late 40’s without any skills or degrees led me to a psychiatrist. She somehow got me to try and write. Because of “circumstances beyond control” and the “role” I chose I had no ego, made no demands on anyone or anything, non-aggressive, very analytical. I had no sense of “I”. “Basic Black” was torture to come out of the closet, as the expression goes. That and the support I got from women and observing the new self-assertion of women, as well as having some public life as a writer, I have had the blissful feeling of getting a second change. The above should indicate that “I” is easily used these days.”

[Answers to student questions, possibly? Described in catalogue as “Various notes on writing” Box 4, folder 10]

___

Weinzweig Reading List

This is a sort of rundown of all the writers who were important for her. Box 4/ folder 12. Here are some excerpts:

Some innovators

Ronald Firbank

Raymond Roussel

Djuna Barnes

Ivy Compton-Burnett

J L Borges

Nathalie Sarraute

Louis Celine

Italo Calvino

Alain Robbes Grillet

Severo Sarduy

Canadian

Ferron

Aquin

Bosco

Sheila Watson

Michael Yates

French

Butor

Pinget

Simon

Duras

Queneau

Latin American

(the longest list, which I’m skipping)

American

Barthelme

Patchen

Coover

Sorrentino

Abish

Other

Kundera

Schultz

Handke

Janet Frame

Italo Calvino

Ann Quinn

Stanislaw Lem (added in handwriting)

___

Canada: From Sovereignty to Servility in One Hundred Years

This must have been written as the 1967 Centennial was aproaching, I couldn’t find where and when it was published. The file is neatly type-written (I believe she had a typist/secetary in her life, but to be confirmed).

We might as well jump right in medias res.

“As we contemplate the disconcerting fact that we no longer own our country – American investment in Canada is almost 60% of the total – we must admit that their so-called greed merely played on our own avarice. [...] And ours was the worst kind of greed, the passive kind. The kind that hands over for immediate profit what took nature a million years to produce. We handed over our unearned wealth: the raw resources of the land. We are right back where we started as a colony… We buy back the finished articles, so that we stagger under an impossible trade balance, importing out of proportion, monetarily, what we export.

…

We do not have an optimism that plans for the nation’s future.

…

On the eve of our Centennial, we are more concerned with American politics than with our own. Next November, we will ask one another whether we will vote for Johnson or Goldwater.

…

…[S]ince 1837 rebellion against bureaucracy and vested interest Lord Duham was sent and gave a brilliant report that made such acceptable recommendations that both sides gave up the struggle, ever since then, each time a problem confronts the nation, or even a province, we set up a Royal Commission to find the source of trouble and make recommendations for remedial action. This takes the wind out of any storm. It takes so long for a Commission to set out its findings that the storm is over and no one can recall what the fuss was all about…

We have never learned to face difficulty squarely, nor have we developed experience in dealing with them.

…

It isn’t that we have nothing to offer our artists and scientists. We just don’t believe in them. […] We have to-day the first generation of Canadian artists and scientists being taught in their own country […] There is little money for research. No one will publish your work or perform your music. We are dependent on Ford grants and American or English publishers.

…

“Man and His World” is the theme of the World Fair to be held in Montreal in 1967. This is an auspicious framework of mind. We serve man and his world best by going about as freeholders, not as servants.

[Box 8/folder 22]

___

It really is a scandal that Canadian writers are so badly served by the publishers and booksellers

A letter from a reader, one Mrs Creech. Things have improved since; this is the early days of CanPub.

Mrs Creech writes to her to congratulate on the success of BBwP, and to politely despair that the book is “impossible to find in London” “and in Toronto I finally got the last copy at Britnell’s and at the Women’s Bookstore. It really is a scandal that Canadian writers are so badly served by the publishers and booksellers.”

In her reply dated “Kearney ON, Aug 9, 1980” HW shares her frustration about the appalling state of distribution of Canadian books to Canadians and finishes with:

“They [the distributors] say they can do nothing if the bookstore doesn’t order the book, and they won’t order etc etc. In Sweden, because there is so little serious writing published there, as everywhere, the writers print, bind and distribute their own books. Perhaps it will come to that. In a way, Loughouse Book Store on Yonge Street who stock only Canadian books, are doing what the Music Centre does in Toronto, but without subsidy. Maybe we ought to go for a book centre? Book Centre, in capitals.”

To be continued at the earliest opportunity