It’s been an average year of reading. 160 books and about 500 academic papers, articles, short stories and other short items. History and anthropology dominated the book reading, as usual, with an emphasis on Australia, the Pacific, the Canadian North and West, and the ideas of 19th century Canadian democratic reformers. I became particularly fascinated by the 19th century convict colonies of Australia and the French Pacific possessions, and I amplified previous readings (such as Robert Hughes venerable The Fatal Shore, and the eye-opening but little known Australia’s Birthstain, by Babette Smith). Thomas Keneally, giving Hughes a run for his money in A Commonwealth of Thieves, covers the general subject with extraordinarily vivid prose, and Siân Rees makes a closer case study in The Floating Brothel — The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth- century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts.
The bulk of the convicts sent to Australia were pickpockets or petty thieves from the slums of London, poachers from the West Country who snared a hare on some aristocrat’s estate, or servants who pilfered hankerchiefs or stockings from their masters. Their exile to Australia was conceived of as “bleeding heart liberalism” — most of them had been condemned to death, or had been rotting in the prison hulks for years. It is hard for a modern reader to grasp that the British courts of the time routinely condemned small children to death by hanging for stealing a spoon, with the judges sternly lecturing the public about the need to be tough on crime, and the contemporary equivalent of Fox News screaming that the courts were too lenient. Siân Rees describes the case of a woman who was condemned to be publicly burnt alive because she had shared a room with a counterfeiter. She was held to be guilty of the same crime merely for giving the counterfeiter lodging. He was only hung, but the law, unchanged since the Middle Ages, required a woman to be burned at the stake. She witnessed another woman burnt before her sentence was commuted to transportation. She survived the long voyage (many did not), served her term, and eventually became prosperous and respected in Australia. Over two centuries, Australians have had an ambivalent attitude to the transportees, with some generations straining to cover up the “stain” of convict ancestry, and others romanticizing them into “working class” heroes, neither attitude having much to do with reality or common sense. Most of the transportees were guilty of nothing more than being poor, but among them were some cutthroats and ruffians. Few were ready for frontier life, but most probably ended up better off in the long run than they would have if they had stayed in England.
Among the transportees were some of the African-Americans who had fought with the British in the American Revolution. In the northern colonies, many African-Americans fought on the revolutionary side, but in the southern states the new American Republic was determined to keep them enslaved, and made this perfectly clear with a brutal reign of terror on the plantations. Britain offered them emancipation, and many heeded the call. But they were ill-used when Britain, licking its wounds from a bungled lost war, let many end up unemployed and starving in London. Some of them were transported to Australia. Cassandra Pybus tells their tale in Epic Journeys of Freedom — Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. But perhaps the oddest group were French Canadians, who were among the few real “political prisoners” transported to New South Wales. Their story is little known, even in Canada. In 1837–38, there were simultaneous rebellions against British rule in (mostly) English-speaking Upper Canada [now Ontario] and (mostly) French-speaking Lower Canada [now Quebec]. In both cases, a largely egalitarian society of self-sufficient farmers was fed up with being ruled by a tiny coterie of self-styled aristocrats — in Upper Canada, the “Family Compact” and in Lower Canada, the “Chateau Clique.” Hardening opposition to reasonable democratic reforms led eventually to outright rebellion, in both cases crushed by well-trained British forces and Conservative elements in the colonies. The leaders of both rebellions easily slipped across the border to exile in the U.S., later to come back and go on to successful careers. But immediately after the rebellion, in Lower Canada, triumphant Conservatives used martial law to round up quite a large number of lesser “traitors” who did nothing more than attend a rebel meeting, or perhaps were inconvenient business competitors, or owned a juicy little property that could be expropriated. Hundreds were tried in kangaroo courts and exiled to the Australian prison colonies. Their story is told by Beverley Boissery in A Deep Sense of Wrong — The Treason, Trials, and Transportation to New South Wales of Lower Canadian Rebels after the 1838 Rebellion. Unlike most of the English and Irish convicts, even the poorest Canadiens were literate, and many were well-educated, technically skilled, and used to hard pioneering work. Some kept journals, providing the only historical souces for the convict system written from the prisoners’s point of view. Once in Australia, they beavered away, making the best of it, eventually winning the Aussies’ respect with their sober work ethic. But they all had friends and family waiting for them back in Canada, and an astonishing number of them eventually got back home from the other side of the planet.
The failure of the rebellions in Canada led eventually to the emergence of two remarkable men, both of whom deserve to be discussed at length, because the trend of their thinking clearly led to the Canada that exists today, and at the same time represented an astonishing alternative path to what the rest of the world was taking. And my learning about this can be traced to a gift I received from my friend Peter Svilans. He ran across an old book in Newmarket, a town 55km north of Toronto, and thinking it might appeal to me, gave it to me. It turned out to be a 1793 English verse rendering of Les aventures de Télémaque, a work written in 1699 by François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. It was a superbly appropriate gift choice, considering my interests. Fénelon is largely forgotten, now, but he had an enormous impact in his time, and he could best be described as the opening canon-shot of the Enlightenment. His Télemaque was a “didactic epic” recounting the story of Telemachus from the Odyssey, but mostly focusing on the advice the boy is given by a sage Mentor (who turns out to be really Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom). Such a thing would have normally been written in verse, but Fénelon chose to write it in simple vernacular prose, with the aim of making it accessible to everyone, including women and children. It was immediately recognized as a fierce attack on the prevailing autocracy and the concept of “divine right of kings”, and Fénelon was promptly exiled to a country parish for the remainder of his life. The book denounced autocratic rule and mercantilism, advocated parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy, and argued that war should be avoided by negotiations in a federal council of nations. It pretty much laid out the basic program pursued by Enlightenment thinkers in the next generation. It was a favourite of Montesquieu and Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson is said to have re-read it many times. A French historian has called it “the true key to the museum of the eighteenth century imagination.”
Now, what does this have to do with rebellions in Canada? Well, the failed rebellions had a transforming impact on two young men who were both ardent democratic reformers, Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine in Lower Canada, and Robert Baldwin in Upper Canada. Both men had come to the conclusion that the rebellions led by firebrands like Louis-Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie, which they had initially supported, had been more destructive than productive of reform, and that a more rational strategy was required. Lafontaine still had faith in the demands made by the Patriotes in the rebellion: democratic government by universal male suffrage, with property qualifications abolished; equality of English and French as legal and governing languages; trial by jury in all criminal and most civil cases; abolition of the death penalty for all crimes except first degree murder; equal rights for all aboriginal peoples “the same as any other citizen”; guarantees of freedom of speech and the press; freedom of religion and total separation of Church and State; abolition of seigneural tenure and remnant “feudal” practices; a free market in land; public education. It should be noted that these demands, made in 1837, went much further in the direction of modern democracy than anything contemplated elsewhere. But the rebellions had only brought about a triumphant Conservative reaction, with massive abuses of civil rights. In 1841, the two colonies were consolidated, after this was urged by the investigating emissary from Britain, Lord Durham. There would be an elected assembly for the new “United Canada”, but the intention was to dilute the power of the French-speaking majority in Lower Canada, with a long-term goal of “assimilating” French Canadians into oblivion. While there were some constitutional gains, the assembly having more power on money bills than before, there were obvious losses. Lower Canada had actually rejoiced in a degree of women’s suffrage: women who met the property qualifications had the vote, and these qualifications were low enough that they applied to a substantial number of women. There was, in fact, nothing like it in any other place in the world. In one contemporary document I ran across, it is casually mentioned to a visitor that “in our country, women are the political equals of men.” This female suffrage would be abolished by the new United Canada. In Upper Canada, the autocratic power of the Family Compact was strengthened, and reform stymied. Lafontaine and Baldwin, both ardent democrats, looked upon the ash-heap left by the rebellions and tried to think out a strategy to bring the reform movement back to life.
Lafontaine & Baldwin
At this point, Lafontaine gave a speech in his home riding of Terrebonne, where he was running for the new parliament. He told the crowd that the best strategy was not to boycott the new regime, as many advocated, but to embrace it, use all the political power they could muster, and win reforms step by step. Foil the plans to assimilate French Canada by becoming the colony’s most adept parliamentarians. Win through grit and determination what the rebels had failed to win with arms. Lafontaine would easily have been elected to his riding, but Conservative hooligans, beating and intimidating voters, kept him out of office.
News of these events reached Robert Baldwin in Upper Canada. The young man, whose equally young wife had just died of illness, had withdrawn into a twilight of grief. His father, also a life-long reformer, told him he must find a new strategy for reform, and pursue it, or wallow uselessly in self-pity. He suggested that Lafontaine’s speech held the key. The elder Baldwin resigned from his seat in the Assembly, forcing a bi-election in the riding of Newmarket. Robert Baldwin wrote to Lafontaine, inviting him to come to Upper Canada and run as a Reform candidate in Newmarket. This was the first step in what turned out to be a life-long collaboration and intimate friendship. Baldwin was eventually to learn French, and send his daughters to be educated in Lower Canadian schools. Lafontaine, unwillingly childless, lived with the Baldwins in Newmarket and came to think of them as family. Both men were prodigious readers. Even before his arrival, Lafontaine sent a gift with his “yes” to the Reformers’ proposal: a copy of Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque, the symbolism of which would be obvious to the bookish Baldwin.
Now, I know this because it is mentioned in the first letter from Lafontaine to Baldwin in their collected correspondence. I had been led to Lafontaine’s writing by a totally different line of inquiry. Upper Canada passed its Act Against Slavery in 1793, making it the second government in the world to do so (they were preceded by a few years by Vermont, which did so during it’s period of sovereign independence between 1777 and 1791). Lower Canada followed suit within a few years. There had never been a large number of slaves in Canada, but they were owned by the rich and influential, and it was testimony to their deeply felt popular hatred of slavery that Canadians were able to get such legislation passed in a political system rigged to support the interests of the rich. While investigating this period, I came across Lafontaine’s De l’esclavage en Canada, in which he sought to bring to light every document concerning slavery in Canada. Reading this little known document led me to read his better-known works, the Deux giriouettes, ou l’hypocrisie démasquée, the Address to the Electors of Terrebonne and the correspondence of Baldwin and Lafontaine [My Dear Friend: Letters of Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine & Robert Baldwin, ed. Yolande Stewart].
I will indulge in some wishful thinking. I like to think that the copy I now possess of Fénelon’s Télémaque is the one that Lafontaine gave to Baldwin. This particular edition is very rare. I could find no copy listed in any Canadian public or university library, not even in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library or the Library of Parliament, which contain many arcane treasures. The only copy, other than my own, which I could trace, is in the British National Library. It’s not likely that there was ever more than a single copy in Canada. My friend Peter found it in Newmarket, Ontario, within a mile of Robert Baldwin’s family home.
Baldwin and Lafontaine are far more important characters than Canadian history books would indicate. In their writings and correspondence, you see the emergence of a set of ideas that were unprecedented. Canadian historians are mostly interested in the fact that their activism eventually led to the creation of the Canadian Confederation in 1867, but do not notice the profound originality of their political thinking. At the time, most political reform and radicalism was built on the premises of romantic nationalism. It was taken for granted that the nation was the natural unit of politics, and even where political movements envisioned democratic governance, this was seen as secondary to the mysticism of the nation as a collective agency. The “nation” embodied biological descent, and required “unity” — conformity of language, faith, and custom. No European intellectual of the period, that I can find, valued diversity or felt that it was a good thing to combine different languages, faiths, or ethnicities into the same polity. It was seen as a defect that might have to be tolerated, but not as something of positive value. Promoters of empires considered diversity the weakness of their realms. Promoters of national independence envisioned their “liberated” states as culturally uniform units.
Lafontaine and Baldwin had come to the opposite conclusion, putting them into a different category from other reformers of the era. They explicitly advocated a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, held together by a commitment to share a political community without conformity. In their view, democracy and the rule of law formed an abstract framework of values that could allow freedom to prosper without needing any of the traditional defining features of nationhood. As they saw it, and stated explicitly, this diversity constituted a strength, not a weakness, just as they had found in their personal friendship. But this was not something that any significant number of intellectuals were advocating. The only available precedent was Switzerland, which had just gone through a civil war, and accomplished something similar with an intense compartmentalism. Europe would go on to more extreme and disastrous manifestations of Uniformitarianism. The colonial empires of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Germany left no doubt that there was to be nothing equal about the ethnicities, languages and customs within them. The United States struggled with a schizophrenic heritage, the implied values of the American Revolution in constant conflict with the urge to create a uniformitarian state, immigrants under constant pressure to “melt” into conformity. But in Canada, the ideas of Baldwin and Lafontaine became the mainstream shaping the country’s destiny. Confederation in 1867 was clearly founded on them. Wilfrid Laurier, our Prime Minister between 1896 and 1911, tried to badger the British Empire into accepting this vision, picturing a brotherhood of equal nations, and struggled hopelessly against the Empire’s relentless march toward the First World War. Time and again, some version of these ideas has brought out the “better angels of our nature” [Charles Dickens wrote this phrase in Barnaby Rudge in 1841. He seems to have gotten it from Shakespeare’s Othello. Abraham Lincoln used it when facing up to the schizophrenia I have just mentioned]. When interviewed while welcoming Syrian refugees to Canada, a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pretty much stated them as if they were obvious. But they are by no means obvious to most of the world, or there would be no refugees to welcome. So reading Lafontaine and Baldwin, seeing these ideas being born, was emotionally, as well as intellectually satisfying.
Another peculiar case of prescient thinking in 19th century Canada came to my attention through another friend, Tim Kyger, an authority on the history of the space exploration. William Leitch was an astronomer and dean of an Ontario university, who seems to have been well-versed in the most advanced physics and astronomy of his time, and incorporated them into a book called God’s Glory in the Heavens in 1862. Because of the title (Leitch was a Presbytarian minister), the book remained in theology sections of libraries and archives, rather than astronomy collections, and its importance was only recently realized. It discusses some ideas in physics that had emerged only months before the book’s publication, and one amazing passage hints at Einstein’s reasoning for relativity. But what has caught the attention of scholars is that he proposed that space be explored with the use of rockets, giving perfectly good reasons why they would be the only practical method. This was decades before similar suggestions by Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth, though he does not, as they did, demonstrate the math.
I finally got around to reading Simon Schama’s Citizens : A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Yes, I know, I should have read it long ago. But I tend to follow my enthusiasms where they take me, and obvious choices get shunted aside. The book sat on my shelf for years. Well-written, as all his books are, but I don’t think it presents a major re-thinking of the period. His virtue is largely in omitting the tendentious abstract claims that have been made for the French Revolution as the fountainhead of this or that idea. But you do see, clearly enough, the precedents for all the disastrous totalitarian “revolutions” that followed. Long before Robespierre’s terror, there were already wealthy aristocrats ordering the arrest and execution of poor peasants while denouncing them as “counter-revolutionary aristocrats.” What “revolution” in the two centuries since then, hasn’t abounded in that hipocrisy?
A fanciful contemporary woodcut portraying Jeanne Baret
There were some entertaining biographies in this year’s reading. Glynis Ridley’s The Discovery of Jeanne Baret — A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe was part of my Pacific reading. This truly remarkable woman, who accompanied Bougainville’s exploratory voyage in the South Pacific disguised as a boy, seems also to have been a first rate botanist. Ridley carefully takes apart the documentary evidence and demonstrates that the account of her “unmasking” in Tahiti, which I had read in numerous history books, was probably a fabrication. What’s most remarkable is that Baret was a peasant girl from a small French village, whose adventurous and event-filled life far surpassed reasonable expectations. Another book about the Pacific was In the South Seas — The Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands, a narrative made by Robert Louis Stevenson of his first encounter with Polynesia. Ben MacIntyre’s Josiah the Great, the True Story of the Man Who Would Be King tells the story of Josiah Harlan, an American adventurer who became Prince of Ghor in Afghanistan, among the contentious Hazari, and before the disastrous British occupation of that country. In fact, he ended up fighting against the British. It is said that Harlan’s checkered career inspired Rudyard Kipling to write The Man Who Would Be King. I would also have to count as a “biography” the 15th Century chronicle La chronique du bon duc Loys de Bourbon, written by Jean Cabaret d’Orville in 1429. There is no English translation of this work, and my friend Steve Muhlburger, a renowned scholar of chivalry, is producing one. But translating medieval French is not easy, and Steve has farmed out some of the research legwork to me. This is nothing like the modern French language, obsessed with precision, clarity and the mot juste. French was then a disorderly henhouse of regional dialects and single words used in a hundred ways. Often one can only guess at what D’Oronville was saying, by systematically comparing it to uses of the same words or phrases in other medieval texts.
Robert Young Pelton’s The Hunter, the Hammer, and Heaven — Journeys to Three Worlds Gone Mad didn’t offer me any surprises, but it was a good read. Pelton specializes in going to dangerous places, and the three he deals with in this book are Sierra Leone, Chechnya and Bougainville. I don’t envy him. I’ve found myself in such places by accident, rather than design, and don’t find pants-pissing terror or overdoses of adrenalin to my liking. It isn’t this aspect of the book that interests me, but his fairly acute observation of people and his realistic appraisals of motives and situations. There is only one place in the book with which I can compare some first-hand experience, and everything in that section rings true, so I’m guessing that the other parts are reliable, too.
Mark McCormack’s The Declining Significance of Homophobia — How Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality outlines a social trend (for a change, it’s a good social trend) that seems to be more advanced in Britain than in North America, but does manifest itself here — at least it does in Toronto. It’s interesting to compare it to the curious book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s by Marshall Kirk & Hunter Madsen, written in 1989 (I read it in 2007) which made some practical points, but, with typically American optimism, grossly underestimated the strength of the opposition. Kirk and Madsen assumed that hatred of gays was more or less the product of unfamiliarity and misunderstanding, all of which would be straightened out by the openness and vitality of American society. There was no understanding that there is also a hard core of vile people who are motivated by actual evil, and in the end, gays will have to fight for their freedom, not just let it evolve.
Douglas Stone’s Einstein and the Quantum straightened out some confusion I had about the role Einstein played in the development of Quantum Theory. It has become a cliché that Einstein said “God does not play dice” about Heisenberg’s work, and there is a widespread impression that he rejected quantum physics and generally behaved like an old fuddy-duddy in later years. But this does not appear to be so. Einstein always had a profound interest in quantum effects, and in fact did much of the groundbreaking work that led up to modern Quantum Theory. He struggled for much of his lifetime to find an interpretation of quantum mechanix that would satisfy him. He was, in fact, as much one of the founders of modern Quantum Theory as were Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac and von Neumann.
Which brings me to the shorter non-fiction reading of the year, mostly of academic journal articles. One of these stands out from the others in importance, but I had to read it three times, months apart, to understand why. I’m referring to Jean-Paul Gagnon’s Democratic Theory and Theoretical Physics, which appeared in the obscure Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and will no doubt take years to sift upward to visibility and influence. Gagnon published Evolutionary Basic Democracy: A Critical Overture in 2013, which attempted to make sense of the maze of ill-defined and contradictory notions that appear in the current global discussion of democracy. To say that this project was ambitious is gross understatement. I think Evolutionary Basic Democracy is a very good book, and it deserves to be widely read. But it did not entirely clear up the epistemelogical fog. Democratic Theory and Theoretical Physics moves much closer to doing this.
Gagnon has long held a position that is dear to my heart, that democracy is a phenomenon with broad and ancient roots in human culture, going back, in fact to the earliest evolution of hominids, and is not something that should be arbitrarily pinned to some particular human community or culture. As Steven Muhlberger and I argued as far back as 1993, the roots of democracy are global, cross-cultural, and rooted in basic human relations, as well as a transcendant morality that is not mere custom or tradition. It has taken decades for any significant number of scholars to escape from the provincialism that dominated democracy scholarship, and the process is still ongoing. You still hear prattle about “the Western concept of democracy.” But most democracy advocates all too easily concede that their propositions do not hold the same kind of validity as a physicist’s statements about the natural world.
Scholars in the “social sciences” often suffer from “physics envy” — a yearning to make their disciplines look more like physical and biological sciences, which they feel will enhance their prestige among the hoi poloi. But in their attempts to do so, they often show a profound misunderstanding of how the physical and biological sciences actually work. For example, there have been generations of archaeologists, sociologists (and some historians) who have tried to force human societies into schemes of “social evolution”, supposedly parallel to biological evolution. However, they misunderstand what biologists actually think about biological evolution, and try to make “social evolution” correspond to a grotesque cartoon version of it, in which many of the concepts are distorted or downright wrong. There were decades of talk about necessary progressive stages of social evolution, when no actual biologist ever conceived of evolution as embodying necessary progressive stages. Another mistake is evident when scholars assume that democratic theory can never be discussed with the rigour of physical theory, assuming that Physicists are possessed of a kind of absolute certainty that, in fact, they do not profess.
In Democratic Theory and Theoretical Physics, Gagnon looks at the actual methods that physicists use to bring forth, elucidate, and accept theoretical constructs of the physical world, and shows that physical ideas are encased in very much the same epistemelogical puzzles as those that plague scholars of democracy, but that they have long accepted these puzzles as “the cost of doing business” in constructing physical theory. Physicists work within parameters of (quoting Gagnon) “symmetry, unification, simplicity, and utility” to suggest a theoretical solution, then develop paths of inquiry that enrich and test the theoretical construct, maintaining it as long as it fattens up on its diet of evidence, while always looking for weaknesses and other angles. As a collective endeavour, physics occasionally undergoes a sea-change of fundamental theory, but always maintains a degree of confidence in a real world out there that the math and speculative constructs have something to do with. Gagnon is confident that his formulation of “evolutionary basic democracy” meets the same sort of criteria, and that we can start stepping a little beyond the current state of “I like democracy because, well, ya know, like it’s cool, but I don’t know what the hell it is.” I agree with him. These issues have to be sorted out in this generation, because sowing epistemological confusion among those who seek reasonable ends is a standard tactic of those whose ambition is to achieve unreasonable ones. People who would like to see their societies be more democratic, or wish to protect what democracy they have, are often drawn to a kind of epistemological and cultural relativism that can easily be turned against them. Soon they find themselves selling the farm to totalitarians, because, after all they can’t prove that its better to be free than a slave, and that a concentration camp isn’t morally equivalent to a Sunday picnic. And unless they find the equivalent of the working tools used by physicists, they will be forever failing to create democracy because they fear they can’t define it.
I’ve read several articles about the Komi reindeer herders of arctic Russia, mostly by Kirill Istomin and Mark Dwyer. They have produced a wealth of knowledge about the dynamics, economics and sociology of herding reindeer, and an equal amount of insight into subjects like alcoholism and school performance, all compiled with enormous care and a huge investment in the hardest kind of anthropological work — the kind where you spend weeks in the bush in ‑40 weather. This kind of social science is not a comfy desk job. Since much of what they write could equally apply to the Canadian Arctic, with which I have some familiarity, it’s all been a pleasure to read.
I’ve read a lot of papers about the evolution of language in early humans, but I’m particularly pleased when someone brings a skeptical and incisive scalpel to trends and speculations that rest on meagre evidence. Rudolf Botha’s Theoretical Undepinnings of Inferences about Language Evolution: The Syntax Used at Blombos Cave, Bonny Sands & Tom Güldemann’s What Click Languages Can and Can’t Tell Us about Language Origins, Karl C. Diller & Rebecca L. Cann’s Evidence Against a Genetic-bases Revolution in Language 50,000 Years Ago, Wil Roebroeks & Alexander Verpoorte’s A “Language-fee” Explanation for Differences between the European Middle and Upper Paleolithic Record, James R. Hurford & Dan Dediu’s Diversity in Languages, Genes, and the Language Faculty all fit that description.
Most of the hundreds of papers I read are fine work, but usually I am not expert enough to have any special opinion about them, or they are so straightforward in their purpose as to need no comment. When I pick one to mention, it’s usually for a tandential reason. For example, P. Thamizoli & Ignatius Prabhakar’s Traditional Governance Systems of Fishing Communities in Tamil Nadu, India: Internal Mandate, Interfacing and Integrating Development confirmed a suspicion I had, based on other times and places, that fishing villages have often been shielded from the internal intrusions and powers of the State by the special nature of their economies and internal organization. The same patterns seem to pop up in places as diverse as India, Indonesia, Japan, Scotland, and Atlantic Canada. Similarly, William D. Hopkins, et al’s The Neural and Cognitive Correlates of Aimed Throwing in Chimpanzees: A Magnetic Resonance Image and Behavioural Study on a Unique Form of Social Tool Use backs up some of the speculations I discuss in Yes, We Have No Savannah.
Fiction has not been neglected. I always read a science fiction novel when I want to un-stress, usually chosing an old one. I’ll either re-read an old favourite, or finally get to one that I always meant to read. I started out the year by re-reading H. G. Well’s The Time Machine, and then read The Chronic Argonauts, a short story that Wells wrote in 1888, which contained the germ of The Time Machine. But this earlier story was only humorous burlesque, a kind of shaggy dog story padded out with Welsh jokes.
Peter S. Beagle, grown up.
Sometimes turning to old paperback SF books, with their wonderful cover art and nostalgia-inducing moldering paper smell, can be a disappointment. For example, I’ve always wanted to read Poul Anderson’s World Without Stars, because the concept of a planet orbiting a lone star in the vast emptiness between two galaxies is just, well, delicious. But Anderson wasted it on a routine, assembled-from-an-Ikea-kit adventure story, and it didn’t have a particle of “sensa-wunda.” The opposite can be said of Peter S. Beagle’s 1960 fantasy novel A Fine and Private Place. I have no idea how it is that I never read it. It’s an acknowledged classic, and its been sitting on my shelf for decades. Now I’ve read it, and I’m pissed off. It’s a fucking masterpiece, and Beagle wrote it when he was twenty. Writers ain’t got no business writing that well when they’re twenty. It just makes the rest of us look bad. If I ever meet him (he’s on my facebook page) I’ll shake his hand, then punch him. Kurt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain, written in 1942, has held up reasonably well, and inspired me to watch the 1953 screen adaptation. Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Weirwoods is one of the best of his mythological fantasies, just oozing with a genteel eroticism. I have written of his work in The Sensual Fantasies of Thomas Burnett Swann. L. Sprague de Camp collected some amusing short stories in The Purple Pterodactyl — The Adventures of W. Wilson Newbury, Ensorcelled Financier. Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewels of Aptor, a very early work, shows some of his future fire, but is basically conventional. Daniel M. Pinkwater’s Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars is a surprisingly intricate SF comedy-drama written for kids. It would have appealed only to the brightest ones. David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten has convinced me to try out his other, more famous novels. It uses some techniques that I hope to bring into my own fiction. [Yes, I write fiction. Been badly burnt. Prefer not to talk about it.] I suppose you would count as fantasy-reading my re-reading of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, this time in three separate versions, one of them in untranslated Middle English.
Of the mainstream fiction I read, what stood out were Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien, Shyam Selvadurai’s rather grim authobiographical novel Hungry Ghosts, set in Sri Lanka, Toronto and Vancouver, Jonathan Safran’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close which felt like a 1960s-70s book, and two by the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses [Ut og stjœle hester] and In the Wake [I kjølvannet]. I much prefered Out Stealing Horses. While reading them, I noticed that much of the atmosphere and style would be familiar stuff to Canadian readers, and wondered if Norwegian writers read Canadian books. Then, in one of the two novels, the main character mentioned that his favourite writer was Alice Munro, and went on to analyze her work.
In a category by itself, I would have to put François Mandeville’s This Is What They Say — A Story Cycle Dictated in Northern Alberta in 1928, ed. and tr. from Chipewyan by Ron Scollon [ᐯᑕᐠᐢᐊᐧ ᒪᐠᑌᐱᔆ ᐁᐢᓂ]. Chipewyan is a Dene-Athapaskan language of the Canadian arctic, remotely related to Navaho and Apache, and completely unrelated to the Cree and Ojibwe languages that are in my turf. But the hunting lifestyle is similar, and the Dene people will dance Cree-style dances and recite Cree stories, albeit always distinguishing them from their own. Ancient story cycles have been kept alive until this generation by the Dene people, and this one seems to have come down from the old times without serious alteration.
I read Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, then watched the dynamite 1962 film production with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell.
Finally, a word on Damon Runyon. I read A Treasury of Damon Runyon, edited by Clark Kinnaird, which put together what appears to be a balanced selection of Runyon’s stories. Runyon is one of those American writers that was once obligatory reading, but has drifted away into the corner where you’ve heard the name but feel no urgency to read. The New York City that Runyon wrote about so lovingly is now so distant and alien that it might as well be on another planet. You get barely comprehensible whiffs of it from slang-filled 1930s gangster films and comedies. Even by the 1950s, his stories had mutated into the broadway musical Guys and Dolls, and were already hazy nostalgia. By the 1960s, it was getting difficult to understand the archaic slang, and the stories were largely read for their quaintness. Today, I can’t imagine what a new reader would make of them. After a few stories, however, you start to be able to translate the slang. Runyon had a knack for pulling you in and keeping you going until you reach the satisfactory denouement, and it still works, despite the confusing patches. His characters were mostly petty criminals, gamblers, shop girls, gangster “molls” and flatfoot cops, and they talk in a kind of clipped, fragmented, nearly stream-of-consciousness patter with plenty of interuptions and diversions. Here’s a sample:
Well, I am going by the jockey house on my way home, thinking how nice its that Hymie Banjo Eyes will no longer have to live with Mahogany, and what a fine thing it is to have a loyal, ever-loving wife such as ‘Lasses, who risks her nerves rooting for her husband’s horse, when I run into this dizzy Scroon in his street clothes, and wishing to be friendly, I say to him like this: “Hello, Frankie,” I say. “You put up a nice ride today.” “Where do you get this ‘Frankie’?” Scroon says. “My name is Gus.” “Why,” I say, commencing to think of this and that, “so it is, but is there a jock called Frankie in the sixth race with you this afternoon?” “Sure,” Scroon says. “Frankie Medley. He rides Side Burns, the favorite; and I make a sucker of him in the stretch run.” But of course I never mention to Hymie Banjo Eyes that I figure his ever-loving wife roots herself into a dead faint for the horse that will give her to Brick McCloskey, because for all I know she may think Scroon’s name is Frankie, at that. [That Ever-Loving Wife of Hymie’s]
To a reader of today, the stories hover uncomfortably between cynicism and sentimentality. Bank robbers are saved from death by stray kittens, there are (implied) hookers with hearts of gold. But at the same time, almost everybody is double-dealing almost everybody else, and the undercurrent of violence is always there:
The moment the train got under way good, Soupbone says: “Now my pretty boy, you’re such a —good traveler, let’s see you jump off this train!” The kid thought he was joshing, but there wasn’t no josh about it. Soup pulled a gun. The Shine, with his own gun in hand, crawled clear on top and lay flat on the cars, trying to steady his aim on Soupbone. The kid was pleading and almost crying, when Soupbone suddenly jumped at him, smashed him in the jaw with the gun barrel, and knocked him off the train. The Shine shot Soupbone in the back, and he dropped on top of the train, but didn’t roll off. As the Shine was going down between the cars again, Soupbone shot at him and broke his arm. He got off all right, and went back down the road to find the kid dead — his neck broke. [The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew]
Damon Runyon is now thought of as a light-weight writer of comical sketches from a bygone era. Well, that’s sort of true. But the comedy is icing on a cake of pain.
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