by Rosemary Sullivan
Humanities and Social Sciences Federation
of Canada, Mar. 20, 1997
Republished with permission

You have generously invited me to speak today on the subject: Perspectives on Canadian Cultural Policies. I felt a responsibility to accept your invitation given the current anxiety that attaches to issues of Canadian culture. I hope I can be helpful.

I speak from the perspective of someone who writes poetry, Canadian biography and literary criticism. You are the public policy makers and the civil servants dealing with the protection of Canadian culture. What I would like to offer is an historical portrait of the evolution of the culture you are protecting.

I want to begin by reading from my book Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. I do so in order to take you back forty years to that time when there seemed to be almost no Canadian culture.

In the 1950s, if you were a writer and wanted to write, the best solution was to get the heck out of Canada. Many did: Mavis Gallant and Mordecai Richler went into self-imposed exile in France and England, Sinclair Ross went to Spain. Margaret Laurence lived outside of Canada for ten years. Why? because there was no cultural fabric to support the writers; there was only amnesia and indifference on the part of a public who were taught to believe there was no culture here. Writing was something done by Americans and Europeans, preferably dead Americans and Europeans. This section of Shadow Maker was my effort to recreate the cultural desert that was Canada at the end of the fifties: Chapter "The Bohemian Embassy" pp. 96-100.

The sixties and early seventies began the long debate: Why was there no Canadian culture? Why did Canadians seem to have a cultural inferiority complex; as soon as some cultural work was identified as Canadian, it seemed, ipso facto, boring? Why did we suffer from collective amnesia, so that behind us seemed ( I say seemed) to stretch a vast emptiness without history, without story - trente arpents de neige.

The answer turned out to be simple - it was part of the organic evolution that all new world, European transplant cultures went through. When I looked outside my country in the 1960s I found Mexican writers asking: why do we have no Mexican identity? The great Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote: "An inferiority complex influenced our preference for analysis and our meagre creative output was due to our instinctive doubts about our own abilities." Even the U.S. had gone through this, though a century earlier (the U.S. as a country is, after all, older than we are by a century). Walt Whitman lamented: "As long as we wait for European critics to stamp our books and authors, before we presume to say they are very good or very bad; as long as British manufactured books are poured over the land, as long as an American society meeting at the social board, starts with wonder to hear any of its national names, or any national sentiment mentioned in the same hour with foreign greatness, so long shall we have no literature."

The cultural inferiority complex was a problem of perception and not of fact. For us, it would take an act of collective imagination to record and recover the culture that was there, that had always been there, but which, because of colonialism, we were conditioned not to see.

In the late sixties and early seventies in Canada, there was a movement of literary nationalism - (I will be talking mostly about English Canadian writers but a parallel though distinct process can be found among Quebec writers). Margaret Laurence coming back to Canada via Africa and England, explained it best: "Many Canadian writers, myself among them, have spent our lives coming back home, trying to bring into acknowledged being the myths, backgrounds and places which belong to us." Robertson Davies was, as were most of the writers, a passionate nationalist. Asked what he thought he was doing in his novel Fifth Business, he replied that he was trying to record the bizarre and passionate life of the Canadian people. To take a Canadian for granted, he said, was like putting your hand into the blade of a buzz saw.

By the late seventies, in our literature at least, we had finally put to rest the colonial cringe, what Northrop Frye called the frostbite at the roots of imagination; you could do art in Canada; by the eighties you could become internationally famous as a Canadian writer.

How was it done? By the recognition that culture is the life blood of a country and that art is part of the collective national project - essential to the national conversation. By the recognition that culture is a living organism in which all the multiple layers connect: the artists, their industries, and the public. The Canada Council and the Canadian government supported culture at these multiple levels: from grants to the writers, tax breaks and subsidies to the publishing industries, support to the schools, universities and to the libraries, through the writer-in-residence programmes which gave young writers access to the expertise of established writers.

 Now we have achieved international stature through the recognition, thirty years later, of writers like Laurence, Atwood, Ondaatje, Munro, Gallant, Richler, Mistry, Walker, Shields.

But let's slow the process down. How was it done? The extraordinary poet, P.K. Page, put it very succinctly: "It takes a lot of manure to grow one tulip."

It takes time to nourish a writer. Margaret Atwood got published in the small presses, kept alive by public subsidy, before she became our international star. And her commercial success surprises even her. She can write a book like Alias Grace about a nineteenth century Canadian murder case and it will be an international best seller because Canada is no longer an unimaginable space to a foreign audience. And she has given back blood by her extraordinary work as an editor reading manuscripts of young writers when at Anansi Press, her generous support in championing other writers, and her work in the Writers' Union and Pen.

Michael Ondaatje worked for years through Coach House Press. He said it was an environment where you could experiment, could make mistakes, even make a fool of yourself, as you learned your own voice. He too worked as an editor for no money for Coach House Press, nurturing talents like Ann Michaels. I'm sure artists give more time for free than almost any other citizens.

And then there is Ann Michaels, whom, you will have noticed, was front and center in Time Magazine's article "A Host of Debuts." They said her novel worked its way "brilliantly around timeless mysteries." Time Magazine is not for me the arbiter of taste. I still remember it as the magazine where, in writing about the subject of love, they had to call it "on-going-inter-personal relationship situations." But it is a barometer of popular appeal. Canadian writers can get into Time now in a way that would have made Hugh MacLennan green. Ann Michael's career is illustrative. She came up through the ranks of poets, publishing with small presses like Coach House, and living by her wits, doing teaching gigs. It took her seven years to write Fugitive Pieces. After the manuscript was refused by several publishers, her advance at McClelland & Stewart was well inside the five thousand dollar range. When M & S sold the manuscript to England and the U.S., not to mention the German translation, her advances were in the six figures for the same book. Well, that's the way it is. But without the network of small publishers who nurture the young poets, there would be no Ann Michaels.

What is it about Canadian culture that it has been so receptive to writers from elsewhere? It is the infrastructure we have created for culture. Rohinton Mistry is now one of the hottest selling authors in England, with two prestigious Booker nominations for his first two novels. He was a young bank clerk who took a writing course at the University of Toronto and was encouraged by the writer-in-residence, at that time Mavis Gallant, a position sponsored by the Canada Council. Without that encouragement would he have been silenced?

But for the few who win financial security there are many more who lose - Gwendolyn MacEwen, whom I wrote about in Shadow Maker, for example. The portrait I discovered in my research of MacEwen's life was of a serious writer - she had taught herself to speak four languages: Arabic, Greek, French, and Hebrew. She had written twenty books and achieved a reputation as one of Canada's finest poets. She could fill the town hall with 500 people. She had written for radio, librettos for classical composers, a play that was produced at the St. Lawrence Centre, and yet when she died she had $2.02 in her bank account. Once, refused a bank loan by her bank manager, even though her credit was impeccable, she had marched into the bank, banged her twenty books on the counter and said : "Here, I did these, all I want is my money."

I remember once, when I was working at the National Library, a librarian told me that Marie Claire Blais was in desperate financial straits. What, he asked desolately, can we do about it? A writer's life is, by definition, financially precarious. Why? Because writers are not attached to any institution that protects them. And because society feeds off the writer and there are few ways we have come up with, other than royalties and grants, to protect them. The financial reality of writing for a living is closer to the experience of MacEwen and Blais than to Ondaatje and Atwood.

But now I want to address something which is very serious. There remains a curious ambivalence about the artist, and art's place in our culture. Indeed, unmasked, I would call it a strange contempt. I am at a loss to account for this contempt; I can only put it down either to ignorance or to the anti-intellectual legacy of colonialism.

Last week, an article ran in the Ottawa Citizen: "Canada Council to Artists: It's Payback Time." Artists who have had success, it was reported, will be asked to pay back their grants. That proved to be false. Artists, the Council said, would be asked to contribute to a fundraising effort, somewhat like alumni are asked to contribute voluntarily to their university. But let's look at the rhetoric of the Ottawa Citizen article. It's Payback Time. There it is again. The implied contempt is that artists are freeloaders on public money. It seems that there are only two versions of the artist: the self-indulgent bohemian who lives in an attic and is peripheral to society or the successful artist who evokes envy and a secret anger, like a pop star. Michael Ondaatje was made the whipping boy for his senior grant of $32,000 (most grants are much less than that) to take time off from other employment to write The English Patient.

But look at the reality of finance with regard to writers. When Ondaatje's novel is published, a novel he spent years alone in a room writing, he will get 10% of the sales price for the hard cover; 3 % for the soft. 90% and 97% goes to the industries that are made possible by his work. Without it they wouldn't exist. Those industries are: the publishers and their staff of editors, publicists, etc; the book stores and their staff of sales reps; the media, both television and print, who will use Ondaatje for copy; the film industry; the academic industry who will teach him, and the students who will write PhD thesis about him; even the tourist industry - I have had a number of inquiries from visiting student aficionados asking me where is the Toronto bridge Ondaatje wrote about in In the Skin of a Lion. He, himself, is an industry in his own right who keeps thousands of Canadians employed. Pay back time is appropriate for him for years of work and all artists celebrate it. But the public like Chris Cobb in the Citizen? Do they ask business men, who have had their loans forgiven, or interest free to start up companies, to pay back the money? No, because they are credited with making jobs. Cultural industries support something like 1.5 million people; investment subsidies in them are not that different from public investment subsidy in heavy industry, aerospace, and research, etc.. And the artists are the crucial component of our cultural industries. Without them they would not exist.

But artists, being generous in support of each other and being loyal, will contribute voluntarily to a fund that can support young writers -- Carol Shields and Guy Vanderhaeghe have already said they will do so. Not because they owe it, but because they believe in the organic living network that is culture and that has given them life.

But this gets me to another attitude that distresses me about art. Andrew Coyne, Toronto Star columnist, offers a much touted simplistic argument. He writes: "There is a distinction between support of the arts and state support for the arts. There is no stopping Canadians from supporting art. If they want to, they will. If not, I don't see any point in forcing them through government use of their tax dollars. Protecting Canadian art has been a failure."

Coyne is confusing art and commercial entertainment. Why will more people go to see Rambo than 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould? There are two answers. First, the Gould film requires intellectual effort, and we are fundamentally lazy. And we are being trained, by the hypnosis of modern pop media, to be lazier and lazier. You all know in your hearts that the capacity for sustained and disciplined attention is not helped by hours and hours of pap like TOOL MAN. It feels good, but so does eating fast food, but it is not good for you. Intellectual and emotional muscles, like physical muscles go slack, and recovery is hard. I have noticed among my students a growing incapacity for sustained attention because we are becoming used to the blitzkrieg of media entertainment. I have noticed it in myself.

But a more important answer is the second. There's all this talk about a level playing field. If one thing doesn't sell as well as another, it's de facto less good. There is no level playing field because of something called promotion. What gets the advertizing machine behind it sells. And the best promotion, the assault machine, goes mostly to things like Rambo.

But for argument's sake, let's take the example of The English Patient. The book is published in Canada; it's popular, but hardly a phenomenon. It has the luck to win the Booker Prize in England, a prize which has enormous profile. Culture in Britain has a history of mattering and public bets are taken on who will win the Booker. Perhaps this is why Canadians are still more impressed by it than by the GG. Winning the Booker guarantees several hundred thousand books will sell. The English Patient gets picked up by a British film maker. Then it sells a million copies in the U. S. and, finally, hundreds of thousands in Canada.

As an aside, I would add that it is embarrassing that the best Canadian film was done by a foreigner and not by a Canadian. In MacLean's, Michael Ondaatje remarked that he was surprised and glad that the Canadianness of the film survived as it went through the hands of foreign producers, directors and actors, though his irony was clear when he added, "even if Toronto was just mentioned in a torture scene." Perhaps he was thinking of the way the Canadian press turned him into a whipping boy and asked for their money back. Must we always think on such a petty scale?

Clearly, it's a long and precarious chain to success. And you don't achieve it easily in Canada. We still don't promote our own. A friend of mine, Maya Gallus, did a documentary about Barbara Ann Scott. It aired on the CBC the same week as an A & E documentary on Sonia Henie. Which do you think got front and center billing in the Canadian TV Times? The A & E product was not a better film.

Make no mistake about it. American culture too is held to ransom by its own entertainment industries. Books must sell, and so you have the phenomenon of the ghost writer and the pseudo-book, like the O.J. Simpson books of which I think there are now 30. Every mass murderer has a book to peddle. Real literary culture is in decline in the U.S.. Important writers are losing publishers.

The application of a commercial metaphor to culture doesn't work. Culture is not a business. It is not a self-sustaining industry. It is a living organism. It is a national conversation. If you want to feel part of a larger history of events that situates you in a particular place and time, you must have culture.

Real works of art cannot be easily translated into commodities that pay for themselves. They are gifts. To say that only that should survive which can pay for itself - the argument offered by the Harris government when Coach House went under, is to confuse art and entertainment and to doom us to the soul-destroying monotony of market forces. We have to protect against the homogenizing influence of commercial culture. In the arts, vitality comes out of the small publishing houses, the small theatres, the small recording and film companies that need subsidies to protect them. There are a lot of ways to destroy a country.

We want to ask ourselves what, then, is culture? And what do you value? What would be the policies I would support in these times of financial restraint?

1. I would urge you support libraries. Why do we need books and libraries in an age of technology? Because books are social occasions too. It is libraries that apprentice readers and writers. Bill 109 in Ontario will end the Province's $24 million contribution to its 1,200 libraries.
2. Support to small publishing houses and magazines must continue. Art Eggleton says our magazines must depend on finding an international audience. But just as we must not buy into the confusion of art and commerce, we must not accept the argument that the test of viability of cultural works is whether they are exportable. In our magazines, we're writing to Canadians about Canadians. You can't take Canadian Living or Saturday Night down to New York and expect it to sell. (In fact, I would like to know what the commercial runs of foreign magazines are in the U.S.? Which and how many foreign magazines make it? I think it would be telling.)

   We are fundamentally split, it appears, with what seems the current American thinking about the difference between culture and commerce. Perhaps we have to begin to find allies among Americans themselves, particularly among artists, given the treat to their own interests from the mega-industries. When Hollywood studios can't even win their own Academy awards, many American artists are scrutinizing the pap that a culture driven solely by the profit motive churns out.

   Finally, speaking as a writer, there are already so few Canadian magazines where Canadian writers can offer their work, that if we lose these magazines under American Trade pressure, we will lose our writers too.

3. The copyright bill must be passed. One of the most successful programmes for writers has been The Public Lending Right Commission because writers feel they are being paid for their work. They are looking to copyright payment, which comes, not through the brutal competition for grants, but for work done, to give them the same sense of dignity.
4. We must have protection despite NAFTA. We must reject the heresy of the level playing field. With a so-called protectionist policy, 95% of Canadian movie screens are showing American films, more then 80% of non-news television in Canada is foreign; 60% of Canadian book shelves in book stores are occupied by American books; 80% of English magazines on Canadian newsstands are American. "If we're protectionist," as Keith Kelly, director of the Canadian Conference of the Arts put it, "we're the most incompetent protectionists on earth." This issues should be seen as a battle for which we energize all our resources.
5. As to the international market, I affirm the third pillar concept, placing culture along side political diplomacy and economic trade as the third pillar of Canadian foreign policy. Speaking only of writers, artists like Atwood and Ondaatje, or Marie Claire Blais and Michel Tremblay, are the public voices by which we are recognized internationally as Canadian.

As a final word, make no mistake about it. Artists would like to see grants, which feel like welfare, turned into a minimum wage (which of course they are; a grant is usually under $10,000 and artists, if they are lucky enough to get one, live on it for a year) and to allow the Writers' Union to establish benefits and retirement funds for artists. But that is utopian. There should also be more private foundations, like the Guggenheim in the U.S. or the Killam here, adding to that support. That too may be utopian since Canadian private money doesn't seem to see culture as high profile, as vital to our survival, to our sense of ourselves. We must make the argument that they should.

Meanwhile the support of culture is a public responsibility. Government subsidies, whether through grants or tax deductions, cannot be dismantled. And we need to be increasingly creative. Youth employment programmes should include supporting more young people to work in the infrastructure of culture, saving on the welfare bills.

The bottom line is what is the role of cultural expression in civil life. Ottawa should make a commitment to protect its existing policies against fiscal and trade restraints. We must secure the cultural gains we have made. Do we want to return to those cringe days when we could not find any images of ourselves in our own stories?

References:

"Canada Council to Artists: It's Payback Time," The Ottawa Citizen, March 10, 1997.
Andrew Coyne, "Eggleton Questions Need to Protect Canadian Culture," The Montreal Gazette, February 12, 1997.

Bibliography

Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the Histories of the U.S., Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Vintage, 1983.
Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville, Greenwood Press, 1955.
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, Grove Press, 1961.

Notes for a presentation by Rosemary Sullivan at "Breakfast on the Hill", a conference held at the University of Toronto, March 20 1997. Rosemary Sullivan is a Canadian poet and writer.