Best Canadian Essays 2021

Best Canadian Essays 2021

Edited by Bruce Whiteman

Biblioasis

Windsor, Ontario

Contents

Introduction

Bruce Whiteman

Anatomy of a Pandemic

Kevin Patterson

Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)

Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Tick Tock: Inside the Quest to Track One of Humanity’s Tiniest Deadly Predators

Stephanie Nolen

All the Kremlin’s Men: On Seventy-five Years of Russian Interference

Joyce Wayne

Writing the Real

Catherine Bush

The Meaning of Poor

Frances Koziar

Wonder Women: The Fight for Female Superheroes in Hollywood

Soraya Roberts

The Finca

Eva-Lynn Jagoe

The Medium of the Archive

Elizabeth Dauphinee

This Is Not the End of the Story: The Lasting Promise of Section 35

Ian Waddell

The Future Accidental

Rob Winger

On Leaving and on Going Back: Women Walking

Jenna Butler and Yvonne Blomer

Fishing with Tardelli

Neil Besner

The Ashes

Mark Kingwell

To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

Hilary Morgan V. Leathem, After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams

Contributors’ Biographies

Notable Essays of 2020

Magazines Consulted for the 2021 Edition

Acknowledgements

About the Editor

Copyright

Introduction

Bruce Whiteman

At the beginning of the introduction he wrote for his collection of poems The Wedge, published in 1944, William Carlos Williams said: The war is the first and only thing in the world today. As I write these words in the late spring of 2021, there are wars in many parts of the world continuing today—in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Ethiopia, among others—but it is the pandemic that is really the first and only thing on the minds of people everywhere. It blighted much of the world during most of 2020, the year covered by this anthology; and while the virus has begun to fade in some countries, in others it is still going from bad to worse and threatens to dominate life for another year, perhaps even a good deal longer. Best Canadian Essays 2021 begins and ends with pieces about the pandemic as an acknowledgement of its dominance in global news and culture alike. The essays of Kevin Patterson and Hilary Leathem are rooted as much in personal experience as they are in scientific or medical research, rendering them ideal bookends for this collection.

But even in the midst of the worst worldwide medical crisis in a century, and what Sarmishta Subramanian, in the introduction to last year’s Best Canadian Essays, called a global syncope, Canadian writers have continued to write essays on a vast variety of subjects. After all, stay-at-home orders and province-wide lockdowns just feel to most writers like their usual writing life: stuck inside, seated at a desk in front of a computer. It may be somewhat encouraging to remember that the writer usually identified as the first modern essayist, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), lived through an outbreak of bubonic plague (albeit a bacterial, not a viral, infection) that killed half the population of Bordeaux, of which he was the mayor at the time. The authorities then were just as hesitant about lockdowns as any Canadian provincial premier; and although there were no vaccines then, visitors did have to show a card demonstrating good health in order to be allowed through the city’s cordon sanitaire. Montaigne also managed to survive a different kind of outbreak, i.e., the Wars of Religion that dominated France during the last third of the sixteenth century. Essayists, then, like writers generally, have often faced demanding and dangerous circumstances during their writing lives; yet whatever the peril, it represents just one subject among many that they feel compelled to address.

Variety of interests and depth of curiosity have been the characteristic strengths of essayists from the very beginning. Plutarch, whom Montaigne called the most judicious writer in the world, and who was to Montaigne what Montaigne was to later essay writers, the master of a style and the possessor of an intelligence only to be aspired to, never achieved, wrote on the usual subjects dear to the later ancient philosopher—morality, superstition, Plato (he was in favour of him), Stoicism (he was against it), Epicureanism (he was against that too)—but also about vegetarianism, rhetoric, grief, and many other things, not to mention the famous parallel lives of the Greeks and Romans, which are not really essays so much as potted biographies. What makes Plutarch the patron saint of all subsequent essayists is that his writing is eternally interesting not so much for what it addresses as for the composite portrait it draws of the author. (Guy Davenport once remarked that Plutarch was probably the most civilized man who ever lived.) The same may be said of Montaigne, who was famously more self-conscious about his intentions (Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book). He called that book Essais, from the French verb essayer—to attempt, to try—and the word first comes into English in its current meaning as the title of Bacon’s Essayes in 1597. Montaigne thus characterized a thousand pages of prose on subjects ranging from smells (he thought that his moustache helped to make his sense of smell more acute) to cowardice (he noted that cruel people wept easily) as a kind of first draft of the known world—spitballing, we might say—all seen through the eyes of a very particular person, with no desire to theorize and a curiosity that knew no bounds.

The essay, then, unlike the academic article or the scientific research paper, has usually gloried in its personal element. We remember and value an essayist like Leigh Hunt or William Hazlitt or Ralph Waldo Emerson for many reasons: for their style, their humour, their insights, their companionability. But even when the subjects they address have lost relevance or their passions seem outdated, even embarrassing, we continue to read them because of the personal frame. Glenn Gould’s writings, most of which are perhaps too brief to represent full-fledged essays, many of them comprising only record liner notes or book reviews, nevertheless have a perdurable quality in part because of Gould’s irrepressible personality. We know his various odd opinions well—Haydn is greater than Mozart, Richard Strauss is the greatest composer of the twentieth century, the live concert is dead and has had its obsequies read, etc.—and yet the work is always larger than its content. That arrow of personal experience in the essayist’s quiver has grown increasingly characteristic in recent years, with the growing book-market dominance of personal memoirs. Memoirs of any kind were rare in Canadian literature before the 1960s, and until recently they tended to represent a kind of capstone to a successful life in politics or the arts. Often they were written as retirement projects. These days, the personal account of life in the family or of life governed by various kinds of trauma or of life as part of an underrepresented community is a genre unto itself, and its popularity with readers is reflected also in the essay form. We are captured by such books or essays through their authenticity, their narratives of coming to terms with the hard things that life can throw at humans, or simply their accounts of how people live their lives in a historical or cultural context. Elizabeth Dauphinee’s essay in this anthology is far more than a piece about house ownership. It is about seeing one’s personal circumstances as part of a much longer and larger historical continuum. Joyce Wayne’s essay also comprises a personal story—she was a red diaper baby—but it is set within an under-discussed aspect of Canadian social and political history, the Communist Party of Canada.

Of course, there are other personal essays that, while not focusing especially on history in the larger sense, move us by their authenticity in evoking a singular past that is vividly realized and compellingly told. (That memoirs do not necessarily have to be authentic to be compelling we know well from the infamous example of John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse. Glassco represented the book as having been written shortly after his time in Paris in the late 1920s, when he was invalided home to Montreal with tuberculosis and a venereal infection, but in fact it was written forty years later and is full of fabrications, guile, and score settlings.) More intimate history as recalled and described in rich and memorable language, parodied in the famed and clichéd school assignment How I Spent My Summer Vacation, evokes our sense of commonality. Neil Besner’s and Eva-Lynn Jagoe’s essays here are unlikely to find readers with identical experiences—childhood summers spent in the first case fishing in Brazil and in the second in a country house in Catalonia—but the beautiful renderings these writers manage create magic and evoke our own parallel if different childhood memories. Francis Koziar shows us what it is like to be poor in a society that prefers to look the other way. Mark Kingwell comes perhaps the closest here to describing a universal experience—the death of a parent—and he sets his personal story in an almost mythical context to which many readers, and not only men, will respond unreservedly: baseball.

The other essays gathered here respond to various psychological and cultural prompts. Catherine Bush’s Writing the Real represents a growing body of essays in many spheres, and not just science, concerned with the fact of climate change. Climate change and the pandemic are threatening forces at work in the life and culture of the Inuit beautifully described by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, and even Stephanie Nolen’s excellent essay on the growing menace of Ixodidae, the common tick, includes an element of concern about global warming, as increasing temperatures push the range of various parasites farther north. Ian Waddell, who died in the spring of 2021, uses his personal voice to describe an important aspect of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s repatriation of the constitution in 1982: the enshrinement of Aboriginal rights in section 35. The poet Rob Winger’s essay on technology, poetry, and the present is the most speculative essay in this book. Soraya Roberts explores female superheroes from a feminist cultural perspective. Jenna Butler and Yvonne Blomer, in an unusual two-author piece, converse and narrate their time spent walking and writing poetry in Assisi and Venice.

When I sat down to start reading for and thinking about this collection, I wondered idly where I would be looking for contributions if it were 1921 rather than 2021. (It is worth recalling that the fourth wave of the 1918 influenza epidemic had run its course only the year before, so there is a parallel.) The Canadian literary landscape at that moment looked very different from now. There were just three publishers for Canadian books: Ryerson Press, McClelland and Stewart, and Macmillan of Canada. Hugh Eayrs had just become the head of Macmillan and published the big book of the year, Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine in the translation by W.H. Blake, a lawyer whose other books were mostly about fishing. (Eayrs also published a book of essays in 1921 by the journalist Augustus Bridle, The Masques of Ottawa, a series of biographical chronicles of Canadian political figures.) McClelland and Stewart was just beginning to publish Canadian books. That year they brought out titles by Bliss Carman and Duncan Campbell Scott, as well as one of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s lesser-known Anne novels, Rilla of Ingleside. The three main academic quarterlies still active today—University of Toronto Quarterly, Queen’s Quarterly, and the Dalhousie Review—were already in existence, and the venerable Canadian Forum had been founded the year before. After these four venues, the pickings would have been slim. Maclean’s existed and might have provided the occasional piece, but Chatelaine, which much later would play an important role in the feminist movement, was not established until 1928. The University Magazine, edited by Sir Andrew Macphail, had come to an end in 1920, and the then new Canadian Bookman was mostly a house organ for the Canadian Authors’ Association. Literary magazines were nowhere to be found. Best Canadian Essays 1921 would have been a rather insubstantial book.

The situation today, if far from ideal, is certainly an improvement over that of a century ago. Unlike the United States, Canada lacks an audience large enough to support the kind of journalism that regularly veers into the conventional essay form that can be found in magazines such as the New Yorker, New Republic, or The Nation. No Canadian newspaper any longer publishes the equivalent of the New York Times Magazine. The days of Weekend and the Star Weekly ended in the 1970s. Yet by contrast to 1921, there are certainly many vital outlets for essays among the monthlies and the quarterlies, and none of these, apart from Hazlitt, has yet moved entirely online. The University of Toronto Quarterly remains resolutely academic in nature, but both Queen’s Quarterly and the Dalhousie Review are open to essays meant more for the general reader; indeed the former, with its emphasis on the visual, has turned into something completely different from the standard scholarly journal. The Canadian Forum ceased publication in the year 2000, but magazines like The Walrus and the Literary Review of Canada have to some extent supplanted it. Quarterlies that publish work ranging beyond the literary, such as Canadian Notes & Queries and The New Quarterly, provide receptive homes for essays on a wide range of subjects, as do the more strictly literary magazines such as Prairie Fire, Brick, and others. Indeed, the literary magazines are almost universally open to what now gets characterized almost everywhere as creative non-fiction rather than the essay, presumably because of the popularity of personal memoirs, which are normally taken to be true to fact, whatever may be the actual circumstances of the story as told.

What makes for a good essayist? In the opening pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, speaking for himself and for the photographer Walker Evans, describes the pair, who were sent by Fortune magazine (of all publications) to report on the poor sharecroppers in Alabama in the depths of the Depression, as two angry, futile and bottomless, botched and overcomplicated youthful intelligences in the service of an anger and of a love and of an undiscernible truth. A little further along, he defines the results of their project, which we might now describe as investigative journalism transmogrified into enduring literature (and art), as an effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is. Allowing for the exception that the writer of essays can be of any age, these descriptions seem to me to go a long way towards characterizing the good essayist’s sensibility as well as his or her aspiration. The exceptional essay derives from a passionate feeling, love and anger being perhaps its upper and lower limits, coexisting with a desire for truth, and it aims for the radiance of what is, cruel or not. Passionate feeling and devotion to the truth are only the sine qua nons, of course, for the other essential element of a great essay is its expression in language that will entertain, instruct, stimulate, and educate its readers, as one scholar of Plutarch’s essays has written. None of the essays in this volume sets out to satisfy a pedagogical instinct per se, but they all, in differing ways, do teach us something. They teach us something about the facts of life, such as the dangers of the coronavirus (Leathem) or the growing risk of a high-spirited walk in the woods (Nolen). They teach us something about culture (Roberts) or history (Wayne, Waddell) or social conditions (Koziar). Or they teach us something about the human heart and its aspirations and travails (Kingwell). There is no theory being taught, no results of scientific investigation or statistical research being presented. If it did not sound ridiculously old-fashioned to say so, you could almost say that the half-visible educational part of these essays is a moral one. But it is a moral tincture evoked through poetry. No reader would be likely to remember that Neil Besner’s Brazilian mentor, Tardelli, told him that he had a lot to learn. We’ve all heard that one. But when the writer adds that he remembers that injunction through a scrim of years that smell of salt water and unfiltered cigarettes, the words come alive and stick in the mind. As for entertainment and stimulation, those seem almost too obvious to require emphasis, although they do not need to be overdone to achieve a great essay and may be even less important than other qualities.

Hilary Leathem’s essay in this book provides an abecedarium of the coronavirus, including self-evident entries such as Black Death, Immunity, and Quarantine. Some of the other twenty-three letters of the Roman alphabet, however, bring in subjects that, at first glance, seem to have little or nothing to do with the pandemic, Functionalism for example, or YouTube. Her point is that almost everything can be understood as being organized in subheadings underneath the highest category that is the virus, the first and only thing in the world today, to quote Williams again. And so too the essay genre, which is capacious, elastic, polyphonic, and unlikely ever to fade from literary culture. We seem more than likely to be reading a lot of essays and memoirs about the pandemic in the coming years, in Canada as elsewhere, just as after World Wars I and II there was a glut of memoirs and studies arising from those two cataclysmic events. But writers will continue, as they always have, to loose their minds and imaginations on many different subjects. Our feelings reach out beyond us, as Montaigne entitled one of his essays, and they must find embodiment.

Anatomy of a Pandemic

Kevin Patterson

To be alive is to be afraid; anxiety is the spirit of this age and, substantially, of all ages. However good things have gotten, at least for those of us in Canada—however low crime and unemployment rates have become, however much war deaths have declined, life expectancy has grown, or HIV, cancer, and age-adjusted heart disease death rates have shrunk—disquiet claws at us. Financiers may advise that what they call the downside risk—the potential for loss in the worst cases—is limited, but at an existential level, we know better. Everything could just go all to hell, no matter how shiny things look. You don’t need to be a wigged-out prepper in the woods to suspect it.

Things have always gone all to hell. Over four thousand years ago, climate change came to Mesopotamia, causing drought and a subsequent famine so severe that the world’s first empire, Akkad, simply ceased to be. Farmers abandoned their crops and many scribes just stopped writing. For archaeologists, for the next three hundred years: near silence.

This is from The Curse of Akkad, written around the time of the silencing:

Those who lay down on the roof, died on the roof; those who lay down in the house were not buried. People were flailing at themselves from hunger. By the Ki-ur, Enlil’s great place, dogs were packed together in the silent streets; if two men walked there they would be devoured by them, and if three men walked there they would be devoured by them.

In the third century, the Three Kingdoms war shattered China. The An Lushan Rebellion, five centuries later, shattered it again. Millions died in each of: the Mongol conquests, the nineteenth century’s Taiping Rebellion, colonialism in the Americas, the Thirty Years War in Europe—and, of course, the World Wars, which killed, conservatively, over 110 million.

Famine and war routinely bring civilizations low, but though he trots closely beside those two, the horseman who carries off the most has always been pestilence. The Roman Empire’s Justinian Plague, which was perhaps history’s first known pandemic, is thought to have killed millions in the sixth century and may have further stressed the weakening imperium. Procopius writes contemporaneously that death rates in Constantinople were as high as ten thousand per day:

And many perished through lack of any man to care for them, for they were either overcome by hunger, or threw themselves down from a height. And in those cases where neither coma nor delirium came on, the bubonic swelling became mortified and the sufferer, no longer able to endure the pain, died.

This was humanity’s first catastrophic involvement with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that would resurface during the Black Death, killing 30 to 60 percent of the population of medieval Europe. Western Europe’s population would not reach what it had been in the 1340s again until the beginning of the sixteenth century. In subsequent centuries, cholera also swept the urbanized world—crowding being a powerful accelerant for non-vector-borne (that is, not insect- or snail-spread) infection. (Paleolithic peoples saw no sustained human-to-human infections; their numbers were too small to keep up chains of transmission.) What John Bunyan called the captain of all these men of death, tuberculosis, has been with us for at least nine thousand years, since the neolithic period, and has killed more than a billion humans in the last two hundred years alone. It was responsible for 25 percent of all deaths in Europe between the 1600s and the 1800s. It remains the most lethal infection worldwide,