Current Issue: 50th Anniversary Interventions (#204)

Canadian Literature's Spring 2010 issue (CL#204), "50th Anniversary Interventions", looks back on Canadian Literature's 50th Anniversary Gala, and celebrates Canadian culture with papers about Duncan Campbell Scott, book policies, copyright, civil war poetry, and new Québecois literature.

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If Century and Eva’s Threepenny Theatre have anything in common, it is their authors’ interest in exploring the shifting sociopolitical and cultural/intellectual terrains of twentieth-century Europe.  In Ray Smith’s novel, the flux of the century is reinforced by the text’s slippery genre; in fact, the destabilization of genre seems the raison d’être of Century.  Generic “slipperiness” is also, arguably, a component of Andrew Steinmetz’s book.  In part a biography of, and a fiction about, his great-aunt, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre is simultaneously autobiographical.  Read alongside Century, however, Steinmetz’s text is more engaging and far more compelling because the writer’s blending of forms feels unforced and organic, a natural by-product of his attempt to capture the spirit of Eva and her age.   

First published in 1986 by Stoddart, Century was re-released in 2008 by Biblioasis with a preface by Charles Foran.  Praising Smith for his achievement, and scolding Canadian readers for overlooking significance, Foran confesses that, as a disillusioned reader of “CanLit” in the 1970s, he had all but given up on Canadian authors (“[w]hy so formally and linguistically conservative and why, why so glum?”) until he stumbled upon Smith’s novel.  After reading Century, Foran sought out Smith’s previous books (Lord Nelson Tavern, 1974;Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada, 1969) and discovered a “local” writer (Smith was born in, and has returned to, Cape Breton, though he spent the better part of four decades in Montreal) “burdened by neither a plodding sense of the novel form nor the apparently unbearable heaviness of being Canadian.”

Divided into two parts, Century is a series of six short fictions spanning the period of 1893 to 1983.  In diverse settings (Montreal, Venice, Paris, the coast of British Columbia), we meet characters at different stages of life, grappling with various problems:  in the opening story (“In the Night, Heinrich Himmler . . . ”), Jane, an alumnus of the ‘60s on the cusp of suicide, is visited in dreams by Himmler; in “The Princess / The Boeing and / The Hot Pastrami Sandwich,” Jane’s brother Ian and his wife struggle to come to terms with their child’s tragic death; in “The Garden of the Hesperides,” Jane’s and Ian’s father attempts retirement after losing his wife to cancer; and in “Serenissima,” the wife/mother, facing her terminal prognosis, tries to revive an adulterous relationship. What these characters have in common—and add to them Kenniston Thorson, the main character of the final two stories, set in 1893 and 1923 respectively—is a sense of existential crisis, perhaps best articulated by Thorson.  “Is it enough,” the narrator asks, “that he is part of something, part of the network, the system, the idea that is bigger than him and his little hut, but encloses them, the idea which comes on silvered rails that stretch to Munich, to Vienna, to Istanbul, to Baghdad?  But why does he join the idea?  His daily bread?  Whose idea? And why the idea?  Where does it come from?” 

To Foran, Century seems “too singular, strange and unclassifiable” for most readers, though he is optimistic that the novel will find a broader readership in its re-release.  Arguing that “naming a thing can often limit how it is viewed,” Foran suggests that the ideal reader of Century is one who can recognize the irrelevancy of generic labels:  the magic of the novel is precisely its absence of “[c]onventional unities of theme and action”; instead, the “textures” and the “musicality” of Smith’s language “serve as medium and message alike.”  Loath as I am to be categorized as a conventional reader, I suspect that a good many readers—myself included—might find the novel less “strange” if it didn’t announce itself as a novel.  For some of us, who certainly appreciate texture and musicality, genre matters.  Genre arouses interest and establishes expectations:  Century, to be blunt, disappoints in large part because it fails to do either.

Eva’s Threepenny Theatre, by contrast, is a gripping work of creative non-fiction that will exceed readers’ expectations.  The “family memoir” can be wearying, especially when its author feels duty-bound to showcase historical research; when “facts” are lacking, it can as easily become a drippy-sweet, sentimental journey.  Steinmetz’s text is neither—perhaps because the Montreal-based author is an experienced memoirist (he previously publishedWardlife:  The Apprenticeship of a Young Writer as a Hospital Clerk, 2001), perhaps because his background as a poet (see Histories, 2000, and Hurt Thyself, 2005) has endowed his writing with no-nonsense precision.

Aptly structured in five parts (read: five acts), with Eva playing the lead role, the narrative begins near the end of her life:  diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at 82, Eva is visited by her great-nephew; facing his great-aunt’s final curtain call, Steinmetz sets out to learn about and record the details of her life, acknowledging that his “portable recorder and tin microphone” are “poor tools . . . for capturing a life.”  Eva’s life is reconstructed in the text’s three dominant narrative strands:  Steinmetz’s encounters with her in her London, Ontario, home (circa 1994); stories of her childhood (she was born in 1912), adolescence, and adulthood in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and, finally, Canada; and scenes which sharply focus on her work in the theatre, especially her involvement in the first performance of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in 1928.  Extraordinarily gutsy and resilient, Eva survives not only the trauma of war, exacerbated by her Jewish ancestry, but also a motherless upbringing, a domineering brother (Steinmetz’s grandfather), and the untimely death of her son.  According to Steinmetz, acting classes taught Eva how to perform on-stage and how to “be” offstage.  She gained the “ability to change and change again, never coming to a standstill.  She was pure verb.” 

In recreating Eva’s experiences, Steinmetz deftly draws his readers into the stories of a family and an age, which coalesce to form, necessarily, the backdrop of his own life.  While he develops a rich “cast of characters,” including his grandfather, his father, Eva’s sisters, and Eva’s last partner, Steinmetz is no detached recorder or alienated observer.  And yet, the “singular” (to revisit Foran’s language) achievement of Eva’s Threepenny Theatre is that Steinmetz makes no apology for the seamlessly elegant ways in which he plays the “playwright.” Guided by Brecht’s notion that “[a]rt is not a mirror to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it,” Steinmetz makes his hammer apparent without bludgeoning readers with it.  We don’t need to be told that he can never know the full truth—and yet, we somehow sense that he has come stunningly close.