I was delighted by the prospect of winning something, but felt uneasy about all this festivity. As a card-carrying introvert, I find eating mass-catered food with men and women I don't know a tedious bore. Participants dress up in uncomfortable clothes and listen to uncomfortable special guests delivering banal speeches they are supposed to applaud. I said: "Can't I collect the award without going to this stupid banquet?"
"No, no," Alan said, "the banquet will be great. You've got to come."
"What in hell am I supposed to wear?" "Well, you know, this is Vancouver."
"So -- shorts, plain T-shirt, and Birkenstocks?" "Whatever makes you feel good."
"I've got a tux." (My wife found it for me in a rummage sale for $5, including cummerband. It fits me perfectly.)
"I wouldn't suggest a tux."
Alan is a busy and energetic man who does not deserve to be badgered by banquet-neurotics, so I got off the phone.
After I'd hung up I wondered whether I was the victim of a hoax. In 30 years of publishing both fiction and non- fiction I have never won an award, though I once got third prize in a CBC playwriting contest. Literary awards, in my view, generally go to people who want them badly enough -- men and women with sharp elbows. Furthermore, if anything I write meets with the kind of approval necessary to win then there must be something wrong with it. And even that CBC prize I regard as a fluke ascribable to the fact that one of the judges was a friend of mine.
Clearly this attitude smacks a little of the cop-out. I am not indifferent to money, fame, and public approval and if any of them were offered to me I wouldn't turn them down. But fortune like this will probably never come my way, and for a good reason. Many years ago John Moss in his Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel wrote that I was "Canada's most impressive minor novelist." And that, I think, is where my reputation (if I have any at all) rests. For a long time after Moss's book came out I toyed with the idea of working on a quantum leap -- to become Canada's least impressive major novelist. But too many candidates compete for this honour, and I let the matter slide. Even so, the news that an award lay within my reach shook me from this fake posture of philosophical indifference. I might win; I might even become Major.
AT THE PRE-BANQUET reception my wife and I bought drinks and stared at the throng around us. I saw a couple of people I knew but wasn't sure what to say to them even though, when very young, I was taught the rudiments of making conversation by an introverted aunt: "What you do," she said, "is work through the alphabet. For instance...'a'.apples. 'Do you have any apple trees in your garden?' " This method actually works and I recommend it to the reader who may, by means of it, acquire a reputation at least as an eccentric if not as a wit. Accordingly I spotted the novelist Audrey Thomas, an old acquaintance, and asked her how her apple trees were doing. She excused herself with some haste and moved away, leaving my wife and me to drift alone to the banquet hall.
This was vast, packed with round tables, and raucous with loud and ugly music played on a synthesizer. Other guests sat at our table and I turned to one of them. I asked her if she ever had to attend board meetings and told another that once upon a time when young I used to play cricket. I asked a third whether or not he kept a dog. Things got better when a young, lively woman named Caroline Adderson arrived at our table and sat down among us. Her book of short stories Bad Imaginings had been nominated for the fiction prize and we share the same pubfisher, The Porcupine's Quill. We agreed it was unlikely we would both win.
"Not good for the trade," I said.
"It won't be me that wins," she said.
"You will most certainly win. You were nominated for the Governor General's Award. It'd be impossible for judges in a purely local event to maintain credibility if they turn you down. Plus the fact you deserve to."
I meant this. Caroline's book is the best work of fiction I've read in a long while. She said: "But we agreed we both can't win. So if I win, you won't. Doesn't that anger you?"
"I'm bound to lose anyway because there're candidates in my category who outrank me. One's a woman, Sharon Brown. She'd normally win against two males. But the other man (not myself) has just died."
"Oh, then, he'll win."
"But then again he may not; he's the archetypal Dead White Male." It was possible, though. Sentimentality might prevail over political correctness, in which case the non-fiction award would go to one for whom the trumpets were already sounding, as Bunyan puts it, on the other side.
"Tough call," I admitted.
We analysed the other categories and predicted the winners -- unerringly, as it turned out. One of the three nominated poets, for instance, was a Metis. It's true that the competition in his category consisted of two women, but neither of them was a member of a minority group. Thus, we reasoned, they didn't stand a chance. This banter, more in game than in earnest, ended when the master of ceremonies, Pierre Berton, clambered onto the stage.
Berton is a robust, noisy, glad-handing man who would look more at home at a race track than a literary dinner. I would not have taken him for a writer of any kind, though I had once by accident tuned into a TV documentary he'd written about the Klondike. It not only caught my attention but seemed informative, thoughtful, and entertaining -qualities so rare on television or anywhere else for that matter, I find it impossible not to respect the author of it. He projected such authority that even the synthesizer player succumbed. There was a sudden and blessed hush. Spotlights played. Pierre Berton stood resplendent in a tuxedo. I wished I had worn mine.
Prizes were awarded. Caroline, as I expected and as she deserved, won in the fiction category and received a cheque from Margaret Atwood who, though dressed in her bag-lady disguise, radiated power. The eminent lawyer Tom Berger had been roped in to introduce the non-fiction finalists. The award went, as I thought it might, to Sharon Brown.
Applause from the audience, gracious little speech from Sharon Brown (who'd written, as I had, about a dying mother), unexpected and unwelcome surge of disappointment within me.
"Bugger it," I thought.
Two comedians appeared, a man and a woman, and did quite good impersonations of Jean Chretien and Sheila Copps. People around me laughed uproariously, and, as is very often the case, I could not understand why. Perhaps they were funny because they were familiar to the audience as a radio turn called "Double Exposure"; i.e., they were funny because they were supposed to be funny. On the other hand perhaps it was because I hadn't had enough to drink -- I'd been asked to keep sober in order to deliver an acceptance speech if required. Now it was no longer needed. I drank steadily throughout the rest of the ceremonies, but without success. Instead of the euphoria alcohol often promises I wound up only with slurred consonants and a staggering gait.
BUT AS I WENT to bed that night I reflected that I hadn't had too bad a time. I'd sat next to a writer I admire, spoken blithely to a variety of interesting strangers, and got down as far as "k" in the alphabet (do you think Prince Charles will ever become king?). I was certainly no longer disappointed about the prize -- the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong (Ecclesiastes, 9:11). In any case, I'd been nominated -- an amazing achievement, I thought, for an obscure writer. And if I resented being obscure it was entirely my own fault; I should've spent more energy placing myself in the public eye and joining organizations like the Writer's Union. I should've moved to Toronto. I could even have become the country's dullest major novelist by such stratagems. I fell asleep contentedly.
But, as Hemingway points out somewhere, "night plans are never any good in the morning." I woke with a raging thirst, throbbing skull, and a bad case of selfloathing. If I couldn't win a prize awarded in a backwater province of a backwater country, what the hell was I doing writing in the first place? All that cheap and easy cynicism about political correctness and the consequent suggestibility and venality of the judges was merely a technique to obscure the fact that even in a small pond I was not even a minnow.
Furthermore, and to change the metaphor, the Ecclesiastical Preacher is mistaken: the race is always to the swift, the battle to the strong, and clearly I am neither.
"Better to hang my lyre on a tree," I told myself, "preferably a blasted oak, and spend the rest of my days playing snooker in a senior centre on one of those dreary Gulf Islands."
I took a shower and the truth began to reassert itself. There is a part of me that cares about recognition and approval and I was more disappointed about this award business than I had let on to myself at the time. On the other hand, I write not for rewards but because if I didn't write I would come out in boils. Out of some weird compulsion, in other words. Freud tells us that what compels the artist is the craving for fame, money, and beautiful lovers. But these are what everyone wants; why struggle with the Arts to get them? A B.C. novelist once wrote that the artist wants to be able to say "look at me, you stupid assholes." One writes, in other words, out of a spirit of revenge. It's an interesting idea, more interesting than Freud's, but I think it too is wrong. There are more comfortable ways of achieving revenge than sitting in front of a word processor for two or three hours a day. No, the fact is writers want to be read, they want to engage an audience, never mind how small; it has I little to do with admiration.
I dragged myself to my desk and began writing this essay. I wanted to describe that banquet, its vulgarity, its brashness, its unfunny comedians, its diminished echo of the Academy Awards. In it I intended to say that the serious and selfrespecting writer ought to keep out of public events of this shoddy kind and get on with the Work. Don't participate in them, don't encourage them. I was going to end with a solemn declaration, an oath, in fact, that I would flee them as I would the flesh-eating streptococcus. I started the essay, but other projects intervened and I put it aside.
That was in the summer. Now I'm back at it to tell you that Alan Twigg has just phoned. He asked if I'd like to be a judge in the 1994 fiction awards to be celebrated this spring. Here is a case of the Preacher being vindicated yet again, and I didn't have to pause to consider this offer:
... I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.
Time and chance had brought me a kind of honour and I accepted it with alacrity and delight.
