Character Parts: Who's Really Who in Canlit Hardcover - 2003

Excerpt

Foreword

John -- not his real name -- is a writer. His many stories and novels have met with muted critical acclaim and with a commercial success so timid it verges on the agoraphobic. Others, less optimistic or less self-assured, would long ago have sniffed the wind and abandoned the chase, but John persists, undaunted, buoyed by knowing that, however it is received by the world at large, his each new publication will be eagerly scanned -- and occasionally purchased -- by his widespread circle of cronies. If asked, he would attribute their support to genuine admiration, perhaps to the imperatives of friendship, and to an extent, he would be right. What he would never, could never acknowledge is that their fascination with his work is also rooted in the certainty that they will recognize themselves peering out, only marginally altered, from between his measured lines. This has been going on for years. Once upon a time, when they were younger, they sometimes minded these unsolicited inclusions, saw them as an invasion of privacy, a betrayal of confidence. Not now. Now that they are tempered by world-weariness, by a kind of sustaining cynicism, it’s just become another game among intimates, this merry business of locating one another, of seeing how their particular circumstances or philosophies, their homes or peccadilloes have been gathered up wholesale and turned to the purpose of John’s fiction, if fiction is what this can properly be called.

John -- and maybe he is real, and maybe I have made him up -- has often been asked, challenged even, by journalists, by other writers, and by those whose essence he makes a habit of siphoning, about his pirating ways. Always he demurs, persisting in his assertion that he draws his work from one source only: the unpolluted well of his own inventiveness. This is patently not so, but it also possible that, after years of repetition, John has come to believe in the truth of his own good-natured mendacity.

Unlike John, most writers, when they create a roman à clef, don’t leave the key dangling in plain view. But just like John, most writers affect surprise, or discomfiture, when some moderately sentient reader lifts up the welcome mat or the terra-cotta pot and finds la clef concealed there, then goes ahead and tries to match it with a likely lock. Most writers will at least make a show, however smirking, of denial, even as the tumblers click and roll and the roman cracks wide open.

Why such coyness in this regard? All the usual reasons, I guess: the fear of litigation, should a portrait be on the defamatory side of unflattering; the pure and childish joy of mischief-making; the clubby pleasure of winking across the room at those who are in on the joke; the warm glow that lights the rendering of a cloaked homage, or its opposite number, the acid satisfaction of base vengefulness. Mostly, I suspect, writers resist pinning the tail on their chosen donkeys out of fear that they will be seen as creatively wanting, and so depleted of that most vital writerly mojo, the imagination, that they must resort to cannibalizing their families, their enemies, their friends. Always one must cleave to the myth that the self is sufficient to the day, that it is bottomless, boundless, even though anyone with a lick of sense knows it’s hooey, knows that even Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” while succinct, was not above suspicion.

Of course, we also know that character borrowing happens by degree. Virginia Woolf based Orlando on certain aspects of Vita Sackville-West’s life and domestic circumstances, but could never be said to have mined her lover’s life as thoroughly and as literally as, say, Tennessee Williams did with his own family to create The Glass Menagerie, or as Thomas Wolfe did, fine-combing Asheville to write Look Homeward, Angel.

There is a whole range of possibilities between these two extremes, and in Character Parts, Brian Busby kicks over their many traces as they occur in our domestic literature, mostly in English, but with more than a few French instances folded into the mix; mostly in novels, but with a significant number of short stories and novellas also included. Why has no one done this before, at least on this scale? What was Canada made for, if not to provide a home, a foundation, for just this sort of enterprise? First, a swarm of busy writer bees, over the years, has daubed together an impressive hive, brimming over with their accumulating honey. As well, while our land might be vast, our country is small, and in this small country we have made a crowning virtue out of regionalism, which is all to say that we inhabit a place where you don’t have to strive long or hard to know someone who knows someone who knows. We are a nation built on the bedrock of 2.5 degrees of separation, and of necessity we have become a place where gossip occupies the same niche of need as oxygen and moisturizers. And let’s face it: the fondness for gossip, or one of its very close cousins -- rumour, innuendo, suggestion -- is really what’s at the heart of our tittering need to know, or to wonder, who such and such an author had in view when he or she created such and such a character. Was it Barbara Amiel in Margaret Atwood’s crosshairs when she birthed Zenia in The Robber Bride? Was it John Fraser that George Galt was channeling when he wrote Scribes and Scoundrels? Was Timothy Findley pondering Marian Engel in his heart when he was writing “Bragg and Minna,” and was June Callwood his model for Jane Kincaid in Spadework? Were they? Did he? And does it matter if they were, if he did? No, is the short answer, no more than it matters that Morley Callaghan’s chance sighting of John Glassco and Graeme Taylor in a Paris café led to a challenge that spawned “Now that April’s Here”; no more than it matters that both Hugh Garner and Ralph Allen made hay with the sports franchise owner Jack Kent Cooke. None of it matters, deeply, none of it is life-saving, but there is no denying that such information brings a certain richness to the act of reading, and underscores the way novelists operate within a milieu, within historical parenthesis, and that their fictions can be seen, whatever their intrinsic virtues, as a gloss on history itself; a supplement to the official record.

The examples cited above -- a very few of the many that Brian Busby has assembled -- come mostly from the late-middle period of our national literature; or rather, from the work of writers who came to the fore during the latter half of the twentieth century. No less fascinating for being less known, at least to me, are the writings and borrowings of their vocational forebears: Margaret Duley, Harwood Steele, Hilda Glynn-Ward, Dorothy Duncan, Edith Eaton, and a host of others whose names are dusty and whose books are out of print and which I fully intend to track down and read the next time the flu keeps me in bed for a day or two at a stretch.

Brian Busby has also found space to include some of the bumper crop of new Canadian writers -- authors like Timothy Taylor, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, and Wayne Johnston, who will be considered classics by a future generation. But Character Parts is already a biggish book, and the fact that much has perforce been left out merely demonstrates the impossibility of inclusivity, and suggests the need, very soon, for a sequel; a sequel that might include John, who is nowhere to be found in these pages, and whose resemblance to any person, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

-- Bill Richardson, 2003

Media reviews

“One of the most useful, not to mention entertaining, reference books to come along in years. A mine of information on literary inspirations.”
—Maclean’s

“Endlessly fascinating. Brian Busby has done a remarkable job bringing together material from a wide range of sources, many of them not found anywhere else, to create a rich and indispensable reference book. This is the CanLit canon as seen from an entirely new angle.”
—Will Ferguson

“Character Parts breathes new life — and real lives — into old literature.”
—The Edmonton Journal

“This A-to-Z guide to our country’s fictional characters is chock full of interesting bits, both literary and historical — not to mention their potential for impressive cocktail-party chat.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Character Parts is an amazing little volume, an indispensable companion to Canadian literature, a useful and entertaining reference book that will delight and inform the CanLit collector. … Busby has done his homework. … [Busby’s] book is a mine of information, a Who’s Who of Canadian literature that is not to be missed.”
—The London Free Press