Stan Persky laments what he sees as a decline of literary discourse in Canada

TORONTO””On a sunny afternoon at Dooney's Café on Bloor Street, in the neighbourhood known as the Annex, Stan Persky, Vancouver's Socrates, was sipping a coffee and holding forth on the affairs of the world and on the meaning of Dooney's Café.

Dooney's is something of a literary fulcrum in this city, but quite apart from the writers known to frequent the place, what is just as important is that Dooney's proprietor, Graciano Marchese, is quite possibly the warmest, friendliest man in Toronto. On this point Persky insisted, but he quickly returned to the case he was making for the decline of literary discourse in Canada, the withering of the journeyman's art of copy editing, and an overall rise in cultural illiteracy, all the while conceding the possibility that what was really going on was he was just becoming something of an old crank.

No way, I says to him.

“I have a sweet temperament, and that saves me from a lot of pain,”  he responds. “But I'm mildly resigned to despair about the circumstances.” 

So Persky is perhaps not quite as jolly as he once was, but there is, nonetheless, a stubborn happiness about him. Despite his insistence that humanity must be seen in its darkness as well as its light, Persky, at 65, is nothing near cranky. He remains just as entranced by humanity's brilliant light in his latest book of essays, criticism, and belles lettres, The Short Version: An ABC Book (New Star Books), as he was in “The Osoyoos Indian Picket Highway 97 at OK Falls and Then Decide to Take the Government to Court” , an essay that appeared in the now-defunct literary review Imago 22 years ago, where I first encountered his writing.

I was little more than a kid back then, but whenever I doubt the great rhetorical power of the language of common speech, or doubt the magic of plain narrative as the primary means by which humanity comprehends the universe, I return to that essay, as I did the other day and noticed that in that same issue of Imago, edited by George Bowering, there were poems by George Stanley, Gerry Gilbert, Michael McClure, Robin Blaser, and Brian Fawcett. And who should walk into Dooney's at the very moment Persky is in the midst of a harangue about the insidious impact of literary awards upon Canadian writing than Fawcett himself. He is Persky's other half, in a manner of speaking.

“We've got the same mind,”  Fawcett explains. “I'm Anglican, unreasonable, and hetero. Stan's Jewish, reasonable, and gay. Between us, we make up a whole human being.” 

Persky then elaborates, explaining that it can be a bit of a fraud, the place where an author's name appears on a book's cover. In the case of Fawcett and himself, entire paragraphs that have appeared in Persky's various works should be properly attributed to Fawcett, and in Fawcett's books, Persky will claim only a few sentences, but vast chunks he has rewritten or edited.

For the record, Fawcett's best books, by my lights, in order, are: Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney's Café and Other Non-Globalized Places, People, and Ideas, followed by Virtual Clearcut, then Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. Persky's best, in order: The Short Version, then At the Lenin Shipyard, and Then We Take Berlin.

What's different about The Short Version is that nothing binds the front cover to the back except its chapter titles, taken from the first three letters of the alphabet, and its consistently intelligent, provocative, and thoroughly entertaining engagement with ideas, literature, place, and memory. Actually, there is one chapter, titled “Out of Order”  (“A sparrow crashed through the balcony doors of my apartment in Berlin one day...” ), which briefly contemplates the idea of order but deliberately refuses to fit. Otherwise, it's true to its form, taking its inspiration from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz's book, Milosz's ABCs.

In this way, Persky appears as an 18-year-old among the beat poets of San Francisco in the chapter “After Lorca” , and then wanders the ruins of an ancient Khmer city in “Angkor Wat” . In the chapter “Berlin” , Persky presents an affectionate meditation upon the metropolis where he has spent the past 15 summers, along with a panoramic view of the way various writers and intellectuals have imagined that grand and tragic city. In “Canada” , Persky demonstrates the extent to which, unlike so many of his expatriate American contemporaries, he has actually taken the trouble to arrive and settle in this country, intellectually and culturally.

And that's the way it more or less works, from “Aboutism” , “Apartheid” , and “Arcadia”  through “Bald” , Bar Mitzvah” , and “Roland Barthes”  to “Capilano College”  (where Persky teaches philosophy), “Notes on Capitalism/Communism” , and “Continued” . The result is some of the most gorgeous travel writing, memoir, and humour ever to appear between the covers of a Canadian book.

Fawcett was in the midst of a great philippic about literary awards, arguing that they're a racket, and that it would be better to name the judges publicly so as to allow for all sorts of bribery and backstairs work and scandal, when it occurred to me that Persky was up for the Hubert Evans Prize for nonfiction at the British Columbia book awards.

“These things are a complete mystery to me,”  Persky says, insisting that awards serve only to narrow the breadth of possibilities in literary experimentation.

What's next?

Maybe another “short version”  with the letters D, E and F, but first he wants to finish a collection of essays with the working title Topic Sentence, and maybe then a book about Canadian literature, a Persky's Canon of Canadian Literature, sort of.

As it turned out, he won the Hubert Evans Prize. But by then he was back in Berlin, so I never had the chance to say congratulations to our brilliant Stan Persky, our beloved Stan Persky, our Socrates.