Robert Weaver. The Anthology Anthology (1984)

     Robert Weaver. The Anthology Anthology (1984) Collection of stories, poems, etc first broadcast on CBC’s Anthology, which Weaver produced for a long, long time. I vaguely remember hearing it from time to time. Anyhow, I can’t remember where I got this book. Maybe Jon gave it to me, or Cassandra, or maybe I found it on a remainder table. If so, it must have been some years ago, because I there’s no date in the front (I write the month/year in every book I buy now). The pieces vary, of course, but they do share a common tone or cast of mind or colour of the imagination. There’s a kind of melancholy, a kind of acceptance of the inevitable, of the uncontrollable encounters in one’s life, that seems to me peculiarly Canadian. When Americans try the same tone, they write stories of defeat. The Canadian stories don’t feel defeatist.
     For example, in “A Private Place” by Joyce Marshall, Lars, a newly separated Norwegian moves into a recently dead older man’s apartment, and reads the letters from the older man’s Canadian mistress. He doesn’t answer them, and she finally asks to have confirmed what she suspects and dreads, that her lover is dead, and her letters are being tossed out. By this time Lars’s wife is asking Lars to let their daughter spend more time with him, he has met a possible future mate, he knows that soon his wife will file for divorce, and he can form a family again. None of this has come about by any action on his part, he has merely drifted from one situation to another. His inability to write to the dead man’s mistress is just another symptom of his passivity. This inability to act, this drifting, occurs in most of the other stories, too. But one doesn’t feel that the protagonists are losers; one feels instead that they are survivors. Which, according to Peggy Atwood, is the essential mark of Canadian fiction.
     Perhaps instead of essential Canadianness we see merely Robert Weaver’s taste. But more recent work, by people who had barely begun their writing when Weaver published this anthology, continues the strain. Timothy Findley died yesterday (June 20, 2002). I have read very little of his work – I find him a glib trickster rather than a writer – but he, too, catches that Canadian ability to accept whatever life dumps on you. Canadians don’t think of themselves as fighting to stay alive, I guess. Just staying alive is all there is. And while you are alive, things happen. It’s the mark of a true person to accept this, not complain, and not triumph either.  A better book than I expected. *** (2002)