Brian Fawcett, 1944 to 2022 — More Reminiscences

You can’t, grammatically, have more than one best friend, but Brian Fawcett was one of my best friends. I met him in 1973, when I arrived in Prince George to start work as an instructor at the college. We were introduced by another of my best friends, Barry McKinnon.

Brian was bigger, better-looking, and more energetic than me. We both wrote poetry, but he thought it should be visionary while I thought it should be entertaining, which for me meant sonnets.

From the start, though, we had something in common. We both thought that being a poet was a good way to get attention, and getting attention was fun. It was especially fun because it involved jamming with the audience, which was made up entirely of other poets. We were both eager to play what Stan Persky calls “insider baseball.” Literary history proves that the game can, on rare occasions, become major league, and Brian and I were both convinced it would, providing we played smart and hard.

Or, to use an analogy from George Stanley, we wanted to be part of “the whisky romance of poetry / the set.”  The set, as we saw it, was a sort of Petri dish, dedicated to the culture of great poems. The livelier the set was, the better.

As part of the set, we were both (as was McKinnon) running small magazines and publishing chapbooks. We both wrote analytical review articles. We both believed that paying attention to others — publishing them (or not), editing them, commenting on their poetry, and even gossiping about their private lives — was good for poetry.

Because Brian had left Prince George four years before I arrived, we communicated mostly by mail, first the snail kind, then the electronic. I have a box of Brian’s letters, the early ones written in longhand, the later ones typed. I have fat files of his emails on my desktop. He devoted the same energy to correspondence as he did to everything else, and he was generous with his time and attention.

You might think that Brian’s emphasis on vision, and mine on display, indicated a sort of genetic difference that would make us competitors on the literary Galapagos. We developed, instead, what a biologist might call a mutualistic, symbiotic relationship, like rhinos and oxpeckers.

Obviously, he was the rhino. I like to interpret the analogy in the sense that Brian got more attention, rather than the sense that he set the direction while I enjoyed the ride and the relative safety from predators. I did, of course, enjoy the ride, vicariously living Brian’s much more varied and intense literary life. But direction, no. As I said, we were on similar trajectories before we met, and we didn’t agree on what poetry — and by extension all genres of literature — did.

Nonetheless, it seemed like I was tracking him. We were, when we met, both hedging our bet on poetry by writing short stories, my half dozen or so appearing in magazines starting in 1973, when his couple of dozen started to appear.

In the early eighties, we both gave up publishing (note: not writing) poetry in favour of stories. We had entirely different reasons for this. I couldn’t get my poetry published unless I did it myself, and he — well, he was being guided by his vision.

An important revelation took place, in 1982, at the entrance of Octopus Books on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. I like to think it might have been fuelled by a couple of espressos and a plateful of bear-paws at Joe’s next door, because it was as dramatic as St. Paul’s. But vision, I was learning, rather than caffeine and sugar, was the key to lifting myth from reality, of making experience meaningful and therefore vivid.

Brian described his revelation in this way: “As I was about to enter the bookstore, I stopped. I couldn’t think of a single person who would really want to read my book . . . . What I was bringing to the bookstore really wasn’t readable . . . . Fewer people read poetry than write it, and still fewer people see the publication of verse as anything more than an obligatory response to composition and/or the availability of government programs to fund its publication.”

LeRoi Jones appears in Brian’s vision, telling him that “art is about thought, not the other way around.” Academus appears because, as Brian says, “a startling number of poets are employed as university and college teachers,” and university and college teachers are, like the denizens of Academus’s groves, “fifth columnists,” busy selling Athens out to Sparta. Marshall McLuhan turns up: it seems that the contemporary version of Sparta is the Global Village. The writers of poetry (valid) and verse (phoney) don’t make an appearance, but in subsequent writings they do, starting with Brian’s professors at Simon Fraser University. Robin Blaser wrote poetry, Fred Candelaria wrote verse.

Brian’s revelation about poetry happened in the same year that the first of his monumental series of story books appeared. 1982 was also the year that I staked my stick on the “prophetic” relevance of Brian’s poetry. This happened in an article in a special west coast issue of Essays in Canadian Writing, an issue that I edited.

But it was going to be short stories, not poems.

What was revealed to him, I think, was that he needed the stimulation of a bigger audience. He was right about that but, overall, his reasons for not publishing poetry seemed contrived.  While thought is the subject of poetry, the light of inductive speculation, no matter how bright, creates shadows, and I saw them in his revelation.

Is it not obvious that Blaser, subsisting in the groves of academe, had, on Brian’s terms, to be a writer of verse, not poetry? If he was an exception to the rule, that exception had to be explained if the vision was to become clear. Is it not obvious, too, that McLuhan, also an English professor, has to be a fifth columnist, a sell-out to the corporate jackals of the Global Village?

Moving on to Brian’s stories, if Prince George is a crucible of globalism, how did Brian escape, never mind me and Barry — both of us carrying the double baggage of being academics? Maybe we didn’t escape. Later, Brian described his Prince George friends as immanent roadkill, “looking like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.”

At the risk of forwarding a clichéd version of Brian’s vision, I’d say deer = obtuseness, and oncoming car = globalism. I assume that other real people in Brian’s books have similar apprehensions and questions about their appearances as literary characters.

Brian registered opinions on most of the review articles I published in assorted magazines through the 80s, mostly adding his own opinion about my subjects, laced with gossip, some of it derived from personal contact. So it happens that, through his letters, I acquired a bundle of comments, reverent and irreverent, on Robertson Davies, John Sutherland, George Woodcock, Rosemary Sullivan, Jan Zwicky, Robin Skelton, Stephen Scobie, George Grant, Frank Davey, George Stanley, Robert Lecker, George Bowering and Elspeth Cameron.

Barry and I, as well as our colleague Don Precosky, taught Brian’s poems and stories, using anthologies of local writing that we generated in Barry’s print shop (see Barry’s account, on this site, of teaching “Walking Cunt”). Brian gave us permissions to include his stories in these anthologies. In the 1985 – 6 academic year, the three of us started teaching The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie in our freshman English classes. We continued to do this for a decade at least, keeping the book in print (Brian claimed) long beyond its natural life span.

Our students responded well, and I reported some of their remarks to him. He sent us some teaching materials, in the form of news items, historical facts and documents — like an aerial photo of the ox-bow island in the MacGregor River where assorted characters found their personal versions of “the castle”. Most years, he appeared in classes to talk about the book.

Brian dropped story writing in the mid-nineties. Public Eye (1990), is his last collection of short stories. His first book of essays, Unusual Circumstances, appeared in 1991. I reviewed them both in a lengthy (3.5 tabloid-sized pages, 4-column spread) in Vancouver Review. The piece seems to me now to be a useful catalogue of my complaints against him accompanied by a series of acknowledgments that my complaints are irrelevant — totally swamped by the urgency and intelligence of his vision, and the vivacity of his prose.

Here, as a small example, is what he says in Unusual Circumstances about Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips, that appeared in the same year and surprised him with its quality. He saw her stories as representing a sea-change in Atwood, from the thematic to the visionary: “The wilderness of Wilderness Tips is the one we all live in— whether we admit it or not — where the sexual and political have become thoroughly confused, and there is no idyllic, ideological campground at the end of the trail — and certainly no serviced parking bays for academic Winnebagos.”

Then, before moving on from admiring Atwood, as if concerned that she might start to like him, he remarks that she’s starting to look like Miss Piggy. I got swept right into this fantasy, saying, “Fawcett looks (see the Public Eye wrapper) a lot like Kermit. Maybe the two of them will get together now that Atwood is talking about the wilderness as Fawcett sees it instead of as Northrop Frye sees it.”

Gender Wars (1994) is “a novel and some conversation.” It can also be seen as a bundle of essays and stories, two things that Brian combined to great effect, as text and subtext, starting in Cambodia (1986). After Gender Wars, Brian started working on, among other things, novels. Along with two or three other writers, I did edits on these novels.

He also, through the 1990s, did edits on most of the stories in my next two storybooks, Other Art (1997) and Tungsten John (2000). He commented on all my articles (but not on the Vancouver Review one I mentioned), and with the advent of his and Persky’s dooneyscafe in October 2000 he became the editor of my analytical review essays.

No revelation, that I know of, was behind Brian’s movement to the novel, or the accompanying movement to memoirs (Virtual Clearcut, 2003) and Human Happiness, 2011, or to the also accompanying movement to the writing of long-form polemical essays and reviews that resulted in Brian and Stan starting dooneyscafe in October 2000. Brian mentions an “intellectual meltdown” that started in the Fall of 1997 after seven years of writers’ block. But there’s no evidence of block or meltdown in the publishing history. It seems more likely that Brian was simply taking on more research-based expository writing.

By the time Serafin died, in 2007, and Vancouver Review folded, I was a fixture on dooneyscafe. I was Brian’s and Stan’s most productive employee, in terms of sheer bulk at least. And the fact that Brian was now editing me, now looking over my shoulder as I wrote, supercharged our symbiotic relationship. My last public take on him was in the last issue of Vancouver Review (2004) where I invite him to walk out of Dooneys Café into Tim Hortons, and enjoy a Timbit. I was pecking at what I saw as the shadows in his analysis of globalism.

In a subsequent phone conversation with Barry, he remarked about this, “With friends like Harris, who needs enemies?” So I knew he still loved me.

Brian was a good teacher / editor. When I submitted something to dooneyscafe, he usually started by saying, “I haven’t got a clue what you mean.” When I tried to explain, he’d say something like “this is important, but you haven’t got it right.” He’d explain what was missing. We’d have a discussion-cum-argument. At some point he’d say, “I’ll help with the edit.”

So it went, right up until the day he died, when he was considering a story that I wrote, in the form of a dramatic monologue, called “The Grand Interpreter.” It was about Christ turning up to do a 40-day hike in the wilderness of Kluane National Park in the Yukon. Christ is accompanied by his disciples, all riding donkeys.

Brian liked it, asked about visuals, and Vivien sent him a photo of two guys and a donkey she’d met along the banks of the Nile River. She blotted out some buildings on the opposite bank, so it looked like they could be standing on the shores of Kluane Lake.

His last email to us was: “Is this for real?”

He sent the email from his hospital bed from which, he said, “I’m not likely to escape.” So we put the monologue of the grand interpreter, and the guys with the donkeys, up on this site. He didn’t have time to edit it, but he liked it.

To add to this story is Brian’s son, Max Fawcett’s tribute to his father published in the Globe and Mail’s Lives Lived column. It describes his father’s personality perfectly.