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Revisiting CanLit’s Golden Age

In a double review of Ross Lecker’s Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit and David Helwig’s The Names of Things, Good Reports’ Alex Good takes a hard look at the era that both memoirs look to as CanLit’s Golden Age. This is the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s when such institutions as Coach House Press, House of Anansi, The Porcupine’s Quill, and (perhaps most importantly) the Canada Council’s block grant program were created, and when books such as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, and Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman, among many others, were published.

After comparing and contrasting the two writers’ disparate approaches to their own personal histories and that of CanLit, Good offers up his take on that decade and its continued influence on Canadian literature and publishing: “Like it or not, there is a canon, and the new writing has to position itself in relation to it, if only to be recognized by lazy critics. I think that’s regrettable. I think the official canon of the Golden Generation was overrated. I also think it’s a shame that so much media oxygen is spent keeping the reputations of writers like Atwood and Ondaatje preserved long after they’ve done work of any interest. And what’s even worse is how we so often look to contemporary writers to be imitators rather than challengers.”

Good ends with a sentiment very dear to our hearts: “Literary debates are always being encouraged, not because of any particular delight in the struggle but because in the end it’s what makes literature stronger.”

Related links:
Read Alex Good on two CanLit memoirs

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