Dear Bruce

A lightly edited exchange with my friend Bruce Serafin, peerless writer, critic, publisher, "public intellectual," founder of the Vancouver Review, who died Wednesday evening in Vancouver:

CJB: Dear Bruce, Sharon dropped into the store on Saturday and confirmed what I already knew, or had half-guessed: cancer, "palliative care," the works. I'd like to come visit but Sharon said you're probably not up to seeing people right now. "You're a writer, write a letter." So I thought I'd put a few thoughts down right away, then maybe add some more, later.

You know you're one of Canada's best writers, right? That may sound like a variation on "best tap-dancer in the room," but I hope you take it in the spirit I mean it. Like [Brian] Fawcett said in his Tyee review of Colin's Big Thing, the book's appearance just concretized what everyone was already thinking. I disagree with Fawcett much of the time, but I thought his careful reading of your work -- of the "you" in it -- was rock-solid, in particular his citation of your careful eye, your subtle and nuanced readings of social history out of landscape.

Like Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace's best work from the 80s, you also possess a kind of psychological clarity about and imaginative sympathy with your subjects, a sympathy which, strangely, you never extend to yourself. Your rigorous and utterly unsentimental judgements of yourself struck me as very brave when I first read them. They still do.

In a funny way, the example of your writing in VR (back when it still meant something to publish there) and, later, in Dooney's Cafe, let me start blogging -- a form which is all rigorous self-analysis, if you want it to be -- and work my way from there back to art criticism, and, eventually, to fiction. I know you weren't 100% thrilled with my kids' book (which I rewrote, and submitted, and which will be published [some time in] 2008), but without your fine example I don't think I ever would have been able to externalize my (largely negative) assessments of my own work and self-worth and keep on writing.

I was proud to be published by you in VR; it felt like a declaration of some kind, maybe one of "aesthetic solidarity." And for the example of your clear, linear, tongue-and-groove prose.

I hope you survive your illness (I wrote "beat," then excised that cliche's beating heart). I hope your criticism is collected and published, preferably with you still around to edit it. You are one of the very few figures I have taken as an "ideal reader." Most of all, I hope you will relax your legendary lack of sentimentality toward yourself and believe me when I say you are widely admired. And loved.

BRUCE SERAFIN: Chris, thanks for your kind letter. I am hard at work on an essay collection and a travel book set in Western Canada. The travel book is half done - and that half is well done, I think - and may end up having to be a short book in itself if I can find a publisher who'll do 30,000 word manuscripts that lend themselves to pix. Know anyone?

The essays: I'm revising 'em and getting Stan Persky and John Harris to look at them. I hope at the end to have a fairly substantial book. I may not see it published, but it would be fabulous to know it's done.

Now. Heh. About your writing. I have had an idea for a long time, religiously reading your blog as I do (nearly every day!) that you should do a graphic book - you should find a good graphic artist - and either do it realistically or realistically with cartoon (i.e. animal) faces on most of the characters. (You are a realistic writer Chris at your best - you have that power) I think graphic books allow an enormous range of intellectual as well as emotional movement - they have that documentary quality - now here's my room - here's what Chris's pix look like. The leaf in the gutter had the exact shape of Taiwan etc etc.

All this would feed to your great strengths as a writer: strengths of vision, outward and inward, strengths of analysis, and strengths of narrative: (I love it when different people come into your store.)

The piece should be about your life. No holds barred man. It should start with you working in the Granville Book Company. It should have as its main action your getting the store Pulpfiction. It should have as its theme I'll Outlast You. It should be about a young man making his way in the intellectual and emotional world of the 21st century. No sentiment. Only love and hate and curiosity and all things real.

[Photo credit: Christopher Grabowski, for The Tyee]
- posted by cjb @ 9:22 AM