Women and Men, Writers and Prizes, Progress

Earlier today I sent this Letter to the Editor to the Globe and Mail:

Re. We need writing prizes for women authors (April 29): You’d never guess from Susan Swan’s piece that, these days, women win more literary prizes than men. She mentions 7 prizes, and provides numbers going back decades—and she’s absolutely right that for far too long there were far too few women winners. But the past 5 years? Women have won 5 of 5 Governor General’s fiction awards, 3 Giller, 3 Writers’ Trust, and 3 PEN/Faulkner fiction prizes, as well as 3 Nobel Prizes for Literature. Of the 7 awards she mentions, only the Leacock and Pulitzer have skewed male. The total since 2018 for the prizes cited for their “discouraging” statistics is 20 women winners, 15 men. We all owe Swan a debt for being part of a monumental effort to bring about a much-needed change. But that effort is achieving more success than she seems prepared to acknowledge.

There are one or two things touched on in that letter—and in Susan Swan’s opinion piece—that I’d like to say a bit more about.

When I write that Swan is “absolutely right that for far too long there were far too few women winners” of literary prizes, I know whereof I speak. To some in my family (certainly to me), a continuing source of family shame is my father’s winning of the 1964 Governor General’s Award for English language fiction. At his best, Dad was to my mind an extremely good poet; I think “Haystack” and “Below Monte Casino” as good as any poems written about the horrors that ordinary troops experienced during the Second World War. But his one work of prose fiction, The Deserter, is an interesting novel rather than a great one; that it won the Governor General’s Award in 1964 over Margaret Laurence’s wonderfully well written and deeply moving The Stone Angel—felt by many to be the finest Canadian novel ever written—was a travesty, and a travesty hard to explain without acknowledging that Douglas LePan was, in 1964, very well connected and very male,* and that Margaret Laurence was neither of those things.

Thank God for progress! If, off the top of my head, I try to think of extraordinarily good works of new fiction I’ve read in the past few years, the names of women authors come to mind slightly more frequently than do those of males. I think immediately of seven authors: of Claire Keegan and Emma Donoghue and Sally Rooney and Elizabeth Strout, and also of Andre Alexis and Michael Crummey and Kazuo Ishiguro. That’s seven authors who come immediately to mind, four of them women.** Interestingly, the ratio of prizes touched on in that letter to the Globe (20 women, 15 men) is precisely the same, 4 to 3. I suppose my intuition, then, is that the ratio of prize winners these days is—so far as gender is concerned—very much as it should be!

* * *

In her highly engaging (if unfortunately titled) new book Left is Not Woke Susan Nieman, who is herself very much a thinker of the left, takes issue with three aspects of what she sees as “woke” leftist thought today. Perhaps the most interesting of the three is her discussion of the great irony that many today who style themselves “progressive” have a deep suspicion of any argument suggesting that progress may be occurring—sometimes even of any argument suggesting that progress is possible. Many on the left, Nieman suggests, suffer from a suspicion of the notion of progress so profound that they recoil from acknowledging progress when it does occur—including when it occurs in large part as a result of “progressive” efforts that they themselves have been associated with. I cannot think of anything I’ve read recently that is a better example of this tendency that Susan Swan’s piece in this weekend’s Globe and Mail. To the extent that it acknowledges that any progress at all has been made, it does so grudgingly; the emphasis is entirely on the degree to which males have dominated over the past 119 years, with barely a nod to the extraordinary degree to which women have nevertheless triumphed in the face of all odds.

The Governor General’s Award for English language fiction was awarded in only eight years in the 1960s--in two years the jury decided against presenting any award--but there were nine winners (in 1968 there were two winners, Alice Munro and Mordecai Richler). Of the nine winners, seven were men; Laurence won in 1966 for A Jest of God, an award that many thought was informed by the failure of the 1964 jury to recognize Laurence’s achievement with A Stone Angel. Even those who argue (and I am very much among them) that women are still discriminated against in many walks of life, and that more remains to be done in order to achieve full gender equality, should surely acknowledge that there has been progress. And if there has been progress over the past half century, that should surely give us confidence that more progress is possible in the years to come.

*He was also, even by most who knew him in those days, thought to be mainstream in terms of his sexual orientation; Dad did not come out as gay until the 1980s.

**One thing to note: this list is focused only on English-language fiction writing of recent years. If other genres are to be considered, I might add three other writers--Lynn Nottage (whose excellent play Sweat I read not too long ago), Margaret Atwood (for her very fine poetry volume The Door), and Ta Nahesi Coates (for his superb long essay "The Case for Reparations")--the addition of which would make the overall ratio 3-2 rather than 4-3.

[I have left the above unrevised, but I should give credit here to Globe editor Danielle Adams, who fact-checked and discovered that I had my addition wrotng when it came to the PEN/Faulkner; as she pointed out, 4 women and only one man had won that award in the five previous years, so that the overall five-year total for these prizes combined was 21 women winners and 14 men. The correction was made when the Globe published the letter on May 9.]

Ashes

[I wrote this essay in 2018, but for some reason never posted it on this blog. I'll do so now.]

For the last year of her life my mother had, as they say, lost it. Anything she picked up, she would lose in a minute. Any thought that she had, she would lose in a second. She was in the nursing home’s double-doored lock ward, so the one thing she couldn’t lose was herself. She’d been dead for several years before I managed to lose her. No, not “lose.” Misplace.

My mother’s ashes came in a lacquered box, about 10 inches long, 6 inches wide, and a couple of inches deep. Inside, what was left of her was in a plastic bag. Thick plastic, the open end folded over twice. There was no twist-tie—no extra precautionary measure to prevent her escaping.

Anyone who has ever seen the ashes of a loved one—but why do I write “seen”? We are all so conditioned to think that what we see is what is most important, when what we hear and taste and smell and feel can matter just as much. What we feel, in this case. The seeing is ordinary, unremarkable. But the feel of a human’s ashes? Anyone who has ever experienced that feeling will tell you that they’re heavy—a lot heavier than you’d expect. For their volume, they must weigh three or four times more than the ashes from a wood fire. And they are gritty, with little chunks all through—not soft like wood ashes. The bones, I guess.

My mother could never decide what she wanted done with her after she died. She knew she wanted to be cremated—that much was clear. But after that?

She’d said at one point that maybe it would make sense to have her ashes buried next to her own mother’s grave. But that was in Pennsylvania, nowhere near where any of the family lived now—and besides, she’d said herself that she didn’t feel any real connection to Pennsylvania.

Perhaps I should bury the ashes in the city I was living in—or the city my brother lived in, where our mother had lived herself for more than twenty years. But it was so cold there; she’d never been very fond of the place.

Maybe scatter the ashes? That would be fine—but where? A few of her favorite places, I supposed; I could think of two of three spots that might qualify. I equivocated. More than once I wished that mother had been more definite as to what she wanted to happen, after she died. So it was that, for years, I kept the box that held her ashes, not sure what to do with it. With them. With her? For a while they were on the top shelf of a cupboard, for a while in a bureau drawer. But at least I knew where they were—and some day I would decide what to do with them.

Then I moved. Then I moved again a year later. And then that place was turned upside down by renovations, and everything had to be moved from one room to another and back again.

So it was that early last year, when for some reason I started to think seriously about doing something about my mother’s ashes, I couldn’t find them. I looked in the bureau drawer where I was sure they had been for a while at one point. I looked on the top shelf of the renovated cupboards. The basement? A lot of things had ended up in a jumble in the basement during that renovation. I looked in each place more than once. She was nowhere to be found. A few days later I looked again, and a few weeks after that I looked once more. She had not reappeared.

My mother had died of Alzheimer’s, and now I couldn’t remember where I had put her.

I tried to laugh, as people do about things that have to do with death. If it hadn’t been me who was responsible, maybe I would have found it funny. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter, that she really hadn’t cared about what would happen to her after she died. And she hadn’t. She hadn’t been religious in any way—other than having liked the sound of a choir. She had believed that we die, and that’s it; what lives on is whatever we have done in the world, and our children and others who remember us.

At odd moments over the course of almost a year I found myself looking for her again. Might I have put her in that forgotten space behind the furnace? Might I have stored her in that closet upstairs that’s never used? I looked behind everything. Twice.

To be reminded of the death of a loved one is to be reminded of one’s own mortality—many people will tell you that. But it’s not true for everyone; certainly it’s not true for me. I may sometimes be reminded of my own mortality by the death of someone I’ve known much more distantly—an acquaintance from high school days, for example, who I was never close to then and have rarely seen since. But if I’m reminded of the death of a loved one, what I’m reminded of is for the most part simply the loved one—nothing and no one else. This was about my mother, and I had lost her.

She always had a tendency to make her children feel guilty about one thing or another. She was doing it still.

I found her last week. The box that held her ashes was in a dark corner of the basement, behind four things and underneath two others; somehow I had missed her all those times when I thought I’d looked everywhere.

What to do now? Finding my mother means I no longer have to tussle with that twinge of guilt that no one who loses their mother can avoid. But it also means coming up hard against the fact of her never coming back.

I’ll be travelling to Pennsylvania for a conference in the spring. Maybe I’ll take her with me.

[Postcript, 2023: My brother and I finally decided last year what we would do. Ashes have gone as ashes will always eventually go, into earth or air, and a memorial stone honors our mother's memory:

Sarah Catherine Chambers LePan

1917-2003

We had a small gathering when the stone was placed; we wept, and we said things in remembrance of her.]

Meat and Milk, Children and Mothers

Nicholas Kristof had an excellent column in the New York Times of April 15; "What a Girl’s Goat Teaches Us About Our Food" tells the story of how a nine-year-old girl in Shasta County, California, grew very fond of Cedar, a goat she was taking care of as a 4H member--so fond that, when it came time to give Cedar up for slaughter at the end of the County Fair, as was usual practice, she couldn't do it. Instead, she and her mother took the goat to a place they thought would be safe. The County Fair authorities argued that the girl and her mother were legally obliged to have the goat killed. The authorities were so determined to have what they saw as a four-legged piece of personal property killed that they liaised with the County Sherriff's office and persuaded the Sherriff to send law enforement officers some 500 miles to capture the goat and return it to County Fair authorities. Cedar was found, and Cedar was duly slaughtered, just as the authorities had wanted.

Kristof treats the incident as a reminder that "the bright line we draw between farm animals and our pet dogs and cats is an arbitrary one." He takes aim at the cruelties of factory farming and the unreasonableness of ag gag laws, and recounts how he himself has given up eating meat.

The piece inspired many comments, a number of which Kristof responded to with comments of his own, including one in which he contrasted the cruelties of today's dairy farming with the practices of earlier generations of dairy farmers. It was in response to that Kristof comment that I ssent the following letter to the Times:

Nicholas Kristof’s moving column on the horrors of the meat industry is superb. But he forgets the fundamental facts of the dairy industry when he writes that "it used to be that dairy cows were mostly pastured and had a decent life." No mother has a decent life if her newborn children are taken away from her soon after birth so that the members of another species can take her milk. And when the mother stops providing large amounts of milk, she is killed (rather than being allowed to live out her 20-year natural lifespan). Even in the old days, the dairy industry inflicted horrible cruelty on the mothers and daughters as well as on the sons who were killed to become veal. Unlike in the old days, substitutes for both dairy and meat products have become readily available; there need be no real sacrifice on the part of humans in moving towards a plant-based diet.

"What a Girl's Goat Teaches Us about Our Food" truly is an excellent column. I urge you to read it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/opinion/goat-girl-slaughtered-california.html

The Message of Ben Affleck's Air: Courting a Legend

In contemplating the popular new Ben Affleck movie Air: Courting a Legend, it may be best to begin with some numbers. The financial net worth of an American senior citizen is typically in the range of $250,000. For the poorest quintile, of course, median net worth is much lower—at the low end, it’s common for a senior to have a net worth of $15,000, or even less.

Legendary shoe and logo designer Peter Moore, who died in 2022 at the age of 78, was estimated by Celebrity Net Worth to have had a net worth of almost $10 million not long before he died. He was, in other words, almost 40 times richer than the average American of the same age, and more than 650 times richer than a typical senior citizen in the poorest quintile.

Michael Jordan is also now by some measures a senior citizen; he recently turned 60. His 2022 net worth has been estimated to be in the range of $2 billion. Last year, then, he was 200 times richer than Peter Moore, roughly 8,000 times richer than the average American senior, and more than 5,000,000 times richer than the average American senior in the poorest quintile of the population.

Unbelievably, the perniciously charming Air invites us to root for Jordan as a financial underdog. In a key scene near the end of the movie, Jordan’s mother Deloris (played by Viola Davis) tells Nike’s Sonny Vaccaro (played by Matt Damon) that fairness demands that Jordan, who will, it’s claimed, be responsible for generating most of the money that will come from Air Jordan sales, receive not only the $250,000 that Nike has offered, but also a royalty on every pair of shoes sold. Vaccaro says he agrees with her that such a deal would be fair, but tells her as well that it’s never been done in the industry, and that he doesn’t think Nike CEO Phil Knight would ever go for a royalty deal. Of course Knight (played by Affleck) finally sees the light, the deal gets done, and it’s hugs and fist pumps and a happy ending all round.

The movie seems to embrace values we all share: how it can pay to take risks, to truly believe in something or someone against all the odds: how oppressed athletes deserve to be empowered against faceless corporate boards; how mothers deserve to be empowered as they struggle on their children’s behalf; how the struggles of black mothers and black women in particular deserve to be acknowledged and celebrated.

Doesn’t it? Well, no. Not unless we take a blinkered view of the movie, and of modern America. Air is such a well-directed, well-acted, well-scripted, enjoyably entertaining film that’s it’s hard not to come out of the theater with blinkers on as to the values that it is promoting. But it’s worth giving the matter more thought.

First of all, let’s remember that Michael Jordan has nothing to do with designing the shoe; it’s Peter Moore who designs the shoe, gives it the name “Air Jordan,” and designs the iconic logo. What Jordan provides is a vehicle for hyping the shoe, not anything that makes it a better product. (A parallel example: if a novel is hyped by Oprah Winfrey, we expect sales revenues for the publisher and royalties for the author to soar—but we don’t think Winfrey deserves millions of dollars for recommending the book.)

Remove the blinkers, and we can see that what Air celebrates is an America in which a tiny minority become fabulously wealthy while ordinary people pay inflated prices for goods whose “value” rests on marketing hype rather than quality. An America in which we are too often tricked into rooting for “underdogs” who are nothing of the kind. (Interestingly, the film chooses to tell the story as one in which Nike offers Jordan $250,000, instead of the amount they actually offered in 1984, $2,500,000—$500,000 per year for five years, not counting the royalties.)

Here’s another take on how the Air story really ends. Michael Jordan’s net worth grows to over $2 billion. Phil Knight’s net worth grows to over $40 billion. Jordan’s agent David Falk sells his business for $100 million. Workers in Vietnam and Cambodia who make Air Jordan shoes are paid 25 cents per hour. And parents who often can’t really afford it are pressured into paying $185 for a pair of Air Jordan shoes that cost $5 to produce. Fist pumps, anyone?

In Remembrance: Vance Benjamin Elliott

Some obituaries can convey a good deal even when they tell almost nothing. In mid-February of this year my partner Maureen and I realized that Vance—a friendly but frail old fellow who had for years been stopping round pretty regularly to take away our empties—hadn’t been by for at least a couple of weeks. We thought that perhaps something might have happened to him—more than once before he’d not been round for long periods when (as we would discover later) he’d been hospitalized. But he had been getting more and more frail over the past year, and of course another thought occurred to us.

We knew his first and last names and we knew he had family down the road a ways in Duncan. When Maureen googled, the search engine quickly brought up “Vance Elliott Obituary - Duncan, BC” and this notice on the Dignity Memorial site:

Obituary Vance Benjamin Elliott August 12, 1960 – January 29, 2023 In the care of First Memorial Funeral Services Vance Benjamin Elliott, age 62, of Nanaimo, British Columbia passed away on Sunday, January 29, 2023.

That was all. The notice said that “fond memories and expressions of sympathy” could be posted and shared “for the Elliott family,” but there was nothing posted, from the family or from any friends.

How had Vance died? Had there been any funeral service? Or any “celebration of life,” as such things have for the most part come to be called? (There is a dreary inevitability to this sort of twenty-first century positivism, with its insistence on “passed away” or “passed” in place of the plain truth of “died,” and its implicit refusal to acknowledge the reality of grief, of loss, of death itself.)

Maureen and I worked out the dates; we must have last seen Vance on Saturday, January 28, the day before he died. He would usually show up at some point on a Saturday morning, his loud “Bam, Ba Ba Bam; Bam Bam” on the door always seeming to belie his seeming frailty. I would usually answer the door, say hi, and ask him how he was doing—though that was generally fairly evident from his appearance. Even at 11am on a Saturday morning, Vance would sometimes be swaying a little and slurring a little; occasionally he would be swaying and slurring a great deal, but more often than not, particularly in his last few years, he was comparatively sober when he called. The last few years too, he usually bore no signs of having been in a scrap; when he had started calling round—perhaps in 2014 or 2015—it wasn’t uncommon for him to look a bit beaten up, and to say, laconically, “yeah, I got into a bit of a fight the other night.”

Other things changed as well. At first Vance had come round with a small shopping cart, and showed obvious pleasure if we had a large bag of empties for him. But then he broke his hip. After that he could only get about shuffling quite slowly, with the help of a walker; the most he could manage at any one time was a pretty small bag of empties, tied to one of the handles. (If there were a larger bag, we’d leave it at the side of the house; “I’ll come back later,” he would assure us, and he always did, though it sometimes took a few days. The odd time he would enlist the help of a relative who would bring him round in her car to pick up the empties; she never looked too happy about that arrangement.)

His spirits held up remarkably well despite everything; his smile was almost always lopsided but genuinely warm. If it was me answering the door he would always say “How’s Maureen?” or, more frequently, “How’s the missus?” I would tell him, and often Maureen would join us and she and Vance would chat for a short time about the weather or about life in general while I fetched the empties. I would always fetch a bit of cash as well—"a small thank you,” I would call it as I pressed it into his hand, assuring him that he was doing us a favor by taking away the cans and bottles—as he truly was.

As time went by and Vance’s condition was obviously deteriorating, the small thank-yous became a little larger; instead of a couple of dollars or a five-dollar bill it would be a ten, or, for the last couple of years, a twenty. (That was no big deal; as things appeared to have gotten steadily tougher for Vance financially, they had gotten slowly but steadily better for Maureen and me.)

Vance never said thank you for the “small thank-yous”—not directly, at least. What he did instead was to begin bringing us gifts. One time he showed up, looking triumphant, with a couple of large ornamental planters, made of some light plastic in an odd shade of faded yellow. “They’re for you and the missus!” He announced with a big smile. And it was with a big smile too that he brought us six months or so ago a set of forty-year-old medical reference books, published I think by Reader’s Digest. One gift I will treasure is a poster mounted on a sturdy wood backing. It’s one of those British Columbia tourist posters with the old slogan “Super. Natural. British Columbia.” But instead of the usual mountains and ocean, the photo on the poster is of faces on a totem pole—faces that look far more realistic than most Pacific Coast totem pole faces, far more human. “I got it from a friend,” Vance reported; “he only wanted twenty bucks for it.” I assured him that we would give it a place of honor on our walls—and we have.

He kept offering to give more. He would often comment on the flowers in front of the house—clearly he liked flowers. And then he would look at the grass and say “I could cut that for you; why don’t I cut your grass for you?” One look at how his frail body tottered was enough to make clear that Vance could never have pushed a lawnmower. But I think he still believed that he could; I don’t believe it was an empty offer.

With his shopping cart or walker festooned with bags of empties, Vance could easily have passed for a homeless person, but he was not homeless. He lived in a small apartment, I believe, though Maureen and I never did find out in what building it was. For a while he had a companion—like my partner, named Maureen, though she kept separate quarters in the same building; “my old lady,” he would call her. But his old lady died a year or so ago; Vance had been alone since then.

Had he ever been married? Did he have children? We never knew. But some months ago we did find out something about his early life. When the horror of Canada’s residential schools had been much in the news for some time, I asked him one Saturday morning if he’d been in one of those schools. His voice dropped and deepened, and his lips tightened. “Oh yeah. We were cold. We were always hungry. I was beaten. We were all beaten. I was raped. The priests…” That was about all he could say.

Though Maureen and I were never on the receiving end of his anger, it was clear that Vance could get into a vicious temper. I remember one day when he stood on the sidewalk, trying to tell me about something he clearly saw as an outrage in the building he lived in. “Those bastards!” he growled, “they won’t keep the stairway clean. It’s filthy!” he spat out the word, and I thought that I wouldn’t want to meet him in that mood on that stairway.

Had he often instigated the fights he sometimes got into? Had his anger led to Vance becoming estranged from some members of his family? (He had an aunt living nearby who he saw frequently and who helped him out, he would tell us, but he also had relatives in Duncan and in Port Alberni, and he didn’t seem to see much of them.) There was a great deal about Vance that we never knew. I had thought I might gradually find out more as our chats became more frequent; as he had become older and frailer, he had started coming round more and more frequently to the houses where he could reliably find empties. Now that won’t happen.

A month ago Maureen and I posted a comment on the funeral home’s site:

We were so very sorry to learn today of Vance's death. For several years now Vance has been dropping by every week or so and helping us out by taking our empties; we have always enjoyed chatting with him. He clearly did not have the easiest life, but he managed to persevere. We will greatly miss his good humor and his generous spirit.

I checked in at the site once more today. It’s the only comment posted. Yet his was a life that had real meaning to it, that had real warmth to it, that even in its odd way had some richness to it. He made something with some richness to it out of very, very little. And, despite everything, he kept real kindness alive in his soul. I will miss his slow shuffle and his smile and his “How’s the missus?” I will miss him.

There’s one other gift I haven’t mentioned—a horseshoe that Vance presented us with about eighteen months ago. It’s a horseshoe for throwing, not for shoeing horses with. But, according to Vance, it will bring good luck if we nail it up above our front door. It’s been sitting on a shelf in the front hall ever since he gave it to us; this weekend Maureen and I are resolved to finally nail it up above our front door. We won’t ever take it down.