The Porcupine's Quill

‘Written over four decades, Pittsburgh Stories, is the second in a projected four-volume set of Clark Blaise’s selected short stories. Set largely during the forties and fifties, these nine stories, with one exception, are reminiscences about a distant Pittsburgh adolescence. The previous and inaugural collection in the series, Southern Stories, was also unified by one locale.

‘Blaise’s prowess as a writer is evident from the outset. The opening story, ‘‘The Birth of the Blues,’’ written in 1983, is clearly the work of a skilful, deft craftsman. A well-honed tale, it impresses with its subtlety and detail. The protagonist, young Frank Keeler, witnesses his father’s humiliation before a woman who has hired him to fix her pipes. Standing before the two Keelers in her bathrobe, she reprimands Frank’s father and summarily dismisses him. In so doing, she sets both father and son alight with desire, ‘‘becoming for Keeler, the prototype of all beautiful women. For his father, the most perfect bitch.’’ ’

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‘Blaise has the writer’s gift of recalling childhood textures in cinematic detail.’

—Ray Conlogue, The Globe and Mail

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‘These stories are polished and raw at the same time.’

—Joel Janofsky, Montreal Gazette

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‘The pieces collected ... display the sure hand of a skilled writer. And though Blaise is unflinching is his portrayal of the poverty and backwardness of the post-war American South, a muted sense of wonder leads the reader over some very rough terrain.’

—James Grainger, Quill & Quire

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‘More often than not, Blaise meets the high standard he has set for himself. In story after story, he deftly blends musings and incidents, subjecting all to searing analysis that never lapses into pat explanations. He’s one of those ‘‘genuine artists’’ Chekhov celebrated in yet another letter to Suvorin, the ones who know full well you’d best keep your eyes wide open.’

—Kathleen Snodgrass, The Georgia Review

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‘Those who have read Blaise will likely be familiar with his non-fiction bestseller Time Lord, not the four volumes of his Collected Stories that have sold somewhere in the low hundreds. Though he became a member of the Order of Canada in 2009, Blaise has never won a GG. And yet his body of work -- and one can speak of it as a coherent body -- is an entertaining and profound monument to the craft of the short story.’

—Alex Good & Steven W. Beattie, The Afterword

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‘These stories imply that we are all outsiders, displaced persons. According to Pittsburgh Stories, there is no simple reason for this, given the vagaries of the individual, but Blaise seems to suggest that this displacement may stem in part from the endless quest for the American dream, the need to pursue, to physically move, and in the process to lose community and identity.’

—Barbara Sibbald, Canadian Literature

Introduction or preface

The narrator of Clark Blaise’s story ‘Identity’ describes a life ‘of sharp and inexplicable and unmendable breaks’, a life ‘without completion’ and, in that sense at least, much like the lives of the other protagonists in Blaise’s Pittsburgh Stories. These are, for the most part, coming-of-age stories in which no one quite develops or advances in the accredited way, stories permeated by an air of obstruction and regret. Everywhere the will to explain and understand is confronted by the sheer, recalcitrant, unlovely obstinacy of the world. Even the familiar assumes, in Blaise’s stories, the status of the ‘off plumb’, the ‘slightly skewed’. Reality itself, for Blaise’s characters, is more than a little problematic, so that ‘concept’ and ‘theory’ and ‘myth’, however vague or unreliable, are inevitably invoked as alternative, if hopelessly inadequate, ways to think about the truth, ever seductive, ever out of reach. Even place is problematic in Blaise’s work, ‘Pittsburgh’ being at once a set of physical coordinates and a state of mind prompting characters to dream of an impossible, lost, beckoning someplace else. Often the other place is a Europe remembered or read about, but it is just as likely to be an even more remote someplace -- ‘anything that spoke of vast distance and remote time. Realities other than the South Side of Pittsburgh,’ says the character in ‘Sitting Shivah with Cousin Benny’, ‘earned my traitor’s allegiance.’ All the same, Blaise’s Pittsburgh is not entirely without its charms. Occasionally there is nostalgia for the ‘real’ Pittsburgh where the working-class or defeated Blaise protagonists cannot afford to live, the ‘East End’ Pittsburgh of the genteel Carnegie Museum where on weekends a boy ‘sketched the animals and skeletons, then walked across the parking lot to Forbes Field to take advantage of free admission to Pirates’ games after the seventh inning.’ There are, in addition, nostalgias associated with the Pittsburgh of Willa Cather, Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, a mythic city where conversation bristles with ideas and the provincial has been permanently banished. But that Pittsburgh is rarely accessible to the hungry imagination of Blaise’s youthful protagonists, and the longing for yet more remote, alien worlds is never far from the surface even in the more optimistic stories. It is tempting, of course, to account for the inexorable attraction to otherness by citing the facts of Blaise’s peripatetic, cross-border, U.S.-Canadian life. This is a man, after all, who has been identified with several locales, who entitled one of his mixed-genre, semi-autobiographical books Resident Alien, who has seemed, in the words of Fenton Johnson, always ‘of and apart from the country of which he writes.’ And yet the resort to biography, to Blaise’s wanderlust and mixed Canadian-American identity, here seems just a little too easy. Blaise, after all, has been deeply invested in the places he writes about. It is not as if he offers to us in his stories mere tourist inventories of the American South, or Montreal, or Pittsburgh. In stories like ‘Dunkelblau’ we can see the numbers on the Pittsburgh trolleys, smell the ‘acrid fumes’, hear ‘the coughs and page-shufflings of the white-haired men and women’ in the public library, with its ‘six-storey ceiling’ and ‘polished wood’. The men coming home from work in Blaise’s stories of the forties and fifties are ‘sooty, sweating’, the buildings ‘smoke-blackened’. On clear days, ‘a rarity in Pittsburgh in those years, you can see through the blackened branches to the top of the Gulf Building.’ A woman keeping house finds that, because of the pervasive soot, she has to launder the white curtains every week. Nor is the detail merely a matter of local colour. Blaise’s characters move through Pittsburgh and its environs alert to its class conflicts and its baulked ambitions, its ‘Hunkie and Polack origins’, its gilded age and its status as ‘the dirtiest city in America, with the ugliest history’. The desire to escape or at least to dream of escape is matched in intensity by a compensatory sense of reality, of a place with palpable claims on one’s imagination, if not on one’s loyalty. The Jewish names on the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 1950s roster, intoned one after the other in ‘Sitting Shivah with Cousin Benny’, constitute an inescapable token of intimacy, involvement. ‘They were ‘‘our boys’’,’ the narrator concedes, though he is not a Jew, and he understands entirely when his Jewish uncle asks, ‘What are we running, a schlimazel farm? Too many of our boys on the field, not enough in the front office.’ The world of this boy’s childhood is not alien, not at all what some have described as an outsider’s ‘placeless place’ in a ‘timeless time’. No doubt there are mysteries and gaps in Blaise’s several worlds, missing facts that make his Prairie towns, or his Southland, or his Pittsburgh sometimes seem a mere way station on a journey to a world elsewhere or an allegorical condition to which meanings may be cautiously affixed. Blaise’s Pittsburgh, circa 1952, or 1960, can seem almost too real, too mundane, too entirely irredeemable, so that it exists for us principally as that which had simply to be left behind, grown out of, if any human progress was to be accomplished. For one adult character, Pittsburgh is the not-Germany, the place where the ‘English equivalents’ of German words or names will never be ‘satisfactory’. For another character, stories of Europe, even of a Europe ravaged by war and human disaster, are always ‘more attractive than anything I knew in Pittsburgh’, where the best you can do is survey the damage and think about the blandness of the standard domestic routine. For such characters, what is missing in their present, fallen world may well be unnameable, but it darkens their sense of possibility and inspires in them a tendency to look for portents, to read everything as if it were a sign of something else. Characters for whom the present landscape is never enough are in Blaise preternaturally hungry for meaning, though they mistrust even their own domestic tales and rarely forgive themselves their own lapses in ‘perception’, their inability to come up with impeccably convincing, perfectly coherent narratives. If Europe is the name of their desire, or Mozart, or art, they know all the same that they belong to the makeshift and provisional, the forever diminished and diminishing Pittsburgh, or Dakota, or Moscow ‘of dreadful Nyet’, that for them Europe can never be more than the polish, the poise, the confidence that is not. One feels in all of this no trace of a merely theoretical anguish, no deliberately portentous assembling of darkly telling anecdotes to confirm the resolutely downward drift of a settled disposition. Blaise’s facts and metaphors proliferate like washes of colour saturating a canvas that has been primed to absorb them, but much of the colour is significant for the mood it imparts rather than for any point it may be said to underline. Just so, the images in Blaise often carry a powerful charge, but they are, with rare exception, ‘passing, irretrievable’, as one character registers them. Even where the smell of apocalypse is in the air, the imagery mostly bespeaks a gradual decline, what is once called an ‘implicit savagery’ or, elsewhere, a ‘long disenchantment’. There are no grand disclosures in Blaise, though there are small shocks, and the language, for all its occasional bluntness and its resistance to languor or meander, gathers its effects patiently, with a special feeling for the lures and deceptions that make any prospect of disclosure seem both appealing and improbable. If ‘Identity’ is the most powerful story in a volume of unfailingly nervy fictions, its power has much to do with the multiple betrayals that give the story its shape and its motive. Identity itself, in this story, as in others by Blaise, is a species of betrayal, an insidious fiction governed by the specious idea that one may realistically aspire to wholeness even as one may reasonably believe ‘you can be anything you want to be.’ The boy in Blaise’s story is ever in pursuit of what and why and who. Though he observes and reflects, he remains uncertain about everything. Even his love for his father, never in doubt, is compromised, threatened, by his inability to know precisely what kind of man his father is. ‘He’d been married twice before, so far as I knew,’ the boy says, ‘and I’d found that out only when I overheard it. It didn’t seem safe to ask if he had other children.’ Why didn’t it ‘seem safe to ask?’ Presumably because the answer to such a question would itself be unreliable, and might therefore open up additional questions, similarly provocative and disturbing. No doubt the inability to know with anything like confidence is related, in Blaise’s story, to the hunger for comforting fictions that might correct the pervasive sense of betrayal or misgiving. But the comforting fictions in ‘Identity’ do not soothe. The desire to be ‘normal’, to grow up without dark misgiving, is routinely confronted by the disorderly procession of intimations that say, unmistakably, no, not simple, not soothing, not ever clear. For all the gathering force of inevitability in ‘Identity’, for all the accumulating evidence to suggest that identity itself will remain for Blaise’s central character unknowable, there is a good deal of comic surprise and inflection. Though the transparently fragile, obviously constructed ‘sheltering memories of childhood’ are relentlessly dismantled in the story, the boy seems often amused even by the more lurid aspects of the painful process. ‘There wasn’t a time I visited,’ he tells us of his frequent forays to a friend’s apartment, ‘when his mother [‘something lurid’, ‘her habits and language loose and leering’, ‘her entire stock of lingerie and negligees ... usually on display’] was up and moving that I didn’t come out of that apartment with something shocking to me, some hunk of flesh observed or knowledge that would stimulate me like some laboratory rat in an uncontrolled experiment.’ The awfulness of the household he visits and the boy’s distress at his raw susceptibility to shock and stimulation are here evoked with a mixture of clear-eyed wonder and an emotion bordering on disinterested gratitude. ‘She had nothing of the mother in her,’ the boy observes, clearly in a position to contrast the behaviour of his friend’s mother with the more obviously maternal features of his own, and therefore able to understand something essential he wishes to hold on to. ‘To have been the son of such a woman, to have absorbed the full blast without any shield,’ he later reflects, again with the relative security of another ‘son’ who has had many a ‘blast’ to absorb, but more than one kind of shield to protect him. Not to know things is hard, Blaise suggests, but distress, exasperation, disappointment are somehow bearable when there is some foundation of affection, some normative ideal of decent conduct available to shield one from the full force of the inevitable betrayals and indecencies. This foundation, the more or less secure presence of a modest, normative ideal, saves Blaise’s story from what might otherwise be a fatal tendency to pathos and self-pity. Yes, the boy tells us, everything has its consequences. Awfulness takes its toll. The hunks of unassimilable flesh must eventually, rapidly produce a nervous susceptibility to sexual excitement, even a readiness to regard one’s own mother as a sexual being, alluring and forbidden. But such intimations are represented as manageable, though they are never quite mastered or discarded. In this way we understand every aspect of the boy’s unhappiness and vulnerability, which he negotiates not with conventional coping mechanisms but with an inchoate instinct for balance, proportion, irony. He may feel, much of the time, helpless, a subject in someone else’s experiment, but he is alert to moments of reprieve. Like other Blaise protagonists, his tendency to melancholia, his attunement to defeat, is offset by an acute sense that there must be more to life than melancholy and disappointment. His suffering, like his gift for irony and proportion, is more a mood than a system. To be sure, grimness often overwhelms irony in Blaise’s fiction. ‘‘People wonder,’ the epileptic boy in ‘Identity’ says, ‘what it’s like to die, and since I’ve done it several hundred little-bad times and a few great compulsive big-bad times, and have died in other ways, too,’ he can tell us precisely what it’s like. But there is no bravado in the recitation of ‘death’ and survival and no restriction of the petit-mal and grand-mal ‘dying’ to the physical aspects of seizure and fit. Neither is there a deliberately worked-up anguish or melodramatic avidity. In spite of the extremity of the controlling idiom -- ‘Dying is like this’ -- the narrative generates a sense of the absurd and improbable. The orchestrated juxtapositions are at once compelling and playful, so that the terrible (‘Something terrible is happening’) is registered along with the bewilderingly delicious (‘Christ, my mother is a sexy woman’). There are, to be sure, on all sides, tokens of loss and confusion, but we do not doubt that, for all of the developmental damage, there will be a marginally viable future for the boy who determines to tell us of his dying. The name of this assurance is not, decidedly not, optimism, but it is, surely, a function of his demonstrated detachment -- call it partial, call it literary, call it emotional -- from the pain and disorientation he wishes us to share, to savour. The works in Pittsburgh Stories were written over the better part of four decades, and published originally in various books and magazines. They are, in important respects, miscellaneous, for all of their common tendency to mix memory and desire, to track the contradictory patterns of tenderness and betrayal in human lives. One feels in them, albeit in varying degrees, a continuous agitation of surface and sympathy. Nothing, it seems, is ever resolved for good and all in these works. For all of their obsession with varieties of blindness and defeat, they do not quite capitulate to nihilism. Characters may surrender to ‘the whole sad business’, may suppose every avenue of escape closed to them, may doubt their own capacity for renewal. But they are, in their several ways, oddly resilient. Confronted with sure tokens of decline or tawdriness, the Blaise protagonists are never less than incredulous, determined to look further, to wonder, to discover in themselves strange liberties of expression and sentiment. Blaise’s feeling for the unaccountable is bracing and vivid, and has nothing to do with the easy mysticism or occultism that provides for many writers of lesser scruple a relief from the problems generated by their own fictions. The Pittsburgh Stories, for all of their thoughtfulness about the vicissitudes of identity and the sheer difficulty of knowing, never reach for ostensibly definitive resolutions. Resistant to the joyless as also to the lugubrious and earnest, they are brisk, elegant, intensely human. One hears in them what Thomas Mann called ‘the teasing melancholy of the not-yet’.

-- Robert Boyers