My first book, a collection of short stories called Man Descending, appeared in 1982. In the forty years following, I went on to publish novels, short stories, and plays, and to write a television miniseries based on my novel The Englishman’s Boy. Despite always and forever thinking of myself as a writer of fiction, I also wrote occasional nonfiction: book reviews, talks about literature, magazine articles, short vignettes of various descriptions.

Years ago, an early mentor of mine, Morris Wolfe, started Grubstreet Books, a press committed to publishing what Morris loved to write and to read—literary non-fiction. At that time, he asked me if I would consider letting him collect, edit, and publish some of my nonfiction, but I declined his offer. He attempted to change my mind but didn’t succeed; finally, he let the matter drop.

Morris Wolfe was a rare breed that no longer exists, someone who took writing seriously enough to want to write about it, not for his academic colleagues, but “for the ‘intelligent general reader,’ a category that now seems quaint,” as he put it in the early 2000s. This he did superbly in the Globe and Mail as well as in the pages of magazines such as Saturday Night, Books in Canada, and Canadian Forum, once important organs of literary opinion that are now nothing more than fusty memories of a long-ago, once-upon-a-time world.

The literary landscape of Canada is far different terrain today than when Morris Wolfe tried to eke out a living in literary journalism and part-time teaching. When I published my first book, more than a decade after Morris had abandoned university teaching in 1970, the newspapers of every Canadian city with a population of more than a hundred thousand still had a books section; even an unknown writer like me could expect twenty or more reviews of my work to pop up all across the country. Late in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Globe and Mail and the National Post were busy expanding their book coverage and recruiting reviewers. When I received invitations to write reviews from Martin Levin at the Globe and Noah Richler at the Post, I agreed. The pay was negligible, but I believed that a discussion about books was important for readers and, more importantly, for writers.

This country’s print media now shows little if any interest in the literary culture of this country. What passes for reviewing is now shunted off to Amazon.ca and Goodreads, where inanity proliferates. As the always delightfully acerbic Cynthia Ozick remarks, “Amazon encourages naïve and unqualified readers who look for easy prose and uplifting endings to expose their insipidities to a mass audience.”

Gathering together these pieces, it struck me that they bore some resemblance to a spotty, desultory archive of my development as a writer and offered a record of my recurring literary obsessions and foibles. I was also prompted to think that they might give a sense of how the Canadian literary scene has evolved over the past four decades. My generation of English-speaking Canadian writers was preoccupied with defining themselves in opposition to the daunting cultural hegemony of the United States; we were struggling to learn how to write the reality of our country. With the passage of time, that impulse has slowly withered. The old cultural nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s is now regarded with suspicion and distrust by many of a new generation of writers who see it either as just another expression of Canada’s tainted colonial past or as an impediment to international success. Of course, the new is always fated to someday become archaic. We never step in the same literary river twice, for it’s not the same river and we are never the same person.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

All the nonfiction I have ever written was solicited, which doesn’t mean that I ever took on a task that I wasn’t at least mildly interested in. Readers will note that, for the most part, my book reviews were uniformly favourable. This is because I made it a policy never to write about a subject that didn’t at least mildly intrigue me, or about a writer whose work I suspected was unlikely to afford me pleasure or to elicit my admiration. In some instances, aspects of a book I was eager to read disappointed me and, if that happened, I did not hesitate to say so.

Of course, the sort of nonfiction that appears in periodicals or is delivered in talks comes with constraints. Newspapers and magazines impose word counts, and lectures have time limits. Nevertheless, it’s not a bad thing for fiction writers to experience the discipline of boundaries. It helps the writer test the necessity of every word. If an editor asked for fifteen hundred words from me, she never got one word more.

It may have been because I lacked confidence in these pieces that had been written to order, chiefly “because somebody asked me to,” that I dodged Morris Wolfe’s offer to publish them, thinking that writing produced at someone else’s behest was less worthy than writing driven by internal necessity. I feel differently now.

Morris Wolfe died in November of 2021, and when I learned he was gone, I felt a great stab of regret for having turned down his request. Of all the “somebodies who asked me to,” he was the last one I should ever have refused.

Guy Vanderhaeghe is the author of three Governor’s-General Award–winning works of fiction: the collections of short stories, Man Descending and Daddy Lenin, and the novel, The Englishman’s Boy; the 2004 Canada Reads–winning The Last Crossing; and, most recently, August into Winter, among others. He has received the Timothy Findley Prize, the Harbourfront Literary Prize, and the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Prize, all for his body of work.

Excerpted from Because Somebody Asked Me To: Observations on History, Literature, and the Passing Scene by Guy Vanderhaeghe. Copyright © 2024 Guy Vanderhaeghe. Published by Thistledown Press Ltd. Reproduced by arrangements with the Publisher. All rights reserved. Because Somebody Asked Me To: Observations on History, Literature, and the Passing Scene published on Sept. 17.