Seeing is Believing: the Alex Colville Retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Decades ago, when I first began teaching at Sheridan College in suburban Toronto, a publisher’s representative meandered through the warren of desks which housed Sheridan’s liberal arts faculty. The publisher’s rep was searching for contributors to a college level sociology textbook under development by Collier Macmillan. I was a recent arrival to Canada at the time, an immigrant teaching courses on Canadian immigration and learning the hard way about black ice on Highway 401. Without much forethought, I agreed to write the textbook chapter on “minorities” with an expanded focus on ethnicity, race, gender and class in the Canadian context. “Sure,” I said to him. “Why not?”

Introductory Sociology. Canadian Perspectives was published in 1982, including my chapter, duly acknowledged, on “Minorities and Race Relations.” I have no idea if the textbook was widely adopted in college sociology courses or not. (For some reason, I didn’t use it in my courses.) And once I received my complimentary copy of the book, I don’t recall hearing from Collier Macmillan again. What remains salient for me, however, is not the content of the book or the size of its readership, but rather the soft cover of Introductory Sociology. It features a woman on a ferry, her eyes hidden behind binoculars. She directs the binoculars directly at us, the viewers, while she herself obscures the man sitting behind her.

I didn’t know then that the soft cover of this particular sociology textbook was a detail from Alex Colville’s celebrated painting, To Prince Edward Island (1965), in the National Gallery of Canada. I’m ashamed to admit that I likely didn’t know where Prince Edward Island was in 1982, though I do now. But perhaps the specifics of place don’t matter in a painting as placeless as Colville’s To Prince Edward Island. The painting is more about the act of seeing, imbued with a feeling of curiosity and mystery. It was the perfect choice for a sociology textbook.

When I recently viewed To Prince Edward Island in a retrospective of Colville’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I was struck by the sociological sensibility that runs through many of Colville’s paintings. Any number of his canvasses could serve as the jacket cover for an introductory book on sociology. Woman at Clothesline (1956-1957) features a female figure holding a laundry basket as she steps over dead leaves. The painting captures a transitional moment in the domestic lives of women. Colville’s Pacific (1967) features a man whose head is cropped off gazing out to sea in the background. A pistol lies on a barren table in the foreground. The painting evokes a sense of impending violence. Danger lurks close by. Not surprisingly, Pacific is currently the most requested reproduction of Colville’s work. Likewise, Family and Rainstorm (1955) has dark and foreboding undertones of psychic disturbance threatening the family. All three paintings focus on subjects which have long been the domain of sociological investigation: gender, violence and family.

Colville consciously made art that portrayed contemporary society. Writing to a critic, he once noted: “I think you seem to have expressed my concern for the actual. Also the almost sociological concern with what life is like now.” No aspect of everyday living seemed too mundane for his canvasses. He painted ordinary moments in such works as Woman in Bathtub (1973), Refrigerator (1977), Kiss with Honda (1989) and Living Room (2000). Colville would no doubt have agreed with the sociologist Peter L. Berger who wrote: “Everything that human beings do, no matter how commonplace, can become significant for sociological research.” Colville might simply have added ditto for art.

Did the seemingly mundane figures and events of everyday life that Colville painted become archetypes of the modern condition, as some reviewers of the AGO retrospective claim? I’m not sure. But I do think that Colville, the artist, and Berger, the sociologist, share a primary wisdom: Things are not necessarily what they appear to be. Social reality, it turns out, has many layers of meaning. The discovery of each new layer seems to change our perception of the whole.

Colville’s work, of course, diverges from that of the sociologist in significant ways. Suffice it to say, Colville didn’t need to undertake an ethics review before he began to research and paint human subjects. His most intimate paintings depict his wife Rhoda, dressed and undressed — with her fully informed consent.

So that’s Rhoda behind the binoculars on the cover of Introductory Sociology. Canadian Perspectives.

Who doesn’t revere the fiction of David Mitchell?  His linguistic exuberance, deft juggling of multiple stories (six interlocking tales in Cloud Atlas) and the originality of the worlds he invents cannot fail to astonish readers, as if we are being rocked out of some formula fiction stupor. In an interview with Mitchell in The Paris Review, his work was described as “ambitious, formally complex, imaginatively powerful, and immaculately written.” The interviewer noted that Mitchell’s novels “zigzag across the globe, across centuries, skipping from genre to genre with a restless, openhearted intelligence.” Accolades for the fiction of this British born author abound. Just recently his latest novel, The Bone Clocks, was reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. The reviewer called Mitchell a novelist “who’s always close to the soil and orbiting the heavens in the same breath.”

All true. But that’s not why I revere David Mitchell.

My high regard for him rests on one of his less experimental novels, Black Swan Green, published in 2006. It’s a coming of age story that is written in the single narrative voice of a thirteen year old boy, Jason Taylor. “Old school,” Mitchell calls the book. He wanted to see if he could write a compelling novel about an outwardly unremarkable boy, who, as it happens, is a thinly disguised stand-in for the author. But neither Jason Taylor nor David Mitchell himself can pass for ordinary, not by the farthest stretch of the imagination. For starters, both have a verbal disfluency. They stammer.

In Black Swan Green, Mitchell gives voice to the stammering boy he once was. As Jason Taylor explains in the novel, a stammer is “where you get stuck straight after the first bit of the word.” The words causing him the most grief — the words he is desperate to avoid — begin with N and S. Consequently, a whole lot of words are off-limits when he speaks, given that the S section of any dictionary is the thickest. “I can feel the stuff I don’t say rotting inside me like mildew spuds in a sack,” Taylor says, retreating into near silence. Out of necessity, he becomes adept at thinking one sentence ahead, substituting words to outwit his stammer. He even names his stammer Hangman and describes Hangman’s “snaky fingers that sink inside my tongue and squeeze my windpipe so nothing’ll work.”

Jason Taylor is clearly one frustrated kid who feels freakish and alone or as he puts it, “a brick of loneliness is reaching terminal velocity inside me.” It doesn’t take much to imagine that the thirteen year old Mitchell was already showing signs of being a gifted writer. Little wonder that his fictional persona, Jason Taylor, cherishes his Silver Reed manual typewriter more than his other possessions. It enables him to write poems which he submits to the parish magazine under the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar.

Although Black Swan Green will probably not be hailed as one of Mitchell’s greatest works, writing this story —his story — was a personal triumph. In The Paris Review, he comments that for most of his life, the subject of stammering was “a source of paralyzing shame, scrupulously avoided by family and friends.” After writing the second chapter of Black Swan Green focusing exclusively on stammering, Mitchell says he felt liberated, like a gay man must feel when he comes out. He didn’t have to pretend anymore. And in that chapter he confronts the questions that any kid with a disfluency would ask: Is stammering “like zits that you grow out of” or are kids who stammer more like toys that are “wired wrong at the factory and stay busted all their lives?” In the novel, Taylor’s speech therapist provides the answer. She tells him that progress doesn’t come by trying to kill a speech defect, but rather by respecting, not fearing it. “It will flare up from time to time,” she says. “But if you know why it flares, you’ll know how to  douse what makes it flare up.” In becoming a magnificent novelist, David Mitchell found a way to douse the flames of his Hangman by turning the childhood experience of stammering into literature.

I confess. As soon as I finish reading a novel, I have a need — almost a primal urge — to go behind the scenes. Is there a connection between the characters and the author? I have to know. Call it an innate reflex or a carryover from Lit 101. I’m addicted to the story of the story.

But try finding the autobiographical hook in fiction that offers alternate universes in spades and a protagonist whose identity never stops shifting. That was my happy challenge when I came to the end of Life after Life by the English author, Kate Atkinson. The heroine of the novel, Ursula Todd, is continually born, reborn and re-created in a timespan roughly covering World War I and II. In one chapter she moves from London to Germany, marries and has a child with a handsome German. In another scenario, she remains in London, childless, and recovers bodies from war-torn buildings during the Blitz. Elsewhere in the novel, Ursula is raped, becomes pregnant, has an abortion, and then marries a wife abuser. Which, if any, of these tantalizing bits was pulled from the author’s life? Will the real Kate Atkinson please stand up?

Interviews with Atkinson provide a wealth of autobiographical clues. Life after Life was conceived as a big war novel with a particular focus on the London Blitz. The fictional Ursula experiences World War II as a young woman. Atkinson, born in 1951, missed any direct contact with air raids and bomb shelters. However, her grandfather served in World War I and was killed by a stray bullet in World War II. The shadow of war was ever present and not present in her family, she told an interviewer. “It was there, but people didn’t talk about it.” What a perfect set up for a novelist. Enter imagination.

Still, I was curious about the structure of Life after Life with its hairpin turns and endless plot permutations. Why did such a gifted author need so many crafty maneuvers in which she scrambles timelines and rewrites scenes from different perspectives? One reviewer suggested that if Atkinson pushed the parallel lives premise any harder, the whole house of cards would collapse. Atkinson, however, does not shrink from this critique. She describes herself as a tireless explorer of what ifs, bifurcating roads and coincidences. Indeed, she says she is not finished with that construct yet, perhaps a reflection of her own unpredictable rise to literary stardom. Like the career trajectory of many women, Atkinson juggled parenthood and an assortment of jobs, including home aide to the elderly and legal secretary. Only after she failed the oral exam for her doctorate in literature and abandoned academia did she turn to writing fiction. If she had her way, she has said, all her characters would go down multiple paths.

I get that. When I finished reading Life after Life, I wanted to open the bottom drawer of my desk and dust off my unfinished doctoral thesis on the founder of modern economics in Britain. It would make great fantasy fiction.