Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA Toronto Public Library

There is a predictable story arc that occurs after an author dies young: their work, their reputation gets renewed, debates rage about the legacy that this tragic figure will leave behind. Think of David Foster Wallace, for example. Love his work or hate it, his massive tomes are still written about, debated, dialogued upon as if we can gain insight into who he was and find portents in his words of his tragic fate to come.

But for writers who have long and consistently productive literary output, authors who die wizened and aged, that story often unfolds in quite a different way vis à vis that authors’ reputation: they often fall off the radar altogether. Their works sit unread on shelves; they go out of print. They are passé. Who reads Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) these days or Derek Walcott (1930-2017)? VS Naipaul (1932-2018)? Carol Shields (1935-2003)? There are exceptions: writers who have a strong following in academia are often exempt from this generality as are authors whose work seems prescient (though it’s usually simply coincidental). And, significantly, it’s often not a permanent condition - inevitably someone in the future will “rediscover” the oeuvre and a whole new generation of readers will discover it. Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is gaining new readers and new critical attention and many of her novels an entire new line of handsome editions by Penguin Random House.

Writers like Umberto Eco seem to be included in the list of exceptions. Four years after his death at 84, there is still a plethora of attention paid to his work in both scholarly and popular media. A recent remake of his 1983 novel, The Name of the Rose (from which this recording is taken), was made into a six-part miniseries starring John Turturro, and was both a commercial and critical hit in Italy and abroad. Partly this is due to the sheer talent that Eco had in being both a serious scholar of semiotics but also a commercial success, a combination that is quite rare. Eco’s vaguely roguish and impish personality certainly helped, a personality that comes out in this reading recorded in Toronto nearly 40 years ago. He was one of those writers who was able to bridge popular culture and the ivy-entwined seriousness of academia without one side of his career detracting from the other. Another part of it seems that Eco simply didn’t take himself too seriously, and that’s a recipe for success and longevity in just about any field.

This audio recording of Umberto Eco, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in
1983, is used with the kind permission of La nave di Teseo and the Estate of Umberto Eco. It’s also used with the permission of Toronto International Festival of Authors which runs this year from Oct 22 to Nov 1. Check the full festival schedule out at festivalofauthors.ca.

Austin Clarke was a writer who was long fascinated by how we are both nurtured by and damaged by the communities that surround us - and most particularly how Caribbean and West Indian communities in mid-20th century Toronto both nurtured and damaged young Black men.

In this reading, recorded on stage at the Harbourfront Reading Series in 1991, Clarke reads the final story from his collection, In This City, which presents the lives of Torontonians as they love, fight, explore, fear, intimidate, feel dispossessed, disobey and search for unpredictable moments of grace both within the confines of their communities but also in the cold and sometimes violent communities that lay beyond walls. The title of this story references a well-known Negro Spiritual, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, which laments the pain of life from a point of view (the slave) that was almost unheard of in the dominant culture which inspired it. The song later became significant as one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most moving anthems. Clarke’s retelling slyly reverses the roles and instead of a motherless child, a mother laments the loss of her son. And it can’t be ignored here that so many times when we see the way the poor are forced to interact with brutal figures of authority, violence is the response. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The audio for this episode is from In This City by Austin Clarke. Copyright © 1991 by Austin Clarke. Used with the permission of the Estate of Austin Clarke. It is also used with the permission of the Toronto International Writers Festival.

It’s easy to forget when one sees how ubiquitous the “author reading” has become that there was a time when this custom was practically unheard of. Writers are, after all, often introverted, timid - even misanthropic - and generally tasked with sitting alone in a room, mired in their own thoughts and pulling words out of thin air which they clack down onto screens and then woops no that won’t do...erase that erase erase. Do it again.

Writers, at least in our often romantic notion of them, are watchers, not do-ers. They linger in the backgrounds and take notes. They brood.

Maybe, though, this very notion is one that is fast becoming anachronistic. For in today’s market-driven go-go-go warp speed world, authors are expected to write a book a year, Tweet witty quips regularly to their tens of thousands of followers, snap brilliant Instagram pics with their lattes and labradors, do the talk show circuit, serve on prize juries, write newspaper columns (“The Death of the Novel”), fly on planes from festival to library to festival and perform their own work on stages to thunderous applause, sign books for hours, listen patiently as readers gush, talk with authority on TV or a podcast episode about the state of this or that or the other- and then innovate, advocate, pontificate. It’s a wonder writers write at all.

This long and windy diatribe to simply point out one brief and lovely moment when Doris Lessing announces from the stage that this reading, this moment from a Harbourfront event in Toronto in 1984, is her first reading. Ever. And when you, the listener, realize that Doris Lessing, though far from being at the end of her career (she was already in her mid-60s by this point), for just a moment you get a glimpse into that other former world of the writer as loner, as someone charged with quietly finding the words and writing them out, not broadcasting them to the world. There is a sweetness to imagining her there on that stage, wondering how she got there, blinking into the lights, dry-throated, looking out into that room of eager faces waiting for her to speak, to be more than a mere writer.

And it’s that world, that old world where writers wrote quietly in rooms (and drank and scrapped and raged - some things never change) and you can hear hints of that old world in her voice when she reads these two beautiful stories about young girls on the cusp of adulthood. That’s the Doris Lessing we hear as we “look” into that world from before, a world she is about to leave behind, stepping up to that microphone for the first time, clearing her throat and letting go of the past.

***

This audio recording of Doris Lessing, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1984, is used with the kind permission of The Doris Lessing Literary Will Trust as well as the Toronto International Festival of Authors. And, as always, thanks to TIFA, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, for allowing us access to their archives. Find out more at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.

Recorded live on stage in Toronto in 1988, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano - a wholly unique writer that could only have come out of leftist Latin America in the middle part of the 20th century - shows us in this reading from his trilogy, Memory of Fire, snippets of the lives that he spent his entire career spotlighting.

Whether he’s showing us stories of the lives of the poor, the downtrodden, the uneducated, mestizos, the descendant of slaves or slaves themselves, Galeano showed how the “big men of history” made their names and carved out countries from the green verdant jungles of the Amazon but always on the backs of others and with consequences that are still present to this day.

The audio recording of Eduardo Galeano, recorded on stage at the Harbourfront Reading Series in 1988, is used with the permission of the Estate of Eduardo Galeano c/o Dr. Eduardo de Freitas and Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York City and Lamy, NM. All rights reserved. The recording is also used by permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more at festivalofauthors.ca.

Salman Rushdie tells a story about a reading he was asked to do for a UK book festival early in his career. On the ticket with Rushdie was another young British writer, Angela Carter who, when taking the stage, looked out into a sparsely attended event and spontaneously invited the entire group of attendees to continue the event across the road at the Pub. That sense of Carter -- inventive, flexible but ever practical -- comes out in this reading, recorded in Toronto in 1986, and demonstrates her powerful voice, complex use of language, and her unique humour and creativity. Her early death at age 51 was a major loss for English-language writing.

The audio recording used in this episode from Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter is published by Chatto & Windus, 1984. Copyright © The Estate of Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of the Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Additionally, the audio is used with permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors.

Recorded at Toronto’s Harbourfront Reading Series in 1979, Argentine author, Luisa Valenzuela recruits Founding Artistic Director of the Harbourfront Reading Series, Greg Gatenby, to be her reading partner in a complex story of two cars as they race through the streets of Buenos Aires. In a style that is like no other writer of her generation or since, Valenzuela portrays the cold determination of the hunter and the rising fear of the hunted.

Written at the height of the Dirty War, Valenzuela herself was exiled for a number of years though she made the politics and censorship of her country a central theme in much of her writing from this era. Later in this episode, Valenzuela reads a darkly humorous story about the plethora of shoes which are found on the streets, so many that even beggars of the city are “The Best Shod” destitute people in the world. The secret is simple if horrific: they are the shoes of the Disappeared.

This recording was used with the kind permission of the author. This episode content was also made with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA).