The Giller Prize winner will be announced tonight. You can watch the event live on CTV, or tune-in at their website, here at 9pm ET.

For those who missed it here’s the interview I conducted with Jack Rabinovitch last month:

Jack Rabinovitch is a philanthropist best known for founding the annual Scotia Bank Giller Prize (named after his late wife, Doris Giller, a former literary columnist and editor at the Toronto Star)for best Canadian novel. Rabinovitch, a reporter and speechwriter who later turned to business, making his fortune in food retailing and real estate,  was an executive with Trizec Corporation where he helped develop close to six million square feet of hotel, commercial and retail space. He was Maclean’s magazine’s man of the year in 1999 and is a recipient of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario.

This week his membership in the Order of Canada was upgraded to platinum…he is now an Officer of the Order. Part of the citation for this added honour reads:

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Some time back I engaged, here in fact, with Zach Wells over the relative merits of poems by Peter Van Toorn and Thomas Hardy. Here’s Zach:

"I don’t know of anyone who would hold up “The Love-Letters” as an example of Hardy’s finest verse. It’s a weak poem. “The smile of pleasantry” is a lame stretch for an “e” rhyme. “Of what, I did not know” is a stock procrustean device to fill out the stanza. The feminine rhyme of letters and fetters, in back-to-back lines hits with a heavy-handed clang. The poem isn’t without appeal, but if this was the best Hardy could manage, we wouldn’t be reading him anymore today and Larkin certainly wouldn’t have taken such a shine to him. “Neutral Tones”; “The Darkling Thrush”; “Hap”; “Channel Firing”; “In Wind and Rain”–these are poems worth spending some time on."

and part of my response:

"…if we follow the logic of your…argument, then the status of all under-appreciated poems would lie static. Van Toorn, because few have admired his work, would remain buried in the past, instead of alive, thanks in part to your appreciation, in this exchange today."

I drag this up again because just yesterday – between steam and freeze cycles at Le Nordik spa slightly North of Ottawa in Chelsea – I happened upon a review by Lytton Strachey of Thomas Hardy’s poems. ‘The Love-Letters’ isn’t singled out for particular praise, however its characteristic ‘weaknesses’ are I think, beautifully defended. Strachey begins by suggesting that Hardy’s work is especially designed to disprove the theory that harmony of sound, mastery of rhythm, and the exact and exquisite employment of words’ lie at poetry’s soul, and that without them the noblest thoughts and finest feelings will never rise above ‘tolerable verse’.

Strachey follows this with the contention that Hardy’s work is full of poetry, and yet also full of ‘ugly and cumbrous expressions, clumsy metres, and flat, prosaic turns of speech;’ not merely superficial, occasional blemishes these, but rather an essential ingredient. Hardy speaks, says Lytton, he does not sing. He talks in the voice of a ‘modern’ man or woman ‘who finds it difficult…to put into words exactly what is in the mind. He is incorrect; but then how unreal and artificial a thing is correctness! He fumbles; but it is that very fumbling that brings him so near to ourselves.’

Hesitating, drab and clumsy…what a relief such uncertainties and inexpressivenesses are, says Strachey, after the delicate exactitudes of our more polished poets. Their taste, scholarship and art though admirable seem so irremediably remote and cold; ‘while the flat, undistinguished poetry of Mr. Hardy has found out the secret of touching our marrow-bones.’

(In memorium H.R.)
I met him quite by accident

It’s the clumsy, heartbroken, self-effacement that gets me.

Must read more Strachey.

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"To a shape like this, so small yet so comprehensive, so slight yet so lasting, so insignificant yet so venerable, turns the mighty activity of Homer, and so turning, is enabled to live and warm us for ever. To a shape like this turns the placid sage of Academus: to a shape like this the grandeur of Milton, the exuberance of Spenser, the pugent elegance of Pope, and the volitility of Prior. In one small room, like the compressed spirits of Milton, can be gathered together

" The assembled souls of all that men hold wise."

May I hope to become the meanest of these existences? This is a question which every author who is a lover of books asks himself some time in his life; and which must be pardoned, because it cannot be helped. I know not. I cannot exclaim with the poet,

For my mortal days, few and feeble as the rest of them may be, are of consequence to others. But I should like to remain visible in this shape. The little of myself that pleases myself, I could wish to be accounted worth pleasing others. I should like to survive so, were it only for the sake of those who love me in private, knowing as I do what a treasure is the possession of a friend’s mind when he is no more. At all events, nothing while I live and think can deprive me of my value of such treasures. I can help the appreciation of them while I last, and love them till I die; and perhaps, if fortune turns her face once more in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my overbeating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy."

from ‘My Books’, Essays, by Leigh Hunt, published by Walter Scott, edited by Arthur Symons.

Alexander MacLeod was born in Inverness, Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ontario. His award-winning stories have appeared in a variety of leading journals, some have been selected for The Journey Prize Anthology. He holds degrees from the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill. He currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. Light Lifting, his first book, a collection of short stories, has been shortlisted for Canada’s Giller Prize.

We met recently to discuss the work, specifically ‘Miracle Mile’, the collection’s first story. Our conversation touches on technique and themes, the search for significance and meaning, disciplines, how, why and what people care about, and the use of metaphor and pace.

Please listen here (and tune in for the Giller announcement November 9th to see if Alexander wins!)

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Enough said.