Brian Fawcett, May 13, 1944 — February 27, 2022 — Reminiscences
Prince George recently suffered the loss of its best-known literary chronicler. Chickenbustales plans to celebrate his life and capture his spirit in a series of reminiscences, articles, and snippets of poetry and prose, material that is both fresh and archival.
We start with reminiscences by Barry McKinnon. Brian left Prince George in 1966, after graduating from Prince George Senior Secondary and working for the BC Forest Service for three years. He left to study literature at Simon Fraser University, and took with him a long-held ambition to be a writer. His family left town permanently, a year later, for Penticton, but Brian continued returning. He discovered that the subject matter for his writing was his home town, and he needed to keep in touch.
In 1969, when he returned, he found that his city had a college, The College of New Caledonia, and that a poet, born the same year as him, was teaching Creative Writing and English there. Barry had published two books of poetry (1967 and 1969), as well as poems in a major Vancouver anthology. Besides teaching, Barry was using his position to build a publishing house and a Canada Council reading series. The two were linked. Barry published broadsides and chapbooks by almost every writer he brought for a reading.
Our first document is part of an unpublished memoir, Chairs in the Time Machine. In it, Barry talks about how he first met Brian.
The Simon Fraser University poets were Robin Blaser and his young followers and students, Brian Fawcett, and Sharon Thesen (newly married and both from Prince George where they grew up). Along with Alban Goulden and others, they edited and printed the punky hard-edged Iron magazine. After Iron, to give a clearer sense of their stance, Fawcett started NMFG (No Money from the Government) which he describes as being “playful and disrespectful”, which also inspired Brett Enemark’s NMBS (No More Bullshit) – as a recalcitrant counter attack to much bad writing of the day. They were, in my view, Prince George toughs in the big city out to cause a literary stir, which they did with great intelligence, seriousness and humour.
The first thing I heard about Brian Fawcett was that he once sat in a back chair at a poetry reading in Vancouver with a big rock in his hand and was poised to throw it on the stage if the reader’s poetry didn’t measure up. That scared me a little, plus the usual Prince George mythology that accompanies anyone who has lived here more than two years: you become logger-tough with a case of beer, and a no b.s. kind of mud-on-your-boots chauvinism that sets you against the cleaner outside world.
Brian left Prince George with rock in hand well before I got here in 1969. But we knew about each other and decided – more so probably on his part than mine – to a territorial stand- off. Initially on my first impressions, I wanted to get to hell out of Prince George fast. I didn’t see or care about the place as “poetic subject matter,” didn’t want to be the chief bull goose loony local poet, whereas he, perhaps, began to sense that Prince George would be the central metaphor and subject for his writing life. His place. This, as we know, has turned out to be the case. I’m thinking of books like, Cottonwood Canyon, Aggressive Transport, the Secret Journal of Alexander McKenzie, My Career with the Leafs, and more recently Virtual Clear-Cut, Local Matters and Human Happiness – prose books (along with John Harris’s short stories) that come closest to defining who we are as a complex community bandied about by complex local and global forces.
He ignored me in the summer of 1971 in Vancouver when we played in the Cosmic Baseball League and attended the writers’ meetings at Stan Persky’s communal house. My diffidence versus his cocky self-confidence either fuelled the standoff, or confused us both so much that we couldn’t speak even if we tried. Probably what we eventually came to know was our common struggle with Prince George, and that its secret and beauty could only yield its clarity by virtue of the intensity of one’s engagement with it. I had to, as it turns out, learn what Brian knew early on: you had to let yourself get kicked around in the raw Prince George social, political and environmental contexts, and then to know these dimensions as the raw source for a poetry and writing that has weight and counts.
In the early 70’s with the help of Gerry Gilbert on the Vancouver end, we organized a writing conference and invited a group of coast writers to Prince George and the college. The list was a reflection the Vancouver writers I most wanted to hear: George Bowering, Gladys Hindemarch, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Kiyooka, and Brian Fawcett (bringing with him a reputation as a tough guy from Prince George, who was also damn smart with a quick tongue that could send those weaker who pissed him off into serious hiding.)
Brian was at the top of the invitation list. I figured if we couldn’t find a place to meet in Vancouver, I’d have to get him here on his home turf. We could drink and arm wrestle and compare our syntax while moonily looking at the cut banks from the trailer park or some other vantage point in the pulpy air of the local geography. As it was, the silence continued, but now at least with less paranoia and suspicion.
Late at night after one of the conference sessions a group of us ended up in a downtown motel in a miasma of beer and after-hours camaraderie. I decided to stay (so did about 10 others) – and at some point in the party I curled up on the floor. Brian had a double bed all to himself – sprawled and sleeping in territorial splendor until I crawled up, cold with crink in neck to steal the bottom edge of the mattress and enough motel quilt to cut the chill. Before sun up I’d pushed him to the floor at least once. Eventually we both found a boundary line – two straight men in a coexistence, a truce that opened the space for a life-long friendship to begin and last over 40 years of talk, discovery, and fun.
During his many visits, we would always, “gumboot the drag” which meant a long stroll up and down 3rd Avenue and George Street where he’d point out the places where he worked and hung out as a teenager, telling stories about the variety of characters and misfits who shaped his upbringing and sensibility. One day we hit a suit sale at Morrison’s Men’s Wear and each bought a cheap gray cotton suit on a clearance rack ($15 comes to mind) – and not exactly a perfect fit. We put them on and continued the walk, looking as Joy put it, like two dimwitted stock boy clerks from Northern Hardware – sleeves too short, tight shoulders, and pants at mid-ankle. We had a laugh and never wore them again. These sale “purchases” became part of our habit when together – including the purchase of a pair of pink women’s clearance shoes we bought from Fichtner’s Footware on George Street. We made Joy put them on for a stroll, who then gave us hell for calling her Minnie Mouse. They were ugly, oversized pumps out of style (thus the clearance table), but a good way, we thought, to get even for the hardware poke and our gray suit embarrassment. Either way, we’d end our days in laughter amidst the serious talks about place, poetry and the tasks of writing. As Brian once put it, poetry is the one place “to let all of the burners go”. Prince George was a good place to dig in and do it.
Our second document tells of how one of Brian’s early stories, from Friends (Georgia Straight Writing Supplement #4, 1971), represented in a locally-published anthology used by Barry in a freshman fiction course, went over with the college, the students, and the town.
A story in the PuIp Mill called “Walking Cunt,” by Brian Fawcett, probably caused the stir. Most students enjoyed this collection because it dealt with situations, places, and experiences that had some direct immediacy for them. The book was interesting to teach because we could tackle this alienating notion that literature and life only happened in Paris or San Francisco etc., but not in Prince George.
Fawcett’s story tells of a middle-class clump of youths in cars, drunk on beer, ceaselessly circling the main downtown streets for that one girl or woman (“walking cunt”) who would “educate” them – a story of sexual disappointment, cruelty, and desperation – really, a moral tale about adolescent male behaviour and sexuality. The principal received complaints about the anthology and asked me in the hall one day if the collection was pornographic. I assured him jokingly that the Canada Council had given us a grant to publish the book and it could therefore not be pornographic! For him, the issue seemed threatening and possibly devastating, given the paradox of a tradition for academic freedom, which Harris and I were exercising, and public pressure that wanted, in this case, a book banned or censored, or at least taken out of the class. The reaction to the word “cunt,” no matter the context, put Harris and me in jeopardy, although no official action was taken. One English teacher insisted that “they” were eventually going to get “us” – and he may have been right. Apropos of that incident, our second anthology, The PuIp Mill (Poetry), published some years later (1980) was kept out of the college bookstore for a week because, as I was warned by a college administrator, the principal didn’t approve of it. The book had to get “special” administrative clearance before my students could buy it.
Barry didn’t just teach Brian’s books to his students, he also tried to explain (and promote) them to the rest of the world —as far as literary periodicals could reach, anyway. The following two book reviews appeared in the British Columbia Library Association Reporter (March 1986): 24 – 25.
Fawcett, Brian. Capital Tales. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984. 204 pp, $8.95 pbk. ISBN 0-888922=221-5. CIP
Fawcett, Brian. The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1985. 206 pp. $8.95 pbk. ISBN 0-88922-227-4. CI
Brian Fawcett is a poet and short story writer who’s been involved in a long and serious study of a particular territory (Prince George / North America) for the past 20 years. He’s a literary surveyor, a persistent lone wolf circling the burning fire — an explorer who looks closely at the world from “odd angles” and perspectives until the complex and haywire truth begins to emerge.
What do we see and what do we learn in these two books? Some of the stories are a kind of unofficial journalism — quick, accurate, “realistic” sketches of northern life and attitudes: Two young men who work part-time in a clothing store casually watch, as entertainment, a drunk get repeatedly beaten and tossed from a bar. Friends and enemies fist-fight to prove macho notions, seemingly necessary rituals for young men who want to survive a raw, tough, and brutal place.
Do we know the northern myths? This is a world of loggers, stripped forests, town administrations that justify any form of industrial work in terms of “progress” (sulphur pollution is “the smell of gold”), the real-estate / chamber-of-commerce cornball boosterism, foreign-owned mills, fly-by-nights and entrepreneurs, drunks, Indians, the 4-wheel-drive moose hunters, and those who are hopelessly boozed-out in trailer parks and shopping malls, etc. These are the common images. This is northern sociology. But these images by themselves are without much meaning or interest. Fawcett’s task as true mythmaker, historian and surveyor is to get us beyond these surfaces and clichés into the heart of darkness, and to put us in touch with “the deepest passions and intelligence of the human species.” He wants us to “learn” this world, and know it as our “true inheritance.” How he does this takes consummate skill, intelligence and imagination.
The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie gives us an imagined history. It is a “secret” journal and the unofficial truth written by an explorer moving dangerously and blindly into new territory, always in anticipation of discovery. The 1793 journal reveals Mackenzie’s sense of “the savagery and vacancy of this land” and his own struggle to defeat the emptiness within himself. He also dreams the future: “Should these wilds be one day civilized it will be by men of will and opportunity to whom all grace and soft arts will be nothing.” These and other prophecies that come in his dreams define an ethos that ruthlessly informs the world that Fawcett, finally, wants to reveal. Big business invades the town. Two guys named Glen Smith (the “invisible invaders” fly into town, blackmail, threaten, and apply their big corporate “methods” to squeeze out the local little guys. What everyone learns is “screw your buddy before he screws you.” This “modern” world becomes an industrial wasteland. “The surplus is gone” in the land of plenty. Those who survive it seem beaten, paranoid and stunned and keep their mouths shut, or make simple homilistic excuses to keep the real truth at bay. Others suicide, or lessen the weight of their own failures at “success” by various illusory means (like heavy drinking with pals from the Modified Golden Rule Club). “Hand Grenade Gary,” the American-hero-hunter, charged with manslaughter after arguing with and blowing up his hunting guides, blows himself up in his camper before the jury’s verdict is given. A young man writes about shooting his brother during a bear hunt. His doctor suggests it would be good therapy to do so. But these characters, whether lost in the woods (or misled in some bizarre way by their own foolish “manly” confidence that usually ends in disaster), never seem to know, in any deep sense, the source of their intense and disturbing alienation. They tell “the stories” as if it’s not really their job to understand them.
On the surface these marvellous tales are “entertaining,” but Fawcett doesn’t want to let his readers slip off the hook, nor does he want to pound them on the head with messages about capitalism, industrialism, ecological stupidity, or about pioneer redneck politicians who could be too easily blamed for mistakes of the past. What finally, then, can the artist say when the field of experience is as complex as Fawcett’s is?
A key to Fawcett’s vision might lie in the stories that move beyond the recognizable “real” surfaces to a recurring fantastic image of a cottage / castle with herds of tame deer, formal gardens, and flamingos — a landscape out of time, out of kilter, out of place. It is a “paradise” on an island in the McGregor River that mysteriously exists and then as mysteriously disappears in the mist — a Garden of Eden that creates a puzzling and unfathomable dimension for those characters who experience it. Mackenzie tries to write about it on June 18, 1763. “I do not know the purpose of the island, nor how it [the cottage / castle] came to be built upon this wilderness I thought myself the first man of European origins to invade . . . .” The narrator’s footnote unconvincingly explains that the physical trauma of Mackenzie’s near drowning “has produced a series of visual and intellectual hallucinations,” and that he is a temporary victim of an “altered state of consciousness.” August Jenson, a surveyor, comes across the same place in 1932, and tells his “secret” 50 years later: “I had blundered into paradise, into what seemed the Garden of Eden itself.” This paradise / garden motif is repeated again in “The Castle,” a story about Ozzy Schultz, a hard-nosed self-made cat-skinner millionaire. When he returns to this “paradise” a second time, it is gone. He garishly attempts to recreate an artificial version (plastic trees, moss, deer, beaver, and seven hundred plastic flamingos, etc.) — but the results are an insane parody of human imagination and possibility.
What is this world, what is real, and where lies the truth? In the last story “My Friends are Gone,” Don Benson makes his retreat from a corrupt and violent human universe to live in a cave with the bears. He is a kind of self-expelled oddball who glimpsed some of the truth. At night, in the cave, he hears another creature singing. The singing becomes a howl and then a moan. Don Benson knows that the bears will hunt this creature down. And while Benson’s fate is not as clear, Fawcett might be asking us to make a guess.
