EJ: Following up on all the talk about your connection to Europe: how do see your interests and influences fitting into Canadian poetry? Are you a Europhile Canadian?

DC: ‘Europhile’ sounds a bit tidy, though there’s no question I read more European writers than Canadian, ratio a lot to one. I’m pretty sure many Canadian writers do the same. I read The Guardian every Saturday and have more pleasure and lasting worth from one of those than from a month of anything close to home. I’ve never traveled to or in any continent other than Europe, which I’m sure is my loss but I can live with it. On the slightly-other hand, I’ve never wished to have been born anywhere but Woodstock, Ontario, to have had parents other than the two remarkable ones I had, or to have had teachers, at the college level, other than Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan in Toronto, both of whom I had lots of hours with and never found their equal in, say, Cambridge. Nobody even close.

With regard to your first question up there, one kind of answer might be that I’ve directed many, many creative-writing groups at York University and in assorted other places and colleges and high schools, and given readings in almost every province of my country; and I did those six-week sessions at Banff for those ten years, meeting many youngish Canadian writers and working with them on their poetry and once in a while on their prose, and enjoying almost every minute of all of those times. And I suppose ‘interests and influences’ might be involved here. This may not be a subtle response, on the other hand perhaps it at least shows a degree of modesty, and about time, too.

EJ: Throughout A Dropped Glove…, you also write of likeable, honourable men: Orwell, Chekov, Kafka, your father. Why is this so important?

DC: I don’t know that I have much more to say about this except that among the writers you list, all are exceptional in their art or sullen craft as well as likeable and honourable men. I’d put Samuel Beckett at or near the top of any such group, by the way – never mind Godot, if you read his letters, written in his twenties when he is for the first time travelling about the continent (of Europe!) and is commenting on the paintings, the galleries he’s been visiting, you’re bound to be moved by this very young man’s sophisticated judgments, the unself-conconscious daring of these, and ‘likeable’ and ‘honourable’, both those, suggest themselves to me all the way through. There are also, or there were, as of course you know, gifted writers of another persuasion, writers who exploited or betrayed anyone who strayed near them: Canetti for one, and there are more but passons; and then there are people like Proust and Rilke, who were, both of them, as close to genius as any except the above-hymned Tolstoy and Shakespeare, but neither of whom I’d much want to buddy-up with. Otherwise, and in general, my reasons for caring about ‘honourable’ men are without originality: one learns, I think, to care more about a word like this as one lives longer and learns how rarely it’s justified. Maybe I’m simply admiring my betters in both their art and their lives.

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