Rob Allen: An Appreciation

Steve Luxton

Writing about my dear friend Robert Allen so soon after his death has proved difficult. Having put off until later a more thoughtful, thorough piece on his own remarkable writings, I wanted to say what I felt regarding what he deeply felt: in other words, talk about his enthusiasms and passions. These included, of course, literature; talented young women and men; baseball; gambling (no secret that!); the progress of evolutionary biology, North American archeology and historiography; a personal dragnet of our land and bioscape by car, etc. So many! Naturally, I balked at the prospect, though, of course, grief had something to do with it. Should I begin with a memory of two teenagers down a suburban rec-room co-authoring poems and novels together on a sticky Hermes?; with our wrangles over how, though he called Toronto, and then Montreal his homes, he exported all his allegiances to the L.A. Dodgers?; or describe, while he faced personal extinction, his rationalist’s delight (!) at reading Richard Dawkin’s demolition of religious belief in his book The God Delusion? Repeatedly I chewed my lip and screwed my eyes shut at the problem.

It was by doing this that I was rewarded by the following vision. Behind my lids I found myself spirited to a vast, airy plateau. There, turning, I took in the landscape: clustered prairie grasses, a similar midground but lined with wooded belts, and, on the far horizon, indigo foothills backed, hull down, by shining mountains. It was a prospect worthy of memorable journal entries by those great U.S. transcontinental explorers, Lewis and Clark. The only anachronisms were the State Highways, sun-lit, ribboning forth.

My irreplaceable friend was also there, (lover both of those historic journals and those small, endless western highways), perched spellbound as I, and, in turning to take in the grand view, once again pivoting along with me in a rhyming so customary and perfect, I no longer paid much attention to it — that is not until then, in my daydream, and now in these sad afterthoughts in which I fully recall our shared enchantment, our deep-drinking of land’s space.

Because, while also the subject of a dream, this tableau happened: at the end of the work year Rob loved to climb into his van and dust, usually south through New York and Jersey to the Carolina shore, but eventually west to The Great Basin and the Pacific Coast and then east again, roaming across the plains of Alberta, Montana, The Dakotas, etc. “Get out on the highway!” exhorts the classic road song. In his travels, Rob paused to linger on every prominent lookout, explored every parallel route, sidetracked through every small town, ogled every cliff-hung Amerindian village, paced reflectively over every historical site, and impeccably remembered all of them. I know because maybe a half a dozen times I went along. Even though, after a long driving stint, he’d surrendered the wheel to me, I don’t recall him ever dozing, relaxing his attention from wonders streaming by. What was the source of this infinite pleasure? Flight activity? Only in the “on pinions” sense.... Emancipation: my friend found freedom in escaping from the social and cultural claustrophobia through travel’s serial extemporization. Rob liked to be “on the wing.”

To drink space, to use the phrase again.

Which usually, eventually, meant westering-trending along the iconic east-west axis. One especially evocative for a bright working class lad (see Matrix’s cover) brought by his parents from narrow British streets to a continent of reputedly open horizons and opportunity. As his oldest close friend, my own background was similar. Small, iron-fenced parks and smudged yellow brick. Only once in his life: just a couple of years before his own death, to spread the ashes of his father, did Rob go back. When he and I car-
wandered North America, we were like two boys who had slipped through a fence hole from a region of tight closes into some huge, only nominally owned country estate, one almost wild, exhileratingly free....

Rob might hesitate at and even take issue with my interpretation, but I claim the privileges and insights of long friendship and twinned experience....

Of course, particularly in his case, this Old World orientation was recessed and almost forgotten, but as for the feeling and lure of emancipation, it remained, though, in the spirit of another of Rob’s great interests, it had evolved (culturally).

Which is where the artistic sensibility it bred proves even more fascinating. Not only did Rob’s background leave him with a yearning for space — or more accurately for fugitive passages through The Unbounded, it also, with natural consistency, gave him the conviction he should break unnecessary and outmoded rules to live and create how he wished, originally.

Being a maverick could make him opinionated and stubborn. A brilliant mind armed with a spectacular memory made him capable of winning or, at least, tying almost any intellectual argument while lodging him deeper in his point of view — all by virtue of the volume of data he could spout. The fact that everyday he read through The New York Times, The Globe & Mail, the Montreal Gazette and, often, the Toronto Star (along with teaching at University full time, editing Matrix, reading many many books, and writing), while recollecting almost every word, enhanced his forensic skills considerably.

Hours of our long, shared voyages were whiled away reading newspapers (and books) to each other. I still recall how furious he got once (he was, as his friends and many students know, customarily remarkably easy going...) when, one day, somewhere on a busy Missouri turnpike, I let a hard-to-obtain, incompletely read The New York Times get sucked out the passenger window!

But where my friend’s determined iconoclasm was most steadfast, and, of course, bore most fruit, was in his literary work.

His temperament, a unique mix of the rebellious and the phlegmatic, along with writing seminars taken at Cornell University during the era of the great Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, and A.R. Ammons, led him to an enthusiasm for innovative poetry and metafiction, etc. He showed little interest in creating (and here I didn’t go quite as far) the tightly oriented, shapely poem or the classical architecture of the middle class (and, in his view, sentimental) novel. Concerning the latter, he questioned the prevailing conventions (and values) that supposed (or superimposed) integrated, consistently behaved characters, and also viewed the continuing obesiance to Aristotelian notions of thematic unity and singleness of effect as a social falsification, though it is true, the anti-structure of his last completed fiction, Napoleon’s Retreat, maintains its mischievous poise by capering around the reader’s expectation of such tried and true elements.

His vision of fictional narrative was more self-conscious and accumulative — full of digression and diversion, “two dimensional characters,” unrealistic and fanciful episodes, giddy stylistic changes, and satiric riffs. More akin to artistic middens like Stern’s digressive Tristram Shandy, or Melville’s Moby Dick, such works are, in a sense, not novels at all, but the sort of writings that Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Critcism identifies as creations with a difference. Identifying Robert Burton’s 1621 prose work The Anatomy of Melancholy as an example of the form, this great Canadian literary critic suggests such creations be called anatomies. “At its most concentrated,” writes Frye, “the [anatomy] presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern. The intellectual structure built up from the story makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative, though the appearance of carelessness that results reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centered conception of fiction.” Inscribed as though by a fingernail in a dusty or wet windshield, or scribbled in pencil in a mileage log, Rob’s narrative is authored by a sly, supremely cool, daring, guerrilla intellect. It delves into, surveys, and muses over the all but endless extent of gimcrack motels and short order shacks, while faultlessly registering the debased, often unavoidably alluring discourses broadcast from the dump of popular culture. If there is any transcendence to be salvaged from this glossy-tawdriness, it lies in the artistic inclusion of pop culture’s incongruous motley, employing forms that don’t gull or stiff the reader, but abandon the suburban plots in a break for the open. Intimations of Kerouac (or Lewis and Clark!) maybe, but, in addition, the writings are steeped in satire and rendered baroque by the influences of Nabokov and Pynchon. And also, with a nod to the author’s Working Class origins, influenced by the dopey jingle-ballads of such English vaudevilleans as George Formby. You might say, as a virtuoso of both high and low art, Rob saw himself as playing an endless neo-baroque digression on a ukulele.

All of which made him something of an odd scribbler out in Canada whose prevailing aesthetic he identified as “order and good government.” He found it amusing that, while, to the south, the forms of the metafictional narrative and “anatomy” were widely acknowledged and even grown venerable, in Canada they continued to be dismissed as “self-indulgent” and obtuse. Somewhat galling in a country whose greatest literary critic so far first identified the vital, eccentric form Rob was entranced by! Again the words of Northrop Frye: “...though the appearance of carelessness that results[,] reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centered conception of fiction.” It is rumoured that one member of a local prize-giving jury, gave the thumbs down to Napoleon’s Retreat with the remark, “It isn’t a novel. I don’t read this sort of thing!” Nor was Rob, while always frontiering, comfortable with the sanctimonious prognoses of cultural theory. As an instructor in the Creative Writing department of Concordia University, he encouraged generations of young writers to jump into their imaginations, wind down all the windows, and drive somewhere else — away from the grids, towards the hills, to find a height where they could pivot on their heels and, footloose and fancy free, take in the full prospect around them.

It was a path that cost him deserved recognition in his lifetime.

Sometimes he fretted about this, but it never diminished his enthusiasm for his writing.

Rob created what he wanted.

I think, increasingly, new Canadian readers, looking around for something vital and fresh, will want what he did.

It is very hard for me to realize my oldest, best friend, so energetic, intellectually accomplished, and creative, is gone. We turned so often as one to view the same thing.... I shall never forget him or cease to enjoy the intellectual, cultural, and artistic “tour d’horizon” his art embodies.