Know thy benefactor

John Metcalf changed the face of fiction in the Great White North. He was the first to, with real feeling, wallop CanLit upside the head, trash the endless merely average writers, poke sticks at mindless ideology in print (including the cliche of so-called nation-building), and nurture the superlative. A truly visionary asshole.

From Metcalf's at times refreshingly bitter 2003 literary memoir, "An Aesthetic Underground": "During the sunset years of the late sixties and seventies it seemed to me that many women stopped behaving like gentlemen.

"Sisterhood was relentless. Bastions were stormed, institutions toppled with maenadic energy. Women were joining consciousness-raising groups and, once raised, were everywhere forsaking their husbands for electric toothbrushes. Men, meanwhile, were wagging around like bewildered golden retrievers unable to figure out their transgression and dispirited by the mistresses' permanent scowl."

Metcalf got a job in Montreal. "Loyola, along with every other campus in the country, throbbed with radical energy. [Wife] Gale was often on campus, often in the faculty club. Aggressive feminism was central to the Zeitgeist. It wasn't an intellectual or practical feminism -- equal pay for equal work, say -- but rather an implacable emotionalism directed against the opposite sex. I am not meek by nature and during 1970 and 1971 our relationship became increasingly testy.

"Gale was pregnant with our second child and demanded an abortion. I was strongly opposed but felt rather helplessly that it wasn't my decision to make. She found a doctor willing to claim that the pregnancy was detrimental to her mental health and the operation was performed at a local hospital. Shortly after this she started spending time with a Loyola student called Elizabeth Bateman.

"Elizabeth Bateman was tall with lank and malodorous hair. She was probably mucky for ideological reasons. She called herself Bitsy. She wore boots and suspenders. She claimed to be a photographer. Gale declared herself passionately in love with this unappetizing creature. The lesbian life, she announced, was the life for her. And she intended it, she said, for our daughter, Elizabeth, too. I objected to the situation and left the house, moving into what amounted to a commune of Loyola faculty members whose marriages had gone awry. Gale referred to this house as Heartbreak Hotel.

"I sued for divorce."