TERRY GOLDIE
Anyone who has ever taken a literature class has undoubtedly met with the autobiographical fallacy. And yet authors persist in using their own lives as subject matter for their books. At times this extends so far that life and writing seem interchangeable. The writer is the book and vice versa.
In many ways, this is the case with David Fennario. In a review of the first production of Fennario's second play, Nothing to Lose, Martin Knelman notes, 'Fennario has been acclaimed by the press as English Canada's first genuine working-class playwright, but already he has become absorbed with that most egocentric, unproletarian of themes, the struggle of the artist to hang onto his true self and resist selling out.' 1 The ride of Knelman's piece extends this statement, 'The playwright as star of the play.'
The split suggested by Knelman defines much of Fennario's acclaim. On the one hand, he is the working class socialist, who can write sentences like this one from his novel, Without a Parachute (1972): 'Their termite world of sleazy taverns and cruddy greasy spoon restaurants lies rotting under the edifice of our tumbling social system.' (p 50) This perception flows quite easily into the stridently autobiographical: 'And I dreamed that I could somehow transcend a world I wanted no part of. I would become a famous and brilliant author constructing word bricks I could toss through all those fuckin' windows separating me from the good life. I'd B & E that world crashing through on my own terms.' (p 65)
Fennario presents his home, Point Saint Charles, as the exemplum of the evil results of the capitalist system. But then he turns to another type of case study as he moves hesitantly into the world of the bourgeois intellectual. In his first play, On the Job, this motion is still understated. In the earlier Without a Parachute, it was glimpsed through his hero's decision to attend Dawson College, and in Toronto (1978) and Nothing to Lose, the concern is made obvious through the focus on the rising playwright. He clearly attempts to maintain a political thrust but, as Knelman says, those struggles of the individual artist begin to overshadow it.
The praise heaped on Fennario seems to be a product of a number of forces. He is, as Knelman suggests, one of the few Canadian playwrights to 'rise' from the working class. His origins contribute to the detail and verisimilitude of his portrait of Point Saint Charles. These roots also create an appeal for the bourgeois intellectual who is sick of seeing plays by other bourgeois intellectuals.
On first glance, that last sentence might seem just glib cynicism. However, it represents a major part of the adulation which Fennario has received. Another part might reflect similar cynicism: Fennario is not only working class; he is a working class Anglo from Montreal. In Without a Parachute, he observes a militant separatist: 'Very stiff face, wire-rimmed glasses perched upon a thin social worker type nose that had a CBC cultured moustache underneath it. More than likely a lawyer's son majoring in political science.' (p 66) This is an English voice in Montreal with no connection to Westmount. Fennario's view of French and English 'social worker types' may be stridently class conscious but it easily rejects the problems of bilingualism and biculturalism which confuse so many of us.
Yet, Fennario's achievement is not merely an unconscious pandering to his middle class Anglophone audience. His dialogue is often excellent, a point which his teacher notes in the autobiographical Without a Parachute. As the novel progresses, in fact, Fennario comes to depend less and less on description and interpretation and more and more on dialogue. Not surprisingly, Maurice Podbrey saw a playwright there and brought him to the Centaur Theatre to create On the Job.
Even given the reflection of this ability which one finds in On the Job, the form of praise which the play received suggests other causes for its immediate success. Myron Galloway writes of the first night, 'Playwrights, like heroes, are born, not made, and David Fennario is a born playwright.' He then suggests his importance as an Anglo-Montrealer: 'There is no doubt in my mind that last night's audience saw the birth of an important new English-speaking playwright, perhaps the first who might be compared favourably with some of the first rank French writers for the theatre in this city.' 2
In his review of the revival of the play, a year later, Galloway modifies his support by stating, 'It is not a great play but then it doesn't pretend to be.' 3 In this, Galloway seems to be making a point which often is forgotten. In each of his first two plays, Fennario employs a very limited vehicle. Although the set is not a kitchen, the play is very much in the tradition of 'kitchen-sink realism.' The implied connection to Arnold Wesker is quite appropriate. A limited set, in most cases highly realistic, is presented as the closed environment of a small 'family' of characters. In On the Job, it is a shipping room in a dress factory; in Nothing to Lose, a pub. Even in Fennario's most recent Balconville, the tenement setting, while exterior, has a similar restrictive feeling.4
One need not stop the search for theatrical roots at Wesker. In a review of Nothing to Lose, David McCaughna sees connections between Fennario and Clifford Odets.5 A number of Canadian playwrights from the 'thirties would be similarly appropriate, particularly W. Eric Harris. Like them, Fennario succeeds to the extent his dialogue and characterization recreate a certain environment. Action and plot are severely restricted to a conflict which represents a daily part of a poverty-stricken life.
In On the Job and Nothing to Lose this conflict is a labour dispute which seems doomed to disaster. In both, the workers, finally reacting to the pain of their slavery, decide to go beyond union contracts and actively demonstrate their hatred of the system. Fennario gives specific causes, the straws that break these working-class backs, but the strikers have no clear idea of what they want in the long term. In Nothing to Lose, the radical writer calls for 'Worker's control of the industries.' (p 124) The similar figure in On the Job, Gary, translates theory into their reality: 'Fuck you. We have only begun to lose...' (p 95)
Like the 'thirties playwrights, Fennario devotes himself to despair. He posits a political solution but it is vague and he does not seem to believe in it. The politicians and union organizers, of whatever stripe, are no help. The downtrodden must look to themselves for control. But they show no potential for anything other than nihilism.
One difficulty, of course, is that Fennario rejects easy answers. In a similar situation in one of Harris' plays, Such Harmony (1936), a radical theorist with messianic tinges seems ready to make the world go right. In contrast, the Fennario figure, Jerry, in Nothing to Lose, knows what the answers should be but he is just as aware that they are unlikely to work. In the great tradition of naturalism, the characters begin in desolation and end in desolation.
Thus Fennario is very much in the tradition of much of naturalist, kitchen-sink drama. The poverty, the despair, the economic determinism, the detailed realism, the limitations in time and set, all fit. There is nothing new in Fennario's first two plays, except that the old model is being applied to a new group. The snatches of French and local references may be entertaining but they do not represent a major new contribution.
This genre can be raised above the norm only through the characterizations. Even a devotee of Fennario, however, Richard Horenblas, admits that 'his characters are thin stereotypes of slum existence, more two than three dimensional, often lacking full-blooded development and rich internal conflict.' 6 We perhaps come back to the position suggested by Galloway. A playwright with a flair for dialogue but with severe limitations in general is praised for a number of nonliterary and non-theatrical reasons.
One more reference, to the previously mentioned McCaughna review, can do much to place the critical problem in perspective. In this piece, McCaughna compares Fennario's play with Timothy Findley's Can You See Me Yet? and rejects the latter for being 'ambitiously stylish' and 'cleverly structured' but 'dead at the centre.' On the other hand, he believes that 'David Fennario has clearly emerged as one of the most important of the new generation of Canadian playwrights, although his style and concerns harken to an earlier era. He writes from a unique standpoint and embellishes his plays with an urgency and power that are outstanding.' 7
Without making any judgement on the quality of Findley's work, it still seems not unfair to infer from this review a rejection of overt technical ambitions and an elevation of theatrical energy, at least if presented in a traditional mode. McCaughna seems to exemplify a critical tendency to let Fennario's 'power', and his often appealing 'standpoint', obscure the limitations of his achievement. Fennario is doing much the same as other Canadians were doing forty years ago. The fact that the scene is now Montreal instead of Toronto does not seem that important.
The difficulty is with a general view of the theatre. The best political dramas of the 'thirties were not the kitchen-sink variety but the agit-prop of Eight Men Speak. Today, the best is probably in a somewhat similar genre, with the likes of Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille, Newfoundland's Mummers and Saskatchewan's Twenty-Fifth Street House.
Some of these reviewers alluded to seem to be saying that form does not matter. But it does. Naturalism will always be with us but it will always present serious restrictions, which can be overcome only by a few major talents. The reviews of Balconville suggest that Fennario has gone further with that vehicle than he was able in On the Job and Nothing to Lose, but references to an Anglo Michel Tremblay will not produce a Hosannah. The sad part is that a very real talent, which was clear from the first sight of Without a Parachute, may be lost. David Fennario, the young playwright with a good ear for dialogue, might be unable to overcome David Fennario, the proletarian star of Anglo-Montreal.
Notes
DAVID FENNARIO,"On the Job", Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1976.
DAVID FENNARIO,"Nothing to Lose," Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1977.
Terry Goldie
1 MARTIN KNELMAN, 'The Playwright as Star of the Play,'
Saturday Night (April 1978), p 59
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2 MYRON GALLOWAY, 'Fennario's On the Job hits
the jackpot,' Montreal Star (January 30 1975), p C8
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3 MYRON GALLOWAY, 'On the Job still on the mark,' Montreal
Star (January 30 1976), p B6
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4 Balconville has not yet been published, and
I was unable to see it in production, so my impression is derived from
reviews and photographs. This impression has been corroborated by that
of others who did see the show.
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5 DAVID MCCAUGHNA, Review of Nothing to Lose and
Can You See Me Yet?, Quarry 28:3 (Summer 1979), pp 82-86.
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6 RICHARD HORENBLAS, 'David Fennario Burning Houses
Down,' Scene Changes 8:1 (March 1980), p 28
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7 MCCAUGHNA p 85
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