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COMMENTARY
May 12, 2007
David Solway
David Solway first came to my attention as a remarkable Canadian poet, a quarter-century ago, when a copy of his Selected Poems fell into my hands, and I realized this was the real thing: a disciplined, intelligent, elegantly mischievous voice, with a new music in it. He was writing fine craftsmanlike verse sunk deeply into English literary tradition, not floundering in an uneducated narcissism, as almost every other recent Canadian poet. Later I spoke with Margaret Avison, whom I consider our greatest Canadian poet (without qualification), and learned of her excitement at having "discovered" David Solway. I have not met him, but discern from various statements and gestures of his over the years that he is utterly his own man, the opposite of a careerist.He has just written a book of breathtaking political incorrectitude, entitled, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity (Lester, Mason & Begg). I find it a hard book to swallow but worth a long chew. Solway begins by recalling his reaction to the events of 9/11/01, which caught up with him while he was dawdling on a remote Greek island. A long essay presents his disavowal of the trite pseudo-revolutionary “left-liberal” belief system he had effortlessly absorbed as a professional student, professor, and café flaneur. And then a longer essay struggles valiantly and recklessly with his identity as a Jew, and with the historical and political consequences of being one. This latter is also a disavowal, of his previous cheap embrace of fashionable “anti-Zionism” and other casual efforts to impugn his own heritage. There are, additionally, many pages of long notes at the back, keyed to the text and providing sometimes arcane but always enterprising little essays in themselves. Solway is obviously a difficult character, and goes out of his way to make enemies, not only among his “left-liberal” acquaintances. He has courage both as virtue and as vice, and repeatedly states, with insolent assurance, facts and arguments that would normally admit of considerable qualification. That is the power of the book, overall: a cocky declaration of war on the smugness and smooth, posturing, self-caressing deceitfulness of the contemporary leftwing intellectual. The book was written openly as a project in self re-education. Solway took five years to digest an event that dismembered all his glib assumptions about the world; instead of the five minutes most people assigned to that task. I encourage my reader to read it, not because I agree with Solway’s views (though I was on the same hymn page with him almost throughout the initial essay), but because I can think of no better way to challenge all one’s own glib assumptions. Solway earnestly exhumes the connexions between one kind of nonsense and another, one kind of lie and another, among the received opinions of our age, until he has constructed a view of our present situation that will curl your ears. It is in the second and longer part that he wanders out of my hymn book entirely. His remarks on the history of anti-Semitism within Christian tradition were acutely painful for this Catholic to read -- starting from his memories of being beaten and abused as a young Jew in small-town Quebec. But they are also frequently unreasonable. He gives, for instance, comminations against Christian persecutors of the Jews by word or deed, from the Gospel of John and “vile spewings” of the earliest Church fathers, indefinitely forward, as if to demonstrate “that anti-Semitism is encoded ineradicably in the DNA of Christianity.” But he does this without ever relaxing into historical context, and while often exhibiting precisely the uncharitable mindset he condemns. He is hardly kinder to Muslim traditions, from the Koran indefinitely forward. He even manages to slander the odd Nazi, Communist, or Islamofascist thug, while gathering all the many eras and kinds of anti-Semitism into an impossible contemporary Gordian knot, that no Alexander will ever be able to slice through. But let me play the old-fashioned liberal, and entitle him to his own acidic opinions. The larger truth he serves is the realization that we will get nowhere against the psychopathic, Islamist enemies of our civilization so long as we allow them to thrive parasitically on our own vacuous and craven left-liberalism -- parrying each new threat against us with evasion, conciliation, sophistry, and equivocation. (And on a point of honour both Christian and Jewish, the existence of Israel within defensible borders is non-negotiable.) But then this: “Though it makes me uncomfortable to say this, it can be argued that to be a Jew authentically is to be an Orthodox Jew and to ground one’s life on the norms, rites, and prescriptions of the Torah and the Talmud.” This sentence arrested me, in the longer second essay. It is a hostage against the future, for Solway has more to think and say, and I more patience to hear it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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