Norman Levine

Norman Levine (born October 22, 1923 in Ottawa , † June 14, 2005 in Barnard Castle , County Durham ) was a Canadian writer who saw language as a "straitjacket" that tarnished the exciting, and wanted what he wrote with the immediacy of abstract painting was seen to him in the artists' colony of St Ives in Cornwall met, where he lived for thirty years.

Life

Origin, military service and studies

Levine, whose parents immigrated to Canada from Poland , grew up in Ottawa, where his father worked as a fruit dealer. As the son of Orthodox Jews , he lived in the Lower Town of Ottawa, a neighborhood predominantly inhabited by French Canadians at the time , so that he felt like an outsider there .

During the Second World War came in 1943, he, as a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) was the first to Britain and served as a pilot of the in Yorkshire stationed Avro Lancaster - bomber squadron . After the war ended and his return to Canada, he began studying English at McGill University in Montreal .

With financial support through a scholarship , he was able to complete a guest study visit at King's College London in 1949 and spend a summer in Cornwall. He later pointed out that without the life among the painters in the St Ives artists' colony he would not have become the writer he became.

Literary work

Previously influenced by life in the St Ives artists' colony

The physical presence of the fishing village of St Ives, which shaped him, first appeared in The Tight-rope Walker (1950), the second of three collections of poetry . He developed the visible, painting-inspired element of his writing by taking a notebook with him on his walks and describing what he saw. The idea came to him when he saw the painter Ben Nicholson painting fishing boats in the local harbor. His circle of friends in St Ives included the artists Patrick Heron , Terry Frost , David Haughton and Peter Lanyon .

During his studies he published his autobiographical debut novel The Angled Road in 1952 , in which he described his experiences during military service in World War II. At the same time he discovered the short story as a form of his literary work .

When he began his literary career, he relied on financial support from the Veterans Act fund and developed a taste for the hard life in his short stories of the 1950s and 1960s. In the short story I'll Bring You Back Something Nice , in which an impoverished writer uses a McGill University alumni get-together to ask his friends for a loan in the men's room, Levine showed his sense of dark humor . The person of the self-taught painter Alfred Wallis , one of the founders of the St Ives artist colony, inspired him to write the short story A Sabbath Walk , which received international attention after its publication in Botteghe Obscure magazine in 1956.

The story We All Begin In A Little Magazine described how Levine found Boden for his early literary work in small British literary magazines before his breakthrough in international magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue .

Canada Made Me and the criticism of its country of birth

In 1958 he published the travel book Canada Made Me , which the Canadian writer and literary critic Robertson Davies described as "a treatise on the country in an expression of provinciality, vulgarity and disappointed hope".

The book caused so much hostility in its native land that another literary critic, in a review of the book, urged readers to insert pins into Levine's- faced voodoo dolls . This contributed to the fact that only five hundred copies of the first edition were sold in Canada.

Another finding was that the Canadian literature market was effectively closed to Levine for decades. Despite his criticism of his country of birth in Canada Made Me , he was appointed Writer in Residence at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) as the first writer in 1965 , and his short stories were adapted as radio plays for the radio program of CBC / Radio-Canada .

Friendship with Francis Bacon and From A Seaside Town

He maintained a close personal friendship with the painter Francis Bacon , whom he met in 1959 in St Ives. Levine believed that Bacon's paintings made after 1964 were shaped by the end of The Angled Road . On the other hand, conversations with Bacon inspired him that a simple and direct writing style is more demanding.

In his second and last novel, From A Seaside Town (1970), Bacon provided him with the template for the main character, the painter Charles Garter, whose visits to an unsuccessful travel writer and his family provide rare breaks from their social isolation in their place of residence was clearly St Ives. The frustration of Levine's art contained therein becomes clear in the German translation of the novel by Heinrich Böll, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature .

Return to Canada

In 1979 Levine got the publisher Denis Deneau to reissue the controversial book Canada Made Me in Canada as a condition for the publication of Levine's next collection of short stories, Thin Ice .

He returned to Canada shortly thereafter and lived in Toronto in the 1980s .

Levine saw language as a straitjacket that tarnishes excitement. He wanted that from him written with the immediacy of abstract painting appeared to him in the artists' colony met St Ives in Cornwall, where he lived for thirty years. He described this environment in the essay Sometimes It Works , published in How Stories Mean by John Metcalf and JR Struther in 1993. He saw life as a Canadian in this exile as a condition for being a writer.

In the following years he had greater success in Canada and in 2001 won the Matt Cohen Prize as the second winner , which has been awarded annually by the Writers' Trust of Canada since 2000 in memory of the Canadian writer Matt Cohen for the life's work of a Canadian writer . In 2002 Key Porter Books published the collection of short stories The Ability To Forget , which includes Levine's last published short stories.

Levine published a total of nine collections of short stories that were translated into eleven languages ​​and also appeared in Braille .

Publications

Short stories

• One Way Ticket 1961
  • Übers. Annemarie Böll , Heinrich Böll, Reinhard Wagner: A little piece of blue. Claassen, Hamburg 1971
  • Single story, translator Annemarie Böll, Heinrich Böll: A little piece of blue. In: The long journey. Canadian short stories and short stories. Verlag Volk und Welt , Berlin 1974, pp. 118-134
  • Übers. Annemarie Böll, Heinrich Böll, Reinhard Wagner, Gabriele Bock: The man with the notebook. Stories. Reclam's Universal Library , 617. Leipzig 1975; 2nd ext. Ed. With ill. (And 11 additional ore) Nachw. Karla El-Hassan, ibid. 1979
• I don't know anyone too well and other stories. 1971
• Django, Karfunkelstein, and Roses. 1971
  • Übers. Gabriele Bock u. a .: Django, carbuncle and roses. Stories. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1987 ( The individual stories and their translators )
• Thin ice. 1979
• Why Do You Live So Far Away? 1984
• Champagne Barn. 1984
• The Beat and the Still. 1990
• Something Happened Here. 1991
• The Ability to Forget. 2003

Novels

• The Angled Road . 1952
• From a seaside town . 1970

Volumes of poetry

• Myssium . 1948
• The tight-rope walker . 1950
• I walk by the harbor . 1976

Essays

• Canada Made Me . 1958
  • Übers. Heinz Winter: Canada made me. Claassen, Hamburg 1967
  • Excerpt, translator Annemarie Böll, Heinrich Böll: A Canadian youth , told in Canada. Edited by Stefana Sabin. Fischer TB 10930, Frankfurt 1992, pp. 160-167 (A Canadian youth.)
• Sometimes It Works . 1993

Web links

• Bibliography in the Open Library
• Norman Levine. Novelist with a painter's perception , The Guardian , July 1, 2005
• Fiction, faction, autobiography. Norman Levine at McGill University , 1946-1949, by Robert H. Michel
• Norman Levine: Notes toward the revival of the jewish left. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory - Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale, Vol. 13, no. 1-2, 1989