_ By FRED WILSON

Ti: are two possible motiva-

tions for writing a book, says.

: B.C. author Rolf Knight.
“You can write for payment, to
advance a career. Or you can write
use your are angry.
“For me it is anger. Anger about
OW people and their causes have
been maligned and degraded.
About how they have been treated
in the media, in the histories and
€very source.
__ I suppose I write to get some
lick back.”?
Rolf Knight certainly doesn’t
Write for money. He has yet to earn

@ penny from six unique books .

about working people and British
Columbia, although there have
some impressive sales.

Recognition has been slow in
Coming, including a growing ap-
Preciation of the contribution he
has made to what he terms gently,
for want of a better definition,

Proletarian literature.’”” What he
Means by that is simply books
about working class people, writ-
ten especially for working class
People.

His best known titles are A Very

fdinary Life, now in its third
Printing, Indians at Work and the
Tecently released Along the No. 20

e. These and A Man of Our
Times, Stump Ranch Chronicles
and Work Camps and Company
Towns are a solid addition to the
Telatively small body of working
Class literature produced in this
country, :

Talk to Rolf Knight, however,
and you very soon get a clear mess-
age about ‘‘recognition.”’
Although he hasn’t completely
Siven up fighting, he long ago re-
Signed himself to being excluded
from the normal avenue through
Which authors gain public recogni-
tion and status within the profes-
Sion.
.,,_ If you set out to write books

€ mine,’’ he says coldly, ‘“you
have to put aside any hope of help
OF support from the literary estab-
lishment,”

There is little doubt that the es-
tablishment hasn’t given Knight
Much, if any, support, and what he

accomplished has been in spite
Of the major publishing houses,

gazines and periodicals, distri-
bution agencies and book stores.

The publishing industry in Can-

1s not an open system. It is con-
‘tolled by the handful of publishers
with marketing power. Distrib-
Utors, book store chains, reviewers
are interwoven with the publishers.
For someone on the outside, often
€ only way to get in is through the
with the faint hope that a
Manuscript will spark enough in-
terest to open a door. Usually it
doesn’t,

Advances or prepayments to au-
thors while they are working on a

k are reserved for the privileged
few. The reality is working two
years or longer unpaid to producea
Script which may or may not be
Printed, and which likely will never
Pay you for your time.

There is the Canada Council,
ae Knight did get $8,000 from

€m to help finish Indians at
Work. But it was a small contribu-
“on for a job which took two years

Write and many more years to re-
Search. A Very Ordinary Life took
tWo years to write, every moment
Of spare time. It is really hard to de-
Scribe the effort that is involved.”

It should be said that there is a
tenuous existence for writers who
ate working in the mainstream.
Support for publishing in Canada
18 minute in relation to the need and
Many publishers, like authors, are
Usually broke. Economic scarcity
Puts the lid on opportunity, espe-
fially for authors like Rolf Knight

Who refuse to fit into the mold of

hes

mass culture and who write with a
ocialist perspective.

: Seca feats what Rolf

Knight has achieved, working out-

side and on the edges of the system,

is important. ©

Ironically, Rolf chose to do itthe
hard way. He is convinced it was
the only way to do it, and maintain
his integrity. When he turned his
back on his job as a tenured profes-
sor at the University of Toronto
four years ago, his colleagues
thought he was crazy.

“J had what most people con-
sider success. Certainly what aca-
demics consider success: a secure
position with one of the foremost
universities. And yes, I could have
used that position as a launching
pad for becoming a successful
writer.”’

e was something of a success
ie story for an east-end Vancou-

ver kid born to a sda class
family in the depths of the depres-
sion. He can recall spending a large
part of his early years in tow behind
his parents as they migrated around
B.C. from work camp to work
camp. At 14 he had his first job
aboard a freighter and over the
next few years he added construc-
tion sites, oil rigs, logging camps,
the B.C. Sugar Refinery, and a day
on a PGE section gang to his work
experience. -

Somehow he also managed to
secure a degree in anthropology
from U.B.C. which brought him
his first real break, a grant to study

TRIBUNE PHOTO — FRED WILSON

at Columbia University in Ni
York. He went on to secure a
Ph.D. and to teach at Columbia
for six years. Later he taught at Si-
mon Fraser University and the Uni-
versity of Manitoba before settling
in at U of T for 10 years, until he
abruptly quit and returned to B.C.
to look for a job in the fishing in-
dustry.

To really understand what made
Rolf Knight turn his back on an
academic career and the opportun-
ity that went with it would take
much longer than any interviewer
could hope to manage. But a major
factor was his writing and the ap-
parent contradiction between it
and the academic world.

He was still at the University of

Toronto when in 1974 he finished .

his first book, A Very Ordinary
Life. (Previously published were
three ‘‘scholarly monographs,’’
that is anthropological theses
‘“‘written so that only scholars can
understand them.’’)

After being rejected by almost 30
publishers, A Very Ordinary Life
appeared in 1974, the first publica-
tion of an aspiring alternative pub-
lishing house based in Vancouver,
New Star Books. Since then it has
gone on to sell 7,000 copies, by any
measure a very creditable perform-
ance for a Canadian book.

It began a lasting relationship
between Rolf and New Star, ‘‘a
thrown together, paste-up publish-
er which still manages to put out
five books a year.’’ It has been a

good arrangement for both, he rec-
ognizes. New Star has madeit poss-
ible for him, and many other good
authors to see print, but he is far
and away their best selling author.

can’t agree, but Rolf insists that

A Very Ordinary Life is his best

work. It is his specialty, oral
history.

Using that skill he wove to-
gether the recollections of his
mother, Phyllis Knight, to produce
an easily read biography, dramatic
yet typical, of an immigrant family
which arrived in Canada in the
1920s and became assimilated into
the life and struggles of the Cana-
dian working class.

But two years after A Very Ordi-
nary Life was published, the liter-
ary world had hardly noticed, and
the academic world hadn’t. En-
meshed in the silence was an un-
spoken suggestion that the content

and style — oral history was less ac- -

cepted then than today — ‘‘wasn’t
academically respectable.”’

Even without the reviews by his
colleagues or the marketing of an
established publisher, to his sur-
prise copies began to surface on
campus. ‘‘They spread the way
most of my books have, word of
mouth, hand to hand,. through
small out-of-the-way bookstores,
friends. . . it’s scratch and catch as
catch can, but it can work.”

Similar experiences with two
more books, Workcamps and
Company Towns — An Annotal
Bibliography, about the only book
Rolf ever wrote to serve academics,
and A Man of Our Times, an oral
history of a west-coast Japanese-
Canadian fisherman, made up his
mind.

Fishing seemed to offer an alter-
native. The possibility was there to
work six or seven months, and use
the remaining months to write. But
like most job opportunities over the
past four years, that didn’t work
out. For the last several months
Rolf has been making his contribu-
tion to the family income by driv-
ing a cab. It’s a 12-hour shift start-
ing at four a.m., and it leaves little
creative energy left.

In spite of the rough economic
times over the last four years,
Knight produced three more
books, the last two undoubtedly his
best, in spite of his own preference.

His most noteworthy .accomp-
lishment, the 1978 publication of
Indians at Work is in many ways
also the most frustrating. “‘It is
raw, I admit that,”’ says Rolf. ‘“But
it is a definite study. It’s been out
two and a half years and 1,250
copies haven’t all been sold yet.”’

That is astonishing considering
the merits of the book. Detailed
and scholarly, yet readable, In-
dians at Work is the first study ever
to examine the working class heri-
tage of Native Indians in Canada.
The result is a convincing refuta-
tion of a dozen, at least, senti-
mental theories about ‘‘traditional
Native culture’ as opposed to in-
dustrial society.

Perhaps because what it has to
say, perhaps because it was not
produced inside the system, only a
handful of universities or colleges
have even stocked it in bookstores,
far less than using it as assigned
reading material in courses.

There are more encouraging
signs with Rolf’s latest book,
Along the No. 20 Line. Since its re-
lease in September it has sold
around 1,000 copies. Areminiscent
account of East Vancouver
through his own boyish eyes just
after World War II, Along the No.
20 Line shows Knight’s progression
as an author. Well written, rich in
imagery and filled with reference
points that almost anyone could
latch on to, it should have a wide
appeal.

“T was invited to autograph

books at an NDP bookstore in
Gibsons Landing, and 32 copies of
Along the No. 20 Line sold in a
day,” he reported positively, only
to quickly change tone. ‘‘That was
one day in Gibsons. Guess how
many copies Classics and W. H.
Smith took for their entire chains?

Twenty-five, between them
both.”’

Experiences like that are the nub
of the problem not only for authors
like Rolf Knight, who are lucky
enough to have a publisher like
New Star. Others have paid for
publication themselves, or secured
a Canada Council grant to pay part
of the costs. But even if the book is
printed, so what if it isn’t made
available to potential readers.

‘The real make or break is dis-
tribution,”’ he says, ‘‘and that is a
tooth and nail battle all the way,
even to get your books on a book-
store shelf.”

With a small publisher like New
Star, most of the work falls to Rolf

.to hit the pavement, store to store.

There is a fair reception from some
booksellers, Duthies, Woodwards,
and the People’s Co-Op, but itis a
curt no from Eaton’s.

Still, Rolf Knight’s books are
selling. With its small and spotty
network, New Star works hard and

Rolf Knight’s name means some- ~

thing to a lot of readers who had
never heard of him a few years ago.

He is encouraged by the work of
others with a similar purpose in
writing about working class peo-
ple: He cites the ‘‘indefatigable”’
Ben Swankey, author of several la-
bor and union histories, Howard
White of Raincoast Chronicles,
Helen Potrebenko, who he respects
for No Streets of Gold, and he ad-
mits a soft feeling for Barry Broad-
foot, whose oral history on the de-
pression Ten Lost Years was an im-
portant acknowledgment of that
reality after almost 30 years of si-
lence.

It’s not enough, however, for
him to offer an optimistic outlook.
“Optimism — no. You push on,
you prevail. That’s all.”’

here is no doubt he will, as in

the past, on his own terms. And

that means writing about work-

ing people in a way which he
thinks is important, telling the
stories of ordinary people as they
understand them, not as someone
else would interpret it for them. ‘‘I
advance the view that people don’t
have to have the ‘correct line’ all the
time to have something valuable to
say,”’ he says. It is a peculiar out-
look shaped by his own working
class background and by his jaded
experiences with academia, and
while it can create some stylistic dif-
ferences between him and other
working class authors, it has dug a
philosophical gorge separating him
from still others.

In the introduction to his first
book Knight wrote: “‘It has recent-
ly become fashionable for certain
writers to discover and portray Ca-
nadian working class life. Two of
the more fashionable have been
Lorimer’s Working People and
Robertson’s Grass Roots. Here,
tricked out in the latest styles of so-
cial concern are the old hackneyed
views of ordinary people by huck-
sters on the make.

“They portray working people
as reactionary, stupid, racist, cul-
turally and intellectually illiterate—
but ‘the salt of the earth.’ Immi-
grants are colorful and stoic peas-
ants in sheepskin coats, workers are
the horny handed sons of toil; the
old Tory stereotypes of ‘the com-
mon man.’ Apart from being scur-
rilous and patronizing, these cari-
catures are nothing more than a
version of the noble savage by writ-
ers who are contemptuous of the
lives of real people.”

Rolf is not about to take a word
of that back. Heis as angry as ever.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—DEC.'19, 1980—Page 11

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