Brian Fawcett, Human Happiness

"In an economic system grounded upon exploitation & energized by expansion / the breakdown of common vocabulary is inevitable."

(Brian Fawcett, "Poetic Words," lines 1-2, Creatures of State, Talonbooks 1977) 

I've still not gotten over Brian Fawcett's 2022 death, though I've also never marked it formally, in part because I never met the man so that'd be foolish. Stan Persky, who I also never met and is similarly lamented, wrote about Fawcett perhaps one of the most remarkable (and longest!) writerly farewell essays you'll ever have the pleasure of reading, though you may need to have more than a passing knowledge of Fawcett for it to hit you as hard as it still hits me.

As it happens, a close family member is currently on the downward trajectory with precisely what claimed Brian Fawcett's life, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which is just another weird link in the chain that develops when you read someone's work closely for decades. Fawcett was born two years before my father, and though I'm no Max Fawcett, and my father is intensely dissimilar to Brian, the generational pull has been real.

So yeah, I've been reading Fawcett for decades, even if I've only blogged twice about him (1982's My Career with the Leafs & Other Stories in 2015, and 2013's The Last of the Lumbermen in 2018); heck, I've even written academically about him, and on reflection less wanker-ishly than I might have, which I think is a good thing even though I'm confident Fawcett would've hated the article if he'd ever read it.

Though I was unproductively annoyed by Gender Wars, to the point that I didn't read Fawcett the same way afterwards, for a significant time one of my bibles was his Unusual Circumstances, Interesting Times, and Other Impolite Interventions (about which I agree with Stan Persky). For some years, in fact, I've been sorely tempted to visit Prince George purely to sit with the archived draft material of this book at UNBC, and maybe someday I will.

Anyway.

His 2018 semi-memoir Human Happiness is remarkable, and also I've found myself utterly unable to write a recognizable review of this book, so I don't think this post will buy him a single additional reader, and I hate that but here we are.

Early in Human Happiness, Fawcett explains that the book was meant to be an exploration of what made his parents happy, during those times that they were happy, at least, and what tools they used to achieve happiness, because "the tool box has vanished, and what makes people happy has changed" (p10). This makes the book a memoir of both his father Hartley Fawcett and his mother Rita Surry, who made it to ages 100 and 90 respectively, as well as of himself, as well as some version of broader cultural inquiry.

Still, rather than something abstract, Fawcett's is a personal inquiry with a personal motivation: "my kids have lost the right to collective human happiness because it is too costly to the planet and to the rest of their fellow human beings. This bothers me. It leaves them to lead guilty lives, with pleasures that are deemed anti-social and selfish" (pp11-12). Animating much of his thinking in Human Happiness, really, is his sense that "Small, decent lives like the ones in this book might be the best accomplishments of the twentieth century" (p17).

You don't have to read much Brian Fawcett before you're struck by how much sheer bloody-minded self-confidence is behind his prose. I've no idea how much self-doubt may have been behind that voice, but many pieces about him highlight his complexity. In speaking with BC Booklook's Alan Twigg, for example, his New Star Books publisher Rolf Maurer describes him as both generous and affectionate, but has other stories to tell, too: "I also knew him long enough to experience what inevitably happened to anyone who knew Brian long enough: a serious falling out over something or other that seemed permanent at the time."

Fawcett's seemingly casual comment of "This bothers me," in other words, could be seen as one of those moments where Fawcett found himself in a serious falling out with much of contemporary thought: and he would've been fine with that. In a reminiscence of Fawcett (organized by John Harris), his friend and fellow writer Barry McKinnon says that "The first thing [he] heard about Brian Fawcett was that he once sat in a back chair at a poetry reading in Vancouver with a big rock in his hand and was poised to throw it on the stage if the reader’s poetry didn’t measure up." Or as his son Max wrote in his tribute for the Globe and Mail, "Breaking rules was one of Brian Fawcett’s favourite pastimes, second only perhaps to creating them."

Fawcett was congenitally, unrepentantly cranky, and in the past I've found myself genuinely angry at what I took to be the cruelty in some of his reviews. In the case of Human Happiness, I've often found myself refusing both his assumptions and his conclusions during the reading and re-reading of this book, but what's the point of reading only things you agree with? 

 Anyway (again).

This book is for anyone thinking about generational change in Canada, especially in BC, and I think it has lots to reward anyone whose own families are full of complicated relationships (healthy or un-), which is all of us. Certainly there's a voyeuristic pleasure available here, as with any memoir, but that's modified by the simple fact that the narrative voice means you're never far from feeling as if the author might start yelling at you. That's a good thing, I'd say, one of the rewards of this book, because Human Happiness is unmistakably in the voice of Brian Fawcett.

I wouldn't say that the world needs more Brian Fawcetts, because one was enough. (Maybe more than enough?!) On the other hand, certainly I would say that the world needs to read more Brian Fawcett. If you start with Human Happiness, you'll get a different sense of him, his thinking, and his writing than you would if you started with a poetry collection like Creatures of State, or fiction like his novel-plus-extended-footnote Cambodia: A Book for Those Who Find Television Too Slow, but that's fine. If the voice or mind here speaks to you, then there's a whole trove more for you to explore.