Norman Levine | Books | The Guardian

Publish date: 2022-07-27
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Norman Levine

Novelist with a painter's perception

The Canadian writer Norman Levine, who has died, aged 81, of a heart attack, saw language as a straitjacket that dulls excitement. He wanted his writing to come off the page with the immediacy of the abstract painting he encountered in the Cornish artists' community of St Ives, where he lived for 30 years. He described the encounter in an essay, Sometimes It Works, which was published in John Metcalf and JR Struthers's How Stories Mean (1993). "And there it was. At a glance. Through the eyes. Onto the nervous system."

Writing in the Contemporary Authors' Autobiography series, Levine recalled being made more aware of the possibilities of language by an eastern European orator at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, at the end of the second world war. "Vat the pipple vant . . . und vat the pipple get . . . ist piss." "He brought the house down," wrote Levine. "And he could not understand why."

Levine's parents emigrated from Poland to Ottawa, where his father became a fruit seller. As the son of Orthodox Jews living in Lower Town, then mainly a French district, he grew up feeling an outsider; as a Canadian living overseas for most of his life, he came to see exile as a condition of being a writer.

He first came to Britain, aged 20, with the Royal Canadian Air Force, flying with a Lancaster squadron based in Yorkshire. Experiences on and off-duty gave him his first novel, The Angled Road (1952), written while studying English at McGill University, Montreal.

Reliant on Veteran's Act funding, Levine developed a relish for "being hard-up", as expressed in his short fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. I'll Bring You Back Something Nice, in which an impoverished writer spoils a McGill reunion by asking his friends for loans in the gents' lavatory, showed his dark wit.

He won a fellowship to King's College London in 1949. A chance decision to spend the summer in Cornwall had a lasting impact. "If it hadn't been for St Ives, and especially the painters I grew up with, I wouldn't be the writer I am," he told me five years ago.

The physical presence of the granite fishing town emerged in the second of three poetry collections, The Tight-rope Walker (1950), and, at the same time, Levine discovered his metier, the short story. The personality of the self-taught painter Alfred Wallis inspired A Sabbath Walk, which elicited international attention when it was published in the journal Botteghe Oscure in 1956.

The story, We All Begin In A Little Magazine, describes how Levine found a footing in obscure literary journals in England before his breakthrough to Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. Eventually, he published nine collections of short stories, and was translated into 11 languages and Braille. The latter pleased him especially because, as he said in a 1985 interview, "This is all you really can do, make another person see."

The visual element of Levine's writing was developed by going outdoors with a notebook and describing what he saw - an idea he got after watching Ben Nicholson drawing boats. His St Ives friends included Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, David Haughton and Peter Lanyon, with whom he learned gliding.

He became close to Francis Bacon, whom he met in St Ives in 1959 - Levine believed that Bacon's image of the figure and toilet in paintings after 1964 derived from the ending of The Angled Road. Conversations with Bacon convinced him that a simple and direct style was more sophisticated: "The leaner the language the more suggestive," he suggested in Sometimes It Works.

In Levine's second and last novel, From A Seaside Town (1970), Bacon is the model for painter Charles Crater, whose visits to a failing travel writer and his family provide rare respites from their social isolation in what is clearly St Ives. Frustration was at the centre of Levine's art, according to the Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, who translated the book for an enthusiastic German readership.

Levine's 1958 travel book Canada Made Me, described by Robertson Davies as dealing with the country "in terms of provincialism, vulgarity and crushed hopes", provoked such hostility in his native land that a critic urged readers to stick pins in Levine voodoo dolls. Only 500 copies of the first edition were distributed there.

As a result, Canadian publishing was virtually closed to Levine for decades, but he was the first resident writer at the University of New Brunswick in 1965, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned stories for broadcast. Then, in 1979, Denis Deneau agreed to republish Canada Made Me as a condition of bringing out the next story collection, Thin Ice.

Levine lived in Toronto throughout the 1980s, and now has a reputation in Canada as a writer's writer. In 2002, he won the Writers' Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award, for lifetime achievement. The following year, Key Porter Books brought out The Ability To Forget, which includes Levine's last published story, the title work. It ends: "People disappear. And that's that."

Levine's belief that "how I write is how I am" was true of the courteous man I came to know while researching writing in postwar Cornwall - austere and amusing, acerbic and affectionate.

He is survived by Cassie, Kate and Rachael, the daughters of his first marriage, Anne Sarginson, his second wife, from whom he was separated, and Moira Dale, his companion in his last years.

· Norman Levine, writer, born October 22 1923; died June 14 2005

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