Preface: Welcome to The Ray Robertson Zone
FADE IN: opening theme from The Twilight Zone (do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do); then the seductively smooth VOICEOVER of Rod Serling:
Imagine, if you will, a swirling vortex of sights and sounds,
profound aphorisms and salacious anecdotes, Greek philosophers
and rock & rollers. You are travelling in another dimension,
a dimension of creative imagination and electric language.
You have just crossed into … the Ray Robertson Zone.
Here, then, is an unusual but I think fitting introduction to an extraordinarily talented but inordinately under-recognized star of Canadian letters. Unfortunately, at this point, you may ask: who is Ray Robertson? And further: why am I writing a book about him? Those are fair questions, and should be answered directly.
Ray Robertson is a Canadian author, originally from Chatham Ontario, who, over a thirty-year writing career, has published fifteen books (fiction, non-fiction, and poetry). For those unfamiliar with Robertson’s writing, it may be described as a wide-ranging, multi-dimensional, eclectic, kaleidoscopic body of work that virtually defies classification or categorization or any kind of linear, logical, analytical assessment.
His books are populated by the likes of Little Richard and Jim Morrison, Jack Kerouac and Mordecai Richler, Bertrand Russell and Friedrich Nietzsche, small-town teenagers yearning to be free and big-city executives yearning to be cool, a canine cast of beloved barkers, and every kind of intoxicant and temptation known to man, woman or beast, all unfolding against a sound-track of country-and-western, rock-and-roll, cool jazz and “Interstellar North American Music.” His books are set in an equally diverse range of times and places: from Chatham Ontario’s Underground Railroad of the 1800s to Toronto’s Yorkville scene in the 1960s to the “torpid Southwestern Ontario suburbs” of the seventies. We visit recording studios in L.A. and hockey rinks in Kansas and “a city of second-hand bookstores” (Toronto in the 1980s), while his topics and stories range from coming-of-age in small towns to living-with-OCD in big cities, from stocking the shelves at Sears to rocking the stage at Woodstock, from babbling babies to Alzheimer wards to embalming rooms. Like I said: wide-ranging, eclectic, kaleidoscopic. There’s something for everyone in the Ray Robertson Zone.
As for the second question (Why am I writing a book about him?), it is because, apart from the sheer breadth and variety and outright laughter arising from his polychromatic palette, Robertson has that most rare of all creative gifts: a distinctive voice.
I’m talking here about a style of expression that is immediately recognizable and distinct from others, in any creative medium. In the musical world, for example, ten seconds is enough to know you’re hearing Jimi Hendrix or Carlos Santana or Oscar Peterson or Miles Davis or Frank Sinatra or Bob Dylan - he won his Nobel Prize for writing, not singing, but that croaky off-key voice is instantly recognizable, a voice like no other. Hendrix’s wild, audacious mind-blowing guitar pushes the sonic limits, while Santana’s melodic playing - lyrical, slightly-bluesy with a Latin pulse - goes down smooth as fine brandy or chocolate cream pie. Miles Davis’ long, cool tones (followed by equally haunting silences) are as distinctive and immediately recognizable as Oscar Peterson’s sixty-notes-a-second cascading keyboard crescendos. But it’s more than just a style of performance that renders these artists distinctive; rather, it’s in their very bones, it’s who they are as artists.
In literature, I read a line like “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to …” and though I don’t understand it, I know it’s James Joyce. And the fact that less than twenty words - such as “the fact that raccoons are now banging an empty yogurt carton around on the driveway, the fact that …” - is enough to know I’m in the distinctive one-of-a-kind world of Lucy Ellmann. There’s an apocryphal story of Hemingway trying to convince his Editor that adding more words actually lessened the emotional impact of his writing; the Editor challenged him (for a thousand dollars!) to write a story with emotional impact - in six words. Hemingway’s six-word story: “For sale, baby shoes, never used.” His distinctive voice wasn’t a style, wasn’t a performance, it was him; Hemingway couldn’t not write like Hemingway. (And of course, he collected the thousand dollars.)
The central purpose and theme of this book, then, is to answer the question: what are the qualities and characteristics of Ray Robertson’s writing that set him apart and make his work immediately recognizable and distinctive?
“To successfully explore a significant theme,” Robertson writes in Mental Hygiene: On Writers and Writing, “requires telling a story.” So, I’d like tell a little story.
In 1974 I was an English graduate student getting straight Ds and on the cusp of dropping out. I simply didn’t understand what was expected in the program’s relentless demand for essays that discussed, analyzed, and critiqued books and authors. Then, in literally a one-minute encounter, an amiable and approachable professor gave me a simple precept that subsequently became my basic blueprint for scholarly writing. The good professor's formula: a clear question, three main points, and good examples. And that little organizational tool literally changed my life; instead of becoming a straight-D drop-out, it carried me through to a PhD - one of the Oral Examiners noted, with scholarly solemnity, that my dissertation was focused and well organized, with excellent examples - and I subsequently enjoyed a long and satisfying academic career.
So now I'd like to use that scholarly little sextant to surveil the kaleidoscopic landscape of Ray Robertson’s prodigious output, and to attempt to bring into sharper focus three of the salient qualities that, I believe, make his writing distinctive. It may be a simplistic approach to such a wide-ranging and complex body of work, but, as Crosby, Stills and Nash once sang so beautifully, What have you got to lose?
The central purpose of this book, then, is to answer the question: What are the qualities and characteristics that constitute Ray Robertson’s distinctive voice? To answer that question, I propose to use the good professor’s simple framework to examine the following three aspects of his writing:
A singular and distinctive theme running through all of Robertson’s work is what I am here calling The Creative Dilemma, the challenge of maintaining one’s artistic integrity in the face of conventional expectations. How does one pursue one’s creative vision while living in the material world? What comes first, the poem or the paycheque? The song or the salary? This dynamic conflict is a distinctive, recurring, and essential theme in Robertson’s work and also, I believe, in his own writing career.
A Verbal Playground of uninhibited linguistic virtuosity permeates Robertson’s work, where how something is said is just as important as what is said. “Word drunk,” proclaim several of Robertson’s back-cover blurbs, but his wonderful wordplay is not simply a decorative display of verbal dexterity; rather, for Robertson, the purposeful use of language, as well as the critical task of finding one’s voice, are essential components of good writing, and represent a distinctive aspect of his own work.
Laughing Out Loud humour! These days it may be a trite and overused phrase, but it’s been a long time since any author made me laugh out loud, and that alone is worth the price of admission to the Ray Robertson Zone. Much of his writing is just plain funny, and contagiously so. A novelist, a philosopher, a poet, and a comedian walk into a bar. “Hi Ray," says the bartender. But again, adding wit and humour to make us smile and laugh is not simply a superficial artifice; for Robertson, humour and sardonic satire, like the purposeful use of language, are in-and-of themselves essential components of good writing.
Therefore, a recurring and sustained focus throughout his work on the creative dilemmas facing artists in a mostly conformist and material world, the purposeful use of language and finding one’s literary voice, and a healthy dose of good old laugh-out-loud humour are not only, according to Robertson, essential ingredients of good writing, but for our purpose provide the hallmarks of his own distinctive style.
But before we begin this literary journey, another question needs to be addressed, namely, for whom is this book is intended?
Firstly, it is written both for all those who have read a Ray Robertson book and for all those who haven’t. For those who are already familiar with his work, this current book will hopefully enhance and enrich their enjoyment and understanding of the author’s craftsmanship; for those who are not yet familiar with his writing, this book will hopefully motivate them to visit a local bookstore or library or online bookseller and get their hands on one (or more) of his books. The 15 essays/reviews of his fifteen books, and the accompanying in-depth conversations with Robertson, will hopefully provide a particularly rich resource for readers and book clubs.
But this book is also intended for a second audience: aspiring writers. I believe that most (if not all) people have a book inside them, but having a story to tell and actually telling it, ie, getting it written, getting it down on paper (or screen), that’s, well, another story. And if by dint of courageous faith in yourself and pure determined stick-to-itiveness you miraculously make it through to those magical last words (“The End”), then savour that moment, because now there’s yet another mountain to climb, namely, getting it published, getting your story out into the world.
There are, of course, countless how-to-write-a-book books, but this isn’t one of them. Rather, this is a book about Ray Robertson’s writing craft and his writing life. However, in reading about how someone from a small town in Canada (Chatham, Ontario) actually managed to write and publish not one (an extraordinary feat in-and-of itself for most mere mortals) but fourteen books, you will vicariously discover here, I believe, a wealth of wisdom and insight and practical advice shared by someone who’s been there and done that.
Finally, who is this Roger Fisher who presumes to write a book about Ray Robertson? In brief, I’m a retired English teacher, a cancer-survivor, and a wannabe novelist who until relatively recently had never even heard of Ray Robertson.
In the intervening Covid-bound months, however, I read his entire oeuvre (with yellow highlighter and red pen in hand), filled five large Cambridge yellow-paged notebooks with comments, quotations, and questions, and soon found myself delightfully amused, astonished and, as the Brits say, gobsmacked. Whereupon I sent an e-mail to Ray Robertson congratulating him on his writing and (on the eve of his next book launch) offering to write an appreciative little profile about him and his work. Somehow that proposal morphed into this expanded project and so, with Ray’s full participation (through e-mail correspondence and in-person interviews), I set to work attempting to share my belief that here is an extraordinarily talented but inordinately under-recognized star of Canadian letters. The fact that you are holding this book in your hand (or reading it on your Kindle) tells me that you are either interested in discovering his work or, like me, you already relish this exceptional writer and want to better understand, appreciate, and/or simply enjoy more of his work. I loved reading his books and now want to, as they say, spread the word. And provide resources. And hopefully, in doing so, make us all better readers of Ray Robertson. And perhaps, better readers in general. And perhaps, for some, better writers. That is why I wrote this book.
There is a blurb on the back of one of Robertson’s books where a reviewer (David Worsley, 49th Shelf) asks
“what will have to happen for [Robertson] to get to the front rank of Canadian writing, as he so richly deserves?”
Maybe, hopefully, this little book will help to make that happen. So fasten your seatbelts, put on your baseball cap (Robertson’s favourite headwear), tune up your Telecaster, fire up your Kindle, and let’s cross over, tentatively but intrepidly, into . . . the Ray Robertson Zone.