Magnetic Dogs, Stories by Bruce Meyer

The attachment of a white dog to a black dog on the cover of Bruce Meyer’s latest collection of short stories resembles a Rorschach test. It also looks like a geographic version or inversion of Canada and the United States, a tension played out in “Magnetic Dogs,” the eponymous story in this volume. The black dog is named Ink, the white Paper, and each has a magnetic attraction and repulsion to the other. These polarities run through many of Meyer’s short stories in Magnetic Dogs which feature canines, mythical animals, and imaginative recreations of historic figures.

“…polarities run through many of Meyer’s short stories in Magnetic Dogs that feature canines, mythical animals, and imaginative recreations of historic figures.”

“Magnetic Dogs” begins with a series of simple sentences and copula verbs, meant to initiate a fable and to imitate these creatures of the imagination belonging to the young first-person narrator. “This is a story of two dogs. One is black. The other is white. One is called Ink and the other Paper.” This straightforward postmodern fable begins to expand: “They are supposed to belong together because they have magnets attached to their feet.” Meyer’s fables or allegories are about the complexities of belonging within family, society, or story, and the magnetic forces that attract and repel senses of togetherness. “The magnets help them stand up, and when they are turned over on their sides the magnets stick together and won’t let go.” These magnets and dogs are emblematic of the characters who stick together but fall apart after severe pressures are placed on their lives. Ink and paper spin their stories.

They “supposedly came from the same litter of Scotty dogs. That’s a story that was made up about them.” Stories about families abound in fact and fiction. “Litter is an odd word,” and the narrator defines its various meanings before he turns to his own family members who split up. “There was a woman who was my mother and she could not forgive my father.” The story circles around his family, slowly spreading: “That is why I have to find my sister. She has Ink and I have Paper. We have a story we need to finish.” Down and out across North America, the family is divided between mother and daughter, who need the United States; and father and son, who seek Canada.” Mom “read the restless writings of Steinbeck and Kerouac, the literature of perpetual motion.” On the other side of the 49^th parallel, “My father knew where the north was …. He was the real compass.” The magnetic dogs are symbols of a past that the narrator wants to cling to, but the magnets will not hold family or nations together in the perpetual motion of ink and paper. Meyer’s first-person narrators hover over the north but encompass other directions around the world and history.

The first and last stories contain musical motifs that serve as magnetic bookends for the collection. “Cantique de Jean Racine” announces the narrator’s love for the frailty of music: “I believe every note has an afterlife, not merely silence, and that is what brought me to the École Niedermeyer today to research the failure and triumph of sounds that last forever.” Meyer’s first-person narrators explore the afterlife of historical moments, in this case, the career of Gabriel Fauré who failed to win the composition competition in 1863 with his score of Psalm 126. The following year Fauré did win, and the narrator researches the archives for the differences between those two years. Meyer’s musical analysis is incisive, stirring, and filled with allusions from Lorca’s duende to Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand played by Paul Wittgenstein. The key of D flat Major links these historical figures, for it is the key of tragedy and also emergence. The author recreates the mood of suffering, as the music enters his prose and the light begins to sing in the aperçu and its aftermath. His epiphanies radiate to include Leonard Cohen and Louis Dudek (in a Canadian aside). The only false note is the reference to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake which, like Forster’s Howards End, does not have an apostrophe, but that is not enough to spoil the otherwise sublime moments in the story.

The final story, “Chaconne,” revolves around a Toronto quartet playing Vitali’s “Chaconne pour Violon.” One of the characters, James Bennett, loses his job at the University of Toronto after a brief affair with one of his students: “he saw the house of cards he had built collapse.” This motif of falling, physically or morally, recurs in most of the stories in Magnetic Dogs. Bennett and the narrator, Mike Tweegie, panhandle the same corner and wander along the streets downtown. When they enter a classical music store, and the narrator hears Vitali’s “Chaconne,” he collapses: “I writhed on the floor,” and is transformed. With a couple of buskers, James and Tweegie form a quartet on improvised instruments. They play from the Park Hyatt Rooftop Lounge and go out onto the terrace where their music crosses to the Church of the Redeemer. They are soon arrested, but the story ends with a sense of redemption and transformation through the power of art: “to delight those who hunger to know what lies behind all the masked faces they pass without a second thought, and to teach what it is to love the world as one would a wild and hopeless dream.” Filled with dreams, masking and unmasking faces, Meyer’s stories teach complex lessons and delight the reader.

“Balcony Scene” signals the kind of liminal space featured in other stories. This replay of Romeo and Juliet tracks a belated love affair between Julia Cassavoy and Ron Montalet where the feuding families live in a “no-man’s-land” complete with a “juliet balcony” in a seniors’ residence. Scores are settled and families reconciled. “The Adagio flowed between the two sides of the town and the sun rose and set several minutes later each day until the season changed and darkness settled on both sides of the river as winter arrived.” The adagio river and rhythm point to Meyer, the lyrical poet of parataxis whose “ands” magnetize characters, situations, and the slow flow of seasons and ages.

“Commerce” enumerates the numbers and casualties involved in the construction of the Bank of Commerce. “Dragon Blood” re-enacts the St. George and the dragon myth, while “Tilting” modernizes Don Quixote attacking wind turbines. “But the windmills kept on turning, either right before our eyes or in our dreams as if they were the hands of clocks.” Meyer synchronizes history, tilting blades, and cutting through time. “I’m a goddamned legend now! … You can tell them this is where I killed a monster.” He exploits various monsters because they are creatures who show (from the French montrer) the way toward epiphanies at the end of stories.

“Leipszthou” demonstrates once again a preoccupation with family history and precarious architecture. “I always wondered why my grandfather had ordered workmen to leave a portion of the balustrade missing from the balcony of his office tower.” The gap is not simply spatial, but temporal as well, since the story focuses on the outbreak of World War I. Whereas his father and grandfather had known extended periods of peace, the narrator is about to experience war: “I could fall and let the world fall with me into an abyss of change and dirt.” The family’s successful laundry business, an ironic empire of cleanliness, is about to fall apart. The final section reiterates the dynamics of magnetism, gravity, and catastrophe: “I thought of all the people who were slipping between clean sheets and holding their partners as they fell asleep together.”

“The Slithy Toves” plays with Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” Humpty Dumpty’s fall, Alice’s tumble down a rabbit hole, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Meyer detects whatever is down in the ground and elevates it in each and every story; his “wabe” goes a long way before, behind, and beyond in short spaces.

Bruce Meyer is the author of more than sixty books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, literary journalism, and literary criticism. He has had two national bestsellers, The Golden Thread: A Reader’s Journey Through the Great Books (2000) and Portraits of Canadian Authors (2016). He is twice the winner of the E.J. Pratt Gold Medal and Prize for Poetry and the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize for the best poem. He was the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie. He is a professor of Poetry at Victoria College in the University of Toronto and a professor of Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at Georgian College in Barrie.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Guernica Editions (Oct. 1 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 100 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771837497
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771837491

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.