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When the facts no longer support my argument, I change my mind," John Maynard, Lord Keynes retorted when challenged by a censorious adversary regarding an apparent inconsistency: "what is it that you do?" I had reason enough to reflect on that swift riposte as I worked my way carefully through David Solway's latest polemic on the often lamentable state of our national literature, a collection of essays initially published elsewhere but gathered together in a sometimes revised structure to present a consistent line of analysis. Director's Cut is a book sharply written and closely reasoned, a book shrewdly calculated to infuriate many, intrigue a few, and possibly even change a mind or two. Including, let me confess at the outset, my own.

But more of that later: the business immediately at hand is Solway's central thesis, the "Great Disconnect" between much of recent Canadian literature and "a relatively discerning nonspecialist readership," which should be of concern to everyone devoted to the serious cultivation of the literary arts in this country. Solway is that very rare phenomenon among us today, an evaluative critic emphasizing the highest aesthetic and intellectual standards in the appraisal of what our poets and novelists currently have on offer. While he takes as his realm of discourse the major genres, he understandably focuses on poetry, where his own practice serves as his most convincing array of credentials. ("The Insomniac's Lament," for instance, stands in my estimation as a wonderously well-achieved performance in the most technically demanding villanelle form, worthy of association with Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle" and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art.") This is a man intensely devoted to craft and art, a man passionately committed to "the poem as shapely utterance, as a constructed linguistic object irradiated by lexical joy no matter what its subject, and as something both demanding and accessible" to the "nonspecialist and sympathetic reader who forms the poet's ideal audience."

Not since Robertson Davies wrote in praise of what he termed "the clerisy" has the role of the literate general reader as ultimate arbitrator of artistic merit been so resolutely advanced in this country. Advanced, it must be stressed, in contrast to "the wiredrawn and overly convoluted theoretical preoccupations of the vanguard moderns and postmodern successors" that have "created an aesthetic state of affairs more or less incomprehensible to anyone who is not a specialist in the field"; it is as corrective to such excessively-refined confusion that Solway prefers the tastes of intelligent, sensitive and variously educated lay readers like his neighbor, "a retired engineer" who "reads Houseman and Hardy and listens to recordings of Dylan Thomas." Conceding that "the question of a poet's readership is not a simple one," he is nevertheless justified in contending that the decline of a wider general audience for serious poetry has now stranded the poet "in a cultural vacuum that could be filled only in part and variously sustained by the life-support system offered by the university." It is a life-support system Solway knows only too well. He has lectured for years at John Abbott College, he has served as writer-in-residence at Concordia University, and he has published prolifically in the academic and intellectual press. Consequently, when he denounces "the unholy alliance between the poet and the academic, the one feeding off the other in symbiotic futility," we should brace ourselves for a spell of Keynesian reflection.

The opening chapter, "The Colour of Literature," dominates all that follows in a profoundly provocative sense. Taking as his point of departure an article by George Elliott Clarke in the National Post entitled "Can only white authors teach anti-racism?" Solway challenges the prevailing and passively accepted excesses of academic "Political Correctness" as a matter of moral and aesthetic duty. He vigorously rejects Clarke's "loaded and patently absurd terms 'white-authored' and 'black-authored' texts" as "facile and invidious" primary critical mechanisms for the evaluation and ranking of literary works. Objecting to the obvious "prejudice" in any practice of "foregrounding 'black' texts against their apparent lexical competitors," he protests that "for Clarke, it is plainly skin colour that determines artistic credibility and value, not imaginative power or narrative competence." While conceding both the intellectual and ethical probity of promoting "the 'often superior' works of black authors like Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright" in any discussion of racism, he strenuously contends "this is as far as [Clarke's] disposition should be allowed to go." The arbitrary preferential treatment of "black-authored texts," solely or even primarily on the basis of the author's race, is just plain pernicious and wrong. "Like Clarke, I too derive from a persecuted people, and I too grew up in a small bigoted community town riven with intolerance and hatred," Solway writes sombrely. "But neither I nor my parents ever objected to Shakespeare's cunning Shylock, a fixture on the curriculum, whom we appreciated as a character in a play ... and indeed we could detect a quality of mercy in our noblest writer which complexified poor Shylock and even established a case for him." This is powerful stuff. "Insight, verbal authority and creative ability carry no pigmentation," Solway declares: "no literary work is 'white-authored' or 'black-authored' or 'Jew-authored' or 'male-authored' or 'woman-authored' except in a secondary or tributary sense." And, dammit, he's right. We have not seen such forthright moral criticism since the days of Samuel Johnson.

It is essential to recognize how readily this moral perspective leads us seamlessly into the broader aesthetic judgments constituting the body of the work. If it is wrong to acquiesce when political correctness transudes queasily into something perilously akin to neo-racism, Solway insists, then it is equally wrong to acquiesce when the literary intelligentsia collectively band together in "diffidence and complicity, the major default features of a critical address that insists on treating what is really entry-level work with inordinate respect and even admiration." No such acquiescence from this critic, at any rate. "Here one must draw the line," he declaims. And draw it he does, with some vengeance, beginning with "the Big Four - Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Carson." Purdy was "the Stompin' Tom Connors of the poetry world," generating reams of material that "embedded all the right Canadian gestures, the apotheosis of eh, ultimately better suited, given its staunchlessness and redundance, to the habits of a campfire raconteur or a drinking buddy in his cups." Carson is "a cipher" as a writer, "not so much a poet as a prize-reaping machine," her poetry "the latest and most conspicuous instalment in the saga of aesthetic tastelessness, derivativeness, institutional bad writing, critical stupefaction and quasi-intellectual self-promotion." Atwood is "a drone" and Ondaatje is "an entrepreneur," no matter whether considered "as novelists or poets or both." Anil's Ghost and Oryx and Crake "move even further into the Realm of the Drear and Dreadful, in the first case cloyingly 'lyrical' and in the second, saplessly cerebral." A newcomer like Yann Martel finds himself assigned to this company, but not much to his advantage. The English Patient, The Blind Assassin and Life of Pi are "among the most boring, uninflected and monochromatic novels ever written and published in this country." As with these widely acclaimed figures, so too with "the little infinite of fellow travellers ... who populate the journals, reading circuits, chat rooms, granting corridors and minority festivals." Many of these, Solway sardonically asserts, "I coffin within."

To be perfectly frank, as recently as a few years ago, I would have considered most of this aesthetic angst a regrettable waste of a fine critic's time and effort. At the very least, here we have an extremely clever man running the risk of being contemptuously snubbed as (in his own opening turn of phrase) "a hometown Savonarola committing most of contemporary Canadian literature to the bonfire of the inanities." Moreover, even if his tumultuous trashings of many well-established literary reputations should in the end prove to be tenable, one might nonetheless still ask: why bother? After all, in the long run, what does artistic ineptitude - however over-praised in its own era - really matter? "In literature," Solway trenchantly notes in passing, "time is the best editor." Each generation of readers will exclusively cherish its own fads and foibles, consistently and expeditiously consigning the different but equally ephemeral fads and foibles of the previous generations to well-deserved obscurity: this is an almost infallible winnowing process that nothing but the most enduring of literary art can withstand. That being the case, why not let time do the work for us? Let's concentrate our critical expertise on the task of singling out and praising our finest work, the work with the greatest potential to endure, I modestly proposed in my own first collection of critical essays. "The proper task of the critic is the exploration of art of classic stature,"I maintained at the conclusion of A Due Sense of Differences: "not the condemnation of art that does not have that stature." In the long run, artistic trash finds its own way to the aesthetic landfill. Leave it alone, it will be soon gone on its own.

Yes, but .... here, as I said earlier, I must confess I am changing my mind. "In the long run," Lord Keynes also famously remarked, "we are all dead." What then of the short run, which we all inhabit and which we all must assess as competently as possible? It is the short run, as this book serves to remind us, that necessarily confronts us throughout our lives. And the problem with our Canadian literary criticism in the short run - a fact I failed to properly acknowledge some two decades ago - is that far too much of it constitutes unstinting and unwarranted praise for highly suspect performances. Thumbing through collection after collection of contemporary poetry, taking Solway's chosen field as primary point of reference, it is hard not to concur with his dismissive snort of derision: "far too many of the poems written by the overwhelming majority of our poets read as if they have been phoned in." Subjective, arbitrary and uncertain as critical methodology might be, it is all we have: and those of us self-appointed to appraise the full range of literary powers have an ethical obligation to exercise our discipline as fairly and as accurately as possible. Since we must concede Solway is unassailable when he scorns the implicit "censorship" of racial "special pleading," we should not flinch away when he spurns as "turgid, spurious and pedestrian ... almost all of the poetry (and much of the fiction)" written in the country today. If he is right, we should muster the courage to face that fact. If he is wrong, the defenders of the artistry he assails have an aesthetic and ethical duty to demonstrate as much. Over time, and in the long run, pace my Lord Keynes, the winnowing process will decide.

And in that process, I strongly suspect Solway is right about the determining readership. Academic scholarship is as prone to fads and foibles as any other dimension of human behavior, and much of what passes for modern aesthetic criticism is quite simply so convoluted, obscure and irrelevant that it cannot forever prevail against the collective common sense of intelligent non-academic readers. What the scholars and professional critics of the present cherish, the readers of the future might well reject. "Who now reads Cowley?" Alexander Pope sneered. That's a line, in all humility, artists and critics alike should never forget. Whatever the professional readership of any era chooses to exalt, it remains with the much larger readership of ongoing time to determine what will endure. Alexander Pope understood that. Samuel Johnson understood that. Robertson Davies understood that. And so does David Solway.