[TOR] "The City Rediscovered"

[rfmcdonald]

Thank Shawn Micallef at Spacing.ca for linking to Margaret Atwood's "The City Rediscovered", a 1982 travelogue that she wrote for The New York Times on her home city.

When I was growing up in Toronto as a child, in the 1940's, I loathed it. I associated it with standing in the slush with dampness seeping through my boots, itchy bloomers, gray muggy skies, old ladies who hit your knuckles with the metal edge of the ruler if you didn't know the words to ''Rule, Britannia.'' Later, when I was in high school, I liked Toronto a little better, though not much. There did not seem to be a great deal to do, apart from sock hops, smoking in the washrooms and avoiding the appearance of being too interested in frog dissection. As for university, it produces angst in the best of us, and I was probably wrong to attribute mine specially to Toronto. Nevertheless, I did.

As I aged, I was pleased to discover that I was not the only person who found Toronto loathsome. Almost everyone else did too. Montreal was where international flavor, international finance and naughtiness (which meant, to Torontonians, wine with dinner) reigned supreme. New York was where the truly sophisticated hung out, and Buffalo was where you went if you couldn't afford the other two. Toronto was ... well, Toronto was where you lived when you weren't having fun. The notion of anyone actually visiting Toronto, for any purpose other than to attend the sickbed of a moribund relative, was alien to me. I set my first published novel in Toronto (where else was I to set it?) but was so embarassed by the location that I never actually named the city and disguised the street names as best I could. Everyone knew that real novels were not set in Toronto.

Toronto has a long history of being loathed. When it was York, as it was known until 1834, it was ''muddy York,'' with good reason. Anna Jameson, an intrepid Englishwoman who breezed through in 1836, called it ''a fourth- or fifth-rate provincial city,'' and went on at some length about the inhabitants' pretentiousness, meanness of spirit, self-righteousness, smugness and general lack of charm - sentiments you could gather today from any Vancouverite or Calgarian at the drop of a name. Dickens sneered at it; almost a century later, Wyndham Lewis, who got stuck in it during World War II, was still sneering at it. In the 1950's it was known as ''Toronto the Good,'' not flatteringly. On Sundays, in tribute to the sentiments of its still-prominent Methodists, it was closed up tighter than an uppermiddle class matron's mouth after she'd just said, ''If you can't say anything good, don't say anything at all.''

[. . .]

In 1961, I shook the clay of Toronto from my feet, forever I thought, and except for a few interludes that were even more emotionally grotesque than fourth grade, I did not return for 10 years. In the interval, strange things happened, and not only to me. By the time I moved back, a decision that had everything to do with money, Toronto had changed. People were actually admitting that they lived there.

As the poster and commenters at Spacing.ca note, in addition to its noted literary merit and wonderful grim humour Atwood's overview of New Wave-era Toronto is worth reading for its take on a Toronto gone twenty-five years.