LITERARY LOCATION: 4394 Main Street, Vancouver

D.M. Fraser lived above Morris's Second Hand Store at this location in an apartment dubbed the Vancouver Least Cultural Centre (a parody of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, a popular venue for theatre and music). Fraser's friends often gathered here for private literary readings. He became a semi-legendary, semi-underground figure - the brilliant, soft-spoken, alcoholic writer who did much of his work in seedy bars - during an era when some of his essays appeared in the Georgia Straight under the editorship of Bob Mercer. Escaping as far west as he could from the conservatism of his Nova Scotian upbringing, Fraser became a vital component of the Pulp Press collective that has given rise to Arsenal Pulp Press, the Three-Day Novel Contest and Geist magazine. Class Warfare (1974) and The Voice of Emma Sachs (1982) are his two major books. His friend Stephen Osborne described him as, "a writer admired for the beauty of his prose and sought after for the pleasure of his conversation."

QUICK REFERENCE ENTRY:

Alongside Malcolm Lowry, singing in the highest choirs in B.C.'s literary heaven, resides a sensitive, alcoholic genius named D.M. Fraser. Hardly anyone knows he's up there.

Born in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, in 1946, the only son of a Presbyterian minister and a high school teacher, Donald Murray Fraser grew up in coal-mining towns, particularly Glace Bay, and came west in 1967 to escape his background and to attend UBC. Instead he developed his astonishingly original prose style and published his first book of short stories, Class Warfare (1974), with Pulp Press, a loose, literary, left-leaning and self-mythologizing collective for which he served as an editor. Gentle and soft-spoken (his speech could be inaudible or slurred), Fraser was renowned as an habitué of east-side Vancouver bars. For many years he lived above a junk store at 28th and Main. In the wee hours he transcribed his estrangement into writing binges that culminated in a second brilliant collection, The Voice of Emma Sachs (1983). At the invitation of editor Bob Mercer, he wrote the short-lived column "Manners"; in the Georgia Straight, and he also published infrequently in other small magazines. He succumbed to a lung infection at age 39 in 1985, unable to complete his novel called Ignorant Armies. It was later edited by Bryan Carson and released in 1990. Also released posthumously was D.M. Fraser: The Collected Works, Volume One-Prelude (1987).

Publisher of Geist magazine, Stephen Osborne, Fraser's closest literary acquaintance, once described Fraser as "a writer admired for the beauty of his prose and sought after for the pleasure of his conversation."; Beneath Fraser's rumpled exterior was a sophisticated and highly sensitive self who often seemed like a refugee from an earlier age. He once said, "The society in which I grew up was repressive psychologically. I was taught to keep my feelings to myself. To be reserved and reticent. Boy, that training took. There are periods when you can overcome it and there are periods when it closes in and you think, my god, I'm giving too much away here. But writing, that's what it's for. You have to give it away.";

Fraser's stories resemble musical riffs more than conventional narratives, and several can be understood as fugues or variations on a repeating theme: in one story, written in 1973, a hair stylist inquires rhetorically: "Have you known the sweetness of life, do you remember it?"; and goes on to ask, "Have you danced to the gentle strains of Pachelbel, in the stilly night? Have you loitered till dawn in waterfront bars, contemplating the mythic sailors who never appear? Have you ever wanted to be an antelope?";

Fraser's appearance in Alan Twigg's overview of B.C. literature, The Essentials, is representative of literally dozens of accomplished fiction writers who could have been included in this book without much debate.

FULL ENTRY:

Born in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia in 1946, the only son of a Presbyterian minister and high school teacher, Fraser grew up in coal-mining towns, particularly Glace Bay. He took a B.A. at Acadia University and came west in 1967 to escape his background and attend UBC, but he left academic studies to become part of the collective that established Pulp Press.

He lived for many years above a junk store at 28th and Main. At the invitation of Georgia Straight editor Bob Mercer, he wrote the column Manners in the Georgia Straight, and was published infrequently in other small magazines such as Alive, Parallelogram Retrospective and Rough Beast. During his lifetime he published two critically acclaimed short story collections, Class Warfare (Pulp Press 1974) and The Voice of Emma Sachs (Pulp Press, 1982).

He died at age 39 to a lung infection in 1985, unable to complete his work on a novel to be called Ignorant Armies that was commenced in 1978. This manuscript was edited by Bryan Carson, a friend who had met Fraser at UBC in 1966, and released as Ignorant Armies (Pulp Press, 1990). Also released posthumously was D.M. Fraser: The Collected Works, Volume One -- Prelude (Pulp Press, 1987). A 25-minute film derived from Fraser's story called Marie Tyrell has been made by Vancouver filmmaker Flick Harrison.

Publisher of Geist magazine, Stephen Osborne, was Fraser's closest literary acquaintance and has paid tribute to Fraser's mystique and talent. "Fraser wrote his stories on scraps of paper in seedy beer parlours and transcribed them into galleys late at night on the typesetting machine in the office of the underground publishing house, which was situated between two downtown beer parlours and was never locked (during these sojourns Fraser was often accompanied by an unemployed night watchman who used to sleep on the fire escape in his uniform); when the stories were done the galleys appeared on the pasteup table, ready to be printed in the house periodical, a four-page zine called 3-Cent Pulp, where they set a literary standard rarely achieved by other magazines. Fraser's stories resemble musical riffs more than conventional narrative, and several can be classified as fugues or variations on a theme: in one of them, written in 1973, a hair stylist inquires rhetorically: 'Have you known the sweetness of life, do you remember it?' and goes on to ask, 'Have you danced to the gentle strains of Pachelbel, in the stilly night? Have you loitered till dawn in waterfront bars, contemplating the mythic sailors who never appear? Have you ever wanted to be an antelope?'"

BOOKS:

Class Warfare (Pulp Press 1974)
The Voice of Emma Sachs (Pulp Press, 1982)
D.M. Fraser: The Collected Works, Volume One -- Prelude (Pulp Press, 1987)
Ignorant Armies (Pulp Press, 1990).

[BCBW 2015]