FE47VRES PmmaFarStar.ThesweetsanityofMiriamWaddinglon. ByAIberrMoritz ...... 5 TheOlher Cnandion. Novelist, essayist. and mandarin, Nai’m K&Ian is our most cosmopolitan writer. By Wayne Gmdy...... 9 The Gift of the Gab. A r.%iew of Anton& Maillet’s P&h?. By Marcy Kahan ...... 17 The~‘erlic~1Man.ArevieaofW.H.Auden:ABiogrcrplly.ByM.B. Thompson ...... 21

REVIEWS Coming to Grips v&b Lucy, by George McWhirter; The Driver, by Nora Keeling ...... 11 RIsAlwoysSummer. byDgvidH&vig ...... 12 The Dess’g December, by Saul Bellow ...... 12 Going Gmnd, by Jack MacLeod ...... 14 The Mad River and Other Stories, by Douglas H. Glover...... 16 TbeNobeIPtizeAcceptance Speech, by Tom Wayman; In Transit, by Colin Morton: A New Improved Sky, by Don Kerr ...... 26 Fla~slntheGIas:ASelf-Portrait,byPatridcWhire ...... 22

DEPARTMENTS Field Notes, by Paul Gibson and&sun Grimbiy ...... 3 The Browser, by Morris Wolfe ...... 30 Inlerview with Antonine Maillet, by Doris Cowan ...... 24 Letters ...... 31 E@lsh, Oar Et@lsb, by Bob Blackburn ...... M CnnWit No. 73 ...... 32 First Impressions, by Douglas Hill ...... 28 The Editors Recommend ...... 34 In Translation, by Paul Stuewe ...... 29 Books Received ...... 34

CO~RlBUT0R.S Trm Avey ls a Toronto graphic artist and designer. Bob Blackburn writes frequentlyabout English usage in these pages. DuBsrry Campru is a Toronto freelance titer. Mutt C&en’s most recent book is The Erpmiale: Colked Short Stork (New Prcrs). dnmie Conklin is a Winnipeg freelancewriter. Dorb Cowan is a contniuting editor of Books in Can&~. GaryDraper leaches CanLit at the Universily of Weslan Ontario. Paul Gibson and Susan Grtmblg me freelance miters in Toronto. Douglas Hill’s tits1 novel. The Scmnd Trap. is to be published this summer by Breakwater Books. Mmy Kaban is a teacher and playwright. Tommo misl Steve McCabe’s drawings appear thmughou! this issue. Albert Morltz is a Toronto poet and tnnslalor. BarbaraNovak is the aulhor of a children’sbook, The SewerGlmc TreesPress). Paul Orrnsteinis aToronto photographer.Libby Sckele~is currentlyat work on a collecdon of poems and a series of shon stories. RupertBchieder teachhaEnglish 91 Trinky Cottage. University of Toronto. Paul Sbmve writes frequentlyabout books in tnnslation in these pa&m. M.B. Thompson teaches English at Carleton University. Marrls Wolfe teaches film history at the Ontario College of An.

EDITOR 0 Michael Smith MANAGING EDITOR 0 Wayne Grady ART DIREnOR 0 Mary Lu Tams GENBRAL MANAGER and ADVERTISING MANAGER 0 Susan Traer CIRCULATION MANAGER 0 Susan Aihoshi CONSULTANTS 0 Robert Farrelly 0 Jack Jensen CGNTI(IBUTING EDITORS 0 (West Coast) 0 (Prairies) 0 Doris Cowan 0 Douglas Hill Christopher Humc 0 David Macfgrlane 0 Stephen Scobie 0 Sheila Fischman () 0 Phil Milna (East Coast) Tim Heald (Europe)

----T-1?- - T ,_. ,:... ~ .., .,_,,.. _;P. ., ..r..-...~,*~.. ._ . ..W& _,. .,a :.. ..:. .,.y _.Iz:_,. rative and interviews. which are in ml- atavistic t&d pnr eweellence. Here the our, and provide a kind of parallel to main character, Christine Forestier. dur- Aquins own life. In their fictional ing a series of personal tragedies, writes LST AU~,IJST. fiveyears afterHubert essence they authenticate, curiously. the novel while simultaneously commen- Ayuin’s suicide in 1977, Deux e@o+s Aquin’s escape from the public eye just ting on a medieval text on which she is &~a b vie d’Huber~ Aquin. directed by after he resigned fmm the RIN in order trying to write a Ph.D. thesis. The rela- Jacques Godbout, was shown on Radio- to “fight clandestinely” for Quebec’s tionship of her readii to her writing is ’s Les Beaux Dimanches series. independence. In Pro&in episode, in that of direct parallel, although situations The film now is available fmm the which he traces the exploits of an errant and characters ate sometimes reversed, National Film Board as no Epimdes in writer in search of a spy who may or may just as the excerpts from Faux Bond are 111eLife of HuberrAqu&. and is a not exist, Aquin depicts himself as “the clearly paralleled by the narration. cclcomc introduction to the complex fragmented symbol of the Quebec rev+ I” The chltuml Fatigue of Canada,” personality and career of one of lution, its fractured reflection and its an essay included in Contempomry Quebec’s most enigmatic writers. suicidal incarnation.” The novel was Quebec Critictim, edited and translated The film coven roughly the last 13 written while Aquin was confmed to a by Larry Shouldice. Aquin says that the ycarr of Aquin’s life, tracing hi clinic awaiting trial. although it was “French Canadian is, in the proper and dwclopment from political to literary published after his release: the film does !i.gural sense, a double agent.” In 1972, activism, from Ids involvement in the not mention that in 1966-67Aquin’s stay Jacques Godbout. who joined the Film early ’60s with Quebec’s separatist in Switzerland was temdnated by the Board in the late 195Os,made a spy fti Rllssemblemenl pour I’Ittd&wndatxe Swiss authorities when they learned of called IXE-13 that was based on a serisl iCadona/lr.through his arrest in 1964 for hi criminal record, an account of which novel of the same name. In a review of car theft, hi subsequent imprisonment, is given in Aquin’s short autobic- the tilm in the Monrreal GazetIe, God- the publication of his first novel, Pm- graphical work, Poinle de Jiik bout is quoted as saying, “Many people cirtda @ode. in 1965. to his sudden The second half of Two Episode is had tead 1X5X3 years before. For them suicide ir, March, 1977. There is as WII a devoted to the events leading up to the movie WBOhalf-way between nosta- photo-montage section that deals with Aquin’s death. The excerpts from Faux lgia and put-on. Two Episodes begins in Aquin’s life before 1964 - the early Bond cease, and Yanocopoulo’s account a similar vein, but it quickly moves days of the RIN. the founding of the takes over the narration. Her delivery is beyond a put-on. Aquin seems to have literary review Libertd, and Aquin’s detailed and remarkably !memotional as worked hard at creating an image of v:ork as a film director at the NFB and it demonstrates her wmplicity in the himself, which Godbout recreates so CBC. This section, with its accompany- actions of ha husband: indeed, underly- well that one suspects Aquin of h@ng ing narrative, puts Aquin’s later private ing her account of the incident is the predicted the rough outline of the film. rz;xies into a more public context. right of the individual to suicide. ‘What In Junr. 1964. Aquin stole the auto- I invent,” says Aquin in Pmchain mobile of Ad&n Pinard, a priest who epirode “1 have lived; what I kill is $horrd political sympathies with Aquin already dead.” In fact, 7’~ Epiroder is and so did not press charges. Aquin was not so much a complete biography as a arrested and tried anyway, and the sort of docu-drama that neverthe& sipniticance of the theft to Aquin’s becomes the image of Aquin as writer. subsequent care- is brought out in The voice of the later Aquin is in sewal interviews, in&ding those with many wys the literary correlative to his Pinard, with Pierre Lefebvre, a psychi- earlier political despondency. In the atrist and co-founder of Liberlti, and novels one notes an increasing sense of S’I’RONOSTATEMHNTS are Dorothy rith Claude Wagoer, who was the judge resignation, a growing belief in the Livesay’s trademark. The capitalistic at Aquin’s trial. Other interviews, inclu- impossibility of “originality.” In Pm-. system that caused the Depression, the ding the substantial accmmt given by . chain epkode, for example., he states: “I amw race, and the “men-only” cad to Aquin’s widow. And& Yanocopoulo. sense that my improvisation is plunging society have all drawn her outspoken tme Aquin’s increasing estrangement into an atavistic mould, and that my criticism; bet poetry forges through the from being politically eng&. The rivet of spontaneity is banked with an unruly character of her times. But, dirtinguirldng features of 7~0 Epkodes, ancient alluvium. I am not writing, I atn besides developing what Mrs. E.J. Pratt howver. rest in the two long interviews written.” His second novel, Blackout. calls a “crisp, harmonious way of ‘: v:ith the writer himself, and in the series through the development of the fEdanal writing,” Dorothy Livesay has also of excerpts friun Aquin’s. television editorial intervention that provides a developed a greater understanding of drama, Faux Bond, about a double substantial subtext to the main text, life. In an interview recently broadcast a:.mt rho was played by Aquin himself. undemdnes the author’s primacy in a on CBGTV she said, “It’s quite matvel- Exwprs from Faw Bond, in black similar f&don. The third novel, L’And- lous, you know, to grow older and to and white. contrast neatly with the nar- phonaire (The Anttphonary), is Aquin’s have perspective. Suddenly, I begin to

I

- .- .r. _. ..._~._ ._.._. _ . . . .._ i__~.___ ..- ~..- ._I. --... -_ - -.-.. - --.--- -~ feel 1 understand.” The vx.rld bar fd- wanted to marry (“I saw the women Where previously she had published a ly caught ttp with this fiemely indepett- chained tom&t”). and wheo her hus- book everyfive yesrs. the poet (who will dent woman. attd David Tock&‘s pm- band did ltt the late ’50s she took a be writer-in-residentsat Massey College fti, The Womm I Am, pays her a teaching contract in Zambia through next year) has for the past decade pub tribute that is long overdue. UNESCO. She returned to Canada lished a book nearly every year. The Narrated by Harry J. Boyle, the film -.. woman’s movement has helped, yet she begtis with tt list of Live&s achieve still is not widely known outside her lit- mats and then trips back in time to ha r-- .-- q erary circle. “I felt this wss a neglected so&list start in Winnipeg. Born in 1909 area,” saysTucker. “Here wasa woman to J.F.B. Liwzsay. founder of the Cank who had been writing for 60 years, and dian Press wire service, and Florence she was not exactlya household word.” Livesay. a wita and feminist who Between the intetvlews and mntmettts “struck out on her ovm,” Dorothy was from such fwres as John Robert Col- a delicate and painfidly shy child. “The ombo, Patrick Lane, and David vzorld tossed me off,” she wrote. and &oason. Tucker has managed to plant when she moved to the “tight Victorian as many poems as possible. “The temp. Toronto” of 1920, she found the exper- ration is to watt to not all of the poetry ience traumatic. Nevertheless, her . . . it’s so good. mtitbtg blossomed. With encourasment “The reason writers are neglected as from E.J. Pratt, she published Green ~levisiott subjects,? says Tucker. “is Pifchw before she was 19. obviously because. on fdm, the easiest During the Depression. after studies thing to do is a visual artist. Poetty is a at the Utivetsity of Toronto and the challe4tge.” Poeuy is not uy to Sorbotme. Livesay’s poetry became pro- translate onto the constticte.d plane of pagandistic. It was not until she dii- ,_..-- _ - television, but it seems apt somehow covered W.H. Auden that her witittg LloroIhy Litway that the face of the woman who d&es became lyrical again. Disillusioned with the banality of life by witiing “I need Commtmism, she married in the late refreshed. her poetry fiw, to teach attd never walk to the store again. . . video 1930; and raised a family. During the to contibttte support to httmattist con- games are here” should appear on a TV ’40s and ‘SOSshe published poetry that Cerns. screen to throw gtapphg hooks with focoscd on the human individual and the What Livesay has given to the world is poetry, htdttg the “commoner” back to x:oman ltt society. She hadn’t really inae.asiDgly being ,mtumed to her. the real world. -S”SANQtthBLY

A CHAIN OF VOICE.9 Andre Brink THE OTTAWYMEN This is the story of two boys, one white,‘one The Civil Service Mandarins 1935 - 1957 ’ black, whose lives are linked together by the J. L. Granatstein , bonds of tiicaanerdom. As they grow up, The Ottawa Men is a study of the small group of however, one the master, the other the slave, mandarins who held sway in Ottawa from 1935 to their relationship turns sour. Nicolaas is too 1957. 0. D. Sk&on, Clifford Clark and Graham weak to fulfil the roll of boss. Galant is too Towers were the founders of the mandarinate that strong-willed and certain to be content’with dominated thii period, and their power bases were in the pain and deprivation of being nothing External Affairs, Finance and the Bank of Canada. more than the white man’s chattel. The Through careful recruiting they br&ght a remarkably themes of slavery and oppression find more able group ofjuniors to Ottawa - men like Lester Pearson, Jack Picker&, Robert Btyce, W. A. and more fateful expression in the lives of Mackintosh and Louis Rasminsky - who inturn Nicolaas and Galant. Ironically, the more rose to hold positions of enormous power. Working they clash, the more they find themselves closely togetkeer, and with the governments of _ bound together by circumstances and their Mackenzie King and Louis St Laurent, they created own conflicting desires. a modern gove&mental apparatus for C&da that This gripping novel moves to its horrif$ng could respond effectively to the most sophisticated climax with the inexorable power of Greek economic and political advice. The Ottawa &fen tells the story of the family, social and political tragedy. 528 pages yzetat bound together this extraordinary group . 352 pages, 30 illustrations Cloth 824.95 PROFILE I--

‘I don’t have the place in that I think I deserve,’ says Miriam Waddington. ‘I’m a Jew, a woman, and I hate all this about blood and knives’ By ALBERT MORITZ

A FE!!! HUNDREDYARM fmm Metropolitan Toronto’s Don Born b4ii Dworkltt in Wianlpeg in 1917, she. was Mills Road, roaring with mid-afternoon tmffz. Miriam Wad- brought up speaking. readii, and writing Yiddish as well as dington’s small piece of ground is quiet. There are early English. Her father, a White Russian, was a so&&t and finches in iineighboar’s ornamental birch tree, which thrusts activist who emigrated about 1410; her mother was slro a RI&.- up through the piled snow into the year’s fust warm sun. At siaa Jew, aad had gone to Moose Jaw to work as a nurse. The her door, Waddiigton is part of the brightness of winter on two met and married la Winnipeg, where Waddington’s father the verge of spring. At 64 she is markedly vigorous in gaze and opened a one-man aieat curing factory. The familywas deeply movement. Her self-deprecating geniality and wit, her spon- involved in the vivid intellectual life of Winnipeg’s Russian tvleous olrerflow of talk, express a lively play of ideas and Jewish community. “Our home,” Waddington t&all& “was pointed ironies. “I alvm~swonder how I can make my work always beillg visited by Jewish and Yiddish witem aad ti bmd more fascinating;” she tar-em. Some of them were SYS. Iauncbim obllquelv into r -- --- zionlsts, soclaIlsts, atmmhkts, a favomite tol;ic, th;thimatic r? but there were poets aad mu.& aad stylistic preoccupations of cims and actors as well. The conttiporati with& “Some ( community valued these people. writers make great theoretical very bitzhly. aad they’d often pronouncements. Or they talk c&e to OUT house when they about their image.,the function wem in Winnipeg to lecture. 2 of the imaae in their work. There were no class dlltlno 5 hat kind of image can yea tions among those P~OPIC. ti have when you’re sqe - sanl- Everyone wo&l gather-&d z ty is a great disadvantage - a. table for a party in tie old ? and )~a wuk and you’re not a .! RussIan way. n&ii Iike ; poor wlf. At least not out- Canadian part&. They would . r’ rardly: all~~ sit around the table for the 3 In life as in her work, Wad- eatbe evening, aad ewyihb~ E din,- is wonderstruck by the you could ever waat would be 9 acat middle range of human on that table: food, wine, $ e:ipeTiencc. Her poetry has wb~2sky, cake-s.The party,” she y aJ!vys celebrated the depths adds mile&e& “~84 ee ;i wthm common thiw, depths i basic this: singing, recltlng, g beyond mysticism and pain. aad impassioned talk.” 2 Like her poetry, ha talk ranges It WBSa climate of political 0” freelyand often touches realms ratber’thaa literary ideas. The S of death, poverty. and loss, but people were not p&arily coa- z is new tempted to detine life !Icemedtiththeiinewcana- in such terms. Waddlngton know that such aa outlook makes dian situation. Their thoughts harked back to Europe, to the her aa outsider, an anomaly, in present-day literature. At the problems of a Jewish homeland and of justice and political tame time she is the grateful heir of a strong tradition, aad is representation for the poor. In 1931 the family moved to far fmm concelviag herself as being alone. Ottawa Miriam at 13 began to be more pemonally bwolved in “My x011: has a certain swetaess of idea and language,” the Jewish intellstual life that was centred in the capitalaadia she says. giving the syIlable “sweet” an inflection that removes Montreal, and which included maay writers. The poetry she all its treacle and leaves it meaalng “fresh and free of bit- had.began to write in sixth grade -to the attention of Ida terness.” “This comes largely from my familiarity with Massey, “a Yiddish poet and a very bohemian hostess of a another Literature and other traditions. I’m really a Europeaa salon” in Montreal witer. Often when people like my poetry, 1 still thll they “She wasn’t rich:” Waddll recalls. “She lived on the don’t reslly know what I’m witling from. The tmdltion I was Rsplanade, and she would entertain every &well@ Ylddlsb brought up in is a very civilized tradition, not a cruel, not a artist with emUus caps of tea, bread, jam, cak&,.whateva she violent tradition. There wasn’t suppression in the society of had.” For the yoang Wadhton, the parade of nomadic and my childhood. You didn’t have to take your passions ouklde. resident Depression-em Jewish writers, artists, aad i&&c- You didn’t have to hide your feellags or hate secretly. You ttmls that visited Ida Massey’s home was the iatmdwtioa to a could hate openly, and love. I was also ludry because it was a life lived for mt. It was there that she fIti heard of AaaIs Nin society very permissive to chlldrea.” and Henry Miller, and it was there that a Yiddish woman poet

.._.,_ .. . :.___.,,. _..__: ,.. .--..v.,-- -_.._ _ ._... -. -.._...... __...... _ -.- ..- . _ . . . . su89cstcd to her a pmjcct she still contemplates - an episodic because they demand the same kind of pakutaking and epic about wo”en from sll walks and rsnks of life. psychologicallycostly dedication as any OF the otker creak Waddington soon began to form ha own literary opi- arts, white the mmrds are usually non&tent. . . nions and to reed such writers as Yeats, Edna st. Vincent The thing tkat we [Cmmdiin writers] all share is tkat, like Millay, Sara Teasdale, Jacob Wasserman. Remain Roland, Sutherland.most OFus have to go it aloar We may sll of us be and Jean Cbristophe. By 1936 she was an undergraduate at the part of a geographicallyvsst moreic. but WCarc each isolated University of Toronto and ha rcadiag broadened to include frsgmeats in that mosaicwhich hasn’t yet resolveditself toto a Henry Miller, Auden and Spender, Rilke, Hart Crane (still a patem. Tlds is as true today as it was in Sutherland’stime. favourite) and eveo C&w, little known at that time. The. Sutherland asked for her fmt book, Green War/d (1945). university was packed with undergraduates eagerly involving and hand-printed it in his Craig Street oftice. themselves in the social and cultural conccms of the 1930s. Tho:e with a literary bent found one another, and it was dur- Fog this period that Waddiogton lint formed many of her enduring friendships and associations, such as those with be_mnd ail gmwapby in a transpn~t place. . . Aone h4arriott and Raymond Sower; she remembers with special respsct the b~telleclual sharpness sod intensity of the This was followed by The Second Silence (19%)).requested by young h4argaret Avitoa These writers became key members Ryerson Press, which also issued her third book, The&won’s of the literary group that Montreal publisher and poet John Lows 11958). Since thbo she bar oublished almost eaduslvel~ Sutherland defiid as belonging to the 1940%Sower, Wad- with ~ford~University Pm. I& books have included Thi diion, P.K. Page, Louis Dudek, Patrick Anderson, lrving Glum TrumpsF (1968), Say Yss (1969). Driving Home (1972). Layton, and others. the much-acclaimed The Price qf Gold (1976), and Tk The social concern and socialist fenvur of the period were V&ikmLp (1981). also a natural and rooted part of Waddington. owing to her In the progress from her fmt book to her latest, her verse lines have shortened and gmwn sparer, more nervous and Jewish socialist backgmund and Prairie bum&ant experience. muscular. The earlier flow- ly&ai pbraser (sometimes ecb&- At the same time she was more skeptical of ideologies, so it ing Dylan Thomas) and the often rhetorical anger of her social seemed to her, than were some of the young writers for whom protest poetry from the 1950s have a8 but disappeared cocidism was a late-blooming enthusiasm. She was also more from later, more fully assured books such as ThePrice ofGold md conc~med to build a private and pmfessioti life apart from _ The Visitam%. It is chiefly the p&on and power for affrma- literature. In 1939 she married Patrick Waddington. a jour- tlon, and the devotion to the things of this world, that rem& nalist v&b the Ottawa Cit.&en and later with the CBC in Mon- as a living thread connecting the.earlicat work and the latest. treal. Their Europearr honeymoon was iotermpted by the out- Waddiioa’s ability to express her primary intuition of joy break of the Second World War; they returned to Montreal to and affumation has grown as she has bcmme older and more fimd Patrick’s job gone, and so came to Toronto where he concerned with loss and death. She has focused more boklly went to work for the SFar. Toronto was their base until 1945. Miism took a diploma la social work from the University of and more minutely on the individual details of life. In her early Toronto sod then camed her Master’s from the University of work, closely obswed fragmeots were swept along in the rush PennsyIvania. After the war they returned to Montreal, where of a poetry that seemed to proclaim joy not out of expe14c.n~ she worked as assistant director la a Jewish children’s agency. but out of its own innocent exuberance: The war period was the begkming of Waddington’s double life of poetry and career; which she has pursued ever since. Despite a busy extra-literary life she remained an active poet, corrc:pondbng with her colleagues scattered by graduation and the car, and publishing her work in the few Canadian literary and lon.?~ lion . . . . magszlnes then operating. The most sisnifieaat event for her In her more recent work, a still gaze s&r&cd out the secrets of literary mr during this time was the acceptance of some of beauty, power, and frailty in each thing, and augments rather her poems by Firsl StutemsnF, which had begun publlshll in than diminishes their baffling richness: January, 1943, and hez meetlog with John Sutherland when she visited Montreal in March of that year. Sutherland remains in Waddington’s mind an exemplar of the Canadian vtiter dedicated to his craft and to the creation of a healthy national literalam.. “There’s no explaining a per- son like John,” she says. “He seemed to come from nowhcre, there v,as no explanation for him in his background or the environment of those times. That’s so often the case with real creative and critical intellects.” Sutherland edited First SF&e- msnF fmm 1942-45and then merged it with its Montreal rival, Pra-iw (published by a group bxludii Patrick Anderson “The good thihingsof the world,” says Waddiion in and P.R. Page), to form Northern Review. Under Sutherland, ‘another poem. “she learned long ago/from the sun out Firs& &z~w~enr and Northern Review published poetry and there/in the prairies ia tbat light.” She lays claim to *‘ablszbng cacouraged the development of disinterested criticism which, bmocence/easy to leam,” but frcdy admits tbat “the other/ Sutherland felt, was crucial to tbe gmwtb of ao independent things that harmed her/(even herself) those/she could never and non-colonial English-lanyage litemturc in Canada. explain.” Yet she does not shrink fmm gadng directly at “the Such ideas and ideals remain basic to Waddington. They other things,” nor does she daim the ability to explain, joy. colour her conversation and are expressed frequently in what She has exulted in their inexplicable depths, and it has never she bar written. la her introduction to an edition of seemed to her that the enigma of win outwekhed the Sutherland’s miticism and poetry, which she compiled for myster@sgiItof bw. - - McCleUaad 11Stewart in 1972. she wrote: Her attitude seems completely natural, without reliance Akhougbpopalsr joumsliits. rcvicwus and careerscholars are upon philosophical or religious ideas as to what may occur plrntiful cwywhe~~ and at everytime, critical talentsare-e beyond death. Though she acknowledges tbe human fear and helplessness before mortality, she is freeof that anxiety that makes life r burden because it must end. This outlook finds e::presslon in the strongest poems of The VXtanfs. “Past the IczA@’ is Qdeceptively simplelooking lyric in which she sue cceds in identifying herself wItb the expanse of geological t@e. and take; a titan’s pleasure in its unfolding without delu- heoelf that even such eons are immortality:

“I’m fairly prolific,” she says. “I haven’t published aII that A sunenvy publicarionof 2 journalsand I’ve witten: about half to h’/@4hirds. probably. I’ve also 100 drawings by A.V. Jackson duti his dcamyed a lot. I think the technIcaI gift for poetry ia genetic, 1927 trip To the eastern arctic abor r&frhc Bcorbic. Clothbound in a boxed edition. you have to be born with it. When I look at some of the things 220 pa~cr. wailable ,une 1. $26. I did when I was 16 01 so, they’re technIcally as good as what PENUMBRAPRESS. I’m doing today. What theysay may be immature, but the tec1micalaspect is there.” She considers her poems as Individual short wholes, not r&cd to r consciously elaborated life’s work. “I diin’t thi& of building up a worl;, perhaps because I’m a woman and didn’t think then of poetty as B career. It was just something 1 did, and certabdy not sometbbag to boast about, because it didn’t help your sodallife any.” The unity she perceives in her poetry is one that grow from the unity of her life. “I have witten from my own experience and f4Ing.s. I don’t think the nat myths that critica like to pursue are very often models for

t&k they should rem& -&ret.” Afta years as a social rrorlter in Montreal, Waddington was divorced from her husband In 1960 and came to Toronto with her h?o young scms. To have more time for them, she let3 so&d work and taught night courses In EngSsh and Canadian literature at AtIdnscm College. This led to an offa of a full- time teaching positIon at York UnIverslty, which she accepted in 1964 vhile working toward her Master’s in En&h at the UniwrsIty of Toronto. Today she is a full professor vrithin one year of retirement. Her Mastefs thesis on A.M. Klein Ied to htr pa~crradng book on the poet (Copp Clark, 1970) and to ha edition of his colIected poems (McOrawHIIl Ryenon, 1970). One of her chief activities at preamt is scholarlymim and publisbing her credits include a long list of articlea published in journals,, addresses to lamed societies, and trandations from the Yiddish. Though she often.deak wit4 mtinrtrcam writers and central questions of Iltaary theory, rcadersof Canada’s ofE&l languages. She is tolerant of the fact that some of the things she loved elicit little response: “I rcrnemb;_rdelivering a paper on the miter Moshe Nadir and comptig his work with that of Stephen Leacock. I glanced up atthe au$ence, and it was like 23 solitudes sitting there.” \vaddingon often alludes to. or addressesdirectly. e duality she feek witldn herself behveen her poetic activity and her non-literary life.The awareness of it goes back at least to her mealng with Sutherland In 1943. She writes that “at that time only half of me was a poet - the other halfwas a romantic middle&w social \*nxke~- I was utter4 horrifiedby John’s complete lack of concern for material comforts and his future.” She has long sb~cebecome a complete poet, and yet po~rry has never receivedher full time and energies, with the cx~ption of brief periods cm grants or at witers’ retmats. “1’~ been lucky,” she says. “I’ve been able to follow my own b~cIinationr I simp4wish I had more time to do more of the

-.i ...... i...__.~. -._-... . __. . - % ._._~ - .~~ ~..~--- .._~ tbinsrthMeome~o.Ihadagoodworkiqgurperieneein so&l work. I was an excetlent social worker and think somelimes I’ll go back to it after I fmlsh teaching. It was em+ tlonalIy rich but it didn’t offer anything intellectually. I fmd teaching lntellwtually dlftlcult and challenging. But most of all I feel lucky that I can write. I’m stiU hoping to produce my great work when 1 leave teaching.” Such ambivalence does not amount to a real conflict or anx- iety for Wadding&m. She views the mad not taken with an equanimity born of her confidence in the one she did take. Her longlng $01 the full-time professional literary life often seems to be as much a hope for Camdii litmature as it is a wish for herself. In fact the doubts, regrets, and reservations she has about her own cereer and reputation are inextricably bound up with her aspirations for Canadian writing as a whole: that it be mature, tolerant, self-confident. “1 don’t have the place in Canadian litemtu~ that I think I deserve,” she says, “ and 1 think I know why. I’m a Jew, a woman, I don’t write out of the Christian tradition. And above all I hate aU this about blood and kniti, .and writen witlng about Indians and 6skimos when they know nothing about it . . . .ti is the great thing for me: I know I’m a good writex and I have faith that my work, the best Of it, will endure. My only regret is that I could have been better and could have written more with more encouragement. If I were starting out, I would like to be a fulLtime artist, but it wasn’t possible then. Today it ir possible in Canada, and that’s a Atiabsorbing and candfd b!OgrclPhyof Pllnceas iood thing.” Mo~aref by vrelllnown London DoI& MaI/ columnId N!gel Demptecwho has kncwn Margaret personally In fact,though, b& too busy is not a wow for Wad- for over ten y+s. UtemryGuild Alternate. dineton. but her element. Her current schedule indudes colic tiGher’s%es written from NO-76 (to be published as Sum- Illustrated. 313.95 meru~.Con&i?er~ch this spring by Mosaic Press), the prepam- tion of scholarly papers, the reading end other work required of a professor, her busy dassroom and office schedule, her participation in the development of a women% caucus wifbin the League of Canadian Poets, a full round of social and pm- fessional activities among friends and colleagues outside the Literary sphere, not to mention ewything from soup to wingauts around ha home. A busy and contented sxnarlo. Yet the disquieting, severe joy of her poetry is there to witness to the truth of her words when she says, “I don’t fed at home anywhere in the world. but I fed less not at home la Canada. My bond is with the landscape. I have the feeling that the landscape knows who belongs to it - and those who belong are not always the pea- pie who were born here, either. I hope that nature will revenge herself on the people who ere spedeting on and ruining the land. There are these possibilities of just&. There is a kind of indifference in nature, as is often said. but there ls justice. At ycur local bookseller,or take advantageof the Cloudland project. too: Order - by mall or In parson - The movement of her words, from tribulation on the earth from these five bookstoresacross Canada: to justice, mirrors the essential movement of her poetry. perceived so clearly and captured with such essential spareness Duthle bQkS 1751 West 2nd Avenue of form in the best poems of her most recent hooks., It is a dii- Vancouver,B.C. ficalt yet eonftint movement that actually begins fmm mar- td death and burial, and mows with eadlesr patience to a Aepsn Books mysterious and fundamental delight 10824 Whyte Avenue lhe hsnrt eJ Edmonton, Alberta T6E 2A7 lhe earth Ir buried r.wy scomrBooks lorrvcr 121 - B Osborne St. and the pui.w.s Wlnnlpeg, Manitoba FGL iY4 4/: wlmr must sound here forms Lengheuce Boo!cshop flowitlb bacb 830 yonge St. to the cave Toronto, Ontario M4Y 122 oJbmn lkhl wd wter bn& Double Hook Boot1 Shop to the snur.x 123% GreeneAvmwe, Montreal, Quebec H?%Z2A4’ c$Mr_shadowy Cl FEATURE REVIEW

The other Canadiian Though cosmopolitan in content, Naim Kattan’s short stories explore a familiar Canadian duality: the plight of the stranger in his own land By WAYNE GRADY

TIx NcI8hbour and Other Stories, by out same of Ottawa’s topography 811it ity of their Iives they feel r&&d by Naim Kattan. McClelland & Stewart. passes our winnow 25 stomys below: the Bumpe, and they feel then that they are r&Y;caoadii Library, 183 pages, $5.95 Supreme Court, the West Block, the not free in their own sormmtdii. Thir paper (ISBN 0 7710 9284 9). magniticeat Ottawa River and, beyond. fediog is the acceptance of Time as con- the spring-green Gatineau IiiIls. All the tinuation. This is the real diffiolty, and EvEaYwEE~;DAY MoRNtw at six o’clock while he is talking. He talks with hi it is the Caoadiaa cboIce.” Ntim Kattao wakes up io hii single whole body, his hands, his shouldem, his In a way Kattao’s afftity for Canada rented room in Ottawa’s east end, eats a forehead, Iike a man who is perpetuaUy also has to do with the Caoadiao atti- solitary breakfast, and beghts to write. buoyed up on ideas. tude toward nature. wldcb is very similar He nites in French, in longhand. using “I’m not Caoadian just because I to m Arab%. “In Green.” he wrote in peacock-blue ink that flows from a $200 pr& Canada to the United States.,” he his fust collection of essays, Red;& und German Moot Blanc fountain pen. heavy gold with a smaU white cross embossed on a red background at the top. Iike a Swiss Army knife_ At eight o’clock he stops witing. dictates the morning’s work into a tape recorder to bz typed later by a secretary, aad takes a bus to his oftlce at the comer of Albert and Queen streets. where since 1987 he has been the Canada Council’s chief literary officer. Kattao was born in 1928 Ia Baghdad, Iraq, and received his early edocatlon at the AIIiaoce Isra6Iite IJoiversdIe and the Baghdad School of Law before going to France on a government sdmlarship to study literature at the Sotboone. At fust a Jew in a predominantly Moslem coltore. then sn Arab in a pmdomi- nantly ChrIstIaa mllleo, Kattan learned earIy the attractions and the daogets of assimilation, and vbtodly a8 of his witing has hem ao iavesdgation of that push-poll relationship between maa and society, as we8 BSof the dlffereaces and similarities between Eastern and Western civilization. He came to isruddtdy saying.“I have become part The&-e (1970). “nature enveloped man, Canada in 1954because. he says, he was of the ethos of what is Canada. Caoada sormandiog him with hw be&&. . : . “attracted by Canada’s attitude toward doesn’t deny Time. There is sn aspect of She might on occaskm seem hostIIe, but Time.” By time he meaos Yradition”; not e Time that makes people well-being and happiness had their Conadiis have managed somehow, he mom boring, mom depressed, less source in her ail-pmwdiig presence.” feds. to be young and vitd without feel-. heroic. There Is a diffxulty in being in This I-IeIIeoic view of nature has quite io8 obliged to sever their mots in Time, because Time is tr&Ic: you decay naturally pervaded Bompe, and has Europe. He agrees with Nortbmp Frye’s and die. How to preserve what has been roughly transplanted in Canada, aphorism tbat “a Canadian is an aImadydled?UptilInow-andtbisis where natwe in real@ is much mugba AmerIcao who has rejected the Revolo- very evident in the Canadian novel - in tooth and claw tbao it is io Greece. tion.” them was aa oppmssion of Time Canadian nature is, in fact, more Arabic At lunch in Ottawa’s revolving throogh tradition. Take SbtcIaIr Ross, than Hellenic: “In the Eastern desert,” restaurant atop the new Holiday Inn. or . ,neIr people still Kattao writes, “nature was the enemy, Caftan is affable, taIkative, and r&&d. live in Europe, in some kind of idea of the host& force from which mao needed He jokes with the head waiter. points Bumpe. But when they look at the real- constant protection.” And between the

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soup and the meat. 7.5 storeyn above they both deal with reality. My second Ottawa, he expands on his point: “The book of essays, La m&toire et la pm- fbxt rime I sew the Prahies in winter. tness? [19781. is a reflezlion on North covered in snow, I thought of the America mainlv. the differences bewcen desert.” the United St&a and Canada In their Kattan settled immediate4i! Mom- relationship to Time and Space. The real, although he taught for e while aL third, which ip now ready for publlca- Level University. He became the don, is celled Le d&ret lepouvoir, and founder and editor of the Bulletin du is a study of the relationship between cwcle juif: the fust Bulletin publication desire and power. There is a chapter, for was called Gv& juv de la langue example, on knowledge as a substitute fmtlsc?Lc(1965). i” which KateIt’s con- for desire; it’s really on Goethe and tribution - an article about Mordecei Faust, and my relationship with Gcr- Richler, who had very little to do with many, which is a very personal one. A Novel by “Ia ianguefmnpW~- Lpan early exam- There’s another chapter on genealogy. ple of K&tan’s curious and eccentric Another on imagination as power - it’s l?AWID WELWIG tendency to blend two cultures. It is not mainly on Macbeth and Madame surprisil that Katten dso sat on the +wy - desire aa created through B&B Commission when it was chaired unagination. There’s one on Don Quir- by A& Laurendea”. ofe. There’s one on The 1001 Nights, ,, I . . . enjoyed it immensely. Since Reality and The&e, for which about the meaning of seduction and the The combination of lush- , he received the Pmnce-Qnada Prize es relationship between desire and death. well es letters of approval from both There’s one on the Arabic mystics, the ness, innocence, and menace Northrop Rye and Amid Melraw, Kat- Sufs. They believe that ir is good to held me right through it. It ten has milten a dozen books - more desert the body, not to control it but to is a fine, true, disturbing than one a year - es well as numerous rise above it completely. They wrote the radio and stage dmmes. essays, and. most beautiful poetry in the Arab book.” - Marian Engd reviews. “I have&cc kinds of \vritlng,” language, but it was not whal they $15.95 he qays. making a little tenl wkh his wented to do.” f~ertips. “I write novels, which are The storier included in TheNelghbour direct chronicle3 of ordinary life, mainly and Other Stories also r&xl this reminiscences that have some kind of meeting of cultures, which is not so aurobiogmpldcal base.” These are much a dash es e process of absorption. Adieu Babylon (197.5) end La fmits In the title storythe narrator lives in am crrmeh8s (1577), both translated by apartment building in Montreal and Sheila Fischmae es PamveIl, Babylon observes over the years the Chinese man and Pati Inlerbtde. The third novel In living in the next apartment. They have the trilogy, La fiattc& pmmise, is still almost no communication other than the unpublished. “Then I write short stories occasionel greeting lo fhe &4l or the and plays, which are to me the same foyer, until on.2 day the Chinese comes kind of writing.” The stories have ovtr to say goodbye. After 23 years in appeared in four collections - Duns le Canada he-is going home to Peking, d&ert (1974), Lu tmverscC (19X), Le brhiging vitb him only a tnmkful of riwgc (1979). and Lesabk de l’fie(1981) notes he has taken from hundreds of - most of which remain untranslated. political and cultural events: “Canada is The Neighbow and Other Stories is e a marvellow country, and what a mine selection of 11 storia from the fuat two of &wledge! Never e night without a collections. lecture or e meeting. I’ve kept everWn8. I’m taking ell my notes with me. I’ll need ten or Meen years in which out of K&a& it, to consult them, to put them in order, to expleiulug it, fling it up. Kaltan says assimilate them and to absorb this the essays “complement” the other treasure.” The man has dearly and works, but it is more.than that. The perhaps tmgicdly gained nothing from “Jan Drabek has written an c3says ere awimtlated into the liction, his stay in Canada - his nota, like his engrossing novel about poli- are wntherlzed by it: in fact, in both fhe mm-rclatlonshlp with the narrator, will tical ideals and the moral essays tid the fiction the word “syn- not reveal to him the truth or the meen- thesis” is crucial when describing iug of Canada: “My father,” he says contradictions inherent in a Kattau’a method as well as his purpose. earlier, “always sought out the most crusade. This book is warn- “Realitj lind, The&e,” he ‘says (and prcclous thing a c0”nwy can offer - ing fire for our times.” - here it should be noted that the French knowledge.” It is not knowledge thal tide is Le r&l et le th&?fml, not quite the man needs: however, but .human June &//bVOOd Reali@ and Theatm, more like l%e Real wmth.Andwecens&thetthestoryls $46.95 and the l7teatrlcab in book stores the s fictional form of Kettan’s evay 011 translation h usually hidden away in tbe Faust and his substitution of knowledge dmme section; it is not about drama), for d&e. “like all the essays, is a reflection on the The other problem Kattan reveals in EasVWesr dichotomy, the myths of. these stories is the danger of assbeiiating these very different civllizatious and how too far into an adopted culture - of dirappzxing entirely into a nw: society REVIEW is stsmped laslde the memory Of that .Ind thcrcby endangering that society. In day. The image of a face I could trust. “l%!2=?’ an Englishman, Edxwd, There isn’t s weak story in the mllec- mrmies a French Canadian and sets out tlon. AU are perfectly constnlcted and to brmmc more French Canadian than told with a tremendous rush of creative she is. He changes his name to Edouard. energy and conviction. And yet they are develops a taste for beer and hockey, tightly controlled. The best are those end .admonishes his wife for not likittg told from the pobit of view of a youthful beer. hockey, or her neigbbours. In the narrator, especially the two “F~tie” end she leaves Ith “I was suffocating stories. In one. a 13-year-old boy under the wight of it,” she says, “I had @rstie) discovers a beached dolphin at to leave before I got to know him. en age when his curiosity about nature before it v:as too late.” has led hiin to plague his biology teacher “I had a reading of my work in with questions such as: “Did the gulls Paris,” Kattan says. “One of my stories, get dry in the mouth when they ate? Or ‘Lr szcef,’ vm taken by Le Monde. Cmlng to Grips with Lucy. by was everything kept well watered by the AftLT the teadim the people who were George McWhlrter, Oberon Press, 140 sea? Did they actually drink salt water? there told me I was speaking about a dlf- pages. $17.95 cloth (ISBN 0 88750417 5) . . Do woodpeckers 8et headaches with fcrcnt North America from the one they and $8.95 paper (ISBN 0 88750 418 3). I kashing treetrunks with their heads7 Do I:wr. It is a North America seen fmm a The Driver, by Nora Keeling, Oberon tortoises know they aye slowcoaches7” distance, but also from within.” This Press, 109 pages, $15.95 cloth (ISBN 0 His teacher’s answers satisfy hlm that dual Mon. the superimposition of 88750 421 3) and 37.95 paper (LSBN 0 there is, indeed, an order to the lullverse. cultures, creates nonetheless a character 88750 432 1). But when his efforts to save the dolphin that is familiar in much contemporary fall, he feels a sense of outrage that fiction. erpecially in Canada: the self- z-m op~~ttwi OFthe title story in Coming makes him look forward to the heating imposed cdle, the stranger in his own lo Grips wifh Lucy establishes the he knows he’ll receive for stayin out land. In one story, “The Visitor,” an author’s artistic priorities: “In the too late. “Firstie wanted to share his E:?volian returns incoaoito to his native beginning was the water well” -not the Da’s rage. He wanted to put himself Cairo, as a spy. In a&her, “From the “word” but the experience. A poet and right with blows.” Bzdconv.” a Brazilian imorisons himself author of two previous tillections of In “The Fopowers (Or Babes in the in his, &&tment in Rio, in the grip of a ’ short stories, George McWb@ter io an Fiekl)” Firstie comes to terms with the paranoiac delusion that “they” are expert stylist who ures words as tools to revulsion he feels toward bid two back- stalking him. Robert Fulford has called give shape to experlenw. The lma8e of wards cousins, after spending some time 1:attan “quite possibly the most the water well ls sustained throughout with a group of inmates fmm a local cosmopolitan Canadian alive,” and the tirst paragraph, which condudes: mental institution. He recognizes their Georce Woodcock has noted that these “The well was mmowed to be bottom- smiles as being like tliose of his wusins, sr& contain “a simplicity that makes less. If so, it must have reached, like a “whose smiles never seemed right, nevu us feel vx are looking through clear glass md of w&r, right through the world to seemed tQ surge from the inside and into the hearts of mea and women who Australia.” The Ulster-born author’s beam out.” Like a smile that’s right, the are strawrs to us and to the world as heritage appears to run just as deep, for stories in Coming to Grips with Lucy do wll.” 6 tv:o modes - cosmopoU- his Irish sensibility flows tbmugh the seem to surge fzom the lnside and beem tar&m and simplicity - need each other entire collection - the stories set in out. The result is totally engagiw. to survive. Canada and Spain as weU as the six 7%~Driver is an uneven collection of Kattan’s cosmopolitanism is reflected storied set in Ireland. short stories by Nora Keeling. In in his life as &ll as in his wiling. several stories involve some sort of general, the stor*s seem self-conscious Though he keeps a room in Ottawa dw- parallel action, a technique McWhlrter and ladring in vitality. The author in8 the reek. he still officially lives in handles brilliantly. In “Coming to Grips intrudes into the narrative and burdens irlonUea1 with hi wife - the actress with Lucy” the narrator recalls an after- her stories with too maay qualifiers and Gaetaae Lariel- and their M-year-old noon when his 17-year-old sister (whom far too manycomnm, so that they never son. travelling back and forth by train he is supposed to be chaperoning) rides manage to build up a momentum of every Friday and Monday. Somehow off bn a motorcycle with the local thdr mm. The following passage from this divided life - the Ottawa hellion while the narrator goes mackerel ‘Himmla. Hotshot and Dandy” (a burraucrat in a rented room. the Mont- fishing with the hellion’s sister, Lucy. story about an old woman whose disap real wirer in a spacious house near the The narrator’s own sexual awakening pointment in the weakness and brutality Oratoire St. Joseph - is a comfortable parallels that of hls sister: of her sons leads her to take a fm stand one for IIattan; he’s been living it for 15 It semd impudent, impertbtmt to on behalf of a pet), illutrates some of years. on a recent trip to China, Kattan think of Lucy with a fella. I dln’t think the technical problems that could have gave a copy of his story “The of treedwith F&s. boulderswhb fellsr, bw~tirwercome with the help of a good ~ki;ohbour” - about the Chinese clak not doing things with them. Wbateva rho returns to Peking-to the seartary quality she had v/as powerful, hand- of the Chinese Wlters’ Union. “He some, hidden like a tree’s in its leaves And, altlwwh he. Gcorgc and hh stirned to like it,” Kattan says, and bark. Better than beauty. P power mother. coukl, on occasion,use more and a ~rcsencs. l-ha. wdualty, I money tbatt they had. aad akhowb “because he told me the next day, very besan to se Lucy in a” opposite Uht. Mathew always offered some, formal, very discreet, ‘I am your other that of a boy looki* at a womaa. I ~avf sheeplrhlyand with disctctimt. neither Chinese. but a little different.“’ In hs.hair. I liked it. It w long. She George nor the old lady wovld ev= many ways, Naim Kattsn is our other wound it into a whorl at the back, like I touch apeaoy that they hadn’t caned Canadian - our other voice, tbmugh reel of, harvest bread. burntshed. themselves. rbich w obtain a fuller description of Lminock-shnped.Russet head and bdd In sa odd sense. they lived toaethr ourscl\~s. 0 face. Rough.yetyoutrutedlt. Thattoo much like a couple. George ate her . . .; ~, :: ,.:. ._.L’:.L_-__. .- _,_rr_L.i;x

cooking. having provided bs x%h the The imagery of flight, for trample (in- whcre~hhalto cook. He slept in the bed predecessors and more. The time is 10 s&s, birds, angels, souls), informs and she hti made up for hh” beween star- years after the first novel, and most of extends both character and event. There ched and boaed sheets, falling asleep the action take place on Wolfe Island. ls no one&-one equivalence here, which bnmedialely upon touchingthe pillows, Many of the people from the earlier “arrows meaning, but a patter” of inter- befor he had had rhe time to think OF books reappear, along with some we relation, which broadens and enriches it. an)lhing irksome- or indeed. anything havep’t met; they are, as before, both The mosquitoes that plague C’s11and the at au. ordinary and credible. wings that Paul Iraces on Cindy’s back ICedIng Is at her best la a surrealistic The central [email protected] are Robert, are evocations of sex& de&e., among mode, with a story like “Green Blades Elizabeth, Robert’s daughter -Cindy, of Grass.” The fmt-person narrative in Elizabeth’s old friend Wayne Buttch, on lbe one hand, tiea& on the other: this story bounces berween dialogues the Wayne’s wife Jane, sod a ma” named The heron that Robert follows is mom Carl Bainer. Helwig lets .the reader than just hip desire for Blizabeth, but, v&h her fiti.-The dlctlon the’ overhear the interior monologues of all because it is that too. it draws o” a of these chiuaeters. each of which is whole network of related bnages. Bven a”d the numer& qualifiers be& disrbtguished not jusl by habits of mind Wllf does a ldnd of barnyard mating almost poetic in their intensity. and what each character thinks about, dance. The author is undoubtedly a wlter of but also by a kind of inner tone of voice. Helwig’s prose at its best is supple a”d talent: certain passages io each of the This ls always impressive when it’s done u”chlttered: stories do manage tn soar. But occa- well, as it is here. And Helwig. keeping The hem” had w&bed somewbae in sional flashes of brlUiaace are “ot six balls in the air, doesn’t resort to ver- enough to sustain a” entire collection. the morning’s rihmy sm. Robert bal tics or caricature., though 1 have to stood at’ the edge of the water. as if The Driver is badly in need of a good say I found the women’s inner voices a puzzled after bating Followed the bird’s editor. I suspect that the collection dii shade less convincing than the men%. flight and Ion it. It had bee” something not receive the benetit of any edltiog at If the extended cast of characters is suddenly dear in all the foa and fear all. In any case, by publishing. these one of the ways ln which thii book is and regret. Here is the bii. Follow it. stories in their present form, Oberon has more ambitious than the earlier two, the (That heron, by the way. ls the central done Keeling a disservice. 0 techniques of chamcterlzation are the device on the book’s dustjacket, which is same. Helwig shows the different faces not only appropriate but very beautiful.) (or facets) that each character weals in The faults of I1 Is Always Summer - different social contexts. In addition, as andithasafew-aretheresultofits ambitious reach. Sometimes the prose REVIEW their p&ale! inner spaces. The effect is tries a little too hard. Sometbnes the something bke those marvellow line imagery - the pattemiog of earth. air, drawinga that revolve in compulerized fhe, and water, for instance - seems projections. You get 10 tie all round. just a little too apparent. Occasionally and through. has mid the narrative takes a” arbitrary turn. But that one of the things he’s interested in these faults come from Hehvig’s will- unsy~patheticman. One of ihi thinG bigness to take chances. .They are rmall that Helwig is doing is denmnstmtiag the and forgivable in a novel as good as this complexity and the fascination of the 0”e. Cl apparently ordinary. This extends beyond character: Helwig also plays the surface view against the inside view of marriage and other pairings. He asks and the” answers that nagging, peren- It Es Alwuys Summer, by David nial oucstion. “What on earth does she Helwig, Stoddart Publishing. 203 pages, see G him?“~ 515.95 cloth (ISBN 0 7737 2001 4). Helwi~ is “wham better with outer than ryith lnna voices. This means that THEFI”ST nw novels in David Helwig’s we get to know his minor characters R&ton tetralogy are pnity good pretty well, eve” if we “ever get to look books. In The Gloss Knight (1976) inside, so to speak. Wilf and Lois and Hdrig tells the story of Robert Mallen’s chaille and Paul are vivid and credible, not-wy-successful affair with the exotic again, not became of surface tics or Elizabeth Ross. Jennifer (1979) is t\titches, but because they have been Boben’s wife, snd that book is her imagined and real&d from the tide story. These are novels of character. out. Their voices me true. Robert and Jennifer are ordinary pea- It is not smprisi~, the”, that some of pie, caught in the ordinary co”fusio”s of the most successful passages i” the book The Dean’s December, by Saul growing older and falling in and.out of ate those in which Helwig orchestrates a Bellow, Harper & Row (Pitahenry B love, in ordinary old Kington, Ont conversation of many voices. There are Whiteside). 312 psges, $17.95 cloth Hel~ig convinces. and makes the reader some real virtuoso pieces here, drawing QSBN 0 06 014849 7). care, by means of his attention to detail power frond a sub-smface of sexuality, a”d to the truth: the way people are in individual voices crackling with desire, SAULBEWOW has bee” quoted as saying this book is the way people really are. jealousy, fear, snd sometimes love. that “the writer who influenced me most II Is AAbws Summer is the fourth For the most part, the images of It Is .was God.” Perhaps because he has TD book in the sequence (the third, A Always Summer support the narrative mained true to his source, Bellow has Smmd Like Laughter, is slated for without calling att&ion to themselves. YCXJR CWILD CAN WIN: THE PRINZHORN Now in paper! ;t;e: ;;;zfz,$LG./=_for ~o~O~$TION THE GOOD FIGHT Poltttcd Memoirs 190%958 L3lsabiities David Lewis Joan Noyes and Norma Macndll A MUCK.-ANTICIPATEDCOLI.ECI‘ION by the accomplished author of Some “Ahl ArlMIwa.pL~mEaz OF PERSOwu THE PIRSTBOOK DESIGNED SPECIEK- times All Over and Anniversaries - and political history . . . The Good ally for concerned parents to use at “poems which are attentive, ten- Fight is not your average politician’s home to make learning fun for their der,’ ’ flexible, offhand but exact -in- book. It will stand as a central soure child, who is part of the astonishing t&ate journeys which alp a joy to for the political history of the period one-in-ten with a learning disability follow.” it covea” Saturdw Night in Canada today. $7.95 paper Sl4.95 paper $17.95 doth rw/DB IN SEARCH OF YOUR Te?t by Pierre Berton, Selected Short Stories BRITISH AND IRISH Jean-Louis Gagnon Cz ROOTS A.E. Johann ‘TX BUD ~HHEMAU WITH IHAT AngusBat= Now REtsS”ED, A VlEw OF OUR astonished gratitude you feel when A COMPIIEHENSIVEAND CLEARLY- country - captured from coast to you meet a real writer.” Thus writer written guide for tracing records of coast in an entrancing text and 128 Alice Munm pf this first collection of families originating in England, fuil-colour photographs by such pro- IZ superbly-crafted stories by a new- Wales, Scotland and Ireland by the minent Canadian photographas as lydismvered Saskatchewan writer. well-known gene&gist and author of John de Viiser and Fred Bmemmer. 16.95 doth In Search of Your Roots 939.95 cloth $17.95 dotb THE PEGPdlTZJUNCTION: A Novella and Five Short Storier AN EXQUISI’IE COLLECTION OF stories, first published in 1975 and long unavailable, about post-war

Division of Gage Publishing ment v:hich, fmto a Notth American because of the uoiversity’s commitment cash itself in for money, sex. status - point of view, seems usually resewed for to free speech, but because he is married tbii is the tmasaction Bellow has alv@s obscure foreign writers whose books to an astronomer of eoommus repute. wvatohed.A Ufetbtte of observation has subsequentlybecome availablein mucb- Corde’s wife Mhtna is beautiful, admired but ettlgmatlc trattslatiotts. unbearably brilliant, and eom~( fmm a kdc, forgiving it tbe l&t of ad.- Bellcn:. Ottthe contrary, not only fails to country where (tbe reader can’t help The Dean’s December is hot quite be for&o, he fails to be obscure: his not&g) freedom of speech is even BeUow’sbest boolr; Its attempt to s@ books have been best-sellers abnost sbxe rarer: Rumania. It is io Bttchexst that hvo citieS with pdi!iCd diCh& SW&S the bc,$mtiog of his career-so much so the novel opms: Cordc end hi wife have even Bellow’s capacity for mainlaining that hc wrote Humboldt’s Gift about the gone these in order to watoh over the contmdictioos. But it is aa excellent burdensof money and success-and he death of Mitma’s mother, Vale&. book. Spmwllng, ambitious. superbly won, in a litting prelude to the Nobel As it turns out, the death is not easily written, it is the slightly self-cotwious Prize, three National Book Awardsfor observed. In fact, for Albert and Mimta, but nonetheless honest attempt of a tictioo e3 well es a Pulitzer Prize. the mother’s dyiog becomes entwined novelist to look at bis world as it really Thus each time one picks up a book with a battle against tbe hospital which is, and to keep laokiig until he fmds tbe by Eellow one is not reading merely a doesn’t want vlsltors, cspecfally -.0 novel, one is reading a product about to , gamer fame, hooours, and money. This functioning. xrein bctweo the reader and tbe book Atthesametimethatheiftitbtethe Bucharest Commtmist plot --md &at is compounded by the fact that in his MEW books Bellow, or the version of himself could be more nasty or heartless tbao he has bwented for public purposes, is officialswho refuse to let a dyiog ubiiuitoos - an emcee preseotiog us woman’s children visit bet as she ex- cith not only the characters end plot but pit&l - Cnrde is occopied with also. absolutely free, the quirky smart- thouehts about the Chicaao aleek tough-guy tone of voice of the bureaicracy, and whether his attack in ihTrltOr-SOUrCe Himselfi a cynical it was justified or merely a public settling realist with a bii heart of gold attd a of old scotes. pocketbook to match. It is as if Hum- Most of the “action” of tbe novel ByD#BARRYCMPAU pti; Bogart and Albert Camus turned takes place in Mbtna’s childhood out to be the same person after all.. bedroom where Corde sleeps compul- Ewa to open one of Saul Bellow’s sively,.dtiks brandy to keep warm, and books is an ad of daring: with what ruminates in Ids o-t. And most of incredibly romantic but neumtic sick0 the “dramatic conflict” of thenovel ls dU the reader be t&xl to travel? And the cootrast between the Commuoist Golog Grand, by Jack MacLeod, where v.iUthe journey lead, if not deep heartlessness ‘of Bucharest and the McClelland & Stew& 2.89 pages, into the heart of Bellow’s heatt-of-gold- Democratic heartksttehs of Cbleago, $16.95cloth (ISBN 0 7710 5563 3). nod-po~ltetbook-to-match celebration neither of them an inspiring vlsiitt. of the United States of America? Vet TheDeun’sDecemberisabookof THE CXARA~~~RS IN Going Gmnd are The central character of The Dean’s remarltable power and optimism. As almost all e.cdemies,but their ivory Dzember is Albert C&e, a one-time should be with all books, its power rests tower is a big city uolversity, opeo ott all journalist who has become a university fmt of all on the language itself: sides to urban excltetttmts, ttdsadveo- dean in Chicago. Unlike Bellow’s Bellow’s quirky tough-guy sinewy voice tures, temptations, and traps. previous characters,Corde has ttot trip has never been so effective. His MacLeod’s protagonist, ecottomics pm- pled himself lo the search for fame or sentences ramble, but new without fessor J.T. McLaughlin, Uvesamidst the money - though he is quick to assure us making unexpected points: thus ideas bttellectual in-fghtiog of his ivy-draped that he has plenty of both. Corde’s that seem rklicolotts when nfkted college and the trendy attd f-&ally obsession is social justice: an armchair upon and reduced to .thelr loglcel corn- exhausting milieu of mid-town. Ittevit- philosopher with a typewiter, he has ponents are completely persuasivein the ably, he has become somewhat schimii. determined to teU the world what he voice of Bellowls narrator. When McLaughlin appeared in thinks of it whether tbe world wants to But beyond the language iulelf, The MacLwd’s fmt novel, Zinger and Me, listen or not. Thus, fmm the barricaded De&sDecember Carrie the force of its his main problemwas academicsurvival. position of Dean of Students, Corde has own cowictfotts.Not only isit vwittenlo Now that he’s ao associate professor become embroiled in a controversy that ao eccmtricand enemetic mose. it is with tenure, he is worrying about how to begon when Hmper’s magwine pub- about en eccentric ant~eoet~etio &hi. keep ids own world together. With three lished a series of his articles about Althou& it is true that the cities he oar- children and a beautiful wife whose Chimgo. a series that in semi-poetical trays Ge authotitarlm and comtpiIn hobby ls extravagaace, he describea l~ua7e exposed and condemned the the worstways - the civictttonstas of himself as b@ lo “the caboose of the corruption of Chicago and its the ’80s have no redeeming features in gravy train.” His house typifies his bureaucracy’s decision to write off large this novel - tht people who inhabit plight: it is on the frbtge of the best numbers of poor people as necessary them have not been reduced. Bellow ttelgbbourhood, has phony shuttersand casualties of inner city decay. believes in ltis cbantcters: even the worst carriagelamps, but only one batbroom. These articles were, naturally enough. are gigantic in their ambitions, their Among his colleagues are Grlmsby tmpopolar in Chicago: in fact, they were pride, the banality of their motives. and Nobby, botb of whom he appm doubly unpopular for hating being pea- The corruption that Bellow portrays is dates, neltber of whom he uttderstmds. tted by someooe in Corde’s position - a not essentially differmt from the cm- Grbnsbyls dour, loveless, and cooscleo- position genemJly suited to being affable ruption io which he has speciali in his tious; Nobby is a dilettante with forged and raising money. Co&, however, other great novels, Humboldt’s Gifl and credentials but genuine ChantI. In a becomes aware his deanship is sectue not The desire of the human soul to seose, McLaughlincaroms betwem their SPORTS HEALTH‘ TheComplete Book of Athletic Injuries William Southmayd THE COMPREHENSNE BEFERENCE FOR PET LOVEP.S EVEBYWHEPE, guide to preventing, diioslng, and Ziggy’s newest cartoon tollection is a heating spports i”jur&s for every treasure trove of warmth and corn- amateur and pmfessional athelete, miseratio”. I” over 250 cactoo”s, the trainer and doctor. ‘loveable loser’ shares his sometimes 820.95 paper frustrating, but always affeckctionate relationshins with his “ets. 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-- ---..---. - - _.. ., ,._-__ ._. _ ._, ._ ___ .__ . . . . .--_. .-- persw.lities - he is devoted to his to pe.“xive a”d.undwtand and com- momentinto a uniquepoetry. students, respects his subject, but municate to us the way we live now - Giova is a” ambitious writer who deplores dreariness a”d fa”cies malt and eve” why. Cl seeks to combine a metaphysical whisky and the aood Life. approach and style with the nitty-gritty Tbi; is a @resque novel - flant- details of daily life. It works. The reader bwant. ciidly funny e&odes are inter- is initially take” aback by such phrases &led &th q&t &v&tions. Among as “a swvingiugbridge betweep two poles the splendidly antic moments are RRVIEW of infinity” a”d “the wheels of McLaughlb~‘s public lecture, which he ew altematbig closely with “Arty attentpts to make under the inadvertent shrewdly married a white girl and started influence of LSD. the unveiling of a a successful lumber business and India” fountain during which a” tmcontroliabie craft store.” This alternation between fmhose sloshes every diiaitaty withht its au almost Piigrim’J Pmgrm style of reach, the xviidride that follows a party writing, in which the characters often where McLaughU” seenu to discover seen~ to be archetypes, and casual. that he has been abandoned both by his detailed urban-novel ia”guage and vtife and his career, and the gorgeous information, characterizes all these ciim”x in which he turns abnost simui- stories, with the exception of the fable., “Panther.” But Giover’s artistic btteg- Ths muted moments are “tore truly lity aud coherent vlsio” ailow hb” to reveaiing of Mclaughibt’s personality. succeed in this unusual and innovative Amny them is a” unwelcome but toier- The Mad River and Other Stories, by conception and style. ated after-dinner talk with Grhnsby in Douglas Ii. Glow, Black Moss Press, One of the best stories in the book, which, in order to cheer his sad and bor- 110 page% 83.95 paper (ISBN 0 88753 “Pender’s Visiotw,” is about a half- in8 yest, he teils him about the things in 080 X). breed Ojibw+y whose life is fti with xvhichhe believes. They are wonderfully hideous experiences not of his making various and among the long list are Ber- wz *aIt ALL .4ttxIs. Life seeks to (iike many of Giover’s characters). He tmnd Russeil, Fia”” O’Brien, oystem, transcend itself,” says a character in gradually degenerates, snaps, and decency, peonies, Guinness stout, and Douglas H. Giover’s fine fmt book, The becomes a sniper holed up in a house in. turtieneck sweaters. A bed-time chat Mad River and Other Slortes. Most of town. Pender is described ss “a with his yowger so” is also touching, Giover’s characters seem to feel that if recalcitrant artist” and the sniping as they can? make tings work out wU Pe.nder’s “creative spurt”: his actiw is a rith this little boy he becomes totdiy and they can’t feel optimistic, at least creative way to cope with, snd end, a relaxed and deiights the child with a they can cope with life creativeiy, inven- badly damaged life. delicious and spontaneousiy created tiveiy - whether through seif-abase Three of the seven stories NIXtold nonsense rhyme. ment (“Between the Kisses and the fmm a female viewpoint. It is a difticuit Like most of us, h4cLaugbUmspends Wine”),’ murder/suicide YPender’s undertakbxg, and often the mark of a his days and nights with other people, Visions”). or tenacious strueaies with taieutedivriter. to be able to speak in the sympathizing with them, contdn8 them, nature (%heMad River,” %orse?). voice of the opposite sex. GioveYs helping or i”suiting them. but in some The worst thing they can do is to i@ life women are wmplm, authentic person- way bounchtg off their assorted per- pass by without anything happening, as alities. He has chose” to portray women sonalities, needs, or deserts. Alone, he is Lucy in “Wild Horses” says to hersdf. occupying traditional female roles snd pitifuiiy revealed. Attempting to write Lucy “wants to be immortal” - and the done that well. his oublic lecture he becomes a” moert characters i” these stories fqd various The three ren~abd”g slories are toid in In ~rocmsthmtim.Hi ability to post- “artistic” ways to seek immortality. straight, narrative style, while the others pone almost btdeftitely the moment of Male confrontations with nature am move around betwee” past and present, physicaily and mentally getting down to at thecentreof thefmt threestories, but and in and out of differ.& modes of a it is a joy to everyone who hates to write Margaret Atwood would not have used charicter’s consciousness. I” but laows no other way of earning a Uv- them to prove her thesis in Survival. “Panther,” the fable/myth that mds ing. He goes through a fde, gets a fresh Giover’s characters are usually not the book, Giover seems to relax after the pack of cigarettes, sharpens six pencils, passive in front of nature, but corn- hard work of the other siories. Basedon. , counts the days on his calendar before bata”ts ready to engage in struggle. The a Jewish legend that Jesus was the so” of the deadline, finds. reads, and checks whitswater canoeist (or kayaker) in a Roman centurion. the story is a beauti- the fine print on a lapsed insumoce “The Mad River” battles wilh nature ful and apparenti effortlessly written policy, inspects the meters in the base and is, iu one se”% defeated, but he tale of gore, drama and magic. ment without understanding the num- does not reaiiy lose: at the crucial One smaii complaint: I wouhl be hap- bcrs on them, chsnges the kitty litter. moment he anbraces hi opponent and pier if Giover had not overworked some clips his “ails. and, ftily, types out a” they become one. His attitude represents of his most succe.%folstylistic traits. For entire sentence. a” aesthetic or moral triumph. example. the Zen-ish list-description is For most, however, the high points of The next three stories BIT about peo- striking when it appears in the title story pie’s struggles with each other and (“he is the paddle, the boat, the river, the i of disorder. But MacLeod hss a corn- within thenwIves. A sbnilar viewpoint rock”), but, p&seiy because it is ss mand of chaos, always contmlUng it, informs these contlicts. On the surface. strilrinp. it loses impact when it tums up weaving together threads of contksio” many of Glow’s characters are gmtes in a similar way in other sto$s. Such, into a brillisnt. riotous patter”. perhaps, are the perils of cokccing in one These sce”ea are so msndlousiy noisy &wse. but they tmnsEend hopelass vohlme stories wittea at various times. aud coiourfui they tend to overshadow situations by the way they think, feei, But consider that a reviewer’s quiibie much that is even more worthwhile in snd respond. Every petso” is a” artist (every rexie.wmust have at iesrt one qtib- the novel. MacLeod has the rare ability a”dca”tra”sfonnaaordbmryorugiy bit) with a very fmc fti book. 0 FEATURE REVIEW I

Antonine &&et’s Acadian odyssey is a ti%mph of story-telling-an affirmation, above all, of the vitality and significance df the spokeri word Ey MRCY K4HAN

P&n$t-: The Ee!ehm lo a Homelnnd. rituals seem more poignant in the con- persecutors remains muted. It fmds ex- by Antonine Millet, translated from the text of deprivation and hardship: the pression in P&gie’s devastating under- French by Philip Stratford, Doubleday, deaths of an old man in South Carolina statement: “What they did, they did. 251 pogcs, $17.95 cloth (ISBN 0 385 and an eight-year-old boy further North: 17133 1). the birth of a &I in Virginia; the wed- one cane aSlcmg me to. fetch them-a ding of P6lagie’s only daughter in basin of water to wash their hands in.” I?! P&gie: The Refurn lo IIHom+nd Philadelphia in 1776. Them am scenes of, Or in the drunken chorus of a wedding- (which. as P&agi&XharreIte, a& the slapstick farce; the rescue of La Catoune party song: “And shit to his En&h 1979 Prix Ctoncowt), Antonine Maillet from the Charleston slave market (an Majesty/Who declared his war on you recounts the IO-year odyssey of her event hiihliited by the incidental and mel” And there is a muftled forsfathers, the intrepid band of Aca- emancipation of a Negro), and a happier nunour of Acadians being used for tar- dians who returned to Atlantic Canada interlude ia Baltimore, where the good get practice by Bostonian Loyalists. in 17:O after years of exile and disper- ladies of the town surrender their silks, At the end of the novel, we discover sion in America following “the &eat laces, and cashmeres to the magical that the chronicle of the odyssey itself Disruption of 1755.” tingers of Pierre-k-Pitre the Fool. There has vindicated the Acadians. P6lagie and The leader of this motley troupe of are tales of woodland adventure, in- her “scraps of relations and refupces is P&a& LeBlanc. “a stiff- cluaing the capture of Pdlagie’s eldest neighbows’, finally reached their below neskzdd, proud-browed” widow, who son by the Imquois and his subsequent ed homeland, only. to disccw.r that nurses the crippled,the ased, and the marriage to a princess of the tribe. Them Grand-Pr6 remains burnt and deserted abandoned. and silences the loudmouths are fantastictales of the White Whale by British edict, “abandoned to the gulls and the rhineen as she drhs her oxcart and the Giant Lady of the Nit-told and the wild grass.” Pdlagie tears off her from the cotton fti of Georgia to the and retold to revive weary spbits on the kerchief, opens it to the wind, folds it by marshes of Tintamarre. As a rcpreren- long journey home. the four comers, and sticks it in her tatiw of toughminded. great-hearted Romance enters the story in the per- apron-pocket. In that pocket lies pra Acadian womanhood. P&gie serves as soo of Captain Broussard-called-Be served Grand-P*, plus a stwk of a w&,me replacement for Longfellow’s s&U, “the Robin Hood of the high ancient words - “words she wouldn’t lonc_suffering maid of Grand-P& seas,” whose four-masted schooner leave as a heritage for foreign throats.” Evangeline. -“es exiled Acadians along the Atlan- This heritage includes the memory of Other characters are equally memo- tic coast. P6lagie and the Captain pledge the harvest season and the maple-sugar rable: Bdlonie, the chin-wagging, their mutual devotion and, in the story’s season and the season of the wild straw- ItlO-year-old chronicler of the past, most moving chapter, offer up their lives berries; of Celina’s sacks of camphor, obsessed by the phantom Wagon of for each other when the cart becomes linseed poultices, and doses of senna, Death that accompanies P6lagie’s mired in the marshes of Salem. Both sw wildcheny, and witchgmss root: of the carwan; Cdlina, the club-footed healer vive the crisis, thanks to the resO”trb “aboiteaux” - the wide dike border- and midwife, whose ancient herbal ing the meadows, stealing land from the remrtiier work miracles during the hush sea. It is a heritage of cunning survival: viinter of 1777; La Catoune, the myster- never equal to defending themselves in ious orphan of the Great Disruption, a‘ dbwt combat, since they am never on cherished wild child with her owe equal footing, the Acadians manage “by lanpuage of babbled sounds. At times, brushing up on the @t of the gab and by the story reads like Mother Coumge learning that the way out of an impasse rewitten by Rabelais: the troupe is is sometimes by way of a cul-de-sac.” enlivened by the addition of P’tite Go& What is most clearly celebrated in - an eight-foot giant of the same breed P&/&is this “gift of thegsb,” an aftir- 35 Gargantua - and Pierre-k-Pitre the mation of the vitality and significance of Fool, whose fantastic improvised tales the spoken word. The narrative is fmm- complement old B6lonie’s official fuhuss of old Bdlonie, whose extraor- ed by the quibbles and laughter of a

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by TW (cm CI~rJkdh This de&$tfully entertaining 4D P guidebook is a must for every Attractive, accessible, con- CnNMfi train, car and armchair cise, lively, informative, traveler. Mispmsable - this goide Specially-prepared maps give to Cauada is all of these anovexviewofauIailaudmad and mom! Ideal for travelas, mutes from Toronto and immignmts, stodents and Western Ontario to British tomists. Columbii. Detailed ix&ma- $3.95 Paper June tion about trains, personnel, accommodation, tips, lore and history is also featured. VAN NOSTRAND REINHOLD PUBLISHERS $6.95 Paper May 1410 Birchmount Road. Scarborough, Onl. MlP 2E7 0 (416) 751-2800 names of the families thrown indis- ing the various shades of humour that himself from his own ego. Rather. he crhmioately into schooners by the British underlie the ordinary problems of daily observes that “every self is the cemre.” soldiers; the names of newly discovered life. He conveys the sense of a self that is nelghbours and relations. who come out In a sectionentitled “Actively Seeking actively pursuing and constructing its of hidiog as the cart proceeds north- i3mployment. ” Waymao deals with the life. And having conducted his search, var& ti tilal m&call of families at the subject that seems closest to his heati he ends the collection by addressing his end. establishing v/ho resettled where. work. He brings warmth and vitality to son, projecting his own past onto his Even the dashing Captain Broussard- descriptions of the details of a factory: son’s future., and concluding with the called-Beausoleil triumphs over an Set&g in, geIrfnglo k#ww the pke. quiet rush of history: Eogllsh naval commander not with Waymnn discovered both box-end and above the mln- carmon-fire but with the hypnotic spell open_cnd wrenches. /inc- ami comse. of his story-Ming. Acadia may be a nation without hmtl- tutions, but Anton& Maillet, like the release b w&m /artof prop&?when B6lonicr and P6lagies before her, has Wayman pas&i behind them. pocketed up enough andent words to The Waymao persona allows the poet a In Transit is an illuminating glimpse at preserve its compelling, lrrepreasible humorous sod lighthearted vehicle with, the transience of 7.&h-century life, at voice. 0 which 10 pursue his vision of people how an individual caught lo the move- Eeratively building the world they ment over space and through time attempts to piece together a meaningful But this collection is afflicted by at sense of identity. least one oroblem: desoite its comic But of these three works, I found Don touches, & “blast of ego” that accom- Kerr’s A New Impmved S&J the most successful. The poem that opens the col- of Ton; Wayman is everywhere, lection - ,‘My father’s soul” - anti& intmduclng and explaining poems, occa- pates much of what is to follow. In vivid sionally foorclngcumbersome metaphors detail, Kerr recalls going to a hockey game with his father, the sights and with an btcffecti;e joke.~Considk, for smells and tastes of She evening, and example, “Travelllng Companions,” lo’ concludes by remarking “I take my boys which Wayman debates censorship with to the games.” This emphasis on place, a character named Four Letter Word, or on the past, prrpeot, and future of.the “Teacher’s Aide.” which deals with people of Saskatoon, .is sustained Wayman marking English essays and throughout the volume. ends with his realization-that “he has In “Capital punishment, December I, been marking time.” In both poems the 1979,” Kerr writes about a man, mr. k, Tb:e Nobel Prize Aefeptsnce Speech, poet foregrounds his own self and poetic who tries to defend “the fuhue of the by Tom Wayman. Thistledown Press, 98 devices @teal of “the conditions and past” by opposing urban development. pages, $6.95 paper (ISBN 0 92006645 3). quality of our contemporary life,,, He describe the aim of the developers 8% In Tmneit, by Colin Morton, which he elsewhere claims to be hi the construction of “a new improved Thistledown &ss-, 83 pages, $6.tii primary intention. sky,” and worries about such changes: papa (ISBN 0 920066 43 7). The poet’s stance in relation to his :‘people take their kids out and say/now _ 21 N&J Improved gby. b;y Don Kerr, subject is of equal lmportaoce in Colin you &member this sky because/it won’t Coteau Books, 65 pages, $3.00 paper Morton’s In Tonsil: Morton has come back.” For Kerr, the developers (ISBN 0 919926 IO K). . organized his first book of poems into ax purveyors of ego who anticipate a several sections that deal with begin- time when “their self is their facade” - AT LONG LAST Tom Waymao has nings, connectloos, and journeys. His a cold, mtional future. jqstifled by “the gathered the Wayman poems into a poems recall genemtions of people mov- absohlte clay of commercial comfort.” sin& coUection. By “Waymao poems” lng through their Liver and across the Kerr’s book has 8 great deal to rrcom- I mean those poems in which Wayman earth, and he develops this theme with a mend it. Fmm “The day the Marxist uses the third person to develop a wonderful sense of detail. Whether discovered money” to “Fred, it’s still all Waymao persona as a character in the explaining how to fill a watermelon with right,” he,placa the comedy of ideo- poetry: in all “afterword” waymao mm or describing moving into an old logies and the tragedy of perronal loss remarks that “my hope is that the house, Morton sets a scene with precl- into a c6ntext abundant with detail and Wayman pmsona will give people mom sion and skill: insight. He takes us to a home town, a to laugh at this blast of ego which, expli- city that is fidl of meaning for the poet Smells accumulate in cwtws mr by citly or implicitly, is a necessary part of year: of mildew In cupboards, and that is threatcoed by the ambitions even’ poem in whiih someone is telllog ah in the woodstow downrhrirr. of men who have no sense of history. you how he or she is responding to the ‘dw wd cobwebs ow all the hoarded This is the crux of Keh’s poetry and why world.” jam and hardwood crnd molding in lbe he concludes with a poetic meditation For the most mrt it’s a very effective. m/em. the cod smell of wler arising from Bergmao’s fh The Ser- da-ice. The PO& piece tog&r B pi* driuping on Iwad. pmt’s&gi our dally lives are housed by ture of a v:eU-intentioned individual who Morton ls not interest&l in finding history, and hence the meaning of our is beset by more than his fair share of the devices that allow the writecto distance lives must be sought in contexts that foible; ;md paranoia of modem Life. often seem remote. Kerr capturea botb Whether he is talking about B Mazola oil aspects of this dilemma: the tender party in Callfomla, his fear of tlying. or details of a life spent ln Saskatoon.and his feelinGp about poetry editors and the anger occadoned by the imposition pubUshers, Wa~?nan succeeds in show- of unsympathetic historical events. q FEATURE REVIEW

A new biography portrays an aging, Queenish Auden, not good at hygiene, but a stickler for manners and financial probity. Then, too, there is his poetry By MB. THOIbfP$ON

F.M. Audcn: A Biognphy, by Hum- But do we need to know how coolly pro- indifference in his early years to the wry. phrey carpenter, lvlethuen, 495 pages, mlscuous he sometimes was about it, touching fiositioo best exprc~ed in 513.95 cloth QSBN 0 04 928044 9). how he preferred oral sex to the other “Horae Canonicae,” in which he asks: kinds, above all whom he did it with at “Can poe#Be saved?” We alI of us “1\ SHtLLtN~I.LFe vviu give you all the almost every j;nctore of his life? Since can. if we rememberthat “we must low fa&as.”In that case an $10.95 life should Carpenter is not wrltiog a study of the one another or die.” as Audcn pat it in give you considerably more, aad this poetry, but only “how it often arose one of his best-known poems, “Sept- nw biography largely does. It comple from the circams~nce.s of his life,” it ember 1.1939,” a line he fast chaoged to mmts and rivals Charles Osborne’s would be carelessof him to prcteod that “we mast love one another and die” and i7.H. Alrden: The Lue ofaPoet (19791, Audeo’s sex (and love) life did not exist. later repudiatedcompletely. V.H. Auden: A i’libute, edited by The poet did not, as we know, exactly The later work inten&d tbis simple Stcphcn Spender (1974), and Edward preserve a resounding sllen~c about his and unfashionable message, and Auden Mend&on’s Eur.!v Auden (1981). Bet- numerous liaisons, and as the climate was seen by many critica and disciples as vxco these and Mend&on’s bruited grew more permissivehe was apt, in cer- having gone soft-centrcd. even account of the later Audeo, we have as tabt company, to plume himself on his mawkish. The brainy aggressive young macb biognphicai Audeo as we am. plessores, make quite open gestures of master of the opaque utterance had likely to want. admiration, change the pronouns in not become a souftly pantoufled old butTera: And here we am on rather shaky a few of bis earlier love poems. Nor was in the fourth of his Bucolics (1952) the ground. Carpentergoes to some pains in he inclined to be secretive about the use of the word “comfy” pmvoked not his preface to argue himself out of the amount of drink he dowtied throughout a few young turks to dismissive con- rcquert, publishedby Auden’s executors his life. He was as happy about his tempt. As Carpenterccmmentsz “After after his death in 1973, that no bio- drinking as he was about his sex, and his long period of spiritual devdopmem gmphy of him indeed be attempted. In and change bad reached a clbnax in the aa essay in The Dpr’s Hand Audw 194Os,his poetry, having recorded sod quite passionately diisociates biograph- even inspired tbat development and ical btqolry from a just awssmeot of change. slipped a little into the back- any vxiter’s vzork. and he is on frequent gmound:” record as aski- friends and corrw- The left wina took even more huffily pondems to suppress memorabiia, part- what th& ra;;~ as Auden’s politi iculsrly letters and personal reml- betrayal. The Evelyn Waoghs of the nlsccnce. world dismissed Auden as one of the Of course. almost nobody did so. “homosexual socialists,” but as Carpenter dismisses the we for rileace Carpenter shows, Auden’s political by citing Auden’s own oft-expressed approval of biographical or even gossipy and imounted to liitle more than a ti12& procedures and by gucsslng that Au&n amalgam of 1930s trendinus and shy, roddn’t have minded a biography kind-hearted philanthropy. He worried bclw critteo after all. The poet was about his religion a bit, bat even in his scarcely discreet about all manner of radical heyday he knew little and cared “highly personal” details, encoding took no trouble to hide it. Carpenter less about the hard core of politics in them not so baftlingly in a numberof hi plays both issues as seasitively as possi- that most political of decades. most important poems, sod was quite ble, noting them whehcrethey pertsin, Auden was first and foremost a poet, prone at times to retail them even to without sensationalist overstressing. He and it is b-use he was a poet that casual strangers. Auden or not, anyway, is equally fair and thorough about sub- Carpenter, Osborne, Mendelson, and we \-ze have here a solid. SOD-pageaccount jects some readers might consider just as are interested in him. Poetry ls not of his lifeand loves - his odd, busy, private: ieligiop, politics, literary “about” reltglon anyway, or polltics, or productive life, Ids human loves. opbdoas, particularly concerning emi- even sex as such. Many of Auden’s old At issue in ail this, as most readers of nent contemporaries.Audeo tP thought friends were dlstrcssed bt later years that 20th~century poetry know, is the qws- of by many as a Christianpoet, though he disclaimed poetry’s power to affect tlon of Audm’s homosexuality.The fact bis orthodoxy would no doubt be sas- anything in the “real” world: “I know that he was predominantly homosexoal pea to a purist. He moved through what that all the verse I wrote, all the posi- is of ao moment one way or the other. Carpenter shows to be a slightly guilty tlons I &ok in the ‘306, didn’t ‘we a

_ .- -_-___ _ single Jew.” Poetry can happen because the other arts, the other writers. Auden hear the old relica in the ’20s. of ao external pressure like Hitler, or an worshipped that queen of arts, opera, Just about every oae of Carpenter’s internal one like a new or a lost friend, aad wrote several for Stravinsky. Heme, reviewers has nutted his pi= into an “I and perhaps it is of mild marginal and Nicolas Nabokov. He considered remember Auden when. . .‘I maunder.I IttterePt to know a little about these. LwJlet,quite rightly, to be a thomugbly think of 15 years before that sad last A&n ras, besides b&g the doml- minor pastime, though he wrote a few of year, 20 or more now, when, as Pro. nant poet of his generation, a profes- those too. He tdollaed Tolklen’s dreary fessor of Poetry at Oxford, Wystan sional teacher, essay%, reviewer, llbret- Lord of the Rings, thrillers, Icelandic Auden held thronged court in the old tist, translator, and raconteur. Much of sagas, lead mines; and lime-stone,and he Cadena Cafe, Like him now gone, and the sme. civilized, literate tone of his never peed in a lavatory if a sink should the young mm reeled away as if they had poetry is to be found in his essays and happen to be handy. He was generous to taken tea (oh, the galIons of that he occasional pieces, and Carpenter ftiy other poets. and by and large abstained drank) with some legendary god, “a- blocks in the likable, rumplea, egoca- fmm definitive castigation of those he hose, raunchy, bloody-minded, a trltle trlc, queenisb fwre who pmduced could not like. He was not good at campy, but a god for all that. The class them. To know something of the heights hygiene, dregs, or exe&e, but was an of ‘73 blew it. and depths of the central love in absolute stickler for punctuality, man- Humphrey Carpenter has given us lots Auden’s life for Chester ICallman adds ners, and hart&l probity. This,’ in of the man. and tbmugh the man we can something valuable, not indispemabIe, effect, is the sort of thing that Carpenter still glimpse the god. To our peril se to our enjoyment of the vrritlag, to letr “0 Ellow. ignore the craftsmzin, and onIy to our plumb the warto friendships Auden had But he gives us. too, the poetry, bright grievous loss do we consign to oblivion (rome sexual, some not) with men product of the manure in which it blew, the maker who lived so hard, so exit- (Jshewocd. Stravinsky, James Stem. and a sense of the far-reaching influence iwly, and so well, and who could leave Spender, IAlman) and women (Mm on the young that Auden once so poten- it llke this;all said and all done: Mann his wife, Rhoda Jaffe, Elizabeth tly exe&se& One of Carpenter’s saddest thowh one cannotulwws Mayer, Gypsy Rose Lee, Ursula pictures, among not a few poignant Rememlnr .mctrV w+zyone hm beenhamy Niebuhr) lets us in, perhaps, on a few of images. la Auden la his last year sitting There ip no forgetting that one was. 0 the minor secrets of the work. AU this alone la an Oxford coffeehouse waiting Carpenter furnishes, plainly, uncen- for the new poets to come and hear him; seriously, unhagiographically. to learn what he, the indiputable master twbtdcian, had to tell them. In the ’70s, The minor tics am fitted into place the trendy young poets dld not want to too, if they matter: the personal tastes in bear_,as Audea himself bad disdained to

c

By RUPERT SCHIEDER

Fhws la the Glars: A Self-Port& by Patick Whih V&ii Press (Peaguin), 288 pages, .%20.95cloth (ISBN 0670 317 594). WHENPA’t’atCK -‘B Flru’s in the G&s hit Australia last fall it achieved a su&s de seandale. Many Australiaus. toucby, defensive where their national image is concaned, thoaght that their continent and a number of notables - including the Queen and Prince Philip, a Governor General, local politlcIans, a well-known academic, and their fom most painter - had been savaged inerci- l&y. tvfany were offended also that Patrick White, the public fp,ure and winner of international awards, should be 80 shamelessly frank about his private Life.The reactions in England were m~rr temperate Now that the book has fmal- ly reached North America, it should be possible to regardit with eqllanimity. I must’ immediately admit to a bias, for if I were asked to name the contem- pomty vxiter of fiction in English who bee-n what I understood as an offering in interests me most, I should have no’ absence of other pifts.” If he is brutal hedtattng Is replying, Patdck Wblte. I with some others, he never sparer Idm- btliwe, however, that Ffaws in the self. Hating his appeamnce as a timid, Glm: A Self-porlmiI has a variety of introspective, hypersensitive boy, at espccts that will interest, concern, and home nowhere, he felt the need to entettain a wide audience here: White “escape his own reflection in the glass.” the Nobel Prize winner, White the public Half a century later he sees himself 1u1 figure, White the private man. and, vain, prickly, unforgiving, bitter, obvious from the first page, the book jealous, yiolent, a slasher and a des- itrelf as an admirable example of a par- troyer. Treating White the man, his ticukx form. an addition to White’s dis- stress is constantly on the “flaws,” the tbt:uished list of novels,short stories, negative. When he shiRs his emphasis to and plays. White the writer, the positive emerges. Although most of the key people and The connecting tissue is stated diitly. incidents in White’s life are included, the “Doomed to becoke an artist. . .sexual subtitle indieater that this is not a ambivalence helped drive me in on my- chronolo~cally arranged autobiography self . . .I chose fiction, or more likely it or diay or journal kept for oneself. The was chosen for me. as a means of intro- form is closer to the confession or the ducing to a diibelieving audiince the apology, witten for a public, a kii of cast of lmmadictory charscters of self-justification, self-exposure. a which I am composed.” From the last years of the19thcentury defence, and in some parts, an offence He claims: “As an artist, my face is this broad novel screcpsthrough to the or attack. Thii is a book thal White had many-faceted. my body protean . . . present da condudiog the towering to wke. ambivalence has given me insights into South d. r,can saga ihar began so magniticendy in A fifcm Flia and Mm The tide, indicating the difficulty human nature, denied, I believe, to those who are unequivody male or ofMm.ToreadaUbreeism involved in this genre, derives from a umu~sscd,unforgettable experience. fknxd tilt mirror that distorts and flue- female.” Writing he also sees as a “mask,” a 48opaga,s17.95 tuate; is Patrick the boy moves: the imoossibilitv of knmvine and omiectine “shield,” patictdarly in Australia, a “hostile land,” an “escape,” but +le creatu;eI swrceIy inev~lily&~ to others. “What to tell and what to leati signif~tly an escape “into a moTe vital out while conveying the truth remains a world.” The actual process of delivering neat question. details that m&e the “resistant novels” is cruel; for the . .the work inside him is like “a calf twisted in or mar a portrait.” The self-portrait is n .-nw%.“nwnt7 *I ~~7%.n&.. ,hl nnvlt:.t made up of a number of different coi- ” -.. ” ..“...“. -..“w..-‘..“““.-. ours and strokes, mingled, conflicting, pays for living so many lives in one foreground. middle ground. and back- body” is bigh. Fortunately, White ground, arranged in three main blocks: believes he has achieved what he most Thewar is over, the RAFwdfbrm’baa “Fkws in the Glass,” “Joumeys;’ and hoped for. not “worldI+ success,” but been handed in and James Herrtot goes the briefer, ominously labelled. “a Iastir& relationsbio with a human be- back where he ought to be-at work in the dates around Damwby. “Episodes and Epitaphs.” ingI can-respect and-trust.= The second section, “Journeys,” con- Mu& has cbaged, the blunt-spoken Typical of White and this genre, the taining some of the sharpest material I York&ire folk and dx host of published v:orks do not occupy the for0 have read on the traveller’s Greece - to fourlegged patients are still the same. SC ground. t.?Vbite leaves the mutilation is rheir vet, who doesn’t yet know that be read after travelling - serves the literary success is just armmd the and misreading to critics and academtcs formalunity of the book, for it is not a rhom he despises and avoids. Muhml -... travelogue. He uses his reactions to 347fJap, flaperback us0 friends suggested that I call on him in Greece and Greeks to “add to this sdf- Sydnq: I decided to spare him and myself that process.) AU the novels, col- lections of short stories, and plays are mentioned in the fti section, abnost in pzing. He does list his “three best” (a judgement that may surprise some K’hite realas): The Solid hz%ndalu, The Atml ‘S Srory, and The Twyborn A.&SW, addii a barb at “what is sacred to AuatLit.” The other works are men- tioned not for their own sakes - for this The dashing and dastardly Hashman is is not a litemry portrait or an artistic back?this time on the sharp end ofa credo - but in connection with the mllickmg Wild West adventure that will delight his hundixds of thrmsandsaf fgures and incidents that prompted portrait that I have undertaken.” He them. Since it is a self-portrait and since devotees around the world. never really leaw “home” - not that 5oopagu,ntw5 _ Vw%ke’sr&on d’erre is writing, the he has been at home aoywhere - for his foxground is dominated by White the lovehate relation with Greece and mawxiter. Siamese inseparable% Greeks is continually related to that with Not pretendi to be modest. White Australia and Austmlians. rays: “My work as a writer has always It is easy to see why the book offended some of his co”ntrymen. The untlatter- “the perfection of the ““ctuous flesh of ing comments splattered cross the Fort Lauderdale avocados”; the Queen paces of the tit two sectIons become “piplog in her high-pitched, cdd, Ehinrr the cetttre of “Episodes and Epitaphs,” voice”; Prince Philip as “a Glucksbwg tbe shortest, most acid, most topical, bully apeing the En&b la his tweedy . . and yet most personal section. Targets hacking jacket”; and John Kerr, the that have been general become specif= Govemor General, as “an amiable, - unfortunately. in the case of his rotty old, fatting Falstaff: It is to the friend Sidney Nolan and hi wife-but fiat two s&ions that I’ll need to keep as White says of tbe job at band: “‘It had retuning, for I think this self-portrait to be done.” The section is worth having will need no se&. I can’t be sure. if only for examples of the verbal felicity White says: “At the age of 69 I am still evident in all his work, the ability to bn- embarking on voyages of exploration pale a subject or person with a phrase: which. . may lead to diicovezy: 0

INTERVIEW

Antonine Maillet charts the long journey that transformed the Acadiansfrom a people in exile into a cultural asset By Doipls COWAN

.~N?oNINEM&ILLET~~~ bomia 1929 in of the great writers. One day I was fed Bouctouche, t’l.B., “one of the ancient up, and I thought, I’m going to write in villsges of the Acadians,” wvhosehistory my own way with my own language, and cultture provide the basis for much with what I hear around me. That ws of her writing Her fmt novel was pab- such a step that I thought, I’ll write it lished ia 1958, and since then she has just for me - nobody will heat of it wtitten shott stories, sewn more novds, because nobody would accept it. So I aad IO plays. Her most famous tfMtre, wrote a play, and the tlrst word is a the one-woman show La Sagmine, has been performed with grear success in both En&h and French. She has reed- ved many literary prims, ittduainp the 1979 Prix Goncomt for ha novel, P&&-la-Charrette, which has recently been published ia translation by Double- day (see page 17). During a visit to Toronto she talked to Doria’ Cowan about her life and work:

Books in Canada: when you began writin& did you think you would be writing /or your own people, for Acad..ns, in the Acadian Ianguagee9 MaIUeftItbmkIhadtbatatleastinmy ,-. .L uncoascious. It wsa’t clear. When I wrote my Iitst hook, I was tryIn. to be as swearing - it means God-dash-to-hell universal as possible. That’s the worst - and if you be& a play with a word tbktStodo.Iwastsyingtowritebta like that, OK. you’re free, you can go very neutral. dassical French. Of course, on. From then on. I knew it could be I didn’t saccesd, happily, because if I done. I could write in Acadian French. had, the book would have had no char- BIG: Gm it be tmmlated? acter at all. But P&t-Coques. in Maillel: Ewything can be translated. If spite of me, is an Acadian book. I used we can translate Shakespeare, tbea any- Acadian material - the story ls based thing can be translated. You lose. but on a fuhermen’s villags near Bow it’s still beautiful. Pd/agie was translated touche - but I was trying to use the beautifully. Not being English, I can see teclmiqws and stmctures and lan~uagc the rhythm and the spirit in it, and it’s ver, faithful Lo the French. Of course, and it doesn’t at all surprise me. Qnebec there’s no English equivalent for Aca- is a male country. Of co”m?,Bye are dian French. You would have to go to desceaded from the same people as the Chaucer, end yet you couldn’t do that Quebecois but in three centuries you either, because there’s no such thing as a develop a different mentality. Quo Chaucerian spoken English, and Aca- becken are more dia. When we make dian French is a live language. fun of them, they don’t notice it. When EiZ iS%hothas the reaction to P&gii they make fun of us, it’s obvious. They la-Charrerte been like among the am the wolves. we are the foxes. History .4cadions? has decided that. They have teeth to Maillct: They feel it’s so theirs and so bite. They’re strong. We’re not. true that rhey want to know, Why didn’t BIG: Is It on decrdian customfor the you mention so-and-so? They question me, Why wasn’t niy grandfather there? mother to- daughter, creating (I fimale What about the Babiueaus. the line elf dwcertt? Goguens? Every family wants to be in il. MaiMetz I don’t know whether it’s a D2 In P&aJe the narrator claimsde0 tradition, but I know that it has been cent from B&nie. the old stow-teller x-ho cumes bock with the cwt. Is the times I smt with a Uttle’tbii, and I normtor .vJvou? make it a big thiag. Not sometimes, all the time. i%Bleh Ves, the narrator is me. Them’s BIG: P&gie b dedicated to your no Bflonie in the Maillet lineage really, mother. Vhgiinle Comder, and in the bur I wanted to be part of the story- novel. as the returning dmdians pan tellers, rather than the leaders. Acadians through Virginia, o baby girl Q born and are either the Pelagic type, or Ihe named Vhghie Comder, fttt qf the BSlonie type: Lhe active, or the nome. Was she your direct mtcwtor? meditative. Malllel: When I was a kid I asked my Sic: R%crr about Pierre&Pierre-b- mother, How come you have the name Pitm? of a state? Probably she joked, and said, MaU!~L:That’s soother Acadian type, Well. I probably had an aueestor that the real clowns. In my family we have all was barn them during the Bxpulsion. that. The MaiUe~sam the thinking peo- she didn’t really know that. But in ple, the vise ones, the Belonies. The honour of my inother I made up the Coniers. my mother’s family, are the story of Virginie Cormier. fun-makers. And on my grandmother’s BIG: How much 4fPelagie ir invented? side I come from the Goguens, they’re The black toan. for emmple. who wws the P&gieses,the tough ones, the leaders. renamed Th60tisteS was he (I real ‘i%E In P6lagie-Ia-Charrette Ihe women chamcter? arc the lerrdem,the strong onas. Is th& MaIllet: He’s an invented character. But bxattses biEtoricolly,the men were klll- them were Negroes who mixed up with ed in the Espukion. orb it just that the the Acadians and came back with them worn~,,ore stronger? Lo Nova Scotia. MoiRel: Those are two masons. Ir’s true .B;B; And the stow of the CharlMon that the Acadian women are stronger than the men. It’s. true today. The lbf~let: Is invented, by me or by leadem of Acadie are still women. And B&x& But when I say it’s invented. the subject of P&&e, the rebirth of a there again, I know that some Aeadiaas aation - cell, who gives birth? If had to Swamto prison. Tbe only characte.r I didn’t invent is Beausoleil, aad he’s the back to the land. Also, another &&I, only one that looks invented. He came and this is a little bit OS&a bit daring or to me through the legend, so the presen- radIc31. I think that nations have pea, tation I got of him was weal, but I that there am male people and female didn’t want to touoh it. It was too pzopfe, like the animus and the mdma, beautiful. When I invent a character, I and their virtues am male or female wouldn’t want to invent one that wa3 so ones. Padeace would be more on tbe .unreal. I’m tryins to be true to life. female side. bur a certain kind of strength. a courage that is exterior, that could be mom on the male side. Acadie is female. its virtues am all on tbe side of pmience. a sense of time, some kind of interioriry, more viscdrate than cMbmh?. Its reasoning comes from instinct, not at all from logic, fmm the c~rt&ien, lilx the French. Pblagie, the symbol of Acadie, is a woman. Even the v:ord. I’dcodie, ir the feminine gender. Le Quebec and le Canada are masculine ;. ., i ._._C_ . . . . i_ L. .~__ .c_..; = ;.. i,Gi_l_iL~e .~.:_. ..~ __---~_

think of then;selwp as Acadte? father and mother. the Acadian lango- Melllet: Yes, and that’s funny. One day age was spoken In real life, as it is still in BhilI?t: No, she’s not legendary, and the students at the universities decided the rural pmts of Acadia and within a she’s not a heroine at all. When she that was all old-fashioned patrIo&n. certain genemtion. But in s&o& and In starts, she’s just takiry her famiIy home, Eva&h& and ail of that. From now the Iiteratare it’s b-me some kind of a that’s a8. Her heroism is built up during on, they decided. we’m francopliones oi chic to speak acadien. So there is a IO ycau. She ends as a heroine but she is the Maritimes. The very day they decid- revival that is a little artiticial, let’s say. not coflscious of it. She Is the anti-hero. ed that, Acadie was born. The next day, But it’s become a cultural asset. I just She’s not Joan of Arc. The Acadians’ everybody was Acadhm. heard that in Paris. c’avl chic d%tre way of being heroic is not gmtzdilo- Since the lS7Os,when Pierm Perreaolt amdien m&tenant. It sounds funny guest, it rouldn’t fit their mentality. made the film Acudie. Acadie, and La because wa felt KI inferior up to now and But v:hen P@le chooses to take the Sagotdne was performed, and Edith suddenly it’s styikh. lxople back instead of going with ButIa began to sing, there has been a BIG: What & the French attitude to Beausoleil, that’s heroic, because she revival. Acadie oft%IaIly ,doesn’t exist, Iiteratwe in Frettcb /mm outside the loves him. And when she dies, she has but even in Ottawa now some members cowmy? the vision of what she did, and knowi of parliament csIl themrelves acadien. Mntttet: Now it’s changing, and the rhat she hs done, but just at the end. You could not have imagined that u) Goncourt was a hii part of that. It’s the And it’s funny. uswIly I write wkh a years ago. Even Trudeau will say Acadie fast time In the Goncourt history not very aI?rt st>rIe,but I couldn’t manage instead ofhoweau-Brunswick, when he only that the award was 8iv.m outside of that in P&gie, and 1 finally understood means the Frenehspeaking part. Europe, but that they would accept to that it was bEawe the oxen had a knv BIG: Is the Acadian Ianguage b&g give it to a book written in another pace. I was doing everything along with preserved? French than authentic Parisian. That Pilazic, I felt the ssme way she did, and P&iUel: It .used to be preserved by the wss a law, an onwrItten but tradItional I couldn’t follow men and be alert. So very fact of the way of living. To my role, and I’ve ovemded the role. 0 the style vaspbts /otwd, heavy. 1 felt it. I couldn’t help it. I knew it was going to take 10 years. so I had a long breath. EIC: i-it& is really the histay of yaw ISVWSH, OUR ENGLISH pcop!r, or a large part sf their history. I .a Did you feel that respomibillty during th@ witing of it? crimes of fashiop: the perfidies of l%UIsfi Yes. Well, I didn’t know when I ad writers, the 1925 Ontario high school raz witing it how far it wooId go. I v/am? trying to be the pa&e of my grammar, and other language ba8hers countty, or anythi~ like that. But I knw that this story was important and By BOB BLAC!BURIV that once it’s written it can’t be written tv.ic.z Yes. I felt that. l:Lc Have yo” ewr witten avthtg bore that nvs as directly about Afe diatt h&or? ONE OF THE BEST and most enduring ddw English with total disregard ~~lti!~~ Hot as far back. And when I advertising slogans ever devised was for the t&IbIe conseqwnc.cs. started to vnite I didn’t intend to go so RCA Victor’s “The music you want There is no shortage of examples of far back. I started to vrrite about 1880, when you want it.” Terse, yet eupho- thaw mimes. Some years ago, as a daily when the Acadians who had been In nious. it delIvered its persaasive message newspaper columnist, I started a pmc- hIding came out. After 30 pages I reali* effectively and gmmmaticalIy, and, rice of devoting a pa&aph a day to ed 1 had to go back to give the back- evidcnUy, sold many phonograph such horrors. I had no trouble finding Louti of the 1880 story, and I decided records. When RCA introduced its new aramples, and could have kept it up to make a chapter with the story of videodisc players. therefore., one might forever, had I not been muzzled by a P&de. So I rewrote the first 30 pages. reasonably have expected to see “The publisher who felt, perhaps not without and when I got to that damn 30thh’page movies you want when you want them.” reason. that thii were tough enough in - that kind of loose plank - I thought But what did their advertising gerdusea the business without gratuitously again, Thii is not it. I have to go back come up with? “Watch what you want crItIcizbtg the people who pay the and whe the whole story of PdlagIe. So when you want,” that’s what. It may be freight. . I set aside the story of 1880 aad said, aUiterativc, but it is also s&c&ic, and An anonymous reader recently sent that eill be my next book. thus is without charm. me a clipping fmm the Hamilton Spex~ Bla And that wm Cent am dam les There is reason to be angry about this. tatorof aa ad for “a servI= being trialed bois? Most of the offences dealt with in this by Bell Canada.” I would welcome (and KIoU!ti Yes. It’s just been pub8she.d In cc&mm are the result of carelessness or print) similar submissions, incIudIng the French in Montreal and it vvI8come out ignorance, but the advertising writers name of the advertiser, fmm readen. in Paris in May as Ln Gribotdlle. The employed by big cornpanics are very French chose the other title because they smart cookies, and you can be certain ANOT~.IBFZawmta. Mm. Honor Buttars don’t understand what it means, to be in when you see the language being savaged of Gore’s Landiwg, Ont.. writes that her the roods, in the bush. Wehave woods by them that they know exactly what 1925 Ontario h&h scl.looI grammar says here; they don’t. they’re doing. From the days of “Wiw that “*each other is always used with EIC: Acadimu we now spread through &m tastes good, like a cigarette should” reference to two, and one another is Ner Bnmswick, Now Scotka, and to today’s “more cheesier” comntcrcial used with refemnc? to more than hvo,” Prim-z Edwud Island. Do they still from Kraft. these people have been and she asks if this rule has been dis- . carded. I don’t believe it ever was a rule, esc.:pt in the mind of the author of that book. rho should have witten “some times” instead of “always.” Says Fowler: “This differentiation is neither of present utility nor based on historical UIB.W: And so another scboolteacbers’ supkition bites the dust. One wonders if h:Iatthew Arnold, had he been educa- ted in Ontario. would have written (in “Dover Beach”), “Ah, love, let us be true / To each other!” and thereby spoiled his mew. i

AS JOHNNY CAF.SON SAYS. let’s see what’s in the necx. It reems that a recent Gcncral Motors layoff was suspected of beiw “in retaliation for the union’s refusal to accept wage concessions.” Perbsps the union refused to accept a propossl that it make concessions. It is, of course, possible to refuse to accept a concersion, but it required an examina- lion of the context in this case to under- stand that the mriter was not saying what he mcmt. BasKng is enjoyins a vogue in jour- nrdism these days, as in gay-bashing, cop-basbb~, tenant-bashing. It’s a col- ourful colloquialism, and I have no objection to its use in the popular press. Eut v:hm il poIiti&lreporter referred to federal-bashing. he was language- bashinS. The term calls for a noun; federal is on adjective (although Federal doss have r very lbnited use BSa noun). If the witcr wanted to be properly slangy, he should have said fedbashing. Perhaps he felt that would be unQii- nified. We VETS told of a “mntentious debate” in Parliament. I don’t know of any other End. Aaotber reporter said that “the prime mitita had no reads lion.” I-k may not have exhibited one, but surely it is a bit presumptuous of the reporta to say that he had “One. Y&n the Tories ended their boycott of Parliament in March, we were told that the nest step Was“to cut the energy bill down to mutually digestible chunks.” That would mean that the chunks could dirt each other. There is no saving that sentence. The man who vote it should be sent out to s bread- and-water dinner with the police Man also makes war, churches, ai, reporter who wrote “So far, any leads pollution, tools, food, jokes and have come up empty.” music. Based on the major I television series, THE HUMAN TH,S COLVMN RE-I.Y dealt with the RACE explores human behaviour un~.vo”ry but permissible use of loon in widely different societies from for Imd. I wouldn’t have believed then ‘five continents. Fresh and vivid that tbis month I would be reporting photographs and text alert us to . that the Toronto Sun has decided not only that loan is a verb, but also that it our collective power and means borrow. That may seem incredi- ble. but I have the cliouba “Loan an engraver from yoUr I&al police station,” advises an article on household

__ _._;.,... .; -...... c . -y _-+T ~.“._ . . __~._ I .-.-. ----. -- . securityprecautions. And after you’ve pose.. Fowler wants that using low& to consider how, and to what degree, done that, you’d better loan adictionary could make you vulnerable to a charge he’s become bwolved in the strwhm, from yaw local borrowing library. of putting on airs. I’m willing to risk been manipulated by it. It’s fun. Rather that. Tonwds is the mote widely used like watching a Michael Snow movie - A RWDEI(tws asked vthether he should fomt. and it’s perfectly acceptable, but U’avelenglh,say. use toward or towlrrds (as a most dictionaries define towards as The narratives touch on vision and preposition). You can suit yourself. I toward, rather than the other way hallucination, dream and nightmare, lean torard townf. The s serves no pur- around. q madness and aberrant behaviour. There’s a plot, involving a funeral, a love-affair. a quest for “blue,” another death. There’s a good deal of deliberate mystif~tion, too, but it seems apt for the creation of mood, which the novel FIR!3 IMPREWONS cettahtly manages. Rahmanl’s prose is chiselled, quite self-consciously crafted. pee@. Then’s Experimental fiction: thre: challenges a fine control of imagery - most of it ‘to the printed page, from the dance of the bees visual - effective in part because of the to an elliptical novel within a novel fevered, strung-out ttarratotx who are defined by it. BIue will strike some readers as perhaps too studied, too much an exer- cise, a tour de force. There’s a certain . artificiality, to be sure - a touch of pretentiousness, a hot-house UMBt- uralnesr of hue and scent. But I think AFrEt? A ml40 dry spell. three openly and confidant - remarks on thell this is only to be expected, and may be ezipwlmental fust novels this month - “pursuit of the exqttlsite (not the allowed, in a book so tight, so ’ avant-gude not so much in ideas, precious) and the witty (if possible).” Tvritten.” There don’t seem to be many though they can be that, too, as in the Most of the time the novel attains those like this around. challenges they offer to the limitations goals. Not cvety page lives up to the of the printed page. Their inventiveness expectations the best will raise; not every x&-s WHATt thought until I str& appears la features of design, typo- mnoslt escape affectatlott. These are Dead Ends. by Keith Hanison (Quad- graphy, and prose style. AU are s”c- minor reservations. The Bee Book ints rant Editions. I35 pages, $6.95 paper). casful. avoid sterility, and on the whole grates its materials, makes a self- In its elliptical, awciafiJe density it argue persuasively for their unconven- justifyl~ context of them. It dancea, makes Blue look like War and Peace. tionality. hums. The prose here is &tipped down to essett- tials; it winds itpon itself in knots and A ~1tLDLYPuzzLao commentator on ANOTHZKmmi Coach House, whens the tangles of ptms, lmagcs, clues, fmgmems. events in The Bee Pooh. by AM qtmllty of the product - the book itself This ls a novel wrapped around Rosenberg (Coach House Press, 208 - still seems to wunt for something. another novel; it presents a titer at pages. 67.50 paper).observes: “it is Readlbtg Blue, by Gemldlne Rabmanl work. What she’s wrltlng - the core- clear that there are analogies to be (176 page% 96.95 paper) ls an intense, novel - is a fairly strai&tfoward but dravxt between the life cycles of the eaccedingly murky thriller, set in Van- bees. the substances they produce and exiided o&. couver. These are the parts of the book human affairs.” Indeed - and as The prlnclpal ttovelty - and dllficulty with the most taabxg. allusive language_ Rosenberg would have it, human sawul - this book offers is its narrative strue This plot hhtges on a matter of industrial affairs prc-eminently. This novel is a ture on the page. There are three espiqng. The hem, DanfortWBlack, ls btilllant structure of verbal and graphic speakers - Maggie, ha brother Danny, a disturbed Vietnam veteran with ctises effects - dialogue and diagram, letters a painter named Michael. The book is of identity far more setious thap the and lists, drawings, typefaces, concrete divided into three parts (two speakers in imposture he’s trying to pull off. As the poetry, photographs - all to Uhmtlnate the fvst two. three la the third), each author puts it (referring to his life as well the power and mystery of (chiefly wvlth tive chapters. Each speaker ls as his mission), he can’t “fwrc out the fern&) sexuality, all thoroughly enjoy- assigned a horizontal one-half or one boundaries of the pmblem, let alone a able. third of the page (lx or she may use it solution.” The book ls bttrlcately organized, for a word, a phrase. a paragraphJ, and “The author” is a young Jcwiph ahh chapters that parallel the rituals of keeps it for all the pages in the part. The woman from Montreal, k&a TN&I. hive-life. Concerned with the biography two - or three - narmtlves treat Chapters tell of her progress with the of Habella Cl, herself a student of the roughIy the same events. novel; ha father’s dying, her falling bee, it delivers a walth of mlrellaneous It’s possible, then, to read across the marriage. Her own story mirrors, with lore, funny and moving scenes, acerbic top half, or third (or middle or bottom considerable complexity, the one she’s and tender portraits. There are some segment). of two or more pages, follinv- trylw to tell: “The mass of other lives, quite ama&g pmber at the nature of ing the reasonably linear (though some the ones I’m paid to recreate, those I girlhood. courtship and marriage. times tortuous) flow of a sb& natr& long to create, and the one I’M pto- motherhood. The plot is slight and tlw.Orortecanrradeachseparatepage created, ex.bausts, tnlam up my OIvn.” improbable. but it nevec gets In the way from top to bottom and observe comp- If Lkad En& has a setious flaw. for of the fun or the pain. lementary but often wnfllctlpg points of me it’s a tendency to prcachbtess about Another narrator - the mabt one, view. It’s up to the individual reader to cultural and polltlcal matters (problems Matthias Harp, Arabella’s thesis-partner devise and test his strategies, or at least ln Quebec, American ownership of Cmda). These are the only places in these three books are stimulating, Lobdell, $17.95 cloth, 88.95 paper), a v%zrc I thought the prose went flat. occasIo”alIy exhilarating. The human spare, rlgomusly controlled novel of a Oiher than that, Harrison maintains a lives they present are almost without ex- young man’s frustrated idealkun that Ievel of insight and tenslon - about ception seriously depressed and depress- makes effect& use of implicit tensions cammdictions of living and wlting, ing. The characters are mired in being, between its method a”d irSmaterial. The abmt some of fhe forms that dondna- tortured by it; the emotional needle of book can be superfIcl@ read es the tion can take - that’s constantly high, their days wavers between despondency standard romantic melodrama of a se”- dcmmding. revxudihg. and suicide, never w&s above anxiety. sltive soul’s destruction by a crass Is this +pemdox? If it is, should it be society, but the protagonist’s myare”e.w surprlsi@ 0 that he in a sense deserves - in a corn- plex and almost fatalistic mm&r - whet happens to him supplies an m&h- ing substratum of meming that lifts it far above the conventional. Wednw day’s Child is a very accanplished IN TR4NSL4TIOh’ novel, which among other tbll dunonstrates that a talented writer ca” spin satisfying new variations on even If the artificial ideas of Blias Canetti get the most familiar the”ws. It’s a fme you down, why feel guilty? Perhaps addition to a noteworthy publIshln8 it’s time to curl up with a little Siienon project. Blies Canettl was if anythii a” even obscurer recipient of the 1981 Nobel By PAUL STUEWE Prize for Literature than had bee” 1980 winner Czeslaw Mllosz. and since I had et least heard of Canal I was slI set to impress my friends with my profound knowledge of his work - as mo” as I IT’S PP.OE~\BL.I’M accident that the wound the fgwe of the serpent-woman could reed the expected new editions. Canodian publishers with the strongest Melusine. I “articularly enioved the tone that is. Auto-Da-RI (translated by C.V. lltcrature-in-translation pmgmms also of the n&tio”, whi& &&es to be IV&wood, Clarke Irwin, $27.95 cloth), have well-delined mrporate images. simultaneously chatty, sug_gcstIve,and a 1935 novel genera&y considered his Lester G: Orpen Dennys, vhose handlI”g’ gnomic in a way that very few writers - major llteraly achiive”lent, is “ow back of its International FIctIon List is an Borges of co”rse among thrm - can ln print, end I must say that I’m “ot object Iwon i” how to a98ressively consistently control. It’s a mawlIous particularly impressed. This is a novel of marlxt rorthwhile books, presents a piece of work, end just the tI& for ideas that can’t be bothered with co”- brashly confident face to the world. And anyone who finds Tollden entertaining forming to the co”ve”ti0” that Ideas Obrron Press, whose English-language but less then adept at the dellnation of require the existence of reasonably editions of contemporary Quebec character. bdewble fictional chemcters to express witing are an important contribution to Aheron Appelfeld is 811Israeli novelist than. Even though they arr often very Canadian letters. relies upon elegantly and short-story writer who has also stimulating and compelling idea, dr:i:ned understatement ln offering us a achicwd a substantial Intemational they’re presented I” such a co”textual large o”d eJntost uniformly diitingw reputation, but The Age of Wondw ~acuwn that their fundamental artifti- ishzd catalo8o.e. Although they project doesn’t quite succeed in creating a aedi- ality is heavily underlined. The other wry differznt perso”alIties. both fm ble fictional representation of a Jewish major work of Canetti’s career, t& stand oat I” a publishing world family’s misfortunes in prewar Austria. psychological study Crowds and Powr, characterized by increasIn8 homogeneity The “owl is narrated by a IO-year-old may well be a more stmlghtfonverd and timidity. and their most recmt boy who nonetheless apmses himself expwition of his thought, but in any releases suggest that this traditl.on v.ill ln the kmgoege of a 4&yea-old intelleo eve”t Aulo-Da-i% ca” be recmmnended continue. tual, and Appdfeld compounds ti very only to those who view the novel as a The nev: additions to Lesler 6 Omen basic disjunction by llmiti”g the boy’s n”?re theatrical backdrop forabstmctl”- Denny& list are Manuel Mu~lca understanding of events to a degree teJlectw.l speculatio”. Lninez’s The Wandering Untcorn It may well appear downright blasphe (trarwloted by Mary Fitton, $16.95 dotlf) a text that xvads like a &ihiIsh 40.year- moos to offer Georgea Sintmon, a and Abaron Appelfeld’s The Age of old intellectual’s account of his you& French author who is popular, prolifE Rorxlers (translated by Dalya Bilu, and it just doesn’t work. The experl- and - shudder - a frequent composer 515.95 cloth). Mojica LaInez is a hi enc.% of persecution and the diicovuy of mystery stories, es an orample of rezpccted Argenthda” writer- the book of evil that ere bell8 dealt v/Ith here are more bophistlcated literary technique, mmes with a” endorsement by Barges clearly important to the author. snd but this seenu to me to be the case. - and his Bornarzo is a brilliant there are times whhmthe tmgic forceful- Sbneno”‘s ‘Weight” novels. such as hktorical novel that inspired a fmc ness of his story silence.5 any CriticaI Big Bob (trmslated by Eileen M. Lowe, op;mtic treatment by Alberto Gil- objections; but tbls mood Is always Acadendc Press. $15.50 cloth); are stcra. T/u Wondering Unicorn is a destroyed by the unsettling narrative osually Intense explorations of the myth-based fantasy of picaresque point of view. As a Mult one cm “ever psychological ramifications of a sb@e adrenture in medieval Europe, and it is relax ad e”joy the positive qualIt@ of crucial event I” the pmragonist’s pasb simply deli~htfuk complexly delightful, The A& sf Wonders. and they succeed precisely because they a~ually. 8wen the detailed tapestry of The latest in Oberon’s Quebec liter- take a manageable amount of materiel love. enchantnwnt, and chivalric velour ature s&s is Gilbert Choquette’s and develop it thoroughly. Here it b the the author hes so beautifully woven Wed”esday’s Child (tra”slated by David i”expUcabIesoicide of the title character

.__,. _ that sits off a series of existcntlal crises $14.50 cloth) a young woman charges it’s also being published as a book, lo the liw of his friends and relatives. a him with sexual harassment, and before chain of events capped by the nwrator’s Maigzet clears hhnself he has been bother looking at mat ail. It’s fartoo r&ration that suicide is the logical brushed by the same web of cimomstan- specialixd a periodical for the gmemJ cldminatlon of an essmtlally meaning- tlal evidence and equivocal testimony xeader. On the other haad, I wouldn’t lez.5 exlstmce. It is simple, inexorable that has -entangled the innocent in want to miss a single copy of Queen’s and profoundly dlshzrbiag, and it’s several of his previous case& It’s one of Quarterly (812.00 a year, Queen’s difficult to see how it mold be bettered. the most satisfylog of a generally excel- University, Kingston, Ontario ShnmOP’S Ma&et novek are msier lent series of police pmcedumls! and if K7L3N6). The Wmter 1981 issue of and more fonmdalc, but here too reality you ever feel that you’re being culturally QQ, for example. contains a provocative keep: brealdng in upon the famous manipulated lntoreadb&utor essay, “Lost in the Canadian superintendent of the Paris police. In some other ovemlght sensation, take Fanhow,” by Stan Fogel, a teacher at MalgzO orl tke D&aslve (translated by two M&eta with iglass of white mine the University of Waterloo. Fogel ls an Alastalr Hamilton, Acadcmlc Press, and go s&a&t to bed. Cl unabashed post-modemist who worries that Canadian wiling and critlckm have been insufficiently affected by Levi- Straws and the stroctomlkts. The result . .. is that we have fallen behind the Americaus. “For too long,” Fogel THE BROWSER writes, “Canadian literature aad I criticism have been PYyxd - what is needed is a better balance of le ctu et le The view from the fimhouse: a consideration of cuk, the raw and the cooked.” The Canada’s place in the history of the world and reason Canada hasn’t yet produced a the contribution of women to hysteria on the tube John Barth, Fogel says, is that “the mn- text witti which the avant-garde can flourish is absent.” By MORRlS WOLFE Pnbllc Corporations and Publlc Polley in Canada, edited by Allan Tupper and G. Brace Doern (The Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2149 Mackay think. The other is that they tend to Street, Montreal, H3G 2X2.398 pages, change much less, and much more tmprlced, paper). Public enterprise has peratlons or so, to write a-hi&y of slowly, than one might think.” played 8 crucial role in Caoada’s the v:orld with the general reader in development. We’ve been forced to mind. The last person to do so in English YHE Q?.NIRALPACT of North American choose, over and over agaln, as Graham v.ns H.G. Wells. v:bose Outline of hktory,” writes June Callwood in Spry put it, between “the state and the Hismy vm published in 1920. Now we Pornail ofcIknad~, “is that there were United States.” That choice mntlmw have The l?encan History of the World fifteen British mlonies before 1776. by J.M. Robetts (Penguin. 1052 pages, Thirteen rebelled and two dll not.” crown mrporatlons were formed in jti 59.95 paper). Roberts, a professional Their “great refusal” (as Frank the pasttwo decades. A number of these historian, has wvritten a book that is a Underhill termed it) bus been cruclal in new crown mrpomtions are involved in joy both to read and to browse in. As shaping Canada’s cultural and economic ~esoarce and manufacturing sectors of -tight be expected, Canada gets but life. Herschel Hardin, Edgar Z. the economy where government tietiE attention in this bit&-eye view Fkkdenberg, Marmet Atvmod, and previously had no direct role. This book of hut&n history. We’re settled by the Northrop Frye have all explored some of presents case studies of 10 public mr- French on page 617, conquered by the the lmpllcatioos of that refusal. Dennis porations - including Petixanada. Brltich on page 619, become a Dominion Daffy’s Gardens, Covenants, &llest the Atomic Energy Commission, the on 734. settle the west on 758. and join Loyallsm lo the Lltemtum of Upper CNR, aad the Potash Cornoration of NATG on 946. That’s it. nut if it’s any Caaads/Ontario (University of Toronto S&tchw - and oifers some comoIatlon. many events - Watcxgate, Press, 160 pages, 823.00 cloth, $10.00 Bmerallzations about their imolicatlons for .sampk - anm’t regarded as impor- paper) is a signifiint addition to that forpiMic ~~llcy. Noi a @vat iad but a tant enough to mahe it into Robem. body of writing. Daffy looks at the. use&l book. There are a muple of interesting differ- writing of William Kirby, Major cow between Wells and Roberts. At the Richardson, Charles Mair, Mam de la ‘~HEBACKGRO~~+DPAPBRSof some Royal end of his book. for examde. Wells is Roche, George Grant, Dennis Lee, Al Commissions are.far more intereaffig optimistic, arguing that “clumsily or Purdy, and Scott Symons. I wish he’d thaa their actual final reports. That was smoothly, the world . . . prom and true, I thlok, in the case of Judy rvlll progress”; Roberts is far leg he seer between his work and FGe’s. _. LaMarsh’s Royal Commia&m on Vio- rangulae. For Wells, history is the story lence lo the Communlcatlons Industry. of great men; for Roberts it is as much ALSO FROM University of Toronto Press The reverse is true of Tom Kent’s Royal the story of ordinary people. When mmes Inlters 10 Gmeda 1980 edited by Commission on Newspapers. IIS fti Roberts asks him&f at the end of his W.J. Keith and B.-Z. Shek (245 pages, reportismuc.hmomthanthesumofits book what he’s learned from his study 823.00 cloth, 87.50 paper). “Lettexs in research parts. I’ve now spent some time of history, he offers a Zen-like reply Canada,” a review of the previousyear’s browsing through the first seven “Only two general truths emerge . . . books, used t6 be published only as’part volumes of studies commissiicd by One is that things tend to change much of the summer issue of the Uniwsity qf Kent - Newspapers sad thalr Readers, more, and more quickly, than one might Tomnlo Quarle&. Beginning this year Newspapers and the Law, The Ne& . _. i_:.:. _ :; pzpzr and Public Affairs. etc. - and I strident and e feminist tract. Now n-e Kanedbtik (Introduction to Gmadknt re~wmmend them to anyone for whom have television cobunnist Roy Shields of Lkmlwe). we also encourage our ell else has failed as a soporific. SIanveek Magezjne complaining about students to write exe@nation theses on the .gowin.g number of women jour- Canedie” Lopies. so you see that cam- A&wtizi”~ In Caneda: It8 Theory and nalists on TV.,“The trouble with televi- dien literature is thriviqg in Germany. Pizctiee, edited by Peter Zany and sion.” he says, ‘% that it brings owthe If your bttervi~vers bed consulted the Robert Witson (McGraw-Hill Ryerso”, worst in women. It has someU&g to do right sources they could hati found fur- 450 pager, $35.00 cloth). Although the with’tbe voice. When wnne” try to thexnmre that the state of CaLit in r’aaciatio” of Canadian Advettisem has engage in a hard-hitting interview they De”mark, Pmnee, OSItaly is very prc- been in existence since 1914. it’s only somehow sound hysterical. They always ndsin& The university of Aarhus (Den- “cw put ta2sther the first Canadiantcxt- rendnd me that I haven’t taken out the mark) specializes in Canadian literature garbage.” Question: Should editors let a (Prof. Jom Cadsen). The UIdversiQ of America”). I t&ted ib this book expect- state&a Likethis go by7 Would they let Lyon (Prenoe) held a confermce on ing to learn about some of the .dif- it go by if the word “bleck” were used Margaret Laurence in May last year. ferences between and instead of the word “women’7 0 Issue 87 of CanedienLifcmfwe contains Anwicans as perceived by advertisers. an article on “Cenadii litemture in The Forword states “that Canadians Italy,” thus show@ wideace of the in- ye very different in some very obvious creasing academic interest iu CamdIe” ““d EO”E wry subtle weys. Not o”Iy do literatunz i” that camtry. It renmbx for v:c have a deliberetely ‘biIin@ and me to stun up that e.Uis Dot yet lost with multicultureI society and economy, but respect to the plight of Canadian titer- w also have habits, manners, end tradi- ature in Europe. tions that wry greatly from those in the KonmdGross U.S.” But that’s it. Nowhere in the rest El, West Germany of tbe book ere those differences esplored. Dead ax!ckoning Per@unt&~ Poverty: The PoIitifpl Sk E?ono”ay of CzmadIu” Foreign Aid by 6leenor Wechtel’s ertIcle on the Gcwer- Robert Carty and Virginia Smith (Bet MI General’s Awards tMarch) iuchules wee” the Lines, 212 pages, $8.95 paper). I have read your survey on how CanLit the folknving int&ti”g &tement: Carty zmd Smith reject WiUy Brandt’s fares abroad bath with interest and sur- “The judges onIy caught up with Lowry North-South:A Progrem for Survival; prise. Taken es a true picture of the @osthu”musly) in 1961 for Hear (XI 0 theyview its recommendations es part of foreign response to the literature of your Lordfmm Heewn ThyDwell& Piece.” the problem. AU cases of under- country I would say lhat the interviews This is a nmarkeble example of fitdug dewlopn~ent, they argue. are ceses of conducted with critica and writers fmm the qualifications to the job. Who could “undwdevelope~- strwhtrcs,powers several countries reveal a bleak situation be better able to assess such s work tbarr end governments” ridii the backs of and hardly justify Ms Wade’s iutrodw a panel of judges who had gone to their the poor and choking off development tory remark that “we are, on the whole, IXt-leId? porsibiities. Canada, it becomes clear. doing very well, thank you.” This IanMcCausland bus bee” es guilty es anyone in this sounds like the famous, or should I say, T~tlttl re:pLyt. There are no easy solutions, ae- hfamous inferiority complex of Cam- cordii to smith and Certy. More aid is dim who apparently stiU praise the squaring file. record in itself not the enswer. An excellent but Victorian virtue of humility and are depressing book. happy when fordgners ere able to dmp sic the odd name of a Canadian writer. Judy Mar&s is wrong in her review of Virhy Fmuce end tia Jew co-authored speaki”g of the plight of czardim Ounther Illaut)s U&t&hed Busina by hlichael h!lemts of the University of literaturein GermanyI cat only say that (January) when she says: “He might at Toronto a”d Robert Peaor! of Colum- you are doing much better than tbe least have taken advantageof the oppor- bir LItdveAy (Basic Books, 432 pegs, tunity an sutobio.gmphy affords to air SZ7.25cloth). P&on and Memu reveal We have bed annual cmtferences on differences, to vindicate or if need be to in meticulous detail the extent to which Canadian Studies sittee 1977. I” vilify.” tbe Prench eagerly mlIebomted with Naranber 1979 the fmt German confer- Perhaps the juiciest tidbit in the book their Nazi occupiers between 1940 and ewe 0” Canadian literature was held i” is Plaut’s squaring of the record with 1934 in car&g out The Final Solution. Bromeu. In February 1980 the Getma” Reubm Slo”kn, Conservetive rabbi cum Blare than 75,000 Jew were identified, Society for Canadian Studies (Dews&e ;urs;ted. and transported to their deaths r%eIlschaft fir Kanedaaulie”) was handedness the-Middle East with the help of the Vichy government. founded end has just published the first alienated him from many of his Jewish There’s no wey of kno\ting how many number of Zekechritl der Gtxellwh@ followers. Plaut caudidly admit% “I ferxr would have died without that fir KanadaStudien.Canadian litcmtwc delivered e Friday night lattue which I help. is part of the Euglish Studies program at titled Tfze Tele#mm and the l’b-uth. the university of Kid. We offer at least Before a stendii room only co”-- IS tT JUSTmy imagination or are we one CanadianIitemturc mume per tcmt. tio” I-was bitterly critical. Now, many tvitnessing a gmwi”g backlesh egeinst The situation in the English depertments years. later, it ha become cIear that the wvmm’s movement by male jour- of the universities of Cologne. Ham- much of what Slonim wrote was quite nalists I” this country? The enommusly burs, Mei”z, Awburg, and Triw is true; in today’s changed dimate the powrful documentary about pomo- sinlila. In Trier Catadieu literature is substence of his reportage would hardly graphy, h’ot a Love Sory, wasdismissed tewht by Prof. Walter Pache who has cause a stir.” hy male reviewrs across the country es just pubIished his JS@hnmg in die PIaut doesn’t stop here: “We exiled

-.-.-. ..-. ..- You to consider what’s in her mind rather UtiitiaSrU dlploniatic. of the communiiy. .the book i/hi& than her pants. Slonim later wrote, Both Sides Now ws Donald A. Smith iu1 intelligent restrained critique of Mariaa E#mel Is sew& a aatae to mtqiwe with. ISIad.” Di;tiydet&zS that would have made C3sqv But his descendants are known m This apology leads to Plaut’s sum- Lard Strathconor. ming up of the quarrel between the Tear oat Rir hair - Janice nrwhitt, Toronto When she Sot to first bue wllh a bear. Canadian Jewish community and the .** Utdted Church Observer editor, A.C. Artths vaa &rk Forrest. “For Forrest the 1967 war was Plerm Bertoa Cannot be suid to irk Is aever quite certain the catershed. Forrest had written Her madem by rep&ion. Look how she Who will edit, approviogly of Israel in the past but that Bat he tah the c&it. Prom piss 10 pegr summer he became highly critical of it.” - D.E. Tacium, Montreal Many of Forrest’s anti-Israel editorials 100 are cited. Plaut bring the entire affair Rend Ldwqae brillinnlly into focus. Smoke3 d.qarettes awe Moaameatal d&lain ~IY srrldB&am Amtel S.L. Dmche A& aad a.@. can cease mea to con&. Ottawa I suspect,In Intimate clasp, Iionoorable mentions: She’d p&m the asp.

Northrop @ve. Eilty Blhop CAh’WITNO. 73 Here3 mud in your eyet Little dreamt that they’d fti up It% been a long. hard road, and d&h up Butyou~J7md~ crackedthe code. Vati0aS vicarioas L’hoaarabk Mare Ldonde IN PPZPARINO Prom his kill% thril’ their spring list, our old Rersemble bemuoap b tout Ie moade. friends at McClarkan & Newspider must Sar( qa’it soarit qaaad It peme Irdng have found last fall’s spectacular Au prix de I’csrcnc. K.C. publishing season a tough act to follow. Has one tenet unneervlng: Uitdwvr’tmakeapmpt- After so many blockbusters. their latest USir Willkm Van Home Off itt titles seem a trifle second-rate. For in- Had “ever been born.. Who woaid have had the honour staace, there’s a new Morley CaUaghan Dorr Richard N&ham Of holding the spike Lord Strathmaa? novel. Morz Joy in Moose Jaw, and for Really expect aayoae to heed him (Even Pierre Butoa W.O. Iviitcheu’s HOWISpetttLcw me.5 C@aS oat like Jeremiah or Job Isa? qalte certain, day, not to mention Mordecai Bichler’s Pmm hlr little comer qfthe Globe? Nor. lj it comes to that. Joslwa Once in a W7dle. ConteStants are Was Ned PmttJ - h&vin Goody, Toronto 000 invited to submit other book titles that -J.B. Baxter, Wilbnvdale, Oat. don’t quite make it. We’ll pay $2.5 for *** William Aberhart the best list received before August 1. -Preached a sew *tart. Marwn Bell Address: CanWit No. 73. Books in In the land of milk and honey ThouSht biS mwes were just swell Canada, 366 Adelaide Street East, Heprodaced h&funny nronyr. . So aataml(y shefound the lake Toronto M5A 3X9. A piece M&e. - Plank cummins, Monin, Ah. .*. Exclaimed Claude Cbarmn: “‘Merdenlars, bon! Viacentbfa~ CIUI:REQUEST for clerihews brought a I follow the sepamtkte line - Wirhw of all thiobs to be dew. landslide of ill-scanning couplets - in- To steal fromthe A&OS ir jur’ dnm’finel He wwed quiet& fmnr!c cluding, no less, ao entry from Mrs. When they called hir accent mid-Atlaatk. G.E. Clerihew of Vancouver. The tin- Donald Sutherland, - Comelia Schuh, Toronto .00 nets (who receive a copy of The Com- Far from his motherland. EncounteredJane. who. fond. acute, nkte Clerlhews of E. Ckrihaw Betttlev Opined. “1 really think he5 Ktute. ” Fadey rdowt - Odymar Vii, Toronto Dldn? alww know it. 040 He dkcmwed woh’ev ad whales &&it contestants, 6h;hose-es iffer- And tarned them into sala. cd a combination of irreverence abd. Louk Rtet - Mamlyn Horsdal, rhythmic mayhem: War hanSednorth ~4 Qu’AppeSe. Somemy th& &I upskzrter pulford Hatboor, B.C. Wm really a Metk marty. 094 lZ7tlizmLyon b4ackenzleKinS - A. Leonard, Halifax Did an unusuatthing. 090 For MackenzteKing He wzd a nomrious morherfkadon . The ocudt wav the thing. To bzcome dzefather of hk natton. perer P0cklinglon He &ed for cmdnepermkdaa Who liws in Hockeytown When maktaS a de&ion .\4arSaretTrudeau’s Will new complain - Hendrika Neuberger. Bool;r nia ao kados Whm his star’s on the nnyne. As art. bat aboat herpbyslml Bdoeil, Que. - l-l. Orpen, Powdl River, B.C. *** Charms all Caaad&m mea are now quizzical. .00

Lloyd Axworth~ Cha&s Rltchte 1 Robertson Davtes Sboald bear in odnd that a carvy Is charminglybiircrrv. Made bks hk babies Ii’onmn nocwd~s wats But at hi3 mast emphatk They catae oat in a strtaS. wgular one>&rsubscrip tion priceof these Canadian ma@nes. How? Slmplg Iill in the order form belmv and mail it to us Wll start ,rour subscrtpti;” right a:ay.

CbNhDtANlWMANSTUDIE A biigal fem. inirt quarterly with artides. nvinrs. poctly I December 1982 and phc4wga. the r@arone year ise= subscription price of these Canadianmagazines. So lill the emno~, addexenc+. mukicullulalirm. rdi. i~‘andwe’llkeepywSMdledin! gionand qorl. 515’4 issuer

‘WBTttTCANKIABEVtEIV

market reports. SW4 issues Send eheque ramble to: rasccamr‘PM%I"-H BOOKS RKEIVED

- The Room 255 Monday Night Er@lsh Class ~k,rke Road Secondary School THE FOLLOWNOCanadian books have London, Ont. been received by Books in Canada in recent weeks. Inclusion in this list doa not preclude a review or notice in a future issue: THE EDITORS RECOMMEND

THE FOLLCIWNGCanadian books were reviwed in the prcvioos issue of Bookr in Cmada. Our recommendations don’t necerssrily reflect the reviews:

FICTION

The RlmortOleedng cud Other Slorf~-%by Henry hreirel. Ne\Vcn Press. Like LB. S.insr and Shalom Aleicbem. Krefselhas tbx European sensibilitythat lends iueU to taking a relativelysmall encounterand shapingit into a finely crafted story that is rich in humanity.

NON-FICTIQN

R%,psand Dmmr: Indtnns nnd the B&h Columhin Fmnder. by Hugh Brady. Dou3fas& McIntyre. A pmverfulblend of personalizedand sockd history that adds up to a sexing indictment of the \~ay the rbke mm has systematicallydisinherited Canada’snative people.

POETRY

S’n~?nos. by Kevin Roberts, Oolichan Books.A restrained“documentary” treat- ment of coal mining on VancouverIsland. based on contemporary sourca and historical facts, and written in hard. spar% direct tanguase.

Classified rates: $6 per line (40 characters to the Ilne). DeadlIne: first Of the month for issue dated fOllOV/ing monlh. Address: Books in Canada Class- Ifled. 366 Adelaide Street East, Tumnto MA 3X9. Phone: (416) 383.5426. OUT.OF.PRINT CANADIANA - hIsto% biography, literature. Books, pamphlets, periodicals. Catalogues free on request. Huronla Canadiana Books, Box 65% Alliston, Ont. WM 1AO. OLD AND RARE BOOKS. Canadiana catalogues. Heritage Books, 3438 6 St. SW.. Calgary, Alberta T2S 2M4. USED CANADIAN BOOKS. Free descrlp 1 tlve catalogues. C & E Books. Box 2744, Stn. B. Kitchener. Ont. NZH 6N3. THE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF ELIZABETH SMART A profile by John Goddard

ICELANDERS IN CANADA A review essay by W.D. Valgardson

THE WHAT AND WHY OF WAUGH A review by 1.M Owen

LIKE ONE THAT DREAMED: A PORTRAIT OF A.M. KLEIN Reviewed by Henry Makow

Available in better bookstores everywhere or delivered directly to your home. Ten times a year. Shouldn’t you subscribe now? ----______--__--___;-______i Yes, I’d like to subscribe to Books in Canada 0 Name Address

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. . . an d-g bkwdof history, adventureandromance jiwm M.M. Kaye, authorof the bestsellingTHE I;AR PAyzLLlONS and SHAD0 W OF THE MOON PenguinBooks $3.95