Frederick Philip Grove: a N Impression

per copy $1.00 Winter, ig6o Articles By: HUGH MACLENNAN, JAMES REANEY, WILFRED WATSON, DESMOND PACEY, DAVID M. HAYNE, W. B. HOLLIDAY. Reviews By: PETER QUENNELL, JEAN-GUY PILON, WARREN TALLMAN, MARGARET ORMSBY, R. E. WATTERS, GILLES MARCOTTE AND OTHERS. Special Supplement: A CHECKLIST OF CANADIAN LITERATURE, 1959. A QUARTERLY OF CRITICISM AND R€VI€W ΑΤ Ι Μ Ε OF PROJECTS A FAVOURITE WORD among Mexicans is proyectismo; it means the rage for making plans without considering t h e probability of achievement. To the outside observer in recent years the Canadian literary world might at times have seemed to be suffering from proyec tismo, so many plans for magazines and other publications h a ve been in the air. In fact, a surprising number of these plans have taken concrete form. Canadian Literature, here publish in g its third number, can regard itself as well out of the project stage, and it is only one of a c o n sid e r a ble group of literary magazines wh ich have started in Canada during a co m paratively short period and which still flourish. Fiddlehead in the Mari times, Delta and Liberté in Montreal, Tamarack in Toronto, Prism in Vancouver — even such an incomplete list shows that the literary magazines are not merely becoming numerous, but also that they healthily represent every region of the country. Perhaps the most encouraging fact about these new magazines is that they do not seem to be achieving mutual strangulation; on the contrary, those whose circumstances we know appear to be receiving more support than the pioneer Canadian little magazines of the 1940's. Whether the people who support the magazines of today are getting more for their devotion in terms of good writing than the people who supported the early issues of Northern Review and Contemporary Verse is another matter, and perhaps not yet to be judged; the important fact at present is that those who do write well in Canada can be more sure than in the past of having places to publish, people to read them, and even a pay- ment which at least makes token recognition that writers should receive material as well as moral encouragement. EDITORIAL OUTSIDE THE FIELD of periodicals other projects suggest a liveliness in the general air of Canadian literature and literary scholarship. One of them is the new Readers Club of Canada which started operations towards the end of last year. This is the first book club devoted to the dissemination of work by Canadian writers, and its early selections range interestingly from relatively light biography to works like E. J. Pratt's Collected Poems and W. T. Eccles' Frontenac. A SECOND PROJECT of rather different literary interest is under way at the University of Toronto, where preparations are well- advanced for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, which will differ from its predecessors, the Dictionary of National Biography in Britain and the Dictionary of American Biography, in adopting the much more practical method of considering its subjects by periods instead of alpha- betically. As a result of a continuing endowment, it will become possible to found a permanent centre of biographical information, where the editors of the Dictionary intend that the material gathered in the en- quiries they direct may be filed for the use of individual scholars. In other words, we shall have not merely a biographical dictionary which will doubtless increase our knowledge of Canadian literary figures and stimulate the art of biography, but also a new Canadian research institution of great value to writers of all kinds. FINALLY, as a project of particular interest to readers of Canadian Literature we would like to draw attention to the Literary History of Canada which is being prepared under the general editorship of Carl F. Klinck, with an editorial committee that includes Northrop Frye, Roy Daniells and Desmond Pacey. The combined efforts of the editors and twenty other writers will produce, we are told, "a compre- hensive reference book (about 600 pages in length) on our literary history, which is due to appear in 1961 or 1962". The collection of essays by many hands has rarely been completely successful in presenting either literary or general history; there is the temptation to produce an an- thology rather than a cohesive narrative. Yet variety of viewpoint has its merits, and we can certainly expect that the Literary History will produce new facts and fresh interpretations which will stimulate interest in this field of scholarship. A FOREST OF SYMBOLS: An Introduction to Saint-Denys Garneau David M. Hayne A NEW ERA i n French-Canadian poetry began when Saint-Denys Garneau published a volume of twenty-eight poems early in 1937. The significance of the appearance of Regards et jeux dans l'espace was not immediately apparent; indeed, the reputation of this young man, whom Etienne Gilson has called French Canada's greatest poet, dates, for all except a handful of his friends, from the past decade. His Poésies complètes (not quite complete, of course) appeared in 1949; his Journal (substantially less complete) was published in 1954. Six years later it has become impossible to speak of twentieth-century French- Canadian poetry without mentioning his name. But Canadian life and literature, as Quebec's first premier noted nearly a century ago, find their image in the great double spiral staircase of the Château de Chambord, which two persons can mount simultaneously without ever meeting. It is not surprising that Saint-Denys Garneau, except for a few pages of translated selections and one or two brief critical notices,1 is almost unknown in English-speaking Canada. 1 Translations by Jean Beaupré and Gael Turnbull in The Canadian Forum xxxvi (Feb. 1957), p. 255; by John Glassco in Fiddlehead xxxvi (Spring 1958), pp. 3-5, in The Tamarack Review vin (Summer 1958), ρρ· 17 35^ and in The Waterloo Re view π 2 (Winter 1960), pp. 50 52; by F. R. Scott in The Tamarack Review IV (Summer 1957), pp. 55 59, and in his Events and Signals, Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1954, p. 22. Professor W. E. Collin discussed the Journal in "Letters in Canada 1954" in the University of Toronto Quarterly xxiv, 3 (April 1955), pp. 321 324. A FOREST OF SYMBOLS Born in Montreal on June 13, 1912, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau was on the paternal side a great-grandson of the historian, François- Xavier Garneau and a grandson of the poet Alfred Garneau; on his mother's side he claimed descent from Jean Juchereau, a contemporary of Champlain and ancestor of one of French Canada's "first families". The young Hector seems to have been baptized "de Saint-Denys" after an illustrious forbear, Nicolas Juchereau de Saint-Denys, to whom Louis XIV granted letters of nobility for his gallantry in the defense of Quebec in 1690. Saint-Denys Garneau spent his childhood at the ancestral manor-house at Sainte-Catherine de Fossambault, about twenty-five miles north of Quebec. When he was eleven, he was returned to Montreal to take his secondary schooling at a Jesuit classical college. Already his talents for poetry and sketching were apparent, and during some of these years he attended classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. His literary début occurred at the age of thirteen, when he submitted a thirteen- stanza poem in a children's literary competition organized by a Montreal department store. His entry, accompanied by a fearsome sketch, was entitled "Dinosaurus", and it began: II était gigantesque Et son nom je vous dis Etait presque Aussi grand que lui Except for the lack of punctuation, which remained a characteristic of all his later poetry, this early effort is evidence of precocity and little else. In 1928, however, a Hugolian mood poem with Baudelairian over- tones, "L'automne", won for him first prize in a poetry contest conducted by the Canadian Authors' Association. Other poems of this adolescent period show the impact upon him of his reading of various nineteenth- century French poets as well as of his compatriot, Emile Nelligan, but the emancipation of his verse form, which he may owe to Péguy, had not yet taken place. His classical course was interrupted in 1934 on his doctor's orders be- cause of a rheumatic heart condition. Devoting himself to painting and writing, he now had the leisure to attend concerts, public lectures and art exhibitions. That same year he joined Robert Charbonneau and A FOREST OF SYMBOLS others to found a literary magazine, La Relève, which was patronized by Jacques Maritain and which lasted, under a rejuvenated title, for four- teen years. During the first three of those years, Garneau contributed essays, book reviews, art criticism and poems to La Relève; except for the poetry, these contributions have not been collected in volume form. The greater part of Saint-Denys Garneau's writing was done before he was thirty, in the five years from 1934 to 1939. In addition to his work for La Relève, he was writing poetry and making meticulous preparations for the publication of Regards et jeux dans l'espace; about sixty poems not included in that volume or composed subsequently are contained in the collected edition of 1949. He was also keeping the famous Journal which caused such a sensation in French-Canadian literary circles when it was published by his friends Robert Elie and Jean Le Moyne in 1954. The published Journal extends from January 1935 to January 1939, although we are led to believe that it may have been car- ried on for another year or two.

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