A SCHEME IS NOT A VISION Stephen Scobie

DENNIS LEE, Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology. Anansi, $12.95; paper $5.95. MY INITIAL, and somewhat Lee begins by setting up an image of frivolous, reaction to Dennis Lee's Savage "two fluctuating fields of force," which he Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cos- calls "world" and "earth." This dich- mology was to see it as a kind of "Son of otomy corresponds only roughly to what Survival." It has the same Anansi format, we traditionally call "civilization" and lots of short chapters with snappy titles, "nature": Lee is at great pains to insist little rows of asterisks between every sec- that "world" and "earth" are continually ond paragraph, all the trappings of pop interacting and indeed co-extensive with philosophy and an Instant Theory: just each other. The image of two overlapping add hot air and stir. fields of force allows him to escape the This flippancy is unfair, for both At- static image of two separate entities. (It wood and Lee are serious writers with is interesting to note that when a literary serious things to say: but the comparison critic these days wants a really authorita- does nevertheless point to similarities in tive image, he turns to science, especially both the strengths and the weakneses of to physics. ) the two books. Both of them make excit- The image of the fields is an attractive ing reading: they are original, contro- one, and in many ways a useful one. With versial, and thought-provoking. Taking its affinity to the Structuralist emphasis the trouble to disagree with Atwood or on relations between things rather than Lee is a more worthwhile critical activity on things themselves, it offers a possible than nodding along with the bland ban- model for the analysis of so-called "post- alities of many other critics. modernist" writing, which is an art of But Survival and Savage Fields share process rather than of product. the same faults too. Both of them present One wonders immediately, however, a Theory, or a System, which is so simul- about the exclusive nature of the image. taneously overgeneralized and oversimpli- Why only these two fields, "world" and fied that its value, even as a provisional "earth"? Couldn't the model of the fields theoretical construct, is severely compro- of force be applied in many other ways, mised. (Lee's introductory chapter at- to avoid, for instance, the heretical divi- tempts to outline a total cosmology and sion of "form" and "content" into sep- philosophical world-view in a mere nine arate categories? pages!) And both of them, despite re- And, much more seriously, why "sav- peated protestations to the contrary, twist age" fields? For Lee, the essential char- and distort their literary evidence to make acter of the interaction of these two fields it fit into the categories their theories is conflict. "The first fact of life is that have established. the beings which make up world and

53 REVIEW ARTICLES those which make up earth are engaged tive force. Thus there is no distinction, in in war against each other." " 'To be' is to Lee's system, between a man who chops be in strife." Here Lee seems to have been down a tree to build a fire to save his wife carried away by the cuteness of his own and children from freezing, a man who title. Indeed, he admits late in the book chops down a tree to make money and that "I knew the title before I knew what doesn't give a damn about what he's do- the title meant." The word "savage" ing to the environment, and a man who (which, unlike "fields," is not at all scien- chops down a tree to get wood for a violin. tific or objective) determined from the Lee's system would force us to see all start the nature of the fields that Lee three as aspects of "world," and as would see. This initial and fatal precon- "strife," "assault" against "earth." Such ception is, I believe, the fundamental mis- a conclusion is manifestly absurd. conception of the whole book. As a general philosophical theory, then, It would obviously be futile to deny Savage Fields seems to me to be simplis- that the world as we know it contains a tic, contradictory, and inadequate. But vast amount of strife, violence, destruc- one might be prepared to adjust to the tion, and agony. But to declare that such shortcomings of the system if it were to strife is the only reality, that it is the fac- provide a framework and a vocabulary tor which determines all other factors of for an accurate account of two such human experience, is an act of such seminal and difficult books as The Col- extreme pessimism that it, in effect, lected Works of Billy the Kid and Beauti- throws in the towel at the start of round ful Losers. Although Lee says that his one. No wonder Lee's vision leads only to book is "only incidentally a work of liter- "destructive madness, lobotomy, and sui- ary criticism," it is nevertheless on the cide" : his initial assumption surrenders to strength and accuracy of that criticism such nihilism without even a show of that it must ultimately stand or fall. resistance. In my view, it falls. Lee's accounts of Although the destruction which Lee Ondaatje and Cohen contain some bril- sees as the ultimate consequence of his liant insights, and many individual re- world-view ought, theoretically, to ema- marks which illuminate moments in the nate as much from "earth" as from texts —• but in each case, the general drift "world," in fact he sees it mainly in terms of the argument is, I believe, a distortion of the latter — mainly, that is, in terms of the book that is actually there in front of human consciousness. From one point of him, misreadings so fundamental that of view, Savage Fields is an attempt to their value as any kind of evidence in provide a philosophical justification for support of Lee's more general claims is the ecological movement: man is, by de- nil. finition, a polluter. In Lee, we see the Lee sees The Collected Works of Billy Puritan guilty conscience of a disillu- the Kid as a book whose "subject... is the sioned liberal run wild: not far beneath strife of world and earth," and he sees the aphoristic surface is a good old- Billy as "an instrument of murder, a citi- fashioned breast-beating hysteria. zen of world." It is certainly true that the In theory, the system of Savage Fields book is about violence, and many of Lee's is amoral : earth earths and world worlds, comments on the ways in which violence and that's all there is to it. But, as I have suffuses the most seemingly innocent suggested, the moral bias of the book in images are excellent. But his view of Billy practice is very much against "world." as the chief exponent and illustration of Human consciousness is seen as a destruc- the destructive nature of "world" leads

54 REVIEW ARTICLES him into an almost ludicrous distortion recollection of Charlie Bowdre's death, of the character Ondaatje presents. coupled to the image of the "headless At one point, Lee says of Billy, "That hen": and just two pages later we en- is why he murders so casually, almost counter the chicken in "After shooting absent-mindedly, out of the periphery of Gregory." In this latter poem Billy does, his vision." Like "savage fields," it's a fine for the one and only time in the book, try phrase; the only thing wrong is that it's to be the kind of killer Lee says he is —• not true. At no stage in the book is there and he can't do it. He "was about to walk an incident in which Billy kills in this away / when this chicken" bizarrely and way. In fact, it is almost a commonplace comically prevents him. Given the asso- of Ondaatje criticism to point out that ciation of the chicken with Billy's memory Billy throughout the book is seen as vic- of Charlie Bowdre's death, we can surely tim, not killer. All the major killings in conclude that it is a fundamental element the book — Tom O'Folliard, Charlie within Billy's own character which is pre- Bowdre, Billy himself — are perpetrated venting him from adopting "the moral of by Pat Garrett. The closest Billy comes to newspaper and gun." Lee's version of the being a cold-blooded killer is his shooting character may be true of the legendary of the cat Ferns : an act of mercy killing, Billy, the black-hearted villain of melo- performed at the request of Sally Chisum, dramatic fiction : but it bears no relation and conducted, not casually, not absent- at all to what Ondaatje's poetry says. mindedly, not out of the periphery of The second point is that, while Billy vision, but with intense awareness and does not and cannot act in this mechan- concentration. istic and cold-blooded way, he does never- Lee's argument for Billy as the per- theless understand it, and is fascinated by sonification of destructive "world" is it. He may watch "the stomach of clocks" based on the poem about "the moral of for hours, but he emerges "living." This newspapers or gun." Lee says that "Billy fascination is natural enough: Billy has kills by adopting" that ethos, and "Be- to know his enemy, and the character cause Billy embraces that ideology, he who does fulfill all the attributes which can 'walk off' nonchalantly as the bodies Lee mistakenly gives to Billy is, of course, he has shot writhe and die." This is just Pat Garrett. (Lee, incredibly, makes no so much nonsense. distinction between Billy and Pat — just Lee's quotation of Ondaatje is mis- as he makes none between Sally and leadingly selective. He begins his quota- Angie — further examples of the coarsen- tion conveniently after the line "so if I ing effect of his reductive categories.) had a newsman's brain I'd say...." What Lee's failure to see that Billy under- Lee presents as a definitive account of stands Pat but is not the same as him is Billy's ideology is in fact, in the poem, a part of a larger failure. Billy, he says, hypothesis, a speculative "if I had ... "seems to possess no inner life at all, to then I would." Two further points follow move through life as a self-less automa- from this. ton." It is at moments like this that one The first is that the context into which wonders which book Lee has been read- Ondaatje sets the poem makes it quite ing: it certainly doesn't appear to be On- clear that Billy does not have a "news- daatje's. For Billy does of course possess man's brain," that he does not "eliminate an inner life: that of the artist, that of much," that he does not "walk off see the consciousness which perceives and none of the thrashing." The poem is im- gives expression to the contradictions of mediately followed by Billy's intense his experience. Ondaatje makes this clear

55 REVIEW ARTICLES throughout the book, starting in the most Cohen's novel as a work of art are [sic] obvious place of all: the title. particularly instructive." To be fair to It is, I concede, common practice to Lee, it was not his intention to encourage refer to The Collected Works of Billy the such reactions; he still sees Beautiful Kid: Left-Handed Poems by the con- Losers as a great though flawed master- venient short title, Billy the Kid, as Lee piece. But his astonishing dismissal of the does on all but three occasions. But in final seventy pages leaves the door open Lee's case the omission of "collected for all those who can't be bothered to face works," with its suggestions of Billy as in the total grandeur of Cohen's accomplish- some sense the author, or at very least the ment. persona, of the whole book, is sympto- Lee gets off to a bad start with his matic. Lee never sees Billy as the source assertion that Beautiful Losers presents a of consciousness in the book, and never myth of Canadian history in which allows the possibility to emerge that he is Catherine Tekakwitha marks the Fall. in any way an artist. "Catherine's virginity," he says, "was an The reason for this is that artists don't act of blasphemy," and he uses the story belong in savage fields (as I hinted at of the spilt wine to illustrate "the infec- earlier in my question about the violin tion of her new sensibility." carver). The artist, above all others, is Douglas Barbour, in his important the exemplary figure of the man who essay "Down With History" (reprinted brings "world" and "earth" into harmony in Michael Gnarowski's Leonard Cohen: with each other; in the artist's imagina- the Artist and his Critics) has established tion, and in the delight of his audiences, the anti-historical stance of Cohen's novel. the contradictions of savage fields are The book's whole structure is directed resolved and transcended. There is no against the concept of linear time; his- strife. The fields are not savage. tory is an oppressive force which has But Lee, stubbornly clinging to his sys- reduced the narrator to a "pitiful hunch- tem, cannot admit this possibility. There- back." It seems strange, then, that Lee fore he attempts to reduce Billy to the should try to reinstate a linear myth of same destructive level as Pat Garrett. As paradise, fall, and redemption. That just a result, he misreads the character, dis- isn't the way the book works. torts the whole book, and sacrifices the But of course Lee is wrong about values of accurate criticism to the sterile Catherine. If her virginity were a "blas- pessimism of his inadequate theory. phemy," then she would never occupy the Lee's treatment of Beautiful Losers is, central position she does in the novel's if anything, even more misleading than quest. She could never be seen as an that of The Collected Works of Billy the aspect of Isis, as a bringer of apocalypse. Kid, and it is especially disturbing to see In fact, Catherine in her highly con- the extent to which early reviewers wel- scious rejection of sexuality is fully as comed his assault on Cohen's novel. Sam sexual a character as either F. or Edith. Solecki in The Canadian Forum saw To Catherine, after all, the Andacwandet, Lee's criticism as "consistently intelligent or Fuck-Cure, is "acceptable": it is a and satisfying," naturally, since he also mode of existence which she understands, claims that Beautiful Losers is "very but has knowingly rejected. (Lee, in an definitely a minor novel." Robin Skelton incredible piece of Orwellian double- in Books in Canada also finds Lee's criti- think, contrives to see this statement by cism "perceptive," and claims that "his Catherine as a distortion by the narrator analysis of the reasons for the failure of of Catherine's "real" opinion —as if REVIEW ARTICLES somehow there were a "real" version, of Book One, but its extension, its con- outside of what Cohen tells us, that would firmation, its consummation. (For F. to correspond to Lee's mistaken interpreta- stay as he is, for F. never to become a tion. ) beautiful loser: that would invalidate Catherine approaches sexuality with a Book One.) Without the assault on F. in single-minded absolutism which acts as a Book Two, Book Three would not be disrupting force in every social situation possible. she encounters, whether in her own vil- My argument here is not as full as I lage, at the polite French dinner table, would like to make it. To counter Lee, I or in the Jesuit mission. Everywhere she really need to put forward a complete goes, she produces a fruitful hysteria, the alternative interpretation of the novel, breaking of systems into stems. Lee sees and that would go far beyond the bounds the story of the spilt wine as "blas- of a review article. I can only refer the phemy"; Cohen's word for it is "apoca- reader to my account of Beautiful Losers lyptic." in Leonard Cohen, which will I hope Lee, however, cannot take seriously the make clear my own reading of the novel. idea of apocalypse, for to do so would Lee's reading leads him to see Beautiful mean taking seriously the book's ending. Losers as a fractured failure, in which And, like the idea of the artist, the idea Book Three makes no sense; I would of apocalypse cannot exist in savage argue that my view allows us to see fields. So Lee sets out on an elaborately Beautiful Losers as a successful unity, perverse destruction of Books Two and crowned by Book Three. My view ac- Three. counts for the structure of the novel as it His argument seems to be that the actually stands; Lee seems to want Cohen undermining of F.'s character in Book to have written a different novel, and, Two somehow invalidates the vision of not finding it, Lee is forced to dismiss the Book One. Quite the contrary is in fact novel that Cohen actually wrote. true. Book One has been concerned with It is worth noting what Lee would the transformation of its central character have us leave out when he claims that it into a "beautiful loser" : someone who is is "finally a waste of time" to read the beautiful because he is a loser, who by final seventy pages: F.'s "Invocation to losing all traces of personal power and History"; the account of Catherine's even identity is able to become "disarmed mortifications; the associations of Cath- and empty, an instrument of Grace," and erine with "ordinary eternal machinery" ; thus move into an apocalyptic transcen- the praise of the Jesuits for their heroic dence of time and history. But the title is choice of "Possible Miracle" against plural: F. also must be made into a "History"; Catherine's sublime dying beautiful loser. Now, F.'s character all prayer, "Oh my Lord, play with me"; the way through has been that of the the image of the System Theatre's neon winner, the master of every game he plays. So the only way for F. to transcend sign breaking "system" into "stem"; F.'s his limitations, to become as he advises vision of the newsreel invading the fea- his pupil not a magician but magic itself, ture; and all of Book Three. It is an in- is for his whole character, style, and per- credible list, the heart of the novel : with- sonality to be destroyed. This is what out it, Beautiful Losers doesn't make any happens in Book Two; Lee describes the sense at all. Lee's suggestion is like a process quite accurately, but he entirely critic casually proposing that we can do misses its point. It is not the invalidation without the Fifth Act of a Shakespearean

57 REVIEW ARTICLES tragedy: it's not criticism at all, it's van- that Dennis Lee is a writer worth dis- dalism. agreeing with. Despite Savage Fields, I "No one," writes Dennis Lee, "is asking retain a great respect for Dennis Lee, not Beautiful Losers to have a happy end- only as a poet, but also as a critic ( I think ing." We may well ask, why not? Why his earlier essays, such as "Cadence, should any critic make presuppositions Country, Silence" and "Running and about the directions an artist's vision may Dwelling: homage to Al Purdy" are bril- lead him in? The only reason would be liant) . But there has always been in Lee's if he were a critic stuck with a system work a hint of intellectual rigidity, of that doesn't allow for the possibility of allowing himself to be trapped too easily happy endings. "Joy," says Leonard into limited choices, either/or dichoto- Cohen (on one of the pages which Lee mies. Any student of Leonard Cohen would delete). "Didn't I promise it? should know that "A scheme is not a Didn't you believe I would deliver? vision," and that systems are valuable This has been a polemical review, and only when broken into stems. If Lee can my intention has been to mount an all- loosen up a little, and allow his ideas out assault against what I believe to be more light and air, out of unsavage fields an ill-considered book; but I would like something yet might grow. to return in closing to my initial comment

HISTORY-MAKING Hilda Thomas

MILTON ACORN, Jackpine Sonnets. Steel Rail. N. BRIAN DAVIS, ed., The Poetry of the Canadian People 1J20-1920. NG Press. DAWN FRASER, Echoes From Labor's War. Introduction by David Frank and Donald Macgillivray. New Hogtown Press. RICHARD WRIGHT and ROBIN ENDRES, eds., Eight Men Speak. Introduction by Robin Endres. New Howtown Press.

NORTHROP FRYE PRESIDES over themes . . . which reveal his reaction to his the critical garrison against which Milton natural and social environment. Nobody but a genuine poet ever produces such a poem, Acorn hurls many of his verbal polemics. and they cannot be faked or imitated or It may seen odd, therefore, to invoke his voluntarily constructed. authority in a review of Acorn's Jackpine Sonnets. Some words of Frye's though, Milton Acorn is a genuine poet. The title seem particularly apt : poem of his collection I've Tasted My Blood which in 1970 earned him the Every good lyrical poet has a certain struc- Canadian Poetry Award and the title ture of imagery as typical of him as his "The People's Poet" attests to the validity handwriting, held together by certain re- curring metaphors, and sooner or later he of Northrop Frye's contention. In his will produce one or more poems that seem earlier volumes, In Love and Anger to be at the centre of that structure. . . . (1956) and Against a League of Liars The poet himself often recognizes such a (1960), and in The Island Means Min- poem by making it the title poem of a col- ai° (!975) f°r which he won the lection. They are not necessarily his best poems, but they often are, and in a Cana- Governor General's Award for poetry, the dian poet they display those distinctive official mark of recognition, Acorn has REVIEW ARTICLES consistently displayed "those distinctive "Sonnet Written Coldly Lest I Cry," for themes ... which reveal his reaction to instance, about the murder of poet Patri- his natural and social environment." As cia Lowther, demonstrates the fusion of a Marxist and a revolutionary, Acorn the two in Acorn's work. In fact all the himself would certainly want to include poems, even the most introspective like the word "political" along with, or per- "The Wake-Up Raven," are character- haps in place of, the social in defining his ized by images of violence, of fear and themes. For Acorn is determined to con- death, of "agonies, insults and injuries —" front in his poetry what Miriam Wad- as in the poem whose title might serve as dington calls the "denied realities" — to Acorn's poetic credo: "!Use the Whole "reclaim and bring to the surface the cast- Environment for a Medium!" There are off and denied elements in our national also attacks on other poets and critics. life." One poem entitled "Shoot Yourself or In Jackpine Sonnets Acorn pursues his Shit Yourself" is addressed to "Friar dominant revolutionary theme in such Northbush" who "would'ev dressed us all poems as "The Craft of Poetry's the Art True Tory Blue / Masqued goalies wav- of War," "To a Goddam Boss" (How ing archetypal symbols —." can you buy me now in these times when What distinguishes Jackpine Sonnets it's sung / How I ripped lyric fragments from Acorn's earlier volumes is his un- from the devil's bloody tongue?) and the typical insistence, emphasized in the title, brilliant "Pigs," which in its opening on the formal aspect of his work — his stanza uses the primary colours and naive attempt, chaotic in expression and deter- images of a child's drawing to bring into minedly polemical in tone, at a poetics. vivid and shocking focus the historical in- This is not to say that Acorn has ne- sight of the last couplet: glected form in the past. As he declares immodestly in the "Tirade by Way of Truck's painted red, sun yellow, pigs quite Introduction," pink From sunburn — I wouldn't be surprised: Previously my books have been noted for a It being precious little they get variety of stylistic types. I doubt if through Of wind and sun. Now here's this jolly trip. all those years I wrote more than three Never mind . . . They don't feel burnt yet poems altogether in the same mode. Prac- And never will — the way things are set. tically all were examples of formal elegance, So far they've been well kept by the man; used in free fashion. Confined, but otherwise done much good by Nourishing meals, delivered right on time. True (or nearly true) enough. But in ad- Now comes this surprise ... A world to scan dressing himself so belligerently to the While they zip through it. There's another subject of technique, and in giving the sky discussion such a prominent place in the Higher and brighter than above their pen. collection, Acorn distracts the reader Filling their eyes with nearness and distance; from the themes of his poems, and invites Two of them stand up, almost like men — the response which has typified Canadian Balancing by forelegs on top of the cab; criticism of separating form and content Like the Cabot Brothers, gazing wide ahead. and treating content as essentially irrele- It's for this they were bred, born, doctored, fed. vant — the very attitude which Acorn castigates in "Shoot Yourself or Shit The volume also includes poems of a Yourself" as "negation / For cause of more personal nature — although Acorn class, all which motivates / Poets to soar would rightly object to the implied sepa- and swoop amazed." ration of the personal and the political. That this un-Miltonic splashing about

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in the shallows of literary criticism is not mode which is best suited to express the profoundly meant may be deduced from dynamic tensions of the Canadian scene: the brief excursion into the subject of a form that will serve in the realization prime numbers ·— "the thirteen-line prob- of the long-suppressed tradition of radi- lem" —-about which Acorn says: cal dissent. Jackpine sonnet will do well enough as a name, if Acorn's description Mad fantasies like these are mental exer- cises a poet goes through to impress some of it as a "réalisant" is adopted : "It has idea on his mind. Many forget the original a basic form, yes, but grows to any shape intent and concentrate on the fantasies. that suits the light, suits the winds, suits What must be taken seriously, though, is itself." Acorn's very real concern with craftsman- The antecedents of the tradition of ship, with the search for a form which radical dissent which is finding expression can be "loaded" with the burden of his in poets like Acorn are, for the most part, savage and passionately political themes. of historical interest only. This is not to Again Frye (pace) has defined this prob- deny the value of publications like The lem, if from a very different perspective : Poetry of the Canadian People IJ20- 1920, Eight Men Speak, and Echoes the poet's quest is for form, not content. From Labor's War, all of which appeared The poet who tries to make content the in 1976. Brian Davis, editor of The Poetry informing principle of his poetry can write only versified rhetoric, and versified rhetoric of the Canadian People, has taken his cue has a moral but not an imaginative signi- from Edward Hartley Dewart who in ficance. . . . 1864 published the first anthology of Canadian poetry, Selections from the Frye goes on to say that Canadian Poets, but with a somewhat A sonnet has form only if it really is four- altered intent. Where Dewart saw "A teen lines long: a ten-line sonnet padded national literature" as "an essential ele- out to fourteen is still a part of chaos, wait- ing for the creative word. I mean by form ment in the formation of national char- the shaping principle of the individual acter," Davis sees "The literature of a poem, which is derived from the shaping class" as "an important element in the principles of poetry itself. formation of that class's character." In With the conception of form as shaping speaking of "the duality of political principle Acorn would undoubtedly agree. thought which produced ... a literature And it scarcely matters whether his short, of conservatism on the one hand, and a intricately-patterned lyrics can properly suppressed literature of dissenting radi- be called sonnets. (Ezra Pound would calism on the other," Miriam Wadding- have it that the sonnet form was found by ton comments that "these dualities have some chap who set out to write a canzone often remained nebulous and confused, and got stuck in the middle. Milton and it has been hard to understand pre- Acorn's Jackpine sonnets, in contrast, cisely where to locate them." The dis- might be described as having come un- torted emphasis in Canadian literary criti- stuck in the middle.) What matters is the cism on mythic or "apocalyptic" inter- dialectical play between form and con- pretation in preference to a historic ap- tent, between the technical devices of proach, on form at the expense of con- rhythm, internal and end rhyme, asson- tent, should not be attributed, as it is by ance, and metaphorical language, the last Davis, to conscious political motives. The of which Frye identifies as the most im- critics, after all, are as much products of portant poetic principle. In his experi- the conservative tradition as are the dra- ments with form, Acorn is striving for the matists and poets, and throughout our

60 REVIEW ARTICLES history it is that tradition that has tri- tionary rupture with the circumstances of umphed. The crux of the problem may the past. be located, if not precisely, then at least Confederation had the further effect of with some hope of shedding light on the intensifying the split between the found- subject, in the failure of the Mackenzie- ing nations, and of preventing the pos- Papineau Rebellion of 1837. sibility of a "fruitful collision" between Mackenzie, a Scot who emigrated to the two cultures. Malcolm Ross describes Canada in 1820, was undoubtedly aware Canadians as "bifocal." The question is of the violent struggle then going on in whether we are also binocular — capable England for freedom of the press, under of seeing, albeit with double vision, two the leadership of journalists like Richard cultures and two classes through our pre- Carlile and William Cobbett. Mackenzie scribed lenses. was certainly in line with the impulse of Frank Watt offers a detailed and sym- rational enlightenment in his desire to pathetic survey of the "spirit of protest overthrow the feudal system of land ten- and dissent which, sometimes deliber- ure which at that time impeded the de- ately, resisted the main current, and velopment of industry in Canada, and which as a consequence of the necessities prevented even those simple improve- of nation-building was almost, but never ments such as water mills and foundries entirely, stifled." That it was not com- in the rural communities. The failure of pletely lost from view is attested to by the the rebellion which he led had the effect poems collected together in Brian Davis' of retarding the political and economic anthology. Davis draws his material from development of Canada for at least a radical journals such as the Colonial Ad- generation, and of inhibiting the growth vocate, the Ontario Workman, and the of that autodidactic artisan culture which Western Labor News, from the Labor had already matured in England. In The Reform Songster of 1892, and from col- Making of the English Working Class, E. lections of folk songs and individual P. Thompson observes: volumes like Wilfred Gribble's Rhymes of Revolt. The quality of the selections is, This was the culture — with its eager naturally, uneven. The best of them are disputations around the booksellers' stalls, in the taverns, workshops, and coffee-houses bold and direct, belonging to or growing — which Shelley saluted in his 'Song to the out of the folk tradition. The worst are Men of England' and within which the doggerel, versified rhetoric in which even genius of Dickens matured. the moral significance is obscured by the turgid language. This unevenness is not It was in a similar climate of radical fer- the problem, however. There is some sift- ment that Milton wrote. Under the en- ing to be done, and as W. A. Deacon sug- trenched rule of a conservative merchant gested fifty years ago, it is a problem for class, no such culture developed, or could criticism, not an excuse for ignoring the develop, in Canada. material. But the volume is oddly ar- Confederation served to consolidate the ranged and carelessly documented. In the conservative rule. As F. W. Watt remarks, Introduction, Davis is loud in his criticism of the academic establishment for having It has long been recognized that the "studiously ignored the poetry of the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867 was primarily a conservative act — Canadian people," and for having lent conservative in the sense of attempting to themselves to "the continued care and preserve in the new political entity the upkeep of a largely imitative and often character, traditions, and advantages of its subservient culture." But it is clear that colonial components, and to avoid a revolu-

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Davis has drawn heavily on the work of makes a real contribution to a neglected scholars like Marius Barbeau, Helen area in Canadian cultural history. Creighton, and Edith Fowke, whose con- In Eight Men Speak, Robin Endres tributions he does not adequately acknowl- makes an even more important contribu- edge in the text; he is also, evidently, tion to the recent endeavour to "encour- indebted to Primary Sources in Canadian age historians of Canadian radical move- Working Class History 1860-1Q30 which ments to make cultural history an integral he mentions without naming either the part of their research and analysis." S. authors (R. G. Hann, G. S. Kealey, L. Jamieson, writing of the neglect by Cana- Kealey, and P. Warrian) or the pub- dian historians of trade union history, lisher (Dumont Press Graphix and Jimuel called it a "conspiracy of silence." Endres Briggs Society). It is impossible not to suggests that critics like Frye and his sympathize with Brian Davis in his at- "student and popularizer, Margaret At- tempt to "make available for the first wood" are guilty of a (perhaps uncon- time a record ... of our own cultural scious) conspiracy to exclude radical cul- achievements" in the interest of "building ture from critical consideration in the a new, more egalitarian society." But this interest of the continued dominance of record must be seen in its historical con- their own bourgeois ideology. This charge text, and it certainly deserves more care- must be taken seriously, especially with ful scholarship than Brian Davis has regard to Canadian drama, if only be- brought to the task. cause of the blank ignorance on the part Echoes From Labor's War by Dawn of most students of the existence of a Fraser, a reprint of verses first published radical dramatic literature, and the lack in 1926, is well introduced by David of critical studies of Canadian play- Frank and Donald Macgillivray. The wrights. George Ryga, for example, is editors, like Davis, believe that "Literary often treated as if he were the magical historians have paid too much attention progeny of the stony fields from which to the 'official' poets in our history and he sprang, without literary antecedents of have ignored the work of the popular any kind (and certainly not national local poets like Fraser, who belong to an antecedents ! ). entirely different tradition." This tradi- In tracing the development of the tion is "animated by ideals of morality, Canadian Workers Theatre Movement by a sense of class and community, and and its origins in the international politi- by an aspiration for social and economic cal theatre of the 20's and 30's, Endres reform." Fraser's verse, though occa- relates theatrical techniques to themes, sionally sentimental and self-conscious, is and shows how the influence of the agit- no blunt instrument. His attacks on the prop tradition is still evident in Canada bosses who, it must be admitted, were as today. Her essay raises a whole series of absurd as they were vicious in their treat- questions for study. The plays themselves ment of the Cape Breton miners of the are less likely to be seen as material for 20's, catch the idiom of the people in future productions. The most impressive their direct, humorous language. At his is the title piece, which dramatizes the best, as in "He Starved, He Starved, I attempted murder of Communist Party Tell You," Fraser remains very firmly leader Tim Buck by prison guards who rooted in the oral tradition — a tradition fired into his cell in Kingston Peniten- which is still alive in Cape Breton today. tiary, where Buck was imprisoned under The historical background provided by the infamous Section 98. A factual report the editors of Echoes From Labor's War of this incident can be found in the

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Report of the Royal Commission to In- vestigate the Penal System of Canada (Ottawa, 1938). The play takes the form of a trial, using to good effect the various techniques of agitprop theatre. That it cannot be performed today is as much a comment on the suppression of Canadian labour history as on the literary merit of the work. In describing the efforts made by the Canadian government of the day to prevent the play's being produced, Endres provides a convincing demonstra- tion of why, in the words of Frank Watt, "The tradition in Canadian dramatic writing has never been continuous." Of the other plays in Eight Men Speak, Mary Reynolds' "And the Answer Is" has a feel for language and character that leads one to ask what happened to this promising writer. Dorothy Livesay's "Joe Derry" sheds an interesting sidelight on her recently published autobiographical work. But although as Stanley Ryerson says on the dust jacket of Eight Men Speak, "the themes aren't obsolete," these "scripts and polemics" can do no more than revive in us the desire to recover a past of which we have been largely de- prived. That process of rediscovery is of im- mense importance, not because it intro- duces into Canadian literary criticism a hitherto missing element of ideology. On the contrary, what it does is to make vis- ible for the first time the unrecognized ideology which has constituted the myth of Canadian literature throughout our history, and which has at once generated and been affirmed by a critical approach itself assimilated to the same myth. Roland Barthes in his Mythologies sug- gests that myth "has the task of giving historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bour- geois ideology." He goes on to say that just as bourgeois ideology is defined by the abandonment of the name 'bourgeois', myth REVIEW ARTICLES

is constituted by the loss of the historical forms" as being characteristic of bour- quality of things. . .. The world enters lan- geois myth. Among them are "The Priva- guage as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes tion of History" (that is, abstracting the out of myth as a harmonious display of object from its historical context), "Iden- essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; tification" (the inability to conceive of it has turned reality inside out, it has the Other, or, at best, the placing of emptied it of history and has removed from things their human meaning so as to the Other in the realm of the exotic), make them signify a human insignificance. and "Tautology" (the solution offered The function of myth is to empty reality: by Margaret Atwood's "Victor-Victim" it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a schema: "Tautology is a faint at the right haemhorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, moment, a saving aphasia"). These con- in short a perceptible absence. cepts may afford a useful insight into In Barthes' definition, "myth is depoliti- such questions as Why are there so many cized speech" which imposes a "second- isolated figures in Canadian fiction? Why order language, a metalanguage" between so many first person narrators, many of the object named and its reality in terms them women, who are traditionally re- of human action: a language of images garded as non-persons? Why so few In- designed to preserve the world by giving dians, heroes, lovers? There may be, as to what is contingent and historically Barthes suggests, "isoglosses of a myth," determined the appearance of being but neither the seasons nor the geography natural, essential, eternal. of Canada, though they account for much A dilemma arises here in that the that is present in our literature, are suffi- language of bourgeois ideology embraces cient to account for what is absent. all that is generally understood by the Barthes' "Myth Today" was written term literature. It is "rich, multiform, over two decades ago. That his approach supple" : to literature, and that of other neo- Marxist semiologists, has had so little The oppressed makes the world, he has only an active, transitive (political) language; impact on Canadian literary criticism the oppressor conserves it, his language is may be in part because of the unavaila- plenary, intransitive, gestural, theatrical: it bility of material like that included in is Myth. Eight Men Speak, Echoes From Labor's Left-wing myth, by contrast (and Barthes War, and The Poetry of the Canadian is explicit that "The Left" is also a mask People, a problem which continues to which generates its own metalanguage), frustrate Canadian scholars. It is more because it "defines itself in relation to the likely, though, that as Frye says in the oppressed, whether proletarian or colon- Conclusion to the first edition of Literary ized" must either borrow the language of History of Canada, "Cultural history ... the oppressor, or confine itself to the has its own rhythms"; "there must be a language of the oppressed, which is "poor, period of a certain magnitude ... in monotonous, immediate" : which a social imagination can take root and establish a tradition." That Canada This essential barrenness produces rare, as a nation never fully accomplished its threadbare myths : either transient, or clum- bourgeois revolution, and hence failed to sily indiscreet; by their very being, they escape the bonds of a colonized tradition, label themselves as myths, and point to their masks. . . . One can say that in a sense, may help to explain why "There are no Left-wing myth is always an artificial myth, Canadian writers of whom we can say ... a reconstituted myth : hence its clumsiness. that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a cir- Barthes identifies a number of "rhetorical

64 REVIEW ARTICLES cumference." This same historical peculi- ing to power, there is the very shape of arity may account for the absence of a every revolutionary situation, the fundamen- self-confident opposition to that tradition. tal ambiguity of which is that Revolution must of necessity borrow from what it wants Frye's 1964 assessment of Canadian to destroy, the very image of what it wants literature when viewed through Barthes' to possess. Like modern art in its entirety, improved binoculars takes on the ap- literary writing carries at the same time the pearance of an elegant but vanishing alienation of History and the dream of His- tory; as a Necessity, it testifies to the divi- dream — a bush garden, perhaps, but a sion of languages which is inseparable from garden nonetheless, in which there is no the division of classes; as Freedom, it is the room for the irreducible Other. Frye is consciousness of this division and the very quick to point out that "new conditions effort which seeks to surmount it. give the old ones a new importance, as As Victor Hopwood says in the Literary what vanishes in one form reappears in History of Canada, "Canadian conscious- another." What is now appearing, how- ness ... was born literate and historical." ever, is not what Frye envisioned : a post- It is from that very historical conscious- Canadian culture in which "the interplay ness, from the sense that history is made of sense impressions is so complicated, and exhilarating, that the reader receives by men and women, that the conservative no sense impression at all." It is rather tradition strove to alienate us. Milton those formerly denied realities which are Acorn (can that really be his name?) asserting themselves in the work of poets offers proof that it was not altogether like Milton Acorn. This new thrust is well successful : described by Barthes in Writing Degree I cannot say I never looked back. From Zero, again written in the 50's: then on I looked front and sideways, up and down, back and outside, inside too. There is ... in every present mode of writ- Never front and centre. Front and centre is ing a double postulation: there is the im- a bourgeois concept. But from that day petus of a break and the impetus of a com- forward I knew who I was.

CRITICS & PUBLISHERS John Lennox

JOHN MOSS, Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel: The Ancestral Present. McClelland & Stewart, $6.95. As A FOUNDER AND EDITOR of extremely anxious to abjure the reductive the Journal of Canadian Fiction and as tendency of broad critical study and at the author of Patterns of Isolation, John several points he reiterates that "this is Moss has established himself as a percep- not a thematic study. Sex and violence tive, energetic and controversial critic of provide organizing principles, not an the Canadian novel. One of the criti- hypothesis." Unfortunately, this repeated cisms levelled at Patterns of Isolation was disavowal of thematic structuring and in- that it subordinated the individuality of tention may alienate rather than con- the works under examination to the in- vince many readers. Moss's approach in- terests of Moss's thesis. In Sex and Vio- volves three stages — first, the examina- lence in the Canadian Novel, Moss is tion of individual works in and of them- REVIEW ARTICLES selves; second, the positioning of each argues that "violence marks the struggle work within a larger, synthesizing pat- for life and against death" and allows the tern; third, the formulation, based on the novelist to discover "the moral dimen- larger pattern, of consequent characteris- sions of his universe." Violence and sex tics of the Canadian literary and cultural together are constructive in providing imagination. These three stages are inter- either for "visions of moral identity" or dependent, but are often brought to- for an examination of moral identity. In gether by Moss with discriminating in- contradistinction to Fiedler's view of the tensity. American novel, Moss states that the The preface and first chapter of Sex Canadian novel "is virtually barren of the and Violence are involved in a definition classic theme of love and death in tan- of what is meant by the title. According dem, fused as one dynamic theme." Love to Moss, sex in the Canadian novel "re- and death as literary themes are possible lates more readily to personal identity" only in an established society. Sex and and "has no meaning, implies no judge- violence are the themes of a culture ment." Violence "lends itself to sweeping "where the quality and the existence of moral visions" and "demands a moral the society are both in doubt." Thus, the response to the conflict that generates it." Québécois novel is characterized by love While sex and violence are universal in and death whereas the Canadian novel is fiction, Moss argues that the remarkably preoccupied with sex and violence. This high incidence of both is distinctive to the last distinction is theoretically interesting, Canadian novel. The range of possibili- but not sufficient to my reading of La ties falling within the purviews of sex and Guerre, Yes Sir!, Mad Shadows, and violence is broad. Sex encompasses every- Kamouraska, all of which are used as thing from puberty, through heterosexu- examples in Moss's distinction. Constant ality and homosexuality, to pornography. throughout the preface and first chapter Violence means anything from "battered is the sustained connection between liter- egos to genocide." Literary violence, Moss ature and society. Moss concludes by suggests, is related to our historical ex- saying that "there almost certainly is a perience while the importance of sex in higher incidence of sex and violence in our fiction has its origins in the history the Canadian novel than elsewhere, prob- and influence of popular literature. To- ably because in no other tradition does gether, sex and violence "give us an elo- community consciousness coincide with quent vision of our collective identity as preoccupations of the contemporary im- Canadians." agination in quite the same way, to gen- erate these responses." Implicitly present as eminences grises in Moss's preface and first chapter is the Subsequent chapters deal either with a work of three critics — Ronald Suther- single work or several works grouped and land's Second Image, Margaret Atwood's studied in relation to a particular aspect Survival and Leslie Fielder's Love and of the sex and violence motif. In addition, Death in the American Novel. Moss con- the thesis of the study often gives way to tradicts Second Image when he warns of a discussion of the form or technique of his intention to show later how "Cana- individual novels. The second chapter, dian literature is an English language "Rites of Passage," deals with the role of literature, quite separate from Québécois sexuality in the depiction of young pro- literature or from the various ethnic liter- tagonists created by writers like Alice atures of this country." In contrast to Munro, Clark Blaise, John Glassco and what is suggested in Survival, Moss John Metcalf. As the chapters unfold,

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Moss develops his study through the use humour in the fiction of Robert Kroetsch of a critical spectrum which moves from and Leo Simpson. works in which sex dominates to those in The final chapter, "Gathering the which violence is most important. His Canadian Identity," is broad and contro- first close reading comes with his third versial in its synthesis. It is persuasive in chapter which examines sexuality in Lives its situating of the Canadian novel in a of Girls and Women. This is a fine inter- third-world context, in its endorsement of pretation deepened by what Moss ac- Commonwealth literary studies and in its knowledges as a shock of recognition and discussion of voice or language in Cana- by the fascinating linking of the persona dian fiction. It is vague in its generalized of Del with Alice Munro. The next chap- enumeration of the development of un- ter focusses on Margaret Laurence's specified forms and conventions influ- Manawaka works, particularly The Di- enced by the new subject-matter con- viners, in terms of the way Laurence nected with Canada. It is zealous in its handles "the conflict between roles im- description of the need for the contem- posed by gender and what we sense is our porary Canadian literary critic to demand essential self somewhere deep within us, of himself "a social responsibility, even surging randomly to the surface." One sometimes at the expense of his literary chapter discusses novels in which sexual vision." It is most contentious in arguing triangles predominate for different the- for the existence of two entirely separate matic and formal purposes. Another literatures in this country — Canadian chapter argues that the Deptford trilogy and Québécois. To argue for a character- is exemplary of fiction where "violence istic preponderance of sex and violence in obtrudes on sexuality." Surfacing and St. the Canadian (English) novel through Urbain's Horseman are examined to show intensive examination of specific texts is the difference between quests for identity one thing. Quite another is to argue, and quests for self. Moss goes on to talk without a similar intensive examination about the fusion of sex and violence in of the same motifs in the fiction of Que- works which he describes as experimen- bec, that "Canadian literature does not tal. Then, in separate chapters devoted to include the literature of Quebec written each of these experimental novels — in French—except through wishful think- Beautiful Losers, The Disinherited and ing and tremendous cultural naivete." The New Ancestors—he discusses how the John Moss is a skilled and intelligent first two fuse sex and violence, while the reader of our literature. His thesis is used third treats them in juxtaposition. Works to select and organize rather than inter- at the violent extreme of Moss's critical pret the works he deals with. Moss may spectrum are examined in chapters en- be admonished for his socio-literary ob- titled "Violence and the Moral Vision" servations, particularly in the last chap- and "Genocide: The White Man's Bur- ter, and for his view of the critic as "guru, den." Among the works studied in these guide and impressario [iic]." There is, chapters, it is Wiebe's The Temptations however, a persistence in the way we im- of Big Bear which seems to hold for Moss plicitly ask our literary critics to interpret the greatest fascination and challenge. our imaginative culture and then just as His distinction between moral and spirit- persistently tell them that, having at- ual vision in Wiebe's novel is succinctly tempted to do so, they have presumed or expressed. In the penultimate chapter, erred or failed. the articulation of identity and moral consciousness is examined in relation to The book's physical details provide the author and readers with reason to be

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alarmed about the attitudes of editors and typesetting, but even if this were the case, publishers. Presumably McClelland & where were the publisher's proof-readers? Stewart felt that Sex and Violence in the Such errors and inconsistencies serve the Canadian Novel would be an event of reader badly and the writer far worse. some importance in Canadian literary What was the commitment within the studies. Why, then, is this book so slipshod editorial department of one of our senior in its physical presentation? There is an publishing houses in the production of inexcusable proliferation of typos — care- this book? less, egregious or simply funny. Some pro- Editorial standards are also implicated vide unintentional comic diversion. Ex- in the need for some clarifying and amples — the synopsis of one story des- simplifying of the book's prose style which cribes a young girl's "public hairs"; the occasionally becomes gluey in phrases examination of Fifth Business mentions like, "It is one of those novels which the short reign of "King Edward IV"; might readily spawn an autochthonic pro- the protagonist of Atwood's Edible Wo- liferation of commentary." Other editing man is "Marion McAlpine"; the protag- might have helped to temper what appear onists of Surfacing and St. Urbain's to be Freudian slips which are delightfully Horseman search "for whom they are." appropriate to the nature of the study, And the proof-readers have left the critic but not altogether supportive of its seri- bereft of defences in their verification of ousness. Example — "Wander through "a single critical approach that is as muti- form as the literature it considers." In Washington, D.C. and marvel at the neo- addition, the Index is indefensibly awry. classical erections." For example, Jack Ludwig's Above This book provides a valuable, intelli- Ground is listed on pages 21, 31, 38, 39 in gent and controversial examination of the the Index, whereas the actual references contemporary Canadian novel by an ex- are found on pages 26, 36, 43. However, tremely close and perceptive reader. He one cannot thereby conclude that the In- and his readers deserve far better treat- dex references are consistently five pages ment at the hands of his publishers both behind where they are actually located in in the quality and professionalism of phy- the text. Charles Yale Harrison is listed sical production and in serious editorial on pages 230 and 231 in the Index, responsibility. A corrected edition is re- whereas in the study itself he is men- quired immediately and McClelland & tioned on pages 232 and 233. This inac- Stewart should move quickly to get it curacy may be the result of computer in press.

HAUNTED BY "CAN LIT" Linda Leith

DAVID STAINES, ed., The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture. Harvard University Press, $10.00. SOME OF THE MOST TELLING the eight eminent contributors presum- impressions created by this collection of ably intended us to learn something from essays on Canadian literature are unin- all the information about our literary cul- tentional. The editor, David Staines, and ture that we are showered with in this

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volume, and although the book makes no McLuhan — deserve any serious atten- pretence of being comprehensive it would tion? indeed be quite possible to glean from it One might, of course, want to argue a fair idea of most of the significant de- that these writers have some special im- velopments in English and (to a lesser portance, but nowhere does anyone argue extent) French-Canadian poetry, prose, that in this volume: rather it remains a and drama. sly but potent impression created — not Why is it then that one can finish read- by any one contributor in particular — ing the collection with a most curiously but by the number of times certain names lopsided impression of what is most im- and ideas recur. portant in our cultural life? Why is it, for It all begins unambiguously enough — example, that ghosts and the supernatural distressingly so — as David Staines in the come to assume such an inordinately opening sentences of his Introduction in- major role? When one sets the book forms us that the Dominion of Canada down one knows full well with one part was formed in 1867 under the British of one's being that there have been scores North America Act, that Newfoundland of worthy writers in Canada. How does joined the dominion only in 1949, and it happen, then, that instead of any com- that at the same time Canada is old as prehensive view, one finds one has be- a place of European settlement. This, come secretly convinced that only a tiny and subsequent references to Vikings, clique of literati — notably Northrop Canadian geography, "A mari usque ad Frye, Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney mare" and regionalism are soon ex- and, perhaps, Douglas Bush and Marshall plained: the volume (although "of im-

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St. Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Nova Scotia REVIEW ARTICLES portance to Canadians") is addressed the imagery of Canadian poetry. It is a primarily to a "foreign audience." Staines, fascinating essay. Frye explains that he who introduced a course on Canadian used the last line of Birney's poem "Can.- literature at Harvard, in 1976 organized Lit." as his title because there are gods a lecture series to supplement that course. here in Canada — natural gods — and Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, Brian that we have offended them by the way Parker, Marine Leland and Marshall Mc- in which we have treated nature. Canada, Luhan all presented lectures that pro- he says interestingly, finds the environ- vided the basis for the volume, and Peter ment less impressive than oppressive: "It Buitenhuis, Douglas Bush and George is not only that nature is so big and the Woodcock wrote complementary studies winters so cold, but also that there is a at Staines' invitation. lurking feeling that if anything did speak So we now know why we are given so to the poet from nature it would speak much basic information about things only to condemn." We can make no con- Canadian, even if it remains distracting. tact with the gods of this land because of One may also be permitted to wonder what we are, and what we did. However, how necessary it really is. While there are there is, according to Frye, a new link undoubtedly untold millions of Ameri- being forged between man and his en- cans (and Canadians, for that matter) vironment in Canada by some of the re- who do not know the date of the BNA cent poets (Newlove, Musgrave) who Act, etc., surely most of those who get as write of attitudes appropriate to people far as reading The Canadian Imagination who really belong here, who are immi- are unlikely to want or need to find ele- grants no longer. mentary facts about history and geogra- In 1945 Poetry published a review of phy in a book on Canadian literature. E. J. Pratt's Collected Poems which as- Staines is not the only one who may be serted that the poet's work was both faulted for being too informative. There dull and a hundred years out of date. appears generally to be a prevailing as- Peter Buitenhuis sets out here to defend sumption among the contributors that the poet against this accusation by argu- they are writing for a readership that ing that it is only in an anti-historical age knows practically nothing about Canada of poetry such as our own that such a and its culture. This assumption would charge would ever have been laid. Unlike on its own not be a disadvantage, but it other modern poets, Pratt was rooted in becomes so when the result, as too often history and in an awareness of his coun- in this volume, is that analysis makes far try's past, and if even Buitenhuis will ad- too much room for facts about writers, mit there was something "slightly ana- for lists of works, and for detailed plot chronistic" about the poet's imagination, summaries. The sheer weight of all the he will nonetheless insist on the virtues information included between the covers rather than the faults of such a perspec- of the volume is partly the reason why it tive. Quoting Birney's "Can.Lit.," Buiten- leaves so little real impression and why huis then comments: "Pratt suffered from the occasional striking comment acquires no lack of ghosts, and he was able over all the more significance: so too the the years to create a usable past for the colour of a drab suit of clothes may go contemporary Canadian imagination." unremarked if it happens to have vividly It's not that Frye and Buitenhuis are coloured buttons. arguing along similar lines (although in "Haunted by Lack of Ghosts" is North- some ways they are), but rather that rop Frye's opening study of patterns in there are uncanny connections between

70 REVIEW ARTICLES their essays in ways that acquire added dian Fiction," is for various reasons dis- significance through repetition. The use appointing for those perusing it with an of Birney's poem is the most striking of eye to discovering new insights into its these connections, but by no means the subject, but most rewarding for any who, only one. The sheer number of times that sensitized by the connections between the names Frye, Pratt and Atwood are Frye's essay and Buitenhuis', have started mentioned in these essays is extraordinary. noting recurrences. Frye, too, has mentioned Pratt, but to Woodcock, first of all, quotes Frye identify him with the earlier poetry that twice in his opening three pages, and then saw nature as oppressive and, notably, again a few pages later on. (He also re- to comment that Margaret Atwood has fers to Atwood on several occasions. ) Two inherited Pratt's instinct for what is im- of these quotations are taken from the aginatively central in the Canadian sen- Literary History of Canada, a work that sibility. (On the basis of this volume it Woodcock has obviously relied on heavily might well be argued that Birney should in what turns out largely to be a listing share in that honour.) Atwood's book, and description of prose fictions written Survival, Frye suggests, has become very in Canada and by Canadians. The main influential partly through its inspired argument of the essay is that Canadian choice of a title: "the word 'survival' in fiction has in the main bypassed realism: itself implies a discontinuous series of crises, each to be met on its own terms, Canadians, faced with the wilderness on one side and a dangerously powerful neigh- each having to face the imminent threat bour on the other, had little doubt as to the of not surviving." Later in his essay he actual nature of their predicament; what remarks that "Even in Pratt, society is they needed was the combination of myth- held together only by the emergencies of ology and ideology that would enable them to emerge from mere escapism and present 'survival'." a countervision more real than actuality. Buitenhuis refers not only to Atwood, but also to Frye: And, he goes on, since the later 1920's there has developed a genuine Canadian There is a good deal of the survivor instinct twentieth-century romanticism. in Pratt's work, but it is not often the grim and desperate affair that Atwood makes it Debatable as this is (Atwood disagrees out to be. In one of Pratt's most typical completely), it is thought-provoking, a poems, "The Truant," survival becomes a fact that makes for all the more frustra- joyful as well as a defiant necessity. The tion when one discovers that Woodcock poem's purpose is to show the undying spirit of man when confronted by the ulti- practically abandons it as an idea when mate tyrant, the Panjandrum, who repre- discussing the specific works. sents himself as God, but is merely, as The romanticism he writes of uses Northrop Frye has noted, "the mechanical "fantasy and dreams as paths to reality," power of the universe." accepts "myth as the structure that sub- Almost immediately afterwards Buiten- sumes history," and "in its ultimate de- huis quotes at some length from Frye's gree of the fantastic" recognizes and introduction to the second edition of unites with satire, its opposite. In many Pratt's Collected Poems, supporting his ways Woodcock too is on the track of the own contention that Pratt was an origi- "ghosts" mentioned by Frye and Buiten- nal, unperturbed by the poetic trends of huis. his day. Margaret Atwood's essay follows : "Can- The third essay, George Woodcock's adian Monsters: Some Aspects of the "Possessing the Land: Notes on Cana- Supernatural in Canadian Fiction," and REVIEW ARTICLES the opening sentence begins: "I first be- Douglas Bush, writing on Stephen Lea- came interested in Canadian monsters, cock, does his generally worthy essay no not, as you might suspect, through poli- good when he gives in to the temptation tics, but through my own attempts to to claim an admittedly tiny thread of per- write ghost stories...." The impression sonal connection with Leacock (via James that, in terms of its concerns, this collec- Wetherell, principal of Strathroy Colle- tion of essays forms an integral work is giate Institute while Leacock was a stu- confirmed. dent there, and possibly provincial In- Unlike Woodcock, Atwood considers spector of Schools who once commended that the mainstream of Canadian litera- Bush). One ends by liking Bush nonethe- ture has been "solidly social-realistic," on less, as he is so anxious to attribute the the whole confining itself to ordinary life inclusion of such trivial reminiscences to on middle earth, and she suggests two the garrulousness of a self-indulgent old reasons for this: age. (But what is Peter Buitenhuis' ex- The first is that the Canadian fiction tradi- cuse? After referring to Pratt simply as tion developed largely in the twentieth Pratt in his opening pages, and after dis- century, not the romantic nineteenth. The cussing the role played by Victoria Col- second is that in a cultural colony a lot of lege in the nurturing of many strong effort must go into simply naming and des- teachers, critics and writers such as Pratt cribing observed realities, into making the visible real even for those who actually live himself, Frye, and Atwood, he self-con- there. Not much energy is left over for sciously mentions "It was at Victoria Col- exploring other, invisible realms. lege, as a fledgling assistant professor of English, that I first met Ned Pratt") Her obvious differences with Woodcock notwithstanding, Atwood too is clearly The sixth essay, and the one that im- thinking along some of the same lines as mediately follows the one by Bush, is the earlier contributors to the volume: Brian Parker's "Is There a Canadian she proceeds to quote from what she all- Drama?" "I have," Parker begins, "bor- too-appropriately describes as Earle Bir- rowed my title from Douglas Bush" — ney's "much-quoted" poem "Can.Lit." as specifically from Bush's 1929 article in well as from Irving Layton's "From the Commonweal entitled "Is There a Colony to Nation," and to ask if this Canadian Literature?" Parker goes on to ghostless, unmagical, prosaic image is (or quote what he considers to be Bush's cru- ever was) really true to Canada or its cial remark from the conclusion to that literature. The balance of her essay shows article: "The best Canadian writing is her doing her bit to bring forward some moving away from the local and paro- examples to prove the existence of a chial to the local and universal, and it supernatural or magical undercurrent in can be increasingly judged by other than Canadian literature. Again it is disap- domestic standards." A sketch of the de- pointing to find her shying away from velopment of Canadian theatre, and spe- comments and conclusions, mainly con- cific discussions of Michel Tremblay's fining herself to descriptions of her exotic Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, James Rea- literary finds. ney's Colours in the Dark, and George While not quite so tightly interwoven Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe follow, as as those in the first half of the volume, Parker argues that there is indeed a par- the four concluding essays have, with one ticularly Canadian drama of good quality. notable exception, by no means escaped In the interesting theoretical part of the incestuous influence that Can. Lit. his discussion he refers significantly both seems to exert over its commentators. to Frye's view that, coming on the world

72 REVIEW ARTICLES scene so late, Canada is inevitably com- enlightening attempt to situate Quebec mitted to a modern international art literature in the American context early style (which he characterizes as spatial on in her essay, she soon leaves that rather rather than linear, imaginative rather unprofitable subject aside. Instead she than rational), and to Marshall McLu- devotes the bulk of her attention to a sur- han's theory of a modern sensibility so vey of Québec literature in its own cul- changed by electronic technology and tural and political context. Many of her speed of communication that it sees things comments are of considerable interest, always in terms of simultaneous pattern. but why is it that not a single contempor- Parker also, in the same context, refers ary Québec writer is named, let alone dis- to Harry Levin's comments in his address cussed? The names Lemelin and Roy to the Canadian Comparative Literature alone grace her analysis of the post-1945 Association in 1972, in which Levin period. Shortage of space was not the pointed out that a lack of a specific na- problem: she indulges in a fairly exten- tional identity may, in fact, be culturally sive (and surely misplaced) discussion of enriching. the impact that the Cégep system has had This latter remark leads us directly to on the province's cultural development. the iast essay in the collection, "Canada: She concludes that Québec literature is The Borderline Case," in which McLu- indeed isolated. The poets, novelists and han argues that in the new world of to- playwrights of French Canada, she main- day our very lack of a solid identity is an tains, all appear free from other con- advantage. The big powers, he writes, temporary literatures: the literary influ- have seen their identities perforated; ence of France diminished after the sec- Canadians have learned to live without ond World War; that of the United such strongly marked characteristics; States and the Latin American countries ergo Canadians are now better off: "the is practically non-existent; and English interface is where the action is." and French Canadian literatures have It may well be possible to argue this exerted no influence on each other. case convincingly, but McLuhan's argu- Her title, it thus turns out, is mislead- ments are never sustained well enough to ing: Québec literature has no American support the ideas he throws out, and his context worth discussing. Leland herself essay degenerates into a series of rather is well aware of this, and one is led to foolish comments on the differences be- wonder whether the title was not Staines' tween Europeans and Americans, and on idea rather than her own. the in-between-ness of Canadians. We are left with a picture of the liter- There is a loose thread in this cultural ary life of Québec that has nothing to do mesh, and, hardly surprisingly, it is with the cosiness of the literary life of Marine Leland's discussion of "Quebec English Canada and that shares none of Literature in its American Context." the latter's concerns with absent ghosts. Here alone one looks in vain for the kind So, in its entirety, The Canadian Ima- of connections that are so remarkable gination leaves us with a more accurate among the other contributions to the impression of the literary culture of volume. Here alone one finds no hanker- Canada than David Staines had any right ing after absent ghosts —• nor even Mc- to expect could be created from a volume Luhan's attempt at creating a virtue out that in many ways promises more than of necessity —· since here alone the ghosts it delivers. It will surely reveal more to are both ever-present and known to be so. its foreign readership than only literary Although Leland does make a not very dimensions.

73 "Gisli, the Chieftain." She could be effec- mks in review tively laconic: ". . . the flesh that I wore chanced to be Less of my friend than my enemy. "So bury it deeply — strong foe, weak CRAWFORD'S FAIRIES friend — And bury it cheaply, — and there its end!" ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD, Fairy Tales of Isabella Valancy Crawford, edited by Penny ("His Clay") Pétrone. Borealis Press. But in these principally flat and ornately THE SHINY PINK AND WHITE paper cover verbose stories, little of her intelligence, of this collection of fairy tales — quaintly her verbal flair, or her humour is ap- lettered, prettily illustrated, and flimsy -— parent. is appropriate to the contents : six quaint, Of the six, "The Waterlily" is the most pretty, flimsy stories. Where did Penny satisfying as a story. The fairy Roseblush Pétrone find them? Unlike her earlier has been abducted by Prince Crystalcoat Selected Stories of Isabella Valancy of the water-beetles. Her admirer, the Crawford (University of Ottawa Press), fairy Goldenball, sets out to find and this book contains no editorial material. rescue her with the blessing of Oberon The reader is left to wonder whether and Titania, here a boringly dignified these tales were dug out of the trunkful of pair of fairy royals of the type scornfully manuscripts that stood before Katherine described by a T. H. White character: Hale as she composed her volume on "people with bluebells for hats, who Crawford for the Makers of Canadian spend the time sitting on toadstools" Literature series ( 1923 ) or whether they ( these two occupy a velvet-covered mush- have been unearthed from the morgues room dais). Goldenball locates Roseblush of newspapers and the other ephemeral easily, so there isn't much suspense. But publications fiom which the poet Craw- there are some charmingly though tritely- ford earned sketchy payments for her described pictures: the absurd but com- prose potboilers. placent gossiping beaux of the beetle Whatever their provenance, these stories court; the magnificent waterlily glowing might better have been left in peace and with the magic light of its fairy captive obscurity. They are unlikely to interest as it emits her musical lament. And there anyone except the most devoted Craw- is an effectively abrupt shift to human ford enthusiasts, and even these are un- perspective when a good little girl en- likely to find in them much sustenance listed by Goldenball plucks the enchanted for their enthusiasm. In her poetry, Craw- waterlilly and villainous Crystalcoat is cut ford had several "best" styles. She could down to size: "an ugly black beetle ran write lushly passionate but reassuringly out of the heart of the flower, and gave precise descriptions of nature ; quirky, pro- her chubby wrist a vicious nip." vocative expressions of complex thoughts Next I would rank "The Vain Owl and and emotional states; carefully inoffen- the Elf," not for its plot but for a walk-on sive but exuberantly comic pioneer dia- character, Swift the squirrel, a more lect poems ("Old Spookses' Pass," "Old obliging than ardent suitor of his cousin Spense," "The Deacon and His Daugh- Jettie. His character is amusingly re- ter" ). She sometimes approached Blake- vealed as Jettie begs help from an elf to ian mysticism, as in the brotherly invita- escape her engagement to a pompous tion of Evil to Good that concludes owl. Swift is broken-hearted, she says.

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"Oh, certainly," replied Swift, turning his condemned in the poem appended to head quite over his shoulder, in order to "The Rival Roses," though it is hard to observe the elegant markings of the fur on his back. see how the catastrophe of the frail tale was invoked by it, unless one believes in Swift is likely to kill himself, she says. a fanatically puritanical Providence. (A bad misprint, "due need" for "due meed" "Most decidedly, adorable Jettie!" re- marked Swift politely. further confuses the issue.) The two remaining tales are thin, wish- Moved more by his own love of mischief fulfilling fantasies — one about a romance than belief in Swift's suicidal passion, the between a bewitched butterfly prince and elf distracts the poor, unlovely owl into a queen of violets, the other of a ship- lifelong barn servitude by playing on his wrecked child tended by fairies who vanity. sound (and look, in Susan Ross's delicate Vanity is also the moral pivot of the drawings) scarcely big enough to splint two least storylike tales in the book. "The her eyelash, should she break one. Rose and the Rainbow" is a fable on the Of course there is a qualitative differ- theme of Rupert Brooke's "Heaven," in- ence between weak stories by an able volving a number of self-ful envisioners writer and weak stories by an inept one. of celestial delights. The rose defines the These are a cut above the ones ordin- moral, a Hans Christian Andersen fa- arily displayed on supermarket shelves. vourite : "in this world everyone sees with The book is also several cuts bigger. As his own heart and wishes, and is all the someone once remarked, children are world to himself." And vanity is explicitly often given huge books with large print

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75 BOOKS IN REVIEW when they tend to have short arms and not only distorts the substance and mean- 20:20 vision. Perhaps children who can ing of the original legends, but more im- get by the archaic aughts and naughts portantly in terms of examination of the will mildly enjoy hearing the Crawford text as an independent entity, she is tales read by long-armed grandparents forced by the nature of the collection to with Victorian tastes and failing eyesight. include a central figure who often does But they could do better. So could Isa- very little to enhance the narrative flow bella Valancy Crawford. of individual stories. Thus the Mouse Wo- man, so enchanting and attractive in the FRANGES FRAZER first collection, becomes a bit of a burden to the storyteller in this text. Both collections, finally, include illus- trations by Douglas Tait, and the full NARNAUK & BADGER page etchings in Mouse Woman and the CHRISTIE HARRIS, Mouse Woman and the Mis- Mischief-Makers are perhaps even more chief-Makers. McClelland & Stewart, $7.95. evocative than those in the first collection. MARIA CAMPBELL, Little Badger and the Fire Unlike Christie Harris' adaptation of Spirit. McClelland & Stewart, $7.95. various Indian legends, Maria Campbell's READERS FAMILIAR with the work of Little Badger simply celebrates one of the Christie Harris are well aware of her in- proud legends of her people. This gener- terest in the lore of the Northwest Coast ously illustrated text tells the delightfully Indians and, in particular, her affection simple story of how a blind Indian boy, for Mouse Woman, a supernatural being Little Badger, bring fire to his people. But whom she first discovered in Boaz' collec- beyond the tale itself, Ms. Campbell also tion of Tsimshian myths and who has be- tries to establish the context in which come the central figure of her last two such tales are passed on, for this is a tale books, Mouse Woman and the Vanished told to a little Indian girl, Ahsinee, by Princesses and Mouse Woman and the her grandfather Mooshoon on her eighth Mischief-Makers. birthday. This second collection of tales, chron- In her first book, a brutally frank icling Mouse Woman's encounters with a autobiography called Half-Breed, Maria series of both human and supernatural Campbell explored a life which included mischief-makers, is not as successful as the drug addiction, prostitution, and a ner- first, perhaps because only four of the vous breakdown. She ended her history seven tales appear to be derived from by saying that she no longer favoured sources which do, in fact, include this armed revolution, but believed that one attractive little narnauk. Ms. Harris seems day, very soon, people would set aside to have exhausted the potential of the their differences and come together, be- character in the first collection, and thus cause ultimately they would see that it is is forced to invent shrewish wives and the only answer. In her first children's magical talking blankets to fill out the book, Ms. Campbell reasserts this same tales. This is nowhere more obvious than belief in love and in the community, re- in the last tale, which purports to relate turning to the legends that first instilled Mouse Woman's own childhood. In the that optimism when she was a child. original text, the Mouse Woman, no rela- Little Badger succeeds in his quest be- tion to the kindly grandmother figure of cause he is drawn magnetically forward the Boaz texts, is not forgiven for her by the beating of the drum of his friend, transgressions, and dies. Thus Ms. Harris Grey Coyote. But when he does come

76 BOOKS IN REVIEW forth from the Fire Spirit's cave with music is as banal as "Tipperary," it does both fire and sight (inspiration), he sud- not lessen its appeal. denly realizes that the drum that drove For Francophones, the story will be the him onward was his own heart and the cheerful and perceptive account of a local heart of all men — the pulse of the world, boy from a small town making good in the music of the universe. the big city. For Anglophones the interest In her first children's book, beautifully is wider. Those of us who live a long way illustrated by Vancouver artist David from Eastern Canada forget, sometimes, MacLagan, Maria Campbell presents one that there are pleasanter manifestations of the most moving adaptations of In- of the Quebec spirit than Pierre Tru- dian legend to appear in recent years. Let deau's intellectual arrogance, and that us hope, like Ahsinee, that there are many the parallels between the average man's more stories to tell. life in Quebec and that in the rest of the country are curiously close. Like thou- J. KIERAN K.EALY sands of other Canadians from small towns, Georges Dor worked at a variety of jobs all around the province before he A SINGER'S WORLD emerged from CBC to earn his living ex- clusively as an entertainer. Like thou- GEORGES DOR, Si Tu Savais. Les Editions de sands of others, he enjoyed his childhood, l'Homme, $5.00. his schooling and his exploration as a THIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY by a popular singer, young man of a big city and the North. a balladeer, with a preface by the admir- Like thousands of others, he married a able Gaston Miron, is the appealing and wife who is a real partner (she ran an artless account of the life of a really nice art gallery for several years) and they guy whose family, had his Irish great- have children. An ordinary North Ameri- grandparents landed in Boston rather can success story, in fact. The charm of than Quebec, would have merged into the account lies partly in these resem- the American scene with no further ado. blances, and partly in the very real dif- But they did land in Quebec, becoming ferences. Georges Dor himself is con- part of the French community, their chil- scious of being caught between his dren and grandchildren marrying among "américanité" and his "québécitude." the local population in small towns. In Without becoming too ponderous about 1931, Georges Dor (the Irish name Dore the political scene, one has to take it into lost its final vowel) was born, to become account in explaining the success of the among other things a "poète-chanson- many "chansonniers" who have no real nier." The word "poète" is important, counterparts in the rest of the country. for Georges Dor is more than a singer. I can't imagine, at the moment, people He has not only written and published wildly acclaiming a song about working poetry, but also novels; he is now run- on the Deas Lake railroad and longing ning a summer theatre. Although he con- to be back in Vancouver (Earle Birney's fesses to being "bilingue par atavisme," poem "Eagle Island" is the nearest I he is a long way from being another know to that kind of nostalgia). The Beckett, and Miron makes it quite clear, closest analogy in modern terms which with the daggered elegance of which only springs to mind — omitting Homer, the French is capable, that he is not a great ollaves, and the troubadours—is the nine- musician either. He does not pretend to teenth-century English music-hall, where be; he speaks to the heart, and if the audience and singer alike shared, rather BOOKS IN REVIEW closely, basic conceptions, experiences and all share in a sense — our music, our lan- a sense of humour, creating the feeling of guage, our clothes — does not protect intimacy which springs from an uncon- him, sadly, from the effects of a rather scious acceptance of a familiar identity. terrifying parochialism. One can sympa- But the songs coming from Quebec mean thize with his experiences in France — a more than this, for they reveal identity. culture as foreign to him as to anyone The whole explosion of literature in from an up-country town in B.C. — but Quebec during the last twenty years can one regrets that his world seems to con- only be understood in terms of politi- tain no contact with the rest of Canada cal, economic, and intellectual factors. It except through CBC colleagues in Mont- would be simplistic to say that, because real, and indeed, no curiosity about it. Wolfe won and Montcalm lost, none of Both he and we are the losers, for the the philosophic ideas of the eighteenth country can ill afford to be ignorant century, which became part of the Ameri- about its moderate and civilized citizens can and the French traditions, were ab- who will all ultimately be swallowed up sorbed into Quebec. But the persistence in the American dream if they insist on of the influence of a seventeenth-century destroying their own. Perhaps a spell at Church, protected later on by the BNA CBC Vancouver, if he would return to act, did produce a situation which has no broadcasting, would help Georges Dor counterpart in other Canadian provinces, expand his vision. in England, in France, or in the United G. V. DOWNES States. The social and intellectual isola- tion of schools and colleges (French- speaking) which persisted until after the Second World War has meant that the LES LIEUX COMMUNS present generation of Québécois are hav- ing to deal with the phenomenon of DE LA CRITIQUE three or four revolutions at the same time — the anti-clerical, the industrial, the BOUCHARD, DENIS, Une lecture d'Anne Hébert. La recherche d'une mythologie. Collection technological, the Marxist, the Maoist. "Littérature"; Montréal: Hurtubise HMH. A yeasty combination, a heady ferment BOUCHER, JEAN-PIERRE, Instantanés de la which any community would find difficult condition québécoise. Collection "Littéra- to digest. ture"; Montréal: Hurtubise HMH. Mélanges de civilisation canadienne-française Inevitably, the search for identity, itself offerts au professeur Paul Wyczynski. "Ca- part of the modern anguish, becomes hiers du Centre de recherche en civilisation crucial for Quebec, and the song-writers canadienne-française"; Editions de l'Uni- respond in their way to a public need to versité d'Ottawa. define, positively, what one is. They ex- CES DERNIÈRES ANNÉES les études consa- press, for the inarticulate, what the latter crées à la littérature québécoise, issues yearn to hear but cannot easily say for principalement des miliex universitaires, themselves. As Florenz Ziegfeld remarked ont augmenté à la mesure de la produc- in a similar connection, they are showing tion littéraire elle-même. Mais en même the people their dreams. It hardly mat- temps que l'on constate le dynamisme des ters whether the poetry is good or not, études québécoises, il faut déplorer une whether the music is original; the im- stagnation et un immobilisme dans les portance lies in the bond between singer critères et les méthodes qui leur servent and audience. d'appui. Je citerai, entre autres, les der- Georges Dor's "américanité," which we niers essais de Jean-Pierre Boucher et de

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Denis Bouchard, qui sous des aspects, s'inscrit, c'est-à-dire de le siteur dans la parfois, de modernité, rééditent les lieux structure propre au texte pour montrer communs du discours sur la littérature. ensuite la fonction de celui-ci dans la Boucher présente onze articles consa- société qui l'accepte et le classe, Boucher crés à autant d'auteurs: des extraits de passe directement de l'extrait à une Nelligan, Laberge, Ringuet, Roy, Lange- interprétation sociologique empirique et vin, Bessette, Miron, Ferron, Aquin et gratuite. Ducharme servent d'illustrations à ce qu'il S'il emprunte parfois un vocabulaire appelle "la condition québécoise." Alors propre aux sciences du texte (narrateur, que son sujet se prêtait à une réflexion et point de vue) il ne tient pas compte du à une prise de position épistémologique à sens que l'on a donné à ces notions. En la fois sur le texte et sur la société, Bou- identifiant par exemple le narrateur à cher écarte toute question de méthode ou l'auteur, il fait disparaître la pertinence de théorie et préfère plutôt répéter les de cette opposition et du même coup stéréotypes de la critique traditionnelle toute l'efficacité méthodologique du con- endossant ainsi ses présupposés idéolo- cept. De même le personnage du récit giques. n'est pas défini comme un signe mais L'oeuvre littéraire est définie comme comme un être vivant: Boucher trace le l'expression d'une réalité, tantôt collective portrait moral et psychologique d'Alain ("Alain est un personnage typique et ex- {Poussière sur la ville),) de Jodoin [Le prime un aspect fondamental de notre libraire), de Mille Mille (Le nez qui âme collective"), tantôt individuelle voque) ; il parle de leur nature, des as- ("Laberge décrit donc avec minutie une pects de leur personnalité, il juge et scène qu'il a dû longuement observer en critique leur comportement. Mille Mille plusieurs occasions"). La forme de l'oeu- et le narrateur de Prochain épisode sont vre de la même manière est présentée traités de rêveurs, d'incapables et d'im- comme un reflet direct de la réalité: le puissants, complices de notre échec col- sonnet de Nelligan désigne l'enfermement lectif. Boucher reprend à son compte la psychologique et social de sa collectivité; thèse de Léandre Bergeron qui accusait le dans Bonheur d'occasion "Le temps des héros d'Aquin d'être contre-révolution- verbes, passé simple, imparfait, présent, naire. illustre le triomphe de l'immobilisme"; La prémisse dont découle ce discours l'utilisation de la première personne gram- moralisateur c'est le principe de réalité, le maticale dans Le libraire symbolise la souci de conformité à "la réalité telle volonté de puissance de la nouvelle bour- qu'elle est." Selon le critique le danger geoisie québécoise des années i960; le jeu qui guette le sujet c'est "l'incapacité de mots chez Ducharme indique notre chronique d'affronter le réel, de le maî- dangereuse tentation de fuite hors du triser, de l'organiser," car l'homme doit réel ; etc... . Tous ces rapprochements en- sa survie "à sa capacité d'adaptation au tre le texte et la société sont la plupart du temps fort hasardeux parce que, comme réel." Mais de quel réel s'agit-il? De celui l'admet l'auteur lui-même, "la jonction que produit la doxa, l'opinion commune, entre ces structures formelles et les struc- le gros bon sens poujadiste et anti-intel- tures sociales est ressentie intuitivement, lectuel qui privilégie les énoncés pro- avec tous les risques d'erreurs que cela saïques et tautologiques : entraîne, plutôt que démontrée scientifi- J'ai choisi délibérément d'écrire dans une quement." Au lieu d'établir le réseau sym- langue simple, dépourvue autant qu'il se bolique dans lequel l'extrait qu'il étudie peut du jargon pseudo-scientifique souvent à la mode. Si j'écris, c'est pour être lu.

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La bête noire du critique c'est celui qui du Tombeau des rois, tandis que dans les n'écrit pas comme tout le monde: par deux suivantes Bouchard aborde les récits exemple Nelligan "désignant par un ridi- {Le Torrent, Les chambres de bois, Les cule 'cohortes bovines' ce que tout le Enfants du sabbat). Enfin une longue monde nomme un troupeau de vaches ou bibliographie, qui s'avérera un instru- de boeufs" ; Miron a la faveur de l'auteur ment utile pour celui qui voudra faire parce que lui parle d'une "poignée de l'histoire de la réception des textes de cet porte arrachée" ; y a-t-il quelque chose de auteur, termine ce travail. (On ajoutera plus concret, de plus réel? Pour être réal- à cette liste les références suivantes qui iste il faut être prosaïque. Pour être réal- ont échappé à notre critique: pour Ka- iste il faut aussi énoncer des évidences mouraska, Times Literary Supplement, 2 (ex.: "Cette rive est basse. Au sens con- avril 1971 et La Presse, 2 mai 1971 ; pour cret, elle est donc de peu de hauteur"), Les enfants du sabbat, les articles de et reproduire les idées reçues sur notre Pierre Vallières dans Le Jour, 13 septem- passé, l'aliénation collective du Québécois bre 1975 et 31 octobre 1975. Une correc- et son "incapacité chronique d'affronter tion: p. 234, il faut lire 1975 au lieu de le réel." 1976·) Sur ce plan Denis Bouchard, dans son Les analyses de Bouchard et Boucher essai sur Anne Hébert, ne le cède en rien ne dépareraient pas le recueil de Mé- à son collègue; il semble puiser ses réfle- langes que les Editions de l'Université xions aux mêmes lieux communs. Lui d'Ottawa dédient à Paul Wyczynski pour aussi s'en réfère constamment à "l'âme célébrer ses vingt-cinq années d'enseigne- québécoise" et à "notre psychisme collec- ment et de recherches au Canada, on y tif." On retrouve la même conception retrouve quelquefois le même esprit. romantique de la littérature comme ex- Textes de création, textes de critique et pression de l'être national. Bouchard dé- travaux d'histoire littéraire se succèdent finit par exemple Le Tombeau des rois ici dans le désordre qu'impose la distri- en ces termes: bution alphabétique des collaborateurs. Dans la première catégorie de textes on Ce recueil est une sorte de système mythique de tous nos démons assemblés de force dans lira des poèmes de Cécile Cloutier et un carnaval souterrain où ils sont forcés de de Félix-Antoine Savard, une narration se soumettre à l'épreuve de l'autocritique. de Louise Maheux-Forcier inspirée des Les poèmes se lisent comme des voix trou- Chants de Maldoror et une farce bour- vant leur unité ultime dans notre collectivité geoise de Gérard Bessette écrite dans un qui les entend pour la première fois. moment où le romancier dut se prendre L'oeuvre serait la révélation du refoulé pour Feydeau. collectif; ailleurs Bouchard n'hésite pas à La catégorie critique est de loin la déclarer que "Anne Hébert s'efface en mieux représentée. Adoptant l'approche tant qu'individu pour se transmuer en la thématique qu'on leur connaît, Eva voix du Québec." Kushner résume la poétique de Gilles Je ne m'attarderai pas davantage sur Hénault et Jean-Louis Major, disant son cette étude ayant dit ailleurs dans Les attachement à la poésie du pays, regrette lettres québécoises, ce que j'en pensais, que celle-ci s'essouffle chez Claude Pré- j'ajouterai simplement qu'il s'agit d'un fontaine. Deux critiques tentent de ré- essai divisé en quatre parties: les deux habiliter des textes injustement négligés premières, consacrées à la poésie, étudient selon eux: La Minuit de Savard que "la présence de Saint-Denys Garneau Jacques Biais récupère en faisant la dans l'oeuvre" et nous livrent une analyse preuve de la cohérence et du foisonne-

81 BOOKS IN REVIEW ment herméneutique du texte et la poésie guistique, psychanalyse, sociologie marx- patriotique de Crémazie qu'Odette Con- iste) n'avait rien modifié aux études de demine s'applique à revaloriser malgré le littérature; aucun dialogue par exemple désaveu du poète. Antoine Sirois et Jack (sauf chez Major) avec les mouvements Warwick poursuivent leur recherche en contemporains qui tentent de faire avan- littérature canadienne comparée, le pre- cer cette réflexion. On croirait que la mier s'arrêtant à l'image du Mont Royal critique universitaire n'a pas encore con- et le second au mythe du Nord dans les nu sa révolution tranquille. romans canadiens et québécois. Il faut situer aussi dans la perspective compara- JACQUES MICHON tiste l'essai de Bernard Julien qui rap- proche le Ti-Coq de Gélinas d'une pièce de Dumas père. Avec un regard plus CANUT ABROAD sociocritique Maurice Lemire observe la société de 1850 à travers Charles Guérin ν. TEODORESCU and P. NEGOSANU, Intelegand et Pierre Page nous dit que la langue du zapada [Anthology of English Canadian texte littéraire varie en fonction de son Poetry]. Editura Univers (Bucharest). AL. ANDRiTOiu and u. scHiopu, Antologie de destinataire. Quant à Réjean Robidoux poezie canadiana de limba franceza [An- qui nous parle de la vocation de l'écri- thology of French Canadian Poetry]. Edi- vain chez Gabrielle Roy, et P.-H. Lemieux tura Minerva. (Bucharest). qui retrace l'évolution de la conscience AN INCREASING AWARENESS of Canadian chez Philippe Aubert de Gaspé père, ils poetry is slowly producing a number of nous ramènent à une lecture biogra- translations into German, Spanish, Ital- phique de l'oeuvre. ian, Russian, Dutch, Polish, Greek and La troisième catégorie d'articles con- even Romanian. Two recent anthologies sacrés à des sujets d'histoire littéraire est coming from Romania explicitly confirm sans doute celle qui convient le mieux à this statement. The English Canadian cet hommage. John Hare vient confirmer poets and poems included in the first an- l'authenticité des mémoires d'un "obscur thology, Intelegand zapada (translated, aventurier québécois," Robert Chevalier, the title would be "Understanding the réécrits par Lesage en 1732; David Hayne snow": exactly what that means is any- propose un nouveau critère de périodisa- body's guess), are the personal choice of tion en littérature québécoise; Paul Gay V. Teodorescu, a well known poet and montre l'influence du pape Pie XII et de translator, and of P. Negosanu, an equally Chopin sur un poème de Gustave La- well known writer and translator of Eng- marche et Pierre Savard fait l'inventaire lish literature. Quality seems guaranteed. des récits de voyages en Europe de Qué- Even the package is promising with at- bécois (connus et inconnus) depuis 1850. tractive layout and graphics. Comme on le voit par la diversité des The poets are presented in chronologi- approches et des sujets, ce recueil s'ad- cal order and the five page introduction resse à plusieurs lecteurs. Cependant tous offers a panoramic view about English- se retrouveront à la même enseigne du Canadian poetry, written for the curious confort intellectuel que nous procurent reader who knows nothing about the ces savantes études qui ne posent jamais Canlit scene. I am aware that no an- la question du rôle et de la fonction de thology can ever be complete. Neverthe- la littérature, ni des conditions de l'ana- less, I should have liked to see poems by lyse littéraire. Tout se passe comme si Pratt, Le Pan, Avison, Fiamengo, and l'intervention des sciences humaines (lin- several others. In spite of this objection,

82 BOOKS IN REVIEW the general quality of the translations is different style and moods in the originals, good and the language has the lively im- and the rhythm and rhymes are accur- mediacy of living Romanian, and, when ately reflected (Romanian permits trans- appropriate, a refreshing colloquial sound. posing some poems almost literally, and Some poems are left as more-or-less raw the transpositions here often vibrate with literal equivalents. But more often, the nearly the same intensity as the originals). editors have translated regular rhyme into There are a few curious renderings — blank verse, slant rhyme, or occasional curious not so much for their relative ac- rhyming patterns that would approxi- curacy, but because they sound like Ro- mate in Romanian its normal frequency manian words or expressions taken out of of rhyme. A comparison with the original an idiomatic dictionary. For the most poems will reveal a style that is natural, part, however, the poems are creatively smooth and unpretentious. The transla- translated and present a faithful and full- tions also contain that felicitous union of spectrum picture of French-Canadian image and thought. Somehow, miracu- sensibility. lously, Teodorescu and Negosanu have NICHOLAS CATANOY captured the essence of the Canadian soul and reproduced sensitively the intri- cate combination of feeling and music which characterizes the original works. RETURNS Intelegand zapada is a valuable an- thology, one that shows a great deal of AND DISTANCES hard work and dedication. PATRICK ANDERSON, Return to Canada. Mc- Some one hundred and fifty years of Clelland & Stewart. $4.95, paper. A Visiting French-Canadian poetry are compressed Distance. Borealis. into the second anthology -— Antologie de PATRICK ANDERSON'S LAST BOOK to be poezie canadiana de limba franceza-— published in Canada, The Colour as edited and translated by Al. Andritoiu Naked, appeared in 1953. Already, after and U. Schiopu. Meritoriously, the a decade of residence (1940 to 1950) authors found room not only for the more during which he became a Canadian citi- established poets but also for young poets zen, he had returned to England, and for as well. In a work of this range and size, many years he stayed away from Canada. certain omissions are understandable. He made a first return visit in 1971, However, omission of such poets as Jac- though England still remains his place of ques Brault, Claude Péloquin or Michel residence. But Canada is once again a van Schendel are to be regretted. place of publication for him. After twenty- The anthology opens with an excellent three years in which he did not publish a analysis of French Canadian poetics, dis- volume of poetry anywhere, two of his cussing the links between the historical books of verse have appeared here within evolution and the aspirations of the a few months of each other: A Vuiting French Canadian people. The second Distance, published by Borealis Press late part of the anthology contains a well- in 1976, and Return to Canada, pub- balanced selection of poems, ranging lished by McClelland & Stewart in the chronologically from François-Xavier spring of 1977. Garneau to André Payette. In addition, The double event is made all the more each poet is preceeded by a brief but pre- curious by the ethically strange fact that cise bio-bibliographical note. The trans- the books largely duplicate each other. lations are uniformly readable despite the We have become used to writers like BOOKS IN REVIEW

Earle Birney inserting favourite poems which it did by escaping (insofar as from past collections into new volumes, quasi-political terms apply in such a con- but always after an interval that has text) from colonialism into cosmopoli- allowed the original volume to go out of tanism before finally attaining a degree of production. In the case of Anderson's national self-definition. The cosmopoli- books, quite a number of the best poems tanism took two directions; while the appear in the two volumes almost simul- First Statement group of Layton, Dudek taneously; nevertheless, the general level and Souster loosely represented the of Return to Canada is notably higher American strain derived from Pound and than that of A Visiting Distance, which Williams, Anderson more than any other contains a much larger proportion of the single figure was the dedicated transmit- kind of second-drawer poems which do ter of the British-European strain that not quite come off in terms of total re- was projected mainly through Preview. sponse but which poets are often reluc- This crucial historical role has made him tant to abandon because they are tech- seem a more effective poet than he actu- nically competent and a good deal of ally was, for at that time he appeared to work has gone into them. Since so much overshadow poets like P. K. Page who of the good work is duplicated, I would have since shown themselves to posses advise readers who are curious about this more authentically original talents. figure from our literary past to buy merely While it is very easy to define Ander- Return to Canada; it is the better value, son's catalytic function and his emphatic in design and in content. historic role during a brief but important Patrick Anderson has always been a phase in Canadian poetry, it is much difficult writer to place in terms of tradi- more difficult — particularly three dec- tions. Undoubtedly he has a place in ades after those heady times — to come Canadian literary history. For about four to terms with Anderson as a poet. We years — from 1942 to 1946 — he played have so long been used to thinking of him a catalytic role as the energizing force in in terms of the handful of poems repro- the circle which published Preview and duced in A. J. M. Smith's Book of Cana- which prolonged the Montreal movement dian Poetry, and especially of his medium- in poetry that had begun in the 1930's long — and possibly best — piece, "Poem with Smith, Scott and Klein. It would be on Canada," that to encounter his work inexact to say that he introduced the spread over two volumes with a total of tradition of the English 1930's into Cana- 260 pages, including many poems that da, as has sometimes been suggested; A. have not seen print before, forces a new J. M. Smith had published in New Verse assessment. How good a poet has he ever and Dorothy Livesay was writing "so- been? And where does he really belong? cially conscious" poems influenced by Day They are both hard questions to an- Lewis and Spender years before Anderson swer. The publisher's blurb for A Visiting appeared in Montreal. But, because he Distance described him as a "mid-Atlantic came after the later 1930's, during which poet," arousing the absurd vision of a her- poets like Dylan Thomas, George Barker mit versifying on an ocean raft to the and the Twentieth Century Verse group tune of Mother Carey's chickens. A trans- moved into prominence in London, An- Atlantic man might be a better descrip- derson did bring an enriched tradition tion of Anderson, for he has had a curi- with him, and so he was an important ous double career on the two sides of the visitor at a time when Canadian poetry ocean, as a prose writer in Britain (for was moving into its modernist phase, none of his travel books and autobiogra-

84 BOOKS IN REVIEW phies has been published in Canada) stimulated other poets in Canada; and and a poet here (for none of his books of now, years later, the process swings back verse has been published in Britain where and Canada stimulates him to poetry his poetic reputation has always been once again. However, all this may be minuscule). There is not very much evi- simplified for his audience in Anderson's dence to suggest what Canada meant to Preface, since a significantly large number him in the years of absence during the of the poems Anderson prints in his two 1950's and most of the 1960's, but he tells new volumes have nothing at all to do us in the Preface to Return to Canada with Canada, being English countryside that "I began writing again when I verse of a very traditional kind. At the learned that there still were Canadians, same time, there is no doubt that his both old and young, interested in my period in Canada thirty years ago does work." Leaving aside the oddity of this have great personal significance for An- confessed motivation, let us be content derson in the 1970's, rather as a lost land for the present to remark on the recipro- like that which le Grand Meaulnes sought cal process of catalysis that appears to in Alain-Fournier's novel. have been at work. Originally in the But leaving aside Anderson's personal 1940's Canada seems to have stimulated myth and his paradoxical sense of identity Anderson to his first significant work (for with a country he voluntarily left 27 years having been in the thick of English poetry ago and to which he has not chosen to publication in 1940 when Anderson left I return permanently, one is impressed — can vouch that he had published nothing on considering his work — with the acute significant in Britain) ; Anderson in turn self-definition that occurs in a poem

SUBSCRIBE TO THE FIDDLEHEAD LITERARY MAGAZINE Short Stories - Poetry - Drama - Art - Reviews Subscription Rates 4 Issues $8 ($9 U.S.) Contributions should include (Canadian) stamped, self- addressed envelope or International Reply Coupon. THE FIDDLEHEAD The Observatory U.N.B. Fredericton, N.B. 5A3 BOOKS IN REVIEW originally written in 1944 about his first Thomas and W. H. Auden. But the only days on the North American continent poets who really resembled Dylan were ("Train Whistle: Vermont"), where he those who shared his background of describes himself as "an Englishman full Welsh chapel rhetoric, from which An- of words." Full of words indeed, for one derson's past was distant, and there never of Anderson's weakening faults is a fail- have been authentic Audenists other than ure— more pronounced in his recent Auden. It is true that Anderson wrote poems — to recognize when he has said some poems that read like pastiches of enough. In A Visiting Distance particu- Auden (like "Song from a Play") and larly, there are whole groups of poems in Thomas (like "Capital Square") as many which one has the sense of prolixity run- other poets did thirty-five years ago, but ning on like an eloquent tap as the poet he has wisely weeded most of these out ruminates and reflects and aphorizes very of his new collections, and what emerges intelligently, but without any real intui- is probably as near as we shall get to the tive discipline. authentic Anderson in his various moods. And here, I think, we are near the It is the work of a travelling minor essence of Anderson's work. It is often English poet, who writes some acute ob- brilliant, but in the manner of a verse- servational poems on the places he speeds writing Paganini, all virtuoso effect, all through and the places where he roosts mental skill, and sometimes this is pre- a while. His long pseudo-philosophic cisely what is needed by the occasion. This pieces about the condition of man tend is why his "Poem on Canada" — which to run down into twentieth-century ren- is reproduced in its entirety in Return to derings of Young's Night Thoughts, and Canada — was such a stimulating and he is at his best in poems where he re- such a historically important work; no counts and comments with a certain Canadian poet had yet found the sheer irony on what he has seen: poems about intellectual effrontery to write a virtuoso people like "Aunt Hildegarde" ("Be piece of this kind about Canada, full of assured that her lonely dress / is con- strident baroque images, occasional flash- temptuous of loneliness") or about ani- ing insights, and splendidly orotund rhe- mals like "Fox" and "Monkey in Malaya" toric. ("fling on my heart your long-arm'd love ! / your mushroom-coloured ears and For see, she says, the salmon pointing home black / attenuate hands and athlete's from the vast sea, the petalled plethora and unplumbed darkness of the sea, she says ; back / and round head like woollen ball, / gliding along their silvery intuitions and sigh, and be no weight at all.") or like current in its cables, volt upon volt, about scenes, like "The Pine: Christie- to flash at last, sparking the mountain falls ville" (though here one is forced into an of Restigouche — spawning a silver million. uncomfortable comparison with A. J. M. Smith's "The Lonely Land," which is a A dazzling end indeed — and such pyro- similar but far sparer and better poem). technics were needed in Canada then, but now there is a feeling of excess in phrases Reading Anderson's poems as they are like "the petalled plethora" and in the now collected •—• the lively young pieces image of salmon gliding "like current in of the 1940's and the more sombre pieces its cables, volt upon volt." of the late 1960's and 1970's — one is im- Anderson came with a mental carpet pressed by a quality of intellectual virtu- bag filled with fashionable devices from osity, of deliberation, of versatile crafts- the English 1930's and early critics were manship that can range among formal easily led to compare him with Dylan patterns, accompanied by an inability to

86 BOOKS IN REVIEW fuse feeling and artifice as a consummate band at Squibb Reserve is not without poet does. Casting back for resemblances, blame for its misfortunes. Diseases caused I am reminded not of Thomas and Auden by indiscriminate fornication, adultery, with whom Anderson has so often been drunkenness, and poor hygiene are among compared in Canada, nor of the Cana- the many problems the authorities-— dian poets with whom he was connected, Catholic priests and Indian Health Ser- but rather of English writers of the 1920's vice personnel —· must cope with. Still, — like Aldous Huxley and the male Sit- notwithstanding the almost wilful acqui- wells—who developed intellectual themes escence by the hereditary chiefs of the in polished verse, with well turned con- band to the hopeless situation, the larger ceits, but who never quite satisfied as share of the blame falls squarely on the poets. One such writer, Humbert Wolfe, Whites. With a few pitiful exceptions now almost forgotten but then fashion- (and these cowed by the customary able, wrote a stanza that has always timidity of bureaucrats before their supe- stayed in my mind. riors), they connive steadily to worsen matters by denying the Indians proper Spring, like the Chinese medical attention. Sculptor's art Has all of beauty It is an old tale of arrogance, procras- Save the heart. tination and powerlessness. The root of It struck me that this applied far more the problem, of course, lies in the evils of exactly to Humbert Wolfe's poetry than a system which is out of date and self- to either spring or Chinese art. He was in perpetuating. For example, according to fact defining a flaw in mannerism, and he its treaty with Ottawa the band had himself was a mannerist. So, in my read- been promised only the maintenance of ing, is Patrick Anderson. a "medicine chest" for its immediate health needs. But times, and attitudes, GEORGE WOODCOCK change. Having watched his mother die because an emergency operation was not performed, the young chief of the band, MARKING TIME Albert Running Up Hill, is determined to get his people a better deal. Naturally, R. GORDON HEPWORTH, The Making of a Chief. he meets quick opposition from those The Sono Nis Press. government administrators whose only As A YOUNG DOCTOR just out from Eng- interest is the status quo, that is, control land in the mid-1950's, R. Gordon Hep- of the purse-strings and the continued worth practised for a year on a small passivity of the Indians. In the words of prairie Indian reservation. The Making the rather cynical narrator of the story of a Chief is a novel based on his experi- (not the author) : "Time was the only ences. As fiction, it is flawed in several remedy.... to sedate the passion of the fundamental ways; on the other hand, Indians." it is an interesting failure since its theme Ironically, the young chief is "made" involves a knowledgeable and forthright in two contradictory senses. First, he attack on Canada's official policies to- learns to distrust White promises and wards the native people. through shrewd politicking with the civil The thrust of the attack is aimed at servants gains self-respect and the admira- the inadequacy of health care facilities tion of his people. But, second, he is on the reserve and the maladministration made a pawn in these skirmishes, by his of the services in general. Certainly, the wily foes, and ultimately is outmanoeu- BOOKS IN REVIEW vred. Yet at the end he has shown Indian Wounded Knee or beneath the Peace and White alike what non-violent pres- Tower in Ottawa, the confrontations sure can provide — a still sub-standard break out with increasing frequency, like but greatly improved treatment centre. a rash on the body politic. Of course Clearly Hepworth sympathises with governments are not solely to blame for Albert's struggle. But his method of story- fostering racism. Nevertheless, it does telling undermines his point of view. He appear that the slow, painful integration uses a doctor-administrator as his omnis- of Indians into Canadian society is hin- cient narrator, a man who appears to see dered by the reservation system which and hear all but who keeps a deliberately treats them as unwanted children, and low profile in order to retain the confi- impedes their efforts to achieve full dence of his superiors. The device might equality before the law in the land of have worked had the narrator been kept their birth. studiously neutral, but in the end he is ERIC THOMPSON seen to be a crafty opponent of Albert. His cynicism has been alluded to; in fact, throughout the story, the reader comes to find his personality more and more dis- IN A HIGH tasteful for, despite his profession, he places more faith in red tape than the CLEAN STYLE Hippocratic Oath. In short, he is an un- reliable narrator, particularly when he IRVING LAYTON, For My Brother Jesus. Mc- Clelland & Stewart. $4.95. feigns ignorance of events he should have DENNIS LEE, The Death of Harold Ladoo. known about until the concluding Kanchenjunga Press, n.p. chapters. c. H. GERVAIS, Poems for American Daughters. Obviously, this narrative fault tends to Porcupine's Quill. $2.95. lessen the impact of the story. The heavily THERE IS ALWAYS a temptation in a re- episodic nature of the plot (and the view like this one, where one is con- burden of repetitive intrigues) are also sidering several books, to give grades or flaws. The authenticity of Hepworth's prizes, to rank the books in a hierarchical descriptions of life on the reserve is like- order. I am trying to resist this tempta- wise marred by several melodramatic tion, because these three books have little characterizations: Albert appears the in common with one another. Let's see if more "white" the more he is thwarted I succeed. by "black" officials such as the incompe- For My Brother Jesus. What to say of tent Dr. Hawke and the sly Father this amazing, provocative, annoying and Creevy. On the other hand, some of the prickly book? Layton's purpose is set out minor characters are well drawn, espe- clearly in the Foreword : to reclaim Jesus cially Meade, the agent, and Miss Pur- for the Jews and to expose the funda- gass, the public health nurse. Their dedi- mental lie of Christianity, a lie which cation to duty, under difficult circum- gave aid and comfort to antisemitism stances, is seldom appreciated on Squibb through the ages. With the zeal of the Reserve. freshly converted, Layton is curiously like In a "Preface" to the novel, J. Michael the man who went off into the woods and Yates reminds the reader that even a came back having reinvented the type- cursory glance at the media is convincing writer. I mean that seeing Jesus as a evidence that the Indian "wars" of the great Jewish prophet is not a new idea past "are happening still." Whether at and seeing Christianity as the prime force

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in history for antisemitism is not either. The Second Vatican Council may have A MAJOR NEW REFERENCE BOOK been moving too late and doing too little when phrases like "the perfidious Jews" TWENTIETH CENTURY were finally striken from the liturgy, but the recognition of guilt was there. CHILDREN'S WRITERS Fortunately, many of the poems in the Preface by Naomi Lewis collection seem to have little to do with Edited by Daniel Kirkpatrick the polemical stance of the Foreword and This completely new reference work gives can be simply read as distinguished addi- detailed information on 630 English-lan- tions to the Layton canon. Such poems guage authors of fiction, poetry and as "Ulysses in Spetsai" and "Seduction drama for children. Each entry includes a biography, a complete bibliography, and of and by a Civilized Frenchwoman" a signed critical essay. Many of the writers show Layton's sharp acidulous eye prob- comment on their own work. The bibliog- raphy lists all the entrant's works and the ing at its best, and especially in "Seduc- nature of each publication (i.e. fiction, tion," his manipulation of languages in poetry, play or non-fiction). Illustrators a kind of tumbling acrobatic verbal rush names are included as well as details of any published book-length critical studies destroys verbal pretension with clear- of the entrant's work. There is an appen- eyed wit. dix on late nineteenth century writers who have influenced the authors of the He switches mood in "For My Distant main body of the book. A supplementary Woman," a delicate love poem — essay discusses important modern child- ren's writers whose work is available in as the sun's semen enters the crimson English translation. Some 150 critics have flowering contributed essays to the book. and often, as now, like the first heavy gout Advisory Board: of rain Peggy Appiah that makes it toss and shiver on its tender Gillian Avery stem. Dorothy Butler Marcus Crouch Then he uses grimly jocular rhyme in Roger Lancelyn Green Virginia Haviland "Fiasco", turns tender again in the nos- Ethel Heins talgic "On Revisiting Poros After an Naomi Lewis Absence of Ten Years", rips into Christian Donnarae MacCann Nellie McCaslin hypocrisy and false piety in other poems Irma McDonough and rushes on. Marcie Muir Nancy Schmidt The word "runt" occurs often in these Rosemary Stones polemical poems. It seems for me to sum Zena Sutherland up his mordant vision of a contemporary John Rowe Townsend Geoffrey Trease landscape peopled by pygmies, a world Lee Wyndham given over to pimps, life-haters, feeble androgynes, the quoters of other men's First Edition: 1700 pp., approx. 7 χ 9]Α $50.00 words. The longer poem "The Arch" says it all in the final image of a broken ruin Order through your bookstores or from the Trade Division: looking like a "faded grin." Layton never stands still. There have been twenty-five volumes of poems and the singing never stops. M Macmillan The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited Dennis Lee's The Death of Harold 70 Bond Street, Toronto M5B 1X3 Ladoo is one long poem, an elegy, a eulogy, a diary, a love letter, a cry of BOOKS IN REVIEW pain, an attempt at exorcism. I am the mid-Sixties, from the private, per- tempted to say confessional, but am too sonal Sister Saint Anne through Other conscious of how patronizing that term Marriage Vows, and A Sympathy Orches- has come to be, and how far short it tra up to Bittersweet, his largest and most falls in describing this poem's painful comprehensive collection in 1972. With honesty. In wry bitter self-condemning each book, his grasp on technique was mockery, Lee tells the story of his friend- more sure and his subjects less personal, ship with Harold Ladoo, young Trinidad- more external, in a steadily widening per- born novelist, who came to Canada in spective. Poems For American Daughters 1968 and who was murdered during a represents an intensification rather than visit to Trinidad in 1973. a "breakthrough." Lee creates a mask of self-denigration The "American Daughters" appear in to good effect. His persona insists on see- a found poem from the New York Times ing himself as a typical white liberal aca- Book Review, but they are also the people demic, living in a life-denying urban land- living in Canada near the American scape. I say "persona" because although border, brought up on American radio Lee continually signals that this is no and tv, seeing American movies, dream- mere book, that he is writing truth, not ing in American. fiction, he does create characters in a pat- Gervais makes real magic out of this tern of attraction-repulsion which I find familiar territory. In "Charles Atlas" he definitely histrionic. In keeping with his lifts a crude ad out of the back of a comic mask of self-contempt and loss, Lee uses book and turns it into enduring myth. a diction which is spare, dry and minimal, But in "His Father," and "Good News" befitting the pervasive tone of loss and and "That Friday Night" he uses what grief. appear to be vividly actual "case his- The Death of Harold Ladoo appears, tories," focusing in on some telling point at first glance, to be a radical shift in until the whole person comes alive for us. subject and style for Lee. From the pub- Often he uses the metaphor of photog- lic voice of Civil Elegies to the private raphy as if (for example in his love chant of this present book seems a long poems) he wanted to preserve and fix the way to go. Yet there are similarities: for passing moment. one, the use of the self-mocking mask, What else are poems for? Lee ended and the strong and persistent sense of an his long poem with the phrase "In a high erosive death-seeking in contemporary clean style." Layton, Lee and Gervais society. have each, individually, achieved this. C. H. Gervais' Poems For American Their poems open our eyes, radically alter Daughters is a very small book. (I seem, our perspective, shake us from our com- unconsciously, innocently, to have fallen fort. into the grading trap. I have arranged EUGENE MCNAMARA my review from the thickest to the thin- nest. Yet I insist that I make no brief for less or more quality. Each of these books deserves our passionate attention on its own merits.) There are only twenty-four poems in this book, all of them short lyrics. ED. NOTE: All of Baba's Children, by Myrna But I feel that it is an important book. Kostash, is published by Hurtig of Edmonton, I have watched Gervais's progress from not M & S, as given in CL No. 77. BOOKS IN REVIEW

and idiosyncrasy; they deepen too slowly A VARIETY OF VOICES as products of a long singular simmering SUSAN MUSGRAVE, The Impstone. McClelland in one place — three years in the Queen and Stewart. Charlotte Islands. IAN YOUNG, Common-or-Garden Gods. Cata- This fact and its artistic results prompt lyst. a serious question. Is there wisdom in DAVID BERRY, Pocket Pool. Peppermint Press. setting up a life this way? Whatever hap- THE EFFECT OF Susan Musgrave's poetry pened to poetry of the common life? in The Impstone is soothing, even though However accurate Musgrave's responses the subject is largely death. In simple, to specialized isolation may be, they attest subdued, mellifluous language, the reader to an over-focussed sensibility, in danger is invited to flow, to escape into cool fan- of cutting itself off. tasies of the unconscious life, to experi- While her style strikes an appropriately ence its purity. So there is numbing fre- contemporary low key — short lines and quency in the use of particular motifs — plain diction — Musgrave's preoccupa- animals, the moon, the sea, fish, blood, tions seem romantic, but in no new or bones, skull, skeleton and dust. One is modern way. One does not find the elabo- lulled and rocked and longs for something rate passions of the Romantics them- hard or harsh on which this smoothly selves, nor the driven quality and com- morbid landscape might falter. But for pulsion to theorize that Lawrence had, Musgrave, "death is the same/ in all nor the tortured brilliance of, say, a Plath. languages." The poems are open and However, Musgrave does make something direct, almost to a fault; they lack surprise of the male as predator; an incantation

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91 BOOKS IN REVIEW to death recalls the alignment, of her roads/ scribbling in their dust." Certain poetic self at least, with the slightly older poems manage a persuasive combination American generation of "extremist" of personal history and mythic strength: poets, and there is a telling quote from "Skookumchuck," for example, claims an Berryman. Derivative poetry is the last affinity felt with Emily Carr which is no thing one wants to advocate, but given doubt genuine. Musgrave's subject matter and her fra- Finally, several pieces have the force of gile, rather conventionalized approach to real incident. In "Recovery," there are it, she does risk some unfavourable com- people: Frances, the nurse, the judge, parison. and references to a traumatic experience Her talent is exemplified in particular that allow this work to achieve poetic poems. "Chiaroscuro" conveys an instinc- signal from a depth of suffering. "Jugger- tive identification with the symbols of the naut" also reveals figures from the past North Pacific Coast: moss, stone, fungus, who have somehow contributed to pres- water. She seems entirely convincing ent disintegration. This dimension of the when she asks "How could I live/ south painful and personal, these acts of con- of anywhere—." A piece called "The fronting rather than romantically dilut- Impstone" belongs to this area of Mus- ing may be a rich poetic vein for a poet grave's imagination and is an intriguing of acute sensitivity and feeling and, it is fable of civilization's evolution, or devo- hoped, a fuller technical range, to mine lution, extending the "stone" metaphor further. naturally but significantly. On the other By contrast to Musgrave's perhaps hand, her use of "frog" elsewhere as over-conscious efforts to be serious, Ian emblematic of evil, danger, perhaps even Young's poems in Common-or-Garden as an animal familiar, seems arbitrary and Gods seem at peace with themselves, and confusing. If this creature has to do with none-the-less communicative. The person- actual myth, then poetic use of it is still ality emerging from this writing is one obscure. Fortunately, other collaborations with a talent for enriched living and care- with presumably indigenous myth or ful listening. As one poem puts it, "no legend do produce a kind of meditative renunciation/ but a following through." verity. Consequently, there is a stimulating mix- There is in The Impstone some prom- ture of expression to be sampled, and ise of a strident tone that gets away with much of it is sensual. the corny line, entered and slightly al- One of the dominant moods is a kind tered, trades moon child for witch hag, of sun-shot melancholy, a nostalgia grieves unprettily over female victimiza- (which combines both appreciation and tion, is bitter and blunt about childbirth. anticipation) for friends or lovers gone, Potentially, this poet has the snap of "for Billy, for Mac, for Craig and Chris, satire. Too often, though, anger evapo- for the night train,/ for the best of it." rates and we're left with anti-climax. This Some poems are characterized quietly by happens also to strong images which dis- an implicit knowledge that though a sipate either into the same beguiling flow moment of joy be marked by nature, by of overworked words, or into split pur- the garden tortoises who "come out, pose. Buried in abstractions, or the muted blinking, slow/ only on sunny days/ for parts of poems, are some gems: someone visiting lovers," it may be too exquisite to is "struggling like a/ crowded room to/ last. Young is good at catching kinds of recover silence;" or this: "Only the ecstasy. In fact the love poem, so difficult dead/ can ... leave you at the/ cross- to write, is enticingly done in this book, BOOKS IN REVIEW

"Letter to Bellingham" for example. This Baptist, Theodoric, Judas Iscariot, and is partially due to a kind of haiku-like various exponents of ancient Eastern wis- reticence; just the right touch is main- dom, to name but a few. One might tained. Some longer poems trace the his- regard the book as a collection of the tory of a relationship, highlighting, amaz- "detritus," to use one of Berry's own ingly, those aspects which do translate, words, from civilization. The problem without themselves being destroyed. seems to be what, if any, of this debris is Often, too, the vigour of passion is worth salvaging? Value judgments are regarded as a species of noble "lion not made. Subjects are given equal time strength." and cleverness of expression, whether The characteristic of sharing is very literary parody or dream lunacy. Fre- strong; the poet is generous, his poems quently cliché is used with darkly comic open and inviting. Often, the invitation effect. Jack the Ripper ends a very touch- is to male homosexual love, as when he ing attempt to elicit our sympathy with regrets "the hazy vision/ of well-married the line "There's No Rest For The men/ living with wives/ they hardly Wicked." There are often ludicrous know." Generally, it is to delicious enjoy- images — the "fat lady of the sonnets" has ments of many kinds. Young offers a "Teeth like tombstones" — and accurate sensibility delightful to know, as in "Sky/ ones —· "Even the self-inflicted wounds Eyes," and "Fireflies," which deftly build are harmless/ here, like cutting yourself and interweave to compose their totality. with paper : / you can cut yourself to Unhappiness is also freely transmitted. pieces, smiling." Other metaphorical uses Odd, uneasy thoughts, feelings and en- run from the disturbingly and/or hu- counters, are followed with precision. morously surrealistic to the merely silly. "Rob, Polishing His Motorbike" presents Enjoyed cynicism plays a significant role. It may be the only pure emotion left. the problem of perceiving — how one sees "Killing Spiders" is one of several poems a friend, how he sees himself, how to making a nasty point about automatic write it. While there is sadness and empti- voraciousness, and elsewhere the mouth ness in this poet's world, there is also seems to be the only properly functioning acceptance, and it is never naive: organ, or location for the only sensation We love one another and have something in we know, to be bitterly savoured: "Life common though we don't speak of it, but is long, decay's a transient,/ thing only fall, slowly, into categories the world will the taste lingers, dissolves." Many poems remember us by. end in a combination of disappointment "Yuletide Story," from which these lines and indifference: the accident victim of come, has an autobiographical tone that "Lady in the Gutter" is efficiently, cal- is masterly. Frequently, Ian Young con- lously dealt with; the persona of "Make veys the mystery of ordinary experience Mine Sarsaparilla" gives up on the Hun- often relating to filming or photography, like Scouts of his boyhood memories when sometimes to words themselves. He is a he realizes they have "drifted into obvi- ous occupations" such as chopping meat very rewarding poet to read, offering for Dominion stores. "Love In The Kit- interest, pleasure, and a sense of glowing chen" details a bored predictability that life. is uncomfortably realistic. With such un- David Berry's caustic little poems in rewarding observations, the poet is left to Pocket Pool have a directly conversation- make his patterns. They are sharp, nega- al tone, but a variety of voices. We are tive, and hilarious at once, constructed spoken to by Jack the Ripper, John the

93 BOOKS IN REVIEW with a quick twist of the kaleidoscope tural criticism, in which the literary seg- from scraps of life: private, public, past, ments are not heavily comparative, present, conscious, unconscious. Book and though Sutherland's criticisms of indi- print are tiny; the result is pointed but vidual authors are much enhanced by his fleeting; you feel it sting, but can't re- ability to put them into bicultural con- member why. texts. The essays on Quebec authors in The disillusioned satiric centre of the particular are good introductions for book may be found in many telling lines : Anglo-Canadian readers, though it seems "Tired of sacrificing himself/ at other less likely that Quebec readers would people's expense/ he proclaims himself/ benefit from, say, his rather sketchy an apostle of lost causes," "knowing you Robertson Davies essay. are/ not renewable," but "from birth a "The New Hero" itself is both the most silent/ turning into stone." For man in substantial and the most comparative of his obsolescence, "there is an eternity of these pieces; I found it more speculative dying." Even Judas Iscariot's flippancy than definitive, however, as the "new only accentuates the bleakness of a life. heroes" come from a small sample of Finally, and most depressingly, there is novels over a very short time, and are, futility. The "last survivor" is left to admit arguably, individual aberrations for the that "Everything bred without him." "norm" of Canadian heroism (if what The conclusion of Pocket Pool, with its that is has yet been clearly determined), Oriental riddles, might have supplied rather than a genuinely new develop- some saving sanity and resolution as a ment. "The new hero ... has suddenly balance to Berry's prickly version of life, exploded from the pages of Canadian fic- but really, we remain with stunned obvi- tion," though he has been "lurking" in ous answers to seemingly non-sensical earlier works, "playing a secondary role" : puzzles. Perhaps because the book's sar- donic tone is already well established, Now he is the main character playing the dominant role, and he is not the end- these final parables don't provide enough product of a long struggle with himself. He of the release possible with true Zen illog- is strong, self-reliant, self-trusting, confident, icality, and we're left with a kind of and highly individualistic, but unlike the hollow laughter. legendary American hero of similar traits, he is not the self-righteous exponent of established national values. He is respected, PATRICIA KEENEY SMITH however grudgingly at times, without being respectable in the conventional sense. Actu- ally, he seems to operate outside the scope of respectability. Undoubtedly he reflects MAINSTREAM changes now taking place in Canadian CURRENTS society. . . . This more assertive new hero is con- RONALD SUTHERLAND, The New Hero: Essays in Comparative Quebec/Canadian Litera- trasted with the "prêtres manques" of ture. Macmillan, $5.95. Where Do the Mac- earlier stories, who blame themselves for Donalds Bury Their Dead?. Paperjacks, their misfortunes and wallow in their own $2.50. weaknesses. Sutherland's chief examples BOTH THE TITLE and the subtitle of The are in contrasting pairs: Sinclair Ross's New Hero are somewhat misleading: Doc Hunter (Sawbones Memorial) so "The New Hero" is simply the lead much more self-confident than Philip article, and the book as a whole (97 pages Bentley; Adele Wiseman's Hoda (Crack- of text) is a mixed bag of literary/cul- pot) so much more individualistic than

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Abraham (The Sacrifice) ; André Lange- read in itself, has been grafted onto a vin's Pierrot (Une Chaîne dans le parc) rather sentimental story about an over- so much more self-reliant than Doctor sexed, but very decent (Scots) Canadian, Alain Dubois (Poussière sur la ville). "operating] outside the scope of respec- Sutherland is too modest to note that, in tability," and his equally decent (French) a kind of self-fulfillment of his prophecy, Canadian friends. Ti-Mac is colour-blind he has himself created a "new hero" — when in America, where he has the nicest Ti-Mac from Where Do the MacDonalds black and American friends (only the Bury Their Dead? whites are sickies.) All this in turn is The MacDonalds is as full of local grafted onto an Information Canada bul- (Montreal) colour as if decades of Cana- letin about why the Québécois want inde- dian-written anonymously North Ameri- pendence — but clearly, if we all got can novels had to be atoned for in one along as well with them as Ti-Mac, they fell swoop, and as burdened by cultural might well not want it. There is enough allegory as if the case for biculturalism French and joual in the book to make its rested upon the strong but average shoul- Anglo readers happy that they took ders of his New Hero, as it does even French in 'igh school, without being upon his bicultural nickname. The macho enough to inconvenience them if they melodrama which sweeps him up would didn't take it in college. There is an aw- seem almost irrelevant to the book's ful lot of sex, jolly at the time, but as one themes were it not that (and with no At- thinks back on it, really very discreet. wood copout, either) only the Americans Such screwing, drinking and fighting are the sickies. A pop thriller, a good fast heroes, male chauvinist pigs of the nicer

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95 BOOKS IN REVIEW sort, are better drawn by far in the novels and Prochain Episode, are not distin- of Robert Kroetsch, whose New Heroes guished, as monologues, from texts like are more reflective, self-aware and three- Huckleberry Finn, which may indeed dimensional than Ti-Mac and just as have some affinity to spoken tradition, virile and jolly. and might thus provide some useful ana- Sutherland's essay on Fifth Business un- logue to the almost wholly oral mono- fortunately attempts to cast Dunstan, too, logues of Quebec. as a New Hero. No doubt he is, in some The other three writers Sutherland ways, but the analogy between him and discusses are Grove and (in one essay) the heroes discussed in the earlier essay Langevin and Bessette. The inquiry into can only be drawn at the price of radical- whether Grove was a realist, as he him- ly overestimating the self-confidence he self maintained, or a naturalist, as the has acquired by his "middle years," and standard critical definitions would sug- underestimating the extent to which his gest, proceeds rather schematically to opt integration is a process not to be com- for the latter, and concludes (more inter- pleted this side of Zürich: precisely "the estingly) with a tribute to Grove as a end product of a long struggle with him- cultural thinker. The Langevin-Bessette self." Likewise, making Dunstan's char- essay tries, perhaps rashly, to establish acter a kind of metonym for the new "distinctly Canadian" motifs, but is with- shape of Canadian identity, though evi- al a useful and informative introduction dently true in very general terms, is to these authors. The account of Bes- stretched past the point of usefulness sette's La Bagarre makes one wonder if when Dunstan's self-investigations are perhaps Ti-Mac did not take some of his paralleled to "a new spirit of inquiry, a origins from there. If so, it would be al- desire to probe ... the darker aspects of most the only example of a bicultural the Canadian totality." influence that I could extrapolate from Fifth Business, being written in the first the contents of this book. person, is described as "another offshoot The remaining essays include an agree- of the ancient monologue form," to ex- able survey of chiefly Anglo-Canadian amples of which Sutherland dedicates war novels and two more culturally what I consider to be the most substantial oriented pieces, "Tabernacles à douze and fascinating essay in this volume, that étages" and (the concluding essay) "The on Yvon Deschamps. Sutherland con- Mainstream." These latter two incline siders Deschamps' monologues as both towards liberal humanist rallying cries •— literature and cultural commentary, and "even more communication" •— and to- here shows clearly and provocatively the wards cultural optimism. One is grateful links between them. He is detailed and for the details, selected by a keen as well informative about Deschamps' forms and as human eye, one is approving (inevit- structures and particularly helpful on ably) of the sentiments, and yet some- Deschamps' language: joual used in sa- times skeptical of the prognosis. tire. The essay is only marred by a very "The Mainstream" is also more com- odd introduction, where all first-person parative than any other essay except narratives are pooled together in one "The New Hero." Sutherland adds the "phenomenon" of monologue, alleged to somewhat uneasy metaphor of the title appeal especially to Canadians (of both to the rapidly growing collection of meta- cultures). First person narratives of an phors for two literatures in one land, to explicitly "written" character—-e.g. As which his original "ellipse" was such a for Me and My House, Fifth Business, notable contribution. "Mainstream" seems BOOKS IN REVIEW

to signify not what Canadian literature is, it may appear, its native contours may as one would suppose from normal usage, emerge. Canadian criticism by nature but what by Sutherland's political syl- faces an ambiguous task, and its basic logisms it ought to be and is perhaps be- gesture must be circumspect. coming: two literatures mutually aware, The achievement of Margot Northey's and taking each other into account. So monograph, The Haunted Wilderness, that trickle of authors who, like Hugh when measured against some recent MacLennan (affirmatively) or Hubert studies of English-Canadian fiction, is the Aquin (negatively) are already thinking relatively modest role that the adjective biculturally, constitute, proleptically, the "Canadian" plays. By refusing, further- mainstream. This is surely ideological more to isolate a dominant theme de- wish-fulfillment blurring, with a rash signed to assert a central Canadian cul- though praiseworthy optimism, the terms tural point of view, the book is assured of literary criticism. of further distinction. As the sub-title im- P. MERIVALE plies, Northey has chosen a type of fiction that has not often claimed critical atten- tion, inasmuch as the relationship be- INTERLACED tween the gothic and the grotesque and a "national experience" do not come PLOTTING quickly to hand. For the sake of con- venience, the book is divided into two MARGOT NORTHEY, The Haunted Wilderness: sections, addressing nineteenth- and twen- the Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fic- tion. University of Toronto Press, $4.95. tieth-century fiction respectively. Each section is provided with brief considera- THAT CANADIAN literature is composed tions of a methodological character, and of two languages, each of which partici- a series of characteristic examples drawn pates in major Western cultures, and has from English and French (with a rare enjoyed contributions from Ukrainian, exception, in translation, alas) are ana- German, and Icelandic, marks it sui lysed. generis as an object of comparative study. The major critical problem that the That its literature is of a minor character, when viewed against the traditions of book raises is reflected in the use of English, French, and American litera- "gothic" and "grotesque" as literary ture, makes it difficult to evaluate, for the terms. As she declares in the introduction : critical attitudes that these three litera- Both terms involve a subjective and often tures have generated cast such a shade symbolic vision of experience which invokes over our literature that great tact is re- feelings of fear or horror, although the quired to assert what is native and what is grotesque may frequently have a comic side as well. Both suggest distortions in charac- not. This, of course, is not a new problem, terization, although the grotesque leans to nor is it exclusively a literary one. At the visual ugliness and bizarre juxtapositions, risk of echoing Northrop Frye's query, whereas the gothic may only give two- "Where is here?," as a way of indicating dimension portraits with emphasis on a few exaggerated qualities. Both the gothic and the context of our literary situation, it the grotesque present mysterious, non- should be said that an adequate criticism rational levels of experience, whether one of Canadian literature depends upon how chooses to call these the dark side of the it is placed, and it must be located at soul, the night side of life, or the impulses once in a North American and European of the id; both react against the conven- tional ordering of reality, seeking in strange zone of significance so that, paradox as ways a truth beyond the accepted surface

97 BOOKS IN REVIEW

of life. Sin and death are the dominant without acknowledging, Marcia Kline's themes of both. distinction between American and Cana- Although the author hastens to qualify dian approaches towards the terrors na- these qualifications by indicating that ture holds [Beyond the Land Itself gothic was the mode of the nineteenth [Cambridge, Mass., 1970] ). While Ameri- century, and grotesque the contemporary can fiction appears to opt for the primi- mode, the definition is so inclusive of tive as opposed to the civilized, Canadian both that one wants to know why the fiction views the latter as "unsuitable" need for two terms. Analysis of the two and the former as "a terrifying alterna- kinds of fiction indicates, moreover, that tive." Without taking into consideration both modes serve different purposes. D. H. Lawrence's statements on the im- While the gothic is not as revolutionary pact of nature on the American spirit, as English examples imply, the pattern some attention should be paid to Leslie seems to be one of virtue and goodness Fiddler's study of the gothicization of triumphant. The gothic, as Northey sug- nature in Charles Brockden Brown's crea- gestively argues, is overcome in Cana- tion of the "haunted forest" (the phrase dian fiction by the sentimental. No one, is Fiddler's). Similarities, in fact, be- however, would state that the same is tween Brown and Richardson make the true for the grotesque. The exhaustion of kind of distinctions that Kline and human will in Biais' novels, to cite only Northey draw difficult to accept. Other one author, is so persuasive that one can assertions are equally awkward. Why, for understand why Marxist criticism can example, is Hebert's use of psychological hail the grotesque as a cultural defeat. analysis "more obviously modern" than The author appears, therefore, to be more Poe, Conrad, James, and Dostoyevsky? exercised by the consistency of her thesis Certain chapters, notably the discus- than by the truth of the text when she sion of Wild Geese and Surfacing, suffer concludes her analysis of La Guerre, Yes from brevity, for surely "sociological Sir! with the observation that: "Carrier gothic," so far from being a paradox, gives no real hint of the shape of things has long enjoyed popularity as melodra- to come, but the undying energy of his matic romance, and thus deserves careful characters and the constant upsurge of scrutiny from the point of view of literary humour against horror, precludes a vision sociology. Furthermore, Surfacing could of total despair." A reading of King Lear have borne fuller analysis, inasmuch as might lead to the same conclusion, but the dialectic of the plot persistently aims Carrier shares with Biais a sense of me- at a resolution of some of the dichotomies tonymy in which humorous elements are already set forth in Wacousta. Since the only introduced in order to be suppressed. strength of her study lies here, one won- While the book demonstrates, then, a ders finally, leaving aside the often forced credible line of development for the conjunction gothic-grotesque, whether gothic romance, the relationship between the kinds of conflict, ambiguity, and in- gothic and grotesque is tenuous indeed, terlaced plotting that Northey is adept at and perhaps the brevity of the book or identifying could not have formed more the paucity of material may prompt the explicitly the argument of the book. sense of weakness in the method. E. D. BLODGETT The treatments of Wacousta (a Cana- dian prototype) and Kamouraska (psy- chological gothic) are particularly well developed. For Wacousta she confirms,

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OF WARS & MEN flict has fascinated men of all ages. But it is clear today that war — whether of the TIMOTHY FINDLEY, The Wars. Clarke, Irwin, Total, brush-fire, terroristic, or Cold va- $9·95· rieties — and its myriad effects on the W. A. B. DOUGLAS and BRERETON GREENHOUS, lives of millions of people is a real pre- Out of the Shadows: Canada in the Second World War. Oxford University Press, $14.95. occupation. PHILIPPE VAN RJNDT, Blueprint. Lester and The three books under review here all Orpen, $9.95. share this preoccupation and are, indeed, RECENTLY THERE HAS BEEN a resurgence serious responses to the subject. Findley's of popular interest in books about war, The Wars is a novel about a young offi- both in this country and abroad. The cer's experiences in the First World War, lifting of the veil of silence around Bri- but in terms of its theme it is more than tain's "Ultra Secret" has undoubtedly led a conventional tribute. Rather, because of to the beginnings of a series of re-apprai- the honesty and intensity in its expression sals of events in the Second World War of the whole horror of armed combat, it period, and the best-seller status of books is surely one of the most remarkable such as A Man Called Intrepid and novels of war ever published. Out of the Bodyguard of Lies testifies to this inter- Shadows is, as the authors explain, a est. In Canada, books such as Heather "popular overview of the events that com- Robertson's A Terrible Beauty and Barry prised Canada's part in the Second World Broadfoot's Six War Years have enjoyed War," but even so it amounts to an il- popular and critical success. None of this luminating — and controversial — treat- is surprising; the subject of human con- ment of an as-yet little understood period

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99 BOOKS IN REVIEW

of our history. Van Rjndt's Blueprint mals to be sacrificed needlessly during an differs greatly from the preceding books enemy bombardment. His fate is sealed: in the sense that it is a novel about pursued by military police to an aban- espionage activities in the Soviet Union doned barn (where he has tried to shelter and in West Germany, but it, too, offers his unit's panic-stricken horses) he is him- us a perspective on man's consuming self shot and captured. Court-martialled, hatreds in a war-like situation. Robert survives the war but dies blind Findley, a novelist in his late forties, and insane in 1922, having not quite has had indifferent success with his pre- reached the age of 26. vious books, although his scripts for CBC's Findley's characterization of his hero The National Dream and Jalna have is always sure-handed — realistic, never earned him a measure of attention. In sentimental. Robert is extremely reticent, deciding to write The Wars he must have introspective, hardly ever voicing a per- been aware of the potential of failure in sonal opinion; but we know him by his dealing freshly with a war about which actions, by his fortitude in the face of so much has been written, including danger, by his selfless care of the fright- novels and memoirs by such famous ened animals he seeks to protect from names as Ford, Cummings, Graves, and man's brutality •— most of all, by the un- Remarque. Probably his motivation was spoken yearning of his soul to live amidst more personal; it appears that his uncle, the mindlessness of slaughter. He is a true a Canadian army veteran of the Great hero, an exemplar of courage. Findley War, was his model for the novel's hero, has achieved something very fine in his Robert Ross. delineation of the human spirit, despite Robert's story begins in April 1915, the the prevailing fashions of our anti-heroic month of the first bloody encounters at age. Ypres. When his beloved, hydrocéphalie The author's narrative method and sister dies by accident, the young man powers of description are also extremely decides to bury his sorrow by enlisting in effective. Findley's technique resembles the Canadian artillery branch. By Febru- Wiebe's in The Temptations of Big Bear; ary 1916, he finds himself, a newly-com- the character and his story are carefully missioned second lieutenant, in charge of reconstructed out of the clippings, diaries, an ammunition supply unit at the front in reminiscences, and "facts" of history, pro- Belgium. Soon the Germans open their viding the reader with a new sense of the offensive against the Allied salient at St. reality of the past. The atmosphere of Eloi, and Robert is caught up with other war is caught consistently; the elabora- soldiers in the rout which follows. Slightly tion of small details stamps on our minds wounded, he is sent on leave to England the fury of bombardment, the inescapable where he renews a relationship with a claustrophobia of life in the forward beautiful but aloof girl of noble blood. trenches, the terror of death by drowning Their affair is a bittersweet interlude, in the mire of flooded fields, and much for Robert is soon back in the mud of else besides. Finally, the use of bird and Flanders with his unit. animal symbolism throughout the narra- The crisis in the plot really occurs as tive — though at times forced — is effec- Robert makes his return to war. One tive in revealing Robert's motives, espe- night he is sexually assaulted by unknown cially his determination to save some- soldiers; and shortly after this outrage, thing of value out of the carnage of in a moment of madness, he shoots a death. superior officer for allowing men and ani- Out of the Shadows conveys a very

100 BOOKS IN REVIEW

different impression of the meaning of lection.) The plot of Blueprint is much war in human affairs. Written by profes- too detailed to summarize, but in the sional military historians, it is aimed mode of its genre, spy fiction, it tells a nevertheless at the layman who wishes a hard-hitting story of murky intrigue. In short, readable account of how the Sec- essence, Captain Alexander Roy of the ond World War affected Canada's social, Soviet military espionage branch becomes political, and economic life. (Naturally, a victim of the sinister Bibnikov, the chief the book contains chapters on the na- of the KGB's Special Investigations unit. tion's military contributions to the Allied Van Rjndt takes too many pains to keep effort as well. Ironically, in this regard, his story-line clear, and the book is much the authors conclude that "in the final too "talky" throughout. The denouement analysis Canada's effort was not essential is melodramatic. Still, these faults aside, to winning the war." Perhaps not, given the novel serves as a grim reminder of the enormous resources of the United how perilously near the surface smile of States; but such a statement is bound to détente lie the fangs of war. anger, and to hurt, many people in this country. ) ERIC THOMPSON Among the important developments in the period discussed by the authors the economic transformation of the country brought about by the necessities of war is ONE CROWDED seen as perhaps most noteworthy. From almost a standing start, Canadians were DIMENSION able to achieve miracles of production in DAvm HELWiG, The Glass Knight. Oberon, the space of a few years. The sluggishness $8.95 cloth, $4.50 paper. of the Depression yielded to a highly- efficient war economy in which every WHEN DAVID HELWIG published his first Canadian had a job and some real hope novel, The Day Before Tomorrow, in for the future. At the end of hostilities 1971, it was suspected that his talents, Canada's place as a middle-power in the though considerable, were not those of world community was asssured. All of this the novelist. This suspicion was strength- is the stuff of contemporary myth and has ened in 1974 by the appearance of Atlan- often been discussed by other writers. tic Crossings, a book of poem sequences What Douglas and Greenhous manage to in which Helwig's quite genuine con- clarify is the deliberateness of the pro- cern for the processes of history seemed cesses of change, how the problems of to have found its appropriate form. poor utilization of civilian, military, nat- With The Glass Knight, however, Hel- ural and financial resources were solved wig returns to the novel, and our earlier by shrewd political policies and the suspicion is confirmed: though Helwig willing co-operation of Canadians. The writes well, what he writes are not good photographs which accompany the text novels. add substantially to the impression cre- The Glass Knight is in fact an alle- ated of a nation at war. gory, in the same sense that Morley Cal- Philippe van Rjndt still hasn't reached laghan's early novels were called alle- the age of thirty but already he has won gories: tolerantly, but with a faint tinge a reputation as a promising thriller writer. of regret. Although Helwig's two prin- (Currently, he lives in Toronto; his earlier cipals, Robert Mallen and his schizo- novel was called The Tetramachus Col- phrenic girlfriend, Elizabeth, are both

101 BOOKS IN REVIEW interesting and complex as characters, but hinders the novel. Though his ran- neither quite comes alive as a human dom incidents are all thematically linked, being. Both are rather bloodless embodi- they do not add up to a plot. They rather ments of contrasting ideas, facing cameos, crowd one another off the page than pro- than the ruthless portraits of humanity in vide the unity and direction the novel conflict one feels they were meant to be. needs. Though the characters are one-dimen- Despite the rambling and the brooding, sional, it's a crowded dimension. The despite the confusion of historic process novel moves loosely around the idea of with politics, the mood of the novel is a pain and its consequent awareness : while compelling one. Helwig's real strength Canada undergoes its mildly traumatic lies in his ability to isolate and to define, FLQ crisis in late 1970, Robert and in his sensitivity to the aching bones Elizabeth's relationship undergoes a simi- beneath the skin of experience. As a larly mild disintegration. Robert, forty, novel, The Glass Knight is the work of divorced, a fragile knight in glass armour, a fine poet. seeks out pain because of the awareness (his quest, you see). Elizabeth, as cold WAYNE GRADY and unyielding as one of Picasso's blue nudes, avoids awareness because of the pain. On the allegorical level, Elizabeth is Canada: she is bilingual but predomin- * PHILIP RESNicK. The Land of Cain. New antly English, she consistently turns her Star Books, paperback, $6.50. JOHN D. HAR- back on reality in order to nurse her illu- BRON. Canada without Quebec. Musson, paper- back, $6.95. These two books, one frankly sions of peace and progress (and gets tendencious and the other unadmittedly eccen- away with it in the end, by the way), and tric, have in common the comforting conclu- Robert even refers to her rather fearfully sion that English Canada can get along very at several points as "quelques arpents de well without Quebec. Philip Resnick sub-titles his book "Class and Nationalism in English neige." Robert's allegorical equivalent is Canada," and writes from an openly Marxist less heavy-handed (and therefore less standpoint, attempting to show how the effective). He bewails Elizabeth's in- emergence of nationalism has coincided with ability to stare down life, but he is as class changes in Canada, and arguing that the Canada which can survive the departure of unable to determine the course of his Quebec will be a socialist one. He ignores the own pilgrimage as (presumably) the rest crucial question of whether true federalism ·— of us poor peregrines. Everyman? Every- as distinct from Trudeau federalism — might canadian? render the choice unnecessary through the The comparison with Callaghan is not development of an imaginative co-operative and libertarian socialism rather than the state entirely gratuitous: Callaghan's early socialism he appears to favour. So does John novel, A Broken Journey, may profitably Harbron, who provides an unusual and some- be seen as The Glass Knight's grandsire. what colourful view of Québec politics by There is the same Marxist economy of treating the French Canadians quite seriously as Latin Americans, and ignoring the brutali- style, the same Freudian teasing, the ties of Latin American politics to suggest how same wooden dialogue that too often de- Québec — and English Canada for that mat- scends into an improbable exchange of ter — might benefit from the examples of soliloquies, and the same intense, brood- Mexico, Brazil, etc. in creating independent societies within the hemisphere. One wonders ing attachment to the minutiae of exist- whether the remedy might not be worse than ence. But Helwig lacks Callaghan's pro- whatever ills afflict us now. saic instinct, a lack that aids the writing L.T.C.

IO2 matter, Frank Davey, editor of the criti- cal journal Open Letter, produces a guide jhimns &nl ndts to our contemporary literature, that, propagandizing and cleverly slanted, seeks to assert a sixties approach to creativity that even ten years ago only served to NEWS FROM NOWHERE bamboozle a few of our young writers until they found their own voices. There Davey's Criticism is much of a feeling in From There To Here that its production was provoked IN MOST PERIODS of our cultural past, by the spate of thematic criticism of Canadian artists in every field have had which Survival was the main wave and to live with the tension between accept- the one most clearly nationalist. "Viewed ing or rejecting foreign aesthetic ideolo- from the seventies, McLuhan would seem gies that came as part of their colonial to have been more a symptom of his time packages. Fortunately, since the nine- than its master," says Davey in his intro- teenth century they have increasingly pre- duction. One's response is to say that ferred to grope for and to grow their Davey himself and the sensibility set for own. In particular, the sixties American which he is the apologist (or would wish style didn't thrive too well in Canada. to be) can be seen in the same light. Because our artists soon realized the so- Davey discusses sixty contemporary called Internationalist school was really authors, in separate articles. Roughly, America writ large there was a more however, the pieces fall into three abrupt turning away after the usual flirta- groups : hatchet jobs, apple-polishing jobs, tion. What use to a country deeply com- and propaganda jobs. The hatchet-jobs, mitted to humanist struggles and a con- although genteel, are directed towards cern with documenting the essential hu- the Atwood-Anansi group in the main, man quandaries of culture clash was an supposedly for their polemical national- ideology dedicated to an assertion of in- ism although the most vicious is reserved dividual will with an emphasis on fad- for Graeme Gibson, whose innovative provoking innovative technique? Remem- prose at first glance might seem to be at- ber the New York art critic, writing of tractive to Davey's sensibility but which William Ronald's large abstracts, who was is dismissed in words which might equally impressed with "the overwhelming power apply to the work of many people whose of the artist's will"? And remember how, work Davey espouses: "The elaborate having played the power game, Ronald narrative methods are annoyingly pre- came back home with a Ginsbergian howl tentious in that they suggest a profundity reduced to clowning for us on radio and that they do not deliver." The apple- T.V.? polishing jobs are directed to older impor- tant members of Canada's literary com- Just as the predispositions of our so- munity and tend to be cautious in expres- ciety and our creative urges are becoming sion, sometimes damning with faint clearer in all areas of our thought and praise. The propagandizing articles are feeling, just as we are coming to realize those which detail the work of writers how unique and potentially important whose work seems to fit easily into we are as an alternative North American Davey's ideology of sensibility. In a great society, just as our art is confidently be- number of cases these are writers who ginning to express ourselves without self- were associated with Davey in the Black consciousness about the things that really

103 OPINIONS & NOTES

Mountain derived Tish group, plus a few of the old truth that what the best others who have come along since then teachers teach is not fact or technique and have fallen somewhat under its in- but attitude.) fluence, especially some attached to the In his introduction, Davey perceives Coach House Press in Toronto. the retribalizing effects of the post-electric This group was, and continues to be, a age as creating conditions favourable for very consciously avant-garde expression, decentralizing publishing and other one determined to obtrude itself onto the powers. These are notions derived, of world at large willing or no. Tish, 5 course, from McLuhan as much as At- (1962) contained an editorial by David wood's Survival thesis derives from Frye. Dawson under Davey's editorship which This is a healthy sign since McLuhan's is reprinted with the article on Davey contribution to the forms of contemporary (written by Tish member Bowering) in literature in this country has not had a blurry miniature which in part reads: sufficient notice. (The best argued essay After four issues we now know what we in From There to Here by the way is the want to do. We have reached the stage one on Frye which goes straight to the where we can say NO; we can reject a good throat by seeking to dispossess the na- poem if it does not interest us. The fact tionalists of much that they feel to be that it may be good does not alter the fact Frye's received axioms. ) But when Davey that it may not work the way we feel a poem should work. We print poems that says that "Mandel extended McLuhan's conform to our taste, poems which move theories to literature," his traditional somewhat in the same direction as our own. academic bias that one idea derives from another cannot accept that two men may Twenty-eight years ago, the Automa- independently respond to the pressures tists of Quebec, in their manifesto, Refus of their age in their own characteristic Global, introduced many of Davey's no- ways. Mandel's open-field approach to tions — especially the idea of unlocking criticism and verse had more to do with the creative powers of the unconscious. introducing "the whole man" into areas Theirs too was a search for new forms grown markedly one-dimensional than through which to express the notions of with creating an ideology of method. In a new society. Unfortunately they also all of Mandel's writings the fettering went to another cultural centre for their power of ideological bias is protested inspiration, to Andre Breton and the sur- vigorously (in Silent Speaking Words for realists of France, believing the repression instance). Mandel's attempt to open up of the old order required a strong and critical sensibility to a multifarious range internationally acclaimed ready-made of expression on its own terms is concor- aesthetic. But, interestingly, this manifes- dant more with his view of the multi- to, unlike Davey's, made it clear that an cultural and mosaic society he lives in, as Exclusivist ideology such as Davey seems well as, one suspects, with his friendship to express, was detrimental to their ulti- with Irving Layton. The fact that Man- mate purposes. In fact, Borduas later felt del can write a critical article called that what the Automatistes thought was "Criticism as Ghost Story" which sees surrealism was nothing of the kind, but a Atwood's Survival as the beginning of a liberating force self-generated, as it has new strain in criticism and at the same turned out to be. (Interesting when we time write a congratulatory paragraph remember that Borduas' apprenticeship on the back cover of To Here attests to and inspiration grew out of his associa- his quite human admiration of both tion with the self-taught and remarkable writers' clever and creative minds, and traditionalist, Ozias Leduc. An example

104 OPINIONS & NOTES also to his eclecticism. Perhaps at the before turning to its successor. In this poetry, time of writing the notice for Davey he truth is a constantly developing thing, an interaction between various phenomena in- was not aware of the fact that Davey's cluding the poet. apparently liberating rhetoric was in fact an ideology of an insidious kind. Man- I find no mention in his lexicon, nor evi- del's retrospective article on the poetry of dence in Davey's poetry, of the polysyn- 1975 published recently in Books in thetic charging of language into meaty Canada is an interesting article to read conglomerates that signifies true tribal ex- in this regard. pression with its tendency to verbalism Davey's ideology favours "the pre-re- that makes static description into true flective consciousness," the "phenomenol- process, resonant with ambiguity·—only ogical," "multi-phasic" or "random" ap- an emphasis on colloquial collages. proach to form and content, with an Davey's critical tendencies are to favour emphasis on the use of "particulars" the lyric expression and its "Post-Layton" over "logicoriented" platonic struggles developments, over the narrative — per- with the general and the abstract. In haps because of the lyric's particularity, these ways, Davey asserts, our writers narrative and longer forms tending to have moved beyond the "old packages" deal with large general issues. Much of and "control" of the modernists and their this preference derives from the Black obsession with artificial mythologies. In Mountain school although that move- Davey's words, "Like the electronic media ment's avowal of the oral was the more themselves, post-modern Canadian writ- seductive reason for its Canadian accep- ing is phenomenological in content, pre- tance since the oral had been the real senting the unprocessed pre-reflective basis for Canadian poetry for generations. phenomena of perception rather than ra- This emphasis on the short form, par- tional reflections of the modernist writer." ticularly the "amatory lyric" which he Although it is not at all obvious from his propounds as the Canadian development prose style in this book, Davey prefers from the Black Mountain school (see "pure noun in kinetic context" and Bowering article) blinds Davey to the "indirection." Of course, both notions, long-standing tradition in Canada of the usually expressed as "cut out the adjec- uniquely Canadian documentary narra- tives" and "suggestion is stronger than tive form. This form Dorothy Livesay statement" have been around a lot longer marvellously analyzed for us in her essays than Davey has. And the expression on that subject in Canadian Literature, "leave your brains in the drawer" when Contexts of Canadian Criticism and else- writing first drafts has probably equal where. Strangely, or perhaps not so antiquity. strangely, Davey mentions not a word about Livesay's researches or of her book, As an example of this system's method The Documentaries (1968) in his article let me quote Davey on Bowering's on her, preferring instead to summarize Geneve: her influence on Canadian writing as His most interesting and original poetry to author of some of the "most sensitive and date is Geneve, a book based on the thirty- powerful poems of feminine sexuality in eight trump and court cards of the Geneva our literature." The persistence of that tarot deck. Here, in a further step in his form in its contemporary expression quest for personal and literary integrity, through Pratt, Birney and Dennis Lee Bowering shuffles the cards into an order he will not know until the book has been writ- and latterly Don Gutteridge and Gary ten, and disciplines himself to record his Geddes, goes unremarked by him prob- spontaneous response to the upturned card

105 OPINIONS & NOTES ably because it refuses to fit into his the new generation" he is in great part theory of the random, multi-phasic and right. This movement may have helped pre-reflective expression he admires. Such make it clearer to Mandel and others that epics require work and intelligence con- Layton's poetry is more directly con- sciously applied to bring them to fruition. cerned with moral imperatives and myth- Consequently he prefers the lyrics, or making than with sexual adventures. "other poems," in Civil Elegies and Other What Davey has failed to recognize is Poems. that retribalization and the re-emphasiz- Further, the lyric as an expression of ing of the old oral tradition in Canadian intensity which Livesay has shown was writing has led not to a pure abandon- often a spin-off from the matrix of the ment of "old packages," but a search for documentary, has, in the sixties and ways to recombine the powers of those seventies, been incorporated, in the ma- forms into more Homeric ones that deal jority of publications, as part of a poem- documentarily and directly with the pro- sequence. As such, the lyric in Canada cesses of our society and the human quan- has been employed as a monitor of daries they evoke. Poets attempt to cap- changes in the poem-cycle, having the ture some of the effects of prose, and same relationship to a larger conception prose writers have attempted to bring as the short story has to the rhetoric of poetry's resonances and ambiguities to the the novel. Similarly, Davey includes a novel. James Reaney's documentary lyri- preponderance of short story writers over cism has finally found its home in his novelists in his book. But here again we impressive stage-saga of the Donnellys; see even these writers expressing a con- and what can be said of Michael On- cern not with the short story in isolation daatje's dramatic prose-poem comicbook but as elements of a quasi-novelistic se- lefthanded rediscovering of the nature of quence. They include such minor figures American Mythmaking in The Collected- as Clark Blaise, whose writing will illus- Works of Billy the Kid? Even our his- trate what I mean, yet strangely exclude torical documentary prose drifts towards others such as Ray Smith, of a much poetry and the novel. Read the involving more experimental and lusty stripe. social history of the Métis in Woodcock's The lyric as entity unto itself is rarely Gabriel Dumont, for example. Found printed as such except in small magazines poetry, which Davey espouses as evidence (the same could apply to short stories) of the use of particularity, also more towards which of course Davey is pre- properly fits into the documentary mode disposed. Thus perhaps his notions are and is thus more widespread than among derived from that rather limited view, the members of Davey's Sensibility Set. being, as Bowering puts it, "a determined John Robert Colombo is its best prac- mover in the little-press world." The titioner, gleaning from the stubble of his- amatory lyric, in particular, seems to have tory and literature some extraordinary rediscovered the musical roots it lost gems. Colombo's Canadian Quotations, when it was ripped from the canzone and in fact, is his masterwork in many ways, sonetta some five hundred years ago, and a documentary narrative epic in found it can now be found comfortably assert- form combining an amalgam of scholar's ing itself in the best of our popular songs. knowledge and poet's sensibility into a That Cohen's lyrics should have moved lexicon of rich texture and evocative in that direction is not entirely an acci- particulars. (The book's publication per- dent. And when McLuhan speaks of haps came too late for Davey to make a popular music as being "the literature of comment on it.)

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Concrete poetry, with its typographical contributing to "the fact that colloquial, and later pictorial arrangements is an- open-form and process poetry has in the other favourite of Davey, but again it last decade come to dominate the older made only a flurry in Canada. It was academic modes," rather than appreciat- really an attempt to render those visual ing that what Layton really taught us ironies of its preceding fad, the haiku, was attitudinal as in Mandel's case — which also didn't lend itself too well to how to relish our lives and speak the good poetry here since it depended for heart's truth bravely, freely, with as much much of its effect on an interplay of the craft as one can muster. Rosenblatt's idea with the aforementioned visual Bumblebee Dithyramb, the title poem of ironies of its ideograms and their place- which is the most engaging chant-poem ment on the page. With a western phon- written in Canada, with marvellous etic alphabet such things are more diffi- buzzes, shifts and counterpoints which cult if not impossible. But the exercise of when read properly has held vast audi- both of these internationalist styles, ences spellbound in Bee-ness, can only be though somewhat contrived and often seen by Davey as "transparently modelled being neither good art nor good poetry, on the sound poetry of Bill Bissett." (As can sometimes be "interesting" as they if his friend Bill Bissett had invented say. chants. ) Davey also seems unclear what he The "particularity" that Davey makes means by the words "technique" and much of might at first glance attach itself "form," sometimes using them both in the to Livesay's notions of documentary form. same phrase. Since throughout the book But a closer look will show that Davey's there is a theme in most of the articles particulars are not of the same order as that the random and multi-phasic form Rudy Wiebe's or Dennis Lee's but are in- is the poet's means to counter the "con- stead attached to the writer's ego. Davey's trol orientation" of his society, it would Sensibility Set assumes "the concept of appear that this anarchic structure is the poet as knowing more than he under- actually form used as symbol! But, to stands — a concept essential to Bowering, Davey, literature is politics anyway: Coleman, Gilbert and Nichol." And "Every poem, film or novel carries in its again, about Gilbert, he remarks, "Gil- form political implications." That he bert's experiental world is that of most should so chide the modernists for "pole- men alive in these decades, mundane, mical verse" seems ironic when all that trivial, thoroughly non-spectacular." In has happened in Davey's sensibility is a Gwendolyn McEwen's work he admires shift of "message" from content to form. "the explicit references to the personal What we are left with, then, is really life of the writer." Except in the genuine an emphasis on technique. George Grant talents of Bissett and others whom he (again in a book that goes unremarked largely misrepresents (there is more con- by Davey) has shown us how this obses- trol in Bissett's work than Davey would sion with technique is indisputably the admit) Davey's "particular" is too often major characteristic of American society the banal. which he woefully predicts will ultimately A strangely Calvinist notion seems to engulf us. I'm referring to Technology govern this sensibility. Although its rhe- and Empire. This concern with technique toric is one of liberation and multifarious- leads Davey to write a rather one-dimen- ness, it exercises itself in diligent exclu- sional article about someone like Layton, sion, of the richly imaged, the envisioned, for instance, whom he sees as perhaps the informed and the well-wrought. For

107 OPINIONS & NOTES years the Shoenberg school tried to steer the inspiration's true nature. As the Eski- clear of "accidental harmonies" in their mo poet puts it, "Let me breath of it"; twelve tone constructions. Cage-style and then begins, "I have put my words soundscapists similarly still avoid any- in order on the threshold of my tongue." thing suggestive of "music" in their tones. To quote Frye again, "The vision in- Just as Cage is now seen by young com- spires the act, and the act realizes the posers as an acoustic engineer rather than vision." a composer, so Davey may be thought of Where Davey basically goes awry is in as a linguistic engineer rather than a poet. his superficial application of McLuhan's Speaking of Davey's confrontations with principles of communication theory to writers and critics Bowering says, "In the contemporary literature. McLuhan is a majority of cases his stand is better- self-confessed footnote to Harold Innis, researched and more sensitive in the area a man who worked with documentary of language." Calvinist also is the idea particulars "in the field" to grow insights that somehow the writer is chosen, be- about the nature of society of stunning comes one of the elect; and once he is brilliance. McLuhan's ideas are an "in- certain of that, all he has to do is let it nering" of his theme that societies grow all go, man, and the universal angels of in response to the nature of their tech- poetry will speak through him. nologies. But that man is a puppet of his Davey's analysis of Frye is directed to- technology has never been an idea held ward a justification of this last position. by McLuhan; as we approach the mid- He speaks of Frye as having been mis- seventies it becomes clear that under- understood (true) and misapplied (true), standing the consequences of our tech- then ends : "Frye's theory of composition nologies and engaging in human choice — based on Blake's dictum, 'the authors about their use is as important as are in eternity' — resembles that of such "Understanding Media" rather than en- contemporary pre-reflective writers as gaging with it in an anarchic passivity, Gerry Gilbert, Daphne Marlatt, George as Davey, in his introduction, advises us Bowering, Victor Coleman, B. P. Nichol, to do. The anthropologists Bailey and and Bill Bissett.... They are the only especially Edmund Carpenter, McLu- writers who have shown faith in the han's earth-bound inspiration, under- ability of the universe to direct composi- stand more profoundly that there exists tion through open, random, or multi- a symbiotic relationship between tech- phasic forms, or a belief that the 'craft' nology and culture, just as one exists be- of writing involves a listening to 'Mother tween culture and language, and as one Nature'." exists between the poet and his inspira- tion. The Innuit carver of pre-Houston I'd like to dispute that contention. It is times in discovering and elucidating the extremely likely, though I have not asked forms hidden in bone and ivory exercised him, that Frye came to that idea through his will neither aggressively nor passively, his friendship with Ned Pratt, whom but in such a way that through a pene- Davey accuses of "overtly fabricated crea- trative consciousness he found the form tions" among other things. Just after he hidden there, then through his skill il- died, Viola Pratt told me that Ned wrote luminated it "from within." purely by "working with the gift lines from heaven." Every creative activity Although he would deny it, Davey's depends on inspiration; there's nothing sensibility, perhaps stereoscopic — even new in that. What has to follow is an flashing and iridescent — is still essen- application of learned craft to illuminate tially plastic and on the surface, still

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related to the multiple perspective of more concerned with the outer world cubism or the veer into dreamscapes of than with the inner: the dive into our- surrealism. (The revival of surrealism in selves has become the dive into the other. the Southwestern United States might be And the language employed is more noted here.) As such, although it offers simple and directly communicative than participation-inviting advances on a New- the esoterica of Davey's card-games with tonian single point of view, it falls short human sensibility or his obfuscatory of an X-ray vision, an entering into the articles in Open Letter. Hopefully, the structural essence of things, a penetrative critic's role as specialist-interpreter will consciousness that engages with reality soon become obsolete, and our literature illuminating it from the inside. One could will be able to speak for itself. also contest Davey's comparison in his introduction of literature with the pheno- PETER SUCH menological basis of science since con- temporary science has given way to a direct study of the invisible laws that govern the appearances of reality rather MUNRO'S than of the interactions between pheno- mena. WONDERLAND In Crusoe, Eli Mandel's recent book of ALICE (LAEDLAW) MUNRO, who sold her poetry, which Davey fails to include in first story when she was eighteen, was his article on him, the jacket copy warns born and brought up on the outskirts of of "some new poems whose simplicity Wingham, Ontario, where her father was and stark diction may startle some a fox farmer. From her early teens she readers." The last poem, Lake Wabamun, began recording in a vein of reminiscent indicates clearly the poet's movement to- realism the events and people of ordinary wards a penetrative dialogue with the life around her. After a couple of years essentials of his environment and a recog- in the Honours English programme at nition of the power of simple language: The University of Western Ontario, she married in 1951 a fellow student, Jim each day I/step/farther/into dark water/ ... Munro, and moved to Vancouver. In to have come to this/simplicity/to know/ 1968 she gained widespread recognition only/ the absolute/ calm/lake/before/night with Dance of the Happy Shades, which won that year's Governor General's It is this notion of an illumined reality Award for Canadian Fiction. A later that underlies Frye's belief in his intro- novel, Lives of Girls and Women ( 1971 ), duction to Dialogues Sur La Traduction and another collection of stories, Some- (between Frank Scott and Anne Hébert) thing I've Been Meaning to Tell You that, contrary to Robert Frost's notion, (1974), have confirmed her position as poetry CAN be translated; what cannot one of Canada's foremost current writers. are merely "the linguistic accidents." The influences, talent and developing The reading of the work of over a technique of Alice Munro as a short story thousand Canadian writers in the last writer are the particular concern of this few years, many of them established essay. In Literary History of Canada authors, and my direct correspondence ( 1965 ) Hugo McPherson shrewdly notes with them, has convinced me that the that she captures the flavour and mood of voice of the seventies, unlike that of rural Ontario and "this region takes on Davey's self-ordained avant garde, is something of the macabre atmosphere

109 OPINIONS & NOTES that we associate with Truman Capote and it is like a series of snapshots, like and Carson McCullers." During an inter- the brownish snapshots with fancy borders view in 1971,1 after acknowledging Eu- that my parents' old camera used to dora Welty as probably her favourite take." author, Munro remarked, "If I'm a The author, in a passage in the Epi- regional writer, the region I'm writing logue of Lives of Girls and Women, talks about has many things in common with about her desire to write down and cap- the American South.... A closed rural ture the reality of Jubilee town: society with a pretty homogeneous Scotch- Irish racial strain going slowly to decay." And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every Also cited as being of particular interest layer of speech and thought, stroke of light were Southern writers Flannery O'Con- on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, nor and Reynolds Price, as well as Mid- crack, delusion, held still and held together western author Wright Morris. Their in- — radiant, everlasting. fluence, though, was less "in terms of This intense feeling for the exact texture form and style" than "in terms of vision." of surfaces and the tone of responses Although there are obviously vast dif- makes far greater demands than any ferences between Munro's own country cinemagraphic technique can adequately and the American South, some attitudes meet. It requires a style more akin to are common to both societies: an almost what in contemporary painting is often religious belief in the land and the old called "magic realism." Among those rural cultural values; a sense of the past loosely categorized in this group, Alice and respect for family history, however Munro has noted a particular apprecia- unremarkable or bizarre it may seem to tion for the American Edward Hopper's outsiders: a profound awareness of the paintings of ordinary places — a barber Bible which is reflected in the very lan- shop, seaside cottages, a small town street, guage and images of speech; and a Cal- roadside snack bar or gasoline station. vinistic sense of sin. Canadian painters like Alex Colville, Also influential in Munro's artistic de- Tom Forrestal and Jack Chambers have velopment was journalist James Agee's also influenced her. While all of these experiment of integrating photography artists express themselves in individually and text in his joint publication with different styles, the overall impression photographer Walker Evans of Let Us which they convey is one of acute percep- Now Praise Famous Men (i960). Like tion of their environment. They exercise Agée, Eudora Welty had also learned the selectivity of the expert photographer; through photography "to see widely and yet by some personal, humanizing stroke at close hand and really for the first time each object or nuance in their painting the nature of the place I'd been born somehow appears to have a special signi- into."2 Both her interest in grotesques ficance in its relationship to the rest of who fail to understand themselves, and the picture. There is a kind of illusionary her technique may be recognized in three dimensional aspect, a super realism Munro's descriptive style. In her "The or magical and mysterious suggestion of Ottawa Valley," for example, the narra- a soul beyond the objects depicted, which tor remarks significantly about her way leaves the viewer participant with greater of ending that story: "I didn't stop there, insights and an increased sensitivity to- I suppose, because I wanted to find out wards the world around. more, remember more, ... bring back all Such an impression Alice Munro can I could. Now I look at what I have done create in her extended images, which

no OPINIONS & NOTES often evoke in the reader an intuitive earlier undoubtedly influenced Munro's awareness of a story's entire impact. In descriptive style, it was their expression of Dance of the Happy Shades this tech- the profound dignity of even the most nique can be observed in a number of trivial events of every day life to which descriptive passages. Frequently the au- she especially responded. Later, when she thor arrests or suspends motion before first discovered Patrick White through his returning to action, as in the still painting Tree of Man (1955), this feeling for the description from "Thanks for the Ride" inherent beauty of every earthly thing of a typical small town near Lake Huron, was reinforced: for her, too, a lowly ant after the summer vacationers have gone or a gob of spittle could be worthy of home: appreciative contemplation. There is a re- markable similarity between the imagery It was a town of unpaved, wide, sandy streets and bare yards. Only the hardy of White and Munro —• probably because things like red and yellow nasturtiums, or of their similar apprehension of the "holi- a lilac bush with brown curled leaves, grew ness" of all aspects of life, in which out of that cracked earth. The houses were "beautiful or ugly had ceased to matter set wide apart, with their own pumps and because there was in everything some- sheds and privies out behind; most of them were built of wood and painted green or thing to be discovered." gray or yellow. The trees that grew there The stories of Dance of the Happy were big willows or poplars, their fine leaves Shades can be examined in the order in greyed with the dust. There were no trees along the main street, but spaces of tall grass which they were written. Three the and dandelions and blowing thistles — open author labels as "sort of exercise stories country between the store buildings. The ... not specifically imitative, but they fit town hall was surprisingly large, with a into certain patterns."3 All these treat the great bell in a tower, the red brick rather maturing process of the young as recalled glaring in the midst of the town's walls of faded, pale-painted wood. The sign beside later, and depend partly for their effect the door said that it was a memorial to the on a bifocal point of view that sees a soldiers who had died in the First World situation from both an adolescent and an War. We had a drink out of the fountain adult perspective. "Day of the Butterfly," in front. with its delicate echo of Benjamin Frank- A winter parallel to this scene is provided lin's "The Ephemera; An Emblem of in the final paragraph of "The Time of Human Life," depicts with compression Death," which presents various responses and polish not only the complexity of to the fatal scalding of a slatternly wo- youthful feelings in the face of inexplic- man's infant. In the description of able tragedy but also youth's serene ac- "wooden houses that had never been ceptance of death. In "An Ounce of painted, with their steep patched roofs Cure" a mature woman wryly recalls her and their narrow, slanting porches, the humiliation over a youthful drinking es- wood-smoke coming out of their chim- capade. Her sophisticated and intimate neys and dim children's faces pressed rapport throughout with the reader closes against their windows" and "dead gar- on a delightfully conspiratorial note as dens" the fidelity of this pictorial detail she revisits her home town to attend a reflects the bleakness of the situation. Yet funeral at which the undertaker was the as snow begins to fall "slowly, evenly," it person responsible for the unhappy epi- blankets in whiteness the harshness of the sode : "I saw him looking over at me with tragedy and the pathetic feelings of the an expression as close to a reminiscent people involved. smile as the occasion would permit,... I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look While the Southern writers mentioned

III OPINIONS & NOTES in return. I am a grown-up woman now; house was endless, dreary and particu- let him unbury his own catastrophes." larly depressing; work done out of doors, The adolescent male narrator of "Thanks and in my father's service, was ritualisti- for the Ride," a vivid dramatization of cally important." The word girl, formerly the humiliation which the poor suffer innocent and unburdened, becomes "a from the affluent, after a bottle of bootleg definition ... touched with reproach and brew and "headlong sex in a barn," is disappointment." Although she accepts stricken by his date's farewell double the necessity in rural existence of the entendre uttered in a voice "crude,... death of animals, she cannot stop herself abusive and forlorn." from trying to help a doomed horse es- In the "first really painful autobio- cape. Laird's pride in assisting in the graphical story," entitled "The Peace of mare's slaughter makes her realize that Utrecht," Helen returns, after a ten years' her father's dismissal of the incident — absence on the West Coast, to her home "she's only a girl" — may be a valid town Jubilee for a visit with her spinster remark. sister Maddy. To Helen the local life As expressed dramatically later in seems empty and forlorn. Her recollection Munro's novel, there may be "a change of an ailing "Gothic" mother, "one of the coming ... in the lives of girls and town's possessions and oddities,... strug- women" when they will not be dependent gling in that house of stone until the very on the categories and roles in which men end," are depressing. An old history note often arbitrarily place and try to keep from High School days, "The Peace of them, but that change has not yet come Utrecht, 1713, brought an end of the War in "The Office" or in "Postcard." In the of the Spanish Succession," opens the first of these a married woman decides to door to less gloomy memories of youthful get a place in which to do her writing activities and suggests a kind of parallel away from her family. Her husband, to Helen's own break with the past of "who does not really want explanations," Jubilee. This return visit has not been a agrees. Renting a suitable office from a success. The sisters belong to two different Mr. Malley, she soon finds his attentions worlds. A renewed association with two a source of irritation. Although she re- tough-fibred old aunts, imbued with "a jects his offer to install comfortable fur- simple unprepossessing materialism ... nishings, Mr. Malley with his patronizing the rock of their lives" and adept at ironi- view of her writing as a therapeutic fe- cal acceptance of their own eccentricities, male hobby and his craving for intimacy is painful because of the way they have is not easily discouraged. In his "obse- preserved not only her mother's clothing quious hunger" to have his own experi- but also a vivid memory of her final ences recorded, he details the calamities agony. Their preoccupations intensify the and betrayals of trust which he has suf- narrator's sense that "nobody speaks the fered. Despite her annoyance the writer same language." listens, but after finding him one night An eleven-year-old girl is the central reading her manuscript, henceforth locks figure in "Boys and Girls," which explores her office door. When he berates her and the different roles and temperaments of suggests that she is using the room for the two sexes as society expects them to purposes other than writing, she con- develop. To the young narrator, who en- tinues unrepentant until his trumped-up joys helping her father on his fox farm charge that she and her friends have and is much more useful to him than is covered the washroom walls with obscene her younger brother Laird, "work in the graffiti makes her decide to leave. In a

112 OPINIONS & NOTES neat switch of roles she pictures him for the dogs. The rusting cars show rain- creating his own fiction out of the epi- bow patches." sode: "Red Dress— 1946" traces the adoles- Mr. Malley with his rags and brushes and cent embarrassment, intermittent despair pail of soapy water, scrubbing ... at the and exhilaration of the narrator during toilet walls, . . . arranging in his mind the an episode that centres on a Christmas bizarre but somehow never quite satisfactory school dance for which her mother has narrative of yet another betrayal of trust. made her a red dress. In delightfully While I arrange words, and think it is my right to be rid of him. comic vein the girl's various moods and the unexpectedly happy outcome in the In "Postcard" a spinster receives a process of indoctrination into social and postcard from a middle-aged beau Clare sexual conventions unfold. Her final MacQuarrie, holidaying in Florida, on realization neatly sums up the teen-ager's the same day that she learns of his mar- perennial problem in measuring up to a riage there. Helen's reflections on her too mother's expectations: "I understood easy but passive compliance over the what a mysterious and oppressive obliga- years with his wishes, and her ironically tion I had, to be happy, and how I had confident expectations of marriage with almost failed it, and would be likely to him once his mother is dead, lead her to fail it, every time, and she would not conduct a noisy mini-shivaree outside his know." home. The response of "fat, comfortable A central story in this collection, and sleepy-faced" Clare is simply to tell her to the "closest" to the author, is "Images," go on home and give his love to her a young woman's recollections of an out- momma. "It didn't bother him too much ing with her father. An intricate series of how I was feeling ... he was a man contrasts is presented: outdoor activity who didn't give out explanations, maybe and the pervasive aura of an unexplained didn't have any. If there was anything he malady; apparent jollity and genuine couldn't explain, well he would just for- misery; death and life; images and actu- get about it." ality. Behind such outward reality as the In "Walker Brothers Cowboy" and practical jokes of the father and his "Red Dress— 1946" the narrator is once homely cousin nursing his pregnant wife, more a young woman recalling childhood the sensuous apprehension of pungent experiences. In the first, she accompanies odours, dead muskrats caught in traps, her father, a travelling salesman for and a meeting with a hatchet-carrying Walker Brothers patent medicines, on an hermit who lives with his whiskey-drink- afternoon sales trip through the "flat, ing cat in a roofed-over cellar, at whose scorched, empty" countryside. A visit en initial appearance the narrator is petri- route to an old flame, Nora, grown coarse fied "like a child in an old negative, elec- and blousy, reveals a new and enchanting trified against the dark noon sky, with dimension to her father's personality. blazing hair and burned-out Orphan Nora's gramaphone records of dance Annie eyes," there are mysterious aspects tunes somehow bring a mood of lightness larger than life. Like the gigantic shadows to the Depression era of the 'thirties, cast by an oil lamp, they forbode ill but when the rural scene is so bleak that even also provide comfort. This is a strange when children "play I Spy ... it is hard story, replete with concrete imagery and to find many colours. Grey for the barns suggestive overtones, that demonstrates and sheds and toilets and houses, brown the author's acute perception of smells for the yard and field, black or brown and tastes as well as of sights and sounds

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and their associations. Her father's boots, In "Dance" the narrator and her for example, are "as much an index to mother reluctantly attend the annual himself as his face was. When he had recital of aging, quixotic, and im- taken them off they stood in a corner of poverished music teacher Miss Marsalles. the kitchen, giving off a complicated Her diminished living quarters are clut- smell of manure, machine oil, caked black tered with old furniture, books and pic- mud, and the ripe and disintegrating ma- tures. Marauding flies buzz over sand- terial that lined their soles. They were a wiches already curling at the edges and part of him, temporarily discarded, wait- flat, iceless purple punch in a cut-glass ing." bowl. After the embarrassed young nar- From her day's tramp along the trap- rator has finished her "dogged and lumpy line and the visit to the hermit's abode, interpretation of Handel" she is followed the girl, privy to her father's acceptance by a group of retarded children who play of the oddities of life, returns home no various pieces on the piano. "There is an longer in awe of her spinster cousin's atmosphere in the room of some freakish bossiness. inescapable dream." Then one girl plays "something fragile, courtly and gay, that Like the children in fairy tales who have carries with it the freedom of a great un- seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our emotional happiness." Miss Marsalles, to fears are based on nothing but the truth, whom "no gift is unexpected, no celebra- but who come back fresh from marvellous tion will come as a surprise," announces escapes . . . like them, dazed and powerful the title of the piece, "Dance of the with secrets, I never said a word. Happy Shades," and those in the audi- In John Metcalf's The Narrative Voice ence somehow feel that they have wit- (1972), after rejecting one critic's inter- nessed an act of magic, "perhaps not alto- pretation of "Images," Alice Munro com- gether in good taste, ... a communique ments that "symbolism is infinitely com- from the other country" where Miss Mar- plex and never completely discovered." salles lives. Her own is not consciously planned or This first volume reveals that Alice arranged, but rather "found." Various Munro can treat a wide range of themes pictures in the mind begin to move "out- with a technical framework that is, in her ward, in a dim uncertain way" as memory own words, "very traditional, very con- and imagination blend into action or feel- ventional." In all but three of these fif- ing that becomes as true as elements in a teen stories the point of view is that of a dream seem true. In this way, the title child or adolescent, modified or con- story of the volume, "Dance of the trolled to some extent by the lapse of Happy Shades," was molded into her own time, new insights and perspectives be- terms from an anecdote heard at a family tween an incident and its recording. In dinner party. "The I of the story is a only one is the narrator or reader's sen- masquerade, she is a little middle-class sorium a male. In each, the characters girl I never was, an attempt to see the are seen in a strongly presented physical story through the eyes of the relative who setting, in which the surfaces of life, its told it to me. But once I got used to be- texture, sounds and smells are described ing her I could .. . remember things — with exactness of observation and deli- the house, the dresses, Mary Queen of cacy of language. The focus is fairly nar- Scots; I was not told any of that . . . the row and highly personal, in the sense that kind of remembering I mean is what fic- "the emotional reality," though not the tional invention is." events, is "solidly autobiographical." OPINIONS & NOTES

Although the stories have no formal Although arbitrarily chosen thematic sequence, they effectively trace the de- headings cannot adequately reflect the velopment of a sensitive young girl into overlapping and variety of minor motifs womanhood. They capture in dialogue, in individual tales, four kinds of stories characterization and description the prac- seem to emerge : first, those in which are ticality and hardships, seasonal rhythms blended a number of related themes — and vitality of rural and small town life, the essential individualism of each per- the barriers between the young and the son, the impossibility of complete com- old, the poor and the affluent, the sick prehension of one's own self let alone and the well. Secrets and a lack of genuine another's, the self-deception, buried re- communication between family members sentments, and often unwitting vindic- or friends often lead to guilty estrange- tiveness of human personality; second, ments; unawareness of a situation, per- stories reminiscent of Dance in their focus haps because of a selfish distaste for un- on relatively simple emotional situations; pleasant things or a fear of ridicule, is third, stories which offer especially re- common; the pressure to conform is re- vealing insights into the author's tech- lentless, and failure of will to make one's nique; and finally, narratives in which a own life is too frequent. The treatment sense of personal guilt is pervasive. of these various themes is everywhere The title piece, "Something I've Been touched with humour, compassionate Meaning to Tell You," a good example of irony, and a comprehension of the absurd the first group, is a finely orchestrated and grotesque. Common experiences be- dramatization of the underlying tensions come unique, yet universal, expressions of and ironies of close relationships. An what it means to be alive during this omniscient author introduces the reader period. through the sensorium of a frustrated In her latest collection, Something I've spinster, Et Desmond, to her beautiful Been Meaning to Tell You ( 1974), Alice elder sister Char, her ailing husband Munro moves into a larger, more cosmo- Arthur Comber, and a handsome former politan world. Only six of the thirteen boy friend Blaikie Noble. Et, "who didn't stories are rooted in what was formerly like contradictions . . . mysteries or ex- considered Munro country. The other tremes," ironically creates a private fic- seven have contemporary urban settings, tion that her sister's youthful attempt at with landscapes as different as a train suicide, her frigid tolerance of Arthur, from Calgary to Vancouver, the West and her sudden death are all connected Coast, the Ottawa Valley, and, by allu- with a fatal attraction to Blaikie. sion, even Europe and North Africa. Through the recurring images and allu- There is a wider variety of characters sions time flows easily backwards and for- also, fewer girls and young women and wards as on the little stage of Mock Hill more middle-aged or elderly people. Most a range of human emotions is portrayed of the stories are longer. There is a ma- with a gently comic undertone that is ture awareness of the complexity and conveyed overtly in the names of the set- fragility of human relationships, the con- ting and characters. fusing standards of modern city life, and Et's fantasy, plausible and ambiguous the conflict of generations. Satire is more enough for a reader to speculate about its common. These new aspects are ordered validity, is presented with splendid irony. with the same characteristic perception, She also sees a mythical parallel when subtle interplay of emotions, droll sense Arthur in a foursome game of "Who am of humour, and ironic compassion. I?" chooses to be Sir Galahad :

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'You should have been King Arthur ... she thinks, in a way that reveals how she King Arthur is your namesake.' rationalizes events just as her more meth- Ί should have. King Arthur married to the most beautiful woman in the world.' odical sister "works out" and finishes off 'Ha,' said Et, 'We all know the end of her past : that story.' What Eileen meant to Ewart, she would tell Char's only response to such ruthless herself later, was confusion. The opposite of June, wasn't that what she was? The shafts is to retreat to the piano. Her sud- natural thing for a man in pain to look for, den demise, occurring within hours of who loves and fears his wife. The brief hearing Et's maliciously fabricated ru- restorative dip. Eileen is aimless and irre- mour that Blaikie has remarried, is as sponsible, she comes out of the same part of the world accidents come from. He lies in tidy and inscrutable as her face in death. her to acknowledge, to yield — but tem- The reader is left wondering whether Et porarily, safely — to whatever has got his ever will tell her ingenuous brother-in- son, whatever cannot be spoken of in his law that his adored Char had "swallowed house. So Eileen, with her fruitful back- ground of reading, her nimble habit of blueing once over a man that wouldn't analysis (material and direction different have her." from June's but the habit not so different, "Memorial" is a complex study of the after all), can later explain and arrange it sterility involved in excessively organizing for herself. and ordering one's life. The reader's sen- Deception of one's self and others under- sorium is Eileen, a relaxed divorcee visit- lies the parting between the sisters, as ing in Vancouver a younger sister June June attempts gropingly to understand and her husband Ewart whose son Doug- her son's death. Eileen, outwardly tactful las has been killed in a car accident. and concerned but actually cold and Ewart is rich and inoffensive. June is ag- tired, wants "mostly to get away. It was gressive, a participator in outdoor sports, an effort to put her hand out. Acts done growth groups, Yoga, transcendental without faith may restore faith.... she meditation, gestalt — the whole gamut of had to believe and hope that was true." modern fads. Even in bereavement she is In "The Spanish Lady" a wife, en apparently coolly efficient. route home to Vancouver, reflects on the After the Memorial Service the house affair between her spouse and his para- is filled with friends and neighbours. The mour. Two attempted letters neatly intro- teenagers, clad in fringed shawls and duce the dichotomy of her attitude to- trailing dresses, smoke pot to guitar music ward them. The first letter is au-courant in the recreation room. The older people liberal in its rationalization of her feeling drink upstairs. To Eileen there is an air of jealousy; the second is reproachful of of unreality about the whole occasion. their cruel deceit. The crumpled notes The funeral service seems a kind of fraud. quickly and graphically illustrate the in- The affectations of June and Ewart — tricacy and frustration of the situation. exotic art, miniature Japanese garden, As the narrator amusingly and ironic- adoption of two children of Indian blood ally reviews the details of their friendship, — all appear artificial posturing. For she imagines returning home to find them Eileen, "the only thing that we can hope together in bed and responding to the for is that we lapse now and then into situation in two different ways : first, in a reality." sophisticated fashion ("Would you like a Wandering out later that night for a cup of coffee, I imagine you're awfully breath of fresh air, she allows a rather tired?"), and then in an outbreak of rage, drunk Ewart to seduce her. "Why Not?" hurling things at the bed, screaming and

117 OPINIONS & NOTES beating "their bare bodies with the hair- I laugh and let him, because I like for brush." Despite her sense of outrage and people to think what pleases them and betrayal, however, she herself admits: "I makes them happy." have lied as well as I have been lied to. "The Found Boat," in the same remin- Men have expressed ravenous apprecia- iscent vein of childhood days, actually tion of my nipples and my appendix scar suggests by its vernal setting, heroine's and the moles on my back and have also name, and the interplay of sunshine and said to me, as it is proper for them to do, water some of the freshness of an Unfällen 'Now don't make too big a thing of this,' Eden. Two schoolgirls, Eva and Carol, and even, Ί really do love my wife.' " find an abandoned rowboat during the During the train trip a convert to the Wawanash River spring flood and help Rosicrucian concept of previous exist- three boys repair it. After the launching ences engages her in conversation claim- down river, they eat lunch together in an ing that he was once a conquistador and abandoned railway station, dark and cool, she a Spanish lady whom he had left be- its floor littered with broken glass and its hind. This theory of "fresh starts" has a walls covered with suggestive graffiti. In certain appeal. But at Vancouver station, a game of "Truth or Dare" all agree to witnessing the sudden collapse and death strip off their clothes and run naked of an anonymous old man, the narrator across the sunlit fields to swim in the cold feels that by his last agonizing cry, river. The new awareness and sexual awakening which the episode brings is everybody alive, is pushed back. ... As if conveyed in delicate imagery as the ini- we were all wound up a long time ago and were spinning out of control, whirring, mak- tial taunting between the boys and girls ing noises, but at a touch could stop, and gives way to a spirit of co-operation, and, see each other for the first time, harmless on Eva's part at least, even a sense of and still. This is a message; I really believe privilege in sharing work. Although both it is; but I don't see how I can deliver it. girls apparently return to their former mocking attitude toward the boys, the Situated between narratives of such "pride, shame, boldness, and exhilara- emotional intensity and sombre overtones tion" of the experience in maturation will are two tales, "How I Met My Husband" obviously remain. and "The Found Boat," which provide a kind of relief from the tensions portrayed Among the stories most arresting for in adult relationships. Both return to the their critical insights into the author's late 'forties and serve as a reminder of technique are "Material," "Marrakesh," the happy aspects of innocent young love "Tell Me Yes or No," and "Winter viewed in retrospect. The first is a charm- Wind." "Material" tells how a writer, ing presentation in appropriately rustic Hugo, transforms a personal incident into imagery and language of a poor farm girl, fiction. His former wife muses about his her awe at her employers' automatic ap- publication with devastating satire on pliances, coloured bathroom fixtures and how "Outrageous writers may bounce three-way mirror, her delight in secretly from one blessing to another nowadays, trying on her mistress' elegant clothes, her bewildered, as permissively reared chil- naivete and trust in love, and finally the dren are said to be, by excess of ap- indulgent and patronizing pleasure she proval." Mocking the book jacket blurb, seems to take in her husband's version of tearing apart its half lies of Hugo's ex- their romance : "He always tells the chil- periences as "lumberjack, beer-slinger, dren ... how I went after him by sitting counterman," she ridicules his image as by the mailbox every day, and naturally "not only fake but out of date."

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You should have said you'd meditated for Dorothy sees her granddaughter and a year in the mountains of Uttar Pradesh; Blair unclothed in his porch, "guzzling you should have said you'd taught Creative Drama to autistic children; you should have and grabbing ... relishing and plunder- shaved your head, shaved your beard, put ing each other.... helpless and endan- on a monk's cowl; you should have shut gered as people on a raft pulled out on up, Hugo. the current. And nobody would call to This is a very complex, ironic and comi- them." Shaken by this sight, Dorothy re- cal story that touches on such themes and treats to her own porch, where with a tensions as the amorality of artists, creat- wry comic note she reminds herself: ing from "scraps and oddments, useless "Strength is necessary, as well as some- baggage," a "hard and shining, rare in- thing like gratitude, if you are going to timidating quality"; the tenuous tie that turn into a lady peeping Tom at the end holds men and women together in love, of your life." "as flimsy as a Roumanian accent or the In "Tell Me Yes or No" a narrator calm curve of an eyelid, some half-fraudu- has an imaginary conversation with a lent mystery"; the way that men, what- dead lover as she recalls their affair and ever their temperaments, know "how to tells of a later trip to his home city. Dur- ignore or use things. . . . They are not at ing this visit she haunts the bookstore the mercy." Dialogue, description, and which his widow operates until one eve- reflection all unite in a realistic and ironic ning the latter gives her a bag of opened interplay of character and events to evoke letters and asks her to leave. Ironically in the reader a rich and varied response. the letters are not hers, but those of an- In spite of its exotic title the main other woman who has become frantic action of "Marrakesh" is set in the Wa- because she has not heard recently from wanash River district. Related from the her lover. point of view of an omniscient author, the Moving with the temporal fluidity of story's chief sensorium is a retired school internal monologue, the story is rich in teacher, Dorothy. Her granddaughter, imagery, descriptive detail, and inner Jeanette, college professor, wearing "jeans revelation as the narrator attempts to and a peasant blouse" arrives in a foreign understand the deceased as well as their sports car for her annual visit. Her lament relationship for the previous two years. that "technology and progress are destroy- Their initial meeting had taken place in ing the quality of life" in the old town an age of "childbearing ... docility ... reminds Dorothy of her own youthful love of limits" when both lived with their love of the picturesque and hatred of spouses on the edge of a West Coast cam- change. In maturity, though, even super- pus. Years later, the now divorced nar- markets with their asphalt parking lots rator and the journalist meet again "un- "would do for her to look at, beautiful or expectedly in a city where neither ... ugly had ceased to matter, because there lived." After a pleasant lunch reminisc- was in everything something to be dis- ing together in a way that rekindles the covered." earlier mutual attraction, they drive One evening she listens while a neigh- through the twilight to meet her plane. bour Blair King and Jeanette over gin As the narrator notes, "love is not in the and tonic exchange various travel experi- least unavoidable, a choice is made." The ences, including a strange story with sug- surrender in a noisy airport hotel is the gestive overtones about robbery and at- beginning of an affair that is chiefly tempted seduction by Arab youths in Mar- nourished by an exchange of fanciful rakesh. Later that night, unable to sleep, letters. He writes, "/ do think of you I

120 OPINIONS & NOTES suppose as a warm and sentient flood . .. faded. The father handsome still, bearded, and I have the normal human concerns hand-on-knee, patriarchal. A bit of Irish acting here. A relishing of the part, which with being overwhelmed, which is what he might as well relish since he cannot now floods do." She replies in coyly suggestive escape it? When young he was popular in Emily Dickinson fashion that she is taverns; . . . but he gave up those ways, he "nothing but the tamest creek you could turned his back on his friends and brought go wading in," and continues to play a his family here, to take up land in the newly opened Huron Tract. This photograph was kind of charade designed to make their the sign and record of his achievement; love seem "harmless and merry." Now, respectability, moderate prosperity, mollified faced with his loss, she reflects wife in a black silk dress, the well-turned- out tall daughters. how women build their castles on founda- tions hardly strong enough to support a Commenting on the different marriages night's shelter; how women deceive them- of these two sisters and especially of the selves and uselessly suffer, being exploitable grandmother's "self-glorifying" renuncia- because of the emptiness of their lives and tion of a former lover, the narrator muses some deep — but indefinable, and not final! — flaw in themselves. And further and fur- about the accuracy of her depiction : ther along this line which everybody is . . . how am I to know what I claim to learning these days like an easy song. know? I have used these people, not all of Virtually the last letter from her un- them, but some of them before. I have tricked them out and altered them and known rival begs the dead lover to write shaped them any way at all, to suit my pur- and "please, tell me yes or no." Imagin- poses. ... I stop and wonder, I feel com- ing the life of this woman, who has suf- punction. Though I am only doing in a fered like herself, the narrator can only large and public way what has always been answer the persistent question "How are done, what my mother did, and other people did, who mentioned to me my grandmother's we to understand you?" by an imagina- story. tive dismissal of the entire experience: Yet the implication that her grand- Never mind. I invented her. I invented you, mother has been "stubbornly, secretly, as far as my purposes go. I invented loving you and I invented your death. I have my destructively romantic" has not been in- tricks and my trap doors, too. I don't under- vented: "we get messages another way, stand their workings at the present moment, . . . we have connections which cannot be but I have to be careful, I won't speak investigated, but have to be relied on." against them. In many of the stories already com- "Winter Wind" returns to Wawanash mented upon there can be noted an ex- with a woman's reminiscence of a winter pression of a sense of guilt for uncharit- storm during her high school days. Be- able thoughts, acts of deceit or omission. cause of the weather she stays in town for In the last group to be discussed, regret a few nights with her grandmother and and remorse are pervasive motifs. "Walk- great-aunt Madge, whose house is as ing on Water," set in Victoria and sug- "cozy as the inside of a nutshell." The gested by a publicity stunt there of tele- family picture of her great grandparents vision comic Paul Paulsen, describes the on the wall fascinates the girl and sym- tragic failure of a young Zen adherent's bolizes the personal sacrifices made by her experiment in psychic control over mat- ancestors to carve out an ordered way of ter, as seen through the perspective of a life. retired druggist. The difficulty of bridg- ing the generation gap is vividly por- The parents are seated. The mother firm trayed in realistic dialogue and sharp and unsmiling, in a black silk dress, hair scanty and centre parted, eyes bulging and imagery, as he attempts to understand

121 OPINIONS & NOTES the sense of values of the flower people. realizes that she has been an accessory in His touching concern for their welfare spirit to the actual executioners. and poignant foreboding reach a climac- "The Ottawa Valley," final story of tic note with his eventual feeling of dis- this volume, is another reminiscence of orientation in their brutally existential a childhood experience by a mature dismissal of the victim's fate: "he wasn't woman. During World War II she ac- one of us.... he was fairly old.... If companies her mother on a visit to a that's what he was going to do, then no- blunt-tongued but good-natured spinster body ought to stop him, should they? Or cousin, Aunt Dodie, in the Ottawa Val- feel sad about him." ley. The woman reminiscences about such In "Forgiveness in Families" an elder amusing incidents as the time they sewed sister recollects with biting satire the the fly up on a summer worker's overalls, career of her hippie brother, "a child of plied him with lemonade, then watched nature," as he calls himself. His early in- from a hiding place as he tried to relieve dolence was a constant worry to his himself, "fairly clawin' and yankin' every widowed mother: "Until recently the which way" until he "just finally went country did not pay you to sit on your past caring and gave up and ripped down uppers and announce that you had his overalls altogether and let 'er fly." In adopted a creative life-style." But in his recalling this and other stories, the mid-thirties, decked out in long hair, san- cousins' versions often vary and their dif- dals and a priest's robe, he can collect ferent responses are comically revealing welfare. When, partly because of his own of their different temperaments and sensi- neglect, his mother is taken to hospital bilities. seriously ill, he brings along a troupe of During the trip the girl is made pain- his fellow dervishes for an occult healing fully aware of her mother's deteriorating ceremony to which she later attributes health, scientifically documented in the her remarkable recovery. Although grate- story by the inclusion of an entry con- ful, the sister is shocked to realize that cerning Parkinson's disease from a medi- subconsciously she had wished her mother cal encyclopaedia. Even in simple games to die as proof of her brother's careless like matching bits of recollected poems, irresponsibility. the generally shared knowledge of the ill- ness brings embarrassment as the subject In "Executioners" an older woman of death inevitably recurs. Preoccupation anaesthetizes with whiskey unpleasant with her mother, the narrator admits, is memories "running underground . . . central in the story : spurting out at another place" in her mind. Taunted as a girl by a bootlegger's it is to reach her that this whole journey has son, she dreams of vicious revenge upon been undertaken. With what purpose? To him, of "driving spikes into his eyes" and mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid, of her; and it did not jabbing him with his knife until "venom- work, for she looms too close, just as she ous substances would spurt and flow." always did. She is heavy as always, she She also recalls playing happily with the weighs everything down, and yet she is in- family of her parents' grotesque maid, distinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever whose two brothers frolicked like magic and refused to fall away, and I could go on, clowns. Actually they are tough and ruth- and on, applying what skills I have, using less to enemies like the bootlegger. When what tricks I know, and it would always be his house is set afire and both he and his the same. son perish in the flames, the narrator The spectre of a gifted, eccentric and

122 OPINIONS & NOTES ailing mother haunts much of Munro's heart you have." Alice Munro's special fiction, and appears either briefly or as a distillation of personality is revealed in dominating figure in several of the col- the quiet humour, gentle irony, and com- lected stories. She is a central character in passionate understanding with which she Lives of Girls and Women. Frequently treats her themes. Her uniqueness lies not associated with her is a daughter whose only in the special angle of vision from growing maturity brings a sense of guilt which her characters are seen, but also in for her own lack of understanding or the lasting impact which they have on the compassion. Another less individualized reader. They are memorable for them- but equally recurring figure in various selves as well as for their symbolic signifi- aspects is the man, whether single or cance. Many are representative of par- married, who uses or ignores women and ticular life patterns, revealed often in a events at his own whim. There is also a single picture, in the fashion of Sherwood whole range of other characters that have Anderson, of "lives flowing past each been imaginatively created out of vividly other." But they still remain individuals recalled memories. For the most part they who become permanent personal posses- are unsophisticated people who only sions of the reader. Her writing is original, vaguely comprehend the meaning of their not for its technical innovation or inter- own lives. The reader is taken with them pretations of the atomic age, but rather through a series of rather subtle, low- for its fragile insights into the complexity keyed circumstances in which the con- of personal relationships. Her narratives tinuum is often disrupted and then re- spring from an imaginative, intelligent established in a way that alters both the and unpretentious individuality to which reader's as well as the characters' emo- fiction is a natural recourse. They are in- tional awareness, and leads them both to dependent, absorbing, and realistic ex- a significant or fresh conception of the pressions of the profound disturbances world. Most of the tales are presented and magic of ultimate human reckonings. from the first person point of view. Even in those few which happen to be written BRANDON CONRON in the third person the narrative voice is that of the central figure. This tech- nique allows an intimate rapport between NOTES reader and narrator. The blending of past 1 With Mari Stainsby, British Columbia Li- and present often generates the energy of brary Quarterly, 35 (July 1971), 27-31. See the story as the perspective continually also Graeme Gibson, Eleven Canadian shifts. In some tales the first paragraph Novelists (Toronto, 1973), p. 248. 2 is a microcosm of the whole ; in others the One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the ending contains the vital clues required Depression/A Snapshot Album (New York, to reveal the full deployment of fictional 1971)) P· 3· 3 See John Metcalf, "A Conversation With forces. Some move forward more by dia- Alice Munro," Journal of Canadian Fiction, logue than description. In virtually all, I, 4 (Fall 1972), 54-62. the rhythm is achieved by a balance of the parts which defies rational analysis. Morley Callaghan once remarked that good stories are written "out of a kind of feeling for life and people drained through whatever peculiar intellectual system you have, or whatever kind of

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worlds of social relationship diminish." A CRITICAL STREETS more significant reason McDougall ad- vanced, however, had to do with the uni- Tollman's Criticism formly academic training of most of our writers then, who came from well-to-do THE HOUSE OF CRITICISM, like Henry middle-class backgrounds, lived their James' house of fiction, has as many win- formative years in institutions of higher dows as there are critics to look through learning, and produced prose and poetry them. However, the reader of Canadian written "neither by Brahmins nor by literary criticism might be forgiven the proles" — literature neither high nor low, impression that the Canadian critical merely academic. "And how," McDou- house is practically windowless save for gall asked, "is one to expect from these one large pane in an upper back room closed, circumspect, and intellectually where most of the country's critics are sophisticated ranks a dynamic view of crowded, jostling each other in an effort society?" to look out at the same view: the fa- What McDougall wrote then about miliar bleak landscape, the one or two Canadian writers was largely true of small figures bent in postures of suffering, critics as well — indeed they were often the solitary house in the distance, prob- the same people. And while there are ably a farmhouse. some writers now writing out of different Few windows of the critical house face and more varied backgrounds and experi- the street, the neighbourhood, the city, ence, the prevailing criticism still pre- the social scene. E. K. Brown, looking sents the same frigid, static scene Mc- down from the top floor front during Dougall saw. Northrop Frye's cultural World War II, intelligently and broadly and social essays, however brilliant his surveyed the economic, cultural, and literary theory, dispose one to imagine literary scene of the time and concluded that his critical window is stained glass or gloomily that the social conditions of the that, like the Lady of Shalott in her country were not friendly to creative tower, the world comes to him in the composition and not likely to improve as darkened reverse paraphrases of a mirror. long as literature and society remained In the critical vision of Atwood, Jones, separate and the fate of literature left to and others, the Gothic or tragic land- the hope for individual geniuses. scape and the private world predominate Robert McDougall, twenty years later, — vacant eye-like windows or blinds complained in "The Dodo and the Cruis- drawn down. ing Auk," published in Canadian Litera- No one should insist that criticism must ture, that Canadian writing, especially its merely reflect literature any more than fiction, singularly lacked any social or that literature must reflect society. Mc- cultural consciousness, that there was an Dougall was not asking for a sociological "abnormal absence of feeling for class" literature but for a "kind of turbulence and for the relationships between people that encompasses the whole of the social within a society. An extraordinary fear mosaic" and makes possible within it, and self-doubt, originating in puritanism, freedom of choice and movement for the prejudice, and in a theory of nature individual. Henry James, having built his which emphasizes an individual's psycho- house of fiction, goes on to insist that logical quest before any collective effort, house, windows, and passing human scene resulted in this lack of social observation; are as nothing without "the posted pres- -— and "as the private worlds enlarge, the ence of the watcher," the eyes at the

124 OPINIONS & NOTES

window, and what those eyes see. And by from 1958 to 1973, and including three knowing of what this watcher has been pieces printed for the first time. Tallman conscious, James says, "I shall express to has been and is an influential teacher and you at once his boundless freedom and presence at the University of British his 'moral' reference." Columbia, highly regarded by students There is something peculiar and re- and writers besides the Tish poets he has stricted in a "moral reference" which is been associated with. As a critic, he is consistently and chillingly devoid of any known especially outside Canada for his sense of communities of men or the exis- articles on American writers (reprinted tence of men as city dwellers, as citizens. in this book) and as the editor, with A repeated emphasis, in literature and in Donald Allen, of The Poetics of the New criticism, on Land, on nature as terrible American Poetry. This Open Letter col- and overwhelming, on private anguish, is lection allows readers to see clearly what exclusive. Indeed, I would argue, though Tallman's main concerns have been over it is not the principal intention of this the years. Those concerns, it seems to me, article, that such emphasis is a way of have been urban and communal, local excluding from a place and a share in the and linguistic, continental and demo- literature all those — the majority of cratic. people — who have no history of contact The first essay, on Kerouac's style, be- with "the land," who can never own it, gins with a vision of all cities fallen in the who live in cities, are cosmopolitan. They post-World War II world, a grim sight, a are excluded by experience foreign to grim fall, but perhaps fortunate, for out them and by threat, from something that of the wreckage a new city can be built. is valued in this society — intimacy with Not the same kind of city, but the city and ownership of land, and therefore re-occurring as speech: "almost the only barred from a sense that they are part of workable polis in our time is words, that written world. In this literature and speech, language, because they form a criticism of ownership, "back to the land" plane at which communication, com- stories (re-claiming it), novels about restoring or returning to ancestral homes, munity, communion are still possible." tales of getting in touch with roots or Throughout the essays, Tallman attempts family trees, critical reiteration of our to describe and discuss this city and its wilderness heritage, are further versions of inhabitants, the verbal neighbourhoods the same exclusivity. writers fashion to make themselves at home, and the condition of those who are One critic, though, for nearly twenty excluded or cast out from the city into years, has been looking through a ground silence. Language, in the Beat collapsed floor front window at the street and city Kerouac world, is a means of survival, outside, keeping a clear, compassionate, improvised to the rhythms and stresses of and lively eye on the "godawful streets of those godawful streets, words driven by man." That phrase, borrowed from Jack the energies and needs of living. If Kerouac, is the title of a collection of Kerouac's outcasts have no more com- Warren Tallman's essays making up the munity than the given moment, his fic- No. 6, Third Series issue of Open Letter, tions create possibilities for the future. In edited by Frank Davey and published by his trust in fictions, in making the world Coach House Press. As with Open Letter's in language, Tallman gives the writer an previous collection of Sheila Watson's important social function, at the same stories and criticism, it's a valuable time as he urges him to come down from gathering, 12 essays covering a period

125 OPINIONS & NOTES his lonely prerogatives and listen to the turns savage under the whips and knives sounds of those mean streets. of the times. Most of us cooler customers Kerouac's beat songs, Ginsberg's mad haven't nearly his nerve for letting the howl songs, the broken bell songs of Hart crudity show even though it can be the Crane are the "music of this world," a very ore in which vital energies are music which seems to Tallman the true locked." sound of modern language, and a world Not surprisingly, then, Tallman began where communion is not a religious sacra- to write about Mordecai Richler before ment with hymns but a happy coinci- that author had much Canadian recog- dence of friends meeting on the corner, nition. As well as being a critic who has all trying to tell the news at once. Not also gone to the streets for his subjects, that "Jerusalem" isn't a fine anthem, but Richler has in his fiction consistently most of us don't live there. Central in played off the crude and the fine. A Tallman's writing is his insistence that an "battle of the brows" Tallman calls it, ear finely tuned to the grand arias of high against low, where the lows have Theme, Meaning, Idea, and Art won't Richler's "special affection because their hear the street songs — or maybe the cry wackiness provides the 'inner life,' the for help — just outside the door. That responsive energy, that lends shaping deafness is a crude distortion of all music. force to his imagination." And Tallman In "Wolf in the Snow: Modern Cana- sees that Richler's best writing comes dian Fiction" (recognized for years as a when he transforms the grimmest, most major critical article), Tallman writes tawdry, ugly, and stupid aspects of life that "finer is relatively crude, because into high comic vision. frequently untrue, and crude can be rela- This double vision of life derives in tively fine. All too often, in fiction as in English literature, especially in satire, life, those pretensions which we seek out from Swift, who understood that every- because they make us fine provide false thing spiritual and exalted in our lives is furnishings for the actual house in which mocked by a gross and corporal parody we live. This fine is crude." of it which we try to ignore. Tallman and The juxtaposing and transposing of Richler share a sense that the crudity of high and low, exalted and mean, shapes the fool who persists in his folly is finer all of Tallman's essays. He sees, for ex- than the refinement of a middle-class ample, that the disturbing split between establishment liberal, the real low-brow. form and language in Hugh MacLen- It's a conservative position: man had man's novels results from the pretence of better attend to the business of living — intellectual depth MacLennan imposes and writing — and leave the towers of on his characters, an impossible façade, organization and ideology to those "so false that [he] is incapable of ani- climbers who want to shut out the low- mating it because it has so little to do down music of turbulent St. Urbain with the profound naivete and relative streets. Duddy Kravitz, in his crude crudity of response in which MacLen- originality, is a mug who "can make with nan's true force as an artist is rooted." the music," and "the music in Duddy The Irving Layton that Tallman ad- Kravitz is where in novels it always is, in mires is not the acclaimed rhetorical the style." It may be a harsh music, but Prospero but the Caliban who is "not "What are the disorders, dissonances, and afraid to reveal the badness of his bad- disarrangements of modern writing but ness, the inner imbecilities and cruelties the bells that break the towers." that gnaw and fester those times the self It is in this broken world of language

126 OPINIONS & NOTES the writer lives, his writing no more com- essays, Tallman turns the action and plete nor whole than his life, than any theme of novels or poems into canvases, life. "Life is the value," and "the visions critical landscapes of Lawrence's novel- of fiction" a major way of knowing that las, Creeley's poems, some Canadian life, of knowing "the actual house in novels. These pictures are less landscapes, which we live." The writers Tallman though, than portraits, with people ar- goes to are those who most seem to him ranged from foreground to background, to enter the language, live in it, and re- illuminated and evaluated by the light of enact the energies of living, whose styles their varying energies. The human image appear to improvise a world in words. predominates, and if there are beasts, if William Carlos Williams' localism, "his this continent is a grey wolf whose shadow intensified preoccupation with the mat- is underneath the snow, the beast is soon ter at hand" ; Robert Creeley's domestic, transformed into "old mother North related world of concentrated percep- America with her snow hair, her moun- tions; Charles Olson's "rooted" intelli- tain forehead, her prairie eyes, and her gence prowling the home of his body in wolf teeth, her wind songs, and her vague the neighbourhood of particularity ("the head of old Indian memories." Time body in which we dwell, our eyes are turns into place in "the vicinity of World home, our ears, our intellects, emotions War I," and place into time at "long past — a human house" ) ; Robert Duncan's World War II o'clock." We are mothered long residence in "the natural habitat of by the land we live on and at the end of poetry"; D. H. Lawrence's animating "Wolf in the Snow," even desolate Cana- consciousness mediating between the dian houses are repossessed, the gods of world's life and the rich images of mind; life returned to them. — Tallman writes of these. And of Gins- Houses, as bodies, as language, as berg, Kerouac, Richler, whose words houses, safe as, are everywhere in Tall- travel the lousy neon holy pavement of man's essays, and houses return us to New York, San Francisco, Montreal. James, certainly the guiding sensibility If other critics have written at greater behind this criticism. There among all length about all these writers, few have those moderns is the writer Tallman calls entered into the spirit of their writing, the "most complete of our artists," who that is, their style, in quite Tallman's way, wrote again and again of the paradoxes his own style quickly taking on the of crudity and refinement, the ironic re- rhythms and syntax of, say Kerouac or versals of high and low in society, the Creeley, and even, in one essay, of Henry ambiguities of value in Old and New James. It's active writing, in the act of worlds. James understood the principles staying close to shifts of perception in a of exclusivity in society, and saw, too, writer, to the text at hand. Tallman has society as a metaphor for inner condi- his own stylistic marks, too, quick to tions. He composed social portrait after fashion epigrams, borrow from nursery portrait, pictured houses and rooms, but rhymes, folk tales, popular slang and they are canvases tracing the motions of song. If sometimes a little fanciful, it's a mind, and structures opening into an animated writing, and never dull. Meta- intelligence and out to the reader. The phors of music and dance, absorbed from intricate perceptions of James or one of Williams, are intrinsic to his critical his hyperconscious characters are as pre- vocabulary: he's always aware of the cise as those of Olson's "proprioceptive voice and accent of language on the page. man," and the inclusivity of a James sen- Pictures, too, are everywhere. In several tence has the same origins as the com-

127 OPINIONS & NOTES prehensive attention shifts in a Williams aching loneliness at the heart of the Can- story. Tallman's modernist paradigm of adian novels he discusses, Tallman sees "self as subject, writing as verb, living as that silence as a kind of death. I was object" echoes the architect of the house reminded many times reading these essays of fiction : artist as consciousness, form as of Frost's poem "The Most of It," with medium, human scene as object. And its cry into the wilderness that what life "reader as correspondent" puts the same wants "Is not its own love back in copy obligation on us as James' exhortation speech / But counter-love, original re- that we be "finely aware and richly re- sponse," and its final vision of the mute sponsible." Olson's biological metaphors beast at the heart of nature : — "And of "sensibility within the organism" recall that was all." To that ambiguous "all" James' image of sensibility as a soil out of many responses are possible. D. G. Jones which subjects spring. "Experience ... is suggests in the conclusion to Butterfly on our apprehension and our measure of Rock that Canadian writers tell us to take what happens to us as social creatures" courage, go into the wilderness, and em- writes James, a measure variable enough brace the beast as ourselves. Margaret to please Creeley and Williams. Tall- Atwood at the end of that dark back- man's essay on The Princess Cassimas- ground to Canadian literature, Survival, sima, taken, I believe, from a Ph.D. stoically mentions there are a few points thesis, and one of the earliest pieces here, of light out there — somewhere — to shows how much of James' technique and keep away predators. The beast could thought he has absorbed. What James appear as a political animal or a pet illu- wrote of the famous Chapter 42 of Por- trait of a Lady — "It was designed to sion. Others might say "that's all? so have all the vivacity of incident and all what?" Tallman's response is, in effect, the economy of picture" — is a good des- "go home where you belong." cription of a Tallman essay. That "home" is not necessarily a Cana- dian home, a regional home, or even a Like James, Tallman is an urban man, city home, but more like where the heart an urban critic, though never, like James, is, a body that speaks. In this sense, Tall- urbane. He is an enthusiast, who, like the man, whose interests are not confined by late film critic James Agee, writes most national boundaries but only by those of perceptively when he can admire and language, is our most domestic critic. But love his subjects, and who finds moments it's difficult to be at home, in language or of beauty to applaud in the most flawed in community, if vested interests, politi- creations. And what he praises in Richler, cal and financial, or philosophical and a forgiving scepticism, is his own attri- aesthetic, beat at the door or plot schemes bute, too. "Just as [this scepticism] cuts of urban renewal. The democratic spirit against everybody's pretensions that they of Tallman's essays — I suppose some are better than they actually are, it cuts would call it "American" — is less inter- against fears that they are worse." Resist- ested in imagining a Canadian Whitman ing romantic views of nature, he is ill at (surely a contradiction in terms) than in ease with W. O. Mitchell's brand of Wordsworthianism in Who Has Seen the imagining an original response to the de- Wind, believing that a soft-focus version mands of an unimagined place. "North of the social realities of prairie small- America, with its essentially unformed, town life disguises, perhaps even accepts, misformed, or mis-informed environ- real cruelties. While beautiful passages in ment" needs the voices and words of "Wolf in the Snow" respond to the silent people, or writers, who can build that city

128 OPINIONS & NOTES of language, form a community to answer tural and social activity everywhere. The the silence of space. writer has a social office to perform, and In "Wonder Merchants: Modernist what he writes is important as informa- Poetry in Vancouver During the 1960's," tion. As Williams puts it, Tallman traces the history of one such It is difficult response (begun about the time McDou- to get the news from poems gall was writing his article), the response yet men die miserably every day of young students and writers, there and for lack then, to American modernist poets—espe- of what is found there. cially those writers who are the subjects of What McDougall called our "obligation to Tallman's other essays. Modernism, in his debate perpetually the credentials of the view, is a more immediate, practical, and social plan" receives more honour from radical response to the present world, and modernists and communalists than from to those empty western spaces, than Hu- nostalgic solitaries wandering the soil of manism (represented by Layton, Souster, their ancestral acreages. The excitement Dudek, Purdy, etc.) or Eclecticism (Bir- of finding community in language is close ney, Mandel, Avison, etc.). "Modernism to a "turbulence encompassing a whole caught on in the Canadian west because society," opening possibilities for doing, it was right for the west, where the en- making, and saying. vironment is so open and undefined that One minor curiosity in Tallman's criti- the self stays open and undefined, child- cism is his quickness to attribute excep- like, perhaps, easily given over to a sense tional abilities in writers to some strain of of inner wonder." Modernist writing oc- non-Anglo-Saxon blood (Wah's Chinese, curs as part of living and both take place Kiyooka's Japanese backgrounds; Wil- in a particular locale and in the world of liams' Spanish, Kerouac's French-Cana- language at large, a shared community. dian origins) or to foreign experience Frank Davey, in his introduction to The (Marlatt's far-Eastern beginnings). And Writing Life: Historical and Critical Tallman's communal vision understand- Views of the Tish Movement (the short ably limits the sympathies he can extend title taken from the title of a Tallman to those writers who are drawn to psychic essay), grandly links this modernism to a or physical extremes "where there is no tradition which includes Arnold, Pound, social fuel," those isolatoes and their Whitehead, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, quarrels with large beasts. Too, when one Buber, Marx, Unamuno, Jaspers, among stays a lot at home, it's tempting to take others. Tallman, characteristically, con- out an insurance policy, and there's per- centrates on recreating the sense of dis- haps a touch of protectiveness in some of covery, the delight, and the necessity, felt the essays, particularly in "Wonder Mer- by young, literarily-unsophisticated peo- chants." But more typically, Tallman ple in the presence of modern writers — keeps an open door policy, everyone wel- living examples; their realization that come who cares for language and treats even here, maybe especially here, writing it well. was possible. I'm here, you're here, he's here: think what we can do, together, In fact, I think that, in keeping with with that. the spirit of these essays, Open Letter might have given more welcome to those Writing seen not as "literary" activity readers who have not previously encoun- but as "living," both Tallman and Davey tered Tallman's work. While the issue is stress, involves the writer more fully with well-designed and the essays speak for his immediate community and with cul- themselves, a gesture beyond the com-

129 OPINIONS & NOTES munity which already knows Tallman table stories of The Hole in the Fence/ would have been graceful: a note on his Mes Amis, mon jardin, for example (two career, some explanation for making a colourfully illustrated 1975 volumes, collection at this time — something to which come for those interested with give the issue the sense of occasion it teachers' guides), are published by the deserves. Federal Department of Health and Wel- McDougall had hope that the Cana- fare under the aegis of its drug abuse dian imagination, a flightless dodo, could programme. And since the unhappy de- be transformed into, at least, a cruising mise of the government publications auk. Twenty years later, Tallman tried a bookstores, it has become increasingly dif- more ambitious metamorphosis. In the ficult to find out what the government conclusion to "Wonder Merchants," and printers do publish. Which is all the more the book, Tallman gathers into the al- the pity when the books are as delightful chemical studio of his prose all the west- as these : cleverly drawn and — despite ern poets whose work he has sketched out the occasional moral solemnity — ac- as "a picture from the west." Then aban- curately evocative of children's school- doning portraiture, he uses découpage yard and neighbourhood confrontations. and assemblage to fashion a life-size mon- The lavish use of illustration and ster, "The Poet." Taking the humours of colour contributes immeasurably to the the poets and the powers of place, he appeal of these books, but it is a pressing bubbles up a potent home-brew, a critical Canadian problem to maintain such elixir which translates the creature into, standards. Talonbooks does a handsome naturally, human form. And sends it job (more appealing to adults than to stumbling towards the East. children, I think) with Elizabeth Hop- I don't think it's arrived in Toronto kins' primitivist drawings for The Painted yet, but last summer, in a community of Cougar. And McClelland & Stewart's dedicated young southern Saskatchewan admirable Magook series ($1.95 each) poets, I heard one of them, in a poem, maintain high standards, too, though it tell about some gophers in the sky teach- is in temporary abeyance after the first ing human beings to fly. Had Tallman's four issues precisely because of marketing poet-beast reached the prairies? With and budget. Particularly attractive in the local visions like that one, it isn't going to first four issues are Ann Blades' illustra- reach the East without further transform- tions, Kathryn De Vos Miller's nature ations. And will all the critics finally leave drawings, and Madeline Kronby's always that back window and take to the streets inventive bilingual stories. But however to stare in wonder? I can hardly wait. attractive each issue is, magazine market- ing is different from book marketing; it ANN MANDEL depends on return custom, and lives on change, on the reader's excitement at the prospect of the Next Issue. Not to pro- duce new issues soon will mean Magook's CHILDREN'S EYES demise for letting that expectation dry away, which (given its quality) would be THE BURGEONING INDUSTRY in children's unfortunate ; it would also be an unhappy literature has resulted in a wide variety blow against all such publishing ventures. of recent publications. Some have been given more publicity than they deserve, Of the new books out, some relate but unfortunately many others go unpub- directly to television programmes and licized or unnoticed. The animated vege- have almost a built-in audience because

130 OPINIONS & NOTES of that. Methuen's The Dog Power are more directly culturally rooted in Tower ($5.95; $3.95 paper) derives from Tanzania, but for all that will give any "Mr. Dressup." Prentice-Hall's The Gift enquiring Canadian child a better sense of Winter ($6.95), by John Leach and of the world of others. Informative in a Jean Rankin, was a CBC special in 1974; different way is Ingeborg Marshall's Beo- delightfully drawn and amusingly con- thuck resource-book The Red Ochre ceived, it has, however, a curiously wishy- People (J. J. Douglas, $6.95), which is washy sense of characterization. The useful more for its precise drawings of figures Malicious and Rotten promise well artifacts than for its Europeanized draw- enough; but their (for some reason ad- ing of people or for its simple text. And verbial) antithetical counterparts Goodly of the four volumes in Fforbez Enter- and Nicely do not get well enough off the prises' new Karpet series for very young the page. They are not meant, of course, children ($1.69, or 4 for $5.95), the two to be genuinely Good or Nice. But the by Sue Ann Alderson are marred by be- impulse to allegory in the context of fable ing imitative fairyland exploits with an loosens what could otherwise be a small intrusive moralism, while the two by Ray classic of a winter world's imagination. Logie, despite the archness that some- The contrast between these books and times intrudes upon his linguistic play- another half dozen is only partly that be- fulness, are entertaining stories. Catherine tween colour and lack of it. Elizabeth MacKenzie's illustrations to Logie's work, Cleaver's paintings for William Toye's moreover, particularly to The Houseless retelling of The Loon's Necklace (Ox- Mouse, are a pure delight. ford, $5.95) are in fact in colour, but the There have also been a series of fic- trouble with them, as always, is that the tional narratives appear, some of them colours she chooses have little to do with more interesting for their authors than the environment she pretends to draw; for their stories. Marian Engel's My the borrowing of Coastal totems as an Name Is Not Odessa Yarker (Kids Can) all-purpose Indian Image is an endemic is a mechanical identity tale, perhaps of cultural problem, but to match it with most interest as an elliptical footnote to the colour blue is to ignore the realities Bear. Gladys Hindmarch's The Peter even more. And least successful as a genre Stories (Coach House) uses children's in modern Canadian children's story- rhymes (Peter and the pumpkin shell, telling is that of retelling the myths and Mary Contrary) to tell adult fables of legends of other or older or previous peo- male-female relationships. And there are ple. Two of the three books from Kids new teenage narratives: Eugenie Myles' Can Press — Kyrylo the Tanner, The Little Cayuse (Nelson), full of confron- Shirt of the Happy Man, and How tations with prairie nature and exploring Trouble Made the Monkey Eat Pepper the necessity of bravery; D. H. Turner's ($2.95 each) —at least have the benefit To Hang a Rebel (Gage), which tells of including written texts in the original the stirring adventures of a boy who lives Russian and Italian, but they (and even in Mackenzie's home at the time of the the English-language West Indian story) Rebellion and becomes a spy for the sound like translations, the conversational cause; and Sheila Burnford's story of a structures are made to sound artificial, dog's life during World War II, Bel Ria and the vocabulary underestimates what (McClelland & Stewart, $10.00), enjoy- children can absorb. Mariam Habib's able for readers who enjoy their senti- African stories {The Lost Child, Vantage ment on the surface, though the more Press, $5.95) are for older children, and compelling because it doesn't deign to OPINIONS & NOTES oversimplify its language along the way. wood, Clarke, and Moore, particularly I leave for the last a curious and lively useful in that it draws attention to an book by Kenneth Dyba, Lucifer and international range of reviews. And in R. Lucinda (November House, $6.95), B. Slocum's valuably annotated compre- partly because it's so naively engaging — hensive Biographical Dictionaries (2nd the story of an orange cat's love for a supp., $35.00), substantial sections are little girl — and partly because it's so devoted to Canadian books and Cana- deliberately contrived as to be an adult's dian subjects. book most of all, and certainly a book for Gale also publishes a number of refer- an adult to enjoy reading to a child. It's ence books for those interested in chil- full of the same quirky humour that dren's writing: Dennis La Beau's index marked Dyba's Sister Rexy; it's a tale of to biographical information on children's magic and transformation (though this writers (included are Montgomery, Haig- theme is a little forced), of adventurous Brown, Harris, and others) is called travel (through the Canadian cat jungles Children's Authors and Illustrations of the Hoodoos, Pincher Creek, Neepawa, ($15.00) ; and there are also two substan- Dryden, and Fredericton), and of pun- tial illustrated reference works that would ning political satire with the mildest of be of interest to teachers and inquisitive edges. There are echoes of Margaret students: Yesterday's Authors of Books Laurence's mole story in it, but Dyba for Children (2nd volume in a series; sounds a voice of his own. Here the nar- $25.00) and Something About the Author rative matters less than the texture, and (volume 12; $25.00). The latter is the the result is one of those startlingly direct least interesting — biographical and bibli- revelations that comes when the adult ographical snippets primarily to give rudi- world is recorded with the illusion of a mentary information. Haig-Brown is the child's sophisticated eyes. only Canadian included in this volume. (Houston and Takashima appear in vol- w. H. NEW ume 13.) The former work is a splendid compilation of biographical and biblio- graphical information, with illustrations REFERENCES from original works and from films and other adaptations. One finds twelve pages A VARIETY OF NEW VOLUMES IS nOW of helpful commentary on the works of available from Detroit's apparently inex- John Buchan here, for example, and Lucy haustible Gale Press. They include the Maud Montgomery appears in volume first volume of Twentieth-Century Liter- one. If there is so far little on Canadian ary Criticism (comments on creative writers themselves, there remains a lot of writers 1900-1960; $42.00), and the sec- material on books Canadian children still ond volume of Contemporary Authors read, and the quality of the production is (permanent series: i.e. biocritical notes consistently high. on now deceased authors mentioned in earlier volumes of С A; $42.), neither of From other presses comes another spate much relevance to Canadian writing. In of books for academic reference shelves. Contemporary Authors (volumes 69-72), Teachers of junior and senior high-school one finds brief notes on people like Moshe Canadian Literature classes may find use- Safdie, but little more. In Contemporary ful a series of guidebooks (lessons ideas, Literary Criticism, volume 8 ($42.00), research suggestions, notes, etc.) released however, are to be found extensive selec- by CanLit (P.O. Box 1551, Peterborough, tions from criticism of the work of At- Ontario). Most widely to circulate (in

132 OPINIONS & NOTES paper, at lower cost, $6.95) among stu- sented by his three most recent titles, but dents, however, will be Michael Gnarow- the high-school anthology which we pre- ski's revised version of his helpful intro- pared together some years ago, Voice and ductory A Concise Bibliography of Eng- Vision (still available from McClelland lish Canadian Literature (McClelland & & Stewart) is not to be found. The rea- Stewart) ; it guides students sensibly to sons for editorial selection in Canadian major works and major criticism. Un- Selection are not clear. Readers should happily it resolves the perennial "Who's use it, but enquire beyond it as well. Canadian?" problem by leaving out both Lowry and Moore. The nationality bat- W.H.N. tle persists. From Clio Books in Santa Barbara comes Narda Lacey Schwartz's Articles on Women Writers ($24.95) > ner net 's wide, and Canadian women are listed, but the critical listings are highly selec- tive. And from the University of Toronto Press come Ontario and the Canadian North ($25.00), a valuable descriptive, indexed (and illustrated!) contribution to local history research compiled by W. F. E. Morley; and Canadian Selection NOW IN PAPER ($35.00), compiled by Edith Jarvi et al. Jarvi's annotated catalogue is designed as AMONG RECENT PAPERBACK publications a guide to libraries interested in building are several welcome volumes: Clara their collection of Canadian materials, Thomas' lively and sensitive biography and I am sure it does its exhausting task of Anna Jameson, Love and Work (in 1060 pp.) with much skill. Yet I am Enough ($6.95), and the third volume of somewhat puzzled by the criteria for James Eayrs' spirited history In Defence selection. Books, anthologies, journals: a of Canada ($8.95), both in the Univer- variety of works is included. But one sity of Toronto Press' University Paper- checks out books of this kind by checking books series; the revised version of Peter what one knows best. I am delighted to Such's novel Fallout (NC Press), a frag- find I am included for five books, but not mentary but in retrospect youthfully vi- sure why others — Four Hemispheres, for sionary indictment of Canada's uranium- example, and a Commonwealth Litera- boom history; Dorothy Livesay's selected ture bibliography — are omitted. Some poems, The Woman I Am (Press Por- Commonwealth books are in; some are cépic, $3.95) ; Barry Broadfoot's settlers' book, The Pioneer Years (Paperjacks, left out. Happily the editors have not an exerted a bias against comparative criti- $5-95) j d for thriller-followers who cal studies. But why a bias against the haven't already found it, Tom Ardies' comparative anthologies that show an- Their Man in the White House (Paper- other face to the same endeavour? And jacks, $1.50). Promised in paper is yet why a bias, in a library guidebook of all another thriller, the captivating fiction- places, against comprehensive bibliogra- alized story of French political intrigue phies? One finds parallel action taken which John Ralston Saul has called The against other writers as well. The novelist Birds of Prey (Macmillan, cloth $9.95). and story writer Jack Hodgins is repre- W.H.N.

133 is a commonwealth of free men." This is a ON THE VERGE thoughtful and thought-provoking book, but the thought is essentially in the history, and **·· MAURICE CARRIER & MONIQUE VACHON. it is as a statement of where we have reached Chansons politique du Québec, vol. ι (1765- rather than where we might go that it has 1833). Leméac. "Political" is defined widely value. in this collection, and the songs range from a graceful tribute to Lady Carleton to a militant pro-British 1807 song (tune: Yankee Doodle), *** CRAWFORD KILIAN. Go Do Some Great and from a spirited assertion (("Ciel, protège ne notre bon Roi/ Et conserve-nous Georges Thing. Douglas & Mclntyre, $12.95. O °f Trois") to an equally spirited denunciation the more neglected episodes of early British ("A ces vils despotes Anglais/Non cette race Columbian history was the arrival, during the adultère/ Retournera en Angleterre" ). Notes, Fraser Valley gold rush of 1858, of several scores, and informative tables support the texts hundred free blacks who had found life in- of the songs themselves and provide a lively tolerable in California. For decades they insight into phases of Quebec's cultural history. formed an important element in the population of Victoria; they prospected and traded in W.N. the Cariboo; they pioneered as farmers on Salt Spring Island and in Saanich. In the early years, while there were many Americans *** MALCOLM M. THOMSON. The Beginning in Victoria, they were still subject to a good of the Long Dash: A History of Timekeeping deal of prejudice, which may have been one in Canada. University of Toronto Press, of the reasons why they generally supported $17.50. From astronomical clocks to chrono- the entry of British Columbia into Confedera- meters to cesium atomic standards, methods of tion. Altogether, the story of the migrant timekeeping have changed radically in just blacks of British Columbia is an interesting one, over a century. Told here are the stories of and it is surprising that Go Do Some Great the people and the ambitions that effected Thing should be the first book devoted to such changes in Canada. What comes through, them. Perhaps it is because information is both in the narrative as a whole and in the slender; certainly Mr. Kilian has at times ex- detail of the research and the illustrations, is tended himself excessively over matters of a sense of the extraordinary technological debt general British Columbian history with which that the culture broadly owes and scarcely the kind of reader who will pick this book is understands. likely to be familiar. But it is a well written book, and a needed addition to western Cana- dian regional history. *** MICHAEL MACKLEM. Liberty and the Holy City. Oberon, $17.50. Michael Macklem disclaims the intent of writing a "history of liberal thought." Nevertheless, his method is *** RICHARD j. SCHOECK, ed. Review of historical, as he investigates key thinkers in National Literatures, η (1976), $8.oo. A spe- England from John of Salisbury, who in the cial Canada issue. It might not seem possible twelfth century believed that "liberty was a that something new could be said about Cana- privilege belonging exclusively to the church," dian Solitudes, but this issue contains a prob- through the various twists and broadenings of ing historical article on the subject. The whole the idea of freedom and its relation to justice, issue, in fact, has a historical, descriptive bias until, having found inspiration in Milton and — useful for reinterpreting Pratt, and inter- a congenial spirit in T. H. Green, he comes to esting on Laurence and Hebert — but it a conclusion which he himself admits is only breaks down (or perhaps only displays the bias a halt on the way. "It had become clear that of its own time) when it turns predictive and liberty is in fact a means of grace or it is insists on identifying a "genuine national litera- nothing. Unless, in other words, spiritual con- ture" with biculturalism. ditions are in themselves relevant to the State, W.N. there can be no such thing as personal im- munity. But if the State exists to promote the *** THOMAS YORK. And Sleep in the Woods. spiritual as well as material interests of the Doubleday Canada. Narratives of conversion individual, liberty must be the first of its ob- are always fascinating, especially to the un- jectives. For the difference between good and converted. Partly this is because of a curious evil is liberty itself. The holy commonwealth contradiction between the deep privacy of the

134 ON THE VERGE process of conversion and the publicity of any ** Hommage à Lionel Groulx, sous la direc- attempt to describe it. However honest may tion de Maurice Filion. Leméac. n.p. Lionel have been the experience, there is a certain Groulx, the patron intellect of Québec separa- self-advertisement that seems inconsistent with tism, was born a hundred years ago. He con- spiritual enlightenment in books like St. structed or reconstructed many of the myths Augustine's Confessions or Newman's Apologia that glorified the past of New France, and pro Vita Sua. The other reason why the un- more than any other writer he was the pro- converted are so drawn to the flame — or the tagonist of a racial interpretation of Canadian ignis fatuus — of the conversion narrative is history. In the cult that now elevates his the feeling all sceptics share — but rarely con- name one sees strange political combinations, fess — that they too may be travelling on one for Groulx himself was an intense conservative, of the many roads that lead to Damascus. one of the leaders of the Québécois version of And Sleep in the Woods satisfies both reasons Action Française and an admirer of Mussolini for fascination. Thomas York, who is a novelist and Franco, if not of Hitler, yet one finds as well as a United Church pastor, certainly among his pious admirers such soi-disant makes the literary most out of the narrative of social democrats as René Lévesque. Lévesque his flight from the American south to the is one of the contributors to Hommage à Canadian woods and the spiritual visitations Lionel Groulx, a centennial tribute to the con- that ensued. One does not doubt his experi- troversial Canon, who was born in 1878 and ences, but still finds it odd that he can write died in 1967 during another centennial, that of them so volubly and with such deliberate of the Canadian confederation which he so artifice. At the same time, as a fellow man of thoroughly distrusted. Hommage is in three letters, one is struck by the haunting specula- parts: a group of academic studies of Groulx; tion of how, if one were after all converted, a group of tributes by famous living Québécois, one would fulfil the normal writer's urge to including Lévesque; and a group of unpub- tell. And Sleep in the Woods is a book too lished fragments by Groulx. It is useful read- self-conscious to be memorable, but it provides ing for those who are interested in the roots some interesting glimpses of the inner life of a of the Parti Québécois and the ideology it reasonably good novelist. represents. G.w. ** PETER SUCH. Vanished Peoples: The *** GEORGE RADWANSKi. Trudeau. Macmil- Archaic Dorset and Beothuk People of New- land of Canada. $14.95. Trudeau is a portrait foundland. NC Press. Archaeologists and an- in depth of the man who, at the moment of thropologists are all too often prisoners of writing, is Canada's Prime Minister. It is based their specialist vernaculars, and this means that one is usually relieved when a professional on long conversations with Pierre Trudeau and writer who makes no claims to be a specialist on months of discussions with his associates, in such fields decides to write on their sub- and it is supported by George Radwanski's jects, and does so with modesty and lucidity. considerable knowledge of the permutations of This Peter Such, the novelist, has done in his Canadian politics during the decade of Tru- illustrated book on the original peoples of deau's administration. Since Trudeau is in Newfoundland. Everything he tells us can in- fact much less a private figure than Radwanski deed be found with labour elsewhere, but he tries to persuade us, there is not a great deal has brought it together interestingly, trans- in the way of revelations that will surprise or lated it from the jargon, and presented us be useful to either the Prime Minister's friends with a readable and useful short history of the or his enemies. Those who detest him will find extinction of peoples. themselves confirmed in their reasons for do- L.T.C. ing so, and so will those who admire him. But this does not mean that Mr. Radwanski has * JESSIE & WREFORD WATSON. The Cana- been neutral; it is obvious that the blue and dians: How They Live and Work. Griffin basilisk eyes directed on him during his inter- House, $8.95. Part of a uniform series, this is views have not been without their effect, and a highly introductory, highly generalized ac- he ends his book with a justification of Tru- count of the society for potential travellers, deau's policies so partisan as to diminish con- better on geographical implications than on siderably any pretensions his book may have history or Art or food. The literary section to being an objective study. scarcely reaches the 1960's, and painting largely closes with the Group of Seven. G.w.