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A Quart€Rly of Criticism and R€Vi€W

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A Quart€Rly of Criticism and R€Vi€W $1.00 per copy Autumn, ig6o ' • • '[.. The Defence of Lady Ghatterley BY HUGH MAC L E N N A N ' ": On the Pressing of Maple Leaves BY EARLE BIRNEY Klein's Drowned Poet .'••' BY MILTON WILSON ·•'·,_ Recoliections of Malcolm Lowxy BY WILLIAM MCCONNELL A QUART€RLY OF CRITICISM AND R€VI€W HONOURS AND AWARDS U P NOW we have refrained from trying the patience of our readers by self congratulation or by printing the messages of appreciation that have come to us from our friends. For the latter we have been grateful, but we have always wished the contents of our pages to be judged on their own merits and to be presented without garlands. This time, however, we cannot refrain from breaking our custom to mention an honour which we value greatly. In the annual exhibition of Canadian printing, Typography '60, the first issue of Canadian Literature was granted an Award of Distinctive Merit ; it was one of fifteen exhibits, out of a total of fifteen hundred entries, to be selected for this honour. This is an occasion for legitimate self congratulation, but even more for congratulation—in which we hope our readers will join—of the typographer and the printer, whose names appear on our con tents page and without whom we would certainly have gone awardless. Lady Chatterley's Lover is not a piece of Canadian literature. But what happens to Lady Chatterley's Lover in the Canadian courts may well become part of our literary history. It is for this reason that we publish Hugh MacLennan's spirited defence of that masterpiece, whose treatment, incidentally, gives considerable support to the misgivings we expressed on the new censorship law in the editorial, "Areopagitica Re Written", which appeared in Canadian Literature No. 2. I N ANOTHER RECENT EDITORIAL we discussed the question of literary awards, and particularly the Governor General's Awards. At that time we made no reference to the prizes which are periodically presented by certain publishers, both American and Canadian, to writers whose books subsequently appear on their lists. Our neglect was not undeliberate. We were disturbed at the EDITORIAL time by the literary quality of the books which receive such awards; the opinion expressed by one of our reviewers in this issue on a recent prize-winning novel, plus our own reading of another which has been honoured by a different pub- lisher and not yet reviewed in these pages, only reinforces our misgivings. We do not know on what basis these prizes are granted. Certainly the best of our contemporary writers and novels never seem to receive them, and a look at the books which do succeed makes one suspect that publishers' prizes are in fact given not for literary achievement, but for saleability, that they are aimed at the mass readership of today rather than the discriminating readership of tomorrow. This suspicion may be unjust, but if it is, then the case is even worse, because we have to face the situation in which certain well-known publishers cannot even tell the difference between well and badly written books. Either way, the result is embarrassing. It is embarrassing for editors and re- viewers to feel that they must expose the pretensions of poor novels which pub- lishers have found prizeworthy, instead of allowing them to go unnoticed with the herd. It is embarrassing for readers who wonder if their taste may be at fault when they find nothing worthwhile in a book that has been launched with much ballyhoo. And it should be embarrassing to the publishers whose motives, or dis- crimination, or both, may be called in question by such dubious awards. Our suggestion is that publishers should abandon all such house prizes granted to books in whose success they themselves have an interest, and leave their publi- cations to take a chance with the rest in competing for the various prizes which are granted by organisations whose interest in the publishing industry extends only to the excellence or otherwise of its productions. If they should still wish to benefit authors, they would surely gain more credit and do more good by esta- blishing funds to be awarded in their names — but not necessarily to authors from whom they profit—by the Governor-General's Awards Board or some similar and wholly independent body of judges. ¿3» KLEIN'S DROWNED POET CANADIAN VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME Milton Wilson R.AYMOND KNiSTER must be the best-known drowned poet in Canadian letters. Writer of pastorals and herald of imagism, cut off at the age of thirty-three and recovered from Lake St. Clair after three days of dragging, he is Canada's ideal portrait of young Lycidas waiting for a pastoral elegy. He still seems to be waiting. Dorothy Livesay describes his last swim in a Memoir, her own poetry is haunted by images of diving and drowning, and she has dedi- cated a long poem to Knister. But she provides us with no more than elegiac allusions; there is no full-dress elegy, Following after Shelley Or wordcarvers I knew (Bouchette; and Raymond, you). Even James Reaney, his successor as a Southern Ontario farm-poet, when he introduces Knister as one of the minor geese of A Suit of Nettles, allows him no meed of a melodious tear. In the April eclogue Raymond himself may sing of the land's rebirth out of the ice age, and also (by analogy) of the flood, the ark and the released birds, but there is no successor to Reaney's early poem on Lake St. Clair. In October, after Raymond has finished his superb autumn song (which is as appropriate to Canada's biographer of Keats as his spring song was to the author of "Feed"), he simply drops out of A Suit of Nettles. All we get in No- vember is a series of four impersonal elegies from four different points of view. When the reader turns the pastoral wheel of the book for a second time, it is his own responsibility if Raymond's first appearance, with spring from the Flood, seems somehow fresher than before. Maybe for a Canadian poet to be elegized as drowned, he should either not be dead at all, or at least not literally drowned. Such, at any rate, seems to be the KLEIN'S DROWNED POET moral of the best recent examples I can think of: John Sutherland's poem on E. J. Pratt, and its successor, Miriam Waddington's elegy on Sutherland. I'm not sure just what moral to draw from George Johnston's Edward (that remote Canadian relative of Edward King), who was drowned and elegized in The Cruising Auk, only to reappear as large as life a year or so later in The Atlantic Monthly. But Raymond Knister's successful rivals have rarely been Canadian. The usual drowned poet in Canadian poetry is anonymous or international or archetypal—or Shelley. H[Ε MAKES an unmistakable and substantial appearance in two familiar showpieces of nineteenth century Canadian poetry: Charles G. D. Roberts' "Ave!" and Duncan Campbell Scott's "The Piper of Aril". Roberts' poem has been called by Desmond Pacey a pastoral elegy, but Roberts thought of it as a nativity ode on the centenary of Shelley's birth. Still, by calling it a pas toral elegy, Pacey quite properly draws our attention to the crucial importance of the drowned poet in "Ave!", and no one could fail to observe how the melan choly of "The Scholar Gypsy" and "Thyrsis" tends to qualify the essential vigour of its tone. It would be presumptuous to retitle the poem "Hail or Farewell", but I would be quite happy to leave out the exclamation mark. Scott's "The Piper of Aril", on the other hand, is a sort of Pre Raphaelite lyrical ballad, whose piper (poet, singer, artist, what you will, Scott was never one to separate the arts) sinks with his complete retinue: audience, palace of art, and all. The tone may be elegiac, but the poem's cycle is closed ; in the end there is nothing to be mourned and no one left to mourn. "Ave!" has often been praised—for its parts. The overwrought brilliance, the verbal inventiveness and ingenuity, the sheer excess of the whole thing, are re markable and exhausting, whatever you finally think of it all. The usual com plaint is that Roberts has failed to tie the piece together. The Bay of Fundy set ting with which it begins and ends fails to connect with the scenes from Shelley's life (Sussex, Rome, the Bay of Spezzia, and so on) which dominate the middle of the poem. This complaint mistakes the central problem of "Ave!" for its chief fault. Shelley is a poet who binds English poetry to its classical and Mediterranean heritage; in "Ave!" he takes a further, posthumous step and becomes the inter mediary who binds Roberts' work as a Canadian and Maritime poet to both its KLEIN S DROWNED POET romantic and its classical past. "Therefore with no far flight ... to thee I turn," says Roberts in Stanza XI, as he turns from the Tantramar region to Sussex and Italy. Whatever meaning he can give to that "therefore" is the centre of his poem, the real justification for hailing Shelley's birth among the meadows and marshes of New Brunswick. "The awful shadow of some unseen Power" which fell on Shelley in Sussex falls on Roberts in New Brunswick and is "strangely akin" to Shelley himself. In the first ten stanzas Roberts tries to paint the lost landscape of his childhood in terms of such kinship.
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