$i.2j per copy CANADIAN Springy ig68 BOOKS OF TH6 Y€/1R Articles BY HUGH KENNER, DESMOND PAGEY, WILLIAM H. NEW, D. J. DOOLEY, GEORGE BOWERING Chronicle BY MARGUERITE PRIMEAU Reviews BY JULIAN SYMONS, GERARD TOUGAS, LIONEL KEARNS, GEORGE ROBERTSON, GEORGE WOODCOCK, H. J. ROSENGARTEN, DOROTHY LIVESAY, PETER STEVENS, LEN GASPARINI, DOUGLAS BARBOUR, R. E. WATTERS, L. T. CORNELIUS, FRANCES FRAZER, NORMAN NEWTON, TONY KILGALLIN, J. A. S. EVANS, FRED COGSWELL, J. J. TALMAN Annual Supplement CANADIAN LITERATURE CHECKLIST, 1967 A QUARTERLY OF CRITICISM AND R€VI€W ABOUT BIOGRAPHIES ONE MARK OF CANADIAN LITERATURE has always been the in- terest of writers in autobiography. Mrs. Brooke, in A History of Emily Montague, though she was writing about fictional people, was not writing of a fictional world. She was giving, quite strenuously, her own emotional and intellectual response to the Canadian scene. Other writers followed her, some in journals revealing the country and their own personalities. Still others made their own personal stories into novels, or what can loosely be termed novels. There are Mrs. Moodie and Mrs. Traill, giving their version of Canada based on personal experience. There is also Ethel Wilson, giving impressions of Vancouver in The Innocent Traveller. The autobiographical element fluctuates with the biographical ; stories are often more than stories, they are frequently based on legends or myths of people who had actually existed in full human form. Canadian writers, interested in their country and its landscape, move frequently into the lives of real people, or often base their fictional world on people who have actually existed. Not that this is a Canadian syndrome, by any means, but it does show that Canadian literature frequently goes to more of reality in its literature than do other literatures. Nor- man Bethune can be seen in MacLennan's characterization of Jerome Martell in The Watch That Ends the Night, and often MacLennan and other novelists have dealt with people not as well known. The interest in a kind of personal biography continues to hold sway in much Canadian fiction. But to tell the tale of a person's life, fictional or real, is always the novelist's function. It appears, however, that Canadian writers more often than not are using characters from the real world. EDITORIAL They do not all do it. But because of a rather misplaced Canadian consciousness, perhaps, it appears that Canadian writers seem to direct themselves toward the biographical. Major Canadian writers, unlike American writers, work in an area where the world of a literary creation is not distinct from the real Canadian world. Canadian writers have not sought to create a universe of freedom within the field of litera- ture itself. They do not triumph over that conditioning in society, the custom and environmental determinism that limit the action and vision of the major charac- ters. There is not a memorable character to come out of Canadian fiction yet because the writers do not try to expand the self-meaning of those characters they describe. They continue to leave them in a world that the reader always recog- nizes. Some day their vision will lift them beyond completely; at the moment only a few authors point beyond, and reveal a capacity for the vision and depen- dence on the imagined world and its primacy over the real that will lift Canadian literature to greater international status. An interest in biography is reflected in the great number of books of pure biography, and autobiography, that came out in Canada in 1967. It was perhaps an auspicious year, and many biographies appeared. Some should not have appeared, but there were many that were needed, and things Canadian will be richer because of them. Three books stand out in this year of biography. Dale C. Thomson's book, Louis St. Laurent, has many fine qualities, though Thomson is a bit too close to his subject both in time and personal relationship for the good of the book, and as a consequence the volume lacks the perspective it demands. Michael Macklem's God Have Mercy is a particularly well-written book on Fisher; Macklem has exhausted all the material on Fisher, and has presented what is frequently pure Tudor political-religious history. And the other book is Father Neil McKenty's book, Mitch Hepburn. It is a successful political profile, lively and well written, and it is very much a life — though not as much at times as one would perhaps always want — of Mitch Hepburn. The tone is not de- fensive, and it examines Hepburn's policies and foibles with fair detachment. It is an admirable contribution to a Canadian history field in which there has been all too little written: biographies of provincial premiers who have given the nation's history some shape. The book is a delight to read. For that reason it has been awarded the 1967 University of British Columbia Medal for Popular Biog- raphy. Canadian Literature extends its congratulations to Father McKenty. THE LAST EUROPEAN Hugh Kenner "I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe." EZRA POUND, 1960 I WAS A FRESHMAN at the University of Toronto, watching black squirrels scamper beneath its elms, and settling into 73 St. George Street for my first extended stay away from home, when Wyndham Lewis was com- pleting his first year's stock-taking of Toronto as a city of exile (". .. Things have come to an awful pass here : if I don't do something to break out of the net, I shall end my days in a Toronto flophouse." .. ) ; I was listening to C. N. Coch- rane's lectures on historiography and G. S. Brett's on the continuous life of the mind and Malcolm Wallace's on Shakespearean compassion while the author of Time and Western Man and The Lion and the Fox was enduring the social chill and the central heating in a room "twenty-five feet by twelve" at the Hotel Tudor a half-hour's stroll away; at the same distance from one another we completed I my sophomore year in Toronto and he his third ( " W e are freezing out here slowly, in this icebox of a country. This hotel burned down six weeks ago, all but the annexe. I am living in the ruins") ; but by the time the junior Eng. Lang. & Lit. curriculum had commenced to revolve past my fitful attention Roman satirists, English Augustans and French Cartesians, the author of The Apes of God had moved to Windsor, two hundred and twenty miles west-south-west. The point of this synchronicity is that it has no point. I never heard the name of Lewis mentioned, and can only identify in retrospect, as a remote little space- time convolution, the two years I lived not a mile from a Titan. There was no conspiracy to keep us undergraduates from finding out he existed. Though Toronto's, like all faculties, contained men scrupulous in their sensitivity THE LAST EUROPEAN to the present (I know for a fact that one of them read Partisan Review) it seems clear that they didn't know about him either. They scanned print more promis- cuously than we did, and his name would have surfaced from time to time before their ken atop, say, contributions to Saturday Night, but merely as a name : four blank syllables, attached to remarks about — oh, Canadian painting, a subject never deemed vital ( our mentors were word men ) . w'HE,N HE CROSSED the Atlantic he left behind what he lived on : his reputation, such as it was. Such as it was, it had gotten him portrait commissions, though never as many as fell to Augustus John. Chiefly he lived on advances for books, also obtained by pledging his reputation. Some were books he cared about, some he would not have elected to write but for necessity. Either kind drew on meditations nearly habitual with him, concerned with fame, illu- sion, groundless belief, and the manipulatability of these. It is no wonder he wrote so much about politics. Painting can be a fantastically lucrative vocation, though it never was for Lewis ; and if a painter have Lewis's gifts, and Lewis's lack of income, he is likely to give thought to what it is that people who buy pictures, when they do buy them, think they are paying for, reflections apt to reinforce any nascent interest his intellect may take in voids and vacua. For what can Pablo Picasso possibly be doing that is worth a gangster's ransom to anybody? The answer is, being Picasso: being the man whose name some utterly mysterious nexus joins to a public idea, an idea his skill, his luck, his dealers engendered. He is not being paid as a workman for a day's work when he overpaints a canvas; nor for the usefulness of his product in decorating a wall, which a reproduction would do quite as well. Nor, since the picture is a unique exemplum sold to one buyer once in one transaction, does some crude determination of the number of people he interests determine his remuneration, as it does a writer's. Nor, except for some such pivotal picture as a major artist will not achieve more than five or six times before he dies, is some unique concentration of human insight coming into the purchaser's keeping. No, whoever owns a Picasso owns (at great cost) just that — a Picasso : an example of his work, very like a hundred other examples, work to each example of which, by agreement, great value is affixed.