To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
David's telepathic hand-holding, an image
of his imaginative forays into other people's
lives and hearts, suggests the exhaustion of
those images of authorial empathy employed
with such vigour by Grass and Rushdie.
From the beginning, the discrete and distinct
narratives are smoothly juxtaposed to
suggest subtle parallels; by the end, they
segue into low-key phantasmagoria, moving
in and out of each other, while leaving
their traces on, and leaking unmistakeably
into, the asylum narrative proper. It never
becomes wholly dear what prompted
David to burn his hands and thus incite his
incarceration in the Hochelaga Memorial
Institute: an Einsteinian sense of responsibility
for the sufferings of the world? (See
the Einstein quote among the epigraphs).
Or the deaths of his own friends? "I've
killed them all," he says, like Grass' Oskar
Matzerath, who also mulled over, from an
asylum bed, his responsibility for history
and the lives of others.
The writing therapy which makes up this
fairly long (perhaps slightly too long?) novel,
Hellman playing with his memories in order
to make artifacts of them (self-reflexive
imagery is seldom far to seek, but most of it
is subtler and more effective than the "magic"
hands, or even the burnt ones), seems to be
therapeutically as well as aesthetically successful.
At the end, the main characters
from his memory-stories come together in
his cell in narrative harmony, to give their
blessing to his reconciliation—through
'real' magic this time—with his parents,
and thus with his own life. "Give me your
hand" are the last words of the book.
Hellman's Scrapbook is one of the liveliest
and most substantial novels of the 1992
Canadian season.
Personal Interest
John Lennox éd.,
Margaret and Ah Margaret Laurence-Al Purdy. A
Friendship in Letters. McClelland & Stewart.
$39-99-
Reviewed by George Woodcock
I admit to a strong personal interest in this
book. Margaret Laurence was my good
friend; I have a stock of her letters, but most
of all I remember phone calls from Lakefield
which would begin at 2 a.m. there and continue
for an hour or more, Margaret with
something on her mind in the lonely hours
and me worrying about her phone bill. She
never would listen to my exhortations to call
collect. Now, in memory, they have a strange
hallucinatory quality, perhaps because we
both dipped into the Scotch as the conversation
went on. Al Purdy still is my good
friend, and a selection of our letters from
the 1960's to the 1980's was published as
The Purdy-Woodcock Letters in 1988. So I do
have a point of comparison in reading and
reviewing Margaret Laurence-Al Purdy, A
Friendship in Letters, this remarkable and
perhaps great book, which seems to me
quite different from the correspondence
between Purdy and me, and which perhaps
reveals a different kind of friendship.
Writers' correspondences tend to be more
a professional exercise than that of nonwriters,
since writers do not think of their
correspondence as a mere communication
of news and sentiments. Writing letters
tends to become an extension of their other
writing. Letters provide a mental exercise in
offering a different genre and intent from the
work they are usually involved in. They provide
a way of escaping the chronic loneliness
of the profession. And they give a partial
outlet at least to the fugitive ideas, reactions
to life, minor but vivid experiences, and the
daily involvement in living, that do not find
a place in the book-length work.
I have already read reviews that accuse