To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
Ryga
George Ryga
Summerland. Ed. Ann Kujundzic. Talonbooks
$19-95
Reviewed by Viviana Comensoli
Summerland is Talonbooks' second anthology
of largely unpublished writings by
George Ryga. The Athabasca Ryga (1990),
edited by E. David Gregory, included
essays, dramatic scripts and fiction written
before 1964 during Ryga's Alberta years. For
the current volume Ann Kujundzic has
selected material written between 1963 and
1987 in Summerland, a small community in
the Okanagan Valley where George and
Norma Ryga settled as an alternative to living
in poverty in Edmonton, and where
they could more easily provide a refuge for
artists, friends and political refugees. Summerland
attests to Ryga's sustained interest
in a variety of genres: television and radio
drama, the essay, and the short story. Also
included are advocacy letters and the poem
"Resurrection," Ryga's final work written
shortly before his death. The anthology is
well conceived and skilfully edited. "The
artist's or writer's work," Ryga explained to
Anne Kujundzic in one of their many conversations
recorded here, is "due no greater
elevation than the work of any person"; it is
"the integrity of the work which count[s]."
Kujundzic's Introduction is both a wellresearched,
fully documented account of
Ryga's literary career and a tribute to the
integrity of Ryga's life and art. Ryga's development
as a writer is discussed in the context
of personal, cultural and political
influences. There is a good deal of pertinent
information about George and Norma
Ryga's marriage, their passionate commitment
to community, and their unrelenting
struggle with poverty. Kujundzic interweaves
excerpts from personal journals, letters
to and from friends and acquaintances,
and recollections and tributes from fellowwriters,
creating a detailed and engaging
portrait of "a very real and remarkable
human being, who happened to have the
word 'writer' attached to his name." To her
credit, Kujundzic eschews sentimentality in
favor of balance and nuance. For example,
in her discussion of the common observation
that for Ryga the political was always
personal, Kujundzic records not only the
praise of Ryga's principles by his friends
and admirers but also her conversation
with Norma Ryga on the rigidity of her
husband's ideology: "He was rock solid in
his beliefs and although he would always
give people their share of the floor, I'm not
sure that he could really listen."
The anthology is divided according to the
three decades that Ryga spent in Summerland.
The 1960s, which Kujundzic characterizes
as "a storm of struggle and success," are
dominated by Ryga's work for the CBC. The
five television and radio dramas included
in this section, as well as the short stories
and essays, show the emergence of themes
that underlie Ryga's writings of the seventies
and eighties: the complexities and struggles
of ordinary people; their relationship to their
land; the need for a Canadian mythology;
the appeal to Canadian writers to tap the
"language and cadence" of their culture;
the tension between Ryga's social realism
and his interest in spirituality and mysticism.
The essays in particular are indispensable
to our understanding of the passionate
convictions that propelled Ryga's major
drama and fiction. In "The Temporary
Arrangement: A Western Viewpoint" (1967)
Ryga bitterly recalls his early childhood
education: "trailing] hot oxen in a cold
field, I was about to go to school where I
would spend some years learning of kings
and crusaders, sea- captains, warlords and
other useless riff-raff unsuited to any useful
pursuit in life What of the people who
came [to this continent] in the holds of
ships like cattle to build a country?" And in
"Theatre in Canada: A Viewpoint on Its
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