To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

ief anecdotes, poems, essays, and an
interview. Thirty-nine writers, friends and
former students contributed personal and
often emotional memories which, although
not always complimentary, evoke Layton's
vibrant character and mark strong
responses to it. But for all this evidence of
the personal, the book presents a curiously
detached view of Layton as perennial enfant
terrible of Canadian literature.
For one thing, Layton himself never
speaks. And while there is an essay on
Layton's attitude toward women, there are
no pieces by his wives. For sure, Layton
speaks through the contributors—every
page bears the stamp of his words—but
they are little performances, poses and mots
justes. George Woodcock describes meeting
Layton ("circling each other like suspicious
bears"); Jack McClelland offers an approving
assessment of Layton's self-promotion;
Elspeth Cameron compares him to a trickster;
Theodore Sampson reads Layton's
deportment as a metaphor; Douglas
Lochhead's "Remembrances" are flagrantly
apocryphal. And among the tributes, both
cautious and effusive, many note the conflation
of Layton with his work, less as
obsessive workaholic than as deliberate
craftsman.
In a way, the book celebrates the poet's
greatest work—his self-creation, his persona.
David Solway's "Framing Layton" shows
this—structured like a triptych, the left panel
is a personal anecdote, the right a critical
study, and the central hinge a theoretical
meditation on "Layton" as a construct. So
instead of a personal look at the man, the
book offers a mosaic of views of the creation.
And there are many sides to "Layton":
gentle nurturer of vulnerable student poets,
spirited and uncompromising foe of pretension
and injustice, wily master of artifice.
Layton exists in, depends upon and
promotes a context of controversy, of which
the book constantly reminds us. Cameron's
biography and the early flap with Ryerson
over The Improved Binoculars which spurred
Layton's condemnation of Canadian publishing
are two such controversies. This is
the impression the book leaves one with,
and it is clearly what sticks in people's minds
about Layton: not the poetry so much as
the pose of the public Poet.
Whereas Raging Like a Fire is synchronie—a
variety of perspectives on Layton
presented at, and for, one moment in time,
the new Twayne book Michael Ondaatje is
diachronic. Barbour uses a chronological
frame—starting with the early poems and
concluding with the celebrated The English
Patient—to show both development and continuity
in the work. Barbour contends that
Ondaatje's work has become increasingly
novelized, in the Bakhtinian sense, moving
from lyrics to increasingly longer, more layered,
dialogic and even carnivalesque texts.
What has remained constant is a liberty with
historical fact and a political ambivalence;
the corresponding themes of revision and
indeterminacy are reflected in the structural
fragmentation of Ondaatje's texts.
Since Barbour considers Ondaatje's
themes more effectively conveyed in his
later works one can infer that Barbour sees
him becoming a better writer over the
course of his career. But Barbour rarely
makes explicitly evaluative statements. He
is showing how Ondaatje's work increasingly
fits Bakhtin's ideals, but he is clearly
uncomfortable with the organic model of a
young writer's gradual maturity. Barbour's
study is of the work and not the writer,
except as he is inscribed within his texts.
Development, then, is shown by comparing
the same images and themes from earlier
and later works to show the work becoming
more open and engaging. Evidently, the
themes don't change as much as the technique.
"Meaning is not the point; writing
is," Barbour says. And "because I can't fix
either the characters or the text within a
single generic focus or a particular kind of
reading, they remain in flux, evading expla-
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