\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWAlthough I have kept few of mypromises —there are three books that bear my name,but I have taught, lectured, and it is all agame.The goal: proportion, order, and harmony,ignoresthe landfalls, guts, and churning tidesuncorkingastern of the shoal-horn's bleat, the coastpilot's caution.Lillard does not entirely forsake the hereand now of his existence :That ploughed field is what matters ;the truth's at oar feetnot out there in the silences.Rather, his somewhat ^indefinable yearningborn of a need for change is an elementwhich figures prominently in ACoastal Range. His is a world in whichman aspires to perfection, in which exaltationand solitude are inseparable.For Lillard, the pleasures of life arethose which seem to capture the movementof time :Alone vast as the space between two words.Alone is a man before the fire, a dog underhis heels;it is Flaubert writing Louise; Cezannewatching the light;it is time pillaged.But of all the images evoked in this collection,one of the more captivating isone in which time cannot destroy theepiphany of nature :What an island and I have lain in herembraceand I will again;somewhere I will watch an eagle and thosestarscloseby as the smokey breath of Tongass,the moonlight ebbing on the sand.It is a transcendent image in which thepure consciousness of the poet foreseesbeauty yet to be attained. The exaltationand anguish in A Coastal Range combineto express a contemplative perception ofman's destiny.In a Canvas Tent, Robert MacLean'sfifth collection of poetry, recounts thepoet's activities as a British Columbiantree planter. Much like Lillard's pieces,MacLean's poems are landmarks along aspiritual itinerary. They do not attempta photographic depiction of those naturalphenomena to which he was witness, butinstead are filters combining images fromboth past and present. Poetry obviouslyallows MacLean to express his restrainedlyricism, and in this way to acknowledgea metaphysical fatigue which is also presentin Lillard's writing: "Tired so tired.Sometimes I find / it hard to generatefaith in anything / except pancakes withmaple syrup."The title of this work is drawn from arecurring image suggesting the poet'snomadic nature :Tent: template. Planting pines 5months each year I turn into an animalwary of all enclosures. Sky roof,horizon walls, earth resilient floor.Sometimes I long for a warm cave.A fixed bivouac, hot cup of teaA structure not to barricade chaosbut to focus it.MacLean's wanderlust seems to be theresult of a deep-rooted dissatisfaction : "Iwant to name all the stars animals /flowers birds rocks in order to forget /them, start over again." However muchhe might wish for a chance to beginanew, the bond to be established with hisenvironment is fragile because of the ravagesof time :Time compressed. Twilight steepedin resin. Pausing on a bridge severedat both ends, a name fell apart in myhand. Does dark gaze back? Stainedglasswindows open and close insidethe earth. Cities shuffle past onthe horizon brokenhanded beggars.I've nothing left to give but crumpledburnt pinecones.Although MacLean does affirm that hopeis necessary in order to realize one's aspirations,he proposes a rather ambiguoussolution to the frustration he feels within141

BOOKS IN REVIEWleroy suit with frilled collars. In thiswork Purdy invites us to return to thepast where "all directions are possible."He asks us "Is this the way it was or isthis the way you wanted it to be?" andreplies for us, "This is the way it waswhen nothing moved or changed."The first part, a series of untitled prosesketches, recreates the days of boyhood,the town of Trenton and its familiarcharacters. We see the Trent River, themain streets, Front and Dundas, the localbakery, mill, factories and coal sheds, thehorse-drawn buggies and Model T's.Purdy vividly recalls the activities ofEveryboy: swimming by the railwaybridge, fishing for mudcats, stealing magazinesfrom junkyards, or watching movieserials at Weiler's Theatre. With the poetwe watch the faces around us dissolveinto those of the past: "for a momentyou think you are living backwards. 1 'With Purdy we are both present and detached.He sees himself at six as a strangerin a land of giants, an outsider "tryingto get used to being alive."The poems, entitled "Some of thePeople," pick up many of these charactersof the past described already inprose. Highway 62 leads out of town towardsthe present; we see the cemetery insummer "evergreen" or watch the poetat the funeral of his mother: "naked /on the needle point of now." Otherpoems evoke the days of childhood, thecolour words of preschool, the friendJack who becomes "The Boy Accused ofCheating." Purdy mourns the father whodied when he was two, the stillbornbrother whom he calls the "dead Poet,"and Cousin Don who returned from thewar with shell-shock and "something lost/ the Loss remained with him always."One of the most compassionate portraitsis of Joe Barr, the village idiot whoroamed the garbage dump and waschased and stoned by the children. Unableto express himself, he is described byPurdy: "the doors of his prison opening/ into rooms he couldn't remember /places he couldn't stay." Two poemssuggest the impact of his grandfather onthe child. The dominating old man withhis "260 pounds of scarred slag," undauntedat 90 and "too much for anyman to be," haunts the poet with hisvitality. Purdy remarks: "the veritableflesh and bone of my Grandfather risesfrom the dust, flashes in my mind, livesagain inside the flesh and bone that ismyself." In these poems the tone of elegyis strong, a sense of place lost. As Purdyacknowledges in one poem "What havewe to do with childhood ? / — no onelives there any more."Of the two portraits, Purdy's is themore vital, and intense. Both the proseand the poems have memorable passagesand moments of brilliance. But to someextent the book seems contrived, designedto fill a space on our shelves of Purdy.The poems, many of them well-known,appear in other collections. For would-bebiographers, both this and Susan Stromberg-Stein'sstudy of Dudek are fascinatingsources of information on the formationand development of genius. Forordinary readers, however, they demandtoo much; in a sense we must write ourown biographies of these complex poets.G. MC LAYPOETRY & PAINTINGANDRE-G. BOURASSA, Surrealism and QuebecLiterature : History of a cultural revolution.Trans. Mark Czarnecki, Univ. of Toronto,$20.00.BOURASSA'S DETAILED STUDY of the surrealistmovement in Quebec literaturehad a mixed reception when first publishedin French in 1977. The author wasaccused of over-extending the definitionof surrealism, and hiding his lack oftheoretical method behind a mass of146

Richard GIGUÈREEXIL, REVOLTEET DISSIDENCEÉtude comparée des poésiesquébécoise et canadienne(1925-1955)La première véritable synthèse de l'évolution despoésies québécoise et canadienne pour la période1925-1955.Empruntant aux théories du comparatisme littéraireet de la sociologie de la littérature, l'auteurmet en lumière les rapports qui existent entrel'histoire socio-politique, économique et culturelleet les textes poétiques. Des interférences apparaissentainsi très clairement dans les cinq réseauxthématiques privilégiés et démontrent que lesévénements de la crise, de la guerre et de l'aprèsguerreont donné lieu, tant au Québec qu'auCanada anglais, à une poésie marquée par lesthèmes de l'exil, de la révolte et de la dissidence.Une étude qui va au-devant de cet intérêt nouveauau Québec et au Canada pour la culture etla littérature de «l'autre».CENTRE DE RECHERCHEEN LITTERATURE QUEBECOISE13,5x21,5 cm307 pages, 16$ISBN 2-7637-7014-2LES PRESSES DE L'UNIVERSITE LAVALC.P. 2447, QUÉBEC G1K 7R4

BOOKS IN REVIEWClark Blaise has called "subversive," thatleads us back into the story. Rather it isthe kind that pretends to resolve everythingwhile resolving nothing, the patanswer that precludes further questioning.Sharon Drache's The Mikveh Manand Other Stories is another first collectionthat deals mainly with life in theJewish community in Queenstown (i.e.,Kingston) and in an old folks' home inOttawa. Most of the stories are about oldpeople — a 70-year-old rabbi, an 85-yearoldcarpenter, a married couple incapacitatedand near death. Drache clearlysympathizes with her characters, whohave suffered in their lives and are sufferingnow the neglect of the youngergeneration. Their triumphs are few butall the more important for their infrequency.In "Let's Make Music," a 79-year-old man and a 93-year-old womanstage a concert on drums and triangle,and in "A Kitel" another old womanmiraculously rises from her wheelchairand somehow conveys her bedridden husbandto a chapel where they lie downtogether to die beside the Holy Ark. Thecourage that these characters show, however,is not enough to make the storiesmemorable. What Drache fails to conveyis any sense of motivation ; her charactersact but do do not know why. If they areto be seen as heroic, it is the less thanhuman heroism of fairy tales that theyembody.Like Barry Dempster, Sharon Drachesets up potential conflicts which are neverresolved. In "The Meeting," for example,a Jewish MP and Cabinet Minister rekindlesan old romance with a gentilewoman he had known in university. Herhusband is now confined to a mentalhospital and divorce proceedings havebegun. Thus, expectations are arousedabout the nature of the new relationshipthat may develop between the old lovers.But the narrative abruptly shifts to wartimeGermany to focus on the woman'shusband, then five years old. The accountof his sufferings under the Nazis is supposedto prepare us for the revelation onthe final page that he has located hisparents' killers and avenged their deaths.Nothing more is said about the JewishMP's relationship with his old flame."The Scribe" is another story withgreat potential that is marred by psychologicalimplausibility and an absurdlyabrupt ending. The scribe is a youngHasidic artist employed by a wealthy artdealer to create specially-designed copiesof the Torah, one of which the dealerattempts to sell to an old friend as a BarMitzvah gift for her son David. Thewoman balks at the price and a year anda half passes before the family returns tothe art gallery. In that time, the oncepious and unworldly scribe has marriedthe boss's daughter and taken over thegallery. He no longer makes copies of theTorah and seems to have completely abandonedhis principles. What happened tothe ideals of the young scribe? Whatturned him away from precepts so deeplyheld? The author gives us no clues forthe reason for this startling metamorphosis.Both Drache and Dempster, despitetheir abundant powers of invention, haveyet to learn how to get the most out oftheir material. Our best short-story writers— Blaise, Metcalf, Munro, Gallant,Hood — return again and again to thesame voices, the same kinds of characters,places, and situations, not because theyhave no new ideas, but because theyrecognize that there is always more to besaid about the old ones. Whereas theaverage writer never exploits the fullpotential of a situation, the great writernever exhausts it.MICHAEL DARLINGI5O

BOOKS IN REVIEWBLACK COMEDYAge. Mac-GUY VANDERHAEGHE, My Presentmillan, $19.95.GUY VANDERHAEGHE HAS FOLLOWED hisimpressive debut as a writer of shortstories — Man Descending is certainly aworthy winner of the Governor General'sAward, with its deadly accurate dialogue,its effective imagery and descriptions, itswit, and its humorously harrowing insightinto the feelings of people who havesomehow found themselves on the outsidelooking in, yet in a quaintly twentiethcenturybourgeois fashion are so aware ofthe failings of those who are inside theywouldn't (and couldn't) join them foranything — with an equally impressivedebut as a novelist in My Present Age.Some early reviews of My Present Age,while acknowledging Vanderhaeghe'scontinuing power as a writer, suggest anunease with the novel. It is precisely thatunease, plus the crafty way he goes aboutdeveloping it, which convinces me thatMy Present Age isn't simply the apprenticework of a coming writer but a highlysuccessful work of art in itself. For Vanderhaeghe,in choosing to write at evengreater length about, and in the narrativevoice of, Ed, the feckless protagonist ofthe final two stories in Man Descending,has chosen to attempt one of the mostdifficult feats in fiction — to make an unsympatheticcharacter sympathetic withoutever losing focus on the traits thatmake him such an unloveable S.O.B. Hesucceeds; in fact, he succeeds so well hehad me laughing out loud one minuteand stunned into silent shock the next.Such success is more than reason enoughto praise and recommend My PresentAge to all who care about contemporaryfiction.As Marsha, one of Ed's old "friends,"tells him near the end of the novel, Ed is"a fuck-up, and infantile jerk. We've alwaysbeen embarrassed for you, the wayyou act." And later she adds this: "Nobodyfelt comfortable around you, everybodyfelt you were judging them, evenpoor Victoria, who was so patiently andpathetically waiting for you to join thehuman race. Do you have any idea howgood the rest of us felt believing weweren't going to end up like the walkingdead all around us? Do you? And thenthis messy shlub, this twenty-two-year-oldzombie, would shuffle into the room andpiss on our parade." Marsha has Edpretty well pegged, though he might tryto tell us that he never judges people;the point for the reader is that Ed pisseswith so much energy and glory that ifone is not in the line of fire (and asreader one is not) one can't help butadmire the act.Those who have read Man Descendingwill recall that in the title story and"Sam, Soren, and Ed," Ed and Victoriasuffered marital difficulties and breakup,though Ed fought hard to prevent Victoriafrom getting wholly out of hisclutches. Many must have felt, as I did,that Ed's story was far from finished, andwanted to find out what happened next.What is causing unease in some readersis not that My Present Age doesn't answerthe question but that it pulls nopunches, and that although there are stillscenes of extreme if also excruciatingcomedy it is essentially a work of palpabledarkness, perhaps even defeat.Ed is still fighting his ex-friend Benny,the lawyer representing Victoria, and heis still capable of savagely funny anger atpeople like the radio Hot-line host hecalls "the Beast" and the prying old manin the apartment below him. But he hasretired from life. When Victoria askshim for lunch, and in the face of his"attack-is-the-best-defence" approachonly manages to hint that she has amajor problem of her own before disappearing,Ed is hauled out of the safe

BOOKS IN REVIEWharbour where he has been indulging inbittersweet memories of their early marriageand imaginative escape through theadventure novels of his youth. Finally,with the aid of an ex-convict who attendshis creative writing class and wants hishelp in polishing his memoirs, Ed sets outto find Victoria where she has gone tohide in some motel in the city, hoping tooffer her some real help.During his crazy journey around thewinter city, Ed encounters various charactersfrom his past and his present.Vanderhaeghe masterfully shows everythingfrom his point of view yet alsoreveals his failings as an observer. Nevertheless,for all his faults, Ed has an unerringeye and ear for phoniness, andVanderhaeghe allows that to emergeagain and again. Indeed, it is because Edis so wittily insightful that we put up withhim, for he is even capable of seeinghimself clearly upon occasion. But he isalso obsessed: with a vision of a perfectionthat never existed except in his mindand which drives him upon his quest butmakes him unable to offer Victoria anythingshe needs when he finally finds her.Vanderhaeghe has created a sad-sackloser whose wit and intelligence renderhim somehow worthy of our complicityin his superb failure to measure up tosociety's demands. As his tale careensfrom slapstick comedy to unnervingangst, Ed holds our attention and ourconcern.There are a number of influences onecould point to, but Vanderhaeghe hasalready moved beyond them to discoverhis own novelistic manner and a languagecapable of rendering particularvoices, such as Ed's, in the context of acontemporary, Canadian, prairie city.Where he will go next, I don't know, buton the evidence of My Present Age asmuch as Man Descending he will go far.I for one look forward to reading themaps he will surely send back from hisfuture forays. Meanwhile, My PresentAge is black comedy at its intimate andsubversive best.DOUGLAS BARBOURLITTLE MAGAZINEOF THE AIRROBERT WEAVER, ed., The Anthology Anthology.Macmillan, $17.95.ANTHOLOGY, THE CBC PROGRAMME, isthirty years old, and the appearance of acollection of broadcast pieces to celebratethe occasion reminds me of the circumstancesof its origin. One evening in 1953my wife Inge and I were having dinnerwith Robert Harlow, then a Talks Producerin Vancouver, and we fell to talkingof the lack of literary magazines.Contemporary Verse had gone out ofpublication; Northern Review was appearingat long intervals as John Sutherlandslowly died; Fiddlehead was all thatremained apart from the CanadianForum and the university quarterlies.Something, we felt, had to be done toprovide an outlet for writers, and thenmy wife said, "Why not a little magazineof the air?" Immediately, it seemed theideal solution, for in those days beforethe Canada Council the CBC was theonly organization with adequate fundsand enough of a commitment to the artsto get such a project working withouttoo much delay.Harlow passed on the suggestion toRobert Weaver, who accepted it as fittingin with the trend of his own thinking,and who talked the CBC authoritiesinto providing air time and funds. As anacknowledgement of the Woodcock partin the programme's beginning, I wasappointed editorial advisor to Anthologyat $100 a month, which in those daysbefore inflation was a reassuring addition

BOOKS IN REVIEWto the money I was earning from freelancework; it kept us in food and evenpaid for a little wine.This is part of the story of Anthology'sorigins that seems to have been lost toofficial memory; certainly it is not mentionedin Robert Weaver's introductionto The Anthology Anthology.The programme was an important innovation;it preceded Tamarack Reviewby two years and Canadian Literature byfive years, so that it can be regarded asthe beginning of the little magazine revivalwhich started in the later 1950's. Italso initiated a period, through the 1950'sto the mid-1960's, when CBG radioturned to literature, and some ambitiousdramatic, documentary, and other literaryprogrammes were being done; theGBG in those days occupied a great dealof writers' time and for many of themprovided a large proportion of their incomes.It is almost two decades since the GBCbegan to abdicate its responsibilities tothe arts, and now, almost every otherliterary programme having vanished,Anthology has the look of a survivorrather than a pioneer. Lately its age hasbeen beginning to show, with duller programmesand less attention to the qualityof readers' voices. This is only natural;magazines of all kinds have their cycles,as Bob Weaver recognized when he choseto terminate Tamarack Review ratherthan handing it on, and perhaps Anthology'stime has come.If it has, The Anthology Anthologywill serve as a peculiarly appropriatemonument, for, whether deliberately ornot, the editor and his associates havenot chosen the best pieces that appearedon the programme so much as the mostrepresentative, so that what we have isreally a true portrait of a magazine ofthe air offered — as was inevitable overso long a period — dull and dating piecesas well as its small masterpieces of fictionand verse. Thus we have excellent storiesby Matt Cohen, Audrey Thomas, MarianEngel, and fine poems by Al Purdy,Gwen MacEwen, Phyllis Webb. Butthese are the reliables, and the collectionis short on writers who are relatively unknownand interesting. Some pieces areirremediably dated, like a conversationbetween Robert Fulford and NorthropFrye that took place in 1980, and someare shallow, like Morley Gallaghan'sappreciation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.And one reads often with a justifiedsense of déjà vu, for most of the pieceshave been published already in books orperiodicals, and some are very familiar,like Alice Munro's "The Shining Houses"and the poems from Margaret Atwood'sJournals of Susanna Moodie. The bookis a worthy and modest souvenir of aventure of some importance to Canada'sliterary history.GEORGE WOODCOCKFRANCO-ONTARIENNE/MANITOBA1NEMICHEL DACHY, Persévérance. Editions du Blé,$6.00.LAURENT GRENIER, La Page tournée. Editionsde Γ Univ. d'Ottawa, $7.95.ANDRE DUHAIME, Visions outaouaises / Ottawax.Editions de l'Univ. d'Ottawa, $8.95.JEAN MARC DALPE, Et a"ailleurs. Editions Prisede Parole, $8.00.ASSEZ DISPARATES ET PLUTÔT déroutantsles quelques derniers recueils de poésieparus en 1984 au Manitoba et en Ontariodiffèrent par la langue et par lecontenu. On y trouve, entre autres, de lapoésie traditionnelle écrite dans un styletravaillé. C'est le cas de Persévérence,premier essai poétique de Michel Dachy.Quant à La Page tournée de LaurentGrenier, les thèmes qui y sont développés153

BOOKS IN REVIEWrappellent la vision d'un certain romantisme,face à la douleur, la désespéranceet la mort. Par contre, il semble que laspontainéité, le réalisme, voire aussil'humour, soient les caractéristiques dominantesdes oeuvres d'André Duhaimeet de Jean Marc Dalpé.Le recueil Persévérance se compose detrent-quatre tableaux bien façonnés oùDachy décrit artistement des scènes de lanature: l'air, la terre et l'eau y sontpartout présents. Le passage du vent oude quelques oiseaux prête parfois un peude mouvement à ces natures mortes;l'unique présence humaine dans ce décorest le regard du poète qui scrute leschoses et s'émerveille.Par la réflexion philosophique, unerecherche minutieuse investiguant audelàdes apparences, l'auteur rejoint lessymbolistes. Un souci évident de la rime,du choix des mots appropriés, voire del'effet à produire, démontre que le poèteprend son art au sérieux. Porte-paroled'une caste sacrée, il recourt volontiers àun "nous" révélateur. Soucieux del'oeuvre à faire, le poète se sent solidairede ces "fous de silences," de ces "fousd'espérances," qui versent dans "leursécrits," leur "âme" et leur "destin." PourMichel Dachy, le poète est avant tout,cet "homme qui observe, qui raconte."C'est en observateur de la réalité que lepoète pose, barricadé derrière la "fenêtrede son coeur." Ainsi s'établit une certainedistanciation entre le poète et son oeuvre.Il y a évolution dans ce recueil, compterendu d'un penseur isolé, désireux decommuniquer avec le lecteur, puis avecses confrères poètes et enfin avec la"femme qui viendrait le réveiller." L'attraitde cette muse décrite en termessymboliques se fait plus explicite dans"Chapelle étrange," poème que nouscroyons être le meilleur du recueil. L'apprentipoète délaisse la philosophie et larecherche trop intellectuelle d'effets littérairespour se tourner vers une sorte de! 54femme-pays. Et cette femme, c'est unpeu la plaine, que le poète connaît etchante naturellement, spontainément.Surgissent alors des images mythiques,lourdes de significations, parmi lesquellesnous ne retenons que les épousailles cosmiquesde la terre et du vent dans cettechapelle étrange qu'est la plaine. Etantdonné la richesse images et des réalitésévoquées, la poésie de Michel Dachy seprêterait bien à une analyse symboliquequi mettrait en valeur la profondeur dontune première lecture, nécessairementsuperficielle, ne peut que donner unavant-goût.Ecrit dans une langue impeccable, lerecueil La Page tournée de Laurent Grenierets d'une densité et d'une profondeurde pensée étonnante. Les quelquesoixante-treize poèmes regroupés parthèmes en sept parties forment un toutbien ordonné. Une nette évolution paraîtdans ce recueil où l'on passe successivementde la réflexion sur la mort et ladouleur à la recherche de la femmeidéale. L'auteur aura ensuite recours àl'humour comme procédé littéraire assezpuissant pour neutraliser la déception etle désespoir. Par le biais de la créationpoétique, de la "furie d'écrire," les dilemmesde l'existence trouvent une solutiontransitoire, puisque l'écriture nedémasque le doute que pour conduire à"un doute plus grand encore." Il ne resteplus au poète qu'un "instinct de poésie."La sixième partie de recueil nous asemblé plus captivante, plus originale,peut-être parce qu'elle révèle la démarchepoétique de Grenier. L'influence d'AnneHébert y est flagrante, au moins dans"Faucon au poing" et "le Pouvoir de laparole," mais l'auteur indique ses sourceset exprime, de façon personnelle, des recherchesidentiques.Pour bien goûter la poésie de LaurentGrenier et en saisir la signification profonde,sans doute le lecteur aurait-ilavantage à examiner les grands symboles

BOOKS IN REVIEWrécurrents, entre autres, certains archetypescomme l'eau, la mer, signifiant leretour à un état primitif de bien-être,univers compensatoire auquel s'ajoutentquelques constellations d'images signifiantl'obstacle à vaincre, l'enfermementou la chute.La richesse de la Page tournée luivient en particulier d'une sensibilité exploitéejusqu'à la limite de la désespérance.La page est tournée mais tout n'apas été dit. Semblable au poisson dansson aquarium, le poète persiste à "creuserle miroir," à chercher des réponses, àposer des questions toutes humaines etvibrantes d'émotions contenues. Tel unPèlerin, il poursuit sa route avec cettelucidité du chercheur intelligent, assaillipar l'incertitude, mais refusant toutepanacée imaginaire.Troisième recueil d'André Duhaime,Visions outaouaises / Ottawax contientdes textes variés. A peu près tout devient,dans la machine à écrire de Duhaime,objet de réflexion ou de dérision, matièreà contemplation ou à jonglerie avec lesmots. Très peu de variantes quant auxthèmes privilégiés antérieurement:l'amour, le quotidien et la recherche dusens caché des choses reviennent. Etpourtant, à première vue, le lecteur al'impression que le concret retient toutel'attention. Les "visions" poétiques deDuhaime valent surtout par leur originalitéet leur spontanéité. L'ère de l'instantané,du "prêt-à-porter" marque cettepoésie du quotidien, tantôt gris, tantôtlumineux. Même si certains textes semblentmédiocres, les finales sont presquetoujours bien réussies. Duhaime, qui apublié de très beaux haïkus, est habiledans l'art de condenser en quelquesmots, quelques phrases, une pensée originaleou une impression évocatrice. Il luisuffit de nommer les choses pour que letexte prenne vie, que la rêverie s'amorceet se prolonge.Le professeur de langue qu'est Duhaimes'amuse avec les mots, les phrases,qu'il transforme, déforme, en guise derécréation — de re-création du réel, detransposition d'un vécu ordinaire. Le tona changé depuis Peau de fleur, premierrecueil fort sage de ce jeune poète. Larecherche de l'effet insolite se manifested'abord dans des jeux de mots, des associationsfantaisistes, puis en tentatived'imiter la langue parlée: "Mais tsé défoua ça prend du temps." C'est avec"Quand la cambuse s'emballe / flacatoune"que Duhaime pousse à la limitecette recherche d'une expression réaliste,THE NEW QUARTERLYnew directions in Canadian writingSPECIAL ISSUE: MAGICREALISMFeaturing a conversation withRobert Kroetsch, fiction by GeorgeElliott, W.P. Kinsella, KeithMaillard, poetry by SusanMusgrave.Available Spring '85Subscription: $10.00$5.00CONFERENCE ONMAGIC REALISM12-14 May, 1985For more information write:The New QuarterlyELPP, University of WaterlooWaterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1

BOOKS IN REVIEWalors qu'il reconstruit les balbutiementsd'un poète ivre, semble-t-il, de "flacatoune."Entreprise de renouvellement?Dessein de dénonciation? Instinct de défoulement?Il y a un peu de tout celadans la poésie de Duhaime.Les longs textes hybrides (s'agit-il deprose ou de poésie?) qui terminent lerecueil ne manquent pas de lyrisme.Gomment ne pas se laisser prendre aumystère du "Lac des fées" et de cetteétrange "Womena"? Gomment ne pasrêver, nous aussi, devant le mannequinsdes vitrines ou les "crocus" annonciateursdu printemps, qu'ils soient d'Ottawa oud'ailleurs? La magie de la poésie agitavec efficacité dans ces textes modernesqui rejoignent le lecteur.Bien que les titres Gens d'ici et Etd'ailleurs aient l'air de se complétercomme les deux volets d'un diptyque, cesdeux recueils de Jean Marc Dalpé se distinguentautant par le contenu que parl'écriture. Le thème de l'appartenanceexploité dans Gens d'ici et Les Murs denos villages rappelle une certaine poésiequébécois. Dalpé continue d'être solidairedu peuple franco-ontarien, mais son écriturese transforme. Le "nous" collectifcède graduellement la place à un "je"plus individualiste. Dans Et d'ailleurs, larecherche d'une identité propre sembleêtre l'une des premières préoccupations.A Paris, le poète, souffre d'être perçucomme l'étranger "qui sort d'autres climats/ respire d'autres paysages / n'estpas tout à fait à l'aise dans le décor."En un long monologue, Dalpé note,avec une franchise quasi désarmante,impressions et souvenirs d'un ailleurs correspondantà Sudbury, New York, etParis. Partout seul, immanquablementattablé devant une bière ou un café, lepoète observe la rue, les passants, puis iltente de décrire sa propre vision deschoses, ses déceptions et désirs, avec lesmots qui lui viennent tout naturellementet s'accordent au décor. La méthode156d'écriture varie peu du début à la fin durecueil: d'abord, saisir les pensées et lesimpressions au moment où elles surgissentdans la conscience, puis les livrer, lesexprimer sans fard, sans artifice.Sudbury paraît d'abord comme un"ville désaccordée." L'insatisfaction, la"solitude collective," le chômage, la misèrese manifestent dans ces textes oùs'incrit en filigrane l'ombre de l'obsédant"American dream." C'est ici que prendforme le désir de s'enfuir, de partir pourun "ailleurs" de rêve. Hanté par "tousces ailleurs intérieurs / ces feux du possible,"le poète voudrait guérir une"plaie" non identifiée, une "douleur"vague.New York sera le cadre d'une deuxièmeexpérience de dépaysement. NewYork: une poésie qui crie, qui hurle, quicrache! Attentif à son monde intérieur etaux messages qui lui viennent de la rue,le poète emprunte cette fois l'idiomeaméricain, son rythme, ses images. Dalpés'exprime alors en un mélange de "slang"et de franco-ontarien. Fasciné, il répètele refrain: "Listen to the streets man."A Paris, le lieu privilégié est encore larune. Get ailleurs que Dalpé reconstruitdeux ans après un bref séjour n'a rien detrès réjouissant. A part une brève rencontrele 14 Juillet, le poète est seul ets'ennuie. New York et Paris: deux villesétrangères qui n'ont pas été choisies auhasard, mais dont la signification pour unjeune Franco-Ontarien a des résonnancesparticulières: l'une représente la prépondérancede la mentalité nord-américaine;l'autre, l'influence de la culture française.Au retour, le poète est déçu, désabusé.Son projet, "de dire ce monde" de Tailleurssemble avoir avorté, mais la dualité"ici" et "ailleurs" aura marqué le poète.La brève apparition de la femme aiméevers la fin du recueil est plus réconfortante;plus attachante que ces villes troprapidement parcourues. Et tout le resteest froidure, cadre vide et absence. Et

BOOKS IN REVIEWd'ailleurs marquera-t-il un tournant dansl'oeuvre de Dalpé? Rest à voir comments'orientera la verve de ce jeune poète,qui parle avec un fort accent de vérité.INSIDE VOLCANOBERTILLE BEAU LIEUCHRIS ACKERLEY and LAWRENCE J. CLIPPER,A Companion to "Under the Volcano."Univ. of British Columbia Press, $45.00.UNDER THE VOLCANO is an opaque,highly-wrought encyclopedic novel andfrom its opening pages Lowry makes hisfictional terrain seem brilliantly andflamboyantly real, while simultaneouslydefamiliarizing it and underscoring itsliteral foreignness by the introduction ofnumerous Spanish phrases, obscure references,and cryptic allusions. A comprehensivelyannotated guide has been longoverdue, and it must be said at once thatChris Ackerley and Lawrence Clipperhave acquitted themselves superbly.Their Companion is a treasure-house ofriches which makes all previous effortsin this field look decidedly superficial.The authors provide well over 1,500notes covering some 5,000 specific pointsof reference or allusion; each note ismatched to the relevant page numbers ofthe Penguin paperback and standardhardback editions.The researches of Ackerley and Clipperare impressive in scope. They haverummaged dutifully among the oddjumble of often arcane and unreadablebooks which cluttered Lowry's mentaluniverse; they have scrutinized everythingimaginable, from the papers of theState Department to early ordnance surveymaps of Wales; they have consultedwaiters in Vera Cruz and explored cemeteriesin Ontario. The Companion coversa diverse range of material, which includesliterary, historical and anthropologicalallusions, foreign words andphrases, drinks, the geography — bothreal and imagined — of Lowry's Mexico,New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London,and Granada; in short, just about anythingand everything that could possiblypuzzle or interest the reader about thenovel, from the history of dehydratedonion factories in the United States toMozart quartets. Having myself longbeen puzzled — among numerous otheritems —• by Lowry's references to Jull(286.2) and Euzkadi (325.1), I hastenedto the appropriate entries in the Companionand found them interesting andhelpful.It's significant that this study is entitleda Companion to Under the Volcanorather than, as was apparently originallyintended, a Guide. Guides can becold and formal, whereas companionsare, if you are lucky, altogether warmercreatures. Ackerley and Clipper's volumefully lives up to its title and offers not adry-as-dust pedantic inventory of referencesbut a lively spirited commentarywhich one suspects would have wonLowry's own delighted approval. Readerscurious about okoolihao (260.3) will beinterested to learn not only this drink'sconstituents but also that the name "derivesfrom a Hawaiian name meaning'iron buttocks'." The authors have amania for detail equal to Lowry's, thoughat times their pursuit of verisimilituderisks the charge of extravagant irrelevance.Their triumphant discovery thatYvonne's father could not have beenAmerican consul to Iquique during theFirst World War because the consulatethere closed for five years on 31 March1915 does rather seem beside the point.Ackerley and Clipper correct the abundantmisprints of the Penguin edition aswell as Lowry's misspellings and errors ofgrammar, though regrettably the Companionis not without its own quota ofminor errors and printing slips ("Bole-157

BOOKS IN REVIEWskine" (178.4) is misspelt; Sherrill Gracewrote a well-known article on Lowry's"expressionist" not "experimental" vision(317.Ο).There is relatively little to quibble within the Companion. The authors mighthave preferred Scott Fitzgerald's definitionof an Oomph girl in "A PatrioticShort" to their own; they make no mentionof Freud's analysis of teeth dreamsin section six of The Interpretation ofDreams, which seems relevant to theemphasis on missing teeth in the sexuallysuggestive Lee Maitland sequence; theyoverlook the significance of Lowry'sechoing of the inscription on the milestoneat the end of the first part of Judethe Obscure ("Joffrey" Firmin's initialsare the same as the doomed Jude Fawley's,too).Ackerley and Clipper are to be congratulatedfor having done their homeworkamong the Lowry manuscripts. Itis pleasing to discover, for example, thatthe Mexican town of "Quintanarooroo"was the novelist's own mischievous inventionand that he toyed with the notion ofdeliberately misspelling the non-fictional"Amecameca." It is also amusing tolearn that in an earlier draft the Consulsourly referred to Montezuma as a "glumchocolate-drinking washout."What the scholarship of the Companionunderlines is the astonishing and possiblyhitherto unrecognized extent towhich Lowry's text echoes the words ofother texts. The energies of Under theVolcano derive in no small way from thesheer multiplicity of genres clashing andoverlapping as the narrative shiftsabruptly from pastiche and parody totragic grandeur and then back again intofarce. The Companion indicates manynew lines of approach to the novel, notleast the remarkable way in which Lowryappropriated the literature of his childhoodand adolescence (Beatrix Potter, F.Anstey, P. C. Wren, Shelley, and works158by numerous other writers) and used itwith a kind of poignant irony to enrichhis darkly comic vision of a man's terriblefall from innocence.Ackerley and Clipper shrewdly recognizethat "Under the Volcano is not anovel with one big idea, but a bookwhich is constantly shifting its ground,one which continually evades the reader."Instead of treating the novel as a messagein code which can be cracked byunravelling a few isolated myths and allusions(an approach which has bedevilledthe work of many previous exegists) theydisplay an acute sensitivity to the interpenetrationof Lowry's ambiguity andwit. Many of the "notes" are in themselvessmall critical essays which genuinelyilluminate the workings of Lowry'simagination. Ackerley and Clipper'sCompanion will send readers back to thenovel with fresh perceptions and a newsense of the awesomeLowry's masterpiece.complexity ofRONALD BINNSIMPALPABLE JAMAICAPHILIP KREiNER, Heartlands. Oberon, 1984.THIS IS NOT YOUR USUAL vacation-tothe-Caribbeannovel. Philip Kreiner is aserious writer. Heartlands, set in a sparse,almost unidentifiable Jamaica, is primarilya novel of interiorization — the recollectionsof the inner goings-on of twopeople. One is Vikki, a thirty-five-yearolddivorcee who has come to the islandto "reclaim her life"; the other is Jimmy,who works on the island (but is alsoCanadian like Vikki). Jimmy leasesHeartlands Great House, but now suddenlyfinds himself engaging in a seriesof mind-peregrinations leading to selfdoubtand a sense of his own "visibility" :he is a minority white in a land populatedprimarily by descendants of slaves

BOOKS IN REVIEWand rife with rasta talk. From a comfortableand complacent invisibility,Jimmy is now painfully conspicuous inhis great home overlooking the peasantvillage below the hill. Both characters tryto work out their ennui in aimless vacationers'fashion. But, in Jimmy's words,Vikki is "like a large moth drawn to thelight to die." Throughout the novel it isnever really clear if Vikki is seeking,through romance, a lost vitality in herlife or not; all that she experiences is anear-rape. Like the other characters,Vikki is not well-defined ; she neither engagesus through pity nor through admiration,say in the powerful manner ofa Judith Hearne.For despite its serious intent, there is ageneral insubstantiality to the book as awhole. As one closes it, the charactersdisappear forever. Maybe this is the verypoint of the novel : the suggestion that incertain people's lives nothing palpablereally happens. No bangs. Merely futile,soft whimpers in totally uncontrived circumstances.Kreiner appears to be satisfiedin simply revealing self-alienation,which becomes an end in itself.Tropical Jamaican texture is virtuallymissing save for a semblance of it in thedialect used by Jimmy's lover Etta.Kreiner pictures the island as hostile andpolarized: people are seen generically aseither blandly black with clichéd violentundertones; or wafer white. Regardingthe latter, says Kreiner, "The whitenessmakes them (on the island) too consciousof their colour." In atmosphere thatmight have spawned scenes of romance,one finds Jimmy reflecting that securityin his life (with Etta) "is more importantthan love." By contrast Vikki's sense ofher own imprisonment derives from herparticular search for love and self. Butall this lasts only ephemerally; as soon aswe turn the pages, the impact disappears.Interesting as the language is in someinstances, it does not achieve the richembroidery of other Oberon Press finds,in such authors as Susan Kerslake orMargaret Gibson. Neither does the paucityof action compensate for what thestyle lacks in resonance. No doubt this isthe price an author pays for atempting anovel of this sort: in aiming, that is, todepict a life-style of quiet boredom.APHORISTICSOUNDINGSCYRIL DABYDEENв. w. powE, A Climate Charged. Mosaic, n.p.FRANK DAVEY'S "Surviving the Paraphrase"(1976), a provocative discussionof the limitations of thematic criticismand the critical methods of NorthropFrye and his successors, signalled the beginningof a new era in Canadian literarycriticism, a period of re-examination anddebate about meaning, reading, and literarycriticism. Evidence of this change inthe literary climate is apparent in thegrowing number of articles and booksproposing new approaches to Canadianliterature — Barry Cameron and MichaelDixon's "Mandatory Subversive Manifesto:Canadian Criticism vs. LiteraryCriticism," Russell Brown's "Critic, Culture,Text: Beyond Thematics," StanFogel's "Lost in the Canadian Funhouse,"Paul Stuewe's Clearing the Ground andWilfred Cude's A Due Sense of Differences.Even prominent thematic criticsappear to be reconsidering their approachto our literature. In "Bushed in theSacred Wood" John Moss refers to Fryeas "somewhat of a false prophet" andargues that critics of the early seventiespresented "a dislocated perception of ourliterature." One of the surprising featuresof B. W. Powe's A Climate Charged, acollection of essays which attempt a re-

BOOKS IN REVIEWassessment of contemporary Canadianwriting, is the absence of a satisfactorydiscussion of these developments and theevidence of the new directions theysuggest.The essays in A Climate Charged arearranged in three sections, and, althoughPowe acknowledges that he has notattempted a systematic commentary andhas consciously avoided theoretical structures,the essays achieve a unity of toneand reflect a consistent set of criticalideals. Powe argues for a criticism whichis polemical and cosmopolitan, a criticismsensitive to language, capable of teachinghow to read "with passion and urgency"and expressed in arguments which are"concrete, urgent and humane." Hismodel critic is a man of good sense andgood taste concerned with assessing thestate of literature and literary criticismin Canada and with identifying writerswho have used language to provide "thebest strategies for understanding theworld." Moral perspectives, value judgements,an interested response to works ofliterature, and a sense of the close connectionbetween art and life are, forPowe, crucial aspects of the critic's function.In the opening section of A ClimateCharged Powe compares aspects of thework of Northrop Frye and MarshallMcLuhan. A former student of Mc-Luhan, Powe offers both a warm personalmemoir and a defense of McLuhan'sapproach to literature and ideas.He views McLuhan as an energeticiconoclast, a protean figure always "mobileand ambiguous," "a man of paradoxand analogy" with a cosmopolitan sensibilityand a flair for epigrams and aphorisms.McLuhan's influence on Powe isapparent throughout A Climate Charged,and Powe argues that McLuhan's "spasmodic-paradoxical-polemical"approachfrees readers to select an appropriate"evaluative process." Frye, however, isseen as "a dialectical-conceptual thinkerwho approaches the literary experiencethrough theory." Powe is uncomfortablewith Frye's "dispassionate systems" and,in particular, takes issue with Frye's rejectionof value judgements and hiselimination "of the moral dimension ofart." If McLuhan represents "a thinkerwho used concrete evidence, the word ofthe world," Frye, according to Powe,"begins with theory, the text in the void."Part Two of A Climate Charged attemptsan overview of the intellectualand literary atmosphere of Canada, andthe title essay surveys contemporary Canadianliterary criticism. Powe's descriptionof the Canadian literary milieu is toogeneralized and too familiar to be effective,but his appraisals of the criticalwork of such prominent figures as D. G.Jones, Eli Mandel, Margaret Atwood,Dennis Lee, and George Woodock areinteresting, and, although his remarksreflect no coherent theoretical base, theyemphasize Powe's dissatisfaction with"efforts to define, categorize, and createstructures and themes" into which worksof art can be slotted. His judgements ofindividual critics are frequently astute,candid, and balanced. For example, hepraises Woodcock's literate tone and eclecticism,but he questions Woodcock'stendency toward "uncritical enthusiasms."He singles out Dennis Lee's SavageFields and John Moss' Sex and Violencein the Canadian Novel as examplesof murky, convoluted and dull writingwhich lacks "the pressure of debate, thedrive of dissatisfaction" and "a sense ofgrit and guidance."The final section of A Climate Chargedconsists of brief but nonetheless widerangingand provocative reconsiderationsof several major contemporary writers:Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, MargaretLaurence, Margaret Atwood, RobertsonDavies, and Mordecai Richler. Theseessays, although inconsistent in the qua-160

BOOKS IN REVIEWlity and the degree of insight they offer,are generally well written, and many offertantalizing opportunities for debate anddisagreement. Powe argues that Laytonhas become trapped by his role as "theraging bull" of Canadian letters and suggeststhat his prose consists of "nothingmore than impudent filibusters and impatientlectures"; however, his lyrics are"the most indispensable of any Canadianpoet of his generation." The essay onLeonard Cohen, while superficial in itstreatment of complex and enigmaticworks such as Beautiful Losers and Deathof a Lady's Man, expresses a genuinesense of regret at what Powe regards asCohen's increasing solipsism and nihilismas well as "his preference for sentiment,sensation, and confusion over irony,clarity, and thought." Margaret Laurence'sfictional world is, in Powe's view,"often dull, dour, repetitive, and clumsilyconstructed," but he affirms the readabilityof her work and its "compassionatehonesty." Powe regards Robertson Daviesas a comic moralist who writes cunningpolemical essays in a polished and elegantstyle, and he describes Mordecai Richleras "an accountant of hypocrisies" with asuperb sense of "the nuances of streettalk"and the uses of satire. The harshestand perhaps most controversial remarksin A Climate Charged are reserved forMargaret Atwood. While acknowledgingher technical polish, Powe complains ofthe artificiality of her novels and takesaim at her obsession with "how to act"rather than "how to live." Powe goeswell beyond the familiar and often timidsuggestions of an absence of feeling inAtwood's writing, a quality of cold intellectuality,to argue that "no balance isattained in her books, no tension, nocontradiction, no otherness, no love, norecognition of wisdom or will."Although Powe does not appear to bewell-informed about the critical debateassociated with these authors, he is capableof careful analysis and detailed argument,and his approach reveals a breadthof reading, a freshness, and a determinationto arrive at a clear-sighted evaluationof their achievement. Summary andgeneralization inevitably limit the effectivenessof these essays, but Powe demonstratesa capacity for intelligent readingand original assessments. At times herelies too heavily on "aphoristic soundings"rather than sustained analysis but,if his conclusions are not always convincing,they are, nevertheless frequently unsettlingand thought-provoking.Although the critical climate Powe disparageshas already shown evidence ofconsiderable change, A Climate Chargedmakes a worthwhile contribution to thedebate surrounding the reassessment andrevitalization of Canadian literary criticism.Powe is capable of astute insights,and his style, which ranges from formalto informal, is engaging. Wit and energyas well as a sense of urgency are prominentfeatures of several of these essaysand candour as well as a good-humouredfairness characterizes his judgements.Unencumbered by specific critical systems,Powe provides a timely and promisingaffirmation of the process of findingnew directions for Canadiancriticism.THE WILDE SIDEliteraryDOUG DAYMONDFELIX PAÚL GRÈVE, Oscar Wilde. WilliamHoffer, n.p.WHEN THE FIRST EDITION of this essaywas still in press (in Berlin, with Goseand Tetzlaff, 1903) Felix Paul Grève wastried and imprisoned for fraud. He hadonly too successfully imitated Wilde'sextravagance, dandyism, and penchantfor scandal. Many of the comments161

BOOKS IN REVIEWGrève makes about Wilde in this essayseem to be a reflection on his own past,or a prophecy about his future. Wilde, atleast according to Grève, dropped all hisposes on his release from prison: Grèvewas, however uneasily, to maintain hisfor life. For example he claimed to Canadianfriends that he had met Wilde(Letters, p. 38, p. 420) ; in fact, as far asanyone can prove he did not. He did,however, meet André Gide; the encounteris recorded in the latter's "Portraitd'un allemagne." Gide spent the entiremeeting terrified that Grève, just releasedfrom prison, would ask him for money,and certain that he was in the presenceof a pathological liar. Interestingly,Gide's own 1902 account of Wilde, uponwhich Grève, in writing his, relied heavily,contains an account of a meetingbetween Gide and Wilde in Paris, whereWilde, entirely defeated, takes Gide asideand says confusedly, in a low voice "Look. . . you've got to know ... I'm absolutelywithout resources ..." Grève did not askGide for money, however, and fought hismountain of debt for five more years beforehe finally gave up the attempt tosurvive in Europe, faked suicide, and leftfor the new world. Any similarity betweenWilde and Grève did not extendto what is most important about themnow, their writings. Only Grove's first,adolescent book of verse showed anythingof Wilde as a literary influence, andStefan George was in fact a more directinfluence than Wilde. As a novelist,Greve/Grove was a naturalist, about asfar from a decadent as one can get.The biographical connections makethis book a fascinating artifact : as a workof criticism it is quite defective. Grèvewas under cruel pressure when he wroteit and it shows. The style is disjointedand little evidence is presented to supportits ideas. It did, however, presentlarge chunk's of Gide's essay ("InMemoriam," 1902, from André Gide'sPrétextes), quite properly acknowledged,to a German audience. And Grève sometimesuses the unanalytical reminiscencesof his two major sources, Gide's essay, anda self-promoting memoir by Robert HarboroughSherard, to make a critical orpsychological point. Sherard notes thatWilde scorned society yet strove for socialsuccess; Grève uses this paradox to revealmore of Wilde's contradictions, to arguethat Wilde "felt sin as sin, and yet committedit."This limited edition is clearly designedfor book collectors and scholars. Bookcollectors will certainly be pleased byRobert Bringhurst's elegant design.Scholars may not find the book's contentas pleasing. The translator, Barry Asker,notes correctly that the "essay seems hurriedlywritten and badly thought out,"and says that it was a difficult text totranslate, but then, somewhat disingenuously,leaves it to "Grove scholars todetermine the quality or significance ofGrove's comment on Wilde." Grovescholars will first want to judge thequality of the translation. According tothe publisher, the edition used for thetranslation is in the library of the Universityof Cologne; no original is known tobe in North America. Without the original,of course, the quality of the translationis impossible to judge. The presenceof an incorrect genitive in the translator'squotation of a German passage ("dieKnappheit des Ausführung" should surelybe "die Knappheit der Ausführung"),which he translates differently fromDouglas Spettigue, leads only to mild unease.Perhaps it might have been helpfulto have printed the German text as wellas the translation. But it is useful to havea translation of the essay simply to knowwhat it contains, even if what it containsis not likely to be significant to many. Tomake it available in Canada without theuse of a publication grant is laudable.And it gains added stature as part of a162

BOOKS IN REVIEWlarger project, by the F. P. Grève Seminarwhich will, one hopes, be able togather and translate that part of Grove'swork that is presently inaccessible to thescholars and critics most interested inhim.The Grève Seminar is an informalgroup of those interested in exploringGreve's European connections as well ashis Canadian ones. Future projects mayinclude translations of Greve's prefacesto his translations of authors such as WilliamPater and John Ruskin, and anauthoritative bibliography. Finally Groveis beginning to get the kind of criticalattention he longed for when he said inIt Needs to Be Said: "In all those countrieswhere literary criticism is a reality,its attitude toward the contemporaiyauthor who produces or tries to produceworks of literary art gives that authorwhat he need more than anything else... it gives him an ideal audience."HERSELF IN PLACEMARGERY FEEISABEL HUGGAN, The Elizabeth Stories. Oberon,$14.95·ALAN PEARSON, In a Bright Land. GoldenDog, $6.95.EACH OF THESE TWO NOVELS locates acharacter in a provocative setting andmakes that character aware of herself insuch a place. In Isabel Huggan's TheElizabeth Stories, the local spirit is amean, peevish thing, belonging to smalltownOntario. In Alan Pearson's In aBright Land, it is voluptuous and indulgent,soothing and teasing the expatriateswho enjoy life in a Spanish coastal town.Like Lives of Girls and Women, TheElizabeth Stories presents a series ofautonomous narrative episodes. Gatheredtogether, these stories acquire momentumand carry the narrator forward toadulthood.The stories are set in Garten, a townsomewhere near Guelph. Although wescarcely know what it looks like, Gartenis a powerful setting. Its systems ofhuman association make relationshipsmeagre, and its blunt sanctions on individualbehaviour weigh on the storyteller.These systems and sanctions make Gartena coercive regime. The town's greatestpower is its capacity to deny and distortpassions by exposing them — or threateningto do so. As Elizabeth's friend observesin the last story, "Garten was fullof people who might tell on you . . . youwere never really safe anywhere."As a little girl, Elizabeth is susceptibleto this kind of exposure. She brutalizes asquat, sickly companion, and her fiercedeed makes her notorious. Her sexualencounter with another nine-year-oldgets town-wide publicity: schoolyardgraffiti name and picture the incident,and the boy's family has to leave town.Passions have resounding consequences.Subsequent humiliations also draw attentionto Elizabeth. Rather bulky, andbig for her age, she is cast as à boy inGarten's annual ballet recital. On stage,her bulging shape and misery are shownto the whole town : "I am in a nightmareout of which I cannot wake." She tries toshatter the nightmare by declaring herself:As we skip forward to the footlights, I canfeel it, I can feel the pressure building.The summoning of the dark abyss. Theothers step back and I lean forward, on theedge of the stage. Into the darkness, driven."I'm really a girl," I shout, my voice horriblyhigh and tinny. The noise in the gymlulls and I shout again, as loud as I can,into the startled silence. "I'm really a girl,I'm really a girl!"But her self-assertion only leads to amore thorough disgrace.Time goes on and some of the pressure163

BOOKS IN REVIEWshifts off Elizabeth. Recrimination is stillthe liveliest action of those around her,but now she is liable to be punished forothers' crimes rather than her own, andfinally she is only a witness to the book'slast episode of passion and communityvengeance.At the end, Elizabeth has made plansto leave this place that denies dignityand consolation. Nothing in Garten canbe cherished. Unlike Lives and Girls andWomen, which is in many ways thisbook's fancier elder sister, The ElizabethStories shuts the door on a diy, damagingepoch, done with it. But the storiesare written with such subtle energy thatthis reader would be glad to hear thatHuggan has had to open the door toGarten again — if only to slam it shutonce more.Huggan's fictional Garten is made upof social liaisons — stunted and disablingones. It has little visual dimension. Pearson'sIn a Bright Land refers to anentirely different aesthetic, embracingvisual detail for its own sake. Pearsontirelessly catalogues the sense data thatreconstruct Spanish coastal places andexpatriate goings-on, and his skill indoing so is formidable.The narrative's protagonist, Claire(daughter of a British "industrialist,"former U.N. translator, beginning poet),is especially receptive to such sense data.She approves of artistic expression thatrescues sensation from temporariness andoblivion, and arranges its mementoes tocreate "syntactic" excitement. " Ί likesurfaces in general,' " she says. " 'Theyare the best part of life.' " "Depths" arelikely to disclose only cliches. So she isprepared to risk the appearance of incoherencethat can come about when lifeor art has no visible goal or argument.But this stance is more than aesthetic.It is also moral because it offers criteriafor conducting one's life, and because itgoverns Claire's response not just to164table-settings and doorways, but also toother human beings. Claire's lover, Jane,is lovable insofar as she fulfils an imageryat once artistic and commercial. Loungingin the sun, she is a "picture"; excitingdesire in Claire, she is like a "promotionaldisplay" for shoes, or she looks"as bright and fresh as if she'd juststepped, fragrantly, out of the latest issueof Vogue magazine."Stimulating sensations accumulate tobuild to heights of eroticism. But theseerotic heights, achieved without the contraintsof argument or abstraction, seemfinally a rather precarious place to takea stand. At first, the rationale seems adequate."To make one's life a work of art,that was the vital thing," Claire tells herself;"and any work of art for her meantthe fusion of pleasure and insight." Yetthese two aesthetic dimensions do notreadily fuse in the text. "Insight" is oftendisplaced, showing up in stiff, imposingconversation among the characters, or inClaire's "reflections." As for "pleasure"— it can be retrieved from documented"surfaces," but its further potential isunleashed by urges towards a brutal sexuality— aggressive and militaristic.For the most part, this brutish aggressionrears up only in Claire's fantasies.But the shape of the novel challenges theboundaries between private fantasy andpublic consensus. At first, these challengesseem innocent enough — playful tamperingwith the reader's expectations andwith the novelistic mechanisms by whichactualities are verified and distinguishedfrom fantasies. But the narrative's conclusionshows that a reprisal is not harmless,and overturns our notion that fantasyis what does not happen. Is eroticsadism a plan rather than a wish? Dothe gestures of authoritarian militarismspring not from political ambitions butfrom fantasies of bloodlust?Claire, whose consciousness is themeans by which these possibilities are

BOOKS IN REVIEWsuggested, is sometimes aware of "theVoid," and senses that her "minute byminute" way of life is somehow moribund.But she is finally not a very substantialcreation. And her author expressesso little scepticism about thebanality of her ideas and doings — parties,picnics, gallery openings — that thepotential excitement of his theme is overwhelmedby the ennui created by thiswoman's string of appointments with thepicturesque.Pearson's storyteller is like a conspiratorwho manipulates wish and actualityto disorient his victim. But this fine intrigueis wasted in a novel which offersas a protagonist a character who seemsto belong in a TV mini-series. UnlikeThe Elizabeth Stories, this story makesthe consequences of passion minor, despitetheir high sensation and aparent newsworthiness.JANET GILTROWTHE GAIETY OF DREADLEÓN ROOKE, Sing Me No Love Songs I'll SayYou No Prayers: Selected Stories. General,$22.95.THESE SIXTEEN STORIES have all beenpublished before in magazines or inRooke's earlier collections, but what ofthat? It is interesting to read them againin this new arrangement and to see howthese particular stories map out the configurationsof Rooke's fictional territory.That territory is defined not so much byrecognizable character types, though theyare his usual misfits who have, as he onceremarked, "a kind of kissing cousinsodour" clinging to them; nor is it definedby the persistent motifs of death andabsence and failure; it is found in thedefinition of spaces rather than places asRooke shows us how desperate imaginationsget to work on everyday reality,transforming it at least momentarily —something like the Yeatsian "gaiety transfiguringall that dread." What fascinatesus are the shifts whereby familiar thingsare made to look different as his storiesgive these alternative worlds reality.Though these worlds may well be illusory(practically all the stories have a strongvein of fantasy), while we are inside thestory we are caught, forgetting that theseinventions are as fragile and vulnerableas the characters who create them.Rooke's technical dexterity is obvious ashe ranges from conventional naturalismin the first story through satire to fantasy,fable, and fragmented postmodernist narratives,ending with a wryly comic revisionof English history. It is refreshingto find in such carefully crafted fictionsno hint of the usual modernist and postmodernistself-consciousness, no meditationon the necessity of fiction-making forexample; instead the narrators' voices aredissolved in the stories they tell. Whenjuxtapositions occur, they do not throwus outside the fictions but register thediscomfiture of the narrators at what cannotbe easily accommodated within theirimagined structures.Many of the stories are about absence,loss, and death: "Mama Tuddi DoneOver" and "The Birth Control King ofthe Upper Volta" are crucially dependenton deaths, while "Break and Enter,""In the Garden," and "Lady Godiva'sHorse" register loss more obliquely, likethe wife in "Conversations with Ruth:The Farmer's Tale" who "knows she haslost something she never knew she'dfound." Common motifs are treated verydifferently in different stories, and it isone of the charms of this collection to seethe number of variations on a themewhich Rooke can play. "Break andEnter" is an odd fragmented story toldby the wife of a couple who have squattedin Gore the Critick's house, always insearch "of livelihoods that inspire." Thewoman's mind teeters between delusions165

BOOKS IN REVIEWof grandeur and gilt, always on "the linebetween the fanciful and the true":"Serene. How tranquil here. The grandeur!How I will hate it — hate my husband,myself, this place ! — when Gorereturns." At the end Gore does returnbut he never comes back into his house:"We never hear from him" and thecouple are faced only with Gore's absence.Nothing makes sense to the womanbut sense is made for us, for the lastsection is headed "Original Sin," andsuddenly the allegory of exile from theGarden of Eden shimmers into view.Like Waiting for Godot this is anotherversion of spiritual dereliction in a worldwhere God is not dead but absent. "Inthe Garden" is another Eden story butwith a more sinister twist : however tenaciouslyRebecca clings to her cheerfulillusions, her enchanted garden is destroyedby a vision of that same gardenfenced about with barbed wire where anavenging God commands the slaughterof its inhabitants. Rooke's vision is nothumanist but religious, a fallen worldwhere evil and corruption flourish as inthe black Faustian fable of Mama Tuddi ;more often it is a wintry world hauntedby memories of loss where even thelamp's illumination is "a foul glow, makingus only more aware of the world'ssolitude. Of my own and hers" in "Conversationswith Ruth."This world is desperately in need ofmiracles, though these are few and unpredictable;but there are some. In "TheBirth Control King of the Upper Volta"Adlai the confirmed fantasist who "lostyesterday" till he remembered that it wasthe day of his mother's funeral, is vouchsafedhis miracle when the landlady'sretarded son suddenly speaks :I sat on, thinking: So many people in theworld depend on you. So many. Even ifyou're nothing — even if you're no one andyou don't know which way to turn orwhether turning is a thing you're capableof — even then they do.The title story ends with a love songafter thirty years of marriage: " Ί gothope in my heart so long as I knowthere's one loving couple left in theworld.' Then she smiled sadly." Thissame sadness is registered in "The Historyof England, Part Four" which endswith a Hoorah for decency, honour, andlove which is denied by history itself.Rooke's stories are about shabby ordespicable people permanently down ontheir luck. Showing us what is remarkableabout such people is one of his greatstrengths as he marks out the gaps betweenwhere they are inside their headsand where they actually are. If Joyce'sDubliners showed in its spare way thateven mean lives have their moments, thenRooke's often fantastic narratives gomuch further, showing that mean livesmay be effectively obscured much of thetime for those living them by their ownimaginations — a cheerful thought if itwere not for the way that dailinessscrunches up against these inventedworlds, threatening their collapse. Ofnecessity these stories are fragmentary,discontinuous, made of scenarios playedout inside rooms and inside heads, forwhich postmodernist fractured narrativesare the appropriate forms.There is good reason to talk aboutRooke's black humour and his nightmarishness,but it is also worth mentioninghis lyricism, for like Beckett and EdwardBond he registers those flashes of insightor idealism which glimmer in the messiestof lives. Dereliction may be the prevailinghuman condition but there are also momentsof grace, and Rooke's narrativesstrive to contain this incongruous mixture.Perhaps there is a clue to his enterprisein his essay called "Voices": "Canthe writer work such a double street? Canhe have it both ways? Why not?"CORAL ANN HOWELLS166

SKETCHES & JOKESALDEN NOWLAN, Will Ye Let theIn? Irwin, $8.95.MummersROBIN SKELTON, The Man Who Sang in HisSleep. Porcupine's Quill, $9.95.BOOKS IN REVIEWANY REVIEW OF ALDEN NOWLAN'S lastbook is bound to be a eulogy — and whynot? The twenty-one stories in Will YeLet the Mumers In? were collected andrevised by Nowlan himself before hisdeath, and they span nearly the whole ofhis writing life, from i960 to 1982. Thebest of them exhibit the humane visionthat Nowlan's readers have come to expect:the patient untangling of complexmotives and the compassion that extendsto persecutors as well as to their victims.This book provides a lot of quiet satisfactionbut few surprises. Nowlan's storieswere continuous with his poems, and wefind the familiar rural and small-towncharacters, alienated from each otherand from their own real feelings, yetunited in a solid community that resistsintrusion. Familiar too is the deliberatelyflat language and the refusal to allowmore than small insights.In his preface Robert Weaver describesthese stories as "a group of sketches."Some of them are too short and too reticentto give more than the most minimalof realizations, but when some of theseshort sketches are read in conjunctionwith the longer stories they resonateagainst them and gain in richness. Likehis poems, Nowlan's stories need to beread in groups.The first and last stories frame the collection."Fall of a City" is about how tobecome an artist in Nowlan's society. Aboy whose imaginative life has beenmocked by an insensitive uncle internalizeshis dream and continues it : "He haddestroyed his city because he could notdestroy his uncle . . . But he did not cryagain. For something very strange happenedto him: he became two persons. .. Every night after that, Teddy wentback to his Kingdom." The last story,"About Memorials," tells what an artistin this society must become, a monumentto other people's vanities and limitations :"Life had given these people so littlethat it was important to them to believethey were each of them a part — not ofme but a person to whom a plaque couldbe erected. Because I had made this possible,they loved me." Both stories areabout acceptance as well as rejection.Teddy recognizes that his uncle can beboth loving and insensitive at the sametime; the poet in "About Memorials"responds to the love beneath the limitationsof his family and native town.Within this frame three subjects standout. One is the need for a home and thedifficulty of recognizing one when youhave found it. The Christmas mummersof the title story appear to treat the academiccouple from Ontario with hostilityand contempt. Yet, as the leader of thetroupe tries to explain, this is their wayof showing acceptance. A second subjectis the sense of menace, how it grows inisolated communities like villages or hospitals,how sometimes people want tofeel menaced because it feeds their senseof self-importance. This theme reaches acomic climax in "Walking on the Ceiling."As Kevin O'Brien, the author'spersona from the earlier "fictional memoir"totters down the hospital corridor,walking for the first time since his nearfataloperation, he overhears an old andparalysed man voicing fears that he andKevin might suddenly start a fight:"God, that's a big bastard .. . I'd sure ashell hate to tangle with him." A thirdrecurring subject is ways in which peopleaccept death, an appropriate irony for afinal collection. All the subjects overlapand interact to give emotional and moraldepth to the simplicity of the individual167

BOOKS IN REVIEW168stories. It is a pity that there will neverbe any more of them.Since Robin Skelton has been writingfor nearly forty years, it sounds impertinentto welcome him as a new writer.But The Man Who Sang in His Sleepcontains his first short stories, and theyshow traits of a writer who is tacklingthe form for the first time. This is a collectionof comic ghost stories. They areall extended jokes, really, each one followingthe same anecdotal patter fromdeadpan opening, through elaborate,shaggy-dog details, to final punchline.Some of these jokes are verbal ("TheBride") ; most are practical, and like allpractical jokes their subject is embarrassmentand revenge. All are narrated inthe first person, ostensibly by differentcharacters, but the voice is always thesame — a storyteller's voice.This should be enough to indicate thatreaders who approach these stories fromtheir knowledge of Robin Skelton'spoetry will find themselves disoriented.Skelton's poems are confessional, verballydense, technically various, intensely serious.The Man Who Sang in His Sleep issimply a different kind of work: betterto look for another approach.Perhaps the stories in this book havemore in common with the collages inSkelton's House of Dreams and the occultinterests of Spellcraft than they dowith the author's poems. (The coverphotograph of the author as magus is acompanion to the one in House ofDreams.) Indeed, in "Sarah," the finalstory, the storyteller's house is transformedinto a three-dimensional collageas a whimsical ghost compels him toamass an endless collection of Victorianbric-a-brac. The sense of acting undercompulsion, very strong in Skelton's commentaryto House of Dreams, is an essentialfeature of these stories, but it alwaysresults in a comic release. Even the haplessnarrator in "Householder," ambushedby ghosts and imprisoned in acrystal ball, can end his story by saying,"It's a lot easier now that I'm more relaxed."These are clever, playful tales,but some readers may find that tenshaggy-dog stories need to be taken insmall doses.PETER HINCHGLIFFEARMAGEDDONw. p. KIN SELLA, The Thrill of the Grass.Penguin, $5.95.IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA at the time.I had been asked to review a collection ofshort stories about baseball or, more accurately,as the back cover blurb announced,about how the game of baseballcan be seen as a microcosm of the humancondition. So... what better time towrite such a review than during theplayoffs, listening daily to Dons and Alsand Howards — especially Howards —hyperbolizing on the mystical perfectionof the split-fingered curve and equatingReggie's October miracles with some ofNapoleon's and Alexander the Great'sbetter days.But then an unusual thing happened :the Chicago Cubs made the playoffs,defying all odds and, by doing so, joiningtogether legions of other perpetual losers.But was their success truly that surprising?W. P. Kinsella explains all. In thefirst story in his collection, "The LastPennant before Armageddon," an extremelyloyal fan strikes a bargain withGod: if the Cubs win the pennant, theworld will come to an end. And now, asthe story predicts, the Cubs had won thefirst two games, and there were disturbingrumblings in El Salvador and Nicaragua.Kinsella's The Thrill of the Grass includestwo types of baseball stories. Thefirst chronicles the tedious, dismal life ofthe eternal minor-leaguer, trapped in

BOOKS IN REVIEWmediocrity awaiting his big chance, theday when he'll make the "Bigs." Ultimatelythe stories are not really aboutbaseball, but about rural North America,small towns in Iowa and Alberta. Thecharacters in these stories have a disturbingsameness, misunderstood men tryingto sustain their dreams in a world ofbitter, unfeeling wives and girl friends,women who don't really understand thegame, who don't share the dream. It's amale world; women are seen as invaders.Even when the hero does make it to the"Bigs," the women don't understand. In"Barefoot and Pregnant in Des Moines,"for example, the hero, after desperatelytrying to preserve his relationship withhis wife, acknowledges at the end, bitterly,that the story's title describes wherewomen deserve to be.. . . It's now the last game of the playoffs.It's gone five games, just as Kinsellasaid it would, and the Cubs are battingin the fourth, safely ahead by three runs.And I'm suddently remembering thewords to various "Acts of Contrition," inspite of myself.Fortunately, one need not judge Kinsella'scollection on his "waiting for theBigs" stories, for the second type of talehe tells is far more engaging: baseballfantasies, a category that includes "TheLast Pennant before Armageddon." Inone story Kinsella tries to decide whetherto trade his life for that of a recentlydeparted Thurman Munson; in anotherhe joins the legendary 1951 Giants as apinch-hitter and resident literary critic.Magically and wonderfully, the Giantsbecome scholars, far more worried abouthow to interpret The Great Gatsby thanabout winning the pennant. BernardMalamud, in fact, is a frequent dugoutvisitor. Yet another tale chronicles thelives of twins who began playing catchin their mother's womb. But perhaps themost delightful of the stories is the titletale. It takes place during the 1981 baseballstrike, when a group of loyal baseballfans patiently re-sod a stadium recentlydoomed to artificial turf. Piece by piece,they bring in squares of sod and bringback the thrill of the grass. And here,baseball does truly become a microcosmof the human condition, and Kinsellaand his gang of true believers find amagnificent way to fight back at all thatis plastic and artificial and phoney in thisever-so-convenient age."Armageddon's" climax takes placewhen the Cub manager, who knows ofthe fateful bargain, must decide whetherto take out an obviously tiring pitcherand save the game, thus ending theworld. And here comes another, real-life,manager, Jim Frey: Sutcliffe, the Cubpitcher, is clearly tired and the Cubs'three-run lead is in jeopardy. And he'sgoing to leave him in. He knows, thankGod!It's a few hours later now. Sutcliffegave up the home-run and the Padres aresafely ahead. The Cubs return to theirproper role as gracious losers. And Ireturn to my review.I liked the book generally, though Idid find it a bit silly and unbelievable attimes.ESPRIT/EAU-DE-VIEKIERAN KEALYANTONINE MAILLET, Crache à Pic. Leméac,$14.95.As THE DIZZYING GYRATIONS of theweathercock above the world of Cracheà Pic signify, the wind is unfathomablein its ways. Whirling about, with neithercentre nor circumference, ever moving àl'improviste, this free-wheeling spiritteaches a strategy for survival to a peopledeprived of everything but its own soul.Maillet's scripture is a carousal of punningwith John 3:8, the Biblical text169

BOOKS IN REVIEWsuggestive of that strategy: "The windblows where it wills, and you hear thesound of it, but you do not know whenceit comes or whither it goes; so it is withevery one who is born to the Spirit."Set in the early 1930's, Crache à Picchronicles a set of interdictions and enactsa way of responding to these. Prohibitionand its analogues, the Deportationand the Expulsion from Eden, providethe focal points in Maillet's continuedhistory of an intrepid people's deprivation.Comment vivre hors du paradisaprès la chute? — that is the englobingquestion. And it is one especially poignantfor those with a lively memory of adiaspora. The answer Maillet's fictionseems to proffer is bafflingly simple, amatter of common sense; nourished onthe past, feed off present adversity. Suchstrategic counsel at once governs the lifeof her protagonist and generates the artwhich gives that life.The heroine of the tale is the last inthat line of titanic thaumaturges, theCrache à Pic. At 27, the long-leggedcommander of the schooner La Vachemarine has taken it for her task to setright the injustices worked by les grandson les petits. The capitalist/bootleggerDieudonné, a diminished Acadian AlCapone, is her immediate antagonist.Though an able gamester himself — likeCrache à Pic, he has learned "à tirerprofit des contrariétés" — Dieudonné isno match for the more cunning defenderof the oppressed: "à rusé, rusé et demi."Her daring coups de théâtre at sea andon land thwart his every strategem. Disguisecounters disguise, counterfeit cancelscounterfeit, code baffles code. Goliathis defeated with his own weapons, as itwere. "Une joueuse de tours," Crache àPic figures that imaginative race whichuses its inheritance to mystify the ignorantand those not so gifted for improvisation.If a Fredericton civil servantcannot distinguish a Robidoux from aRobichaud, a Comeau from a Cormier,if a parish priest cannot make out themoonshine behind the bricks, if federalagents cannot discriminate between theTatamagouche and the Mistouche, theMadagouiac and the Kouchibougouac, ifcustoms officers cannot tell genuine fromfalse priests or rubbing alcohol fromwhisky, and if a translator and a judgeare set aspin by a tour de force of logicand language, so much the better: thereis cover and power in mystery and mystification.When entered into with an unflinchingfaith in the self, in the wondrouspowers passed from generation togeneration, the game of illusion andreality rewards the skilful player withlaughter and continued life. "Seules survécurentles bêtes les plus rusées."It goes without saying that where inventivenessconfers power, the maker andteller of stories is king. And nothing lessthan the world's (re) creation is the missionof Crache à Pic. Even the Land ofCockaigne is possible to the fabulist whofashions in the spirit of Albert the Great(not the teacher of Aquinas here, but thesorcerer of the Liber de Alchima). "Unconteur en ce pays est plus qu'un rapporteurde menteries." As Maillet imaginesthe adventurous life of Crache à Pic,passing from Old Clovis to the narrator'sfather to the narrator to the reader ofCrache à Pic, the very distortions or liesattendant on that transmission serve asfurther confirmation of the imagination'sdominion as a life-giving power. Tellinglies and rebuilding the world are coincidententerprises.But there is a dark side to this celebrationof shrewd inventiveness or prevarication."Plus on a faim, plus on tape dupied"; or, as Montaigne once remarked,the more the disorientation, more thewriting. As in the Abbey of Thélème,singing, dancing, and storytelling inCrache à Pic testify to a crying hunger.Suffering and death may inspire a people170

BOOKS IN REVIEWwith a love of life, but they remain areality no wit or fabulation can circumvent.Even storytellers have inborn limitations.There is always the chance, too,that the fox will be outfoxed, that theweaver of tales will be ensnared in herown game. After all, the wind and thefabulist are not one and the same. Cracheà Pic, who believes she can remake theworld in six days, is so caught in a suddenshift of improvisation that she is powerlessto counter or sidestep: Dieudonné'sbullet, meant for another (a case of mistakenidentity), ends the life of her lover,Vif-Argent. The wind's high-spiritedtheatrics can sometimes reduce even thewiliest and most self-contained of playersto tears.It takes courage, then, to follow improvisationwherever it may lead. "Sefier à la mer, à son flair et à son intuition"— this is the resolve enacted in and byCrache à Pic. Everything is in the playing,in the living in accordance with thefaith which that resolve implies. "Trinque!"Maillet calls to her reader. We areexiles, but we are not without somefelicity. This wind-swept world is a stagefor comedy as well as tragedy, andlaughter is humanity's perennial tonic."Mi-nu-it, chré-tiens . . . C'est l'heu-reso-le . .. so-le . . . hie!" The spirit giveslife — and not only within the gates ofparadise.CAMILLE R. LA BOSSIEREINTERCOMPREHEN-SIONSPHILIPPE BARBAUD, Le choc des patois enNouvelle-France: essai sur l'histoire de lafrancisation au Canada. P.U.Q., n.p.PATRICK IMBERT, Roman Québécois contemporainet clichés. l'Univ. d'Ottawa, n.p.Le choc des patois en Nouvelle-Franceprésente une étude de la francisation duCanada français susceptible d'intéressernon seulement les linguistes mais aussitout lecteur curieux du fait français dansl'Amérique du Nord.La méthodologie phénoménologiquedont se sert l'auteur ne confond pas lalecture, grâce à un style précis, claire etsouple, mais rend plus intelligibles lesliens entre la langue, ou les langues, et lasociété dont elles font partie intégrale.Car, pour expliquer la francisation auCanada, Barbaud emploie ce qu'il appelleun "modèle comptable," modèlebasé sur le relevé des "faits," c'est-à-diredes statistiques. Si l'approche est alors"Scientifique" (Barbaud) et s'appuie surdes traditions plutôt européennes quenord-américaines, cet ouvrage n'est paspourtant uniquement un livre de spécialiste.Les non-initiés sont aussi capablesque tout linguiste, tout spécialiste den'importe quel aspect de la civilisationde l'Amérique française ou de la colonisationfrançaise de l'Amérique, d'yprendre plaisir et même d'apprendrebeaucoup sur le développement du françaisau Canada. Mais cet essai représenteaussi une étude approfondie à travers lalangue, les patois, c'est-à-dire, à traversla francisation du Canada, de toute uneculture sous tous ses aspects sociaux, religieux,culturels, aussi bien que linguistiques.Partant de la statistique PhilippeBarbaud discute le besoin de l'intercompréhensionqu'avaient ressenti les habitantsdu Canada, besoin plus immédiatvu la grandeur et l'isolation du pays,distingue entre langue orale et langueécrite ou lue, et en plus souligne la distinctionentre les sexes sur le plan linguistique.Cette dernière distinction représenteun facteur important et presquetotalement négligée dans les études précédantessur la langue française au Canada.Barbaud arrive enfin à sa thèse surl'importance de la femme et surtout dela mère au Canada, importance primairedans la francisation du pays.171

BOOKS IN REVIEWQuant aux études précédentes sur leCanada français Philippe Barbaud ne lesnéglige aucunement. Il en fait des analysesapprofondies relevant l'essentiel, lepositif dans ces ouvrages non seulementlinguistiques mais historiques, démographiqueset sociales pour en même tempsrejeter l'absurde, l'incompréhensible, lesrecherches mal faites. Et Barbaud nemanque pas de leur faire une critiqueassez sévère en constatant que malgréleur contribution ce qui leur manquec'est une vraie théorie de la francisation,théorie qui paraît avoir fait défait jusqu'àprésent et c'est ce défaut qu'il a commebut de corriger pour comme il dit "comblerun vide étrange."Avec sa bibliographie importante cetouvrage offre un outil de recherches essentiel,pour tous ceux qui s'intéressentau faut français au Canada. Il faut néanmoinsadmettre que nous aurions appréciéun index, surtout vu le grand nombrede faits importants mis à notre disposition.L'étude de Patrick Imbert malgré sontitre un peu décevant même trompeurreprésente une contribution importanteaux études sur le roman moderne. Quoiquele lecteur apprenne aussi sur leroman au Québec des trois dernières décennieset un peu moins sur le roman duCanada français du passé cet ouvrages'offre comme tout un analyse des tendancesromanesques actuels et occidentauxdu roman, de son style et de sonlangage. En plus c'est un analyse structurolinquistiquedont se sert l'auteurcomme base de sa méthodologie et quialors se relie à l'ouvrage précédent sur lafrancisation du Canada.Imbert constate qu'il existe deux tendancesde la culture québécoise: "D'unepart la rupture du mot cliché, d'autrepart l'amalgme total. Ces deux démarchesrévèlent une obsession face aunormatif et une volonté dynamique decréer de la part d'un individu qui affirmesa liberté face aux discours officielsen rejoignant un univers de la totalisation."Ce n'est pas portant le roman québécoisqui est le sujet du livre mais plutôtde cliché, le stéréotype. L'auteur admetne pouvoir ni ne vouloir tout dire sur lecliché qui est un sujet trop vaste pour cesquelques 160 pages. Voulant définir sestermes différents, Imbert passe trop detemps sur les définitions, sur l'histoire ducliché, du stéréotype et d'autres conceptslittéraires et linguistiques pour que cetouvrage soit un livre sur le roman québécois.Il faut admettre aussi que, enpartie à cause du jargon trop évidentdans les premiers chapitres, ce livre n'estpas facilement lisible. Les recherches qu'afaites Imbert sont approfondies et impressionnantes.Se référant aux practiciensde la Nouvelle critique à Barthes,Riffaterre, Kristeva, il n'omet pas nonplus les classiques ni les philosophes ancienset modernes, les Américaines telsque Watts et Laing, des écrivains tels queMemmi, Reboul pour aboutir à la philosophieorientale, à celle de Zen, de TaoTe Ching et de Mao.La thèse du livre enfin exprimée l'auteurfait remarquer que la littératurequébécoise jusqu'aux années récentes "nepouvait... se poser qu'en s'opposant,"et continue par dire que la littératuremoderne au Québec est alors "contestatairepar obligation" même si tous lesécrivains du Québec ne sont pas révolutionnairesdans tous les sens du mot. Laplupart tendent vers une réorganisationrévolutionnaire — réorganisation quis'exprime par leur emploi du cliché, dustéréotype, du paradoxe, de la grammaire,de la construction et de l'enchaînementmême du récit, sans oublierbien sûr le jouai. Ils emploient tous ceséléments pour les ridiculiser, pour lesrendre "carnavalesques." Se servant detous ces éléments du passé, de la tradition,ils réagissent contre, ils en créent172

BOOKS IN REVIEWdes jeux romanesques, jeux de langage etde style et jeux inter-, intra-, et paratextuels.C'est ce jeu qui représente pourImbert l'élément le plus subversif dans lalittérature québécoise, et comme la foliequi revient comme thème important danscette même littérature, ces jeux permettentde dépasser les stéréotypes de voirau delà des apparences. Même le rôle dulecteur et son narcissisme entrent en jeudans cet analyse aussi bien que toutes lesdifficultés comprises dans la recherched'identité, dans la situation paradoxaleindividu/société. La conclusion de cetteétude c'est que pour les écrivains québécoistels que Ducharme, Beaulieu, Brossard,etc. qui fournissent la majorité descitations dans cet ouvrage, la conventionou les conventions sont négatives et àêtre rejetées. Ce que cherche l'écrivainquébécois c'est plutôt la spontanéité,l'authenticité, un "renouveau de valeurset d'une écriture qui sont prises dans unsystème politique économique ou culturel"et c'est vers une philosophie plutôtorientale, une mode de pensée inspiréepar la philosophie Zen qui est le contrairedu christianisme tel qu'il a été vécuau Québec que se dirigent ces auteurs.Ce qu'ils ne veulent plus c'est le "combatavec l'ordre ancien ni tentative d'imposerun ordre nouveau, mais une transformationde la perception globale de l'hommeatteignant à une autre dimension."Livre alors intéressant quoiqu'un peudifficile de lecture. Important surtoutcomme étude de philosophie moderne, dela nouvelle écriture et de ces concepts decliché, de stéréotype, etc. De là à traiterexclusivement du roman québécoiscomme genre à part qui s'attaque à latradition sans parler du nouveau romanfrançais ou du roman moderne en généralnous semble un peu trop borné. Il n'estvraiment pas possible d'étudier le style etle langage du roman québécois moderne,ce que Patrick Imbert semble vouloirfaire, sans le mettre dans le contexte detoute une évolution et une révolutiondans la forme du roman occidental.SENTIMENT& SENSIBILITYVIRGINIA HARGER-GRINLINGDON BAILEY, Swim For Your Life. Oberon,$"•95·ANN COPELAND, Earthen Vessels. Oberon,$ΐΐ.95·DON BAILEY'S FIFTH BOOK, Swim ForYour Life, has eight titled chapters, shortstories laid out along a single plot line,which relate the crises in the family lifeof Wayne Maitland brought on by thedeath from cancer of his wife Wanda.Writing each chapter so that it can existas an independent story or be placed asan episode in a series has certain dangers.The information given to make each storyindependent may become repetitiouswhen the stories are brought together:we are told four times that the protagonistis 42 years old. Details which givepoint to the stories may by inconsistencyjar in the longer narrative : we are firsttold that the dead wife had been buried,then later Maitland tells a telephonecaller that she had been cremated. Themiddle class teacher of Film Studies, ifsuffering a mental crisis as a result of herdeath, should at least remember what hedid with her body. Incidentally cremationwas the fate of Wanda, wife ofWayne Maitland in the narrative whichlinks five of the eight stories in Bailey'sprevious book, Making Up. But theMaitland of those stories is a decadeyounger, of a lower class, and more infear of poverty and the police than ofennui. He had best be treated as a separatefigure, sharing only in the genericsimilarity of all Bailey's protagonists,neither rogue-heroes nor anti-heroes but173

BOOKS IN REVIEWmen with no sense of public role andlittle certainty about private value, haghauntedby memories, closed and warywith the doll-bitch compound calledwoman yet needing the tactile warmth ofone in order to reach his goal of privatepeace. Setting is usually the submarginal,whether on a farm or in downtownToronto. Often the stories are told in thefirst person, as are the last three in SwimFor Your Life, and always the protagonistis struggling to achieve a sense ofself-worth and continuity while threatenedby time, memory, and death. Themale must shop with care amidst promiscuouslyavailable commodities such as sexand alcohol if he is to maintain thatideal consumers' co-operative, the family.Swim For Your Life is a little more mellowthan its predecessors, the centralfigure not quite so near the wall, the relationshipsrather more sentimental. Thereis Bailey's magpie realism and a writingstyle which, although powerful whenpresenting the protagonist's morbid andwitty inner dialogues or turbulent flashbacks,in straight narrative reminds oneof Maitland's daughter Gloria musing onpigeons: "They did not fly in the fluidway other birds did. They flapped theirwings furiously and wobbled into space."Earthen Vessels is Ann Copeland'sthird collection of short stories. Her first,At Peace, related stories set in a teachingconvent. The Back Room, her secondcollection, with the exception of one storyabout a cold-hearted perfectionist priest,urbanely deals with secular life. The titlestory is filled with exuberant humour,and in "A Woman's Touch" Gopeland isable to illuminate the shape of livesgoverned by the familial past with thesure touch of Katherine Mansfield in"The Daughters of the Late Colonel."Of the eight stories in Earthen Vessels,two are excellent: "Second Spring," and"Will." In "Second Spring" the speaker,a rather bitter woman who has left herteaching order for secular life and marriage,relates the story of Sister David, anintelligent woman who, when seduced bya promiscuous Jesuit, leaves her orderand takes an apartment to be availableto him. The speaker's tepid lie to herhusband, concealing the reception of aletter from her ex-sister, suggests that forboth women the late second springbrought little freedom. Like Claire Martin,Ann Copeland can treat the effectsof convent life with disillusioned clarity.In "Second Spring" the speaker commentson her response to a sexual advancefrom the same Jesuit, "a worlddevoid of taboos loses some possibilitiesfor feeling." The same might be said forCopeland's imaginative energies, thatthey need institutional confinement tokeep from becoming dispersed. Fourstories of secular life are rather flat allegoriesof moral progression or regression.Two stories, about a university extensionEnglish class in a prison (unnamed butprobably Dorchester) and about Awards'Night at a Catholic girls' school, arelively brief vignettes. But in "Will," astory of a convict given parole to attenda nearby university, the central characterdoes hold the reader's interest, throughthe gradual revelation that the ravagesof conscience and institutional routinehave left his inner life too brittle to survivein freedom. Spiritually he is amongthe dead, so that the discussion of capitalpunishment occasioned by a prison breakwhich he overhears in a barber shop, andwhich precipitates his collapse, is finallyirrelevant.Ann Copeland is a writer with a civilizedsensibility and a sense of her craft.If the stories in Earthen Vessels do notdevelop in range or technique beyondher previous work, they show a continuitywith it and are a pleasure to read.TOM MIDDLEBRO174

BOOKS IN REVIEWDIFFERENT WORLDSA Fair Shake: Autobiographical Essays byMcGill Women, ed. by Margaret Gillett &Kay Sibbald. Eden Press, $16.95.THIS IS A PUZZLING BOOK, havingvisible raison d'être or claim to academicseriousness. It is designed to commemoratethe admission of the first womenstudents in 1884; the inevitable comparisonwith M. C. Bradbrook's That InfidelPlace (1969), which celebrated the centenaryof Girton College, Cambridge,does not favour this volume. Most of thecontributors are graduates of McGill, therest present or former members of itsfaculty. Inevitably, the writers live inUpper or Lower Canada and tend, exceptperhaps for the academics, to beprominent only there. The list includessome obvious choices, such as JessieBoyd-Scriver, one of the first four womenadmitted to Medicine. Nevertheless, thereader searches the prefatory material invain for a statement of the principle ofselection that might explain some surprisingomissions or, for that matter, the inclusionof two former directors ofWomen's Athletics. Instead of any explanation,however, one finds in the introductionsuch material as the followingeffusion on the contributors :Amid the diversity, we discovered muchcommonality. Our authors shared characteristicssuch as love of reading, love oflearning, and even — unfashionable thoughit may be — love of formal schooling. Mostof them like travel, most appreciate thegreat outdoors, some are keen on sports,more than two-thirds are married and almostall of these have children, some havebeen divorced. Some careers overlappedpredictably — Gladys Bean took over fromIveagh Munro as Director of Physical Educationand Athletics for Women: othersemerged unexpectedly — Isabel Dobell didnot really plan to follow Alice Johannsenin the McGord Museum; still others intersectedin strange places — both MargaretGillett and Melek Akben spent some timenoat the Haile Selassie I University in AddisAbaba, Ethiopia, before coming to McGill;and there is at least one case of curiouscoincidence — Kay Sibbald and ElizabethRowlinson were born on the same street inEngland and both became Associate Deansof Students at McGill.The defect of this book, in comparisonwith That Infidel Place, is that it is notof interest to the general reader. A few ofthe essays are genuinely informative andinteresting, especially those of Dr. Boyd-Scriver and Dr. Swales, the EmeritusCurator of the Herbarium, for they grewup almost in a different world (bearingin mind Virginia Woolf s assertion thathuman nature changed at the end of1910). In the essays of the younger women,the 1950's graduate will find somebits of information about changes in theuniversity. However, most of the essaysare frankly self-indulgent, so that if theirauthors do not have household names,the readers wonder impatiently why thewriter thought anyone would care.Admittedly, self-indulgence is an inherentliability in the autobiographicalessay. As the editors themselves observe,a writer "is not quite comfortable abouthow much to say, how modest to be, howfrank." That is generally true of anyautobiographical essay. Usually, however,the occasion provides direction andboundaries; the publication of one'sbook, an appearance on stage, a milestonein one's career will give point to anaccompanying autobiography and dictatewhat it contains. So here, Dr. Scriverknows that readers are interested in whatit was like to be born in 1894, to enterthe university in 1911, to lean, a "partialB.Sc." student, against the door of theFaculty of Medicine until it opened toadmit four women into the second yearof the M.D. programme. Other contributorslack that certainty about what willinterest the reader.When one goes to a photographer, oneknows the purpose, one has in mind the175

BOOKS IN REVIEWrecipients of one's portrait. If, however,one is asked to sit because one's face hascharacter, one may well simper selfconsciously.This has been the fate ofseveral contributors. Instructed to setdown something that would allow "individualvoices of this century [to] be heardin the next," they are reduced tosimpering.Presumably, the purpose of this bookis to add to the material available tostudents in women's studies, to expandthe amount of female utterance in print.If quantity alone is desired, it may beunfair to cavil at the triviality of thisaddition to its editors' curricula vitae.However, teachers and researchers oftencomplain that their publications in women'sstudies are undervalued. Unfortunately,women's studies will not gainrecognition as a serious academic subjectas long as anything in the field can findits way into print.RUBY NEMSERAFFECTIONATE LIFECLARA THOMAS and JOHN LENNOX, WilliamArthur Deacon: A Literary Life. Univ. ofToronto Press, $24.95.WHEN WILLIAM ARTHUR DEACON recalledhis 1922 move from Dauphin, Manitoba,where he had practised law, to Toronto,where he became literary editor of SaturdayNight, he did so with a pleased consciousnessthat he had made Canadianliterary history by becoming the nation's"first full-time, professional book reviewer."Professors Thomas and Lennoxnote that from the beginning of this newcareer he thought of his literary life asmaterial for the memoirs in which hewould sum up his distinctive place, andthat by his retirement he had amassedmore than 18,000 pieces of correspondence,clippings, records of literary societies,and manuscripts to serve as both176mnemonic aid and documentation. Failinghealth and the sheer volume of thematerial prevented his realizing this finalproject; now Clara Thomas and JohnLennox have undertaken a more scholarlyand biographical version of what heenvisoned.The Deacon of this "Life" is followedthrough his career as book reviewer andliterary editor at Saturday Night (to1928), as syndicated book review columnist,as literary editor of the Mail andEmpire (1928-1936) and of the newGlobe and Mail where he stayed until hisretirement in 1960. His biographers quoteat length from his reviews and correspondencewith writers. They also supplementthe account of the newspapercareer with a series of chapters titled "ACommunity of Letters" about friendshipswith writers and his encouragement ofthem, a chapter on his work for TheCanadian Authors' Association, andchapters on his essays for Canadian andAmerican literary journals and on hisbooks.The strength of this biography is itscareful and extensive presentation of informationculled from its subject's papers.Deacon emerges from behind all thisdetail as a man of strong enthusiasmsand strong prejudices, both informed bya prophetic and didactic strain whichgained strength as he aged, both madeacceptable to his readers by a lively witwhich unfortunately lost much of itsflexibility as he aged. The enthusiasmswere for the economic, political, andliterary independence of Canada. Nearlyeverything he wrote, every organizationhe supported, aimed at gaining Canadianreaders for Canadian books: he sought,and gave personal and public support to,Canadian writers; he found publishersfor them; he encouraged readers to readand teachers to teach them. The prejudiceswere against imitation of non-Canadian cultural or economic models,

BOOKS IN REVIEWagainst academic criticism, against writingwhich used Canadian detail inaccurately,against "Modernism," beginningwith Imagism.His enthusiasms and his energy were,above all else, timely. Embarking on acareer not only new to him but new toCanada, he did much to make Canadianstake Canadian books and reviewing seriously.His early (and continuing) achievementwas the successful promotion ofCanadian literature; his own writingnow seems ephemeral and only his parodiereview of Arthur Stringer's EmptyHands still speaks to us. The achievementsof his later years — including hiswork in The Canadian Authors' Associationfor tax regulations appropriate towriters and for standardization of theircontracts, his part in establishing theGovernor General's Award for Literature,his encouragement of Gabrielle Roy— are far from negligible. Yet it is by hisliterary journalism from the 1920's thathe really changed the practise and thereception of Canadian book reviewing.The style, the format, the interests, of hiscolumns had been set by the early 30'sand remained comparatively static, whilehis own predilections made him increasinglydefensive about much contemporarywriting, particularly poetry.Is such a subject worth the 268 pagesof this biography? In the context of aculture in which every rock star, everyhockey player, becomes the subject of anadulatory hodgepodge of gossip and advertisinghype masquerading as biography,we obviously must be grateful for alegitimate biography such as this one, inwhich a serious attempt is made to retrievea significant moment of our literarypast. But if, from a more scholarlypoint of view, we ask whether a biographyis the best posible use that couldbe made of the Deacon papers, there isroom for some doubt. For WilliamArthur Deacon reads like a biographywhich has been compelled from itsauthors by the academic opportunity thesheer volume of the archival materialoffers. Certainly, detail after detail willbe relevant to scholars examining Canada'sliterary journalism between theWars, and to those retrieving what wemight term the sociology of the Canadianwriting scene. But whatever compellingnessDeacon has in biography belongs tothe first ten or twelve years of his literarylife, the period in the 1920's and early30's during which his initial decisivenessand energy led him to a career new toCanadian letters and during which heshaped a new literary journalism. Beyondthose years, the personality offers littlerevelation or information; the details ofthe literary life would be as adequatelyrepresented in some other form of literaryhistory. For finally it is literary historians,searching out the history of literary journalism,of publishing, of literary awardsin Canada, of authors' associations, ofreviewing practices, who will use thisvolume. On the evidence it offers, I suspectthat the riches of the Deacon papersdemanded a history of Canadian literaryjournalism much more than they demandeda biography of William ArthurDeacon.However, Thomas and Lennox havewritten a biography: a biography drawingon so much archival material is noslight achievement, and it is in terms ofthe conventions and demands of thatmost difficult of all genres that we readthe results of their research. They haveobviously thought about the genre's conventions;whether or not they have cometo any conclusions is less apparent. Theytry to counteract the predictability ofchronological organization, for example,by dividing Deacon's career into threephases (the 20's, the 30's, and the 40's toretirement) and each phase into threeaspects of his professional life (his reviewingand literary editing, his literary177

BOOKS IN REVIEWfriendships, his writing in the early yearsand work for authors' societies in hislater life). The decision lets them focustheir discussions but it also involves acertain amount of repetition.Their uncertain attempt to move in anumber of directions is summarized intheir sub-title: "A Canadian LiteraryLife." "Canadian" is of course clearenough. But even this limitation can leadto lacunae that keep troubling a reader;when, for example, Deacon goes to NewYork in 1919 to be "in the very centre ofthe American literary scene," we findthat he returns, after half a paragraphabout his health, to Winnipeg, theAmerican literary scene disposed of withthe observation that "Though the tripwas a fiasco as far as literary ambitionswere concerned, his determination to becomea writer remained constant andtotal." We, however, have never beentold anything more precise about his ambitionsfor the New York trip than thereference to the "centre of the Americanliterary scene" would suggest; we do notknow whom he tried to meet, whom hedid meet and with what response, whatenabled him to persist in his determinationdespite an apparent setback. It maybe that the eye resolutely fixed on the"Canadian" is responsible for this sketchiness,but it may be too that a "LiteraryLife" gets its authors into difficulties, invokingas it does that sub-genre of biographywhich restricts itself to the professionallife of its subject. Professionaldecisions can seldom be explained byrecourse only to professional circumstancesand motivations and those ofDeacon are no exception. Thomas andLennox, for example, cite the importanceof theosophical beliefs to his convictionthat he should abandon law for literaryjournalism, thereby moving from theprofessional to the personal, but they donot go deeply enough into the personal(or into theosophy) to tell us why Deaconshould have wished to replace Methodismwith theosophy or to trace the influenceof this doctrine on his writing.Later, hypothesizing that My Vision ofCanada is understandable in the contextof Deacon's theosophical beliefs, theauthors draw but do not develop ananalogy with the influence of theosophyon Irish nationalism and tell us that a"they" without antecedent believed inCanada as a New Athens exemplifyingspiritual perfection. This is the sort ofanalysis that needs support: who arethese "they"? — no such belief, for example,is expressed in the writings ofMme. Blavatsky. Other examples of theprofessional life's refusal to remain distinctfrom the personal life encompassdecisions Deacon made, the biographersimply, with an eye to his mother, wife,and children: the brevity of their allusionsto these figures in the interests ofrestricting the account to the "literary"makes some of those decisions seem scantilymotivated.From a narrative point of view, perhapsthe most satisfying biographies arethose in which we can identify with thebiographer as well as the subject, inwhich we see the biographer strugglingto come to terms with the subject, toempathize, perhaps even to sympathizewith him, then to move through andbeyond that emotion to a more objectiveunderstanding which embraces it. ProfessorsThomas and Lennox achievesomething of this in a muted way. Theiraffection for Deacon is frequently in evidence,as is their conviction (and demonstration)of his importance to a phase ofCanadian literary life, yet it does notkeep them from noting the limitations ofhis own books and the conservatism of hisliterary interests; affection occasionallybecomes affectionate irony and Deacon'sunwilling and ungracious retirement andthe senility of his last years, while ascharitable a presentation as possible is178

BOOKS IN REVIEWgranted them, are not glossed over. Butthere is little of the drama here by whichthe biographer and, through him, thereader feel the emotions of the subject.We can, for example, identify Deacon'senthusiasms in this account, but little ofthe excitement, perhaps even the sentimentof power, which surely accompaniedand may even have motivated his "discoveries,"comes through. Nor is thereany of that drama in which the biographerstruggles to come to terms withthe subject and to shape a coherent andcompelling life from the evidence available.Instead we find everywhere thetrace of the researchers' index cards, ofdata unformed into that dynamic coherencethat we think of as a "life." PerhapsDeacon himself was not a man sufficientlycompelling in the magnitude of hisachievement, in the depth or complexityof his character, or in the drama of hislife to make a compelling biography; atany rate he does not become so inThomas' and Lennox's affectionate, butlimited, relation to him.He is made even less compelling by thebanalities of their style. The sheer accumulationof data often overwhelms thereader's sense of narrative development.But then there is no narrative developmentbeyond that predictably providedby the passing years; the "Community ofLetters" chapters, for example, are largelystructured as a list of Deacon's literaryacquaintances. Thomas and Lennox alsowrite with an evenness of tone that deniesdrama to any circumstance and recordslarge and small events with equal blandness.And they cannot recognize clichéseven when they are embracing them:"the path to the realization of his ambitionseemed a smooth, broad highway";Zena Cherry could have written theacount of the banquet at which Deaconwas installed as president of the CanadianAuthors' Association, "a galaxy of themost distinguished authors in the land[the literary social register follows] . . .mingled with the hundred-odd memberswho were present"; Saturday Night advertisingin the 2o's (anticipating theslick mag of the 70's?) reflected "thecultural conflicts inherent in the massivelife-style changes that were rapidly takingplace."Much in William Arthur Deacon willbe useful to Canadian literary historiansfor Thomas and Lennox have done us aservice in their extensive quotations fromthe Deacon papers, and in the informationthey have provided us about theliterary journalism of the period. Buttheir work is notes toward a biographyrather than a successful example of thegenre; it gives us only research data,supplemented by sketchy accounts of motivesand brief literary judgements, unskilfullytacked each to each in a semblanceof narrative. William Arthur Deaconis seldom touched by the shapingpower that makes the great biographiesworks of art, nor by the best biographers'capacity for subtle discrimination andprofound discoveries about their characters,a capacity that can make their subjectsas well as their works great.BAD BATCHSHIRLEY NEU MANERIC NicoL, Canadide: A Patriotic Satire.Macmillan, $16.95.KENNETH DYBA, The Long (And Glorious)¡Weekend of Raymond (And Bingo) Oblongh.November House, $8.95.OPENING A NEW BOOK or a new bottle ofwine should be attended by anticipation,and ritual, followed by the pleasure offulfilment. If neither reaches a standardof taste or interest, the consumer presumablyhas the option of sending themback, to oblivion. Neither of these booksdeserves the attention of a review. Neitheris worth buying, borrowing, or steal-179

BOOKS IN REVIEWing. Or reading. That should make anend on't. Dr. Johnson had the luxury ofblunt and honest dismissal, but modernreaders demand an explanation for thatdismissal. Besides, such statements generallystimulate rather than dampen interest;read on at your leisure for therationale, and for some judicious quotations.Opening Eric Nicol's Canadide putsoff the palate: " 'MAY THE BLUEBIRD OFHAPPINESS NEST IN YOUR PUBIC HAIR,'murmured Mavis. . . she fell asleep.Mavis had come eight times (six confirmed,two probable). That I had satisfiedher was evident: her snoring had arich vibrato that I recognized as plenitude."Nicol's opener won no annualworst opening sentence prize, but itmight at least have merited an honourablemention. That "honourable mention"sentence begins the wanderings ofMartin Richard [or is it Richard Martin?],"a name both anglophone andfrancophone," his "single most importantqualification for a career in the publicservice of Canada." From Richard's [oris it Martin's?] being bribed into theCivil Service, the novel follows themuddled and silly path of his specialservicing of the bureaucracy and of severalwomen. Eventually tiring of his rolein the SS (Special Services) MartinRichard finally pulls out of the Civil Servicewhen he beshits himself in a fortuitousthunderstorm on Vancouver's WreckBeach while helping Mary plant sandgrass to prevent the insidious erosion ofthe sandstone cliffs: "Fortunately it wasa small, integrated turd, and I was ableto shake it down my pant leg, into theplanting hole, while my companion resumeddigging. It was the closest I haveever come to a religious experience." It'sbad — cover to cover. Mary and Martinlive together from that day forth tendinggardens and doing good. This book ismeant, seemingly, to be ironic, satiric,and funny. But it is only tired. The satirenever comes off; you may lift the lid atyour own discretion.Bad as Nicol's book might be, KennethDyba's The Long (And Glorious) Weekendof Raymond (And Bingo) Oblonghis even worse. The technical term forover-fermented wine has to be "putrid,"and over-fermenting occurs when thebubbling, swirling, fermenting mustbreaks down and decomposes into noisomestuff with rising fumes. This bookis filthy fantasy. Raymond is a 340-poundmamma's boy who at the age of 44 finallygoes downtown on the long Thanksgivingweekend with his 17-year-old dog Bingoin search of adventure and his lost love,Alberta Rose. He discovers a "bizarrecarnival of decadent debauchery" — agracious understatement taken from theblurb on the back cover. Raymond meetsMr. Alice, "a finely-feathered transvestite"who introduces Raymond to thesado-masochistic machinations of thebutch, the geek, the bulldog, the egyptian,and the power struggle between thevotaries of emasculated Ike Big Balls,owner of the Paradise Gardens nightclub,and his arch-rival, the emasculator,Princess Winter and her Butch Brigadefrom the Winter Palace. What follows istormenting mayhem out of the gayfantasticworld of S & M, complete withlurid descriptions of grubby, greedy, engorging,gagging gobbling, topped offwith a variety of demented buggeries andbutcheries climaxed by the gang-rape ofAlberta Rose.To be fair, Dyba's language has energy,but it is the energy of the open sewer,dropping downhill. Across the back coverof this book are printed three colourcodedwords, apparently quoted fromother critical reviews: "Erotic ..." "Disgusting..." "Unforgettable..." Neithererotic nor unforgettable is criticallyaccurate. Well, one out of three ain'tmuch, even if that one is right-on-dead-180

BOOKS IN REVIEWcentre. Between the boredom of Canadideand the buggery of Oblongh, thereader faces consuming a bad batch ofCan. Lit. Here lies penury not plenitude.KRISTOFFER F. PAULSONSYMPATHETIC MAGICFLORENGE VALE, The Amorous Unicorn. Porcupine'sQuill, $7.95.PENNY KEMP, Binding Twine. Ragweed, $8.95.ANN FOX CHANDONNET, Auras, Tendrils:Poems of the North. Penumbra, $7.95.MARIANNE BLUGER, On Nights Like This.Brick Books, $4.50.The Amorous Unicorn, by artist FlorenceVale, is a children's book for adults. Valeapproaches her subject — erotic adultlife — with a child's abandon. The bookis a grand romp through the life of thesenses, full of pollen-laden bees, blackbutterflies, and sweaty thighs. Limericksabound : "There was a young lady namedFlory / who frightened a moose in aquarry." Several pieces have an epigrammaticturn :Tragedyisloving a manwho could drive Oscar Wilde.Equally as witty (and erotic) are Vale'spen and ink drawings throughout thecollection. In the cover picture, "AmorousUnicorn," a unicorn sports a distinctlyphallic horn.The unicorn had a headacheand was seen rustling his hornin the oak leaves.Soft perfume and pink cloudsfloated all around.It is an orgiastic book, the senses "buffettedby one ecstasy after another," anda book of magical regeneration:Golden water from asecret wellswelling in the earliest dawnspilling nectar only meant for butterfliesand lucky me revivingwith the drops.The Dionysian dimension is delicatelytempered by moments of mature sadness,such as in "Leaves Hung Down," anunderstated lament for a dead child.Vale's poems scorn laboured interpretation;her craft is open, generous, andconfident — a gift to the reader.In 1980, poet Penny Kemp lost custodyof her children. Binding Twine is herrecord of that loss: "testimony the judgedid not, could not hear." According toher preface, Kemp uses poetry as "a kindof sympathetic magic" to review painand win "a gift of awareness." Thismagic, her last strength, sometimes takesthe form of incantation, words as witchcraft.She asked for my children.She asked for their things.She asked for the tableon which sat my typewriter.She got the children.She got their things.She got more writingthan she could have dreamt up.I kept the table andthe typewriter.Wary of "a lurking desire for vengeance,a stridency," Kemp's record of her journeythrough stages of naïveté, shock,confusion, and hatred transcends vindictiveness.Her simplicity, at its best, is persuasive:an agony not to be denied orignored. Often the style is prosaic butcharged in its banality, as when shenaïvely first sends her son to stay with hisfather :hi and goodbyeand see you around.At least now his fathersees him. Isn't thatwhat I asked for?Puns and wordplay gain Kemp a distance181

BOOKS IN REVIEWof pained laughter; she hears her childrencalled "unkempt, my name / undone."Admittedly, the self-consciouswordgames are sometimes distracting, butthere is power her, power rooted in adesperate faith thatonly thought might last:the transfer of a mindonto the page. Shadowson Hiroshima walls.And after the grief and desolation, thepages lead to a final affirmation :We are jars that lovehas filled emptiedand fills again.For the Alaskan poet Ann Fox Chandonnet,spiritual clarity is the reward ofmetaphorical imagining. In Auras, Tendrils:Poems of the North, she strives tobreak through separations, to see X as Y,thus glimpsing divine unities. Her poemsare about critical moments of passing betweenrealities. When we are invited to"sing the seasons," we realize that we arenever in one season without sliding intothe next. Death merges with life as themummy-wrappings of winter are indistinguishablefrom the flesh of spring, andbone meal for tulips smells of Dachau.Ghandonnet's northern landscape is inthe Romantic tradition — an other-thanselfwe penetrate in order to enter ourselves.Our opposites are as necessary asthe white space around a poem: "Whattouches us most: / the word, the white,the contrast?" Unifying polarities, findingand crossing edges, we "submergethe temporal," "an act of faith andmagic." A sacred post in a native villagebecomes a wonderful, magic link betweenheaven and earth, while masked dancerswonder if this is "the womb of creation" :"Did the stream of sunlight / become achain of copper arrows... ?"We grip the mask between our teeth anddance,try to become other than men,try to swallow Raven-spruce-needle,become great with spirit.Auras, Tendrils is dense with details oflandscape and native culture, detailsgiven sharp-edged purpose by the poet'sintense commitment to a vision of radicalanalogy.Marianne Bluger's On Nights LikeThis invites us to the "edge" :Right there at the edge of imaginingis what happens in the end.You know it as you blench, your heartknocksand the pieces lockin the only picture possible.On the other side of the edge is the unconscious,symbolized most often by thesometimes terrifying night :He of yellow jackal eyeswith snout smearedand lips curled.At other times, night is a plush jewelbox pried open with a "ruby flash." Inany case, if we hush our chatter, thedark unconscious has a song for us :Shh, be quiet nowlet them come out —the frightened creaturesscuttled under the rocks.We are promised discoveries :as with that Greek who marvelledat the stars and so doing fellinto a pond, a night, an end,his own especial seaweird with reality.Bluger celebrates a certain sensibility, buther characteristic vehicles — "the night,""the sea," "the wind," "spring," "longing"— carry her close to the clichédmoods of limp, "sensitive" verse. Thereis a kind of narcotic pleasure in readingthese poems with their easy flow ofimages, but one begins to find somethingunhealthily passive about that sensibility.Perhaps it is only that after the tough,assertive energies of Vale, Kemp, and182

BOOKS IN REVIEWChandonnet, we can hardly believe apoet who tells us, "It comes for us all /as we wait where we are."POETASTINGBRUCE PIRIESTEVEN SMITH, Ritual Murders, Turnstone,$6.00.FRANK DAVEY, Edward and Patricia. CoachHouse, $6.50.ROGER NASH, Settlement in a School ofWhales. Fiddlehead, $6.00.ST. jONN SIMMONS, Wilderness Images.Fiddlehead, $6.00.STEVE MCCAFFERY, Knowledge Never Knew.Véhicule, n.p.LOUIS DUDEK, Ideas for Poetry. Véhicule, n.p.THERE IS MORE TO POETRY than meetsthe ear, even the mind's ear: some versemust be not only composed and presentedbut also taken and interpretedorally, transforming the conventionaloral-aural relationship of poet and audienceinto a considerably more sensuousoral-oral relationship. To the sextet ofpoets and poetic experimenters and theoristshere under review, there wouldseem to be more to poetry that meets themouth, especially the mind's mouth ofingested verse.The mouth as a womb-wound symbolof sexuality and violence abounds inSteven Smith's cryptic-elliptic RitualMurders, a narrative poem sequence disguisedas a prose narrative of interrelatedstories, their narrator a kind ofalphabetical serial killer poisoning hisreader by feeding him ten vignettes ofbrutal murder, both real and imagined.The "ritual" element of the murdersinvolves proscribed forms of codifiedconduct, in particular sadistically methodicalrapes, seductions, and otherultraviolent personal violations, all ofthem climaxing in metaphysical deathmade physical once again. But the narratorhimself is a ritualist, his at oncepoetically and journalistically spare, detacheddescriptions of the most horrendouscrimes assuming a kind of ceremoniousnessin their very effort to outrage.This searing-cering language has an observationaldetachment seemingly at oddswith the participatory violence of thesubject matter. "Subway," for instance,concerns a man at a desolate subway station,waiting for a late-night train to takehim home to his fifty-sixth birthday celebrations.Without ever leaving his spoton the platform or his maculate imagination,he witnesses three tough young girlswho break out into fierce fighting andwho, when he intervenes, begin to attackhim with equal violence :one jumps for his legs, the other pushes athis chest, another throws herself at him.shocked he seems to fall backward forever,he crashes onto the grey tile, then overonto the concrete, his head hits last, stopsJais voice, he pushes back, tries to free himselffrom this choke of bodies, handsscratching at him. knees on him. boots digginginto his ribs, he kicks out. the subiwayrumbles in his ears, one falls aside,stands, black leather draws back, flashes asit moves to his face.In due course this attack turns literallyrapacious, the man responding to hisassailants by himself seizing the sexualopportunity, their engagement so helplesslyecstatic that only the "crush" ofthe screaming train can effect their fourfoldconsummation. That the bystandershould simply imagine this violence,rather than committing it, seems inconsequentialto Steven Smith, who is intenton documenting our propensity towardssexual violence and violent sexuality thatare ultimately murderous. But his photographicdescriptions and crude languageare at their worst merely pornographic,as if life were a sequence of acts of prostitutionand the poet and the readers183

BOOKS IN REVIEWmere voyeurs. Seldom has ritual been sounrighteously self-righteous.Lascivious in another direction, FrankDavey articulates the benign amours ofthe eponymous Edward and Patricia,comic characters whose romance andmarriage provide them with a forum fortwo decades of sexual expression. Althoughsome of their bedroom antics andacrobatics are farcically amusing, followingthe characters through thirty-ninevariations on the same theme is no morethan doing one's conjugal critical duty.Here the I-love-you-so-much-that-Icould-eat-youtheme assumes psychosexualassociations and casts the reader in avoyeuristic role, taking it all in, followingEdward and Patricia from their first datein high school, when "with her back /against the storm door, she would embracehim" and significant moments laterhe "would sag against the porch rail / &marvel at how the door never opened," tohis realization after years of variationson-a-thememarriage that he has quitesimply been seduced, that he has beenliterally had. His ultimate love note toPatricia, signalling his indefinite departure,is a curt "You ARE a whore" lipstuckon the mirror and punctuated withthe appropriate expletive greeting, suggestingthe consummation of their sterilerelationship and the reward of a kind ofautoerotic isolation that each of themdeserves.As we follow Edward and Patriciathrough their orgastic and orgiastic strugglefor synchrony, we recognize many ofthe sexual clichés of the past two decadesand acknowledge Frank Davey's ratherpathetic attempt to document the pathosof physical incompatibility and sexualinsurrection. But his insistently genitalpoetic is ultimately crude both in its contentand in its methodology and neithergraphically nor even pornographicallystimulating. By holding the mirror-onthe-ceilingup to nature, Davey offers usmerely the burning flesh and blood of consummationand invites us to consume thesexual act in cannibalistic fashion, as hestirs the fleshpots of what amounts tolittle more than pulp lit. Although thesepoems might provide readers with anaughty diversion from Davey's moreserious and innovative verse and fromhis role as a literary scholar and critic,they seem to lack aesthetic and mimeticlegitimacy, degrading men and women bycatching them with their collective pantsdown and denying the sexual dignity ofmankind. That for all their seemingfecundity Edward and Patricia should beunable to conceive a child points to one'shope that their poetic narrative too willdie without issue. In celebration of thedeath of bad taste, one can only passaround the cigars !In his first published book of verse,Roger Nash takes the metaphor of consumedpoetry and transforms it into ametaphor of inhaled poetry, his readers,like the whales of the title poem, revellingin their underwater imagery preciselybecause they must periodically come upfor air (for end-stopped lines, as it were).The delightful irony is that Nash's linestend to end without punctuation, andthus seem at once to surface and descend,surface and descend ; and to go on indefinitely(with no forseeable end and withsyntactical unpredictability). The poemsare less about whales qua whales thanabout images of threatened life, as thetitle poem suggests in the speaker's recognitionof whale forms in the geologicprotrusions of the Sudbury landscapeand hence marine forms on the shore ofthe prairie sea: "in summer outcropsbask in doldrums / as asleep as ovens aswarm as whales the children / hopscotchover their humps talk to them tease themtreat / them cruelly as alive." This poemis indicative of the collection in its encouragingthe reader to re-create the184

BOOKS IN REVIEWworld by perceiving original aspects inthe natural and human environments.Thus the poetic discovery of Canadabecomes a process of naming in the Adamicsense, involving the inhalation of thespiritual breath and the utterance of thename. In several of the poems this pronouncedvision of country assumes amanifold perspective, as in "Eight waysof spending an evening on WhitsunLake," the octet of haiku reminiscent ofthe amusing sentences of Wallace Stevens,ranging in mood from the metaphysical"The owl's eye is / a chink inthe barn, ajar / for mice to enter" ; to thewhimsical "Ravens on fence posts / sit asblack as telephones, / expecting a call";to the sentimental "Just warm and alive,/ the three of us, you, I, and / the firstbutterfly." In this respect, whether theline is short and monosyllabic or, as elsewhere,long and polysyllabic, the meaningsof all these poems emerge in the actof reading itself, rather than in the processof reflection or analysis, somewhat asthe taste of food emerges in the act ofchewing and swallowing, rather than inthe process of digestion. (Whether thisundigested verse is intelectually nourishingis another question entirely.) In hisconcluding piece, "A poem as a question,"Nash develops a metaphor of husbandryas mastication and poetry as husbandry,taking the form of a series ofquestions on the meaning of growth anddecay, concluding: "Does anger have amouth to eat? / or the dumb man atongue / to sing himself asleep?" Thusdoes the poet encourage us to feed on theharvest of poetry and to articulate ourwhole consciousness.An even more consistently animalorientedcollection of poems — indeed akind of bestiary based on a zoologicalpoetic — comes from St. John Simmons,whose wilderness verse has the exotictaste of game that as one eats one canstill see running wild. His world is one ofman, animal, plant, and stone interconnectingenvironmentally, with no oneelement dominating the others. In "AnEvening Song," for example, Simmonsponders the dreaming death of a childenfolded by nature, beginning: "Here,the wolf. / There, the lilac. / Between theshadow of the boy / who wouldn't live. /Falls purple as a desert sunset." The followingstanzas readjust the elements butdo not upset the balance of nature; andthe poet seems to compose his verses notonly to imitate but also to maintain thisbalance.Prominent among the poems is thefigure of the child, who appears to representthe poet in the wilderness of language,in awe of his environment butunthreatened by it. The opening poem,"In My Mouth the Young Boy Dances,"captures the child-poet relationship andinaugurates Simmons' own treatment ofingested verse, involving the tasting ofexperience and the perpetuation of experiencein the mouth of the singingpoet, in particular the child's entry intothe world of experience. In "The ChildrenAsked Me to Kill You," for instance,beauty is the murder weapon andthe children innocently sound a chimemade of their dead mother's bones.Through this kind of unusually graphicimagery Simmons encourages us to recoverwhat in the masterful prose poetryof his preface he calls our "domaineperdu."The best among this mélange à six ofbooks demand the least commentary aswell as the highest recommendation, bothsteve mccaffery and Louis Dudek offeringextremely understated reflections onpoetry that seem to say more than poetrycan say for itself.McCaffery's reflections take the formof aphorisms and epigrams and assumethe format of a journal, each entry comprisingat the top of the page a whimsicalhistorical or temporal reference and at185

BOOKS IN REVIEWthe bottom of the page a terse poeticstatement which, although defying interpretationitself, does inspire interpretivereflection and even seems to assign theblank page above with the meanings ofthe poem it invites through its veryemptiness and seeming wastefulness. Asthe poet himself says: "great poems areread from the bottom up." The emphasisof these poems-at-bottom falls on theminim rather than on the mal of minimalism,as the book's concluding minimalmaxim (appropriately followed byseveral completely blank pages) suggestswith anti-intellectual wisdom: "neverread / never write / always continue tolearn." The greatest compliment one canpay to McCaffery is to encourage him tofollow his own advice by testing knowledge'signorance and by thinking aboutall that thought thought he did.Rather than aphoristic or epigrammatic,Louis Dudek's reflections aredidactic and prophetic. In some casesDudek simply gives wise advice, as whenhe suggests we compile an "encyclopediaof ignorance" or informs the young poetthat "It is humility to publish privately,at your own cost" ; whereas in other caseshe offers more profound speculation, aswhen he considers the perpetual possibilitiesof a chess game in relation to theendless free choices of human life orponders the probabilities of genealogyand concludes: "Everyone you meet is adistant family relation." Each entry is aself-contained idea on ideas, based onDudek's own poetic concerns and stimulatingour own concerns for poetry andfor the history of theoretical thought. Inhis belief that reality is more contemplativeeven than linguistic, Dudek seems toecho McCaffery's own contention thatthe silence of the blank page is perhapsthe highest poetic expression, representingas it does thought in its purity beforethe imperfection of oral or verbal expression.Both poets represent the purity of186ingested verse in that they pronouncetheir raw poetic ideas directly and yethave the refinement to keep silence,acknowledging silence as the criterion bywhich we judge the spoken essence ofpoetry. Even the critic must observetheir silence.These six collections of poetry andpoetic experimentation and theory pointto the fine distinctions between merepoetasting and the poetic of ingestedverse. If Steven Smith is rather tastelessand Frank Davey somewhat in bad taste,Roger Nash and St. John Simmons areeasily acquired tastes, and Steve McCafferyand Louis Dudek could very well beto everyone's taste. But each poet in hisown way enunciates the pre-eminentcritical distinction of tasting poets themselvesthrough the poetasting of ingestedcriticism. Buon appetito!COVERING KIDSP. MATTHEW ST. PIERREKEN ROBERTS, Crazy Ideas. Groundwood,$5-95-JACQUELINE NUGENT, Beyond the Door.Groundwood, $7.95.WILLIAM PASNAK, In the City of theGroundwood, $6.95.King.IF THESE THREE BOOKS from Douglasand Mclntyre's Groundwood Press wererepresentative of all new book publishing,the adage "you can't judge a bookby its cover" would soon be meaningless.The cover illustration on each of thesethree children's novels gives the readeran honest depiction of both the plot andthe flavour of the story within.Crazy Ideas is an easy, funny, predictable,and delightful tale for young readerswho want the open-mouthed, onedimensionalexcitement of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with the bonus ofa real story. Like the story the cover is fullof activity and colour: two round-faced

BOOKS IN REVIEWchildren in hard hats, looking alarmed;a bow-tied mayorish gentleman flyingbehind a purple machine; a photographersnapping pictures; a house amiddestruction. The round-faced childrenare a brother and sister who live in Skeletown(the streets are named after thebones in the skeleton so the people canlearn anatomy). Skeletown is a citywhose Mayor has proclaimed that innovation(i.e., crazy ideas) is its most importantresource; to graduate from highschool, students must invent a schemenever before imagined. Jon has inventeda comic book (the fourth most popularin Canada). Christine finally comes upwith the best idea yet: a "do-it-yourselfdemolition company" in which peoplecan, for three dollars, take out their frustrationsby smashing windows, takingsledge hammers to walls, and kicking inplaster. All would go well, but naturally,there is one sinister element in town andChristine's demolition plans are demolished.Ken Roberts is a children's librarianwho has no illusions about what Canadianchildren want to read. This isGordon Korman for the younger set. Butdo not scorn — when it is National BookFestival time, Canadian public andschool librarians will thank Roberts forhis crazy and highly readable idea.Beyond the Door moves about as farfrom bright, primary colours and innovativeideas as possible. The cover illustration,in muted beige, blue/grey, andyellows, shows a huge expanse of sand, adorway, two children, a boat, and thesun. Illustrator Deborah Drew-Brookehas captured perfectly the static greynessof the novel. The story begins like a newversion of William Sleator's House ofStairs. Two children suddenly find themselvespropelled from a burning movietheatre into a world of sand. Eventuallythey are taken to a "loonie bin" fromwhich no one has ever escaped. Up tothat point, the novel has a bit of Sleator'ssurrealistic tension, but it soon slackensinto a lulling journey reminiscent of TheWizard of Oz. The two children andtheir three new-found Ozish friends manage,with a very simple plan and littleeffort, to escape from the asylum. Theirescape sets the pace for the rest of theirquest; the fivesome never seem to be inany real danger. Reading the book is likewatching a television series and knowingwith absolute certainty that the star willalways be safe because she must returnthe following week. By the time the novelis finished, two of the characters havepredictably fallen in love, one has died,and the two children return to find thattheir guardians have met and married.The future is guaranteed to be pure (iftedious) bliss.The cover illustration for In the Cityof the King matches perfectly the gentlefantasy it depicts and protects. The art,by Ian Wallace, shows the fresh strengthof young Elena dancing before the confusedKing and the sinister Priests. In theCity of the King is a black versus white,good versus evil fantasy. Young Elenaand her older partner Ariel are minstrels.Both entertainers are special: Ariel becausehe is a member of "the brotherhood"which subtly protects the Kingfrom Evil; Elena because she is a memberof a secret society called the Daughtersof Ismay. The two become embroiledin a mission to save the King from thecontrol of a group of evil Priests. Thestory, like the cover illustration, movesgently and believably from the youngwoman's simple role as entertainer to herhuge responsibility for keeping the Kingfrom the Priests. It isn't Susan Cooper(though the cover blurb does compare itto The Arabian Nights and The Horseand His Boy), but in Canada, wherethere is a paucity of good children's fantasy,this one is at the top with Ruth187

BOOKS IN REVIEWNichol's A Walk Out of the World andMarrow of the World.A quick reaction to the covers of thesethree books from Groundwood becomesa summary : one is fun, one is a bore, andone is gentle fantasy. Just a glance, butthat should cover the works.JUDITH WALKERLIMITS OF FEELINGMICHAEL BULLOCK, Prisoner of the Rain.Third Eye, $10.00.GERRY SHiKATANi, A Sparrow's Food. CoachHouse, n.p.MARLENE COOKSHAW, Personal Luggage.Coach House, n.p.EVA TiHANYi, Prophecies: Near the Speed ofLight. Thistledown, $8.95.JOHN LENT, Frieze. Thistledown, $8.95.THESE FIVE BOOKS, two of them firstfull-length collections, force some considerationof poetic technique, of theaccessibility of poetry to the interestedintelligent reader, and of the obviousrelationship between the two. In four ofthese books, the transmission of seriousfeeling seems to lie largely outside thepossibilities of the techniques, and it isfar from clear what emotional note isbeing hit, what our response should be.Michael Bullock offers us ninety-eightsurrealist prose-poems. Obviously surrealismis still alive, at least in Vancouver,and Bullock's track record in thismost difficult genre is, of course, impressive.However, there are problems withthis book, and for this author it must bejudged disappointing. The best surrealismtakes us into the subconscious in sucha way as to help us emerge from astrange journey seeing things freshly.This does not happen here; there is littleor no shock to the comfortable logic ofour lives. The images are certainlydreamlike, but soft-centred, gauzy, pallid,even fey, and their impact is minimal.The prose-poems often seem flabby —justifying the right margin does not, initself, make a good prose-poem, and thesame effects could be had by using continuousprose or free-verse. There seemsno necessity for the form and not enoughappreciation of its difficulties. In particular,there is far too much syntacticalrepetition (especially in the first lines),and I doubt if many readers will responddeeply to lines likeUnder the covered gaze of hawks the starfilledsky opens to reveal its empty womb.Waving trees beset it on either side andmushrom clouds of fish swim through itsinner waters. Houses rise on a foundationof clouds and drift towards the approachingwind.It all seems so dated, so familiar, so unchallenging.However, I must mentionsome Monty Python lines (if only therewere more like them) which delight thereader, stunned and weary by the sheerweight of often tedious writing: "At thebottom of a well a redheaded toad iswandering / around holding a balloon ona string." And why not? Bullock's admirerswill no doubt find this book essential.Others will want more than imaginarytoads in imaginary gardens and will probablybe waiting for a giant cartoon footto descend, popping the balloons.Gerry Shikatani's is a big collection(143 pages) and is finely illustrated byRosalind Goss. In fact, poem and drawingmerge often in interesting ways.Shikatani claims that his work is "actionin service to compassion," that he is exploring"such things as speed acceleration,shape, density, line, angle." Poetryis a tenuous thread in "ecological being."Luckily, this sort of bombast is not alwaysnoticeable in the poetry itself, the bestof which is supple, spare, and suggestive :where silence is bittenoff bitby bit / hereand there188

BOOKS IN REVIEWa tree is rootedor a rock.Many things here hint at a solid, unusualtalent, but much of the collection fails tosatisfy fully, fails to communicate. Manyof the poems come across as experimentalexercises: we progress through the bookassailed by handwritten poems, graphs,concrete poems, drawings, and every kindof avant-garde device, but we never findthe real voice of the poet here, as he castsaround, seduced by experimental gesture.The collection, for all its attempts atgnomic wisdom, leaves me ultimatelybaffled and a little bored as I search forreference points to which I can connectmy own experience. Playing with words,wrenching them around, missing outconnectives, dislocating syntax, does notin itself make language into poetry. Ihope the poet will continue in the directionpointed to by "Cultivated Earth,""From Snow to Snow," "No Frame,""Gat," "In Umbría." He has real talent,but a book this long does not serve himwell at this stage.Still seeking recognizable and tangibleexperience, feeling I can respond to, Iopen Marlene Cookshaw's first collectionand find myself once again in a semisurrealisticworld with few referentialtoe-holds :Let's say you're almost down the alleywhen a man passes you on his way to thegarbage binLet's say, too, that your lover constructsparallel beamsfor both him and you to follow. Youkeep straying to hisAnd the man has in his hand a deadwoodpeckerWhat, really, is this all about? We can,I admit, by working hard enough, tentativelyconjecture some symbolic meaningsin Cookshaw's work, but why shouldwe have to? Why the bafflement? Whythe long sequence of prose-poems, wherethe pseudo-narrative confuses? Much ofthis seems like private experience writtenin semi-private language, and the poet isnot communicating enough because sheis using techniques of obliqueness to hidebehind. She gives away practically nothingwhile pretending it's a lot. Not all islike that, however — there are somehopeful signs in poems like "ZoologicalGarden," "Angling," and "SevenMonths" that Cookshaw will come todeal more openly with the real world.When she allows us in, we can see a verygood poet.Eva Tihanyi lets us further into herpoetry, her world of experience. Theblurb gave me chills — "a range of imageryfrom mythological and romantic totechnological and cosmic" — but it's notthat bad! Here are real people in realplaces having real and clearly expressedexperiences. Blessed relief. But look alittle closer and the "cosmic" comes in,nuzzling at the poet, tempting her tojump too high to find "significance." Wehave "the primal pull of blood," "the truearcanum," "the primitive pliant consciousness,""God's invisible fingers," "thesky's dream" — over-elevated stuff whichis clichéd and pretentious. This showsTihanyi at her worst, but there are realvirtues here as well. When she comesback to earth and writes of people, relationships,laundromats, blueberries, windowblinds, her poetry is accessible andstrong. This is a promising and interestingbook, where we can find shrewdobserved significance in the ordinary.When she realizes that ultra-romanticcosmic imagery is softening her work insteadof giving it strength, Eve Tihanyiwill be a poet to watch :The only reassurance:that somewhere in the small movements,a hand brushing hair off a browor flicking lint from a shoulder,there is a poignant rhythm,a trifling dance of humanityJohn Lent's long, handsome collection189

BOOKS IN REVIEWenters and stays in the "dance of humanity."It is the most satisfying of thesebooks, allowing the reader access to manykinds of experience, not afraid to beconfessional, full of deep feeling. Hegives us fragments of the autobiographyof a sensitive and intelligent man, comingto grips with his subjects out of necessity,not out of fashion. We come to know thepoet's friends, his journeys, his fears, hishopes, what he has read, what his life islike, and it is all done with a freshness ofvoice which convinces and persuades.(This voice transcends the irritating habitof leaving spaces between words, evenwhen there is no syntactical justification,and the poems which are too long andindulge in superfluous detail.) It is, aboveall, a human book and one I shall returnto for its insights into the swaying conflictsof a life, of happiness suddenlyturning sour, of a self-mocking and/orserious exploration of personal struggle.Edmonton, Toronto, Regina, Nelson,Vernon — the poems are rooted in realplaces, but these are turned into placesof the mind, way-stations of the migrantheart, touchstones in the poet's search formeaning. The search is intensified by thetonal range of the poetry, from the highserious to the most colloquial, blendedsmoothly and always at the poet's service.The poems here do not lend themselvesto short quotation. Suffice to saythat this is a very fine collection.Perhaps the lesson to be learned fromthese five books is that strong, complexfeeling does not require complex surfacetechnique; that power in poetry does notnecessarily derive from technical experiment;that the good poet can examine,define, and transcend the everyday andmundane; that mystification, in languageor technique, can do nothing butmake wider the gap between poet andreader in Canada — those few hundredcopies sold, and, often, no wonder.CHRISTOPHER WISEMANMONSTERS WITHINSUNITI NAM jos HI, From the Bedside Book ofNightmares. Fiddlehead/Goose Lane, $6.95.JOHN OUGHTON, Gearing of Love: Poems andPhotographs. Mosaic, n.p.ALTHOUGH CANADIAN NOVELISTS havebeen noticeably engaged of late in socialcauses (Margaret Laurence and nucleardisarmament, Margaret Atwood and politicaltorture in Bodily Harm), Canadianpoets are no less committed. Themost recent collections by John Oughtonand Sunti Namjoshi bear ample testimonyto this fact, and reveal, as well,both the challenges and pitfalls of combiningpoetry and social issues.Oughton's collection, as its title suggests,is primarily concerned with theclash between the artificial or technologicaland the natural. The structure ofthe work highlights this clash; in the firstsection, "Welcome to Japan," the poet'sappreciation of the traditional reverenceshown to nature in this ancient civilization("Take rocks / for text / learnstream's / tongue well") collapses whenhe is faced with "geisha-land,"from whose assembly loins springHONDASONYPIONEERCANON. . .This convergence of Eastern and Americanvalues reaches a climax at the end ofthis section, when the poet kisses a cryingJapanese woman whose "lips are bittersweet/ as berries on a rough, Ontariofence." Back to the land of rough fences— chained and imprisoned nature — wetherefore return in Section Two, "In StillLife."Here, the confrontation of artifice andnature reaches a fever pitch, and thepositive motifs in Japanese culture areentirely inverted, as though one were190

BOOKS IN REVIEWpresented with the negative image of aphotograph. The quiet harmonies of"Japanese Music," for instance, whereinart and nature coalesce in the "Refrainof all things that / return : flower, season,wind, tree," are harshly jarred by Americandiscord : "Turn up the Tom Jones /Max! Those waves are loud," shouts oneof the American faithful on a pilgrimageto Daytona Beach.For Oughton, violence is the inevitableoutcome of this distortion of the natural.In "Espresso Bar on Harbord Street," thepoet half-listens to the violence of aspaghetti western (a palpable instance ofartifice, indeed) and half-listens to theverbal abuse going on at the table nextto him. More unsettling in Oughton'spoems, however, is the association of violenceand the feminine. In "AnimaDream," the speaker describes a dreamin which he murders and dismembers awoman, telling his father later that he"only wanted to see what / made hertalk." Thus, we witness the dismemberingand destruction of the verbal, creative"woman" in man. Similarly, thepoem "Zoology," which describes thehatred that moves two lovers to rip "outeach other's stitched-up / stuffing, layingbare the mythic bones," is accompaniedby the photograph of a laughing girl, astuffed leopard draped over her shoulders.The parallel is extremely disconcerting,especially when one considersthat the photographic symbol of theancient Japanese reverence for nature isthe male Buddha.Oughton's use of photography, however,deserves a more searching study, forhe has chosen in the photograph theideal symbol for the merging of natureand the machine. Oughton's own photographicstyle has been strongly influencedby Edward Weston and Ansel Adams (ashis photo for "Gape Travers, P. E. I."reveals). Weston's philosophy of photography(now in sharp disfavour withphotographers) is that photography revealsthe hidden essence of nature.Weston's photos of sand dunes, likeOughton's photo of rippling water, revealan order inherent in nature, independentof man. Or, as Oughton himself expressesit, "Who needs a nurtured rose / whereeven the great silent birds wait / andeven the weeds sing?" The greatest travestyoccurs when man attempts to harnessnature, hence Oughton's final poemson nuclear weapons. "Cruise Missile," arewriting of Pratt's "The Shark" for thenuclear age, is sadly disappointing;Oughton is better able to visualize thepresent horrors of American society thanthis potential disaster. What should bethe strongest poem in the collection unfortunatelyfalls into cliché : "it's smarterthan your car or stereo." How does oneimagine the unimaginable?Suniti Namjoshi's From the BedsideBook of Nightmares provides an implicitresponse to this, as well as to other questionsraised by Oughton's collection.Namjoshi's feminist poems are not blatant"social cause" poems, but witty rewritingsof Western mythologies. In herlively imagination, Caliban as well as"Baby Frankenstein" become female figures,leading the reader to muse uponthe sexual dynamics of these myths.In Namjoshi, the female is associatedwith creativity in a more positive waythan in Oughton. In fact, the female isclosely allied with nature ; Baby Frankensteindreams that she is a green shrub,uprooting herself and prancing about,much to the disgruntlement of hermother. When slightly older, she becomesa creative liar, telling her brother that hehas green hair; she is "enchanted" bythis heady "power of the lie." Namjoshisignificantly links this lying with the creativeact itself, by inserting a quotationfrom Mary Shelley: "The fabrication oflife is not a matter that may be under-

BOOKS IN REVIEWtaken lightly. It is an experiment fraughtwith peril."Thus, the female artist is a defiantone. Namjoshi, like feminist poets AdrienneRich and Sylvia Plath, is fascinatedby the image of the woman as defiantmonster. Here, what is monstrous andferocious in woman should not be tamed.Referring to Isabel Archer in James'sPortrait of a Lady, Namjoshi's "Creature"protests,there's no placefor me in that portrait of hers . . .There's somethingobnoxious and cruel about meI don't shut up,and I am not deadWhich is more unnatural, Namjoshiseems to imply, this creature's ferocity orIsabel's return to Gilbert Osmond?Namjoshi, too, is concerned with theclash between the natural and the artificial,and like Oughton, she uses themetaphor of the camera to embody thisclash in "Snapshots of Caliban." Moreover,her very choice of The Tempest isan apt one, since this play, more thanalmost any other Shakespearean play,juxtaposes nature and European civilization,to the distinct disadvantage of thelatter. This Caliban, however, is a femalemonster, whose natural impulses aresmothered by the threatening patriarchalfigure of Prospero. Caliban, like BabyFrankenstein, is creative; Miranda bothfears and envies her dreams of heaven.At the end of the cycle of poems, evenMiranda can accept that "You are partof me," (a line from one of Miranda'spoems, which she has earlier crossedout). The final poem, "Prospero," revealsthe magician's inability to admit whatMiranda has admitted. (Ironically, inNamjoshi's version, Miranda becomes thewise and tolerant one, and Prospero thenaif.) "Maiden and monster," he proclaims,"I dare not claim them." In thisironic reversal, Prospero's moving speech,"This thing of darkness I / Acknowledgemine," undergoes a sea-change indeed.Both Oughton and Namjoshi showthemselves adept at organizing and juxtaposingtheir poems in suggestive, imaginativeways (Namjoshi's mythology is, inkind, a descendant of Jay Macpherson'sThe Boatman). More importantly, bothpoets, regardless of ideology or approach,agree on one central point: the need toacknowledge our monsters within.VINTAGELORRAINE M. YORKAL PURDY, Piling Blood. McClelland & Stewart,$12.95.I HAVE NEVER LIKED то CALL writers"great," since for me "great" is a poweradjective; I hold with Lord Acton that"all great men are bad," and I don'tthink that kind of moral badness goesoften with the vocation of writing, thoughit did with D'Annunzio and perhaps withEzra Pound. Nor am I happy with theword "major," since that poses a categorizationbetween major and minorwriters which is out of keeping with therealities of poetic creation, denying as itdoes that all excellences are individualand incomparable with others. So howdo we find an adjective to describe a poetlike Al Purdy, whose largeness of visionand talent so distinguish him from mostof his contemporaries, and who is argiiably,in terms of craft alone, among thebest three or four poets writing in Canadatoday?Purdy himself, I feel, would reject anyadjective imputing a special status tohim, for he is one of the most democraticpractitioners of an aristocratic art, and hemakes his attitude very clear in a poemaddressed to Archilochus, the archaicGreek poet and mercenary soldier, thatappears in Piling Blood :192

BOOKS IN REVIEWHe wasn't Homer, he wasn't anybodyfamous ;he sang of the people next door;his language was their language; he diedin battle(with a brand new shield). Living washonourenough for him, with death on every hand.Archilochus the soldier, he was us.Three thousand years? I can still hearthat commonsense song of the shield :a loser who managed to be victorious,his name is a champagne cry in my blood.There is no reason to wonder atPurdy's inclination to identify withArchilochus, one of the great originativetalents of antiquity and, in his free useof the Ionic vernacular, a predecessor ofPurdy's own development of a poetrybased on the Canadian vernacular."Commonsense" is the basis for the workof both poets, but only the basis; theyboth fly far from that launching pad.And the stance of the "loser who managedto be victorious"; is not that thesame as Purdy takes up with such effectin the triptych, "Machines," about hisworking in a mattress factory?You could never winthe best to hope forwas not to loseand $1.50 an hour.So we witness Purdy, despite his vastand curious autodidactic erudition, singingof the lives of ordinary people anddoing it in their language; and that ofcourse is one side of him, the ordinaryman who resists all suggestions of beingextraordinary. But what makes him infact extraordinary is not his stance,which many a dull ranting "poet of thepeople" has taken, from Hugh McDiarmiddownward, but his ability to use it,as the real artist can always use mythsand modes of any kind, to produce poetrywhose technical skills equal his philosophicvision.This is perhaps an odd comparisonthat will annoy many purists in Englishliterary studies; I often see Purdy as akind of Wordsworth achevé — a Wordsworthas he would have liked to havebeen rather than as he was. For Purdyreally does "adopt the very language ofmen," as Wordsworth merely aspired todo, and he succeeds because he retainsthe vitality of that language without reducingit to the dullness of Wordsworth'smetrically arranged prose. Purdy oftensings, and sometimes he argues out hisphilosophies of existence with comic irreverencein the hearing of his readers,but he is never prosaic, even metrically,and a good case can be presented forregarding him as our most notable philosopherpoet in a literature whose versifiers,from Sparshott to Layton, are not backwardin presenting philosophic attitudesthat range all the way from St. Ambroseto Friedrich Nietzsche. What makesPurdy the most interesting is that (a) heis the most steadily and consistently developingpoetic craftsman (with whatfelicity he used the Chaucerian tag totitle his first mature book, The crafte solong to lerne —- and never ceased learning!),and (b) he is his own philosopher,and in that aspect more like the archaicGreek poet Xenophanes, who defied theancient gods to fashion his own worldview, than he is like most of his owncontemporaries.For Purdy goes far beyond the poemsabout underpaid work in mattress factories,or about literally piling blood(sacks of it dried), or about the experiencesworking in the abbatoir which hecannot leave behind him :there were no poemsto exclude the screamswhich boarded the streetcarand travelled with metill I reached hometurned on the record playerand faintlyin the last centuryheard Beethoven weeping.Obviously such experiences link with

BOOKS IN REVIEWempathy towards suffering beings thatshapes other poems in this book, like thesemi-comic narratives of Purdy's encounterswith archaic species surviving in theGalapagos, and his more elegiac meditationson exploring the fossils of the UpperCretaceous period (Xenophanes also wasfascinated by fossils) and moving amongthe remains of earth's largest animals, thedinosaurs. In a poem like "Lost in theBadlands," there is an almost shamanicsense of shedding human identity andmerging into the great common past ofall animals, of mingling one's very boneswith them :No wind or sound of voicesonly this non-silencea mirage of screaming soundor an illusion of silenceas if every animal that ever livedand died was strugglingtrying to get your attentionand all the calcium carbonatein your bones shufflingits components uneasily.There are fairly constant componentsin all Purdy volumes: the comic poemsof henpecked husband or ageing cautiouslecher; the historic resonstructions of theLoyalist past. And they are here again,in new forms. So are the autobiographicalpieces, which in Piling Blood touchon every period of Purdy's life from boyhoodto the present, pondering the natureof memory, the way self as well asbody changes, and treating the lives oflosers, who seem to have inhabitedPurdy's life in exceptional numbers, witha deeper compassion, more honest becausemore bewildered, than in the past.There is one especially moving poem,"My Cousin Don," about a companion ofthe distant orchards and gardens ofchildhood whom wartime experiencesseemed to destroy :I insist there was something, a thing ofvalue.It survived when death came callingfor my friend on an Italian battlefield :not noble, not heroic, not beautiful —It escapes my hammering mind,eludes any deliberate seeking,and all I can think ofis apples apples apples . . .And another — "How it feels to be old"— is obliquely about old men but overtlyabout old dogs, a boy's dog shot for stealingchickens, another who the day beforedying went to the water and tried toswim away :At the hour of departurethere seems to me littledifference between speciesand that's a good a wayto leave as any(Dylan notwithstanding) :swim straight outwardtowards a distant shorewith the dog star overheadand music on the watersBut for me the most memorable ofthese poems are those in which the philosophicruminations are mingled with alyrical vision and the elegiac mood issuddenly lightened with a joy in living.Perhaps the best of these poems is thelast in Piling Blood, "In the Early Cretaceous,"where Purdy imagines the firstappearance of flowers in the age of thedinosaurs and sees in it the splendour ofunrecorded history, the great sweep oftime so vast that it becomes incomprehensiblein its linking of all the world'sprocesses in vast, inevitable and unrememberablesequence.But no one will ever knowwhat it was likethat first time on primordial earthwhen bees went mad with pollen feverand seeds flew away from homeon little drifting white parachuteswithout a word to their parents— no one can ever knoweven when someone is giventhe gift of a single roseand behind that one roseare the ancestors of all rosesand all flowers and all the springtimesfor a hundred million yearsof summer and for a moment194

BOOKS IN REVIEWin her eyes an echoof the first tendernessAnd yet, as in all good books of verse,it is the whole, the varied continuum,rather than the individual pieces — eventhe anthology gems — that is important.In Piling Blood one is aware, with a feelingthat grows from page to page, notonly of a general triumph of poeticworkmanship, but also of a depth ofvision and wisdom that few of Purdy'scontemporaries have equalled. Purdy islike one of those apples of vanished varietiesfrom the orchards of our childhoodsthat ripened late and in their lofts improvedin flavour long into the winter.As a poet he ages well.GEORGE WOODCOCK**** BOB BEAL and ROD MGLEOD, PrairieFire: The 1885 North-West Rebellion. Hurtig,$19.95. History, which is an art as much asa science, moves through time on two levels.There is a sense in which general historic insightsare never superseded, no matter howmany new facts may be unearthed, and so westill read Herodotus and Gibbon, Acton andToynbee, for the grandeur of their visions,though we know that in many ways our detailedknowledge of the pasts they wrote aboutis greater than theirs. We are getting to thepoint, in Canadian history, of making thiskind of distinction. Much has been publishedon the North-West Rebellion of 1885, and agreat deal of it of high quality, bringing thewestern Canadian past into luminous focus:e.g., George Stanley's The Birth of WesternCanada and his Louis Riel, Desmond Morton'sThe Last War Drums, Marcel Giraud's LeMétis canadien, John Kinsey Howard's StrangeEmpire and, in another direction of insight,Rudy Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear.These books, and others perhaps, will remainas classics of Western Canadian history. Butevery year recently new sources have becomeavailable — diaries and letters discovered,documents and records released for publicexamination, so that, though the generalaspect of the North-West Rebellion may nothave changed, facts and details have emergedthat modify it in various ways. This plethoraof new information released over the pastdecade has made Prairie Fire: The 1885North-West Rebellion a much more closelytextured work than its predecessors. It doeslittle to change our sense of the shape ofevents at that time, and though, largely forform's sake, its authors offer a few rathergentlemanly challenges to some of the conclusionsof past historians, they rarely win theirarguments decisively. It is not as visionaryhistorians with original insights that we welcomethem, but rather as competent researchersand writers who have not set out to correctthe record, which for the most part theyaccept, but to make it more complete. PrairieFire is a book all aficionados of western historyshould not merely borrow but buy. It is goodpopular history, accurate, conscientious andaccessible, and probably the last work of itskind on the subject for some years after the1885 Centennial.Recent reprints include Ralph L. Curry, TheLeacock Medal Treasury (Lester & OrpenDennys, $11.95), an d (i n i ts 3 r d revised form,adding a number of poets born in the 194.0's)Ralph Gustafson's Penguin Book of CanadianVerse (Penguin, $9.95). Under the title TheConfessions of a Harvard Man ($30.00; pa.$ ! 9-95) Paget Press has republished HaroldStearns' 1935 autobiography The Secret IKnow, with an appreciative preface by HughFord. Sometime editor of The Dial, Americanexpatriate in Paris during the 1920's and1930's, reporter, panhandler, and literaryfigure of no small stature, Stearns tells here ofhis campaign against mediocrity, his quest forindependence and judgment, his experimentin bohemian homelessness, and his orderlydesire for home. One looks in vain here formention of Callaghan or Glassco, but onefinds instead something of the milieu in whichthey lived. Stearns writes of his early failureto distinguish a "change in tactics" from achange "in ethics": "I don't comprehend howstubborn and perverse is the heart of man —how we can know the better, yet follow theworse path. I thought that merely to see andknow the good and the beautiful and the truealso means to embrace them gladly. I was notyet really aware that there was the problem ofevil. I was still a child." Now in paperbackare The Oxford Companion to CanadianLiterature (Oxford, $24.95), and The OtherSide of Hugh MacLennan, Elspeth Cameron'sselection of MacLennan's civilized essays(Macmillan, $8.95).W.N.195

F. R. SCOTT 1899-1985WHETHER ONE KNEW HIM personally ornot, F. R. Scott figured as a senior poetand statesman for generations of Canadianwriters and readers, a role he wasmarvellously equipped to play. Our lastnineteenth-century poet, first among ourearly twentieth-century ones, he was alsoa lawyer, teacher, and political thinkerthe erudition and intelligence of whoseideas will continue to influence the legaland political systems of Canada for along time to come. Readers of CanadianLiterature will be familiar with his manyaccomplishments, which have been mostrecently documented in On F. R. Scott:Essays on His Contributions to Law,,Literature, and Politics, based on the1981 conference, "The Achievement ofF. R. Scott" (which Scott wittily dubbeda "pre-mortem" ). He was a giant amongmen, as the saying has it, but rarely hasa saying seemed so appropriate.Scott towered above most people physically,and also in personality and charm,as well. His immense personal charisma,his unwavering energy and integritycome first to mind when one thinks ofhim. People recalling Frank Scott thinkof the person they knew, and only afterwardsof the major poet, translator,constitutional lawyer, teacher, politicaltheorist, and founding member of theCCF.Few readers of Scott's poetry, while itis Scott the poet they know best, wouldfail to recognize how fully his poems engagethe philosophy by which he livedand worked. That they are poems of tension,that they seldom offer clear andsimple answers but continually interrogatepossibilities, are testament to a mindand spirit which never stopped seekinganswers yet knew better than to thinkany one simple "truth" was the answer.The Collected Poems of F. R. Scott testifiesto the rich and full life of a man whoinsisted on living, in all his variedcareers, the contradictions which hispoems refused to pretend weren't there.Classic in form yet often romantic inaspiration, sometimes satirical, sometimesfull of transcendental yearning, they seeminevitably Canadian in their reflection ofthe contradictions of modern Canadianculture. And it is those poems whichmost fully register the profound moralambiguities of the twentieth century thatwill last as Scott's major contribution toour literature.But all of Scott's various writings, inthe many areas of Canadian culture andsociety to which he contributed so much,will continue to exert their influence.People will remember his work and useit, because its value is clear. But thevalue of his personal involvement is alsoclear: he always put himself on the line,and in the literary community alone, hissupport of magazines and small pressesmade possible the publication of earlywork by some of our best writers. Manywriters were proud to count him theirfriend, but he lives in the memories ofalmost all who ever met him. Indeed, ifthere is ever an Oxford Book of CanadianLiterary Anecdotes, the entriesunder F. R. Scott's name will take up alot of space. Seldom when writers of anygeneration from the 1920's to the 1970'smeet does a story about F. R. Scott notcome up. And all the stories testify tothe man's charm, graciousness, intelligence,toughness, and wit. Truly, he was,in all his varied careers, a "singularman." The writing remains, and we aregrateful for it. The man is gone, and itwill be long before we see his like again.DOUGLAS BARBOUR196

TO BEE OR NOT TO BEEBEES DANCE MOST INTRICATELY,AnnRosenberg reminds us in The Bee Book,when imparting information about farflowers to the hive-bound, the stay-atcomb.If one wishes to reduce Rosenberg'smulti-faceted novel to a singlemetaphor, then this one serves. The BeeBook is a brilliantly intricate dance recreatingfor the reader distant regions ofimagination, fanciful stratispheres of invention,into which few bees — or fewwriters — dare to fly.Shortlisted for the Books in Canadafirst novel prize in 1982, The Bee Bookhas received good reviews but littlenotice. The obvious reason for the inattentionis that, at first, the book seemsawesome — as intimidating as a swarmof bees, as finely structured as a honeycomb.The novel begins, for example,with an epigram :Her hair was auburn ;her face, lively.She was the first (in our circle)to read Levi-Strauss. 1OPINIONS & NOTESHow many literary heroines are characterizedby hair, face, and familiarity withstructuralism? And once past the introductorycomments on Lévi-Strauss —translations of From Honey to Ashes, ofcourse — one next confronts a differentorder of disorder. Linear prose is constantlyreplaced by diagrams, charts andgraphs; witty concretist poetry; arcaneline drawings; obscure scientific equations— and that's just in the eleven-pagePreface.Language, too, mixes and merges. Thetext freely uses (and sometimes abuses inruthless parody) Spanish, French, German,Italian, Egyptian, Chinese, Korean,Latin, Suazi, and Koutomi, as well asthe complex jargon of science, the aphasielanguage of advancing age, and, continually,the precise and sometimes poignantlanguage of bees. This book is aboutlanguage, communication. After a seductionthat takes place largely because ofthe mercurial nature of words, Rosenbergdichotomizes bee-speak and humandiscourse: "Spoken language ... is notnearly as pragmatic as the language ofthe bees where so many shuffles to theleft or the right sends the worker offfollowing the directions of her scout tojust the place where the flowers are." Incontrast to the bees, Saul Hartig (aliasSolomon the Egyptologist) employedmore indirectly the provocative powersof the word — chiefly erotically-inspiredhieroglyphs scrawled on a placemat in anItalian restaurant — in his campaign tode-flower the smart but naïve protagonistof the novel.As the play on the words flower/deflowerand the metamorphosis of SaulHartig into mysterious Solomon bothsuggest, The Bee Book not only redefinesthe limits of text and expands theboundaries of language, it also constantlybreaks language down into its smallestparts and thereby creates an intricatestructure of semantic homologies. Everyname embodies a constellation of othernames and meanings in an often arcanesystem of puns. Consider, for example,the main character, Habella Cire. Herfirst name, deriving from Medieval Spanish,suggests that Habella is often had.But her last name, "Cire," is all brightness,bright eye, a fabric made brilliant,appropriately, by an application of wax.( Back to bees again — we are always, inthis novel, back to bees. ) Habella's roommate,friend, and the editor of Habella'spost-human (but not posthumous) memoirs,is Renata Schwenk: "Renata,"reborn; "Schwenk," turning, or, in keepingwith her function as metaphoriceditor of the text, from German schwenk,a technical term for a cinemagraphicpanning shot. Habella's lab partner,friend, and nonsexual lover (he is a197

OPINIONS & NOTEShomosexual and thus, in the punningsystem of the book, a queen both like andunlike Habella), bears the curious name,"Matthias Harp" — or the wedding ofscience ("math" is the root) and music.And then there is Habella's husband,Fred Smith. Compared to the others,onomastically and otherwise, Fred is flatindeed.As the barest summary of the novel'splot indicates, The Bee Book, for all itsexoticism, is yet another modern tale ofunsuccessful marriage. We might chartthe action as follows: Girl meets boy;girl marries boy; girl grows sexually frustratedwith boy (and, in fairness, the boyisn't too excited by this girl either) ; girlcontemplates affair (a story we've readbefore) ; girl, instead, turns her bedroominto a hive; girl flies away. Literally.One day Habella is a housewife, metaphoricQueen Bee, mother of four offspring,and the next day she is gone,literal queen bee, presumably swarmingin the treetops, photographs of which(taken from a bee's eye view) constitutethe last "utterance" of the novel. Norshould we be surprised by this ending. InMatthias's Preface there are dark hintsof Habella's disappearance or demise,including her last letter to Matthiaswhich ends : "I offer you now these lucidwords. I will taste a metaphysical passion.I can't live out the similes of thenormal wife. Tomorrow, I fly to Africa."And she does. If The Bee Book teachesanything, it is that fiction is constrainedonly by the imagination of its writers andreaders, not by restrictive notions ofrealism.The line separating metaphor fromreality is most elastic in Ann Rosenberg'spostmodernist novel. Thus, when Renataearlier comes to visit her friend she isalarmed by Habella's increasing identificationwith the bees she once studiedscientifically: "Habella, you're not abee!" Renata protests. "No, Renata, I'mbecoming a metaphor and that is worse."At the end of the novel, Habella movesfrom metaphor to metamorphosis — andpresumably that is better. At the veryleast, it is less stifling. From the claustrophobicand ultimately unsatisfying marriage— where communication devolvesinto an exchange of sarcastic notes lefton the fridge door — Habella flies into alyrical expanse of cloud, space, open sky.The success of that flight might at firstseem in question. Habella's parting missiveto her children and husband reads:"I have flown to mate with Apis Africanus."There is an ominous suggestionhere of the bees humans refer to as"killer bees." Is this a sign of Habella'sembracing of death? insanity? oblivion?I don't think so. Killer bees kill onlyhigher mammals. Habella has preparedfor her flight by feasting upon RoyalJelly (obtainable at your local healthfood store : a diet guaranteed to turn alowly worker into a queen). She has imbibednectar (etymologically, "overcomingdeath" — that is why the gods drankit). If her diet and thus her metamorphosishas been successful, if her flight isconstrued as literal not metamorphic,then perhaps Habella has indeed becomethe queen of Apis Africanus — no longer"had" but having.Rosenberg can claim this optimistic ifunrealistic conclusion because the structuralistpoetic of the entire novel valorizescontinuities between high and lowmimetic fictional forms as well as betweenso-called higher and lower lifeforms. Like Lévi-Strauss, Rosenberg assumesthat basic ideational structures,patterns of meaning, underlie all humansocieties and inhere in all human statements— from Hopi rituals to Hopkinspoems. The crosscultural and crosslinguisticallusions throughout the textaffirm continuous structures. But Rosenbergalso implies that Lévi-Strauss's universalismis actually quite limited, is,198

OPINIONS & NOTESindeed, rife with "species-ism." Just asLévi-Strauss documents the various customsand habits of la pensée sauvage(misleadingly translated into English as"the savage mind") in order to stress thebasic commonality of all humans, so doesRosenberg elaborate upon the rituals ofanimals — particularly mating behaviour("kinship") — in order to emphasize thebasic commonality of all life forms. Beesare our most often asserted partners inthis larger pensée. But Rosenberg findscontinuities everywhere as in a scenewhere Habella attempts to seduce one ofher husband's employees by recounting tohim the various mating rituals of slugs,snails, and woodticks :"The Great Grey Slug is eight inches ofhermaphroditic charm who insinuates himselfthrough the landscape parting thegrasses with a blunt nose, oozing himselfalong the ground in the slime that is theby-product, the rheumy extension, of selfso that it is imposible to decide where thiscreature's definition lies, just as it is difficultto declare where the fish mucus becomesthe water or where the water becomesthe fish ...""Go on, go on," murmured the youngman (fascinated).The husband appears on the scene beforethe seduction is consummated, but theyoung assistant flees red-faced and pantinginto the night. Habella has a waywith words.Birds do it, bees do it, Great Greyslugs, snails, and even woodticks do it."Kinship," in Lévi-Strauss's polite anthropologicalterms. "The circulation ofwomen," in less circumspect, more androcentricterms. For Lévi-Strauss, this circulationof women becomes the "language"of human society, the phonemeupon which whole systems of rules,habits, customs, and myths can be elaborated.Again, Rosenberg extends the continuityto animals. What Lévi-Strausslimits to a universal anthropology is, inThe Bee Book, biology. More accurately,it is bee-ology.The transference from a man-basedstructure to a bee-based structure alsooccasions Rosenberg's most importantideological emendation of Lévi-Strauss.If bees become the basis for our structuringmythologies, females cannot be renderedso easily into commodities ofcultural exchange. For, of course, it is thequeen who provides continuity in thehive, the workers (female) are thequeen's labourers. It is the drones (themale bees) who circulate, who flit andpose and vie for the queen's attentions.She selects only one drone as her mate.Immediately after the act, he dies. Themetaphors (and structures) must changeto accommodate the apiary.The structuralist significance of beesociety is also attested to by the misstructuringsof the past. Bees were longviewed in human terms. Thus Renataquotes to Habella a representative passagefrom Shakespeare that celebrates, ina kind of Renaissance "sociobiology," the"rightness" of a productive society ofmale bees — a single King, busy workers,actively affirming the human status quo.Rosenberg, in contrast, does not simplyanthropomorphize the hive. Quite theopposite transference occurs. Habellagrows stronger the more she appreciatesher bee-ing. Even at the conclusion,when she flies away, she has the strengthto do so precisely because she has completedher identification with the queen.After all, seeing is bee-leaving.Ultimately, The Bee Book is a bildungsroman,quintessentially a novel ofeducation: how to become a better humanbeing (the puns are inescapable).Each section of the novel is patternedafter an apian analogue such as "Learningthe Dances," or "The Drone," or"Becoming Queen." As she progressesfrom menarche to metaphor to metamorphosis,Habella grows more stately,199

OPINIONS & NOTESqueenly. But for this evolution to work,she must increasingly surrender humandefinitions and assent to bee definitions,particularly of her sexuality. Kinship,sexuality, defines the structure of thenovel. Habella's first period; the loss ofvirginity that felt "like a bee sting";Habella's decision to marry not for lovebut for procreation, like a queen's mating,all mark the book's time. Reinforcingthe counterstructures of human andapian sexuality in the novel is a brilliantpun, hidden within the text yet continuallyevoked by the underlying metaphorswith which the book begins, develops,and ends. The scientific name for bees:order, hymen-opt er a, "membrane wing."The homologies established by that punare the connecting link between Habella'ssexual initiation and her final flight.One should not, however, think ofThe Bee Book as reductionist. It neithersubsumes humans to bees (a hierarchynot confirmed by the book) nor limitslife's possibilities to queenly procreation.On the contrary, if there is a true herofigurein the book it is the bent, haggard,seemingly sexless Miss Kelly, primaryteacher in St. Paul's Catholic School, a"tireless worker," in apian terms, "whodoes not outlive her usefulness." MissKelly inspires her youthful charges withan unequalled love of learning and loveof self. They grow taller in her presence,flourish under her nurturing affections.In one of the most delightful scenes inthe novel (a comic transformation, perhaps,of the infamous moth ball dance inMargaret Atwood's Lady Oracle), MissKelly encourages Habella to dress in aQueen Bee costume to help illustrateMiss Kelly's lecture on the language ofthe bees. While the other children strokeher, Habella pushes eggs from a secretplace in the abdomen of her costume.In contrast to the shame of sexualityimposed by her parents, here Miss Kelly(the spinster-character ridiculed in muchtraditional fiction) encourages this naturalappreciation of sensuality. She becomesHabella's inspiration both as ascientist and as woman aware of herunique gifts. Similarly, Matthias, thehomosexual, is the first man to loveHabella and to appreciate her poetic insights.It is Matthias, too, who arrangesfor the publication of The Bee Book, thelast and living word of his friend andnonsexual lover. It is also Matthias whodelivers the novel's eloquent tribute tothe workers who have "no sex life at allthat we would recognize" but who mightactually lead "more fully sensual andsatisfactory lives" than "you or I." Heconcludes his speech on bees :"The sexless worker ... is stroked andnuzzled a thousand times a day, her abdomenrubbed by a dozen workers seekinginformation and sustenance. She shines inthe radiance of the sun as she searches withfreedom and ingenuity for the nectar of amillion flowers. I bid you do the same."The Bee Book is an intricate and technicallydazzling work. As much as Quebecwriters such as Louky Bersianik,Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, orJovette Marchessault, Ann Rosenberg ishelping to redefine the boundaries ofexperimental fiction. Yet Rosenberg'snovel, just when it threatens to overpowerwith its erudition, yields to atender story of Miss Kelly, an octogenariannow, doubled with arthritis, taking atrain to Minnesota to rescue an agedsister from a nursing home. Or we havecomical interludes such as the attemptedseduction through stories of sexy slugs.Sometimes fuzzy and cute, The BeeBook's satire yet packs a sting. Finally, itis a landmark novel. It is challenging,charming, outrageous, inventive — inshort, a honey of a book.NOTES1 Ann Rosenberg, The Bee Book (Toronto:Coach House Press, 1981), p. 7.CATHY N. DAVIDSON2OO

OPINIONS & NOTESThe work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, that giantof contemporary structuralist thought, is rootedin the studies of Franz Boas — the prolificpioneering student of the West Coast tribes.In turn Lévi-Strauss's The Way of the Maskshas been widely read. These conjunctions maysuggest a cultural climate in which semipopular,lavishly illustrated studies of North-West Indian art and ceremony proliferate. Abubbling stream of books from Douglas & Mc-Intyre certainly supports the demands of amulti-disciplinary, intellectual inquiry which, atthe same time, has at its heart the need to restoredignity to the everyday and the primitive— that is to the first or originating cultures.Among current titles the most comprehensiveis The Legacy: Tradition and Innovation inNorthwest Coast Indian Art (Douglas & Mc-Intyre, $1595), a reprint of the catalogue ofa 1980 exhibition at the British ColumbiaProvincial Museum. Although its photographsare frequently dulled and slightly blurred (incontrast to the crisp reproduction in The Boxof Daylight, which is something of a companionvolume), the essays clearly and simplydifferentiate the styles of the principal tribes.The book's strongest feature is its showingcontemporary Indian art in the context of itstradition. Other works in this unofficial"series" of large-format books are focused ona particular artist, a particular resource, anda particular ceremony. Bill Holm continues hisevocative explorations of West Coast art inSmoky-Top: The Art and Times of WillieaSeaweed (Douglas & Mclntyre, $29.95),catalogue of the work of one of the most productiveand celebrated of Kwakiutl carvers.The book constantly reminds us of the structuralistview that any human activity is humanthinking. That thought, and thereforecivilization and intelligence, is not necessarilywritten, is given convincing support by Holm'sshowing how carving and masks take theirform from "convoluted and extremely detailednarrative tales" describing the ancestry of eachsocial unit. Seaweed's masks are essential tothe dramatization of these tales, to the definitionof rank and privilege. Holm makes hisown contribution to revealing the complexmythic world by evocatively setting Seaweed'swork in the firelight and smoke and sounds ofthe dance ceremonies, as well as in the labyrinthineenvironment of sea and forest andnaturally carved rock, and in the twentiethcenturyhistory of the West Coast tribes. Holmwrites more than a catalogue; it is a lovingbiography of an impressive artist. In hismeditation on the setting of Seaweed's artHolm shows the intricate relationship to landand sea in Kwakiutl technology. A still fullerunderstanding of the relationship lies in HilaryStewart's study of Seaweed's primary rawmaterial, Cedar: Tree of Life to the NorthwestCoast Indians (Douglas & Mclntyre,$24.95). Again, Indian work in cedar, mostobviously the totem poles, but also the thousandsof practical items which were made fromcedar, is a substitute for the written documentationof the community; Stewart reads thatmaterial history with skilful perception. Herunwritten premise is that we comprehend anyartefact better if we know how it is made.Thus, her book combines an encyclopedia ofcedar, in chapters on the wood, bark, withers,and roots, from whistle to canoe, from towelto fish nets, with meticulous illustrations onhow-to-do-it (Stewart has tried, herself, tomake many of the things she describes ). Thisbook conveys a deep feeling for ecologicalconnections, a recognition that the cedar is aculture and a world in itself, which mustinclude, as Stewart's last chapter shows, thevital spirit of the cedar as well. So careful areStewart's step-by-step instructions that thereader feels like a privileged insider. So toowith Ulli Steltzer's photo essay A Haida Potlatch(Douglas & Mclntyre, $16.95), a recordof Robert Davidson's potlatch, November 6and 7, 1981. Although the photographs areentirely in black and white, and often toodark to show details, the book reveals thestages in preparing and presenting a precious,and often misunderstood, ritual, and thefunny human side of ceremonial seriousness.Comments by dozens of the participants increaseour understanding of the photographs.Perhaps we are most grateful, here, for therecognition expressed by Dorothy Grant that"tradition... is a continuous process," thatthe potlatch has maintained its ancient roots,and yet can adapt to a school auditorium inMasset, a sign of a culture at once living andreviving. The most eloquently worded evidenceof the tradition that is continuous processis the handsome The Raven Steals theLight (Douglas & Mclntyre, $24.95). Twodedicated artists, Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst,re-tell nine of the Haida tales of Raven,complemented by Reid's shadowy and hauntingpencil drawings. These are, simply, thebest versions of Indian tales I have read: theyare colloquial yet poetic,, precise yet spillingoutside their boundaries, accumulating andthen blending into one another. The writers,like Raven, are intelligent yet irreverent. Asis fitting in the oral tradition, each story201

OPINIONS & NOTESbubbles with a contemporary twist or context,so that the sundappled creek with whichRaven falls in love is "in this century. . .driven underground by the clear-cut loggingof her watershed." In such collisions, werecognize that "the purpose of myths... isnot merely to relate experiences, but to lead tosignificant changes in the structure of things."Bringhurst and Reid share this passion in atruly extraordinary, liberating collection ofentertainments.Enthusiasm for the short story in Canada hasresulted in a recent burgeoning of anthologiesand commentary. Among several collectionsare such regional and thematic enterprises asTales from the Canadian Rockies, ed. BrianPatton (Hurtig, $19.95) an d More SaskatchewanGold, ed. Geoffrey Ursell (Coteau,$4.95). What "Gold" indicates is the enormousvitality of short story writing in Saskatchewan— there seem more writers persquare mile, and more sheer enthusiasm forwriting than in any other place in the country.In the 31 stories collected here are mostly"realistic" works, but at the heart is the talltale-tellingimpulse that perhaps explainswhere the enthusiasm (the delight in story)comes from. There is Ken Mitchell's jauntyengagement with exaggeration; and there isAnne Szumigalski's "A Dog Experiences Difficultiesin his Search for Self-Knowledge," aproto-existentialist fable of devotion andunderstanding (with a hint of parody)."Rockies" is a different kind of book, one thatgathers snippets of fiction, poetry, and documentaryrecord, finding "story" in adventureand experience as well as in invention andplot: Birney's "David" is here, along withmemoirs of mountain guides, grizzlies, backpacks,and cold swims. It's a book for thosewho love the outdoors. Fred Cogswell's TheAtlantic Anthology (vol. 1, Prose; Ragweed,$12.95) i s an excellent classroom selection of27 writers from Haliburton and Basil Kingthrough MacPhail, McSween, MacLennan,and MacLeod to D. A. Richards and AnnCopeland. King's "The Ghost's Story" is afascinating rediscovery ; and amidst the moreconventional tales of initiation and loss are thewonderworks of Susan Kerslake and HelenPorter. They need to be known more, andAtlantic writing needs to be more widely recognizedacross the country for the quality andvariety it amply possesses.Less conventional is Shoes & Shit (Aya,$16.00), ed. Geoff Hancock and Rikki Ducornet,an international collection whichassembles stories and fragments all having todo with the two title motifs. "Processes," weare asked to imagine them. Also "symbiotic" :"footsie" and "poopsie" even. There is whimsyhere, some affection, some absurdity, andsome dross. Atwood's "Liking Men" perhapsepitomizes the quality of mind and kind oftension that has led the editors on theirmarch: a story about the desire to like men,it takes the narrator on an associational trekfrom innocent feet to threatening jackboots —it's the connection between love and fear thatAtwood repeatedly finds words for, the balancebetween the sexes so precariously perchedon a fulcrum of power. Atwood also appears(with "Polarities") in Rosemary Sullivan'sexcellent anthology Stories by Canadian Women(Oxford, $10.95), as do 28 other writersfrom Crawford, Wilson, Hebert, and Roy toGloria Sawai, Joy Kogawa, Louise Maheux-Forcier, and Dionne Brand. The anthology isat once a tribute to forms of ethnic impact onCanadian prose in English and French, anaffirmation of the continuous contribution ofwomen to Canadian literature (it usefullyreprints S. F. Harrison and S. J. Duncan),and a declaration of concerns female. It isabout life and words, action and thought,words in action and the mind alive. One mightquarrel with the choice here and there (theWilson is weak, for one) and one might wantother writers represented (Ann Copeland?Helen Porter? Susan Kerslake?). But this isgood value.Some of the finest of recent critical commentson English-Canadian short fiction areto be found in Ranam (no. 16, 1983), a reviewfrom Strasbourg. Papers from a symposiumlargely concerned with narrative strategy,the collection looks at Laurence,Hodgins, Munro, Gallant, W T icbe (Coral AnnHowells' article is of special interest), Lowry,Carr, and MacLeod. The primarily Frenchand German critics together discover a suretyof technique among Canadian writers: Canadiancritics might profitably learn from them.The appearance of this issue — like that ofthe Canadian poetry issue of Trends (5, no.10; Wilfion Books, 30 p.), the Paisley Collegeof Technology Literary Magazine — is furthertangible evidence of the new Canadian culturalpresence abroad.202

OPINIONS & NOTESGale's Contemporary Authors vol. 12 ($80.00)includes a sketch on Marian Engel (a sketchamply supplemented by the special issue thatRoom of One's Own devoted to her in 1984) ;Contemporary Literary Criticism vol. 28($80.00) summarizes Waddington and Hoodcommentary; and the new ContemporaryAuthors Autobiography series vol. 1 ($70.00)includes a long and valuable entry on (andby) Josef Skvorecky. Oxford has reprinted inpaper ($16.95) the useful second ( 1971 ) editionof J. E. Girlot's A Dictionary of Symbols.And also from Oxford is the splendid ConciseScience Dictionary ($24.95), an invaluableclear guidebook both for the science-mindedand the technologically illiterate layman;every classroom should have one, and everyreader of modern writing. Contemporary LiteraryCriticism vols. 27 and 29 (Gale, $80.00and $82.00) excerpts criticism on R. G. Everson,Timothy Findley, W. P. Kinsella, andJane Rule, and on Clark Blaise, Michael Ondaatje,Anne Hébert, and Michel Tremblay.Children's Literature Review vol. 7 (Gale,$70.00) opens with a survey by Sheila Egoffcalled "The Same, Only Different: CanadianChildren's Literature in a North AmericanContext." Among other recent reference worksare Linda Hoad's Literary Manuscripts at theNational Library of Canada (a short checklist); Gernot U. Gabel's valuable CanadianLiterature: An Index to Theses Accepted byCanadian Universities /955-/960 (EditionGemini, DM 36), which (for all its virtues,and it does appear to have been very thorough)nonetheless misses at least DorothyLivesay's thesis and my own; and John RobertColombo's well-packed and densely illustratedCanadian Literary Landmarks (Hounslow,$35.00; pa. $19.95). Colombo's book is atourist's glimpse of literary associations —there's a picture of Birney's father's ranchhousein the hills above Erickson, for example,and a quotation from a Wilson story reflectingon the puzzle of Louis Hémon in Chapleau.There are a number of substantive entries,and yet every reader will want more. I shouldlike to have seen more specific B.C. references(perhaps the Joe Fortes monument for Wilson'sInnocent Traveller) ; too often the commentsflag in generalizations ("A good manywriters . . . were associated ... to name a handful").Or in misleading statements (to call"Lulu Island" — a suburb about the area ofVancouver city — "a small island" in theFraser estuary "that Dorothy Livesay oncevisited" in order to write Call My PeopleHome, is to distort reality a little). But this isan enthusiast's book, full of affection. And it'snow possible for the General Reader to walkevery inch of this country, it seems, book inhand, finding other books — and writers everywhere— springing to mind.LAST PAGERandom Notes: ( 1 ) When you get to be afamous writer, you can republish your earlyworks, or you die and somebody collects you.Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner (Little,ls aBrown, $18.95) book of the first kind,bringing together five early stories; the lateElizabeth Bishop's The Collected Prose (Farrar,Strauss, Giroux, n.p.) is of the secondsort: Robert Giroux's affectionate anthologyof nine essays and eight stories, some editedfrom manuscript and all marked by Bishop'sexacting search for effective image and affectivecadence. Pynchon professes embarrassmentat his early craftsmanship ; devotees may nonethelessfind signs here of his later metatextualintellect. Few general readers will find engagingnarratives, however — it is an effortfulread. Bishop's book, by contrast, is an absorbingadventure in image and memory —memory mostly of Brazil, where Bishop lived,and of the quality of person she met there;and of her Nova Scotia childhood — in theessay "Primer Class" and the extraordinarilymoving story "In The Village," which framethe other works. One delightful discovery inbetween is the memoir of her experience as amarker for a suspect correspondence school ofwriting. But it is to the Maritime pieces onereturns: to the terrifying constant presence ofher mother's illness, to the wit and the wordplaythat throw this reality into relief, and tothe prize and wound of independence the poetcalls love.(2) Next books are sometimes no better thanfirst books. Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale(Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch/Academic Press,$ ! 9-95) starts off as a marvel, an adventurein the violent imagination of New York: whena master mechanic refuses violence and findshe must flee from the pursuers who turn onhim, his horse begins to fly and takes him offto winter and the dreamed-of Eden of thefuture. But the novel wears itself soon intocops-and-robbers verbosity: the Americandream touched by John Wayne, Pegasus, andHan Solo. Graham Jackson's The Decline of203

OPINIONS & NOTESWestern Hill (University of Queensland,$14.95: pa. $7.95) sets its story in an Australiantown the author has relied on before; ifthere is such a thing as a suburban style, thisis it. Shiva Naipaul's A Hot Country (Collins,$19.95) i s overwritten in another way — burdeninga story by trying to elongate it into anovel, Naipaul finds violence in the politicallife of an invented South American countrycalled Cuyama, and despairs of the emptinesshe finds in the political attitudes of ordinarypeople. They "had been duped," he writes,"out of the knowledge of their condition.That, in the end, was the true oppression."People want, he says, "a new, uncontaminatedworld of their own making," but in theirhearts they lack both the power and the desireto create, so accept slogans instead, to hidetheir emptiness most of all from themselves.(3) When you reach 25, you celebrate, andwhen you reach 3, you stop. There have beena number of quarter-century celebrations recently,those of Prism international and CanadianLiterature among them. In Australia,Quadrant, too, is celebrating survival, with a500-plus page anthology of essays, stories, andpoems from the previous two-and-a-half decadescalled, not provocatively, QuadrantTwenty-Five Years (University of Queensland,$22.50). Contributors range from the filmdirector Bruce Beresford to performer BarryHumphries to poets David Malouf and JudithRodriguez. Surprisingly, the essays in retrospectseem conservative and the stories conventional;but an eye for poetry has over theyears proved remarkably fine. And the anthologyas a whole is an instructive guide tosome of the literary and social interconnectionsin Australia in our time. Maurice Gee'sSole Survivor (Faber & Faber, £7.95, $25.95)is volume three in the trilogy that began withGee's magnificent Plumb. This work followsthe Plumb family's futures into a third generation,into the life of Raymond Sole and some1960's and 70's experiments with drugs,sexual variations, indifferent independence,and political ambition. It's cast as a journalist'smemoirs : a reluctant removal of masksthat previous characters and novels have puton, and an admission of limits to the family'sProtestant heritage. If the novel lacks bothPlumb's psychological force and Meg's verbalhigh intensity, it's an estimable literary conclusionnevertheless, full of mordant discoveriesabout the observer's involvement in the liveshe claims only to see.W.H.N.204