\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

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