$7.50 per copy

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PO€TS' WORDS

A QUARTERLY OF CRITICISM AND R€VI€W

OTHERWORLDS

VIRA'iRAGO TRAVELLERS has republished the 1852 edition ofSusanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush, with a lively introduction by Mar-garet Atwood. It's the introduction and the context that reshape the book here.Atwood reflects on her personal connection with Moodie (Classic, Shadow) —also on Mrs. Moodie as history, on women in nineteenth-century Canada, andon the travel-literature conventions which Mrs. Moodie emulated : the ordeal ofthe journey, the sketch of setting and person, the nascent plot, the "self-perceivedlunacy." To the list of parallels Atwood suggests (Traill, Langton, Jameson, allobserving Ontario), one might add another context still: that of the settlementjournal — which in Western Canada and Labrador, for example — Susan Alli-son, Elizabeth Goudie — was published years later. This additional filter reshapesthe easy distinction between then and now, and reminds us that "pioneers" notonly extend definitions of space but also alter our expectations of attitude andtime.

Of review books that have lately arrived on the editorial desk, several take upthis proposition, or at least seek to change the filters through which we glimpse thepast. They range from anthology to history, biography to critical theory. AlanRoss's London Magazine ig6i-ig8^, for example (Chatto & Windus), readsalmost as a Who's Who of three generations of writers ( R. K. Narayan to Chris-topher Hope, Malcolm Lowry to Paul Theroux) and reminds us of the constantquality the London Magazine has sought to sustain. Eliza Fay's Original Lettersfrom India (iyig-1815), ed. E. M. Forster, with a new introduction by M. M.Kaye (Hogarth), is a reminder of a different sense of Empire — one in whichLondon still asserts its supremacy, but in which Calcutta and Mysore ensnare.Literally, for Eliza Fay — who with her persistently incompetent husband wasimprisoned on arrival in one of the princely states. But metaphorically as well.These letters (shades of Arabella Fermor, hints of Mrs. Moodie to come) aredoughty, witty expressions of the self-confident British woman, and of her fascina-tion with the otherworlds which she can perceive but never quite understand.A book like Naveen Patnaik's A Second Paradise (Doubleday) is more strikingfor its visual record — offering a glimpse of Indian courtly life ( through art andarchitecture, reproduced here in rich full colour plates), and of its rituals of

3

EDITORIAL

opulence and power, to which few travellers of Mrs. Fay's time would have hadclose access.

In Glynne Wickham's A History of the Theatre (Cambridge) by contrast, theEmpire figures scarcely at all. Except inferentially. A well-illustrated guide todevelopment in European drama from the Greeks to the Expressionists, the bookcomments on theatrical design, dramatic presumptions, and changing modes ofcritical approach; it does not shrink from discussions of the politics and economicsof theatrical eminence, but it also does not address the politics of omission. Thatis, when received taste asserts its "universal" standard, it implicitly consigns"other" activities —• those which do not fit a category — into a historical dustbin.Hence, here, there are comments on eighteenth-century opera, but no mentionof Mrs. Brooke, William Shield, and the popularity of Rosina. Sarah Bernhardtis here, but no mention of the significance of her tours abroad. "America" ismentioned repeatedly in that expansive British gesture towards the western hemi-sphere; but there isn't even a hint that Canada exists as a separate culture, orthat there were lively theatrical traditions growing in all the colonies. Plainly,they did not impinge on London. Such cavils are, in some degree, beside thepoint, for they ask a different question from those which Wickham addresses indetail. They call, moreover — inevitably •—• for another book.

David Mackay's In the Wake of Cook (Victoria University Press, N.Z.) probesthe economics of eighteenth-century empire in just such an "alternative" way.Subtitled "Exploration, Science and Empire," the book talks of the "rediscoveries"of the world made possible by advances in telescope and other navigational instru-ments. But basic to European expansion was commodity control: the manipu-lation of trade in furs, cotton, coffee, tea, pepper, sugar, silk, and slaves (andconsequently of food for slaves, which led to various expeditions transplantingbreadfruit and other crops from one territory to another). The scientific advancesthat sustained imperial expression had many less than admirable consequences.But with the whole world as a laboratory, scientists by the end of that centurywere also on the edge of the integrative theories that in the century to come wouldsustain a belief both in taxonomic and political order.

Other books offer different glimpses past the conventional paradigms of re-ceived history. The papers from a 1983 conference of Australian aboriginalwriters, for example (Aboriginal Writing Today, ed. J. Davis and B. Hodge,Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies), hints at the oral dimensions of nativeAustralian literature, and at the Fanonian politics of writing an aboriginal litera-ture in "white forms." (The continuing Handbook of North American Indiansseries from the Smithsonian Institution — vols. 8-11 are now available — probessimilar issues, though more formally, and in contexts involving the analysis ofartifact, mythologies, and living patterns.) "An Emigrant Mechanic's" Settlersand Convicts (reprinted from the 1847 edition by Melbourne University Press,

EDITORIAL

and attributed here to Alexander Harris) is a narrative observation of the "Objec-tionable and mischievous conduct" of certain classes of Australian. Implicitlyjudgmental, and as marked by the nineteenth-century travel sketch conventions asis Mrs. Moodie's journal, it translates the perspectives of the "rebels" through theeyes of orderly desire. What constitutes "rebellion" depends, that is, on the angleof political commitment. On ethnicity, gender, class, power, speech.

Katherine Middleton Murry's "unknown life" of her father, Beloved Quixote(Souvenir Press), is a loving testament, a reclamation of John Middleton Murryfrom the critical enclosure ("husband to Katherine Mansfield") to which literaryhistory has generally consigned him. Ocean of Story (Viking) recovers some 35uncollected stories by Christina Stead, reminding us of the degree to which repu-tations still rest in booklength publications, and of the disservice this criticalshortcut does to writers who work in shorter forms and journals. By contrast twovolumes from larger series (vol. 5 of A History of Australia and vol. 9 of Aus-tralian Dictionary of Biography, both from Melbourne University Press) suggesta massive effort to deal with detail, but resist being assessed individually. In thesecases it's the accomplishment of the whole that matters. Finally, Rolston-Bain(of Windsor, Ontario) has published a treasure: vol. B-8, Coleccion "DocumentaNovae Hispaniae," ed. David Marley, is a facsimile Spanish/French edition ofthe 1763 Treaty of Paris. It's a potent reminder of the role of the Spanish (toolong neglected) in European-Canadian history. It's also a nicely phrased diplo-matic dialogue of an unrepentant political standoff, between "El Rei Christian-isimo" and "el Rei de la Gran-Bretana," unquestionably polite, and indisputablyregistering a mutual disdain.

But is this a "final" boundary after all? There are innerworlds, innerfilms, forwhich still other writers seek expression, and they, too, reconstitute the way weperceive. A. J. Hassall, writing of Randolph Stow's extraordinary books inStrange Country (University of Queensland Press) speaks of the many worlds"peopled by visitants,. . . strangers and afraid, in landscapes which are alien, andyet which reflect that strangeness they also find when they look inwards. . . ." VanIkin's historical collection of Australian Science Fiction (Academy Chicago) be-gins in monsters and stellar invasions and ends in the economics of shadows,pursuing a parallel quest for meaning beyond the definitions of the tangible. It'sa context of sorts in which pleasurably to read Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyper-reality (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), a collection of essays on waxworks andholograms and some of the ideas they suggest : the idea of idealism, the absolution(and absolutism) of falsehood, the American craving for opulence, the approxi-mate realities of museum artifacts. Americans live not for fantasy, Eco argues,but for a trip to Fantasyland; one sign of the current fascination with the pastis the often unthinking millenarianism that governs contemporary politics; the"inconceivable" happens every day, therefore what explains the passive deter-

EDITORIAL

mination among so many people to define themselves apart from experience?These are lively, provocative essays, on subjects that range from Islam to Super-man to Marshall McLuhan. To what end? "Sometimes you speak," Eco writes,"because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you havethe 'scientific' certainty that you are saying it in an unassailable way." Yes,indeed.

W.N.

L€TT€RS TO M71RYYvonne Trainer

I.

Mary you are the one who writes firstthough I know you curse mebecause I promised toHow quickly I open the envelopesealed with the extra scotch tapeMy hands sticky with excitementor is it from the nights I clung tothe doorhandle the dash the armrestwhile you passed every car on the highwayafter some guywho dented your fenderor gave you the fingeror yelled at you out the window It is evening

You write to ask what I'm doingYou write to ask if I'm writing poetryYou write to say you've taken up hang-glidingjust for the exercise

I walk corridorsThe rooms magnified mailboxesRemembering the happy facesthe upside down sad facesyou painted on the wallBottles you kept on the sillFootsteps you inked in red on the dull ceilingabove the door out the window It is darkI scuttle hallways

POEM

In my room the walls are closing inlike wings or signs in a windor sheets of stapled paperOn my deskyour address.

II.

Mary it is almost a yearand again you write to sayyou are coming for a visitand you've cut your orange hairas though that could smoulder the glowthe days you cycled couleesskipped classes

to skateboard sidewalks laughingwhen you reached level ground

this city was too small for you

Mary I too have tamed this cityEvery evening going home for supperstreets are my allegoriesMy metaphors turn avenues into

into twisted armsImages intersect traffic

Tomorrow when you comeWe will buy steaksWe will build an open fireThis city will eat from our hands.

III.

Mary because you have phoned to sayyou cannot comeAnd because my room is four walls of concretethat will not allow me to breathe properlyI invite Flora to come with meto the park KnowinglyI am teaching her to build a fireShe gathers wood by the riverI burn old news-papers and letters

POEM

Today Flora will make many trips to the riverTo build a fire she will carry many logsShe will smell the paper burnShe will see how an axe cuts

new anglesinto old wood.

IV.

Marysomeday when I am oldsomeday when I sit cold and crumpledin a wheeled chairyou will comeyou will comedancing on high heelswearing your peacock blue hatwith your orange hairthrowing firelike a comet

You'll breatheeighty years

adventures into meWe'll change wheeled chairfor chariotYou'll flycupping a goblet of wineI'll ride without reinsWe'll carry brown bread

Our arrival will be the starsYou'll giggle cartwheels on their tipsI'll balance on moon's edge laughingFrom where we arethe earth will be smallerthan the smallest cityIt will be winter

From where we areWe'll reflect orange glowson silver iciclesin ever-

greentrees.

STEALING THE TEXTGeorge Bowering's "Kerrisdale Elegies'and Dennis Cooley's "Bloody Jack"

Smaro Kamboureli

Transformer l'oeuvre en chose, muette donc et qui se tait en parlant parcequ'elle se passe de signature, cela ne se peut qu'à inscrire la signature dans le texte,ce qui revient à signer deux fois en ne signant plus.

The process of transforming a work into a thing — mute, therefore, and silentwhen speaking, because dispensing with the signature — can only be brought aboutby inscribing the signature in the text, which amounts to signing twice in theprocess of not signing any more.

JACQUES DERRiDA, Signêponge = Signsponge1

" GEORGE BOWERING'S Kerrisdale Elegies and DennisGooley's Bloody Jack,2 like most contemporary long poems, resist generic defini tion. Bowering's long poem is not simply an elegy : it is an elegy imitating anotherelegy, specifically Rilke's Duino Elegies. To use Mikhail Bakhtin's term, it is a"double voiced" poem,3 a poem which is generically located on the edge ofquotation and discourse, thus blurring the difference between mimesis and origi nality. Similarly, Bloody Jack defines itself as a "book," but it is not a book ofmonologic discourse. It is a collage of genres such as the oral poem of the folktradition, the ballad, the elegy, lyrics with their musical scores and the concretepoem, a collage which threatens to destroy the poem's frame as a book.

The long poem's resistance to definition has much to do with the dialogicinteraction that informs its discourse. Inclusiveness is one of the generative prin ciples that locates the long poem within a web of genres. The reader is invited torecognize a "new" genre of impure origins, a discursive formation which resultsfrom an ongoing dialogue of genres. The generic intertextuality of the long poemparodies the singularity of traditional genre definitions. The simultaneous presenceof various genres and their heterogeneous interrelationships mark what Bakhtinwould call the "polyphonic"* nature of the long poem. As a polyphonic structure,the long poem "novelizes"5 our traditional concepts of genre as well as the specificgenres deployed in it. Through their novelization these genres, according to Bakh

BOWERING & GOOLEY

tin, "become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporatingextraliterary heteroglossia and the 'novelistic' layers of literary language, theybecome dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parodyand [. . . ] a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished,still-evolving contemporary reality."6 Perhaps the ultimate carnivalesque elementin the long poem is its double intent to be seen as a "new" genre, that is a hybridof genres, and to resist any attempt toward precise definition.

George Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies and Dennis Cooky's Bloody Jack exem-plify some of the most significant concerns of the long poem as a "new" genre. Inmy discussion of them I will focus on the transgressive functions of authorialsignature in relation to the genres these poems employ. I take signature to relateto the operations between proper names and common nouns, between words andthings.7 The author's proper name permeates her or his text as it participates inthe process of signification that composes the text. The author is written into thetext as s/he writes it. Signature is employed as a sign that plays with and againstthe arbitrariness of signifier and signified, a sign that oscillates between theauthor's presence and absence in the text. Signing is also the enabling act thataccounts for the author's use of, and departure from, traditional genres. Bow-ering's and Cooley's writing is both an imitation of existing genres and texts anda transgression of their principles. This parallel writing act is accomplished byinterrupting the continuity that validates genre, by apostrophizing what theyimitate. I will show, then, how their authorial signatures locate referentialitywithin the field of textuality.

[rvEN THE LONG POEM'S RESISTANCE to definition, thereis a certain appropriateness that the covers of both Kerrisdale Elegies and BloodyJack are facial images creating illusions of proximity. In Kerrisdale Elegies thecover image is the face of the author wearing dark glasses. The ragged edges ofits frame simulate the double texture of a torn photograph, the texture of glossyand rough paper (a manuscript page of writing?). The torn top of the photo-graph exceeds its margin threatening to erase Bowering's name: the author'svisage is foregrounded ; his name is held in disbelief. The reader is faced with thedouble bind of signature, the naming of an absent presence.

Cooley wanted a "stylized icon" of himself on the cover of his book,8 but hispublishers did not go along with that. What we see is an indistinct face -— the"pale spectacle" of historical Krafchenko taken from a newspaper photograph,a dissolved identity becoming an anonymous icon. It is a face that is more of anoutline than a concrete image in which "we can read / inklings of" the author,9the surface of a palimpsest where both character and poet blend into each other.

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BOWERING & COOLEY

A face in a stage of collapsing, receding into the poem, "a book by DennisCooley."

While both authors hold a pose, their long poems sign themselves on thecovers as specific instances of different genres: that of the elegy and that of thebook. Yet, as is the case in many long poems, the readily identifiable genres ofthe elegy and the book are not the sole parameters designating the genericcharacter of Kerrisdale Elegies and Bloody Jack. The reader can take for grantedonly a number of elements when dealing with these poems. Two books (twofaces) : two long poems ("an encyclopedia of genres"10) : one reader (theviewer). The reader of these two poems finds herself caught in the perennialtriangle of the story of desire. Each face presents me with the "organ" I need inorder to see it, to touch it; they give me the "eye" and the "ear" through whichI can read them.11 These facial images, the textual masks of the poets, initiatea series of paradoxes between themselves and their referentiality. Beginning withtheir parodie self-portraits on the covers, Bowering and Cooley imitate the tropesof the genres they employ but at the same time they practise a mimesis thatunwrites the style of these tropes. The intertextuality of the generic interplay inthe two poems points to an erotics of reading: the poets as faithful or adulterousreaders — reading, misreading, plagiarizing.12 What reconciles the heterogeneousactivities within these long poems is the intertextuality of the authors' signatures.If these authors' fixed images fail to seduce me, the translation of the authorialimage into signature does not.

The authorial signature in Kerrisdale Elegies and Bloody Jack, which beginsto assert itself on the covers, supplements the dialogue of genres in these longpoems. The signature does not only authorize the deployment of diverse genres;it thematizes genre while presenting signing as yet another form of writing. "Howcan one cite a signature?" Jacques Derrida asks. "The signature spreads overeverything, but is stripped off or makes itself take off [...] ."" Through theauthorial signature writing becomes rewriting, autographing, a constant revising(reviewing) of the discursive field of the long poem. It allows digressions; itchanges the direction of our study, as Gregory L. Ulmer says, between "theauthor-text relation" thus "allowing contamination between the inside and out-side."14 The authorial signature, in other words, disseminates in the text not onlythe author's presence but his act of writing and what it entails.

This multiple signing enables Bowering and Cooley to play hide-and-seek withtheir readers. They make brief appearances: the poet as flesh, as desire incarnate,as the one who enters where I as a reader, to "misquote" Bowering, "have beenbut can never enter" (3.43). The reader is invited to share a slice of life, thosefragments that become poetry. The authorial signature foregrounds the presenceof the reader in the text while, at the same time, putting this presence undererasure. I'm there, in the text, but at the same time I'm constantly put on hold.

1 1

BOWERING & COOLEY

U/OWERING:

If I did complain, who among my friendswould hear?

If one of themamazed me with an embracehe would find his arms empty, his own facestaring from a mirror. (1.9)

Love me / love me not, says Bowering's picture. Love my text, the flesh of mylife.

Beauty is the first prod of fear,we must

live our lives in.We reach for her,

we think we love her, because she holds the knifea knife-edge from our throat.

Every fair heartis frightful.

Every rose petalexudes poison in bright sunlight. (1.9)

Love the terror of beauty, the image says; make a home for yourself, reader, atthis knife-edge space.

She saysI've got you under my skin, yes, she saysyou walk with me wherever I go,

you arethe weather.

I reply with a call for help,I'm disappearing,

there's a change in the weather. (2.25)

Love me if you can, if you can really afford it, it says. I nearly can. I can onlyif I let "you" steal my freedom, my strategies as a reader. Only if I steal "your"glasses covering what is already hiding within the pages of the book. Only if Ilet the mirror image ("his face") erase my gender, become the neutral readerwhich objectifies these textual slices of life. It is the "I" of the cover image speak-ing — not the author — its life assuming the physical reality of language, beingaffirmed by the signature of the writer. Bowering threatens to disappear when theweather changes, when the reader threatens to get too close.

Although Bowering remains nameless in the poem, his signature is disseminatedby place names and images : Kerrisdale is the name of his Vancouver neighbour-hood; street references are to the same area; he has been in Duino and some of

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the other Italian locations he refers to; he is a baseball fan and has written aboutbaseball before both in his poetry and in his fiction; there are allusions to someof his favourite poets such as Shelley, H.D., Robin Blaser, and Jack Spicer15 aswell as references to his A Short Sad Book. The signature is no longer the author'sproper name but has become a metonymy. As Derrida observes, "[t]he rebussignature, the métonymie or anagrammatic signature, these are the condition ofpossibility and impossibility. The double bind of a signature event. As if thething (or the common name of the thing), ought to absorb the proper, to drinkit and to retain it in order to keep it. But, in the same stroke, by keeping, drinking,and absorbing it, it is as if the thing (or its name) lost or soiled the propername."16 The signature as common name writes the poet into his text while alsomarking his departure from it, becoming thus a countersignature. The writer'sdeparture — his decomposition that erases the strictures of the dialectic presence/absence — is one of the markers of the elegiac tone of the poem.

God, there goes another breath,and I go with it,

I was further from my gravetwo stanzas back, I'm human.

Will the universenotice my unattached molecules drifting thru?Will the dead poets notice our lines appearing among them,or are their ears filled with their own music? (2.26-27)

When the author-in-the-text asserts he is dead, when his friends' arms reachtoward him to embrace only air, when his lines appear written over and in-between the lines of a dead poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, it is his signature thatsurvives this death incurred in language, that posthumously, postwriterly, keepshim absorbed as a non-proper name in the text.

The translation of Bowering's signature into countersignature is the first markerthat designates Kerrisdale Elegies as a counterfeit of Rilke's Duino Elegies. Andit is not only the title of Bowering's poem that points to Rilke's Duino Elegies.A comparison of Bowering's text to any English translation of Rilke's Elegies willtestify that Bowering's long poem is a palimpsest, his own text superimposed onRilke's text. It doesn't really matter what specific translations Bowering used.17

What matters is the ways in which Rilke is re-cited, countersigned, in the site ofBowering's text. Here is an example from the fourth elegy :

RilkeEven when fully intent on one thing,we feel another's costly tug. Hostilityis second nature to us. Having promisedone another distance, hunting, and home,don't lovers always cross each other's boundaries?18

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BoweringI follow one scent,

sure of my appetite,but am distracted by a crossing spoor.

My natureis torn,

I am a trespasser,I promised to

steer clear,stay in my own territory,

but lovemakes intruders,

I am not I here,but the burglar

of your past. (4.52)There is as much sameness as there is difference between these two texts. Thesameness violates the distance that is traditionally promised between an originalsource and a text derived from it. But this sameness is "translated" into differenceas misrepresentation when Bowering alters Duino Elegies in ways that thematizehis misappropriation of Rilke's text. Duino Elegies is also violated by the formof Bowering's text, that is the visual rendering of Rilke's Elegies in KerrisdaleElegies. Nonetheless, Bowering does not intend to erase Rilke's signature fromthe Elegies™ for his long poem is inscribed by the games of textual desire: themating of text with stolen text; the mating of poet with poet. The poet, then, asthief of words. He is a thief engendered by the object that inspires the theft —the poem that expropriates itself from the singularity of authorship, that liberatesitself from monologic existence — a thief exonerating himself for the stealing oftext by using his signature — a double signature at that — a thief appropriatingorigins and mocking originality by stealing in the name of writing.

The games Bowering plays with origins point to an erotics of intertextuality.Kerrisdale Elegies identifies itself with Duino Elegies, but this is an identificationwhich has to be perceived, to use Linda Hutcheon's expression, with "criticaldifference."20 Yet intertextuality is too general a term here to articulate thedynamics that bring close and separate from one another Bowering's and Rilke'sElegies. I would like to propose another term, that of parallaxis, to signify theparticular instances of intertextuality that we observe in Kerrisdale Elegies andother long poems, an intertextuality that involves not merely allusion or trans-ference of certain signifying forces from one text into another but mimesis astranslation and simultaneous alteration of these forces.21

Parallaxis derives etymologically from para + allaxu. It is the polysemy ofthese two components that makes parallaxis a useful concept in discussing specificfunctions of intertextuality: para means beside, towards, going by, beyond, con-trary to, in comparison with; allaxis means change, interchange, making other

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BOWERING & COOLEY

than it is, giving in exchange. Parallaxis then signifies the range of forces thatbuild up tradition, the dynamics that gravitate one text toward another andwhich determine the extent of influence, namely the interdependence of texts aswell as the autonomy of individual texts. The parallactic movement is accom-plished through transference by alteration and variation, a transference based onsameness as well as difference. The semantics of parallaxis, as opposed to that ofintertextuality, delineates, I believe, the dialogue between texts and genres withgreater precision, while its particular semantic configurations evoke the diversityof the dialogic play at work. It indicates an exchange (expropriation), the other-ness of text, the shifting of text in alternating contexts, a shift and change whichoften involve corruption of origins, deviation from an original/originary point.

Bowering's deviations from Rilke's text do not erase the original; they alter itwhile maintaining the "crossing spoors" that affirm not only the sameness thatbinds the two poems but also Bowering's writing steps that make his own textdiffer from Rilke's. The parallaxis that informs Bowering's writing act producesa text of marginal differences, a text of differance. For if Kerrisdale Elegies is a"translation," it is an annotated "translation," the annotations being Bowering'sappropriation of the marginal space and the space between the lines of DuinoElegies.

The infidelities that the reader notices in Bowering's "translation" of DuinoElegies operate exactly on the level of parallaxis: he remains faithful to thefundamental structure, imagery and ideas of Duino Elegies by stealing and appro-priating them in his own text through re-writing. One could explain, of course,this appropriation by pointing out that Bowering relocates Duino Elegies in Van-couver; yet the changes incurred by this relocation do not account for KerrisdaleElegies composition. For Bowering alters (adulterates) the form, the languageand many of Rilke's allusions. Linos, for instance, to whom Rilke refers in theend of the first elegy, is translated in Kerrisdale Elegies as Marilyn Monroe.Bowering's parallaxis maintains the mythological allusion but translates it incontemporary terms. From the myth about a pagan figure we move to the stardomof Hollywood, to Marilyn who is, as Bowering says, "the stuff our words aremade from" (1.20). Linos in Rilke's poem is a double signature: it signifies amournful song ; it is also the name of a young man whose life assumes three mythicconfigurations, two of them related to Apollo — Apollo as Linos' father avengingthe death of his son, Apollo as the god of song punishing Linos for transgressinghis human limits as singer.22 Both signatures of Linos identify the genre of thepoem as elegy and raise questions regarding the nature of origins and transgres-sion. Marilyn Monroe's life has similarly evolved into a myth that is still beingre-written.

Bowering's parallaxis here becomes a form of parallelism, the setting side byside of two texts, thus further enunciating the degree of sameness and difference

BOWERING & COOLEY

between Kerrisdale Elegies and Duino Elegies. His writing act is an act ofmimesis; mimesis, however, in Gérard Genette's sense of forgery: "la forgerie estl'imitation en régime sérieux, dont la fonction dominante est la poursuite oul'extension d'un accomplissement littéraire préexistant."23 During this mimeticact as "forgery," Bowering also imitates (writes into the text) the writing processhe is engaged in. The poet as trespasser is, again, the common name as signature,but this time it is a signature that thematizes the question of genre in this longpoem. But if plagiarizing Rilke's text is an aesthetic si(g)n that stigmatizes Kerris-dale Elegies with the double signatures of Rilke and Bowering, it is a si (g) n thatBowering is far from ignoring. "[B]ut love / makes intruders," he says, "I am notI here, / but the burglar / of your past." Bowering's apostrophe is to the figureof the lover, but, given the erotics of intertextuality in his poem, his apostrophemay also be directed toward Rilke. Love effaces the writing poet as origin, as thesingle maker of the text; it presents the poet as the parallaxis of his own self, asa "burglar" who cannot extract himself from the tradition. He is "playing housewith" (1.12) the textuality of writing. "[T]hrowing" his proper "name away"(1.18), writing himself over (making love to) Rilke's text, the poet as lover andthief emerges from within the text of another poet in the carnivalesque paradiseof his own text : "Upstairs with my toys ·— a pen, some lined paper, / my booksopen around me" (4.58). Bowering's signature and countersignature present hislong poem as the hiatus of text as source and text as the parallactic other of thatsource.

The same principle of mimesis as forgery operates in Dennis Cooley's poem.you have my word

periodicallythey thinkthey have mewhere they want methat theyve got metyped [. . .]lines laid out

but i dontpause dont evenhesitate where theymake the signs

[. ..] i live in the gaps beneath thotbelieve in the invisible gasps under printi learn to hold my breathhold by breath

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in envelopes of airrefuse to be taken ini am guerrilla of bracketsyou cant see me on the pagewhited out in your eyes

[ · • · ]

if you dont keep watchi will surface under your faces[··•]from the edges where youwould gloss me overwrite me out of existencei will shoutto you hardof hearing

that is whyto find meyou must read between the lines (16-8)

"You have my word," the poet says, hiding behind his words, talking himself outof the text, inside the text, bracketing his presence, making the reader an accom-plice of this war between presence and absence. You have my word, the poet says,and he breaks his promise, he breaks away from the reader's hold, as he translateshis words into plural meaning, warding off definition. And he surfaces under myface : he translates his act of writing into the reading act, reading under his ownface, under my nose, delaying the performance of my own reading act by stealingmy privilege as reader, by inscribing my reading in his text.

Dennis Cooley's transgression of his writing role breaks the laws that controlaesthetic decorum. He's "laying down the law" (52) that there are no limits forthe writing and reading acts alike. It is a law signed by him in script, "yes trulyDennis Cooley" ( 146 ), countersigned by his main character, the Ukrainian out-law Krafchenko, signed repeatedly by the poet's own inventions of himself. "Forthe law as it stands neither you nor I have any responsibility" ( 49 ). This lawlesslaw informs the design of the whole book. Bloody Jack could be described as adocumentary poem about a Ukrainian bandit, persecuted by the Winnipeg policeforce and loved by the Winnipeg community in the igio's. Cooley gives hisprimary sources in the beginning of the poem. Yet he supersedes the documentsat hand and meanders through a web of genres, and of authentic and forgeddocuments. One of his epigraphs is by Julia Kristeva talking about Menippean

17

BOWERING & GOOLEY

satire which she defines as an "all-inclusive genre."24 This sums up the documen-tary nature of Bloody Jack. Far from being a document about a specific criminal— whom the public nevertheless saw as a Robin Hood figure thus parodying thelaw — Bloody Jack becomes a document of the generic interplay that character-izes the long poem. One might argue that Bloody Jack is about the poet's dreamof living in the margins: the lover and poet as outlaw.

The lawlessness that Cooley advocates is primarily realized by the encompassinggenre of Bloody Jack, that of the book. And Bloody Jack is a book whose mainintent is to foreground the material it is made of, that of language. "Jack's dic-tionary of cunning linguistics" gives a clear sense of how Cooley uses language:

[...]radical : in a hot bed of activity[...]marginal: involved in split decisions[• · ·]thorough: doesn't want to leave anything out[. . .]optimistic: believes s/he is making head way[...]reformed: gets a weight off his shoulders

divine : she brings down the world on his head[ · · · ] .promiscuous: has a loose tongue[...]traditional : is above that sort of thing[•··] (i 18-19)

The body of language as the mat(t)er of the book is in constant dialogue withthe author who fathers the book. The semantic distortions of the words, whileaffirming Cooley's playfulness and the erotics of his writing, deconstruct the con-cept of definition itself. Bloody Jack is presented as a book both in an empiricaland a generic sense, but it is a book that defines its bookness through parallaxis.If the book, as Maurice Blanchot says, is a "vehicle of knowledge [. . . that]receives and gathers a given determinate form of knowledge,"25 then Bloody Jackas a book — dedicated "to Penny," a fictional character and a muse/writingfigure -— becomes its parallactic other, what Blanchot calls "the absence of thebook." "The absence of the book revokes all continuity of presence, just as itevades the questioning conveyed by the book. It is not the interiority of the book,nor its continuously evaded Meaning. Rather it is outside the book, though it isenclosed in it, not so much its exterior as a reference to an outside that does notconcern the book."26 Bloody Jack foregrounds itself as an empirical book, completewith an "appendix." This is its last paragraph:

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BOWERING & COOLEY

Perhaps, dear reader, you would like to remove this appendix. Go ahead, just cutit out. You always wanted to be a doctor, here's your chance. Be careful to cutneatly so the body will not be mutilated and the scar will not be conspicuousenough to affect the resale value of the book or to ruin your practice. Perhaps, ifyou are lucky, you will nick Cooley's conscience, his mind there on the margins, inthe gutter. Go ahead, take it out on him. (237)

The book as an empirical artifice seeks to undo its own physicality, talks aboutitself as if it were an "other," seeks to meet with its "absence." It is the author,however, or more precisely his signature that is implicated in the book's deathwish.

Bloody Jack in order to be sustained as a book needs its author's name. But thename of the author loses its authority as it becomes a deictic signifier on the book'scover designating the title: "a book by Dennis Cooley: Bloody Jack." The authordoes not present himself here: he is presented instead by the (his) writing act;he is positioned in the third person. Emile Benveniste says that "the 'third person'is not a 'person'; it is really the verbal form whose function is to express thenon-person. [.. .] Indeed, it is always used when the person is not designated andespecially in the expression called impersonal."27 In this respect, the author remainsabsent as a person — his presence being further neutralized by the passive contextof the third person, "a book by Dennis Cooley" — while his book appropriates hissignature. The book and the author become each other's metonymies, two figuresexisting only through parallaxis. Parallaxis here evokes the paralogon, the goingbeyond logos, beyond homogeneity. The book reaches out beyond its margins andits physical body toward its absent other, whereas the author disappears as a personin order to reappear as a character with the same name, a character who bothreflects and deflects the author. The destabilization of the author's presence isprimarily signified by the single occurrence of his actual signature in the contextof which the conventional "yours truly [. . . ] " is inscribed in longhand in such away that it can also be read as "yes truly [ . . .]" ( 146). Signing as writing, whiledestabilizing language and its signification by virtue of the individual configura-tions of handwriting, becomes an affirmation of the I's positioning, "yes trulyDennis Cooley," a "yes," however, which deconstructs the logocentric positionsof language and the self as well as the logocentricism of interpretation.

In "high drama" for example, a playwright with the name Dennis Cooley hasa hard time making his characters/actors follow his script :

COOLEY ( to you, dear reader ) Why don't they make love?( to them ) Hay! What are you doing? ( they look up,discovered ) I want you to make love. I'm prettydisappointed in you characters, especially youKrafchenko. [. . .]

KRAFCHENKO ( recovered ) Butt out buddy. It's none ofyour business. ( Kraf & Penny begin to kiss. Defiant,then lost in it. Cooley looks angry & impatient. )

BOWERING & COOLEY

cooLEY [. . .] According to the script, Kraf, you get yrass outa here. Then Penny is supposed to make a play forme. I wrote it that way. A clear case of textual authority.Of my authority. My authorization. [...] (222)

By dramatizing the relationship between signing and writing (penning), Cooleyas a writer playing with language both affirms and deconstructs his authority. Inanother instance, in "the obligatorylongawaited poem in which the hero / speaksfrom the grave thots thick with gumbo," it is Krafchenko himself who talks aboutthe writer's authority and who foregrounds the self-conscious use of genre :

yes yes well i spose cooleywas a grave robber all alongwasnt hethis comes fromknowing FoucaultI told him so myself& I spose I wulnt even get a peep in here if cooleywasnt interested in some kind of parody. [. ..] (231 )

These references to Dennis Cooley as playwright and as poet still maintain theproper name of the author as person but they are not to be considered as auto-biography. This illustrates what Ulmer calls autography, a form of writing which"transforms the proper name into a thing, into a rebus."28 Autography in BloodyJack constitutes the author's parallaxis, more specifically both the deconstructionand the dissemination of the authorial self. The author's signature is the centreof the book's puzzle, but it is a centre lying off-centre, refusing to be given asingle configuration, a monologic interpretation. The signature in the text imitatesthe subject of the proper name, inscribing the author within his own inscription.

It is this same function of the signature, together with the multiple genres thatCooley uses and his excessive use of punning, that brings Bloody Jack as a bookcloser to its absent other. Bloody Jack falls apart, disorders itself, and pre(post)-scribes into its body the responses it anticipates to generate as a published book:"Dear Editor, I for one am not in the least amused by Dennis Cooky's writings.And I know from talking to others that they have had it up to here with all thisfilthy language," says a Mrs. Agnes Klassen (89). The book outdistances itself;it denounces its bookness by taking over its own margins. As Blanchot says, "[t]hebook alone is important, as it is, far from genres, outside rubrics — prose, poetry,the novel, the first-person account — under which it refuses to be arranged andto which it denies the power to fix its place and to determine its form. A book nolonger belongs to a genre."29 Bloody Jack as a book explodes its frame by display-ing its anatomy. "Have you no sense of anatomy?" the "cunning linguist" asks(84). But the genreless genre of Bloody Jack, its deconstructed anatomy, offers

20

BOWERING & COOLEY

only intimations of its absent other. Blanchot remarks: "How long will it last —this lack that is sustained by the book and that expels the book from itself asbook? Produce the book, then, so that it will detach itself, disengage itself as itscatters: this will not mean that you have produced the absence of the book."30

Dennis Cooley does not produce "the absence of the book," but internalizes in hisdiscourse the absence that he cannot write in. His signature as proper name andas the name behind his exaggerating use of puns countersigns this absence. BloodyJack is its own parallaxis. Its content is, ultimately, what it cannot contain.

Both in Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies and Cooley's Bloody Jack, the authorialsignature validates the act of stealing, the appropriation of other texts and genres.Stealing in the open from another text or within the author's own text is to beseen as an act of denying originality, of merging the beginning of a poem with thebeginning of poetry, of dissolving the frame of a book. It is the poet as thief, ascriminal, who can immerse himself totally in writing, who can marginalize his ownbook. The admixture of diverse genres in the long poem is a double signal: itchallenges the classic law of genre theory that argues for the purity of genre, andit recommends what Jacques Derrida calls "the limitless field of general textual-ity."31 If this "general textuality" creates the impression of generic or formalchaos, it is the chaos of carnival. And it is the presence of the authorial signature,the proper name as frame of property and agent of interruptions, that validatesthese long poems as rites both affirming and questioning the tradition.

NOTES

This essay was originally delivered at "Assessing the Eighties," Discussion Groupof Canadian Literature in English, MLA, Chicago, December 1985. My thanks toProfessor Arnold E. Davidson for inviting my contribution. My thanks also toProfessors Dennis Cooley and J. Hillis Miller for their attentive readings.

1 Signeponge = Signsponge, translated by Richard Rand (New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press, 1984), 36, 37.

2 Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984) ; Bloody Jack (Winnipeg:Turnstone Press, 1984). Page references will appear immediately after the texts;the page references to Bowering's text will be preceded by the elegy number.

3 Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, with anintroduction by Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984),185.

* Ibid., 8. For studies of the Canadian long poem see Open Letter, Sixth Series, 2-3(Summer-Fall, 1985), which gathers together the papers presented at "Long-liners," a conference on the Canadian long poem, York Univ., May 1984.

5 "Novelization" is Bakhtin's neologism put forward in "Epic and Novel," The Dia-logic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson andMichael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 5, 6.

6 Ibid., 7.7 My debts here are to Derrida's "Signature Event Context," in Margins of Phi-

losophy, translated, with Additional Notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of

21

BOWERING & GOOLEY

Chicago Press, 1982), 307-30; his Signéponge = Signsponge; and the elaborationson his work by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu,"Diacritics, 7, (Fall 1977), 22 43, a n d G regory L. Ulmer, "Beyond D econstrac tion: D errida," Applied Grammatology: Post(e) Pedagogy from Jacques Derridato Joseph Beuys (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins U niv. Press, 1985),3 153·

8 Personal communication with Cooley, Winnipeg, 1985. My thanks for his permis sion to quote him.

8 The section "this is me: a retort," from which these references are taken, dealswith the cover of the book. The ambiguity of the cover image is further accen tuated in this poem by the referential subjects of the " I " and "you" whichconstantly shift from Cooley to Krafchenko.

1 0 The Dialogic Imagination, 65.1 1 I am quoting from M aurice Blanchot's essay "Reading," in The Gaze of Orpheus

and Other Literary Essays, translated by Lydia Davis, edited, with an afterword,by P. Adams Sitney, with a preface by Geoffrey H artman (Barrytown, New York:Station Hill Press, 1981), 92.

1 2 See Linda H utcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth CenturyArt Forms (N ew York and London: Methuen, 1985); Gérard Genette, Palimp-sestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982).

13 Signéponge = Signsponge, 150.14 Applied Grammatology, 21, 63.15 Spicer is particularly important because he "translated" Rilke's Elegies between

1950 and 1955; see his "Imaginary Elegies I-VI," in The Collected Books of JackSpicer, edited and with a commentary by Robin Blaser (Los Angeles: Black Spar-row Press, 1975), 39· Bowering, who has shown his indebtedness to Spicer inhis earlier long poem, Allophanes (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1976), said thatSpicer facilitated his "intrusion into the field of Rilke that had been staked outby many Rilke loving friends, and to which I didn 't feel real rights, being hesitantabout Rilke . . . and not G erman" (letter to the author, January 1986). My thanksto Bowering for permission to quote him.

1 8 Signéponge = Signsponge, 64.17 Bowering said that he "used basically 2 translations, and a bit of a third . . . Not

David Young. Not Exner" (letter to the author), but he couldn't recall whichones. The translations I used are J. B. Leishman's and Stephen Spender's, RainerMaria Rilke: Prose and Poetry, edited by Egon Schwarz, with a foreword byHoward Nemerov (New York: Continuum, 1984); Stephen Mitchell's TheSelected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited by Stephen Mitchell, with an intro-duction by Robert Hass (New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House,1984) ; and A. Poulin's, Jr., Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus (Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

18 Translated by Poulin, 27.19 In response to this statement, Bowering said that "I wasn't interested in erasing

Rilke so much as rewriting him. I have a funny relationship with him; althoughhe is probably the most popular source for my poet companions in Vancouver, Ihave never been quite ready to trust him, his feyness, his rhapsody; I realize thathe is right, he is onto something, and that he is a pre-Spicerian demonstration ofthe poet inspired or inspirated; but I have always been uneasy. I had to respondto that doubled feeling somehow" (letter to the author). Bowering's uneasinessabout Rilke is manifested in the poem in more than one way, but a discussion of

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it falls outside the scope of this essay. But whereas Bowering lets Rilke's signaturestand, he does not provide any clues for the poets' identity with regard to theFrench quotat ions in Kerrisdale Elegies. I t is their language and tone tha t locatet h e m within the context of French poetry. As Bowering said about them, " R e theFrench quota t ions: well, they seem to me to do something — make connections?make correction, comment? on the surrounding text. T h e y operate, it feels to me,the way quotat ions operate re the rest of the text in Allophanes. I t is not exactlycollage, because it reads on like poetic text, along the alonging poetic text tha t isthere . They make sure that the writer is not running away with the poem . . ."(letter to the a u t h o r ) . T h e quotations are from: Baudelaire 's " L a Prièred 'un pa ine" (1 .17 ) ; François Villon, "Le Tes tament ," Oeuvres complètesG X I X ( 2 . 3 0 ) ; Anne Héber t , "Le tombeau des rois" (4.61) (my thanks to Pro-fessor Stan Drag land for this reference) ; Apollinaire's "L ' e rmi t e " from Alcools( 5 . 7 2 ) ; Michel Beaulieu, "rémission du corps énamouré ," in Visages (6 .83 ; mythanks to Bowering for this source) ; Mallarmé's "Peti t air I " (7.99) ; Nerval 's"Vers Dorés" (8.111) ; Laforgue's "Complainte de l'oubli des mor t s" (9.123) ; Ihave failed to trace the source of the last quotat ion ( ι ο. 131 ) . Sin ce t h e co m p le t io nof th is essay P rofessor D r a gla n d publish ed t h e first study o n Kerrisdale Elegies," T h e Bees of t h e I n visible, " Brick, 28 ( F a ll 1986) , p p . 14 25.

2 0 H u t c h e o n , 36.2 1 See J u l ia K r ist eva , Semeiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Par is : Seuil,

1969) , Le texte du roman: Approache sémiologique d'une structure discursivetransformationnelle (Paris, T h e H a g u e : Mouton, 1970), and La révolution dulangage poétique (Paris : Seuil, 1974), translated as Revolution of Poetic Languageby Marga re t Waller, with an introduction by Leon S. Roudiez (New York : Colum-bia Univ . Press, 1984) ; see also Michael Riffaterre, Production du texte (Paris :Seuil, 1979), translated as Text Production by Terese Lyons (New York : Colum-bia Univ . Press, 1983). For the history and development of the term intertextualitysee M a r c Angenot, "L" in te r tex tua l i té ' : enquête sur l 'émergence et la diffusiond 'un champ notionnel," Revue des Sciences Humaine, L X , 189 (janvier, mars1983), 121-35; and the special issue "L' intertextuali té : intertexte, autotexte,in t ra tex te" of Texte, 2 (1983) , which includes Don Bruce's "Bibliographie anno-tée : écrits sur l ' intertextualité," 217-58.

22 See "Linus," The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949) ;rpt. 1968).

2 3 Palimpsestes, 92 .24 The epigraph is from Kristeva's Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to

Literature and Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez, translated by Thomas Gora, AliceJardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), 83.

25 Blanchot, 146.26 Blanchot, 147.27 Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral

Gables, Florida: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), 198, 199.28 Ulmer, 132.29 From Blanchot's Le livre à venir (Paris: 1959), quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, "The

Origins of Genres," translated by Richard M. Berrong, New Literary History, 8(1977), 159·

30 Blanchot, 149.31 "La Loi du genre / The Law of Genre," translated by Avita Ronell, Glyph 7

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 210.

FOUR PO6MSPaddy McCallum

GIFTSOur gifts litter the years behind usand go bearing our own concerns.One Christmasyou were reading translations from the Chineseand your gift came wrappedin the simplicity of stone.

I carried that heavy image all Springuntil your birthday cameand five mysteries broke into your house.You never forgave me. Even nowall you send are poemswrapped in burning paper.

This is to let you know my gift is coming.

Prepare yourself for a mousand novelsset at the dawn of time.They describe how shelves were inventedto hold the artifacts ofmisunderstanding. And how each yearthe characters extend their home.

CLOSE-UP M71CICLast night, under the dark sheet, I promisedsnow by morning. And there it was,a full three inches. You shook your head.I said repeatedly I'd fix your carand without so much as a glance the knockingstopped. You were amazed. I snappedmy fingers and my first wife vanishedtaking with her disturbing emanationsfrom a previous life. On Sundays

24

POEM

I make God exist by leaving the houseand on Mondays I cover cheques withmoney we didn't possess on Friday night.You line up at seven to catch my act.

For you I will produce the Ultimate Showwith nothing but a card-table, twofolding chairs and a tablecloth. Your heartwill vanish like the past to liewith silt inside my pocket. That partis easy. Keeping your interest,making your body rise, shackling youin water where you breathe alive,these things get harder as the years go by.I have performed naked, shaved my head.What I cannot control is substance:the dove moving to betray its purposebeneath the sliding cloth.

TH€ LOST SONOftenwhen I'm lonely for my sonI go out among the wet flowersand paw the muddy grassand taste its sulfur.

Or I climb the beach fromtower to towerbut he is gone, perhapshe is gone intothe water. My toeskick the salt-packedlogs set free from boomand blade and fire. Theyare history. Memoryis a child.

And when I find my sonand lift him in my mouthand lay him in his mother's lapam I not then free?

POEM

They devour each otherand gaze at me.

I go outside for duskfor quiet.

The mule deer vanishwith apples to the forest.

TH6 PO6TRY OF G€ORC€JGHOSHJlPHtfr MOUNTAIN(1789-1863)Forms of the long canoe-hymn. Narrativesof narratives of wild conversion,though of rivers there was littlehe could bring his tired Assembly,having secured his birchbark poemsto the Mission dock so firmlyhe failed to make them hear the heartof his dog as it swam its nineteenth springto greet him. Landscapesquivered in their eyes Elysian.

So when the ice broke he loaded suppliesand headed West again to preach. Bearsbecame sheep. The singular stateof the trapper his own soul's fate.

Songs, he said, and the days sang slowly by.

At certain points the river shallowedredeeming eels from bedrock, troutlike the fallen pieces of sky he lived on.

Deer watched with the eyes of saintsas remnant Huron found protectionin his wet arms, knee-deep. The sunwhen they rose was sheer white.

26

POEM

His years stretched stanzaic Missionsalong the thirsty riverbanks. Failed epics.His lines rhapsodic, pure, shorterthan praise, slighter than images,a glimpse of fields where the richest soilruns its perfect furrows to the sun.Songs all evening. Prayers at dawn.Trails cut by the flames of His gown.

FORTH6R6CORDYvonne Trainer

Embarrassment is the teacherwhen his prize studentcannot remember her linesin front of the visiting poet

There are excuses:the poem doesn't rhymeit's not a good poemanyway

The kid's nervous eyesflickering like electricityhands twisted wiresword lost in caved mouth

Nobody can explain

memory :

signs namingbranches of rivers crossed each morningforgotten

things we record when we learn to writethe reason for learning to write.

27

DEMETER'S DAUGHTERMarjorie Pickthall & the Quest for PoeticIdentity

Diana M. A. Relke

M.LARJORIE PICKTHALL sold her first manuscript to theToronto Globe in 1899, when she was 15 years old.* Her career ended abruptlyin 1922, when, at the age of 39, she died in Vancouver of complications followingsurgery. Perhaps no other Canadian poet has enjoyed such enormous fashionablesuccess followed by such total eclipse. Canadian critics of the early twentiethcentury "seized on her poems and stories as works of distinction,"1 and some evenhailed her as a genius and seer. "More than any other poet of this century," wroteE. K. Brown in 1943, "she was the object of a cult. . . . Unacademic critics boldlyplaced her among the few, the immortal names."2 Brown might also have notedthat unreserved praise was lavished on Pickthall by scholarly critics as well. Shewas admired and encouraged by Pelham Edgar who, at the time of her death,wrote: "Her talent was strong and pure and tender, and her feeling for beautywas not more remarkable than her unrivalled gift for expressing it."3 ArchibaldMacMechan wrote: "Her death means the silencing of the truest, sweetest singingvoice ever heard in Canada."4 Within 18 months of her death no less than tenarticles — all overloaded with superlatives — were published in journals andmagazines such as The Canadian Bookman, Dalhousie Review, and SaturdayNight. In his biography, Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of Remembrance, LomePierce includes ten tributes paid in verse to the memory of Marjorie Pickthall bycompanion poets; Pierce himself writes rhapsodically of her "Colour, Cadence,Contour and Craftsmanship."5

Modern literary historians have taken the opposite view. Pickthall's poetry isoften regarded as "proof" of the bankruptcy of the Canadian poetic imaginationduring the first two decades of this century. For example, in 1957, when LomePierce did her the disservice of publishing a selection of some of her most deriva-tive verse, much of it written when she was little more than an adolescent,Desmond Pacey responded: "If one approached the book seeking a new revelation

* The author gratefully acknowledges the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ofCanada for its assistance.

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PIG KTH ALL

of Miss Pickthall's genius one would be disappointed."6 For Pacey, this edition ofher work only served to confirm his earlier opinion that Pickthall had fulfilled herartistic potential with the publication of her first volume of poems, and that herlater work "sustained rather than enhanced her reputation."7 And yet, as a closerexamination of some of her poems will reveal, she did develop significantly as apoet over the course of her short career. What Pacey identified as the "essentialhollowness" of her work gives way in the later poetry to considerable depth ofinsight and an increased sense of her identity as a woman and a poet trapped inthe literary and gender conventions of her day. I would like to begin by exploringPickthall's emergence as First Lady of Canadian letters because her attempt tocome to terms with that role is part of the struggle for self representation whichshe undertakes in her poetry. This will be followed by a comparison of two of herearly poems with a group of later ones which, I believe, reveals a degree oforiginality not generally recognized in her work.

ΤIH EIH E YEAR MARJORIE PICKTHALL came to the attention of the

critical establishment, the Victorian Romantic tradition was already in need offresh talent. By the turn of the century Lampman had died, Carman, Roberts, andD. C. Scott were settling into middle age, Crawford, who had never really enjoyedthe attention she deserved, was long dead, and her Collected Poems, edited byJohn Garvin, would not appear until 1905. Pauline Johnson, also middle aged,was spending most of her time on tour in the West, and as a result her literaryoutput had slowed down considerably; her collected poems, Flint and Feather,would not appear until 1912, a year before her death. William Henry Drummond,eight years Johnson's senior, and Tom Maclnnes were enjoying success but theirwork was not in the mainstream of the established tradition. Senior poets imitatingthe "Confederation" group were filling the pages of newspapers and magazineswith pleasing but mediocre verse: among these were Wilfred Campbell, IsabelEcclestone Mackay, John Reade, Helena Coleman, F . G. Scott, Sarah AnnCurzon, Mrs. J. F. Harrison ("Seranus"), Agnes Maule Machar ("F idelis"),and Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald.

The role of deliverer of a literary tradition in extremis was thrust upon theunprepared and unsuspecting adolescent Pickthall; it was a fate she would cometo loathe. She seemed an ideal candidate for the role. She was young; she was alsodirectly in the mainstream of the already established Canadian tradition. Manyof her models were the best of the nineteenth century British poets, and she hadgreat thematic affinity with D. C. Scott, successfully incorporated many Lamp manesque images, and recalled the best of Carman in the intense musicality of herverse. Furthermore, the Christian overtones of her poetry appealed to the clergy

29

PICKTHALL

men and other church affiliates who constituted the core of the Canadian literaryestablishment. But what Marjorie Pickthall did best for the men who advancedher career, promoted her image, and published her books — powerful men suchas Archibald MacMechan, Andrew MacPhail, and Lome Pierce — was to post-pone a little longer the day when they would have to face the fact that the GoldenAge of Victorian Romantic poetry in Canada was over.

At the age of sixteen, Pickthall had no way of knowing what the literaryestablishment had in store for her, nor could she have been aware that in termsof life experience she was not yet equipped to meet the demands of a supposedlydiscerning reading public. Bound by the gender conventions of her day, she wasdenied the kind of experience necessary to her art. Many of her poems werecreated out of second-hand experience derived from a close study of the work ofher many male models. Later in life she came to realize how fatal this was to herart. Indeed, as she wrote when she was 37 years old:

Called to a way too high for me, I leanOut from my narrow window o'er the street,And know the fields I cannot see are green,And guess the songs I cannot hear are sweet.

Break up the vision round me, Lord, and thrustMe from Thy side, unhoused without the bars,For all my heart is hungry for the dustAnd all my soul is weary of the stars.

I would seek out a little roof instead,A little lamp to make my darkness brave."For though she heal a multitude," Love said,"Herself she cannot save."8

Appropriately, she titled this poem "The Chosen." It is a successful poem because,unlike the fatally imitative work of earlier years, it expresses first-hand knowledge :it is an expression of Pickthall's experience of limited experience. In an attemptto meet the expectations of her readership in general and her mentors in particu-lar, she studied the "fields" and "songs" of life as they appeared in the work of herliterary forefathers, guessed at the greenness and sweetness of that life, andimitated it in her own verse. Trapped behind the "narrow window" of convention,she studied the freedom of male activity on the street below and recycled herobservations as poetry. From her dizzying perch above the lesser poets of the day,she administered short-term healing to a dying tradition but had no remedy forher own ailing poetic : "I've got a kind of passionate distaste for my own worklately," she wrote to the poet Helena Coleman the year in which "The Chosen"was written.9 She longed to be "unhoused without the bars" of the gender con-ventions and the literary expectations that entrapped her; like her speaker she felt

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she was living in the "darkness" of her own ignorance of life. This is in keepingwith the sentiment she had expressed two years earlier in a letter to her intimatefriend, Helen Coleman, niece of Helena Coleman :

To me, the trying part is being a woman at all. I've come to the ultimate con-clusion that I'm a misfit of the worst kind, in spite of a superficial femininity —Emotions with a foreknowledge of impermanence, a daring mind with only thetongue as outlet, a greed for experience plus a slavery to convention, — what thedeuce are you to make of that? — as a woman? As a man, you could go ahead &stir things up fine.1®

This statement seethes with anger at the gender conventions which entrapped her.By the time she wrote "The Chosen," that rage had degenerated into fear andunhappiness. Lacking the male power to "stir things up fine," the speaker in "TheChosen" calls upon the Source of all power. The God she invokes is the ultimatepatriarch, the dispenser of power not only to the oppressive culture in which shelives but, more specifically, to her male models and mentors to whom Pickthallmust be grateful for the dubious honour of being "The Chosen." Given that bydefinition she has no access to that all-pervasive power, it is hardly surprising thatshe is "hungry for the dust" and "weary of the stars" of a meaningless celebrity.

IMITATION IS, OF COURSE, a valid starting-point for an appren-tice poet but, ideally, by the time a poet has earned critical acclaim she hasabandoned her dependence on her models and established a voice of her own.But in Pickthall's case, critical recognition was premature and had the effect ofpostponing the day when she would begin to take the necessary risks involved inworking out her own unique poetic. What proved so fatal to her early verse washer failure to understand "woman's place" as dictated by the conventions of thetradition in which she worked. Because she cannot identify with the self-assertive"I AM" of the Romantic male poets whose work she imitated, it is not alwayspossible to know where the poet stands in many of her early nature poems. Forexample, in "The Sleep-Seekers," the poetic voice seems to shift location as thepoem progresses:

Lift thou the latch whereon the wild rose clings,Touch the green door to which the briar has grown.If you seek sleep, she dwells not with these things, —The prisoned wood, the voiceless reed, the stone.But where the day yields to one star alone,Softly Sleep cometh on her brown owl-wings,Sliding above the marshes silentlyTo the dim beach between the black pines and the sea.

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There; or in one leaf-shaken lovelinessOf birchen light and shadow, deep she dwells. . . .[...]Here shall we lift our lodge against the rain,Walling it deepWith tamarac branches and the balsam fir,Sweet even as sleep,And aspen boughs continually astirTo make a silver-gleaming, —Here shall we lift our lodge and find againA little space for dreaming, (p. 51 )

The "you" receives the invitation from the speaker to transcend the prison ofnormal consciousness — the "voiceless" state — and enter into the imaginativestate of dreaming sleep. This poetic state is represented by the "dim beach" whichis located "There" in nature. In the closing stanza, however, the perspective shifts:"There" suddenly becomes "Here," "you" becomes "we," and the sought-afterstate of consciousness is now a protective space deep within the womb of nature.Comparing these lines unfavourably with Archibald Lampman's practice, R. E.Rashley writes that "Lifting our lodge breaks the communion with nature ofLampman, and turns the last line, which with him would have been a com-munication of mood, into a separation both from life and from nature."11

Rashley's objections are understandable, for these lines do not conform to theconventional Romantic model, which images communion between the poet and aclearly differentiated landscape. What they do image is a speaker who is not fullydifferentiated from nature; communion between poet and nature is not possiblewhere the poet is identified with, nature. The invitation to enter nature is as muchfrom nature itself as it is from the speaker. This poem is typical of Pickthall'searly work, where the poet is often absorbed by her own landscapes.

The failure of Pickthall's early nature poetry can best be understood in termsof Margaret Homans' theory of female poetic identity. Female literary experience— the experience of reading poetry written almost exclusively by men — is thesubject of her Women Writers and Poetic Identity, a study of women poets in theRomantic tradition. Using psychoanalytic terms reminiscent of Harold Bloom'sThe Anxiety of Influence, Homans explains what aspiring women poets mustconfront in their initial encounters with Romantic nature poetry :

. . . as the most powerful feminine figure in Romantic poetry, [Mother Nature]dominates the consciousness of women entering the tradition as newcomers. Shewas there before them, as the mother precedes the daughters. For the male poetsof the Romantic period, the poets of the past and the figures of the poet repre-sented in their works constitute a father figure against whom the younger poet,picturing himself as son, must define himself. If the figure of the powerful poet ofthe past is the father, in this family romance, then the mother is surely the MotherNature represented as the object of that poet's love.12

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The paradigm of Romantic poetry images the interaction between human moodsand natural phenomena as a universal marriage between man and nature — acoupling which depends upon identifying nature as both otherness and female,and subjectivity as male (p. 19). The poet images himself as initially the child ofMother Nature ; maturity means the gradual development of consciousness result-ing in the ultimate separation of his identity from that of the mother. He istranscendent ; she is the agent of his transcendence. Fully differentiated from her,he now uses poetic language as a means of repossessing her.

The male poet's relationship to nature and his imaging of nature as female areclearly problematic for women poets. Women are also the children of MotherNature, but as daughters they cannot achieve gender separation from her. Thisidentification of woman with objectified nature denies the female poet subjectiv-ity: "Without subjectivity," writes Homans, "women are incapable of self-representation, the fundamental of masculine creativity." Further, to be identifiedwith nature is to be identified with unconsciousness, inarticulateness, and fatality.In order to achieve poetic identity, women "must cast off their image of them-selves as objects, as the other, in the manner of daughters refusing to become whattheir mothers have been. The difficulty is that the image of Mother Nature is soappealing. The women poets do not want to dissociate themselves either fromNature or from nature even though they know they must" (p. 14).

But the identification of woman with landscape goes much farther back thanthe Romantic tradition in poetry. Classical mythology imaged this relationshipin the story of Demeter and Persephone. However, as suggested in another ofPickthall's early poems, "Persephone Returning to Hades," enforced separationfrom Mother Nature is equally as self-annihilating as merger with her, for Perse-phone's descent into hell represents another kind of disappearance into (orbeneath) the landscape. This is in keeping with what Grace Stewart has dis-covered in her examination of the Demeter-Persephone story as the myth ofidentity which has informed the female literary imagination for at least the lasthundred years. Persephone as Stewart describes her in "Mother, Daughter, andthe Birth of the Female Artist" embodies the identity dilemma experienced bywomen who struggle for self-representation in their writing :

Demeter, the strong woman who challenges patriarchal law, is offset by Perse-phone, the woman as victim. .. . Both the loss and the jubilant return [of Per-sephone] are tinged with sorrow and what the Greeks term anagnorisis (recogni-tion, epiphanic comprehension of identity). However, the story does not directlyreveal the emotions of the maiden. She stands mute, torn between male and femalelovers, mother and husband, a pawn in their battle for control.13

This is the Persephone with whom women writers identify : a silenced victim of afierce power struggle, a woman who is doomed to know herself only as anextension of the forces which jointly possess her. As in the literature Stewart

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examines, this is the figure who often emerges in the poems in which Pickthallattempts to come to terms with her identity as poet.

In "Persephone Returning to Hades," Pickthall invests the mute Persephonewith the interiority denied her in the myth. Persephone's remarkably eloquentmonologue dramatizes the identity erasure experienced by Pickthall who, as awoman poet in the Romantic tradition, was forced to live that myth. Much ofthe poem's success is due to its technical execution. For example, the word "little,"the most overworked word in Pickthall's canon, is not even used, much lessabused.14 Further, there is no silver or gold, opal or pearl and, mercifully, noloveliness ; that kind of diction and imagery mars many of her other poems. Theblank verse of "Persephone" and its judicious use of long vowels create sombrenesswithout melodrama. Perhaps it was the fear of her invalid mother's ever impending death which helped Pickthall select just the right tone of dread forPersephone's monologue :

Last night I made my pillow of the leavesFrostily sweet, and lay throughout the hoursClose to the woven roots of the earth; earth,Great mother, did the dread foreknowledge runThrough all thy veins and trouble thee in thy

sleep?No sleep was mine. Where my faint hands had fallenWide on thy grass, pale violets, ere the day,Grew like to sorrow's self made visible,Each with a tear at heart. . . . (GP 178, 11. 1 9)

The striking image of "faint hands. . . fallen / Wide" on the grass creates anaccurate sense of Persephone's decreasing substantiality, which complements theconcretization suggested by "sorrow's self made visible." This opposition ofinvisibility and visibility evokes nature's transformation, as fruitful summer dis appears and desolate winter emerges in the landscape.

The reluctance with which Persephone leaves for hell is effectively conveyedin the opening lines of the second verse :

. . . Yet, ere I turnedFrom these dim meadows to the doors of hell,Gathered these sad untimely flowers, and foundLong beautiful berries ripening on the thorn,With one wide rose that had forgot to die.These I bore softly thence. But here withinThis gathering place of shadows where I waitFor the slow change, there cometh a sullen windBlown from the memoried fields of asphodelOr Lethe's level stream ; and these my flowersSlip from my hands and are but shadows too.

( . 15 25)

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"[TJurned" and "slow change" evoke again the turning of the seasons, and thereluctance with which Persephone turns and changes is embodied in the rose thathas forgotten death. The archaic diction — "ere," "thence," "cometh" — is lessdistracting here than elsewhere in Pickthall's work, where it is often disastrous;the damage done here seems to get cancelled out by the way in which sound andimage work to such good effect in "doors of hell," "sullen wind," and "Lethe'slevel stream."

The last two verses are remarkably effective in their evocation of Persephone'sdeteriorating memory :

Why should I grieve when grief is overpast?Why should I sorrow when I may forget?The shepherds' horns are crying about the folds,The east is clear and yellow as daffodils,Dread daffodils —

The brightest flower o' the fields.I gathered them in Enna, O, my lord.Do the doors yawn and their dim warders wait?

What was this earth-born memory I would hold?Almost I have forgotten. Lord, I seeBefore, the vast gray suburbs of the dead;Behind, the golden loneliness of the woods,A stir of wandering birds, and in the brakeA small brown faun who follows me and weeps.

(11. 26-29)Interestingly, the tempo picks up as Persephone questions her state of mind. Thecadences change and change again, suggesting the disruption of thought process."Dread daffodils," an allusion to the wonderous bloom of the narcissus which hadenticed her to stray too far from Demeter — an error which resulted in heroriginal abduction by Pluto — now signal the dreaded reunion with the god ofdeath. The poem climaxes in "the vast gray suburbs of the dead," the mostchilling and powerful image in the poem. The last line is unfortunate: the weepingfaun is too precious an image to end an otherwise quite powerful piece; theweakness of this line suggests a backing off, as if Pickthall is afraid of coming intopoetic power.

Elsewhere in Pickthall's nature poetry the merging of persona and landscapealmost always confuses the issue; in "Persephone" it is the issue. The fatality andunconsciousness which women poets in the Romantic tradition must struggleagainst is, in the Demeter-Persephone myth, central to the plot. Further, thismerging process in Pickthall's poem is under tight, conscious control. But it isPersephone's loss of memory which is the most terrifying aspect of the poem, forto lose one's memory is to lose one's identity, and it is this loss of identity whichmakes the poem a kind of signature piece for Pickthall as a poet.

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D.URING TH E LAST EIGHT YEARS of her life, Pickthall wroteseveral nature lyrics and other short pieces which, while they differ in poeticintent — sometimes radically — reiterate on some level the process of losing heridentity in the landscapes they depict. Some of these poems remain unfocused andvaguely recall her heavily derivative verse in which the voice of the model takesover and removes Pickthall from the poem. These poems are nevertheless instruc tive because they demonstrate the enormous difficulties confronting women poetsin the Romantic tradition. But a few of these lyrics move beyond PickthalFsfailure to establish poetic identity in terms of Romantic convention; they turn"woman's place" as denned by convention into a poetic fiction, or mask. Thatis to say, their poetic intent is to articulate the literary experience of being iden tified with Mother N ature — with inarticulateness and fatality.

"F or all literary artists," write Sandra Gilbert and Susan G ubar, "self definitionnecessarily precedes self assertion: the creative AM' cannot be uttered if theΤ knows not what it is."15 The " I " in PickthalPs "Inheritance" knows what it isin terms of the conventions which define it :

Desolate strange sleep and wildCame on me while yet a child;I, before I tasted tears,Knew the grief of all the years.I, before I fronted pain,Felt creation writhe and strain,Sending ancient terror throughMy small pulses, sweet and new.I, before I learned how timeRobs all summers at their prime,I, few seasons gone from birth,Felt my body change to earth, (p. 147)

It would be difficult to deny the " I " in this poem; the word is repeated seventimes. It is no coincidence that the thrice repeated phrase "I , before I " is a poeticrendering of "self definition" before "self assertion." What this poem is saying isthat the poet, having found out how her self is defined, is now, for better or worse,asserting that self. I t is, of course, a poetic or fictive self — the self as defined bythe conventions of the tradition in which she has been trying to locate herself allher poetic life. But personal experience in the wider sense is also integrated here,for the poem, written within five years of PickthalPs death, looks back to theperiod in her life in which she became defined by the oppressive culture in whichshe was raised. This period was indeed a period — her first one — for this is apoem clearly inspired by the newly awakened memory of the poet's first menstrua tion. Mensus is a woman's "Inheritance" from her mother — and from Mother

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Nature. "Desolate strange sleep and wild" is a powerful evocation of the alteredstate of consciousness which the onset of mensus brings : with the sudden appear-ance of strange and unstaunchable blood comes dizzying insight into "the grief ofall the years" which lie ahead : the tears to be tasted, the pain to be confrontedas one's biological destiny unfolds. In terms of the myth that structures Pickthall'simagination, this poem reunites Persephone with Demeter; the memory lost in"Persephone Returning to Hades" is here restored. It is via this journey backthrough memory that the poet connects with an understanding of both hercultural and literary identity. These stanzas clearly articulate what it is to befemale in patriarchal culture and a female poet in a patriarchal tradition: to befemale is to be identified with nature, to feel one's "body change to earth" ; it is tobe identified with fatality and decay, to learn that time is one's greatest adversary.For time —· to borrow horticultural terms used to describe the decaying effects oftime upon woman -— robs her of her "bloom" and "ripens" her to maturity. Inshort, time erodes her sexual attractiveness, her only power in patriarchal culture.

The most significant thing about "Inheritance" is that, like much of EmilyDickinson's poetry, it is not primarily a landscape poem ; communion with natureis not its poetic intention, although it is clearly informed by the poet's experienceof that convention. Its primary intention is to get in touch with the poetic selfby focusing not on nature but directly on the "I." Consequently the convention isthrown into something resembling photographic reverse field: the poet half ofthis poet/nature configuration comes to the forefront; the nature half recedes.The poet does not lose herself in nature but rather finds herself there. And findingherself there means reconnecting with her long matrilineal heritage ; as the secondverse implies, it is a terrifying experience. Who the speaker is derives from an"ancient" source — from the first woman ever to hand down this terrifying"Inheritance" to a daughter. Within the analytical framework in which we areoperating here, that first woman is Mother Nature herself.

To mention "Inheritance" in the same breath with Emily Dickinson is to implyits success. And it is without doubt a successful poem. Enclosed within Pickthall'scanon and surrounded by failure after failure, it has never been recognized forthe success it is. Not only does it integrate female experience and art and establishpoetic identity, it is also technically excellent; it is better even than "PersephoneReturning to Hades." It contains no pathetic fallacy, no overripe diction, noarchaic language, no awkward syntactical inversions. The presence of a strongpoetic voice is directly related to the absence of these irritating affectations ; whenPickthall's poetic mask is securely in place, she has no need of them.

L O V E UNFOUND" was written one year later than "Inheri-tance" but unlike that poem it focuses primarily on landscape and as a result risks

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falling into the trap laid for the woman poet by Romantic convention. Neverthe-less, the poem does seem to throw the convention into some kind of reverse fieldin that the convention does not exploit the poet, the poet exploits the convention.The poem is an intense search for a lost female ancestor and, as the title suggests,the search fails; in this way it dramatizes both the poet's literary experience andfemale experience in the larger sense:

She was earth before earth gaveMe a heart to miss her;Stars and summers were her grave,Any rains might kiss her;Wild sweet ways love would not crossCurbed in sorrels and green moss.She's been dust a hundred springs;Still her face comes glancingOut of glimmering water-ringsWhere the gnats are dancing;Loosed is she in lilac flowers,Lost in bird-songs and still hours.If I'd lived when kings were great, —Greater I than any, —I'd have sold my olden stateFor a silver penny,Just to find her, just to keep,Just to kiss her eyes asleep, (p. 126)

Although the poet avoids use of her characteristic affectations, the poem never-theless has a fuzzy quality about it, which suggests that she is not fully consciousof what she is trying to say. The poem operates on several levels, not the least ofwhich is the biographical : it is one of the many short lyrics in which she appearsto be expressing the loss of her mother, Lizzie Pickthall. But text and subtext arenot fully integrated; poetic intent is being sabotaged by unconscious intent. Theexperience of reading the poem is one of seeing double, of seeing two seeminglyidentical images out of focus with one another. The image that appears to berelated to the subtext is the more interesting of the two. The poem is subtitled"A Portrait," but clearly the image of this dead female ancestor is not a paintedportrait but a landscape painting. A hundred years after her disappearance frommemory, traces of her image are still recognizable in the landscape which hasabsorbed her. Perhaps the glimpse of this foremother's image which the poetcatches in the rippled pool is a reflection of the poet's own face. As the last stanzasuggests, even if the poet could exchange her female powerlessness for the malepower to change the world, she could still not reclaim her lost matrilineal heritage.Indeed, so irrevocably lost is the identity of this ancestor that it is beyond eventhe highest order of male power to recover it.

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As poems like "Persephone" and "Love Unfound" suggest, Mother Nature'swomb is also a tomb, and for the female poet, identified as she is with non-transcendence and fatality, death is essentially a female space. This would seemto account for the fact that, as in the work of Christina Rossetti, Pickthall's mostdistinctive voice emanates from the grave. Paradoxically, it is this most articulatevoice which communicates her sense of herself as the silenced woman and thesilenced poet:

I chose the place where I would restWhen death should come to claim me,With the red-rose roots to wrap my breastAnd a quiet stone to name me.But I am laid on a northern steepWith the roaring tides below me,And only the frosts to bind my sleep,And only the winds to know me. ("Exile," p. 77)

Unlike "The Sleep-Seekers," in which the poetic voice seems to emanate fromtwo places at once, there is no confusion about where the speaker stands — orrather lies — in "Exile." The poem post-dates "Inheritance" by three years andcan be seen as its companion piece. "Exile," however, is not as strong as theearlier poem, as if the terror of self-discovery that informs "Inheritance" had wornoff. What is significant about this poem is that it addresses the question of choice.This speaker's words are an implicit reproach to those who have robbed her ofthe power of choice. Her request to be buried under a headstone which wouldidentify her to future generations has fallen on deaf ears, for she lies in a remoteand inaccessible place in an unmarked grave. In terms of Pickthall's place inCanadian literary history, this erasure, or "Exile," from civilization's memory ishauntingly prophetic.

It is in keeping with the woman poet's Romantic literary experience that only"the winds" — that is to say, nature ·— knows the speaker in "Exile." This dis-appearance is reiterated in "Departure," where only "the dreaming earth" knowsthe poem's vanished female figure :

She went. She left no trace to find herNo word with wind or flower,No rose, no rose let fall behind herThat lasted but an hour.She went. She left no following voices,No sign with star or stream,Yet still the dreaming earth rejoicesIt knew her from a dream, (p. 200)

This poem was written in 1915, two years prior to "Inheritance," and it hasa kind of "pre-conscious" feel to it. Given that the female figure it depicts is

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tragically lost to human history and her identity erased through merger withnature, the word "rejoices" is somewhat incongruous; here, once again, is a poemslightly out of focus. But negation, made explicit through the sixfold repetitionof the word "no, " makes it difficult to deny that the intention is to emphasize theunequivocal silencing of this female figure. Whatever murky depths of the uncon scious it emanates from, the universal fear of poets — the fear of leaving "N oword," "no following voices" — is undeniably present in the poem.

Τ1 :I H E IMAGES OF FORGOTTEN WOMAN and inarticulate poet are

strongest in "Theano," which was written in the same year as "Inheritance" :All you who spared lost loveliness a tear,All you who gave some grief to beauty fled,Go your ways singing. Grief is ended whereTheano laid her head.She was so merry. Winter did her wrong.She was so young. Spring proved to her unkind.It loosed her like a bird without a song,A flower upon the wind.Here in the shadow and the heat I stray,Spring's hand in mine, her music round me flung,Seeking the bird that fled me yesterdayWith all her songs unsung, (p. 199)

Theano is one of those minor figures in classical mythology whose identity is sofragmented and scattered throughout the myths that it can be said of her thatshe has no identity at all. N ot much more is known of her than what the poetsays here in lines 5 and 6. Indeed, as this poem seems to suggest, Theano is sucha shadowy figure that her life must go unsung, her death ungrieved; she is "loosed. . . like a bird without a song." The poet sums up Theano's life in four short,almost monosyllabic statements. I t is all she can do, for it seems that spring hasbeen as unkind to her as it was to Theano: the poet strays through "the shadowand the heat" in search of her lost muse; like Theano it has disappeared "Withall her songs unsung."

As the cryptic nature of "Theano" suggests, it is silence rather than speechwhich calls for interpretation. As the daughters of inarticulate Mother N ature,both Pickthall and her literary foremother, Christina Rossetti, struggled againstthe silence which was their female inheritance. Like other poets working withinthe female tradition, they developed their poetry as an art of silence where it hashistorically been treated as an art of speech.16 Both Rossetti and Pickthall seemto accept death as a female space, but rather than be condemned to the eternal

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silence which death implies, they turn silence into a female aesthetic. Their poetrystands as evidence of their refusal to accept nature (and, by implication, them-selves) as inarticulate. For example, the dead female figure in Rossetti's poem"Rest" is enclosed in the grave and held in "Silence more musical than anysong,"17 and the dead persona in "Echo" invites her lover to return to her "inthe speaking silence of a dream" (p. 314). Similarly, Marjorie Pickthall's strong-est and clearest voice emanates from the unquiet grave of "The Wife" :

Living, I had no mightTo make you hear,Now, in the inmost night,I am so nearNo whisper, falling light,Divides us, dear.Living, I had no claimOn your great hours.Now the thin candle-flame,The closing flowers,Wed summer with my name, —And these are ours.Your shadow on the dust,Strength, and a cry,Delight, despair, mistrust, —All these am I.Dawn, and the far hills thrustTo a far sky.Living, I had no skillTo stay your tread,Now all that was my willSilence has said.We are one for good and illSince I am dead. (p. 201)

Surely the most silent woman in patriarchal culture is the betrayed wife. Thiswife's failure to make her unfaithful mate stop and listen to her complaints isreally his powerful refusal to stop and hear them. Alive, she is the victim of thistotal censorship; dead, she is a powerful reproach. Merged with the summer, thedawn, the hills, and the sky, this dead woman has absorbed the power of nature'ssilent speech. Through the eloquent silence of death she can finally exert the forceof her will. Her sinister silence will forever haunt his shadow, his strength, thesound of his own voice. The penultimate line mocks their empty marriage vow,"till death do us part," for only her death has the power to make them "one forgood and ill." The narrowness of the grave, like the narrowness of her life, isreflected in the shape of the poem on the page. But unlike her empty marriage,

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this poem is densely crowded with language. It is a solid upright coffin of a poem :nothing opposes the force of its vertical gravity; the eye is convinced it canstand.18

"The concept of Mother Nature," Homans explains, "is only a fiction amongother fictions" (p. 200), and as the more successful of the poems examined heresuggest, when Marjorie Pickthall recognized Romantic convention for what it is— merely convention and not literal truth -— she was able to create poems ofmore merit than literary history has given her credit for. On some level of con-sciousness she came to terms with Persephone's identity dilemma. She discoveredthat separation from Mother Nature means loss of identity through death and thatreunion means the absorption of identity by Mother Nature. By turning thisunresolvable dilemma into a metaphor for "woman's place" in the poetic universe,she managed — paradoxically — to articulate her sense of herself as inarticulate,to transform female silence into song.

NOTES1 E. K. Brown, On Canadian Poetry (1943; rpt. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1973), p. 65.2 Brown, p. 65.3 Quoted in Lome Pierce, Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of Remembrance (Toronto:

Ryerson, 1924), p. 157.4 Quoted in Pierce, p. 47.5 Pierce, p. 10.6 Desmond Pacey, "The Poems of Marjorie Pickthall" (1957), rpt. in Essays in

Canadian Criticism, IQ^8-IQ68 (Toronto: Ryerson, 1969), p. 146.7 Desmond Pacey, Creative Writing in Canada (1952; rpt. Toronto: Ryerson,

1967), p. 101.8 The Complete Poems of Marjorie Pickthall, ed. by Arthur C. Pickthall (Toronto:

McClelland and Stewart, 1927), p. 143. All quotations from Pickthall's poetry arefrom this edition and further references to it appear by page number in the text.Dates of composition of Marjorie Pickthall's poems have been taken from thepoet's handwritten manuscripts ("ms.") and autographed manuscripts ("ams."),which are held in the Marjorie Pickthall Collection, Victoria University (Box 1,Folders 1-12) and the Lome Pierce Collection, Queen's University Archives (twomanuscript books, Box 60, Folder 9; individual poems, Boxes 60-66). With theexception of "The Wife," all poems were first published in collections of Pick-thall's verse. Dates of composition and place of earliest publication are as follows :"The Chosen," ms. 1917, The Wood Carver's Wife and Later Poems (Toronto:McClelland, 1922), p. 23; "The Sleep-Seekers," ms. 1905, Little Songs (Toronto:McClelland, 1925), p. 75; "Persephone Returning to Hades," ams. 1905, CompletePoems; "Inheritance," ms. 1917, The Wood Carver's Wife, p. 32; "Departure,"ms. 1915, Lamp of Poor Souls and Other Poems (New York: Lane, 1916), p. 35;"Exile," ms. 1920, Little Songs, p. 35; "Theano," ms. 1917, Complete Poems;"Love Unfound," ms. 1918, Complete Poems; "The Wife," ms. 1920, Smart Set(June 1921), p. 13.

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9 Letter to Helena Coleman, 12 June 1921, The Marjorie Pickthall Collection, Box2, 21, E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University.

10 Letter to Helen Goleman, 29 Dec. 1919, The Marjorie Pickthall Collection, Box2, 20.

11 R. E. Rashley, Poetry in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson, 1958), p. 101.12 Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-

ton Univ. Press, 1980). All further references to this title appear in the text.13 G. B. Stewart, "Mother, Daughter, and the Birth of the Female Artist," Women's

Studies 6 (1979), 132.14 In her Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1976), Ellen Moers

maintains that "little" is the most overworked word in the female canon. Accord-ing to Moers, this relates to the woman writer's sense of herself as small andinsignificant because she is female (p. 244).

15 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The WomanWriter and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and Lon-don: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 17.

16 See Jeanne Kammer's theory of the strategies of silence in Emily Dickinson,Marianne Moore, and others ("The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women'sPoetry," in Shakespeare's Sisters, ed. by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar[Bloomington and London: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979], pp. 153-64). Kammer'stheory is equally applicable to contemporaries of Dickinson and Moore, includingChristina Rossetti and Marjorie Pickthall.

17 Christina Georgina Rossetti, Poetical Works, ed. by William Michael Rossetti(1904; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 325. All quotations from Rossetti's workare from this edition; further references appear by page number in the text.

18 My language is borrowed from Kammer; see her analysis of the visual impact ofwomen's poetry, p. 162.

M7IRCH: V6RN7IL GQUINOX(for Maria)

Pat Jasper

Monday morning they will shave her head,pump sleep into her veinsand wheel her into a white winterworld she may never wake from.

Pump sleep into her veins . . .An hour ago I coasted to a stop —Oh, world she may never wake from . . .I doused the lights and sit here in the dark.

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An hour ago I coasted to a stop —That's the place in the nightmare where you wake up :I doused the lights and sit here in the dark.An hour of cold hands and cold feet.

That's the place in the nightmare where you wake up :the door ajar, her in robe and slippers,an hour of cold hands and cold feet.Weak blue walls pulse at her temples.

The door ajar, her in robe and slippers —What words can carry that weight?Weak blue walls pulse at her temples.These could be her last two days alive.

What words can carry that weight?Good luck? If I don't see you again —(These could be her last two days alive!)thanks for the good times?

Good luck, if I don't see you again —(This long winter reluctant to let go)thanks for the good times.(Your spring nipped in the bud)

This long winter reluctant to let go,I want to reach out and hug you, Maria,your spring nipped in the bud.Please, whatever you do, don't die.

I want to reach out and hug you, Maria.Instead I unwrap these hothouse tulips.Please, whatever you do, don't die.I leave them on the doorstep blooming for all they're worth.

Instead I unwrap these hothouse tulips . ..Monday morning they will shave her head . . .I leave them on the doorstep blooming for all they're worth.They wheel her into a white winter world.

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J D0Z6N M0R6 PROFOUNDS77INZ71S

Ralph Gustaf son

l.

Conditions are such that the worldIs snow, white, everywhere,On red chimneys, on roofRidges, and blue hills.It is a beautiful world, covered :

2.

The defection was barely noticeable —The gain of a perversity, the subtractionOf love. Yet community shifted,The imagining of things was affected,The grace of what is made.

3.

One must assume primal imagining.The obscenity of a corpse emptyIs easy enough, nothingAfter corruption's success.Yet there must be a beginning.

4.

"The cow jumped over the moon,"One yelled in childhood assertingThe certainty, the whole house,The doorway, the yard, the tree,Challenged forever and ever.

5.

Ruined temples descriedThat challenge, lotus pillarsAt Karnak, the silliness at Ephesus,Segesta and her marble,Wesley and barebones.

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6.The grave. An end to it. The SovietsSuppressing Uzbekistan.I watch the catkins fall,The walk is covered with them — and nextYear's autumn leaves

7.

Which we won't be here to encounter.Brahms lay dying, cancerIn him, and there was a massacreIn a synagogue recently, in Turkey,I think, yet the flowers bloomed

8.Like crazy in the garden that yearOnce the sheep manureWas spread early enough.Horticulture is a sermon,And instinct and neuro-aesthetics,

9.Also reason — informedBy love — and readings in variousLanguages, ElizabethanAnd the scrolls of Galilee.Personally, I like Faulkner

10.And Edgar Rice BurroughsAnd anonymous pornography if decent.Which brings us back to love.Always we get back to love,The start and needed point.

11."The dish ran away with the spoon —"The old nursery rhymeGoes on. ImaginationAnd footnotes, fact and poetry,Hey diddle diddle.

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12.

So much for today. The impossibleAnd the actual. Snow fallingLike the last resurrection, neverStopping, the rooftops white,The walkway, the houses, the trees.

VIT71L DISTRACTIONSDerk Wynand

Lime on the grass, thenwater on the lime:

the lawn must becomegreener, every other thingpermitting.

The same crow, I believe,perches on the samegarage roof:

neither will grow blacker.

These thoughts, all at oncedarker, keep turningto the same thing.

What they hopeto avoid like thatI don't care to sayexactly.

Sure, I have a good idea.

In the garden, two womenI know well are preparingthe soil.

No need to guesswhat they are sayingand not saying.

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"PROCEEDING BEFORE THEAMOROUS INVISIBLE"Phyllis Webb and the Ghazal

Susan Glickman

I H Y LIHYLLIS WEBB'S LATEST BOOK, Water and Light, brings to-gether five sequences of "ghazals and anti-ghazals," including "Sunday Water,"first published as an Island chapbook in 1982, and "I Daniel" from her GovernorGeneral's Award-winning selected poems, The Vision Tree (1982). At first, onemay wonder what it was about the ghazal, a highly conventional oriental lyric,which attracted a poet like Webb. A little preliminary history of the ghazal,followed by a consideration of Webb's career before she discovered it, should makeclear how fortuitous the meeting has been for the writer as well as her readers.

/ . The Ghazal

The most popular form of Urdu and Persian poetry, the ghazal traditionallyconsists of five or more couplets on a single rhyme: AA BA CA DA and so on.Although all ghazals follow the same rhyme-scheme, there are many differentprosodie patterns to choose from ; however, whichever metre is chosen is adheredto strictly for the length of the poem. A final convention is the insertion of thepoet's pen-name in the closing couplet as a kind of signature.

A high degree of conventionality obtains also in the traditional characters,situations, and imagery of the ghazal. In its emphasis on poetic artifice and on thenovel deployment of stock metaphors, the ghazal has much in common with theEnglish sonnet; it also describes a similar world of courtly love. In the ghazal,the poet speaks as an unrequited lover, pining away in adoration of a Cruel Fairwho wounds him with her eyes and ensnares him with her hair, sometimes evenrejecting him for an unworthy rival. Webb illustrates this situation in the twelfthghazal of "Sunday Water" :

Drunken and amatory, illogical, stoned, mellifluousjourney of the ten lines.The singer sings one couplet or twoover and over to the Beloved who reignsOn the throne of accidie, distant, alone,hearing, as if from a distance, a bell

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and not this stringy instrument scraping away,whining about love's ultimate perfection.Wait ! Everything is waiting for a condition of grace :the string of the Sitar, this Gat, a distant bell,even the Beloved in her bored flesh.

For a student of European literature, this situation is strikingly familiar. Thecorrespondence in literary conventions is based on social reality for in medievalculture, whether Islamic or Christian, marriages were arranged, often from child-hood— hence "romantic" love tended to be extramarital (and therefore genu-inely "dangerous" and often hopeless). A wider range of erotic experience isacknowledged in the ghazal than in the sonnet: besides desire for an inaccessiblemarried lady or purdah girl, we also find expressions of love for courtesans andyoung boys. The lack of grammatical gender in Persian makes possible a lack ofspecificity as to the Beloved's sex; in Urdu, the Beloved is conventionally mascu-line, so as to suggest many possibilities.1

The ambiguity of the Beloved's identity is related to his/her stereotypicalbehaviour: in both cultures, what the poet is addressing is the nature of hispassion for an elusive ideal which may be embodied in a specific individual butneed not be. This is the link between social reality and metaphysics; as RalphRussell puts it, "the situations of earthly love . . . are taken over bodily . . . andapplied to the experience of divine love, or mystic love."2 In Webb's ghazal eventhe Beloved is waiting for this "condition of grace," she too is waiting for a signalthat all this repetitive behaviour is actually in the service of something transcen-dent, that her "bored flesh" incarnates a transforming principle.

The humour in this characterization of the Beloved's flesh, like that of the poet'sdescription of her incompetent instrument, is profoundly related to the self-consciousness of the courtly tradition in its treatment by later writers. Elizabethansonneteers, like nineteenth-century ghazal writers, continued to explore the pos-sibilities of these conventions even when they no longer corresponded to "reality,"because they recognized their symbolic content. So within the narrow compass ofthese forms we find both pathos and wit, traditional images and innovativedevelopments of them, verbal brilliance and metrical conformity; the poet is atonce committed and skeptical. In both traditions, writing within conventions whilesimultaneously transforming them is the great challenge.

We shall see how well Webb understands and appreciates this challenge, howher own career has consistently shown her testing the validity of poetic devices injust this way. For this reason alone, the ghazal clearly should appeal to her. Butwhy the ghazal rather than the sonnet?

John Thompson, whose book Stilt-Jack introduced Webb to the form, insiststhat "the ghazal is immediately distinguishable from the classical, architectural,

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rhetorically and logically shaped English sonnet."3 His description of the sonnetis rather eccentric; epithets like "classical, architectural" can more readily beapplied to the Augustan closed couplet than to the sonnet which, however"rhetorical," uses the structure of logic more as a self-dramatizing posture or anargumentative tactic in the battle between the sexes than as a form of publicstatement. English sonnets tend to become more and more logically unstable uponanalysis-—just as many ghazals include apostrophes and moral statements andfeints of logic.

But to make a distinction is also to acknowledge a similarity, and it is mainlyThompson's desire to keep us from classifying the ghazal as simply an Islamicsonnet that makes him overstate his case. What he wants us to recognize is thecharacteristic way a ghazal moves — by association and imaginative leaps ratherthan in linear, discursive fashion. This progress by implicit rather than explicitlinks is what makes the ghazal so appealing to modern writers like Thompson andWebb who hope to achieve "the poem of the act of the mind." That is, whatoccurs in some sonnets •— especially those of Shakespeare — is the way of allghazals: a surface tension of rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, wordplay, and asso-ciative imagery holds together a structure discursively obscure. Connections aremainly thematic, not logical, and we are given a constellation of ideas, images,and feelings around a particular stance or in response to a particular event, itselfnot always clearly defined.4

Webb came to the ghazal via Thompson's free-verse imitations, and the ren-ditions of contemporary translators who prefer not to be too restricted by rhymeor metre.5 What these works share is first, a loosening of the formal conventionsof the ghazal and second, a fervent appreciation of its phenomenological accuracyas a mode of expression. Retaining the couplet structure is integral to the characterof the ghazal not only as a formal signal (as fourteen lines identifies a sonnet,even in the absence of rhyme or iambic pentameter) but also because its deepstructure is one of setting thought against thought, image against image, discon-tinuously. For in the traditional ghazal each couplet is self-contained both ingrammar and meaning : in effect, each is designed as a self-sufficient poem whichcan be savoured on its own, however much it gains from its association with theother couplets of the ghazal. Sometimes two or more couplets may form a con-tinuous sequence within a ghazal, but this is so unusual it is especially noted inthe margin. Similarly, there are "linked" (musalsal) ghazals in which the senseruns on coherently for the whole poem, but they are few in number and "nottypical examples of the genre."6 And even in a linked ghazal each couplet is stillclosed, designed to be appreciated as a finished expression.

Adrienne Rich explains clearly how the discontinuity of the ghazal provides anopportunity for a new kind of unity — one well-suited to the needs of a contem-porary poet.

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The marvellous thing about these ghazals (for me) is their capacity for bothconcentration and a gathering, cumulative effect.... I needed a way of dealingwith a very complex and scattered material which was demanding a different kindof unity from that imposed on it by the isolated, single poem: In which certainexperiences needed to find both their intensest rendering and to join with otherexperiences not logically or chronologically connected in an obvious way.7

So ultimately the ghazal, as perceived by contemporary poets coming to it intranslation, represents an orderly couplet structure used, paradoxically, as a non-linear method of development; a way of opening up the range of the lyric poemwhile maintaining tight structural boundaries. This is the form as Webb uses it,and as it is used by many other contemporary writers including Jim Harrison,W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich. In her ghazals Webb reveals that she isfamiliar with the oriental tradition and recognizes how different her versions arefrom their models; she acknowledges this by calling them "ghazals and anti-ghazals." But cryptically, she doesn't specify which poems are which; this suggeststhat she also recognizes how profoundly she has been influenced by the traditionand how, in making its conventions her own, she is paying tribute to its con-tinuing authenticity.

2. Webb's Career

It is not surprising to find Phyllis Webb going outside the mainstream ofEnglish poetry for inspiration since her whole career has been one of rigorousself-scrutiny and ceaseless experimentation. In many ways the ghazals, as orientallyrics, are a natural progression from The Naked Poems, her 1965 volume ofsapphic haiku.8 In that book Webb created a larger narrative structure out ofintense lyric moments by writing in suites, and then organizing these suites (five,like the five ghazal sequences of Water and Light) into a "story." In this waythe static form of each brief poem was transcended, and a different kind of unitywas discovered than that of the single lyric. A minimalist vocabulary of images —not metaphors, but colours and objects — was replayed again and again, so as toaccrue value merely by the fact of repetition.

Webb explained in a 1964 interview that what she was trying to come to termswith in the Naked Poems was

phrasing.. . the measure of the breath . . . to clarify my statements so that I couldsee what my basic rhythms were; how I really speak, how my feelings come outon the page. . . . The Naked Poems .. . are attempts to get away from a dramaticrhythm, from a kind of dramatic structure in the poem itself, and away frommetaphor very often, so that they are very bare, very simple.9

Obviously this is a very different kind of intention than that behind the ghazals,with their reproduction of the rich chaos of the personal and historical momentthrough metaphorical abundance and a refusal to simplify, Nonetheless, in both

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projects we are impressed by the poet's stylistic flexibility, her testing of limits.They are dynamic experiments to discover what her "true" voice is, setting self-conscious craftsmanship against the modern preference for open forms with theirillusion of spontaneity.

From her earliest publications Webb has shown herself skeptical of the verypoetics which she practises so elegantly. Although a loving maker of brief lyrics,Webb has never fully trusted the lyric's illusion of unity and control, of "emotionrecollected in tranquillity." There has always been a nervous energy in her workquestioning the very artifice which gives that work shape. This is often comple-mented by a summoning up of past masters to argue with them about thepredicament they've passed on to her, exposing the assumptions and values asso-ciated with the poetic tools she's inherited. For example, the spirit of GeorgeHerbert is evoked in "The Shape of Prayer" (published in Even Your Right Eye,1956, and reprinted in the 1964 Selected Poems). Though he is mentionednowhere in the poem, it is impossible to read Webb's lyric without hearing it asa response to Herbert's sonnet "Prayer" — a bleak, modern corrective to hishard-fought-for faith that ultimately "something" is "understood" because some-one is listening. Webb's version reduces Herbert's ecstatic catalogue of prayer'sattributes to a single intellectually laboured-for definition of its "shape," thatdescribed by a pebble skipping on the water and then "drowning." Poetic strategyhere is ethical in import, telling us that Webb's world offers her less evidence ofdivine presence than Herbert's did him. For the same reason, Webb rejects thesonnet form (God is not her beloved in this poem) and the chiming of cross-rhyme (with its connotations of order and stability).

Nevertheless she pays tribute to Herbert in the counterpointing of rhymeagainst line-length and stress-pattern ; the form of her poem imitates his strenuousrhythm even as the content rejects his religious conclusion. We see the sameprocess of evaluative parody much more explicitly in poems like "Marvell's Gar-den" [Even Your Right Eye), "Poems of Dublin" {The Sea Is Also A Garden),and "Rilke" ( Wilson's Bowl). What these poems all confess is a simultaneousadmiration of the achieved styles of past writers and a fear of being too easilyinfluenced. Moreover the influence is perceived not only in the overt content oftheir poems but in the possibility that even using poetic devices associated withthem will covertly imply their assumptions about the world. In "Poetics Againstthe Angel of Death" Webb enacts this drama of simultaneous attraction andrepulsion with iambic pentameter as her adversary. Even metre is value-laden inWebb's poetics.

Poetics Against the Angel of DeathI am sorry to speak of death again(some say I'll have a long life)

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but last night Wordsworth's "Prelude"suddenly made sense — I mean the measure,the elevated tone, the attitudeof private Man speaking to public men.Last night I thought I would not wake againbut now with this June morning I run ragged to eludeThe Great Iambic Pentameterwho is the Hound of Heaven in our stressbecause I want to diewriting Haikuor, better,long lines, clean and syllabic as knotted bamboo. Yes!

The poem's success lies in its witty, imitative form, its explicit commentary onitself, and its expectation of a literate complicity with the reader. Most noteworthyis the poem's veering toward iambic pentameter as soon as Wordsworth is men-tioned (lines 4-7 are all decasyllabic), then "running raggedly" to elude themetre which closes in again, finally regular by the tenth line of the poem. Equallyobvious of course is the way the poem "dies" into lines the length of those in aHaiku, and then opens out for the final long line of affirmation.

None of this casual expertise makes us doubt the poem's sincerity; we recognizeit also in the self-deprecating irony of the opening, in Webb's acknowledgmentof her public image as a suicidal, "morbid" poet. For her, inability to write trulywould be death; hence being overpowered by Wordsworth's elevated tone, beingrun to ground by Iambic Pentameter, would be falling asleep to never wake again.She suggests two alternatives for herself here as ways of "eluding" the continuingpresence of Wordsworth in post-Romantic poetry that were to shape her careerfor the next twenty years.

The first of these, the Haiku orientation, was followed by the Naked Poemswhose intimacy — that of a private woman speaking to her lover — was far fromthe public ambitions of Wordsworth. But even while writing these brief lyrics,Webb anticipated a return to a more extroverted and ornate form of expressionin a series of long-lined poems on the life of Kropotkin.10 One of the more notori-ous facts about Webb has been her failure to complete this projected work; manywriters might take this as confirmation of the superstition that one should nevertalk about work-in-progress to anyone until it's done! Certainly the first of hertwo apologia prefacing Wilson's Bowl (the book in which many of the "Kropot-kin" poems appeared) suggests that her ambitions had grown too unwieldly, "toogrand and too designed," and public interest in the work may have contributedto this over-explicitness.

In connection with the second apology, for the dominance of male figures inthe book, John Hulcoop offers a different explanation ( the two are not mutuallyexclusive). As he says,

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it seems reasonable to assume that Webb has abandoned her conscious pursuit ofthe long line because she has come to identify it as "male" and to associate it withan assertive, aggressive male domination.11

In support of this contention he quotes from Webb's remarks in her essay "Onthe Line" describing the long line in exactly those terms:

aggressive, with much "voice". Assertive at least. It comes from assurance (orhysteria) . . . big-mouthed Whitman, yawp, yawp, and Ginsberg — howling.Male.12

But in an interview with Eleanor Wachtel published in Books in Canada (Novem-ber 1983) Webb explained her abandonment of the project straightforwardlyas the result of disillusionment with the ideological content of the work. She said :

The Kropotkin Utopia enchanted me for a while until I saw that it was yetanother male imaginative structure for a new society. It would probably not havechanged male-female relationships.13

And in a private letter, Webb has declared that she was never disenchanted withthe long line itself: "Completely opposite in fact-— I want to expand and othersto expand, though the short line has its uses of course."14 The problem, therefore,was and remains the ethos, the rhetoric of assertion, Webb associates with thetraditional use of the long line ; the cultural context of the poetic technique. Thisis the predicament she addressed in her poem on Wordsworth and blank verse:the dilemma of a modern poet trying to write accurately of present experience ina language and with poetic conventions saturated with the values of the past.But now Webb has recognized a further dimension to the problem for anyfemale poet : that past has been patriarchal.

Interestingly, Webb concedes in the Books in Canada interview that she neverthought about these issues at the beginning of her career, when she was sur-rounded by "super-brilliant men" who, in her words, "allowed [her] in."15 Morerecently, speaking at the League of Canadian Poets panel discussion of "TheFemale Voice in Canadian Poetry" (Regina 1984) she wondered whether herearly acceptance by the predominantly male literary establishment had in someway inhibited her development as a poet, encouraging too great a reliance onmasculine approval and the literary techniques which seemed to ensure it. SoWebb's grappling with ancestral influence has assumed a new dimension for hersince her experiments with private and public voices in the "Naked Poems" andthe "Kropotkin Poems." This dimension is elucidated by the poems of Wilson'sBowl.

Ann Mandel describes Wilson's Bowl asa leaving, only partly in the sense of 'offering' but more a 'leaving behind', or anattempt to do so, of dominating presences, presiding instructors, an effort atthrowing away the names of the great, throwing off the rhythms, the music that

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once enthralled. The poet struggles to throw off silence, but only if the words thatthen come are new words, her own language.16

She notes too the preponderance of "winged things — angels, gods, black birds,and envied chevaliers in many forms" as a motif in the book; most of Webb's"dominating presences" are apprehended as spirits hovering over her.17 LikeWordsworth in the poem we looked at earlier, they are presented ambivalently;angels of death or guardians? Webb's not sure.

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom borrows a figure from Blake topersonify the artist's "creative anxiety" as it becomes identified with a "precursorpoet" whose accomplishments are felt to be a block to originality. This figure isthe "Covering Cherub," an illusion of the interference of past art with presentcreativity.18 Whether or not Webb has read Bloom, she has arrived at the identicalmetaphor herself. She esteems these figures but at the same time, as she notes in"Socrates," suspects that their "claritas / hid from shadows / it alone cast." Shewants to discover what is in the shadows, the female experience that has not beenarticulated ; indeed, has scarcely been acknowledged.

According to Bloom, the presence of the Covering Cherub is a particularproblem for "strong" poets who recognize their literary debts and therefore feelthemselves engaged in a constant struggle against the influence of their mentors.He describes the revolt of the "ephebe" against the "precursor" as archetypallyOedipal, as though identity of gender — rather than of literary ambition — werenecessary to account for the younger poet's ambivalence toward the elder(s). ButWebb too identifies the men who originally influenced her as "fathers"; in fact,she speculates that it was because she lost her biological father at an early agethat she "gravitated to men, to fatherly figures."19 For Webb, too, men repre-sented authority, and in the literary world only men had power, and wereempowered to approve her work.

In the foreword to Wilson's Bowl Webb confesses thatthe domination of a male power culture in my educational and emotional forma-tion [has been] so overpowering that I have, up to now, been denied access toinspiration from the female figures of my intellectual life, my heart, my imagina-tion. The 'Letters to Margaret Atwood' are an exception; I was asked to write onthe subject of women at that time.

"Letters to Margaret Atwood" concludes the "Portraits" section of the book, withits valedictions to Webb's male muses. In it, the poet expresses the hope thatsome day a genuinely female aesthetic will be found, and affirms her faith that"the poems and paragraphs eventually proceed before the amorous invisible,governed by need and the form of its persuasions." Again, ethos and aestheticare one, as they are in the Romantic manifesto of Coleridge, whose desideratumfor poetry-—that it embody "form as proceeding" rather than "shape as super-induced" Webb seems to echo here. For Coleridge, "the latter is either the death

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or the imprisonment of the thing — the former is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency."20 Ironically, his champion Wordsworth has becomethe deadly exponent of "shape" for Webb. As a Covering Cherub he is a "demonof continuity" whose

baleful charms imprisons the present in the past... . This is Milton's 'universe ofdeath' and with it poetry cannot live, for poetry must leap, it must locate itself ina discontinuous universe, and it must make that universe (as Blake did) if itcannot find one. Discontinuity is freedom.21

5. Webb and the Ghazal

Discontinuously, we arrive with Webb at the ghazal, a form which "allows theimagination to move by its own nature . . . the poem of contrasts, dreams, astonish-ing leaps."22 It should be clear by now why Webb should find the ghazal socongenial. It is formally challenging, yet unrestrictive. It comes from outsideEnglish literature and so, whatever associations and inhibitions it has within itsown culture, it can have few for Webb or her Canadian readers. Moreover themovement by couplets provides a perfect mean between the extremes Webbposited for herself of either "writing Haiku" or "long lines, clean and syllabic asknotted bamboo." Writing in couplets gives her units of expression which are therhetorical equivalent of long lines within the ghazal as a whole. At the same time,each couplet may be a self-contained little poem, like a haiku.

One could go even further and say that Webb has discovered a kind of aestheticandrogyny in the ghazal, equivalent to its traditional ambiguity as to the genderof its subjects. For if long lines, to Webb, are "male," and the couplets approxi-mate long lines, the white spaces between the couplets resemble "those gasps,those inarticulate dashes" of Emily Dickinson's which she cites as a "subversive,Female" alternative within the English tradition itself.23

I'd like to conclude by looking closely at one of Webb's ghazals to see howshe uses it to unite her public and private voices, her extroverted "male" concernsand her shadowy "female" ones. Webb tells us that she turned to the ghazal inorder to open up:

I wanted something to subvert my own rational mind, to get more free flow ofimages a little wilder in content, to liberate my psyche a bit.24

Like Thompson and Rich, she sees the ghazal as an embodiment of "form asproceeding." At the same time we will see that she has relinquished none of hertechnical expertise in the ghazal; the narrative and thematic movement of thepoems may be more open but she still strives for tight relationships at the levelof detail. Imagery, stress-pattern and rhythm, rhyme and sound effects are allhighly controlled.

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Sunday Water, Ghazal 1I watch the pile of cards grow.I semaphore for help (calling stone-dead John Thompson).A mist in the harbour. Hydrangea blooms turn pink.A game of badminton, shuttlecock, hitting at feathers.My family is the circumstance I cannot dance with.At Banff I danced in black, so crazy, the young man insisting.Four or five couplets trying to danceinto Persia. Who dances in Persia now?A magic carpet, a prayer mat, red.A knocked off head of somebody on her broken knees.

It is clear why Webb made this poem not only the first in "Sunday Water,"but also the first in Water and Light as a whole. It sets up the poet's situation,harbourside, in summer, learning to write ghazals. It adds a little local detail —people outside playing badminton, mist, hydrangeas soaking up moisture andchanging colour. Then it contrasts this outwardly serene scene to the poet's innerconflict about her family, and flashes back to a seemingly unrelated memory ofdancing at Banff. So far we are in the familiar world of twentieth-century lyricpoetry; confessional and inconsequential. Except for the disturbing fact that JohnThompson is dead, this is a fairly soft piece so far. But in the last two coupletseverything shifts, and the death of Thompson, the poet's embarrassment at herinappropriate behaviour at Banff, the fact that she is trying to write ghazals, allcome together to reveal their public and political implications. We are presentedwith the contrast of the muddleheaded poet, able to dance but unwilling, with aheadless woman, fallen on broken knees. What the subject of the poem is revealedto be then, is Webb's ironic awareness of the impropriety of her borrowing amiddle-eastern lyrical form to speak of her "predicament" as a poet in the West,in the light of what's going on simultaneously in the Middle-East. Her concernsseem lightweight, a mere "hitting at feathers," when Persia itself is dead, themagic carpet grounded, prayer ineffectual. The red of the prayer mat is contrastedto the pink of the hydrangea, the game of shuttlecock with the knocking-off ofheads, and the death of John Thompson becomes a symbol of the loss of a linkbetween the two worlds.

The shape of the ghazal is particularly appropriate for enacting this tensionof opposites, the incompatibility of the worlds being emphasized by the self-sufficiency of each couplet. In later ghazals Webb was to experiment withenjambment, running the sense along from couplet to couplet and playing againstthe visual pattern and the pausing suggested by it. But here the traditional dis-continuity of the ghazal is enlisted by Webb to recreate the experience of adivided mind. Both lines of the first couplet begin with "I," signalling the poet's

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self-preoccupation; in contrast, both lines of the next couplet begin with theindefinite article "a," taking us outside to the objective world. The third coupletis again personal — "My family" and "At Banff / " — but it turns the analyticalviewpoint upon the self, exploring motives and behaviour. The reason for thisscrutiny becomes clear with the abrupt, ironic transition from Persian poetry toPersian politics in the last two couplets. By the last couplet the perspective is"objective" once again, linked to the second couplet by the use of the indefinitearticle, but the tone is no longer detached. Rather than simple description, theitems listed in the last couplet are value-laden because of the ironic contrast set upearlier, and because of the intrinsic horror of "A knocked off head of somebodyon her broken knees." The poem tells us that this is what is happening in Persianow, in contrast to the here and now of the speaker's situation.

What the poem enacts, then, is a movement outwards, from self-absorption toa compassionate identification with the sufferings of others. And the reason for thistransition is the poetic form itself, as a historical phenomenon. Robert Hass sug-gests that the form of a poem is "the shape of its understanding," and remindsus that the way a poem orders its experience and leads us through it is a largepart of what it is about.25 We can see how the shape of the ghazal suits Webb'sintent in making us feel with her the simultaneity and the incompatibility ofwhat she is feeling as a writer, as a daughter of her family, as a woman, as anobserver of the local scene, and as a citizen of the world.

Rhythm and sound are equally attuned to meaning here. The repetition ofsounds in "semaphore for" sets up an initial stutter indicating strong feelings.A sense of hopelessness is engendered by the spondees in "stone-dead JohnThompson" — it is clear that no help will be forthcoming from that quarter.The flutter of dactyls in the second line of the second couplet links the frivolityof badminton with dancing at Banff in the third; this waltz rhythm continuesinto the fourth couplet for ironic contrast ("trying to dance / into Persia. Whodances in Persia now?"). Finally the last couplet links back to the first, with theheavy stresses in "A knocked off head" recalling John Thompson's deadness.

Webb uses alliteration, rhyme and half-rhyme with similar finesse; within theten lines of the ghazal she deploys a full range of poetic devices. Particularlyeffective is the use of short "a" sounds and rhyme in the third couplet as aunifying pattern in "family," "circumstance," "dance," "Banff," "danced,""black," and "man." Clearly, for Webb the ghazal does not represent a rejectionof the conventions of English poetry. While the apparent discontinuity of theghazal form is what enables her to surprise us with the gap between what she seesaround her and what she thinks of as she writes, coherence is maintained by thedevices of sound and rhythm, which insist on relatedness. One might suggest thatit is because the ghazal's movement is essentially non-linear and associative,because of its thematic and narrative discontinuity, that Webb feels free to pull

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out all the stops and play with sound and language as she does. She doesn't haveto worry about the poem feeling too constricted and cerebral as she might if itwere equally controlled in its propositional sense. Another ghazal sequence,"Frivolities," consists of poems which move almost entirely by verbal and visualassociations; its very title tells us not to look too hard for "serious" content.So, one of the things the ghazal seems to have done for Webb is to have, briefly,solved her old dilemma about the nature and consequences of using poetic devices.

By borrowing a structure for her poems from another culture, Webb has beenable to perform an act of translation by which finding becomes making and"shape as superinduced" becomes "form as proceeding." The character of theghazal itself, with its tendency towards abstraction and its discontinuous structure,make it well suited to adaptation by a Western poet whose orientation has alwaysbeen metaphysical both in theme and technique. Perhaps ironically, althoughWebb discovered in the ghazal a way of liberating herself from the patriarchaltradition of English literature and presenting more accurately her modern, femaleexperience, she was able to do so only by adopting yet another "father," Ghalib.And so, the last poem in Water and Light bids farewell to this mentor as earlierpoems did the others. Ghalib, the tutelary spirit of the poems, materializes as asad man drinking himself to sleep, dreaming of "what was / what could havebeen possible." He is oblivious to the emblem Webb makes her own, "a smallbranch of cherry / blossoms, picked today, and it's only February." The unsea-sonal blossoms would seem to represent a miracle and yet Webb holds the cherrybranch up as a flag, "dark pink in moonlight — / from the land of / only whatis." That is, the poem closes embracing the present and the real and eschewingthe luxury of nostalgia. The gap perceived in the opening ghazal of the bookhas not closed for Webb, but she leaves Ghalib tenderly, having learned whatshe can from him.

The ghazal represented one solution for Webb's on-going struggle with form.Inevitably, it was not the solution for Webb whose career has been one of con-tinuous experiment; once she solves a problem, the solution itself becomes aproblem if it threatens to become habitual and restrictive. This is the way anygood poet works, but for Webb it is also one of the great topics of her poetry.Given the rich results of her attempts to solve her dilemma as she is forced, againand again, to confront it, one trusts that "the amorous invisible, governed byneed" will find a new form for its persuasions.

NOTES1 See Muhammad Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature (London: Oxford Univ.

Press, 1964), pp. 37-39, and Ralph Russell, "The Pursuit of the Urdu Ghazal," inThe Journal of Asian Studies 29.1 (1969-70), pp. 107-24 for further explorationof the idealization of illicit love in medieval society and literature. For the Euro-pean context, the locus classicus is C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (N.Y. :

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Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 1-43. Lu Emily Pearson studies the transmissionand evolution of courtly love conventions in English poetry in Elizabethan LoveConventions (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1933).

2 Ralph Russell, "Ghalib's Urdu Verse," in Ghalib: The Poet and his Age, ed.Russell (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. n o . In the English tra-dition, the ascent from carnal lust to humble adoration of the Divine in its mortaland female incarnation comes from the fusion of Provençal eroticism and neo-platonic introspection in the "Dolce Stil Nuovo," as transplanted by Sir ThomasWyatt. That Wyatt underplayed the metaphorical fusion of the Beloved with Godin order to explore the psychological implications of masculine erotic experiencedidn't completely inhibit the development of this identification in English poetry;think of Spenser's Amoretti, for example. And the subconscious split between bodyand mind suggested by the need to "transcend" mere fleshly desire in order tomake love spiritual is taken to outrageous limits, made to burlesque itself, inShakespeare's sonnets with their division of love into chaste homosexual worshipand misogynist lust.

3 John Thompson, Intro, to Stilt Jack (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1978).4 Many contemporary critics of Shakespeare's sonnets discover their unity in their

imitation of "the richness, the density, the logical incompleteness of the mind."See Arthur Mizener's essay "The Structure of Figurative Language in Shake-speare's Sonnets" (from which the preceding quotation was taken) and the essaysby G. L. Barber and Winifred Nowottny in Discussions of Shakespeare's Sonnets,ed. Barbara Herrnstein (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1964). Stephen Booth's phenom-enological readings have been very influential in this regard, both in An Essay onShakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969) and in his 1977Yale University edition of the sonnets.

5 Aijaz Ahmad, the co-translator and editor of the translations Webb cites in Waterand Light suggests that

formal devices such as rhymed couplets or closely scannable prosodie structuresare, in contemporary English . . . restrictive rather than enlarging or intensifyingdevices. The organic unity of the ghazal, as translated into English, does notdepend on formal rhymes. Inner rhymes, allusions, verbal associations, wit, andimagistic relations can quite adequately take over the functions performed by theformal end-rhymes in the original Urdu.

Intro, to Ghazals of Ghalib (N.Y. : Columbia Univ. Press, 1971 ), p. xix.6 See D. J. Matthews and C. Shackle, Intro, to An Anthology of Classical Urdu

Love Lyrics (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 10.7 Adrienne Rich, letter to Aijaz Ahmad, quoted in Ghazals of Ghalib, p. xxv.8 John Hulcoop notes that Sunday Water "begs to be compared with her 1965

Naked Poems." See " 'Bird song in the apparatus' : Webb's New Selected Poems,"Essays in Canadian Writing 30 (Winter 1984-85), p. 359.

9 Phyllis Webb, "Polishing Up the View," in Talking, ed. Gary Geddes (Montreal:Quadrant, 1982), pp. 46-47.

10 In her 1964 interview she picked up the adjective "knotted" from "Poetics Againstthe Angel of Death" to describe the long lines of the "dark . . . more heavily ladenpoems" she hoped to write as soon as Naked Poems was finished. See "PolishingUp the View," pp. 47-48.

11 John F. Hulcoop, "Bird song in the apparatus," p. 364.12 Phyllis Webb, "On the Line," Talking, p. 68.

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13 Eleanor Wachtel, "Intimations of Mortality. [The Splendid Isolation of PhyllisWebb]," Books in Canada 12.9 (November 1983), p. 13.

14 Letter to Susan Glickman, April 19, 1986.15 Eleanor Wachtel, "Intimations of Mortality," pp. 13-14.18 Ann Mandel, "The Poetry of Last Things," Essays in Canadian Writing 26

(Summer 1983), p. 89.17 Mandel, "The Poetry of Last Things," p. 85.18 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford

Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 36, 24.19 In the interview with Wachtel recorded in "Intimations of Mortality," p. 14.20 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "On Poesy or Art," in Biographia Literaria, Vol. II,

ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 26. Throughout Cole-ridge's criticism there are discussions of "organic form" and the necessity ofimitating Natura naturans in the creative act. The impact of Wordsworth's andColeridge's challenge to Augustan notions of form, and its legacy in the pluralismof modern poetic styles is discussed at length by Donald Wesling in The NewPoetries: Poetic Form Since Coleridge and Wordsworth (Lewisburg: BucknellUniv. Press, 1985 ).

21 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 39.22 John Thompson, Intro, to Stilt Jack.23 Phyllis Webb, "On the Line," p. 69.24 Recorded by Eleanor Wachtel in "Intimations of Mortality," p. 14.25 Robert Hass, "One Body: Some Notes on Form," Antaeus 30-31 (Spring 1978),

P· 33·

7INTICONISH SUMMERLachlan Murray

Popcorn and musicthe breezelifts the gasp of an accordionto the one boy, twelve; the other thirteenhidden within the bodyof a towering mapletwo hearts pale green, flutteringin sympathy with the leaves

below, the muddied riverslow as Augustthe near-side trailer parkstrings of lightsagainst the softening day,the thick summer peoplesunk in folding chairs

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multi-coloured outside the conveyanceskrazy kamper and the like,a shoddily-boxed middle america,culture of men drinkingdisposable tins of beergrails they raiseunto hairy bellies,talk of nukeler spremcy,each with a hand of cardsand a wifemute within a cageof straw yellow hair

high up the two,cast in the roleof interloper,by the prickling light noticeonly the skin of these peoplethe same boiled redas the sinister lobsterbutter trickling in rivuletsfrom the corner of more than onemouth

our two have onlyto lift their eyesacross the waterthe familiar roofsguarded by treeslike green mushroomsgreet themthe aliens washed awayin an instant of the small town,electric smellsof youth

62

FROM TH€ B71NKRobert Kendall

Long ago a woman stood at the endof a wharf, holdingthe wind by the hand as it leftthe water for pine trees.His sadness is still in her eyes.It moistens the surfaceof breezes,streaking the window hereturns to each night.The water stretched like the openingwings of a bird.

Cars pass him on the street,dragging the rain in their wheels.He looks into the faces ofsounds that go by. Their eyesare always clear and hard. Yeta hole rises towardthe tops of the buildingsto search the skyline's closed fist.The wind needs a soundas it strokes his clothing. A soundlike a woman's quiet weeping.

He sits in his kitchen nakedand unshaven. The daylight liesunopened on the table,touching his arm.Traffic noises rise to his doorand he sits therea long time, listening.The morning's surface feels as cold andsolid against his skin asthe marble of an institution.There was never anyoneat the edge of that lake.

THRΠROCKS JUTTING UP FROMSNOW

Yvonne Trainer

in the back yardgray rocks without meaning unlike the three rocksplaced in white raked sand at the Japanese Gardensin Lethbridge My aunt and cousin are with meWe go on a sunny windy dayto see the five tiered Pagodawith ceremonial belland island shaped like a turtle

Japanese girl in traditional kimonoexplaining "nothing in the gardenmust distract from meditation"I am only half-listening

Before entering the tea roomwe take off our shoesThe Pagoda is made without nailsThe wood imported from JapanThere are probably other thingsI should rememberbut mostly I remember my aunt in pink flowered dressexclaiming "I thought there'd be flowers in the garden at least!"

On that same day another aunt Great Auntdying in hospital Hush of nursesvases of flowers on the night stand IV attached to her handsteady drip drip of liquid into her body tubes like vines reaching

A week laterI sit with cousinsstare at the open coffin the smiling faceWhite coffin surrounded by flowers at a time whenlife becomes a joke Distracted I wonder How many nailsto make a church? Where is the wood imported from? Liliesand yellow mums and roses other times other places

This morning three rocks without meaning jutting up from snow.

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W71TCHING TH€ W7ITCH6RS IN R6PTiL€ House

Robert Gibbs

It's no small talk their eyes make withdiamond-back rattlers and wrist-thickconstrictors Voracious they are and poppedthese six from the colony Jacob's children

chattery as the next busload of schoolkidsthree wide from bearing kerchiefed andshawled three slouch-hatted and stooped fromworking acres of acres But it's

my eyes fed too full of iguanas andlizards blinking and unblinking intheir false sunshine and all thiscoiled and sprawled and draped

serpentine musculature my eyes pulledback into their headbone niches thatcan't help watching all twelve of theirssparked with out-of-school brightness Then

others pass stary-eyed sated from themonkey-house where they fed long enough onMr. Gorilla sideways on his elbow legscrossed jauntily winking back and Miss

Orangutan peek-a-booing coyly from under herwash-tub fedora They circle by like thoseat a stand-up party who pause to speakwhile their eyes seek past yours the

beautiful that will make them beautifulSo they stop a minute at the flick-tonguedcoral but their glances flicker on to whatunspeakable sight might be next stuffed

like me with visions of hippos and baby hipposyet far less satisfied than those six whosegutterals up ahead around cornersand corners sing back at us

RELIGION, PLACE, & SELF INEARLY TWENTIETH CENTURYCANADARobert Norwood's Poetry

Alex Kiz.uk

IIN ROBERT NORWOOD'S DEVOTIONAL VERSE TEXTS of the firstdecades of the century, a cleavage between priestly service and poetic practiceappears as a slippery interface of the antemodern language of religious authorityand a modern's need to legitimize individual experience. This cleavage runs clearthrough his work, at times almost invisible but at other times parted and resonat ing with the sound of recognizably human voices. These voices emanate not onlyfrom a religious source but profoundly from the inner life of place, plumbed byway of self discovery. In his "Voice as Summons for Belief," Walter J. Ong arguesthat any discussion of Christianity and poetry "must at some point enter into themystery of voice and words."1 To believe in God is to look for a response fromHim, and this response is identical to the thou world' of phenomenologicaland personalist philosophy. This world, Ong believes, has never been more highlydeveloped in the consciousness "of the human race" than it is in our postmoderntimes.

According to Jean-François Lyotard, the Western world just isn't the sameplace it was twenty years ago. Lyotard defines the spreading epistemological gapthat separates us from mid-century discourse as a process of delegitimation inwhich we no longer find it possible to share collectively a modern nostalgia for"the sublime," for "the whole and the one," the illusion of totally communicableexperience. "It is our business," he concludes, "not to supply reality but to inventallusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented." For the mid-century,however, well-wrought urns, verbal icons, and quasi-mythological fearful sym-metries were enough for a consensus of taste in which readers of poetry found"solace in good forms," pleasure in individual fusions of tradition and talent.The poet's mind was an empty vessel filling continually with language, ideas,impressions, and memories. Similarly, an object of devotion was an already fullcontainer, explaining all and any response to its sublimity. Eliot insisted that"Religion and Literature" come together in criticism as contained and containing,as a process of legitimation in which "It is our business, as Christians, as well as

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readers of literature, to know what we ought to like." In the Four Quartets thecontained chaos of the imagination fuses together in an alliance between faithand art which serves, as Lyotard would say, to supply society's demand and nos-talgia for "the lost narrative."2

Today we think it is our business to ask why anything should be legitimate inthe first place. Modern poets felt a need to legitimize their experience becausethey saw it as essentially different from anything that came before. Speaking fromthe site of that other epistemological gap in modern times — William Jamespointed out that when we attempt to approve what the definition of deity impliespragmatically and empirically, "we end by deeming that deity incredible."Religions can no longer expect to appear self-approving, James suggests, sincetheir 'truth' depends on how well they minister to sundry vital needs found reign-ing in any given time and place. Devotion is no longer an obligation; religiouslegitimacy dissolves before the Darwinian law of survival, and what we need toknow now is the answer to this question: "Shall the seen world or the unseenworld be our chief sphere of adaptation?"3 James's 'delegitimation' of the reli-gious experience sets the stage for a modern discourse that must supply represen-tations of the unseen world for verification in the Here and Now. It also poses aquestion that is fundamental to Robert Norwood's poetic adventure.

In the year James began his Gifford Lectures, 1900, Santayana explained how—• in terms anticipating Eliot — representations of the unseen world could belegitimized and how the lost narrative could be recovered.4 Santayana simplydefined poetry as the container of religion, "poetry become the guide of life,"poetry as essentially "an outward sign of that inward grace for which the soul isthirsting," poetry as a "momentary harmony in the soul amid stagnation orconflict, — a glimpse of the divine and an incitation to a religious life." Themost sublime poets know that their highest mission is to prophesy, and this mission"contains the whole truth," belonging as it does to "the sphere of significantimagination, of relevant fiction, of idealism become the interpretation of thereality it leaves behind." This reliance on poetry as the vessel of "utmost purityand beneficence," in which religion "surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive,"eventually led to a modernist poetry of hollow vessels, sterile frameworks, andscaffoldings that could no longer mean, but only be.

Poetry in Canada has suffered as much as any other discourse from the modern-ist cul-de-sac, because from the turn of the century at least Canadian poets havebeen preoccupied with legitimizing their work as myth-oriented interpretationsthat leave human life and reality behind in their wake. Yet in the devotionalpoetry of Robert Winkworth Norwood (1874-1932) we find an example of earlymodern writing that succumbs to an overwhelming sense of mis en oeuvre, ofworking without rules in order to formulate rules for what will have been done,to use Lyotard's tight-fitting language, that sense of slipping beneath the surface

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and awakening to a cacophony of innumerable human voices. But how could thisbe? How could transitional writing from the early part of the century have any-thing to say to those making the transition to the postmodern condition? Perhapsthe antemodern questioning of religion and the contemporary view of all knowl-edge as a language-game are really two sides of the same coin. In this essay Idiscuss the licit and illicit values that Robert Norwood assigned to the metal ofthis coin.

MIORWOOD WAS A PRIEST deeply involved in ambitiousmachinations within the Anglican Church and profoundly devoted to his parish-ioners. The combination of his near-irresistible presence speaking in public, hisseriousness, and concern for his charge guaranteed him a considerable audienceamong the religious. His contacts with Kenneth Leslie and Sir Charles G. D.Roberts, however, and Lionel Stevenson's appraisal of his works as having attaineda new myth-making capacity in his narrative poem of the maritimes, Bill Boram,were not enough to convince readers of poetry in Canada that his verse wasimaginatively significant enough to provide an alternative to the apparent chaosof their rapidly changing times. Too much of his reputation depended on hispersonal aura. He is remembered today as a member of the Song Fishermen andnot entirely forgotten as a pulpit orator and the author of two religious versedramas, but not by many. Shortly after his death, a large following of his parish-ioners from New York and Philadelphia attended the unveiling of a memorialbust of Dr. Norwood in a ceremony commemorating the centennial of the ultra-exclusive and prestigious St. Bartholomew's Church and the ministry of its sixthRector.

He was born in New Ross, Nova Scotia, the son of the Reverend JosephNorwood and educated at Coaticook Academy and Bishop's College in Quebec,King's College in Nova Scotia, and Columbia University. He failed to distinguishhimself at university, particularly in mathematics, and avoided society because,as Albert Durrant Watson apologizes, he "was not financially able to dress appro-priately for social functions, and, besides, he desired to read so as to perfecthimself in belles-lettres." He was encouraged in poetry by his professor of English,C. G. D. Roberts, and given the freedom of Sir Charles's home and library. Hewas ordained in the same year in Halifax and was highly regarded by the CapeBreton parishioners of his first charge. He married Ethel McKeen while in CapeBreton and went on to larger parishes in Quebec, London, Ontario, and Phila-delphia in 1917, at which time he became an American citizen. From 1925 tohis sudden death in 1932, Norwood enjoyed affluence and prestige at St. Bar-tholomew's in New York City.5

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Norwood's first book of poetry aside from Driftwood ( 1898 ) , a student chap book, was His Lady of the Sonnets, whose title poem is a sonnet sequence vaguelyreminiscent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Thebook, published in Boston in 1915, was written along with his first verse play,The Witch of Endor ( 191 ), during his ministry at Cronyn Memorial Church,London, Ontario. The biography and the publishing history tell us that Nor wood's first allegiance was to his Church and that he saw his growing followingin New York State as his poetry's audience. His reputation at home was enhancedfor a time by his ability to attract American publishers. McClelland and Stewarthandled local distribution for Sherman and French of Boston and George Doranof New York. His second religious closet drama, The Man of Kerioth (1919),along with an undistinguished collection The Piper and the Reed ( 1917 ) and asustained tribute to Browning in The Modernists (1918), were all written asverse texts for his ministry in Philadelphia. Contemporary critics looked into theseworks and recognized the Mystical Love that had been taught Canadians byJohn Daniel Logan among others and, noting that Norwood and Marjorie Pick thall both chose to work with Biblical subjects, really had little else to say —except to mention his commitment and success in the field of pulpit oratory or topoint out that the poet's great grandfather married a full cousin of none otherthan Oliver Wendell Holmes. Aside from the chummy appreciations of his friendsA. D. Watson and Elsie Pomeroy, and Logan's criticism in Highways of CanadianLiterature, his work has gone unnoticed in Canada. This is regrettable since hisIssa ( 1931 ), his last poetic work, is simply one of the most interesting book lengthpoems in Canadian literature.*

Watson saw in Norwood's verse a "masterful art and clear prophetic vision"where others noted an overly rhetorical flair, but many agreed that the mainvalue of Norwood's verse was its sense of purpose in the transmission of his faith.7

His rewritings of Biblical subjects and the theme of inspiring love worked toreinterpret modern life for Canadians in such a way as to instil a confidence inreligious narrative that had been lost after Darwin and Higher Criticism. Nor wood thought he should espouse the values of formal craftsmanship and propheticaspiration as a poet, yet from the beginning he could not resist supplementingthese with his own pulpit rhetorical voice. I t was this reliance on a specificallypublic voice that, I shall argue, caused his verse to shear away from the then dominant values of poetry in Canada: that poetry ought to be an object ofaesthetic beauty, that it should employ the prophetic mode, and that it shouldpursue the creation of a local mythology which the nineteenth century Canadianlong poem had begun. In his verse as in his ministry, Norwood strove, as he saysin "Fellow Craftsman" from His Lady of the Sonnets, to bring "full confidence"to the lives of his parishioners in a co ordinated Christian context that they"know / Thou and thy God can perfect everything!"8

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The Lady of the thirty sonnets in the title sequence is a multiple figure amongwhose aspects are: Woman, Eve, "A dear Dream-Goddess," Diana, an immortalsoul, innocence, a "hidden, lovely Eremite," a "goddess, robed in white," "Waterturned to Wine," a "Dear Comrade," Helen of Troy, "white light," and Christas love incarnate among other things. Similarly, the male persona comprises:Man, Adam, a dreamer in a paradisal garden hung with precious metals andstones, Endymion, one who "knows / How you surpass the lily and the rose," thethree wise men, a Roman slave, one of Charlemagne's servitors, RenaissanceItalian nobles, and Plantagenet and Guelph robed in purple, and more. Thesetwo multiple figures are primarily an arrangement in which physical love isinexhaustibly deferred so that the poet has space enough and time to propose arule of ethical conduct, which would seem somewhat compromising for a priest,and certainly not begotten by scripture. The major symbol of the sequence is akiss that is capable of miracle, of "Transforming void and chaos" into the King-dom of God on earth. The lovers "have lived before" through cycles of reincar-nation. In each life the mystical kiss comes closer to perfection and atonementwithin the divine unity of God. Neither death nor sin, flesh nor malice can with-stand the onslaught of this eternal supplementarity whose representation in thesonnets is meant to "Let Joy and constant Certainty appear." The poem is centredon an affirmation of emotion and physical love, but this centre at once dropsaway toward the primitive origins and a future sublimity of the kiss. The readeris thus offered a paradigm of kisses as a rule to live by.

His Lady of the Sonnets continues with a sequence of ten dizains, "Antony toCleopatra, After Actium," in which the theme of love between man and womanas a mutual sacrifice akin to Christ's is further developed. Then follows "Paulto Timothy," a dramatic monologue (that later appears in The Modernists andto which I will return), which describes Paul's conversion to a faith in "OneGod, / One Law, one Hope, one Faith, and One Desire." "Dives in Torment,"the next poem, is a dramatic piece set in seventy-four quatrains reminiscent ofWilfred Campbell's "Lazarus" and Francis Thompson. Here, Norwood unfoldsthe tenet that he is working toward : that the One Desire will have been the vehicleof salvation for all men who, like Lazarus in this poem, incorporate the divinityof the saviour. The book closes with a miscellany of songs and sonnets that reprisethe themes of reincarnation, the perfection of the human spirit through history,and love's absolute authority.

In 1915 Norwood had set out to produce an annual book of verse-texts for themessage of his ministry. His two verse-dramas expand on the theme of love asmodern man's answer to a lack of confidence in traditional methods of achievingcertainty in salvation. The Witch of Endor continues his rewriting of Bible-narratives. The Man of Kerioth teaches that it was Judas's impatience to knowthe Kingdom of God on earth before its appointed time that led to his betrayal.

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The play in effect absolves Judas in that his impatience was due to love of H im,and thereby elevates human love above all uncertainty and alienation. "The SlowEmerger," in Piper and the Reed, asserts that man's "task of slow emergence fromthe clod" is to perfect himself through love in the present and to learn throughthe examples of history that "man must not chain a woman's soul," that "dearand tender fiction."9 This book sentimentally pursues the theme that one mustnot bind society and society's voice, poetry, to conventional rules of behaviourand practice.

Of his eight books of verse, The Modernists is the most accessible to a modernistreading. The nineteen personae of these dramatic monologues range from "TheCave M an " to "D arwin" and the "Voice of the Twentieth Century." The booktraces the evolution of human perfection through history in such a way as tomake sense of life as his readers knew it in 1921. In this grand design the moderncommon man is a King. The Second Coming will have been our age of demo cratic humanitarianism in which Man becomes the sign and the instrument ofthe Word, the Will, and Law of God. The sign of this sign is the book's personal,unaffected voice, the voice of ordinary men articulating the inner truth and lifeof a righteous community held together by love.

The Modernists attempts to bring order to a jumble of abstract and contra dictory images and motifs in discursive fashion, but it is in Bill Boram ( 1921 )that Norwood strikes a truly original note, producing a fiction of confidence andcertainty for his charge that surpasses his earlier rewritings of Classical andBiblical texts. As Stevenson says, the subject matter "is so simple, dominated bya single entity — the ocean — and devoted to a single calling, that the poem,without seeming overburdened with detail, presents a synoptic view of the local ity." The poem's prospect of a legitimate yet personal coherence is set in the NovaScotia fishing villages that Norwood knew as a child and as a young priest inCape Breton. Charles G. D. Roberts, his life long friend, felt that its characterscame intensely alive on the page and that it was a vividly objective dramaticnarrative, despite the language Norwood chose to use, which was too vulgar forRoberts's taste. To John Daniel Logan, however, the poem as a whole lacked"imaginative truth and dramatic power" because Logan could not believe thatthe conversion of Bill Boram's love of sensuous beauty into a spiritual love waspossible and appropriate to poetry.10 Yet it is just this vulgar impossibility, thisunpresentable testing of 'legitimate' notions of religious and poetic truth, thatNorwood found himself confronting in Bill Boram.

Τ1 ]

POEM COMBINES subjectivity and objectivity in the man ner of the documentary poem of succeeding decades. I t presents human voices,

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moreover, as masks for an interior dialogue of I and thou. Such communicationis only possible "in a world shared by our individual consciences so that by namingthe objects in this world we can break through our solitude and communicate withone another."11 The voices of the poem, in naming the locality from which theyspring, are like the voices of children who believe they know something as soonas they can name it. Out of the interiority that voice masks, therefore, emerges afurther dialogue on the ways in which its personae make sense of their lives andlocality. Norwood impales this I-thou narrative of place and self, however, uponthe crucifix of a sincere and rigorously worked out treatise on the One Desire,guiding his readers toward an I-thou parallel by means of a lyrical and supple-mental sermon that concludes predictably :

My story ends. The polar night is breaking.What do you think, my friend, of bad Bill Boram?To me this Northern sky with song is shaking —The song of Christ: "O come, let us adore him!"

As a whole, the poem is a composition of example and lesson, but as Ong pointsout, "Faith moves toward knowledge and love of persons," and persons cannot beknown as objects.12 The voice that manifests bad Bill Boram's blasphemy, atheism,and drunkenness does not deny or resolve the essential incoherence of life in hisplace and time. On the contrary, it invites us to respond to that fathomlessinteriority in an act of faith.

Norwood's strategy is to release his reader's inner feelings of doubt and con-fusion, and then to guide these feelings toward compassion. His belief is that thisact will instil full confidence in the reader. The narrative consigns all evil andsin in life to relative insignificance with the one exception of malice, personifiedby "The She Weasel." Since malice is the only sin and since the scrap of tender-ness in Bill's personality must by its nature extinguish malice :

. . . With wealthOf tenderness, amazing us, the thickHard hands of Borum paid in full the scoreWrit down against him by the pen of God.

Bill's conversion is a part of a providential design in which all men, rich and poor,sophisticated and rough, are evolving toward perfection, "Till Was and Will-Behad become I Am !" His character is similar to Paul's in "Paul to Timothy," a"prisoner of Jesus Christ" condemned to sacrifice his body for the faith, exceptthat Bill is uncouth and uneducated. Bill's saving grace, his love of flowers, iscomparable to the Greek boy who sings a song of Sappho's to Paul in his cell. Yetboth boy and flowers must be sacrificed to the One Desire. Bill "disagrees wit'pa'sons" whose souls are frozen by orthodoxy and trusts only in his stoutness ofheart :

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". . . an' these sparsA tap'rin' up'ard tells to me a sightMore'n most o' men c'n tell. To hell wit' creeds!Yet, begod, them dam tubers gets my goat.I'm strong for fightin', an' I likes the deedsO' deviltry; they is no man afloatG'n lick Bill Boram, an' I'm surey bad ;But somethin' like a tuber's inside me,That tunnels up'ard, somethin' that is gladIn darkness wors'n hell. What c'n it be?"

"Yer soul!""Oh, hell! they ain't no soul."

Yet he is redeemed despite himself because every man "is G od's Son," and "hisfinal need / Is always G od."

Norwood relies heavily on a new approach to language in this work in orderto make the poem seem more immediately relevant to the ordinary man, anapproach divested of decadent images of brilliance and the verbal tonalities ofthe prophetic voice. Yet the narrator, Tom Blaylock, a parson's son, interruptsthe narrative periodically to supply a running gloss and point up the lesson ofthe text. Tom explains that "they must live forever" who come to know that eventhe smallest forms of love are "at one with what goes up to G od," an imminent"mystical desire" whose name is Christ: "G od's ecstacy of pure creation, / Heis the artist in the soul of things." It is Bill, however, who has the last word — inthese lines addressed to Bobby Fox, "the sage of the cove," whose wisdom had"knocked to smithereens / Them fables that made the Bible a poor book" :

Bob, I found this at last: Things has their soulWhich hides from us, accordin' to the lawO' beauty, as a woman hides each breast,But gives 'em freely to the lips she loves.

Working toward a simpler, more personal poetic ministry, Norwood foundhimself at sea amidst the souls of things in Bill . The poem questions thelanguage of religious authority and his received notions of what a poem oughtto be, "verbal color and music" that contains the "power of spiritual vision andexaltation," in Logan's words. Yet it ends in comedy, with the community'slaughter far more convincing as an ending than Tom Blaylock's solemn moral izing tagged onto the close. Unlike Pratt's uproarious The Witch's Brew (1925),Bill is not an exercise in myth making. The reader is simply invited tolaugh along the poem's voices, with the assurance that our laughter is one alter native to life's contraries and the pain of evanescent meaning. Norwood wasunable to develop this comic aspect in his later verse, however. Mother and Son(1925) records his personal search for consolation and sublimation following the

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death of his only son. In two long poems, the companion-pieces "The Mother ofCain" and "The Mother of Christ," woman is no longer a loose arrangement ofdisparate elements held in staccato coherence by the force of an intellectual pas-sion, but an enforced separation of modernity and tradition, doubt and certainty,the plain language of Cain and the stately language of the ode.13 Norwood stroveto heal this rupture in his poetic and in himself in Issa ( 1931 ), a spiritual auto-biography of some eighteen-hundred lines, divided into seven cantos.

In Issa, Norwood uses his own life as an exemplum. to teach the power ofhuman love to bring order and meaning to a life such as his. The poem spins"Webbed images of life"

In such a dance of wordsThat he who readsMay feel the flight of birdsAbove new seedsFlung by the sower with a reckless handDown the long furrows of his hopeful land.

Thousands of images of disparate things, fragments of the man's life, faith, andhomeland, well up through the poet's voice in a dialogue between himself andIssa, or Christ, whose other unnamed names are the Word and the Son. As inthe Old Testament or in the Eucharist, so here in this dialogue, objects are wordsand not the other way around :

For nothing 'neath my roofLacked soul or self —The inkwell in the hoofHigh on the self.A broken peacock fan tacked to the wall,Trunk, hatbox, shot-flask, powder-horn, and all.

Memories of the localities in which he has lived and worked, of friends, relatives,and loved ones jostle against one another for their places in an ecstatic paradigmthat includes ordinary things and a plethora of mythological and literary allusions."Descend, you hierarchies, be made man!" cries Issa, and the speaker is so besidehimself in passionate discourse with Christ that his body and the soul of his nativeland are become homonyms of Issa's words, blessed for sacrifice, "For high com-munion in this common cup." As in "His Lady of the Sonnets," the beloved otheris a multiple figure whose fragments contain no totality but are rather a mobilerevolving around "one law only — love!"

The poem demonstrates "How love makes of all life a sacrament" of "Earth'slittle things," and it enacts a loving rite of passage through which all must passto the secret of Lord Issa in order to attain "their Godhood" or be lost in "outerdarkness." Heaven and hell "have but one door." The poem is not an object but

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an event of Holy Togetherness that occurs on the living, breathing threshold oflanguage or voice, which alone can mediate and maintain the unpresentableinteriority of speakers' and listeners' sense of self, the divided I-thou psychology ofman, "the sign / Of life to me — / Life, human and divine: / Duality."

For Norwood, Issa's secret is a divine mystery, a chaos that will never becontained until God and man are one. Yet the resemblance of this obscureappelative of Jesus to Isis suggests a cleavage of religious and poetic concep-tion that is securely tied to human sexuality. The One Desire is clearly asublimated passion, which, when we unfold it, appears to be creased by at leastthree different contraries: "Duality / Of spirit in God's holy likeness made," theopposition between multitudinousness and the One Law, and the duality of poetryand redemptive silence. Honour and renown shall be due only to Christ whenon his "glorious day" all songs will be quieted "and harps laid down." No book,church, or creed "Has value, where / Faith, like a broken reed" is ruined bydogma. The poem has a fissure running across the breadth of its metaphysics; itstruth is broken within itself even as it is uttered. Poetry "Was heaven's last,highest, holiest gift to earth," but poets no less than saviours are made "Uponthe thorns / Of life," and "However horrible the lonely night," they must obey"The goddess, she / Will tell you what to say." As we have seen, Norwood'sgoddess is no vessel or chalice of truth, no Gravesean White Goddess. She is indeedthe sublimation of an extremely motile and acathectic desire capable of dottingupon anything from hatboxes to God.

This sublimation allows itself to be dispersed in the language of CharlesG. D. Roberts's poetry of place. Norwood's reinscription of this language,however, privileges faith in the possibility of communication and response aboveall else. The I-thou condition of human life is stated in the poem's motto:"Wherever there are two, they are not without God, and wherever there is onealone, I say, I am with him. Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me, cleavethe wood and there am I." The first lines make it clear, moreover, that Norwood'sdialogue with Christ begins as in a dream, "Calling a name, / To waken onthe world's most poignant sting — / The pain that starts with love remembering."The entire poem is Isis/Christ's answer to this call, an answer that the poemtranslates into words coined from the immiscible fragments of life. This languageis no closed system of signifiers and signifieds. Its chief symbolic representation inthe poem is a moment of beholding, "earth's most true interpreter — a tree" :

I see a window whereThe curtained skyIs caught, is framed, and thereA tree so highThat all the morning's gray and gold and blueBetween its web of branches filter through.

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The tree does not articulate the light; it merely marks a point in space where thebeholder's attention may be focused. In terms of today's philosophy of religion,the tree is a "living framework" or a "mode of understanding" and not aninvariant structure imposed on reality. The moment of beholding permits per-ception to filter through 'licit' confines toward, as Thomas Munson says, "anoutlook that is not simply intellectual but shot through with values, with a wholeway of handling and feeling things.14 It is fundamentally a religious moment ofcelebration in which "A stone, a plant, a tree, / Had soul and was most intimatewith me," but it is also a moment of liberation that clears the "dull uncompre-hending human gaze / That never knows invention or amaze." Similarly, thepoem's language articulates nothing other than the site of a powerful current ofpain and pleasure, yearning and hard-won confidence, or what Lyotard calls "thereal sublime sentiment, which is in an intrinsic combination of pleasure andpain." The poem's pleasure derives from wonder that even "odds and ends ofthings" have "Soul, voice, significance," and it celebrates these "living words"despite "The hot, tear-tense / Thirst of my longing for a silent voice."

This is not the place for an extensive discussion of Issa, and I have wantedonly to provide an introduction to this unusual early twentieth-century work,which somewhat resembles the Prelude as a study of local piety and the growthof a poet's mind, as well as Pound's Cantos in its syncretism and thematic archi-tecture. I have also wanted to suggest that Norwood's poetry has been unwar-rantedly neglected by Canadian critics. I have relied on the language of reader-response criticism in this essay because of the importance of the role that voicecame to play in his poetic. Many writers today would probably agree withLyotard when he says that the postmodern poet is in the position of a philosopher,but as Thomas Munson suggests, modern philosophy "came to birth in religion— a fact of utmost importance not only for a dialogue between philosophy andreligion, but for the understanding of religion itself."15 The relation betweenreligion and philosophy had been hotly debated in Canadian intellectual circlesat least into the 1950's, and poets as different as Avison, Klein, and Livesay —particularly in "The Colour of God's Face" or "The Second Language (Suite)"—· have registered this dialogue in verse concerned with questions of place, voice,and self.

NOTES1 Walter J. Ong, "Religion as Summons for Belief," in Literature and Belief:

English Institute Essays, éd. M. H. Abrams (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,195%), PP· 80, 90.

2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of MinnesotaPress, 1984), p. 81; T. S. Eliot, "Religion and Literature," in his Selected Essays(London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 399.

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3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature(London: Collins, 1971), pp. 324-25, 361-65.

4 George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribners,1900), pp. 286-90.

5 Albert Durrant Watson, Robert Norwood (Toronto: Ryerson, 1923), p. 20. ElsieM. Pomeroy, a friend of the poet, wrote the biographical chapter "Robert Nor-wood" in Leading Canadian Poets, ed. W. P. Percival (Toronto: Ryerson Press,1948), pp. 158-67. Sir Charles G. D. Roberts mentions the changed citizenshipin his introduction to Issa, "The Poetry of Robert Norwood," pp. ix-xiv (NewYork : Scribners, 1931 ) , in which Roberts also claims that Norwood was "a greatreligious poet."

6 Norwood's published poetry: His Lady of the Sonnets (Boston: Sherman andFrench, 1915) ; The Witch of Endor: A Tragedy (1916), The Piper and the Reed(1917), The Modernists (1918), The Man of Kerioth (1919) , Bill Boram (1921),and Mother and Son (1925) were all published by Doran in New York; Issa(New York: Scribners, 1931 ). There is a copy of Driftwood (1898) in the LoganCollection of Canadian Verse at Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia. JohnDaniel Logan and Donald G. French, Highways of Canadian Literature : A Synop-tic Introduction to the Literary History of Canada (English) from iygo-ig24(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1924), pp. 211-12, 315-19. Logan sees Nor-wood as part of "The Second Renaissance in Canadian literature," comparablewith Pickthall except that she wrote of "private experience," whereas Norwood'swas a public voice of interpretation on the subjects of "Ideal Love" and the"divine function of Woman," pp. 288-90.

7 Watson, Robert Norwood, p. 24. V. B. Rhodenizer, in his Handbook of CanadianLiterature (Ottawa: Graphic, 1930) : "Whether he is writing in prose or in verse,his ultimate purpose is to interpret the universe in terms of Divine Love" (p. 237).Lome Pierce's Outline of Canadian Literature French and English (Toronto:Ryerson, 1927) provides biographical details not found elsewhere, and considersNorwood chiefly as a dramatist of great compassion interpreting "the Biblical timesand characters" (pp. 117-18).

8 "Fellow Craftsman," Lady of the Sonnets, p. 67.9 "The Slow Emerger," Piper, pp. 54-55.

10 Lionel Stevenson, Appraisals of Canadian Literature (Toronto: Macmillan, 1927;rpt. Norwood Editions, 1977), p. 234. Charles G. D. Roberts, "The Poetry ofRobert Norwood," Issa, pp. xii-xiii. Logan and French, Highways, p. 318.

11 Ong, "Summons," pp. 98, 103.12 Ong, "Summons," pp. 91, 95.13 Logan and French, Highways, p. 289. "The Mother of Cain," "The Mother of

Christ," Mother and Son, pp. 14-25 and 26-34.14 Thomas N. Munson, The Challenge of Religion: A Philosophical Appraisal (Pitts-

burgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 10-12.15 Munson, Challenge, p. 7.

77

FROM COUNTING TO 100Alan R. Wilson

* · * • * * * * * * ** * * * * * # # * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * *

81 82 83' 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

81What hidden pride.To take outcast 3'sand multiply theminto something fresh,acceptable.

82

Loops and twistsas if impatient

with the page,as if acquainted

with rumours of volume.

83

This round mouthof a zeroin a mirror

even now(the half-loops gaping)begins to disappear.

Something herehas slippedfrom memory

POEM

the words already emptywhen they reachthe lips.

84Seven dozen. Slow. Plodding even,but solid, dependable. A goodneighbour. Willing to add to 83when it needs more. Decrease thestrain on 85 when it aches forless.

85

Watches the night sky with awe.The count of stars

greater than itself.

86

multiplication of emptiesover the beer hall table

curves and swells —the spectacular mathematicsof the dancer's body

your own body —

the distance betweenyou wished to reduce:

but the heavy hands that roundedyour stumble to the stage

that tossed youlight as her single featherinto the street

87

Eyesight failing.The 8 aheadlooking like a 6.

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POEM

The memory:less than it was . . .

losing the place . . .

every time it counts itselfgetting a different result.

88Are these shapes the humansof the numerals' imaginings?Flat and abstract,lacking in features,lifeless even to the fewthat view them with interest?

89the still hands of the pianist —

their slow roll up the keyboardsuddenly ended

90a ship yawsin the pitch-dark waves

a line of menstruggle along the shorethe small ones the tall onesequally bent

behind a still curtaina woman tosses and turnsas the windangles her dreams

8o

STEPHEN SCOBIEBiographical

Margery Fee

Α IN CANADA as a poet since 1966, Stephen Scobiehas published ten books of poetry, including McAlmon's Chinese Opera, whichwon the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1980. The "Chinese Opera" isthe "long/ high wordless toneless wail" that got the American writer RobertMcAlmon thrown out of many famous Paris bars in the 1920's and 1930's. Scobieturns it into a rich metaphor, not only for McAlmon's failures, but also for arttaken to the edge of meaning, and beyond. McAlmon's milieu — the decadent,complex, neurotic, and creative Paris of the American literary exile — consistentlyfascinates. But it is his voice — cynical, cold, and angry — that instantly compelsattention. This voice speaks with the authority and immediacy of a revenant, itspain "screaming down / the airwaves of the long dead years." That Scobie'svoice is completely unlike this — except perhaps in its conviction — adds to theimpressiveness of the writing.

Scobie was born in Carnoustie, Scotland, on the last day of 1943· He remainedin Scotland, honing his intellect, until he graduated tied for first in the Facultyof Arts of the University of St. Andrews. He began graduate studies at theUniversity of British Columbia in 1965, receiving his Ph.D . in 1969. He marriedMaureen McHale in 1967. Between 1969 and 1981 he taught English at theUniversity of Alberta; he came to the University of Victoria as a full professorin 1981. He and Douglas Barbour frequently collaborate: they were co chairmenof the League of Canadian Poets between 1971 and 1973; they form the experi mental sound poetry performance group Re:Sounding; they co edited The MapleLaugh Forever, an anthology of Canadian comic poetry; and co authored ThePirates of Pen's Chance. Scobie has been on the editorial board of several journals,including The Malahat Review, and is a founder and editor of Longspoon Press.In 1986, he was awarded the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literature'sGabrielle Roy Prize for his contributions to Canadian literary criticism. Bestknown in the academic community for his critical work in Canadian literature,especially for Leonard Cohen (1978) and bpNichol: What History Teaches( 1984), he is also known in Victoria and Edmonton as a trustworthy and, whennecessary, vitriolic movie reviewer.

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MARGERY FEE : Why McAlmon?

STEPH EN SCOBIE : This goes back several years to an interest in Gertrude Stein,and radiating out from that, an interest in that whole period of American writersin Paris. And then to an intense love of the city of Paris itself. All of this coalescedin the spring of 1977 when I was giving a graduate course on that period, whichused as its major focus volumes of autobiography. Everybody who passed throughParis in the 1920's wrote an autobiography, and they all appear as characters ineach other's books, thus producing this marvellous, multi dimensioned creationlike a huge Alexandria Quartet in about forty different volumes. Among the booksI was using were, of course, Stein's autobiography and Glassco's Memoirs ofMontparnasse. I guess it was in Glassco that I had first come across the name ofRobert McAlmon, several years before. One of the other books was BeingGeniuses Together, a joint autobiography of Kay Boyle and McAlmon. It waswhile I was teaching that course that I began writing the poems and they beganin classic form. Late one night, I was lying in bed, not getting to sleep, andMaureen eventually said "You're trying to write a poem, aren't you? Get out ofbed and write the poem, otherwise you're going to keep me awake all night." SoI stumbled into the next room without fully waking up and sat down in front of apiece of paper and started writing, and I was about half way through the firstpoem when I fully became awake and realized that this was Robert McAlmonspeaking.

F : Which poem was it?

s : It was the first . It actually started "What I never wanted / was pity,"and I really didn't know until I got to the last couple of lines — "N ine hours aday / at a dollar an hour / in 1921" that it was McAlmon.

F : Whose voice had taken over.

s : In fact that night I wrote the first three poems more or less as they appear inthe book. There followed a period of about three months of intense activity, theclosest I've ever come to being possessed. I was writing sometimes two or threepoems a day, basically in chronological order, though not entirely. I was, partlyfor the course, partly for this book, reading everything on or by McAlmon thatI could lay my hands on in Edmonton. I did not try to interview Kay Boyle oranyone like that, partly because I was a little scared of getting too bound up inthe historicity of it. I wanted a lot of information, but on the other hand I wantedto be free to invent. So the second phase, which was quite long, almost a year,was a phase of going through the manuscript very slowly, very carefully, doingrevision, which often came back to the original version. During that time I didtalk briefly to John Glassco. I got a few things from him, though not all thatmany. He told me, for instance, that McAlmon had written a novel, of which he

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(Glassco), was the hero, called The Susceptible Boy. I believe that the MS stillexists, among McAlmon's papers, though I haven't seen it; I did use the titlephrase, however. A couple of the things he told me I very deliberately did notuse : there were things I already had in the book which he said weren't true, butwhich I decided to keep anyway. And a couple of my favourite stories, like theone that is ultimately used as the preface to the whole book, the filthy handreaching in the window, and McAlmon putting his glass of whisky into it, Glasscoflat denies. He said, "That never happened, and if you know the physical layoutof that particular bar you know that it's impossible for it to happen." Still, themajority of the historical details are accurate.F : You wanted to have a sort of framework to build on.s : I wanted to have control. And I felt that there is a kind of authoritativeness infact. One of the things that always interests me about any author is the sheernerve of coming to you and saying "Listen to me, spend some of your valuablelimited time upon this earth reading my book." I think it is an enormous demand,and that an author has to have some kind of authority — I'm playing with thedifferent senses of author, authority there — and fact is one of them, to say:"I'm telling you a truth." And yet I can't be satisfied with someone who simplytells me fact. I want to see something done with it. I'm perfectly prepared in prosefiction to tell and to be told the most outrageous stories, but somehow in my ownpoetry, I'm very reluctant to invent, which, in my more personal lyric poetry, isa kind of limitation. There are certain things that I'm not prepared to do in orderto write poems. I'm not prepared to go out and have five adulterous affairs andtake drugs and spend a year in the mental asylum. I'm just not prepared to doany of these things in order to write poems and yet at the same time I am unableto write poems imagining that I'm doing them. I could, I suppose, as a sheerexercise, sit down and write a poem in which I imagine that I am carrying onan adulterous affair and write poems about the tortured emotions that evolve outof that, et cetera, et cetera, but it would be a false exercise.

F : Well, maybe you need a character like McAlmon.s : Yes, certainly part of the attraction of McAlmon was that I could write poemsabout taking cocaine and being a homosexual in Berlin in the nineteen-twenties . . .F : And you didn't have to do it. Do you think you'll do that kind of book again?Or do you think that it descends on you, and can't be controlled.s : I'm vaguely on the lookout for it, but I can't at the moment imagine what itwould be, because it would have to be a subject which had as much appeal, asmuch richness of detail as McAlmon's life had, and yet at the same time it wouldhave to be different enough so that it didn't look as if I was doing the same thingover again.

SCOBIE

F : Scobie warming up McAlmon.

s : I think Ondaatje has been incredibly lucky to go on from Billy the Kid toBuddy Bolden. And he's got his whole family. But I can't at the moment seeanother figure that is equivalent to McAlmon, which raises all kinds of problemsfor me. What am I going to write about?

F : You'll struggle along. Has Kay Boyle seen the book?

s : Yes, and she hates it.

F : Why?

s: Well, various reasons. Mainly, she was upset by two things: by the book'sdepartures from factual accuracy, and (which is connected) by my evidentadmiration for John Glassco. I don't think there was ever much love lost betweenBoyle and Glassco. Years ago, I came across in Toronto a presentation copy ofMemoirs of Montparnasse, inscribed to Kay Boyle, with a very interesting noteand poem by Glassco included in it — I quote it in full, and use it as a majorsource, in my article on Glassco.1 But the point is that it was knocking aroundsecond-hand stores in Toronto less than two years after its first publication, soBoyle must have got rid of it fairly fast.

F : That's interesting. But she's not in that book. He never mentions her.

s : I think he does mention her somewhere, but that's just a blind. In this notehe wrote to her, he goes to great pains to deny that she was the model for DianaTree.

F : Bad idea.

s : And obviously she didn't believe him. I thought for awhile that Diana Treewas really Mary Butts, but the most recent research seems to confirm that she isKay Boyle.

F : Did you buy this book?

s : No, I didn't at the time, and I've kicked myself ever since. It's now in theNorth York Public Library, and I acknowledge them whenever I quote it. So thatwas the one problem with Boyle. She also says that recent history should only bewritten by those who lived through that history — which strikes me as nonsenseanyway, apart from the fact that I wasn't writing history. But I do think it'sunderstandable that people who did live through historical events should be farmore upset than other people would be by distortions or transformations of theseevents. Kay Boyle has always had a sort of proprietary attitude towards McAlmon ;I'm sorry she doesn't like my book, but I'm not surprised.

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I think it does raise a major and quite legitimate question: what right doauthors have to use historical figures in this way? We are in a sense appropriatingthem for our own purposes, even for our own gain. It's a rather queasy moralpoint. All I can plead is that if we make something imaginatively genuine outof it, then that carries its own justification. But I can understand people whoobject, on principle, to the whole idea. The same problem comes up with Bower-ing's Vancouver, say, or Findley's Duchess of Windsor, or Heather Robertson'sMackenzie King . . . the list is endless. Ondaatje too; he lies all the time.F : I wanted to ask you about the connection between your work and Ondaatje's.s : It was very deliberate. There's always been a lot of contact and interactionbetween what I teach and what I write. I never see any contradiction betweenthe two activities: they're just two manifestations of the same thing, a love ofliterature, a concern for poetry. Often I treat the same subject in both modes atonce. At the time I was writing McAlmon's Chinese Opera I was also writing anessay on McAlmon's fiction and I've since written a major essay on Glassco. Atthe time I wrote my essay on Ondaatje's Billy the Kid I was also writing the shortstory, "Deputy Bell," about Billy the Kid, which appears in the first Aurora. Oneof the aspects of recent Canadian poetry that I've been very much interested inis the long documentary poem, for which the major prototypes in the modernperiod are Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Ondaatje'sThe Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

F : And there's the Livesay essay, of course.2

s : And then there's Gwen MacEwen's T. E. Lawrence poems : an absolutely fan-tastic book. So, the documentary poem was very clearly present as a model. Butit's not particularly Billy the Kid; that's just one of the major examples. If any-thing, I suppose, McAlmon is slightly closer in form to The Journals of SusannaMoodie, in that it's in the protagonist's voice, it's divided into three chronologicalsections, and is a kind of retrospective. There are a couple of hints left inMcAlmon's Chinese Opera that it was originally all intended to be spoken by himin the last year of his life to an interviewer. There are still a couple of hints inthere where he says things like "You can sit where you like: / the chairs are allthe same," and "You'll find / another bottle on the bookshelf there / proppingup / some priceless first editions of / nobody's autobiography," which is a doubleallusion to William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Originally that was muchstronger, but eventually I thought "That's kind of a hokey idea to pursue literally,"so as a major idea in the book it got dropped.

F : I wondered, because I thought in the relationship between Billy and Pat Gar-rett, and then William Carlos Williams and McAlmon, there's a kind of parallel— two people acting against each other.

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s : Well, that was inevitable, because in fact William Carlos Williams did makethe comparison between McAlmon and Billy the Kid. He doesn't carry over intocalling himself Pat Garrett, obviously. And I looked at that and I thought "Thisis too good to be true, I can't resist using that." And yet it must seem so totallygratuitous.

F : Well, it struck me as an allusion to Ondaatje, I didn't realize that it was real.You practically need a footnote there.

s : I know that a lot of Canadian readers will simply take it as that, which is fineby me. It works perfectly well that way. And I guess I put a lot of stress on therelationship to Williams all the way through, right from the very first poem.

F: Well, it's one of the themes; you want to find out what happened betweenthem, because McAlmon's so vicious at the beginning of the book as an old man,yet they had been great friends.

s : It's one of the great mysteries of McAlmon's life : I've read and re-read thepage in Williams's autobiography which McAlmon took such violent exceptionto, and it's hard to see what exactly hurt him so much. I suspect that more thananything else it was simply the entirely casual tone that Williams uses to describeMcAlmon's marriage to Bryher. Williams sounds as if he's saying this is a funnylittle joke that H.D. managed to play.

F : And the marriage was McAlmon's major emotional focus.

s : It was the ruin of his whole life.

F : DO you really think so?

s : I don't know. I feel that it must have been, because there is very little in thebiography to suggest that his emotional life was, up until then, anything otherthan normal and healthy, although he certainly had a fairly disordered childhood.But there is a kind of emotional deadness in the later McAlmon which does seemto set in around the time of his marriage. He was clearly bisexual, and I thinkalso that Bryher was lesbian, and as far as I can tell, the marriage was neverconsummated. But the marriage is such a mystery. Bryher, in a 250-page auto-biography, devotes one half paragraph to it, and McAlmon ostentatiously beginshis autobiography on the day after the wedding, so both of them blatantly refuseto talk about it. I've written a story about it from Bryher's point of view called"A Marriage of Convenience."3

F : Which it was, except for McAlmon, and I suppose it did him more harm thangood in the long run.

s : Yes, it did.

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F : I instantly thought of Ondaatje's poem "White Dwarfs" when I read Mc-Almon's Chinese Opera, and I thought "Aha, here's one of those so-called failedartists who yet is a success because he's withdrawn into a transcendent silence,"and you took violent issue with that. I wonder if you could give your reasons,because I think other people would make that connection too.

s : Well, I don't know whether I would take violent issue with it.

F : Mild issue.

s : The point where I would not accept the connection is that it does not seem tome that McAlmon would ever have committed or even considered suicide. TheWhite Dwarfs, beautiful losers, that whole Ondaatje-Cohen-Phyllis Webb con-nection . . .F : All your favourite writers . . .s : My favourite writers, yeah. . . . They are talking about very self-destructivepersonalities for whom suicide is always a possibility, and for many of them anactuality. That's what I don't see in McAlmon at all. He was self-destructive inmany ways. He certainly had a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong timeand he certainly had this marvellous aptitude for offending potentially usefulpeople.

F : Publishers.s : Publishers, mainly. I mean the famous story of how he went to New York andhad lunch with Maxwell Perkins at Scribners, and Perkins was seriously consider-ing publishing him. McAlmon, attempting to ingratiate himself with Perkins,spent the entire lunch telling him that Hemingway was a drunken homosexualwho beat his pregnant wife, which may or may not have been true, but whichcertainly did not endear him to Maxwell Perkins.F : Who was Hemingway's publisher, right?s : Yes. Hemingway was the blue-eyed boy at the time.F : But I thought suicide was not the only way out; people just stopped writingfor one reason or another.

s : Well, McAlmon never really stopped writing, either. He kept on writing, andeven as late as about a couple of years before his death he left California andcame to New York for six months and tried to get some kind of recognition. Sothat really flamboyant self-destructiveness, that idea of going out in a blaze ofglory — "after such choreography what would they wish to speak of anyway" —that isn't there in McAlmon.

F : He never had the glory, for one thing.

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s : He never managed the parade. I have a tremendous interest in the figure ofthe failed artist.

F : Why did he fail?

s : It's very difficult for me at this stage truly to distinguish between talking aboutthe historical Robert McAlmon and the McAlmon who emerges in the poems.One of the key things is certainly this kind of emotional deadness that sets in,which leads him to a kind of sterility. And yet, even in my poems, he never givesin. He never finally admits his failure, and he persists in saying that all he reallywants is a fair judgment. Right to the end he's repeating:

Montparnasse in the first light of dawnhas a kind of hard-edged honestyit makes all judgements lies

That whole thing. In my poems, he still believes right to the end that he was agreater writer than Hemingway.

F : Do you think he was?

s: Yes. Oh, yes. I do have to be careful here: I mean, there's always the possibleconfusion between the McAlmon who "really" existed and the McAlmon whom/ created. The McAlmon in my book expresses certain literary views which, byand large, I share, and which, I think to a lesser extent, the historical McAlmonshared. I'm sure we all share the belief that he was a greater writer than Heming-way ! But my McAlmon is kinder to Gertrude Stein than the real one was, so insome places the Scobie biases creep in. And I certainly played up the anti-Hemingway aspect because it was such fun for me to do !

The historical McAlmon had in his writing this whole ideal of contact whichhe and William Carlos Williams jointly formulated around 1920, which was areaction against what they saw as the excessive literariness of Eliot, who was, atthat stage, the major target. And I think Hemingway became the major targetlater. What they wanted was a very flat, realistic literature of direct contact withAmerican life, which called for a kind of absolute honesty, but also for an almosttotal lack of artifice in the presentation. Now what this produces in McAlmon'swriting, in the historical McAlmon's writing, is some astonishingly good shortstories, especially the stories of Distinguished Air, because he had an honesty andan ability to accept absolutely anything nonjudgmentally which I think goes way,way beyond anything Hemingway ever achieved. The crucial thing, I guess, is thewhole issue of homosexuality. Hemingway just curled up in embarrassment andtook refuge in all these terribly phony macho ideals of the real man, et cetera,et cetera, whereas McAlmon just sailed right into the Berlin nightclubs of themid-nineteen-twenties and produced in Distinguished Air a series of astonishingstories about homosexuals, transvestites, cocaine addicts, whatever. And he just

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accepts them all, nonjudgmentally; he's not fazed or embarrassed, even whenhe's writing long monologues in the persona of a man called Mary, he doesn'thave to prove anything about his own sexuality, his own ego. That's the "contact"ideal at its best : it enabled him to look clearly at people who were, in one sense,the dregs of humanity, and to see them simply as human; to present them thatway, without posturing, without moralizing, without evading.

But equally, of course, the aesthetic that he was working with, also impliedhuge stretches of very dull writing, precisely because he rejected any ideas ofliterary artifice and didn't like to revise or anything like that. So the result is thatwhen he's on, he's good, but when he's off, he's terrible. OK, so I'm very interestedin that kind of writing, especially in the very long poem, and it seems to me thatMcAlmon was anticipating the things which were achieved with much greatersuccess by William Carlos Williams, by Pound in the Cantos, by Olson in theMaximum poems, and, to some extent, by bpNichol in the Martyrology. There'ssomething in McAlmon's aesthetic which leads into that whole strand of modernwriting, which he himself never managed to accomplish. As he went on, hebecame more and more embittered, and the good patches in his writing becamefewer and fewer. That bitterness sets in which I think destroys him, both as aman and as a writer. So in that sense, to get back to the poem, the poem doesemphasize this and comes back several times to the idea of contact, to the ideaof abundance (which is the word Stein applied to him), the reaction against thefake posing of Hemingway and of Eliot. So McAlmon's a failure. But he's apeculiar kind of failure, because at least part of the purpose of the whole bookis to assert he wasn't really a failure, that right in there was a perception, therewas a vision, fitfully realized, which was real and which got lost somewhere.

F : And that's the failure, the losing . . .

s : And the failure is that he got lost.

F : Given all these relationships — Robert McAlmon and William Carlos Wil-liams, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, what about you and Douglas Barbour?

s : It's certainly not a Pat Garrett-Billy the Kid relationship.

F : No, no, no. I shouldn't imply that. Which one of you is going to get shot !

s : I think we work together so well because we are so different. We like the samekinds of thing, but we both have a very wide eclecticism in what we like. Cer-tainly over the years we've influenced each other. He's introduced things to me;I've introduced things to him. It's never been a relationship of conflict; it's alwaysbeen complementary. I think the peculiar thing was that for twelve years there,all the way through the seventies, there were the two of us in Edmonton, and wewere really the odd men out in prairie poetry. If you look at the images of prairie

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poetry in the seventies, there was Suknaski, and there were people like GlenSorestad ; a whole thing grew up of prairie poetry as anecdotal and realist and . . .

F : Horizontal.

s : Horizontal and conversational and all the rest of it and then off in this oddcorner in Edmonton were Scobie and Barbour who clearly didn't have anythingto do with that, whose connections seemed to be either to Talonbooks in Vancou-ver or Coach House in Toronto, who kept on talking about people like PhyllisWebb and bpNichol. Somehow, when people talked about prairie poetry theynever included us.

F : YOU didn't fit the pattern.

s : There were nice generalizations to be made, and we didn't fit in.

F : Whereas other people, like Elizabeth Brewster, who isn't from the prairies atall, fit in so well.

s : There are ironic twists here. One is that I've just edited and introduced Suk-naski's Selected Poems — an odd choice. And there is the whole question ofKroetsch. During most of the early seventies, Kroetsch was in Binghamton, andI don't think that people thought of him as a prairie poet. But when they try towrite an account of prairie poetry that does include Robert Kroetsch, they'regoing to have to bring in Doug and me as well.

F : Because of the postmodernist slant.

s : And because there are connections between us, especially between Doug andKroetsch. Doug is probably closer to Kroetsch than I am, in poetic practice, ifnot in theory.

F : I wanted to talk about your story "Streak Mosaic" and the whole idea ofregionalism. In that story, which I found a very good one to teach students in awestern Canadian literature course, you're taking the whole "prairie" thing andmaking fun of it. Yet I think it's also a very good story, and a story that does leadinto the tradition.

s : A lot of my short stories, of which there are not many, play with a conventionalform, or a conventional set of ideas, and push them just a little too far, so theycan't be taken completely seriously, yet they're not so totally burlesqued that theyfall over into mere parody. I like hitting that line where they still work if you takethem at face value, and yet it's done also with that edge which says "I know this iscliché, I know this is a ritualistic thing." "Streak Mosaic" is every cliché that youcan possibly think of, about the prairies, and yet it's true. I've written a spy storyset in Victoria, which involves some weird plot machinations. The plot keeps

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getting more and more horrendously complicated, and the events succeed eachother faster and faster so that by about the last six pages of the story, plot twistsare following each other about once every two paragraphs. So the reader cannottake it completely seriously as a spy story; it becomes a kind of parody of thegenre. And yet it has to work. If you stop and figure out all the twists in the plotthey are all logically worked out, and the plot does hold together, and there is aplausible explanation for everything that happens, but in a twenty-page shortstory there are more events than there are in a two-hundred-page novel.

F : You should add water and put it on the New York Times best-seller list.

s: Well, that's the point. As a prose fiction writer, I'm very lazy. I can't bebothered. I think I got corrupted years ago by Borges, who said he was too lazyto write novels.

F : Talking about prairies and regionalism and so on, does being from Scotlandput you at a distadvantage? Do you think people overlook you?

s : I don't know why people don't pay as much attention to me as they should ![Laughter.] I'm regionalist, in the sense that I always have a very, very strongresponse to landscape, and the sense of place is always very important to me. Onthe other hand, I've got, oh, at least four or five different places. There is Scotland,and I can still respond very emotionally and directly to the Scottish landscape;there are the years and years on the prairies, so I have some kind of feeling for aprairie landscape; and I love the west coast. And there's the European thing,centring on Paris, so that you can't call me a regionalist from any one region.

F : Which is the way it should be, I think. It's true that people write about theplace they are in, but they don't have to be in one place forever. I think that's theunfair part of it; people insist: "You're from Scotland, so you can't ever be aCanadian writer." That's silly.

s : I guess there's a suspicion that you're skimming the surface. That you haven'tearned the right to write about Big Bear.

F : Yeah. Well, phooey to that. I thought "Why McAlmon," and then I thought"Why Cohen?" because you and Cohen don't seem to be that closely connected.If I thought "Who would Stephen Scobie pick to write a major book about," theanswer certainly wouldn't have been Leonard Cohen.

s: In the first place, I arrived in Canada in 1965 at the height of Cohen'spopularity.

F : Cohenmania.

s : He visited Vancouver in April 1966. He was probably the first major Canadian

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author that I met. I read Beautiful Losers when it first came out and was com-pletely bowled over by it.

F : Like everybody else.

s: So for that period, 1965-66, Cohen was the major avant-garde author inCanada. And secondly, there's the whole business of the songs. One of my con-tinuing and abiding interests is in the poetic use of the medium of pop songs,which began for me with Bob Dylan, and which fascinated me in LeonardCohen. In 1966 when he came to give a reading at U.B.C., Beautiful Losers wasjust out and none of the records had appeared. Nobody knew he was a singer.He arrived to give this reading and there were about 250 people there, all clutch-ing copies of Spice Box of Earth and waiting to hear this marvellous romanticpoetry. He strides into this huge auditorium at U.B.C. carrying a guitar, andinstant freak-out all over the audience, "What is this?" I had no notion at thattime that Cohen had that kind of interest, not knowing then about the BuckskinBoys and all his early exploits. So he gets up there and reads a couple of dutifulpoems from Spice Box of Earth just to get us all happy, and suddenly plunkplunk plink on the guitar and he starts "Suzanne" which at that stage nobodyhas ever heard.

F : What was the reaction?

s : I don't know what the general audience reaction was, but I was knocked outby it. I thought it was just fantastic.

F : YOU have the art of being at the right place at the right time.

s : And he sang also, "Wasn't it a long way down, wasn't it a strange way down" ;lines that echoed in my head for days and days afterwards. I was sold on Cohenas a singer from very early on. Next, Judy Collins's album that had "Suzanne"on it came out and we all rushed out and bought that. It was the album thatspring. So that's why Cohen in the first place. Then, I guess, the more I becameinterested in Cohen critically, the more I also realized that he was completelydifferent from me.

F : Another thing that comes up is your fascination with the arbitrary, the ran-dom, the cryptic, things that happen accidentally, anagrams, word play. I won-dered where you got that interest.

s : Part of it is just a games-playing attitude. My parents were both great cross-word puzzle addicts, and I am too.

F : Do they play Scrabble?

s : Yeah, they play Scrabble.

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F : Corrupted at an early age.s : I am fascinated by chance happening, not just at the level of language, butodd things happening.F : Do you call them synchronicities, rather than coincidences?s: Well, I'm very hesitant to ascribe any inherent purpose or meaning to themin themselves. I think that the purpose and meaning are what the writer brings tothem, in the very act of choosing them. A lot of people talk about chance as anideally impersonal medium, as a way of escaping from the demands of the ego;you can get quite mystical along these lines. A lot of the theorizing about abstractart, you know, is very musical — Kandinsky, say, or Malevich — and it's notsomething I've ever been very happy with. If I had to put a philosophical nameto it, I suppose I would use "existentialist" : that is, the significance is not inherentin the material, the artist brings the significance to it, largely in the choice —which is in some way the existentialist "authentic" choice — of saying OK, thisis a poem.

F : IS that what lies behind The Pirates of Pen's Chancel

s : Well, I don't think that Doug and I ever talked it through in quite these terms.In fact, a lot of our attitude was much more pragmatic : the technique is here touse, let's see what happens. And the composition of that book was, in a friendlyway, quite competitive : I'd try out a method and get a poem, then I'd run downthe corridor to Doug's office and say "Ha! Look at this!" and then he'd have togo me one better, and so on. I guess we both believe that this kind of poetry isthere to be found, but you still need a poet to do the finding. And this happensnot just at the level of language, of found poems, homolinguistic translations orwhatever, but also at the level of events. A lot of my more anecdotal poems, whenI do get anecdotal, are based on curious things that happen, things that peopletell me, events that I stumble across.

F : Another area of fascination of yours that I find interesting is all these . . .borderlines . . . between various genres — sound poetry, concrete poetry — andalso nonacademic interests that you bring into academia like song lyrics andfilms and horror movies and so on. Is this just eclectic taste, or do you have somekind of poetic theory that inclines you towards these areas of art that are notconsidered central.

s: It's partly eclectic taste, it's mainly a fascination with what bpNichol callsborderblur. In my introduction to my book on Leonard Cohen I say somethinglike "There are people who define a circle by its centre, and there are people whodefine it by its circumference; people who define a thing by looking at the middleof the road, mainstream examples of it and people who define things by going to

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the limits, and if necessary, going over the limits in order to find out where thelimits really are." In that sense, I suppose I'm like Cohen in that I really likelooking at things at their outer edges. I'm fascinated by the areas where differentart forms interact with each other, cross over to each other, where poetry becomespainting or music, or whatever, much more so than by a really mainstream,middle-of-the-road thing — the tradition. I've always had this interest in moviesand in pop songs, and I just keep adding. One of my closest friends in Edmontongot me hooked on opera, another obvious borderblur area. Then, partly becauseof my interest in Paris, I became hooked on Cubist painting. Borderblur again.So I keep on adding interests. So far I haven't taken a great interest in ballet, butI'm sure it's coming. I think it's the same thing even in my interest in Canadianliterature.

F : It is. And you teach a course where you spend more time on bpNichol thanon Margaret Atwood; now that it not a typical course.

s : But also, even there, even Canadian literature is an area that is, as yet,undefined. I'd much rather deal with contemporary literature than with thegreat tradition. I enjoy reading Shakespeare, I enjoy teaching Shakespeare toundergraduates, where it is new for them and where obviously I'm not trying tosay anything vastly original about Hamlet; I'm just trying to get them to under-stand what's going on.

F : If you teach so as to get students to understand, what are you doing readingDer rida?

s : I've become interested in Derrida specifically and in critical theory generallyfairly gradually over the past four or five years. I guess I'd first heard of Derridayears ago, from Steve McCaffery long before Derrida was the household wordhe is these days in American academe. Steve was doing this marvellous poemcalled "Of Grammatology," where he scattered alphabet cereal all over the floor,and rolled around, simultaneously eating and pronouncing them. He would climbup to the top of a stepladder and pour them on the floor and then get down andwallow around in them, munching them up and reading each one as he pickedit up with his teeth off the floor.

F : Did you tell Derrida about this when you met him?

s : There was a project to have Steve and the Four Horsemen perform in front ofDerrida this June in Toronto, but it never came to anything. It's a great regretto me ; I would have loved to see Derrida's reaction. But it was in connection withthat piece that I first heard the name Derrida, in 1973-74.

F : That early?

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s : Yes.

F : That's a weird way to hear of Derrida, I must say.

s: McCaffery has this voracious appetite for strange theories of all kinds, andwas heavily into Derrida very early. So, I'd been aware of Derrida for awhile. ButI read a lot more Barthes. I read The Pleasure of the Text when it first appearedin English translation without at that stage understanding half of what was goingon in it. I'm not sure I understand half of it now.

F : Does anybody? [Laughter.]

s : I've read Barthes for years ; I read Elements of Semiology and Writing DegreeZero back in the sixties, in fact quite shortly after Elements of Semiology firstappeared. But it was only a few years ago, when I read Christopher Norris's book,that I began to understand what Derrida was talking about. This is just accident.I don't think Norris's book is necessarily the best introduction to Derrida. Now Iwould say that Culler's On Deconstruction is the best general introduction. Thenin Toronto in June 1984 I spent a month at the ISISS4 symposium and actuallyheard Derrida, and certainly he's a very impressive man. He has a presence. Hehas all the things his theory says he shouldn't have.

F : Authority.

s : Authority, presence, charisma, the self-present word and all that kind of stuff.

F : He should stumble and mutter and throw Alphabits about, really.

s : Yes. His theory, at least implicitly, denies, puts into question, tends to qualifyquite severely his own presence.

F : He should take Steve McCaffery with him wherever he goes as a kind ofalter ego.

s : So over the last two or three years I've become increasingly interested in criti-cal theory. And I'm aware that this is some kind of bandwagon, some kind offad. But I think that there are genuine reasons for this, that is I think that theoryis genuinely exciting and interesting, that the fact that everybody in NorthAmerica is doing it now obviously does have undesirable consequences, that itdocs come to seem merely fashionable. But look at it positively, it does show thatthe theory is meeting a genuine need and is giving to many people a new anddifferent way of looking at literature and revitalizing a study of literature thathad, I think, become very tired and stale. Many of us were floundering arounddoing the usual theme studies, biographical studies, studies of image patterns andall the rest of it.F : And it was getting boring. You could do that.

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s : Do I really want to spend the rest of my life writing about image patterns?

F : Did it change your teaching, or will it, do you think?

s: It's difficult to know exactly how it will change my teaching. I did try in agraduate course I gave last year to use at least some poststructuralist or decon-structive ideas, but I was dealing with bpNichol's The Martyrology, which invitesit, and mentions it, and necessitates it. I was dealing with graduate students, buteven there I couldn't assume they knew anything about it, and indeed, some ofthem didn't know anything. I think what will be really interesting will be whenyou get to the stage when there are regular courses on literary theory and youcan go into a course on Canadian literature and feel that you can say Derridaand they're not all going to look around and say "Who?"

F : It'll be awhile yet.

s : Not necessarily all that long. Just talking about the University of Victoria, wehave several people on staff now who can and will be teaching these courses.So that will change. How it will filter down to freshman teaching, is difficult topredict, because obviously you can't go into a freshman composition class andoffer them a course on deconstruction. On the other hand, it seems to me thata lot of the stuff I've been reading in say, reader-response, narratology, receptiontheory focused on the act of reading is very useful, and does provide a systematizedbasis for teaching. The last time I taught freshman English I presented studentswith a highly simplified scheme of authors, narrators, readers, in about threestages. Next time I'll probably offer them a diagram in about seven or eightstages, which is much more sophisticated, but which I think I could teach at thefreshman level.

I think that theory operates at two levels; first, there is the theory in and foritself. You get carried away with the beauty of the theoretical construct. And toa certain extent if you read a lot of Derrida you don't get to talk about the text.The theory just exists for its own sake. But that seems fine. And second, it doeswork, where you turn and apply it to texts. It works in different ways. If you'redealing with highly traditional, hierarchical texts, then you are basically lookingfor ways in which these texts work against themselves, fall apart under a certainkind of scrutiny, and there's a danger there which the critics of deconstruction veryoften bring up, which is that you end up saying exactly the same thing about textafter text.

F : Oh, look, this is another logocentric text.

s : Let us take apart the logocentrism of this text. Here is another based on thehierarchy of speech and writing, let us take this apart. Certainly there is thatdanger.

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F : Or in discovering that your favourite authors are all secretly deconstructionists.Every essay says, ah he, unbeknownst to anybody . . .

s: Or, you can turn the theory of contemporary experimental texts, which tosome extent do deconstruct themselves already or do work with these ideas. Whenyou're working with McCaffery or Nichol or with other people like Fred Wah,these are the people who read the theory themselves and are already beginningconsciously to use that kind of idea. The Martyrology, book 5, is scattered withreferences to sliding signifiers, and obviously, bp knows all about Lacan.

F : Has it affected your writing? Has it affected your poetry?

s : Some of the recent poetry, the sequence called "Rambling Sign," which is inthe book Expecting Rain, certainly uses signs in its vocabulary and as a large partof its subject matter. I've written about that kind of thing. I'm not sure that I canyet break the patterns of my own writing radically enough to be able to say thatwhat I'm writing is deconstractive poetry. Some of the sound poetry and someof the poetry in Pirates of Pen's Chance does seem deconstructive.

F : Even destructive.

s : Yes, I think Pirates of Pen's Chance is a book that could be described preciselyin terms of dissemination. In terms of my own critical writing, that's anotherproblem. The major example so far is an essay entitled "Surviving theParaph-raise."5 There's a very strong theoretical, ah, bent, to that essay. There'sa long section in the middle of it which is practically wall-to-wall quotations fromDerrida. But I was fascinated by that essay because I found that what I could do,by starting from some highly theoretical ideas in Derrida, circling around thenotion of the signature, was to say things about the poetry which I could nototherwise . . . there was no way I could have got to that kind of commentary Ioffer on Wah, Webb, and Nichol, if I hadn't used theoretical ideas, or beenstarting from theoretical ideas. The essay is, for me, the first major instance in myown critical writing in which I have been able to take this interest in post-structuralist theory and really use it to say something about poetic texts. At thesame time, I wrote it originally to deliver as a lecture at Edmonton. Part of mymischievous intent was that I would go back to Edmonton and prove to every-body there that I had finally gone completely crazy.

F : That they had gotten rid of you just in time.

s : And therefore I allowed myself in that essay a certain amount of self-indulgencewhich I haven't previously allowed myself in academic essays. There's a pun onevery page. The entire essay is based on, and grew out of, a pun: the paraphrase/paraph-raise. That pun was the starting point of the whole essay. So the style

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throughout the essay is very playful, it invites puns, rather than trying to avoidthem, and at various stages in that essay, the argument is carried by puns.

F : Which in fact is what you enjoy doing in your poetry, there's a lot of that kindof language play there too.

s : And some of my recent poems have used that kind of highly convoluted wordplay as the basic generative devices for the poem.

F : So there is a connection between your critical and your poetical writing, then.Does this theory allow you to integrate your interest in various kinds of media —songs and films — in a way that your earlier academic criticism couldn't?

s : The theoretical certainly embraces them all. There have been several gesturestowards a deconstructive theory of film. In the sense of conventional narrativecinema as perfected by Hollywood in the forties and even fifties, film is aneminently deconstructable medium. It sits up there and begs for this kind ofanalysis, and especially a feminist analysis, such as that carried out in Teresade Lauretis's book Alice Doesn't. The attack on the structure of narrative film isa semiotic attack and a feminist attack. The subtitle of de Lauretis's book,Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, is very interesting because it speaks to that kind oftotal interconnection. Obviously deconstruction works straight into a kind offeminist criticism with, at this point, a major footnote, caveat, warning, modifica-tion, call it what you want, that Derrida himself, although he provides, I think,the tools for a lot of feminist discourse, is obviously a very ambiguous figure forfeminist criticism insofar as he is an extremely powerful male, subject to extremeadulation from people like me. [Laughter.]

F : Have you touched the hem of his garment?

s : I have shaken the master's hand, I have my signed copy of Of Grammatology.It's very hard, I think, for feminist criticism to use the insights that Derrida pro-vides and yet at the same time to steer clear of Derrida himself as this kind oftotem figure. And a great many of the bigger guns of deconstruction, which is anunfortunate metaphor right there, are in fact male. You start in on this stuff andyou've got Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Eco.

F : Kristeva's really the big name who's a woman.

s : But Kristeva's not entirely sympathetic to feminist criticism. You have to gooff into people like Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. It's really noticeable thatin the whole flood of translation of French critical writing that we have, verylittle feminist writing is available. Everything by Derrida is available. A great dealof Lacan, absolutely everything by Barthes, absolutely everything by Eco. Thesepeople are all available in English translation, even Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-

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Oedipus is around in translation. But Cixous and Irigaray were until very recentlypractically unavailable, a few essays here and there.

F : You have to be able to read French.

s : You have to be able to read deconstructive feminist French ! It is a cause fortremendous concern that the pattern of translation of avant-garde French theoryis at the moment very heavily male-oriented. There is a desperate need forfeminist critics to be translated. Their influence in Canada is almost entirelythrough Quebec.

F : Through people like Nicole Brossard, Barbara Godard . . .

s : And Louky Bersianik, Louise Cotnoir, people like that, who are obviouslyreading and quoting from Irigaray, in French, but not any other way. It seemsto me that there are very strong connections between deconstruction as a philo-sophical project, semiotics as a study of the social function of signs, and feminism,and that these concerns have focused upon narrative rather than poetry, and evenwithin narrative, they have tended to focus on film largely, I think, because of thework by de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. And so much of it came out originallyin Screen magazine in England, people like Laura Mulvey. In books like StephenHeath's Questions of Cinema, and Kaja Silverman's book on semiotics andTeresa de Lauretis's Alice Doesn't. I'm fascinated by everything that Heath saysabout visual space and the construction of visual space, because that feeds intopainting. And it feeds into everything that I want to say about Cubism. WhatI'm trying to do at the moment is to get back to a long-standing interest in Cubismand literature which has been on the back burner for about the last ten years,and trying desperately to shove it onto the front burner. Derrida is on the frontburner —

F : And he won't get off !

s : But once I do get him off, I can say quite simply that what I have to do is todeconstruct Cubism.

F : You can say it quite simply, but to do it is another matter.

s: Yes. But the way I'm going to do it is by taking a lot of what the cinemapeople have to say about the construction of visual space, and the ideologicalimplications of the construction of visual space and to apply that to painting. Itbecomes a narrative medium. Cinema came along, and one would have imagined. . . let me step back a bit. The whole Renaissance tradition in painting and thevisual arts generally was to build up this very unified and coherent visual spacewhich was organized by linear and aerial perspective, and a static point of view,and produce this whole sense of a coherent spacial world. Now when the cinema

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came along, what one would imagine the cinema would do would be entirely tobreak up that space, because the cinema implies a moving point of view, amultiple point of view, and a film can be edited, et cetera. But in fact whathappened is that as narrative cinema evolved in Hollywood in the thirties andforties, what they did was to construct again a coherent visual space, which washierarchical, and secure in all the old ways. I'm drawing very heavily on StephenHeath here, although I think I'm inflecting it differently. But I think whathappened, against all odds and expectations, is that cinema took over the role ofclassical painting. And the deconstruction of the visual space that went on inCubism, happened in painting, at around the same time that the thing that itwas replacing was beginning to establish itself in cinema.

F : So you just got the theory in time.

s : The whole thing would have been very different five years ago. It would havefitted into a very much more stable kind of discourse than I can now give it. It'sobviously going to be a much weirder book that I ever thought it would be.F : Well, that's all right.

s : What it then comes down to is a question of belief.

F : Do you buy the implication of deconstructive theories?

s : Yes : that, as Hamlet said, is the question. Is it simply a set of ideas that youcan use or is it something that you ultimately believe in. If Derrida's position istaken to its logical conclusion, it's not simply a way of saying funny things aboutliterature. It's a rethinking of the whole philosophical tradition that deals withthe nature of the way we see the world.

F : To see the world the way Derrida does, you have to change everything.

s : You have to change, or at least you have, to use his phrase, to be able to placethings under erasure. That is, they're simultaneously there and not there. Everyoneaccepts that you do not live every moment of your life at the plane of ultimatephilosophy. In daily intercourse, in buying groceries, you obviously make certainpragmatic assumptions about the way language works and the degree of stabilityin the meaning of words. If I go into a butcher's shop and order beef . . .

F : You expect to get beef.

s : Right. At the day-to-day level we work on the basis of pragmatic assumptions,and Derrida does that the same as everybody else. So obviously there's a sense inwhich questions of ultimate belief operate in daily life in suspension.

F : But isn't it more than just a linguistic theory? This is the problem. It is attack-ing some of the sources of religious belief, as well as describing the way language

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works. It's not just privileging text over voice, it's also attacking God as theultimate source of authority.

s : That depends on how you define religion. Insofar as religion is connected witha system of hierarchical authority, in which you have a god who is the ultimateauthority, the ultimate origin, and the ultimate father, then obviously everythingthat Derrida says goes to take apart that whole system of beliefs. In deconstructionyou cannot attribute any meaning to a god who is the authority, the origin, thefather. He takes apart most of conventional Christianity, Judaism . . .

F : And a few other religions !

s: But if you define religion as a much more general belief in a religious orspiritual dimension to human experience without attaching it to this kind ofhierarchical authority, then I'm not so sure. Derrida himself is very interested inChristian mysticism, in what is called "negative theology."

F : Religion comes up in only two, maybe three, of your poems and yet it comes upin fairly dramatic ways. How did you deal with religion when you were growingup? Were you religious?

s : I was intensely religious until the age of about twenty, or twenty-one. Prob-ably to begin with simply without thinking about it at all, because my father wasa minister of religion and every male relative in the past three generations onboth sides of the family was. And when I was very young I think that I justassumed that I would do the same without even consciously deciding on it.

F : Do you think you write because your father wrote the Sunday sermon?

s : It has connections, yeah. In the first place I was brought up in an intenselyliterate household where people read and where people wrote and where therewas even a certain kind of rhetorical tradition which probably carries over toa lot of my writing. I have written several poems about my father who is a manI intensely admired as well as loved; quite apart from anything else I just straightout admired him.F : Did you lose your faith?

s : To say I lost my faith makes it sound much more dramatic and melodramaticthan it is. But partly because I understand so much about what a religious lifecan be, because I lived so close to such intense examples of it, I'm probably muchmore demanding with myself about what true faith would involve.

F : So you can't compromise.

s : I can't drift along. So I would have to say that for the last ten or fifteen yearsof my life, I've been essentially nonreligious, agnostic, certainly not atheist, cer-

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tainly not anti-Christian, because it still seems to me that as an intellectual schemeChristianity has not only a coherence, but a certain kind of moral grandeur.Again, thinking mainly of my father, I've seen at first hand the workings of thatfaith in the life of the best man I've ever known. So I can never reject it or discardit, never be blatantly anti-Christian in any kind of propagandistic sense, and yetin my own life, for the moment at least, I can't embrace it. I make no conclusions.

NOTES1 "The Mirror on the Brothel Wall: John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse,"

Canadian Poetry no. 13 (Fall/Winter 1983), 43-58.2 Dorothy Livesay, "The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre," in Contexts of

Canadian Criticism, ed. Eli Mandel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971 ),pp. 267-81.

3 "A Marriage of Convenience" in The New Press Anthology *1: Best CanadianShort Fiction, ed. John Metcalf and Leon Rooke (Toronto: General, 1984), pp.201-16.

4 International Summer Institute for Structuralist and Semiotic Studies.5 Forthcoming in Open Letter.

FLYOV6RS/STOPOVERSRobert Gibbs

— Ein zwei drei — the boy beside mecounts — four five six Ich wurde

in Hong Kong geboren — Then his two tonguesare still His mother keeps watch lovely her

Hanover eyes open to the long night Thebreeze swizzles and keeps us breathing

A boy and his mother are flying home to Perththirty hours downunder from

English and German grandmothers Throughmy headset unendingly coming round

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POEM

four Bach harpsichords wing meover the time-zones Belgrade

flickers on and out I doze and thenthe Bosphoros

Red Arabia ripples out from blackbiblelands Back of yesterday Goethe

stands bronze-eyed over his bombed-outcity high again with night-joints and a

factory-sized Oper (where a freshlunged tenor rang last night above

five double basses What anicy little hand The gulf

rages a still blue where thoselower birds fly at tankers

white-waking for the strait Thisairport allows no photos only

pistols-at-the-hip and immaculatemullahs with scimitar-edged grins

boarding for Kuwait Gnarled Muscatdrops away into an angel-scudded

sea Lost in yesterday all thoseholy places and Goethe's river

pen-and-water-coloured and spiredtall enough Goethe's study compiled

out of bomb rubble and his father'stomes tomb-heavy Closed

courtyards crammed with Japanesecameras Japanese eyes

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POEM

Also lustig sah es ausWo der Mayn vorüber floss

back there in the dark with holylands crossed in the long night

and holy wars (a bomb in thatdeparture lounge already ticking)

Mother India waking coversthe world a tough lychee rind

rust and yellow Mother India as shehas been as she has to be

heart tightening Along a tracksomething moves oxcart or truck or

low horned buffalo goaded homeThese strands flight threads break

groundward to the rootlands riversgouged in red earth meeting

in one flow heartplace of tonguesmother of motherlands

WHOse WOOD S TH6S6 meMichael Darling

These woods are mine,my neighbour says,dumping the remains of last year's flowerson my budding raspberry bush.

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You're wrong, I say,dropping another bag ofgrass clippings on the trilliumsbehind his house —these woods are mine.

To prove our claimswe each havesimilar red stakes we'veplanted in the no-man's-landbehind our tenant farms.

The kids across the street —social climbers to the end —steal the stakes tohammer in a tree,making a ladder we can only hopethe landlord never wants to use.

NOV6MB6R SUNDale £ieroth

The November sun can't find its wayto meIt slants aroundand divesinto the ground, the white crustysnow and dirtIt leaps off a househorizon and pell-mells inthrough the long hall windowbut I have already gone It can'ttake me in its arms like a summer sunIt can't draw me down into the grassestossed by the creekIt is fiercely forgettingwhere I am, turning its hot faceto the bodies of the South The daysshorten and stall,

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everyone piled up in the houseand all our baublesdo not turn the dark around One morningfrom under your layersbrush open the curtain to seefrost works, and far offthe winter sunHearts grow stiff hereor die hardy Afternoons spentcatching what you canon your face At nightnever once does the name Canadaappear in your dreams — but the countryis tipping away, pullingdown and you are going with itNovember's sun is coldand the earth grows colder

TH6 CR€Y FL€€C€Michael Bullock

Nailed to the tall wall that surrounds mea fleece hangs grey and dirtya ram's skin and taildangles forlornly

Aries in decline his horns turned downwardthe horoscope has circled about meleaving this garden of black earth and damp leavesa melancholy graveyard in which the dead

dance their midnight sarabandebefore the Great Beast flayed and martyred

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IMAGE AND MOODRecent Poems by Michael Bullock

Jack F. Stewart

ΤI H R :

IH REE REGENT COLLECTIONS attest to the current creativeefflorescence of Michael Bullock, who has been called "one of the most vivid,mysterious, and technically proficient poets writing in English today."1 His poemshave an enigmatic clarity that does not yield up their secrets to casual reading;they delight and puzzle.

I t may be helpful to divide Bullock's long career as a poet into four phases,beginning with ( ι ) Transmutations ( 1938 ) ; resuming with ( 2 ) Sunday is a Dayof Incest ( 1961 ), Poems of Solitude, translated from the Chinese with JeromeCh'ên ( 1961 ), World Without Beginning Amen! ( 1963 ), and Zwei Stimmenin meinem Mund/Two Voices in my Mouth, a two-language selection withGerman translations by Hedwig Rhode (1967) ; continuing with (3) A SavageDarkness (1969) and Black Wings White Dead (1978); and culminating with(4) Lines in the Dark Wood ( 1981 ), Quadriga for Judy ( 1982), Prisoner of theRain: Poems in Prose (1983), Brambled Heart (1986), Vancouver Moods(1986), and Poems on Green Paper (1987).2 Many of the images and symbolsthat grow and spread throughout his work first appear in Transmutations, inwhich a TLS reviewer found "the secret intensity of life and the strangeness ofbeauty." This prelude is marked by eclectic experimentation, especially withImagism, Surrealism, and Orientalism. At this stage, the nineteen-year-old poethad read one poem by Ezra Pound ("The Garden"), plus one number of theImagist Anthology, in which he discovered affinities with Pound, Aldington, andLawrence. He had responded enthusiastically to the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936(organized by Sir Herbert Read, whom he was later to meet), and this was thestart of a lifelong involvement with Surrealism. Finally, he had made a voyageto India (where he had fallen in love with Maya), and he had read Chinese,Japanese, and Sanskrit poetry in An Anthology of World Poetry.3

The style of Bullock's second phase (published in England and Germany inthe sixties) is a personal amalgam of Expressionism and Surrealism. In thisperiod, however, he also encountered the eighth-century poet Wang Wei's "FortyPoems of the River Wang," which led to his Poems of Solitude, a significantexercise in the art of conveying a mood through natural images. The freshness

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of Bullock's style stems from a deep immersion in nature, an aptitude for medi-tation, and a craftsman's precision in handling words. He once maintained thata single word, "Green" for instance, could be a poem. This would require acreative reader, who could release the potential that lies locked up in a word,and harmonize its radiating associations. Poetry would thus become a form ofsubliminal stimulation, inducing the reader to pass beyond the mirror of thetext in a "free and deliberate exercise of the imaginative Book that is in all ofus."4 The third phase of the poet's development (and the first in Canada) is themost strongly surrealist, although Bullock eschews Breton's automatist dogma infavour of a flexible approach to conscious and unconscious creativity.5 The fourthphase (consisting of six books artistically produced by Third Eye Press) involvesconsiderable stylistic diversity. Here Surrealism may serve as a technique forexpressionist ends, as in Lines and Quadriga, or appear unalloyed as in the bril-liant prose poems of Prisoner?

The present essay is an investigation of image and mood in the latest trio oftexts, whose predominant styles may be characterized as Imagism fused withSymbolism in Brambled Heart, and Imagism with surrealist overtones in Van-couver Moods and Poems on Green Paper. This mature poetic vein shows areturn to, and refinement of, original techniques and themes. As a young man,Michael Bullock was influenced by the Symbolist theory of "Pure Poetry." Poetry,he felt (with Mallarmé), aspires to the condition of music; it is nonreferential —it gives no message, makes no point. It deals in images and is nonexpository. Itcan't be presented in any other way; it is essentially these words in this order.Indeed, theorizing is a paradoxical activity, for pure poetry doesn't stem from aconcept or have a purpose. Bullock was later to quote to his students McLeish'smaxim, "A poem should not mean but be." These ideas, which he has neverrepudiated, show how firmly rooted his poetry is in the aesthetic soil of Imagismand Symbolism.

Yet Bullock's chief orientation is to Surrealism, and his own fiction and paint-ing are "unequivocally surrealist." What then is the role of Surrealism in hispoetry? Surrealist philosophy aims at a conjunction of opposites, including "thereal and the imagined" (M, 123), while surrealist technique involves startlingconcatenations of disparate images to form previously unimagined entities. AsLautréamont observes, "One does not often see a lamp and an angel united inone body."7 J. H. Matthews has pointed out that "the key to the surreal is tobe sought in the image," and Bullock also "believe[s] in the overriding importanceof the visual image as the embodiment of the imagination at work."8 Thus thecult of the image, which Pound describes as "an intellectual and emotional com-plex in an instant of time," provides a legitimate link between Bullock's Imagismand his Surrealism, which often shade into each other. A statement by the authorbest clarifies the issue:

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My poetry is made up of images; therefore it is imagist. The images are surrealin that they follow their own laws and not those of everyday reality; thereforemy poetry is surrealist. The images are drawn from the natural world but shownin the distorting mirror of a personality and used as a means of expressing thispersonality; therefore my poetry is expressionist. Let critics make of this what theywill. For my part I feel that the designation surrealist is the most all-embracingand affords the highest degree of freedom; therefore I embrace it. But if ever Ifelt that surrealism had assumed the significance of a dogma, I should at oncediscard it. (Journal 4/5/86; italics added.)

At the heart of Bullock's eclectic, but original, style stands the visual image.Brambled Heart is divided into six parts, in which short poems cluster around

a nuclear image. Whereas his prose-poems allow for a fluid form of surrealistautomatism, Bullock's linear poems are more consciously composed and tendtowards a crystalline art of the image. But these poems are far more than imagistdecorations. An explicit key to Bullock's underlying motif of abandonment andloss is to be found in "Complaint of the Poet's Foetus" (the title of which is takenfrom a poem by Jules Laforgue) :

Curled in this liquid warmthI clingtight to the paradisal ropeExpulsion loomsthe open gatewill close against my backward gazeAhead a long road stretchescold and greywith sharp stones strewn along the wayThe journey's endI see it in the gloomthe hard walls of a wooden wombCurled in this liquid warmthI clingtight to the paradisal rope

Here the paradisal state is suspension in the inner sea of the mother's womb, andbirth (expulsion from the womb) is the fall. The world is a stony road leading eastof Eden to the tomb. Active fantasy strives to recapture that paradisal state ofoneness. The trauma of severance is sometimes linked with a mysterious voice, awhispered but aborted communication. The desire to conjure with words, to sharea secret language with nature — a motivating force in Bullock's art — seems togo back to the pre-speech phase of infancy, when the poet lost his mother. Thesignificantly titled "Word" (which first appeared in The Double Ego: An Auto-collage [1985]) reveals this pattern :

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The song streams skywarda fluttering ribbon of soundspun from the poet's navelto the placenta of a cloud

The umbilical imagery is explicit, and one notes that it is poetic language("song") that links the poet to cloudy space, a sublimated image of the Mother.Reciprocally, a voice flies toward the poet from this remote abyss, only to die as"it whispers / a word I cannot grasp." This elusive word, assuming the angelicattributes of the voice that delivered it, then plunges back into the cosmic womb.The poet remains bereft, like "a tree with a severed root" : an image that relatesto the broken umbilical bond. The mother's early removal from the poet's lifeobviously left a traumatic wound, which the act of art-speech strives to anneal.Another version of the umbilical image appears in "Bird," where the sense ofbeing cut off from the life-source causes emotional erosion. "Without its feedingstream / my heart has dried / and shrivelled in the heat. . . . "

Water is an archetypal symbol of birth, death, or regeneration and streams,pools, and subaqueous imagery occur with almost obsessional frequency in Bul-lock's work. In "Voice," "the pale light from a drowned sun / runs like water-colour behind the roofs," and "The silence is deep water / in which I drown. . . ."Many of the images in "Voice," if read against those in "Word," relate obliquelyto intra-uterine experience. Drowning, which has the dream significance of re-immersion in the womb, is a key trope; in "Drowned Poem" it is compoundedwith the act of writing, seen as a form of suicide.

The razor edge of the paperslashes my handreleasing a stream of bloodThe ink runsin turbulent wavesWords drowntheir faint criesrise from the black floodThe poemis swept away on the flowSilence returnsthe page is once more white

Such poems, which at first sight seem mere fantasies, are actually microcosms ofthe poet's preoccupations. For one thing, poetic imagination is immersed in atrancelike state — the genesis of such writing lies in images long nurtured in theunconscious — and the will to verbal expression is linked with its double, the willto purgation (or voiding) of consciousness. There are subtle transactions herebetween what lies inside and outside of language.

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α"N E SIGN OF TH E TRUE POET is his aliveness to the infantilesources of his imagery. The key poems discussed above reveal unconscious under pinnings of many others that deal with natural objects in a Symbolist fashion.(The references to Jules Laforgue and the romantic poet Gérard de Nerval aresurely indicative.) Consider, for instance, the Rose that floats, sinks, falls, is"consumed in the flames," then rises as perfume to the sky — "Only its thoughts /still drift about the room." Surely this spiritual icon is correlative of the Mother,who appears in so many guises — consoling, menacing, or seductive. But oncethe psycho-symbolist nexus is established, one does not need to labour the manifestcontent of these poems, for each exists, irreducibly, as a work of art.

"Leaves" is a dendromorphic folio, the key to which is "Tree 1," whereempathy leads to metamorphosis:

Sap runs through my veinsleaves sprout from my fingersby morningbirds will nest in my hairMy roots seek waterdeep down in the soilas each cell swellsfilled with green soul

The exchange of human and arboreal attributes is complete when "sap runsthrough my veins" and the new tree is "filled with green soul." Here is "themotive for metaphor" in extreme form: desire to close the gap between the mindthat observes and the vitality that simply is. If the trend of "Tree 1" is dendro-morphic, that of "Tree 2" is correspondingly anthropomorphic, with the treeyearning to burst into human life. Incidentally, a photograph on the back cover ofBrambled Heart shows the author's face half-lit, with a female mask, sproutingantlerlike branches from its head, peering blankly over his shoulder. This mask-like apparition is a detail of a painting by Joe Rose, based on Bullock's poem"Black Wings White Dead," which contains the lines:

I am here hidingbehind dark treesgrowing from a soilnourished by the white dead.9

The humus of the white dead has produced an Anima-figure, a catalyst of ramify-ing transmutations, who seems to stare back at us from the heart of a blackmirror. Moreover, the title which appears on the cover design in red letteringagainst an expressionist background of black and white shapes, suggests entangle-ment in nature — a motif amplified by the Shakespeare epigraph which links

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everyday sufferings with the Forest of Arden. The theme of metamorphosis isfurther enhanced by greenish art-paper, with muted tree, sun, stone, and seadesigns.

The last three sections are linked by the central "Mirror" image, for "Moons"are shining spheres and "Rivers" reflect. The first four texts in "Mirrors" areprose-poems, which give more scope for surrealist expression. "Moons" alsobegins with a surreal image. "Greenly the dark-haired moon / floats above thewater of the lake." Then a "Skull Moon" "mirrors [the poet's] face in [its]midnight glass." "Moon smeared with red" provides a Heraclitean image ofduality: it is

a broken mirrorreflecting the skyreborn abovestill floating belowtwin moons yearningone for the other

"Moons" are mirrors of creation in all its aspects — eroticism, grief, exhaustion,death, frustration, violence, fruition, decay. The most minimal are "JapaneseMoons," a series of brief illuminations that approximate haiku form, rangingfrom a classical seventeen to a mere eleven syllables.

Mirrors, symbolic of imagination or self-perception, have complex associationsin literature. As J. E. Cirlot points out, "mirror-symbolism [is linked] with wateras a reflector and with the Narcissus myth: the cosmos appears as a huge Nar-cissus regarding his own reflections in the human consciousness."10 This mythicimage consorts well with Bullock's pervasive animism, that marries the mind tonature and the perceiver to the world he perceives. It is the flux of phenomenathat "projects this quasi-negative, kaleidoscopic image of appearance and dis-appearance reflected in the mirror.. . . It is a surface which reproduces imagesand in a way contains and absorbs them." In folklore, it is a source of potentmagic, "serv[ing] to invoke apparitions by conjuring up again the images whichit has received at some time in the past, or by . . . reflect [ing] what was once anobject facing it and now is far removed. This fluctuation between the 'absent'mirror and the 'peopled' mirror lends it a kind of phasing, feminine in application,and hence . . . it is related to moon-symbolism" {ibid.).

Bullock's "Clear Mirror" is psycho-metaphysical. It illuminates "a room whereeverything hovers as though floating beneath water" — the poet's subaqueousworld of memory and reflection. Here the drowning image becomes transparent:"the face in the mirror is drowning in light. The deep water behind it will soonwash it away. It is marked by the transience of tidal things. No rocks of darknesshalt the flow of light in this evanescent, mirrored world, and the mirror-gazerhas nothing fixed to hold." "Black Mirror" reflects its own opposite — a proces-

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sion of childhood memories centred on white robes, snow, and silver tints. Thereare signs of a ritual sacrifice. As the memories fade, leaving only a few "shimmersof white," the black mirror reveals a gaping void. If "Black Mirror" relates tomemories and the unconscious, "Cloudy Mirror" relates to fantasies and thesubconscious. In a mirror-within-the-mirror, "a myriad hazy figures drift.. .caught in an aimless and unending saraband." This rapturous dance, suggestingthe Veil of Maya, is very different from the solemn processional in "BlackMirror."

The aim of Bullock's surrealizing imagination is to move "Beyond the Mirror,"the title of his next prose-poem. But even in this "landscape of the soul," there arehidden mirrors, for "trees lean towards the mirror's light reflected in scatteredpools. . . ." This is the realm (or source) of art, an exotic jungle where thingsmove swiftly and grow freely, where "huge flowers" festoon the trees "with badgesof defiant colour." A coda well exemplifies the enigmatic quality of Bullock'sart: "But the mirror offers only the smooth perfection of its surface and themocking reflection of whoever looks into it in a vain attempt to see beyond itsveil." "Watery Mirror" deals with flux and dissolution, and with the duality ofthe self — a Double Ego that can never quite close the gap between consciousand unconscious being. Here the mirror is a pool shadowed with reeds. Lack ofpunctuation (as in all the poems) affords an interesting ambiguity, or momentof doubleness, in the second line of the last stanza:

The face looks downbehind the barsit gazes up with empty eyesthat close as the mirror-watcher turns away

The face that looks down for a moment converges with the face that looks up.The last poem in this sequence, "Blue Mirror," seems genuinely mystical. Itstheme is the yearning of the creative soul to pass through the mirror and reachthat point of surreality where opposing modes of dream and reality fuse in avisionary state of being. Blue is the spiritual colour, but who will presume tointerpret the image of "the blue star burning / in the arching night"?

"Rivers" involve movement as well as reflection, and traditionally symbolizepassage through life. The poem "River" is divided into twelve short sections,that reflect this notion without imposing any pattern of progression. In the open-ing piece the river is a Mother, "carrying on its bosom / a child with closed eyes /clutching at the moon" — possibly an image of the poet's role as blind seer(cf. Rimbaud). The idea of vital momentum is underscored in this sequence byverbs and participles. But the life of the river "that flows on wedded / to anempty boat" is motion that knows no purpose other than to mingle with theocean — even if, along the way, it "seeks its soul beneath the soil." Surrealanimism flourishes as sun and moon make love to the passing river :

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The river lets down its long green haircatching the eye of the sunthe sun comes down and with brazen fingersstrokes its silky skin

The "rose on the river," a symbolic extension of the Mother image, takes onnegative overtones. It "sends out waves of scent" that form a net which pullsthe observer into the river and drowns him. The lost enchantress has become a"devouring mother." In the next piece, the serpentlike river seems bent on anni hilation of the island self it encircles. However, passing on towards the sea, it"scribblfes] a winding path / white on the green earth." Thus the flow of lifemerges with the flow of writing.

The last poem, "River and Raven," involves an aborted communication be tween the river that writes and the raven that reads, between earthly depth andcosmic height. "The willows bend lower / scribble on the water / mysteriouswords / risen from their roots," terrifying the raven that "soars / back into thefathomless sky / pursued by its vengeful stars." This poem seems to contain anapocalyptic myth of writing — the spirit above provokes the dark place beneathinto ritual acts of language that spring from the unconscious.

Τ1

CLEAR ELUSIVE POEMS in Bullock's VancouverMoods are arranged according to the four seasons and are essentially imagist,giving an "emotional complex in an instant of time." In a sense they are empty;they provide no grist for the mills of thought. Rather they attune the mind tosilence or "unheard melodies." A faint enigmatic aura clings to each piece. Thisis a minimalist art that smoothes out ripples on the surface of the pool. Yet theblank spaces around the texts seem to open into wider mental and spiritualexpanses. Bullock's transparent images enable one to look at nature through apoet's eyes. Reading them suspends the mind in a state of contemplation. Thereis a lingering sense of something just out of reach that adds to the enchantment.Rather than stirring up ideas, these poems co opt the reader's sensibility andencourage it to perform in new ways. This is the function of an oriental as wellas a minimalist aesthetic.

Metaphors in Moods spring from a series of binary oppositions between natureand culture, nature and language, sound and silence, artifice and being. Animismprevails, for the life of the perceiver mingles with that of the visual scene, whileobjects mirror moods. Language is a metaphoric key; the writer reads nature asa palimpsest of signs. Thus the surface of Beaver Lake is "mapped by waterlilies /scribbled by the beaks of gulls"; in Jericho Park, "sparkling water . . . flashesmessages," and a tree points "a gaunt finger... at the unwritten sky." All the

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world's an illustrated book: as scenes and seasons change, one turns the leaves.But it is a gnostic script, a secret code :

On the leaf I see writtenin the thickened veinsa message indecipherableas the sandafter the sea has left it

Often the message is reduced to a single word cut free of context, or to a wordlessword, a hieratic gesture toward language. Where the "pointed nails" of thebamboos "scratch the porcelain sky / white letters write a word / that crackleswith a sound of breaking ice. . . ." Aware of the "ineluctable modality of thevisible," the poet of Spanish Banks might echo Stephen Dedalus's "Signs of allthings I am here to read."

The beach is covered in signs —crab's clawsfootprintsshells upon shellstwigs and leavesa gull half buried in the sand —that tell an indecipherable tale.

All such objects bear the marks of complex individual histories and of the obscureforces that shape organic matter into protean forms.

But the sign language of Vancouver Moods does not lack emotive overtones.A pervasive melancholy, a cool sense of solitude flows through these poems. "Anabsence casts an endless shadow the sun has no power to banish." Delicate scenesare sketched upon a void. The sense of abandonment has psychological andmetaphysical dimensions. These poems, with their repeated, almost hypnotic,natural images, do not offer the kind of meaning that Western readers are con-ditioned to expect. Instead, they point beyond objects to a meditation withoutcontent. Here the sound of water blends with silence, emptiness, space. For alltheir visual precision, these images remain images, that open up luminous spaces.The secret of Bullock's transparent poems is an act of the mind that transmutesscene into sign, and generates a corresponding act in the mind of the reader.

The earth is alive, and if we still our hurrying thoughts we can learn to readits silent language. Some of these poems are so stark in their expression of nothing-ness ("the birds are black notes on a lineless page") as to express an erasureof personality and its persistent inner monologues. As an aesthetic sequence,"Winter" displays an austere black-and-white abstraction that surpasses the artof photography. Meditations like "Winter Pond — UBC Asian Garden" are actsof clearing the mind : there is no attempt to make the image function as a symbol.Bullock shows that, like Wallace Stevens's Snow Man, he can cultivate "a mind

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of winter," and "nothing himself, [behold] / Nothing that is not there and thenothing that is." This does not preclude an amorous play of fantasy around thevisual image. The secret of these poems is that dual sense of fullness and empti-ness that lies at the heart of Zen. There is an oriental precision, like that of aJapanese garden, in Bullock's articulation of space. In the economy of his art,scene is mood, and perception Being. As with Roland Barthes's perceptualJapan, "the place has no other limit than its carpet of living sensations, ofbrilliant signs . . . it is no longer the great continuous wall which defines space,but the very abstraction of the fragments of view . . . the garden is a mineraltapestry of tiny volumes. . . the public place is a series of instantaneous eventswhich accede to the notable in a flash so vivid, so tenuous that the sign does awaywith itself before any particular signified has had the time to 'take.'>J11

Similarly, Bullock's poems are acts of attention that illuminate, even while theyfrustrate the reader's greed to "know." These miniatures point to nothing beyondthe visual/verbal image as a momentary conjunction of mind with nature.Although the same images recur and interweave, they do not "add up" syntag-matically : they are discrete units in a succession of timeless moments. They mayglow or fade, but they can never be arrested in a fixed idea. Indeed, their effectis that "suspension of meaning which to us is the strangest thing of al l . . ."(Barthes, 81). As in Japanese calligraphy, executed with a soft brush, "every-thing, in the instrumentation, is directed toward the paradox of an irreversibleand fragile writing, which is simultaneously, contradictorily, incision and glissade. . ." (Barthes, 86). Briefly, Bullock's art of casual precision marries surface anddepth.

The minimalist surface of Bullock's texts should not blind one to the intricaciesof his imagery. As in "Winter Pond," there is a level of implication that invitesreverie, and ultimately "teases one out of thought." The restraint of Bullock'slanguage allows images of things themselves (such as raindrops on dark water)to spread through the poem and flow over the reader's mind, dissolving its habitualstructures. There is a suggestive magic here that invites the reader to exercisehis own creativity. Poems such as "Rainy Day" seem sinister, because the synapticlink between image and mood is concealed. The metaphoric image of "dagger-pointed / bamboo leaves / . . . serpent's fangs / seeking / a vein to pierce" isvisually clear, but its métonymie symbolism is more enigmatic.

Ponds, in all their seasonal trappings including ice, have a special fascination,for Bullock's key motif is water, dark or dazzling element of constant transmu-tatiton. These poems range from limpid transparency to obsidian opacity:extremes that are not ultimately remote from each other, except in mood. Theirvisual concentration does not lend itself to elaboration, but there are some surrealtouches, as in "December Snow," where "The world is suffocating / beneathwhite roses / fallen from a black hearse / on its way across the sky." Bullock's

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imagery is pervasively animistic, and self-reflexive metaphors of art fall naturallyinto this poetic context: "Very softly / the melting ice / is singing to itself / Thecold sun / paints everything / diamond bright."

Poems on Green Paper is divided into three sections: "In the Woods," "Gar-dens," and "Beyond." A basic trope is inversion of above and below, taking asubaqueous form: "In the deep water of the wood / I fish for poems." Theenchanted forest is that of the U.B.C. Endowment Lands, but more significantlyit is a Baudelairean "forest of symbols" where one looks for "Correspondences."("La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir deconfuses paroles. . . .") Indeed, the opening poem, "Lure of the Forest," speaksof a "wealth of manifold images," then lists eight nouns in a single line, each ofwhich will proliferate into a cluster of images. If Gardens represent art andcivilization, Woods represent the archetypal unconscious. Fantasies of sub-mersion in the forest lead to a series of transformational images in the succinctlytitled "Wood Water." Water is a polyvalent symbol in Bullock's work, that per-meates the structure of his imagination dissolving the solid world into a dream,and it can stand for the flow of imagination itself. It is also associated with thewaters of birth and with the shadowy figure of the Mother: "Leaving behindthe hot sun / I swim / into the cool womb of the wood." Transformation is againthe poetic strategy in "Drowned in a Dream," the undercurrents of which canbe clarified by reference to the "drowning" poems in Brambled Heart. The poet'sfertile fantasy springs from a psychic source to transmute images drawn directlyfrom nature. In this poetry of "Correspondences," outward impressions set offinner echoes.

In "Sunlight and Shadow," there is a rhythmic interplay of opposites, like adance of nymphs and dryads, leading to their joint immersion in running water.Streaming sunshine and sunny streams unite, as nature takes on magic. Thisalchemical process is treated with a classical lightness and grace. Nature speaks insign language, encoded in animistic metaphors:

Bare trunks tower skywardwaving green flagsto semaphore the sunexcited birdsadd their messages in Morse

In some unstatable sense, the key to existence lies in such signs. The "Voice" of thewood, made up of multiple animate and inanimate sounds, "speak [s] an unknownlanguage." The seeker's "footsteps / echo sadly / among the trees / periodsmarking the end / of these despairing sentences. . . ." There is a semantic gap,for the language of nature does not cohere without consciousness, and conscious-ness cannot quite formulate its syntax. Many poems engage with this problem,

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and in "Voice" it is suggested that the signs of nature hold some clue to thelabyrinth of self. The final poem of this sequence, "Today," negates a wholeseries of metaphoric fantasies, affirming that "everything is serenely itself / Thetrees are simply trees," only to conclude that "the root-snakes," earlier seen asobsessive, "still crawl across the path." Not all the symbols of this Pandora's boxcan be exorcised, for some objects persistently give rise to unconscious fears andmemories. Visible impressions strike chords with invisible moods and memories,and out of such identifications poetry is made. The forest darkness contains an"array of mysteries," and in reading them the poet explores hidden strata of theself.

The darkness of "Woods" contrasts with the brightness of "Gardens," wherethe quest is for aesthetic essence, a music distilled from flowers. A surreal animismenlivens these scenes ("The grass combs its tangled hair") and subaqueousimagery recurs ("In pools of shadow / fallen leaf-fish swim"). "The upwardand the downward way are one and the same," according to Heraclitus, and hereabove and below are formally interwoven in arabesque units —

Blue hydrangeasspeckles of skycaught on green prongsamid green leaf-birdsMy gardenis sky-invaded

— where the "green leaf-birds" suggest René Magritte's or Max Ernst's hybridforms.12 Surrealist imagination assimilates the world by seeking points of junctionbetween contraries. Thus cyclamens become "Greyhounds / with their purpleears laid back," a trouvaille in Pierre Reverdy's sense whereby the sheer distancebetween objects increases the power of the image (see Ai, 20).

Ponds are microcosms in which universal patterns can be read. The idly stirring"green scum" becomes "a vegetal galaxy / spinning / in the cosmos of a pond."Similarly, the genesis of the earth can be read in "Crater Garden," where "flowersbloom / multicoloured sparks / spurting from the magma / far beneath." Insideand outside enfold one another in harmony :

the spraying of a fountaincloses the watchful eyeand with its soundmakes the mindanother silent pool

This microcosmic image reminds one of Andrew Marvell's metaphor of "Themind, that Ocean where each kind / Does streight its own resemblance find"("The Garden"). In "Meditation Garden," the affinity of Poems on Green Paperwith Marvell's cult of greenery grows to the verge of allusion —

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Pines and palmshold the sun at bayleaving a shadein which the mind can fadedissolve in a penumbra

my mind is filledwith dark green thoughts

— as if "Annihilating all that's made / To a green Thought in a green Shade."Marvell's neoplatonic meditation is closely allied with Bullock's Buddhist or Zenmeditations, as in "Japanese Garden," where the multiple forms of nature seemto merge with the empty sound of "falling water."

The affinity with Marvell is one of sensibility rather than form: Bullock'spoetry is formally closer to the translations he made from the Chinese of WangWei, in Poems of Solitude. A mood of solitude is also the keynote of these poems.Walking in the gardens clears a space in the mind, so that past and present meetin a moment, and "a sunlit emptiness / walks beside me." Memories merelyenhance the sense of solitude that is strong in all these communings with nature.Absent voices (ghosts) speak more clearly in the silence "than the voices / of allthe invading strangers."

As its title implies, the third section, "Beyond," has symbolist overtones. The"Dark Rose," whose "reflection on the still dark water / remains unmoved /impassive and untouched / fixed and eternal / in a different world," can againbe seen as a symbol of the departed Mother, while a "Black Bird," "[flying]between me and the sun," has the effect of "cutting the cord of warmth" thattied the poet to his life-source. The motifs of "Grey Morning" suggest entrapmentor paralysis: a struggle between the desire to relapse and the desire to fight onis projected into the scene. In an atmosphere of saturated stillness, only thecreative impulse motivates existence:

This world grows shadowyeverything moves farther awayor turns its backonly my writing hand seems realat the centreof this phantasmal universe

Writing authenticates inner life and bestows significance on the shadowy worldof phenomena. As Wittgenstein says, "There is no reality in the world"; realityis only to be found in acts of consciousness that construct a subjective or aestheticorder.

Poems on Green Paper represents one such virtual order, in which the life ofthe mind overlaps with, and transfuses, vegetal existence. The hieroglyphicscript of nature, that parallels the meanderings of verbal art, is ultimately a system

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of "empty signs" in (Barthes's sense) signifying nothing beyond its own vitalprocess :

On the blue-black waterof the midnight rivera single golden threadis lazily floatingCurled and coiled by the swirls of waterit writes its moving message as it passesthe banks of dream gardensplanted with flickering flowersThere is no eye to read the messagethat is washed away by the flowing waterBlinded by their own light the flowerssee nothing and vanish when the dark riveris lost in a pale-blue lakeThe golden thread has made its voyage in vain

Here basic homologies link nature and language, life and art. The poet is a seerwho studies signs in a gnostic script:

A solitary birdhaunts the lonely skyblack inkmarking blue parchmentWhen the bird has gonethe palimpsest skybears an invisible textthat taunts the hungry eye

To a mystic like Jakob Boehme nature is a repository of layer upon layer ofoccult significance, inscribed in a language that reason cannot fathom. It is herethat poetic imagination comes into play, and it seems indicative that Bullock'sfinal emphasis should fall on an appetency not of the mind but of the eye, avisionary hunger.

NOTES1 Brambled Heart: Poems (London, Canada: Third Eye, 1986) ; Vancouver Moods:

Poems (London, Canada: Third Eye, 1986) ; Poems on Green Paper (London,Canada, Third Eye, 1987). The quotation is from Andrew Parkin, Issue 2(March/April 1985) : 60.

2 These phases have been abstracted from a prolific career in other genres (eightfictional works and numerous translations), not to mention parallel activities as apainter and graphic artist.

3 See Randolph Cranstone and the Veil of Maya: A Parabolic Fiction (London,Canada: Third Eye, 1987), where Maya, the "goddess of illusion," is based on a

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real girl. An Anthology of World Poetry, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York:Harcourt, 1936), was the greatest influence on Bullock's early style. Other impor-tant influences were Symbolism (Baudelaire, Valéry, Verlaine) and Expressionism(Peter Baum, Else Lasker-Schüler, Richard Schaukai, Kurt Heynicke, and GeorgHeym).

4 Jean-Jacques Auquier and Alain-Valéry Aelberts, quoted in J. H. Matthews,Toward the Poetics of Surrealism (Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse Univ. Press, 1976),190.

5 See André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R.Lane (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1982). (Subsequent references in mytext are based on this edition, abbreviated as M.) In the first Manifesto (1924),Breton defined Surrealism as "Psychic automatism in its pure state . . . dictated . . .in the absence of any control exercised by reason . . . " ; in the Second Manifesto(1930) he spoke of liberating the imagination through an "alchemy of the word"(M 26, 173). In his Journal (18/5/86), Bullock amends Breton's views with aclearcut distinction: "Not 'automatic writing' but free association is the essentialcharacteristic of Surrealism. Automatic writing implies a true state of trance; freeassociation, on the other hand, is practised in a state of full consciousness butwith the minimum of conscious control, which is voluntarily relinquished." Seealso Bullock, "Some Thoughts on Writing," Canadian Fiction Magazine 50/51(1985): 137-40.

β See my essay, "T h e Surrealist Art of Michael Bullock," Canadian Fiction Maga zine, in press.

7 Maldoror, trans. G uy Wernham (N .p. : N .p., 1934), 94.8 Matthews, Poetics 161; Bullock, featured in Canadian Author and Bookman 61

(1985) : 22. See also M ary Ann Caws, Surrealism and the Literary Imagination(The H ague: M outon, 1966), 21.

9 Black Wings White Dead: Poems (Fredericton, N .B.: F iddlehead, 1978), 49.1 0 A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (N ew York: Philosophical Library,

1962), 201.1 1 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard H oward (N ew York: H ill, 1984),

108. Subsequent references in my text are based on this edition.1 2 See Magritte's The Natural Graces (1962) and Treasure Island (1942), in H arry

Torczyner, Magritte: The True Art of Painting, trans. Richard Miller (N ew York:Abrams, 1979), 32: Figs. 36, 37; Ernst's The Joy of Living (1936), in U we M.Schneede, Surrealism, trans. Maria Pelikan (N ew York: Abrams, 1973), 71:PL 8.

1 2 1

7IPH7ISI7IDale

It is the suddenness of crossingoverthat cannot be comprehendedOne moment she is among usreaching for her purseand then she fallsIt is the tongue protrudingand silencedas the brain chokes,a clammy right handhanging downits weight of flesh (and fate)

The nurses clean and cuddletalk in numbers —b.p. one-ten-over-sixty —and these we babble to friendsand those givers of ill advice,hours when the smells arenot our own, even childrenquietening downin the sudden blow of dumbnesswhere she lives

After a journey of many simplicitieswe spy her stillalone, at a great distance, immobilebehind that other number

none can guess We practisecontactbut she cannot

speak read or writeat first we smash upinside all nightafter the hours of visitation have safelypassed and the dark leads usaway Alone on the wardshe hunts for bedcar teeth comb

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FOR MISS COOK6Lachlan Murray

From 3000 miles awaythe blunt typographyof a murder, actuallytwo

A Phys.Ed. teacherliked by her studentsat the private schoolfor girls, with(lucky our media)a somewhat younger loverof a different race,receives an appalling rewardfor living,one fears, salaciously —a final caresswhich necessitates reloading

When questioned, our detective:(does one imagine the hint of a sneer?)LOVE TRIANGLE REVENGE MOTIVEIn the past her fluidmuscles had been putto many uses

A distaste for the gravelly-voicedusers of this library.Already two weeks oldthe paper from another cityis left,one of a hundredyellowing shroudsin its rack

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7IFT6RNOON 7IND €V€NINGDale £ieroth

Afternoon dreams do not fit the usual analysis :you lie down with your feet upwhen sleep comes to the ottoman Or not quite sleepThe sunlight seeps in and dilutes the greater coloursThe woman who has been married three timesdreams she has no name; the man who lives for Sundaydreams he is three men The child might dream one colourthat isn't in the rainbow — and which we yearn for —but when he wakes, his head is for play and arrangementI wake up worried I have slippeda deadline, the orange-flowered cover pawing me awakeI leap to the window, looking for time, and see crowsalready gathered in the far woodsraking their hearts together in a pile for the sunsetclaw-claw-clawing

She's taking seventeen pills a day At least one of themis making her voice waver as if she's deaf sowhen I listen on the phone and she talks to mefrom half a continent away, it's underwater talkMy youngest on the line As for me I'm focusing on the hallwaythe door at the end, the smell of the pay-phone in my handall the troubles poured into its mouth Laterpropped on the bed, I might shout what rushes usMore likely I'll drift, get under the coversand doze, perhaps the dream will cometo open the lines in one great jag of lightback to what's been — to where — the doors blown opencats from childhood hunched up and hissing, windwhere the fires used to be

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HUNT€D CITIZENSR. Hillis

In the fall you discovered death,a headless bird on the sidewalk outsideour home. You turned it over & overthen with the toe of your sandal

until a passing jogger said a falconhunted our town. It is winter now.Chill winds have already claimedthe lives of two. You and I

keep to ourselves and read. A straycat outside the window has beenscratching & you throw bits ofhard food into the snow. Try to

forget the frosted lace on its ears.We have cats of our own, you say.Rabies, ringworm, distemper, dollars,death, you say, we have our own.

I have something to tell you. Thismorning on our walk of ice I foundanother bird fallen through the cracksof branches. I held it in my gloves,

expecting the falcon's reminder, butinstead saw the frozen beads of itseyes. There was no wound, no blood,but what could I do? I killed the bird

for you. With a stone brought downover the head. Buried it in snowby the black bridge. That was thismorning, & tonight we listen forthe scratch that will not come.

IN D€C€MB€RDerk Wynand

Everything drops or threatens to drop:

the final leaf burned to a fine brownon the last tree, the tree as well,

the cat in its tracks, the dog in its,

the low sun, too, hanging ona thread of cloud, the thread itselfdropping or seeming to drop,

the woman carrying wood, on her last legs,the man stacking the wood also —

everything, everything droppingor about to drop.

In context, this need not callfor such alarm:

the thought of petals on the airalready promises much;

the cats and the dogs, at least,have stopped raining down on one another;

and the woman and the man, if trueto their nature, will bear up, eachfor the sake of the other.

It's the end of autumn already,is it not? The piles of woodcan be stacked no higher.

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THE END OF POETRYDavid Solway

Our native Muse, heaven knows and heaven be praised, is not exclusive. Whetherout of the innocence of a childlike heart to whom all things are pure, or with theserenity of a status so majestic that the mere keeping up of tones and appearances,the suburban wonder as to what the strait-laced Unities might possibly think, orsad sour Probability possibly say, are questions for which she doesn ' t . . . in herlofty maturity any longer . . . care a rap, she invites, dear generous-hearted creaturethat she is, just tout le monde to drop in at any time . . .

— w. H. AUDEN, The Sea and The Mirror

D.1.

ESPITE THE STATE OF FRATRICIDAL STRIFE that existsamong poets and the schools they are associated with, there is a common andimplicit assumption about the poetic calling in the modern world that unitesthem. It has now attained to the status of an unchallenged dogma, which can besyllogized as follows. First, if a poem is to be a vital and meaningful commenton or analysis of experience, it must to some extent reflect that experience.Secondly, experience in and of the contemporary world is a reductive phe-nomenon, fragmented, anarchic, pulverized. Consequently, any poem that pre-tends to authenticity or authority must reflect the discontinuities of the life we arecompelled to live by virtue of the fact that we are living now.

This series of postulates has much to recommend it and is obviously persuasive.For one thing, who can doubt the critical placebo that poetry must, in one wayor another, reflect the structure, quality, or contours of the age in which it movesand has its being if it is to retain its vitality? Otherwise, must it not be hospital-ized, kept alive by elaborate life-support systems, surviving intravenously in astate of archival nostalgia? Poetry must be in its time in order to be of its time,and it must be of its time if it has any intention of lasting since only through avigorous participation in the temporal can it presume to achieve eternity.

For another thing, the analysis of contemporary experience as disintegrativeis now little more than a blatant truism. Hardly anyone questions any longer thepsychological commonplace that a sense of alienation, loss, and despair is theessential factor in the modern experience of the world. The only absolute we

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acknowledge is the speed of light; as for the rest, the Heraclitean flux has escapedthe confines of a pre-Socratic apothegm and threatens to swamp us all in everyaspect of our lives. If God died in the nineteenth century, as Nietzsche tells us,Religion promptly followed in the twentieth, taking with it our only viableguarantee of a now mainly worthless moral currency. The spectre of instantannihilation robs us of our seriousness in our dealings with one another and withposterity. Political life has broken down as has the humanist faith in Reason, andeven the ultimate cohesions of speech have been syntactically undermined. It isnot just that monologue has replaced dialogue but that the monologue has be-come largely unintelligible. The precarious balance of whatever ecology we wishto consider has been upset beyond, as many suspect, the possibility of restoration.

If this is the condition of life which the poet confronts, then (assuming thatthe creative élan has not abandoned him, that he has not been reduced to silence,which may be the only honest response to such irremediable devastation) itfollows that the poem he sets about composing, repressing the conviction of itsfutility beneath the surface of his narcissism, must reflect the chaos, the rootless-ness, the violence, the disruptions, the spiritual centrifugalities of the world he iscondemned to die in. And this evidently means that the poem he is condemned tolive in must rid itself of all historical ballast and of all those traditional beatitudesof form, order, and intelligibility invoked by the more fortunate poets who stilllived in the age of innocence between Pericles and Hitler.

Such, put simply, is the modern poetic creed. Obviously, the issues it raises aremore complex than its mere formulation might indicate. For example, does not apoetry which resists its time, opposing lucidity to obscurity, order to chaos, senseto senselessness, by that very token indirectly or elliptically participate in its time,if only through the medium of a problematic recognition? Is not its actual practiceimplicitly diagnostic? May not rhyme, let us say, constitute a plea for harmonyand not an atavistic ineptitude? May not the very existence of, if not metre, adiscernible cadence suggest the need for internal continuity and psychic momen-tum rather than the ineffectual hope of dim arcadian symmetries? In short, maythere not be historical periods in which poetry if it wishes to survive is compelledto live in partibus infidelium, carrying on a sort of guerrilla warfare against thepervasive assumptions and dominant 'realities' of the day? The relation of litera-ture to its time is not necessarily one of strict equivalence and the commitmentof the former to the latter is often paradoxical or rebellious.1

We are touching on the insoluble dilemma of the relation between art and lifewhich I do not want to resurrect here. Suffice it to say that neither pole of theequation can substitute for the equation itself. The self-contained world of artis at best a dubious refuge from the confusions and banalities of raw experience,bringing with it the dangers of inanition and preciosity. On the other hand, thesheer, voluminous flux of experience into which the artist is regularly advised to

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plunge in order to revitalize his flagging energies will more likely than not leavehis literary corpse washed up on the beaches of respectability, academia or, ifhe is thorough, in the churning surf of an African exile. But the artist mustnevertheless judge which pole of the equation he should diffidently approach inthe service of his unforgiving muse if his work is to avoid becoming parodistic orinconsequential.

To return to the development of our theme. Despite the almost infinite per-mutations which the subject permits, the theory of poetry reduces as does that ofart in general to the theory of imitation taken in its widest conceivable sense. Andimitation is conceived in basically two ways. The artist is required either toimitate "nature," which can mean anything from landscape to manners to interioror psychological configurations. Or he is exhorted to the imitation of the tra-ditional forms of literary endeavour in appropriate language, in which case he"copies" not "nature" but one or another of the formally established ways inwhich it has been agreed that nature may be copied. In the first instance, hisimagination must be governed by his apperception of reality or, in the complexrefinements of later speculation, by its own intrinsic laws as it conspires with theexternal materia to produce reality itself. In the second case, imagination mustbe subordinated to a social and critical consensus regarding the appropriate formsof literary representation, whose pedigree dates from the Republic and the Poetics.

The operative terms are, of course, to be understood with a certain generouslatitude. Literature is not slavishly mimetic, it is also inventive and analytic, andno genuine writer is concerned with photographic verisimilitude. He does not copyso much as interpret. Similarly, the antithetical terms "nature" and "tradition,"notwithstanding the venerable polarity into which they have been historicallylocked, are susceptible of endless modification. But the two "moments" of theantithesis can never be entirely eluded and the thrust of the writer's creativetemperament moves in one or another of these ancestral and inevitable directions.In this sense it may be valid to claim that beneath the profusion of individualmodulations we can distinguish these two fundamental impulses toward the imita-tion of "nature" on the one side or the imitation of established "form" on theother. That is, we may speak either of the "laws" which the creative temperamentmust obey or of the "norms" to which it must conform.

The two impulses are not at bottom diametrically opposed, as the social doc-trine implicitly assumes that reality is not infinite and there accordingly exists adefinable number of expressive forms which correspond to its limited permuta-tions. Of course, the classical world is extinct and the neo-classical sensibility washijacked by Industrial Capitalism, but the simple fact that we continue to acceptthe rhetorical distinction between poetry and prose, that poets (somewhat heed-less of their innovative practices) tend to leave the customary margins on eitherside of the page, and are also given to declaiming or chanting their verses rather

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than merely reading them, is evidence of an abiding belief in the formal differencebetween the two media and therefore in the general validity of the classical idea."Form" is grounded in "nature" and is solidly associated with a repertoire oflegitimate strategies for the expression of different kinds of experience.

2.The blunt fact remains that the theory of poetic convention has fallen on evil

days and is widely regarded as superannuated. The classical idea of poetry asrequiring elevated diction — as commanding a unique language distinct fromboth prose and ordinary speech, equipped with a peculiar set of rules, conventions,and formal exclusions — is now considered as an exercise in brahmanic arroganceor anachronistic fatuity. It simply does not meet the brazen imperatives of con-temporary experience and is as unseasonable or ludicrous as mixing a Molotovcocktail in a Ming vase. When Ortega defines poetic language as a "hovering"medium, raised above the abrasions and rugosities of current speech, he is lookingback to the traditional conceptions of epic, drama, and the prophetic literature.But even the conversion of the hoary emblems of the winged steed or magiccarpet into that of the lexical helicopter does not redeem his formulation fromthe charge of antiquarianism. Poetic conventions are passé: rhyme is obsolete(did not Milton consider it a barbarism?) ; metre is infantile, and even the stress-count is a throwback to Anglo-Saxon artlessness; the stanza form continues to beused but more as a logical convenience, an adaptation of the prose paragraph,than as a part of the traditional architectonic; and the language itself must avoidarchaic "heightening" or "point" as it scrupulously democratizes its mandarininclinations in the direction of the idiomatic, the colloquial, and the ubiquitous.Poetry can now be dialed on the telephone and read on the buses sandwichedbetween advertisements, as if Wordsworth's Preface were actually to be takenseriously.

The prevailing dogma is clear and unmistakable. The doctrine of the imitationof traditional form is defunct, relegated to the limbo of a classical irrelevance.A poetry which honours the canons and attitudes of its masonic past, whichreveres the illustrious predecessor, which recognizes degree and precedence, andwhich deploys a complex, formally appropriate, and distinctively memorablelanguage is dismissed as either hieratic snobbishness or creative senility. Theproper use to which this kind of poetry can be put was determined by Congreve'sMrs. Millamant, who curls her hair with love letters, but "only with those inverse . . . I never pin up my hair with prose." And the poets who continue topractice these ancestral sanctities are patronized as elegant but pitiable old fogiesmourning the end of their feudal prerogatives. The world has passed them by.The careening motorcar has flung the yellow caravan into the ditch and the poet

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who wishes to survive must shake the dust out of his knickers and dream ofmagnificent onsets into a levelling future. Thus the principle of mimetic formis no longer adequate to the explosiveness and terror of the modern world andmust be abandoned if we are to come to terms with the nature of our experience,the superluminal chaos of our event-horizon. Otherwise, along with religiousfaith, good craftsmanship, diplomatic immunity, and other such vestigial remnantsof a vanished order, poetry cannot hope to escape obsolescence. This, more or less,is the creed to which the majority of poets now subscribes.

But if the imitation of form, the hallowing of poetic convention, has been tossedonto the scrapheap of outmoded pieties, we are left with the imitation of natureas the only theoretical foundation on which to ground the poetry of the modernera. The forms we must devise or discover in order to mirror, contain, or inflectthe volatilities of our experience must inevitably correspond to that experience.In consequence, form moves toward the paradoxical assimilation of formlessnessand the poet begins to conceive of his work as a sequence of ambiguous strategiesto reflect the sense of confusion, homelessness, and disruption (or of mere indif-ference) with which the world persecutes him. Honesty, he asserts, compels him towrite directly — eloquence is suspect, stable form the result of quaint artisanalcompulsions, and time too valuable and fugitive an inheritance to waste onlaborious composition. A poem can no longer claim the luxury of evocativeness,and the sense of its commitment to pressing, immediate needs invalidates itsallegiance to its own constituent materials, an activity it can only regard as anuntenable hedonism or technical encapsulation. The predictable effect of all thisis that poetry comes increasingly to resemble prose.

The poetic modes which flourish in this climate of misinformation are clearlythe descriptive narrative, the documentary, and the personal reminiscence (oftendeflected pronominally into the third person to evade the accusation of lyricalinfatuation). These modes of poetic discourse are seen as unobjectionable fromthe standpoint of the contemporary milieu and even as adventurously experi-mental. And they are accompanied by the feverish search for structural models:the memoir or diary is high on the list of acceptable templates, but a quicksilverbacking can be scraped together from almost any paradigmatic quarter, providedit is non-poetic in origin, such as the TV script, the recipe, the memo, or eventhe telephone book. (The fact that Villon, among others, used the testament inprecisely this way partially explains his resurgent popularity.) The point I ammaking is that today the tendency is almost universal and by no means a maverickor eccentric gesture. The technical vacuum left by the extinction of conventionalform has been surreptitiously filled by the substitution of prosaic or documentaryprototypes, since the poet must get his structural patterns from somewhere. Theelement of disingenuousness arises from the conflict between the proclaimed con-viction that form must be internal and organic and the obsessive practice of

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ransacking (to use Johnson's word) the world of common, unmediated experiencefor exemplars and paradigms. There is no escaping the ironical conclusion thatthe contemporary notion of form is at least as external and artificial as theliterary conventions for the application of which the traditional poet is routinelydenounced.

But there is a further and more corrosive irony at work in the matter underdiscussion. The imitation of form is widely construed as archaic, reactionary, andinappropriate; heightened language is regarded as artificial (once a term ofapproval, now dyslogistic) ; order and restraint are dismissed as hangovers froma pastoral and genteel state of mind, now understood as historically incongruousor irrelevant. But the imitation of nature or of the given state of affairs whichunderlies contemporary practice is in effect the province of the novel, as has beenthe case since Robinson Crusoe domesticated his island and Moll Flanders pickedthe pockets of the contemporary scene. And when it comes to holding the mirrorup to nature on Stendhal's dusty highway or in Hamlet's theatre, poetry is outof its league and cannot compete with its formidable opponent. The novel isjust too compendious, too all-embracing, too versatile and flexible and omnivorousa genre to defer in its analysis of experience to the right of poetic primogeniture.Moreover, to add injury to insult, it is capable in its lyrical mood of actuallyswallowing and digesting its traditional rival, so that the only place where wemay still encounter poetry in its old-fashioned guise of evocative speech is in thebody of the novel itself — an irritable Jonah, a lying Pinocchio, whistling in thedepths of the Leviathan. And as if to administer the coup de grace, moderncriticism has deposed that the novel is not a continuation of the classical tradition,the descendant of the epic, but is the unique literary expression of modernsociety deriving ultimately from the Puritan reformation of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries and the industrial upheavals of the eighteenth.

This irony is not only inescapable but possibly terminal as well. Poetry, inapproximating to the novelistic parallax, ceases to be "poetic" and grows moreand more prosaic in structure, content, and language. The idea of "decorum" didnot wither away, however, with classical and Renaissance literary values. Decorummay be defined as style accommodated to subject, means to ends, idiom to inten-tion. Thus the idea of poetic decorum in today's literary environment exacts anextortionate price from the practicing poet because he must now bring his poeminto line with the novelistic perspective on the world and adopt the techniquesand strategies of an alien genre if he is to retain or regain credibility. So thetruth stares us glumly in the face. The poet goes on multiplying narrative upondescription upon documentary in odd linguistic constructs called poems thatscarcely anyone bothers to read except other poets and an entrenched minorityof academic critics — without whom, be it said, the medium would quickly suc-cumb to literary entropy. Meanwhile it manages to maintain itself prosthetically.

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If the imitation of nature is the privilege or the proper sphere of the noveland the imitation of form has been consigned to oblivion, it seems reasonable toassume that poetry is confronted with only two options, namely, it must be eitherprosaic or irrelevant. There is no tertium quid. It reflects and participates in themodern experience of universal chaos and predictably disintegrates, becoming dis-continuous, haphazard and aleatory, or variously smuggles an extraneous conceptof order into its performative ambience and so reduces itself to a parasitical andundistinguished existence, encroaching on the terrain of the novel only to be wipedout or incorporated. This is where the imitation of nature inexorably leads it.The other alternative is equally depressing: it opposes the experience of violenceand anarchy and stays equally clear of the giantocracy of the novel, setting up asmall, countervailing linguistic system predicated on order and continuity. Thusit becomes instantly obsolete and intensely private, the formal expression of nos-talgia for a lost coherence.

The modern poet navigates in the straits between the Scylla of the irrelevantand the Charybdis of the prosaic, and there is every sign in the apocalypticmoment we inhabit that his epic journey is about to be cut short, if it has notalready ended. And if, as many believe, the novel is itself endangered by thegraphic and electronic revolutions inspired by a triumphant technological bar-barism, prose will soon confront its own set of complementary options : to becomeirrelevant as its predecessor, or somehow cinematic and instantaneous as itssuccessor. In which case it is possible that poetry will be deprived of even itsposthumous survival in the body of the novel, one more minor, unrememberedcasualty in the collapse of the past.

NOTE

1 This is a point stressed, perhaps overstated, by Wilde in The Decay of Lying, whichclaims that art in no case reproduces its age. "So far from being the creation ofits time, it is usually in direct opposition to it. . . ."

Concluding NoteIn a certain sense poetry (or the improbable act of writing and reading it) hasmore in common with Science Fiction than with any other branch of prose literature,given the 'Coleridgean' proviso that Science Fiction (of the cruder sort at any rate)is popular since it relies on the familiar operations of fancy and poetry is paradoxi-cally remote since it is based on the rigorous principles of the imagination. Thetraditional poem and the SF story construct codified worlds which in terms of con-sistency and intelligibility provide a fleeting alternative to the feeling of dispersionand the experience of triteness we associate with contemporary life. At the same time,it is obvious that Science Fiction cannot be diffracted through the medium of verse(although this has been inadvisedly attempted) without the reciprocal annihilationof the two genres. The poem in its quest for poise and equilibrium is immediatelycrippled by an orthopedic self-consciousness while the Science Fiction story in itsneed for spectacle and narrative expansiveness chafes in frustration at the formal

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and rhetorical limitations imposed upon it. But it might be worth suggesting thatpoetry was the Science Fiction of the ancient world, not in the sense of detailingimplausible adventures in the epic (or even Lucianic) mode but rather in describingan implicit trajectory that overarched and to some extent negated the world of dailyexperience. Poetry once provided, as Science Fiction does today, the significantalternative to the commonplace.

We might also note that poetry has been crowded out of the aesthetic field notonly by its brawny, mimetic competitor, the novel, but by its once-pliant, formerhandmaiden, music. Eric Havelock tells us in his Origins of Western Literacy thatas the written word gained its identity and became "increasingly prosaic," it wasfreed from its previous bondage to mnemonic verse rhythm. But this emancipationhad the concomitant effect of releasing rhythm from its subservience to poetry,allowing it to be conceptualized in pure sound independent of diction and "increas-ingly thought of not as an accompaniment to words but as a separate technologywith its own laws and procedures." Thus both the mimetic and phonetic functionsof verse have been taken from it by the disciplines of fiction and music, which arebetter adapted to the respective modalities of verbal imitation and rhythmic soundthan is their ostensible predecessor.

W.R. Martin

UNROParadox

andParallel

Dr. W.R. Martin discusses AliceMunro's writing and the prominentfeatures of her art: the typical pro-tagonist, the development of hernarrative technique, and the di-alectic that involves paradoxes andparallels.

0-88864-115-X; $25.00 cloth0-88864-116-8; $14.95 paper

The University of Alberta Press141 Athabasca Hall, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E8

in review

DISCOURSEOF THE OTHERROBERT KROETSCH, Advice to My Friends.

Stoddart, $6.95.

Advice to My Friends consists of eightsequences of poems: five of them havepreviously appeared in prin t; the remain ing three, "Advice to My F riends," andthe two remarkable sequences, "Sound ing My N am e" and "Th e Poet's M other"are published here for the first time.Together they constitute the second vol ume in Kroetsch's continuing poem,Field Notes, and establish that work asone of the most important poems pub lished in Canada in many years.

"We go into the unknown, even theunknown," the speaker in "T h e Frank furt Hauptbahnhof" declares, "with ex pectations." Readers of Field Notes willfind many of their expectations met inthis second volume. Certainly the speakerof the poems is familiar; he is that lonely,self conscious, slightly bemused, oftensad, frequently amusing figure encoun tered in the earlier poems. F rom "Del phi : Commentary" :

Meggie was taking pictures. Laura andI stood behind the omphalos and Meggietook a picture. Meggie and I stood behindthe omphalos and Laura took a picture.How does onepose for a pic ture taken at thebelly button ofthe earth? Whatsmile is not asmile of embar rassment? of self satisfaction? ofhybris? Whatangle of the arm

Frazer: Even in hisbest days he [Apollo]did not always rise toverse, and in Plu tarch's time the godappears to have givenup the attempt indespair and to havegenerally confinedhimself to plain, if notlucid, prose.

does not betraya certain inap propriate pos sessiveness?

H ere, as in so many of the earlier poems,the situation is commonplace; the poetas tourist, smiles self consciously for thecamera, caught in the discourse of theobligatory photos. (H ere's Laura and Istanding beside the omphalos; here'sMeggie and Laura by the omphalos;here's Meggie and I . . . .) The language,too, is commonplace, sometimes takingon the colour and energy of colloquialspeech, sometimes taking flight, but moreoften than not, quietly insisting, like thespeaker himself, on its own prosaic quali ties.

"I AM A SI M P LE P O E T , " thespeaker of "M ile Z ero" writes "in thedust / on the police car hood." But weknow better. We come to the poetry ex pecting to find, behind the speaker'sseeming naïveté, the figure of Coyote, thetrickster; and we are mindful that thepoet's declaration of simplicity occurs ina poem complex enough that it cannotadequately be reproduced here.

I looked at the duston the police car hood.I looked around the horizon.(Insert here passage onnature —

try: The sun was blightenough for the wild rose.A musky flavor on the milkforetold the cracked earth . . .

try: One crow foresaw my fright,leaned out of the scaldingair, and ate a grasshopper'swarning. . .

try: A whirlwind of gullsburned the black fields white,burned white the dark

ploughmanand the coming night. . . )

I AM A SIMPLE POETI wrote in the duston the police car hood.

What cannot be reproduced here is theinsertion, in the new "Mile Zero," of

BOOKS IN REVIEW

another poem, "Chateau (A Landing)Frontenac," following the line "and thecoming night. . . ."

The seeming simplicity of the poetry isbelied at the level of discourse: one col-umn speaks to another, one poem to an-other, one text to the next. In "MileZero" the original version of the poembecomes the intertext of the new work;in "Delphi: Commentary" the contem-porary poet's account of his tour of Del-phi is juxtaposed with passages fromPausanias' Descriptions of Greece, a sec-ond-century A.D. guidebook :

From this point the highroad to Delphi growssteeper and more difficultto a man on foot. Many anddiverse are the tales toldabout Delphi, and stillmore about the oracle ofApollo. (Pausanias. Hisscattered Greece underRoman rule.)It is always that way, the poem, the aban-doned poem, in which the hero, seeking theanswer to the impossible question, seekingthe impossible question, takes to the road.Hero. Eros. The evasion that is the meet-ing. The impossible road.

And we follow (so the story goes). Wefind ourselves entranced in the play oftexts, find ourselves in the relations of thetexts.

In The Postmodern Condition Jean-François Lyotard defines postmodernsimply as an "incredulity toward meta-narratives." In the postmodern worldthere are no master narratives; we have,finally, not one narrative but many.Kroetsch characteristically finds his ownformulation closer to home, in a passagefrom Ken Dryden's The Game whichserves as an epigraph for the new "MileZero" :

. . . hockey is a transition game : offence todefence, defence to offence, one team toanother. Hundreds of tiny fragments ofaction, some leading somewhere, most go-ing nowhere. Only one thing is clear.Grand designs don't work.

This passage could easily serve as an epi-graph not just to "Mile Zero" but to theseventeen sequences that, to date, makeup Kroetsch's continuing poem, for inField Notes poetry is a transition game,writer to reader, reader to writer, "hun-dreds of tiny fragments of action, someleading somewhere, most going no-where." The evasion that is the meeting." ( Insert here a passage on / nature —/ try:" from "The Frankfurt Hauptbahn-Iwf" written in response to bp Nichol'squestion about notation in Field Notes:

Notation in Field Notes, Barry, is the readerin the text. The narrator, always, fears his/her own tyranny. The notation, in the poemoccasions the dialogic response that is thereader's articulation of his/her own pres-ence (the ecstatic now of recognition? thelonger, if not always enduring, experienceof transformational vision?)

"Silence,please."Bugles.

the gone strangerthe mysterious textthe necessarytransfer.

The necessary transfer. Kroetsch's poetryinsists on that transfer, insists on theevasion that is the meeting.

As these brief excerpts suggest, Adviceto My Friends is, among other things, ameditation on the transition game thatis poetry; it is, above all, an explorationof "the other" conceived and addressedin discourse. The need for and creationof the other in discourse is made readilyapparent in the opening game of the"Advice to My Friends" sequence, titled"for a poet who has stopped writing":

if we could just catch a hold of it,catch aholt, some kind of line,if the sun was a tennis ball or somethingbut it ain't, the impossible thing is the sunif words rhymed, even we could catch a holt(a bush) and start the stacking, wordslined up, I mean, like, in the old dayswood behind the kitchen stove

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but you take now your piecemeal sonnetwow, certain of these here poets,these chokermen can't even count to

fourteenand as for Petrarch, well, I meanI've been to bed with some dandy and also

skilledladies, sure, but would I a ballyhoo startfor the keen (and gossipy) public?I'd be sued or whatever, maybe killedbut (now and then) you've got to tell

somebodyand a reader has I guess, in spite of all,

ears.

The poet as chokerman. What he catchesaholt of here, gets a line on, are the earsof the other, the other conceived as ears,as somebody.

In Advice to My Friends the other isvariously conceived : sometimes the "you"of discourse is a fellow writer, sometimesthe poet's daughters, sometimes the ab-sent lover. From "Letters to Salonika" :

June 4No mail at all from you. None. I talk tomyself. I begin to suspect I am writing theseletters to myself, writing the poem of you.Its title is, / Think About Women Much ofthe Time. That is the poem about you andyour silence.

In the lover's discourse, as RolandBarthes observes, the other is always "ab-sent as referent, present as allocutory."As a result, the " I" is "wedged betweentwo tenses, that of reference and that ofthe allocution: you have gone (which Ilament), you are here (since I am ad-dressing you)." As Barthes also pointsout, historically the discourse of absenceis articulated by the female; "Letters toSalonika" fascinates, in part, because thediscourse of absence is sustained by themale:

What am I supposed to do with the egg-plant in the fridge? It stares out at mewhen I open the fridge door. . . . It remindsme of the color of your eyes when you areangry.I took my black oxfords, the shoes you don't

like, to the shoemaker behind the hotel onPembina to have them resoled and he saidthey aren't worth resoling. After I throwaway my black oxfords I'm going to throwaway the eggplant. In fact I may throwblack itself, defying that absence of coloreven to color my life again. I shall therebyrefute Greek widowhood. I think of yourgrandmother, serving olives and bread andsliced tomatoes, pouring ouzo. I am, today,my own widow.

The absence of the other not only colourshis life but grants him entry onto thestage of language. "Penelope was theartist, in that story," he reflects in an-other story, "Odysseus, only the dumband silent one, approaching and beingunravelled and approaching again."

The most remarkable poems in Adviceto My Friends are the two closing se-quences, "Sounding the Name" and"The Poet's Mother," toward which thevolume as a whole seems to move. Bothfocus on the figure of the poet's mother.In Labyrinths of Voice Kroetsch ac-knowledged some years ago that he hadkept the mother figures very silent at thecentre of his writing, partly because thedeath of his mother caused him suchpain, and added:

. . . it's funny how I kept that silent and oneof the things that I can see happening, inthe next few years as I go on writing, is akind of enunciation. But I can feel evenmy long poem, Field Notes drawing towardthat.

In the last two sequences we have thatenunciation, poems that bespeak an al-most unbearable pain, poems writtenwith the guard down, with the arms wideopen:

In the fall of snowI hear my mother.I know she is there.In the weight of the snowI hear her silence.I count white stonesin October moonlight.I break dry breadwith a flock of gulls.

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I tear sheep's woolfrom barbed wire fences.The visible,the visible —where are you?

"The central figure of Nichol's work,"Stephen Scobie writes in his recent, muchneeded study of the poet, "is separation— of the child from the parent, of thesignifier from the signified, of friendsfrom each other — and the humanistdrive to his writing is a heroic attemptto overcome such separation." Much thesame, I think, can be said of Kroetsch'spoetry. We don't think of him as a hu-manist; we don't want to think of himthat way. He is Coyote; he is postmod-ern. But he is a humanist, at least in theterms Nichol himself sets out in his 1966statement :

there is a new humanism afoot that willone day touch the world to its core, tra-ditional poetry is only one of the means bywhich to reach out and touch the other,the other is emerging as the necessary pre-requisite for dialogues with the self thatclarify the soul & heart and deepen theability to love. I place myself there, withthem, whoever they are, wherever they are,who seek to reach themselves and the otherthru the poem by as many exits and en-trances as are possible.

Advice to My Friends is a collection ofpoems written for and about the other,about the self's need for and discovery ofthat other. (It is, among other things, thepoetic counterpart of Tzvetan Todorov'sfascinating study of the other, The Con-quest of America.) At the Ottawa sym-posium on "Literary Theory and Cana-dian Literature" Kroetsch announcedthat Advice to My Friends had turnedout to be the last volume of Field Notes.Let's hope he proves as wrong aboutField Notes as bp Nichol has been aboutThe Martyrology.

PAUL HJARTARSON

UNDERSTANDINGZEROLORNA CROziER, The Garden Going On With-

out Us. McClelland & Stewart, $9.95.

IN LORNA CROZIER'S SIXTH book ofpoems, The Garden Going On WithoutUs, there is a poet at home in manyplaces. She uses the old legends of theGarden and of Icarus and of swans,whether they be Leda's or Tschaikov-sky's. She imagines into herself the moremodern voices of Wallace Stevens andDavid Wagoner and Georgia O'Keeffe.She traces the prairie landscape and thetimeless themes of love and family. Sheis an erudite but accessible poet.

A section of "Poem about Nothing"shows Crozier's easy blend of allusion andobservation :

Icarus understood zeroas he caught the smellof burning feathersand fell into the sea.

If you roll zero down a hillit will grow,swallow the towns, the farms,the people at their tablesplaying tic-tac-toe.

When the Crée chiefssigned the treaties on the plainsthey wrote Xbeside their names.In English, X equals zero.

I ask my friendthe rhetorician who studies mathematicsWhat does zero mean and keep it simple.He says Zip.

Zero starts and endsat the same place. Some compare itto driving across the Prairies all dayand feeling you've gone nowhere.

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Yet the language and imagery are notalways this accessible. In the poem filedunder the title "Marriage: Getting UsedTo," the speaker blends images fromfairy tales and cocktail parties and theold northern legends of dragons :

It did not take me longto get used to his leatherwings . . .It was his feet I couldn't stand,his horny feet, ugly as a bird's,

It was waking to find himwith a flashlight and a mirror,staring under the covers at his feetIt was his nailsclicking across linoleumIt was the fallen gold scalesthat lay on the sheet like scattered coins

Other poems are as dry and restrainedas a prairie landscape, their allusions toplace and to near history. In "ThePhotograph I Keep of Them" Crozierwrites :

It is before my brotherand long before I demandedmy own space in her belly.

Behind them the prairietells its spare story of drought.

I can write down only thisfor sure:

they have left the farm,they are going somewhere.

Or Crozier can be simply and happilybawdy, as in "Carrots" from The SexLives of Vegetables:

Carrots are fuckingthe earth. A permanenterection, they push deeperinto the damp and dark.All summer longthey try so hard to please.Was it good for you,was it good?

Actually, this bawdiness seems to me alittle contrived, the images as mascu-linely familiar as inked on beards and

mustaches on postered women. "My NewOld Man, He's So Good" offers sen-suously the more remarkable lines:"snake / swallows mouse, he dies / insideme often."

These poems do not lend themselves togeneralities. Crozier's voice is a consistentone, her lines short and vivid with occa-sional self-effacing rhymes that includeinternal and sprung variations. Her im-ages, whether of dragons or drought,zeros or mindlessly fertile carrots, are in-tense and precise. Lorna Crozier is aregionalist in the best sense, intenselyaware of the world immediately aroundher but also of its connections to the geo-graphical past and to the cultural pastbrought to the land by the language inwhich the poet writes. Icarus and Eden,Englished, are as much a part of theCanadian prairies as of the Mediter-ranean world, packed carefully in thecultural baggage of prairie settlers, alongwith hymnals and pianos and the folkwisdom of "Sex Education" :

They saidmice wear paths in the linoleumhide in the couch springs andunder your bed wait for a chanceto whoosh

up your housecoatnest in your crotch

Crozier's angels are of snow, not stone,and they melt and reform themselvesagain and again in this collection as ex-perience and education come together instrong and witty images.

FRANCES W. KAYE

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HARNESSING ENERGYROBERT MELANCON, Blind Painting. Philip

Stratford, trans. Véhicule, η.p.MICHEL GARNEAu, Small Horses & Intimate

Beasts. Robert McG ee, trans. Véhicule,n.p.

A TRANSLATOR OF POETRY who IS Set a close working relationship with theauthor of the original may be looking fortrouble. F rustration with the usual diffi culties of rendering shades of meaningcan conceivably be aggravated by per sonal temperament, and the inevitable"betrayal" of one language by anothermight quickly become a source of per sonal animosity. On the other hand, theinteraction may stimulate the creativeprocesses; as N orthrop Frye has noted,some translation is tantamount to a"creative achievement in communication,not merely a necessary evil or a removalof barriers."

Such was the case some years ago whenF. R. Scott and Anne Hébert engagedin a meticulous and courteous dialogueon the subject of Scott's translation of"Tombeau des rois." The result, adroitlyedited by Jeanne Lapointe, and with anintroduction by Frye from which theabove remark is quoted, was published asDialogue sur la traduction (1970). Thetranslator can learn much from the dia-logue's revelation of inspired craftsman-ship on the part of Scott and patientelucidation on that of Hébert.

In the case of the works under dis-cussion here, poet and translator haveworked at a level of intimacy at least asproductive as that experienced by Scottand Hébert. Philip Stratford, anthologist,critic and seasoned translator of fiction,embarked on his first translation of versewith Robert Melançon's Peintureaveugle, winner of a Governor General'saward in 1976. Robert McGee, a Mon-treal poet of the Solway, Harris andFurey generation, and translator of Mi-

chel Tremblay's Albertine en cinq temps,has undertaken the challenge of puttingMichel Garneau's ebullient Les petitschevals amoureux (1977) into an equallyenergetic English.

For Robert Melançon, getting trans-lated was by no means a passive experi-ence. Forced to look once more at hispoems, he found many of them wanting."Je l'ai enrichi de suppressions," hewrites in an introductory note, "et j'aicorrigé, parfois récrit complètement,presque tous les poèmes." In effect,Peinture aveugle has been reborn throughthe catalytic action of translation. Me-lançon has deleted whole poems from theoriginal, enlarged and changed others,added new sequences, and tinkered withthe remainder. Whether he has madebetter poems or simply other poems can-not be discussed here, though one detectsan easier flow and a more calculated ele-gance in the new text. The more tantaliz-ing question is exactly how the collabora-tion with Stratford affected the creativeprocesses of both, for Stratford tells usthat the poems "continued to change onboth sides of the crease." Perhaps theprocess cannot be disentangled at all;Melançon says that at times it was Strat-ford's version which became the original.All that one can say with confidence isthat there is, in the present Véhiculetext, a French poem on the left and anEnglish on the right which appears tobe its translation. For further clarifica-tion we must await a new Dialogue surla traduction.

Blind Painting is arranged in sets ofcarefully interwoven sequences, eachpoem meditating variously upon place,season, love, time, and the creative pro-cess. The structure is essentially musical :themes and variations orchestrated chieflyfor strings and woodwinds, a muted,chromatic poetry, something like De-bussy in an autumnal mood. In Liberté(décembre 1983), Melançon has written

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on the importance of music to poetry:"II cherche une langue qui atteigne àla transparence, dont le sens serait im-médiat comme celui de la musique."Here he writes of "le poème / naît parlente improvisation" and of poetry as"chant muet / où s'entend toute musique,figure / sans forme où remue / le pos-sible" ("mute song / in which all music'sheard, formless / figure that contains therange / of the possible"). This mellowsound is matched with a "taste for skiesof clouds / where the hours melt to-gether / in a neutral light" ("ton goûtdes ciels de nuages / où les heures seconfondent / dans une lumière neutre").Again and again the poems depict varie-ties of light and surface, leading Strat-ford to a diction replete with wordslike incandescent, shimmering, glistening,laquered, washed, melted and shadow-less, somewhat over-rich in English per-haps, but faithful to the original and inany case quite unavoidable.

Melançon's verse gives the impressionof unobtrusive music revealing by degreesan inner world of finely tuned percep-tions. On the whole Stratford has beenable to do justice to his subtle tonalrange, even to the internal assonance ofindividual lines. He has succeeded in pro-ducing a convincing and familiar Englishmovement to the lines while committingfew injustices agamst the original. Wherehe does deviate significantly, it is to avoidan awkward literalism by choosing a con-veniently "poetic" English word: "Notrepeu de raison" becomes "our fragile wis-dom," "l'obscurité lavée" becomes "silverobscurity," and "dans l'inachevé" be-comes "into the inchoate." I found onlyone truly unfortunate line. When Melan-çon writes: "Les bois, les champs, laLoire, les villages / résumaient alentourle désordre universel," Stratford con-strues the verb cumbersomely as "re-sumed around."

Michel Garneau's celebratory, idio-

matic poems are another kind of chal-lenge altogether. There is the temptationto make him sound like Walt Whitman,and indeed there are certain similarities:a happy self-centredness, an unabashedcommitment to pleasure, a tendency tolively inventories. But Garneau seemsmuch closer to the primal juices, and hisego much less prone to cosmic posing.Some of the poems in Small Horses andIntimate Beasts, given as they are toflights of boastfulness and tongue-in-cheek excess, are really for afternoondrinkers :

je pète en couleurset je prends à la santé de tousune belle grosse botte de vie(I fart in technicolourand to everyone's healthI take a great big flying fuck at life)

Clearly the political and social Gar-neau oftimes past has been swallowed upby a more elemental voice defying death,seizing the day, celebrating kinship withother creatures:

comme des bouleaux qui auraient gagné laparole

nous nous écorchons jusqu'à la vulnérablevérité

en nous criant des noms par-dessus latendresse

pour faire reculer la mort l'empêcherde baver sur nos vies(like birch trees given the power of speechwe skin ourselves down to the barest truthscalling each other names louder than

tendernessto make death back off to keep itfrom drooling all over our lives)

Poetry, Garneau has said, "is made byeveryone / the poet is anyone at all /and man is anyone at all." These poemsare an extended gloss on this demo-cratic and populist affirmation. Garneauspreads his sympathies to animals of allkinds, the "animaux intimes," which are,in fact, metaphors for human feeling,and, collectively, an environment of

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energy and tenderness. See especially thebook's last poem "pour chanter à tuetête en auto" ("to sing at the top of one'slungs while driving").

Like Stratford, Robert McGee hasbeen able to work closely with his author;in his introduction he acknowledges the"luxury" of "inside information." Al-though there has been nothing like thetransformation wrought on Melançon,one does nevertheless detect in theseverses a spirit of camaraderie, as if Gar-neau, who has a keen ear for NorthAmerican English himself, was able toassist McGee in some of his more inven-tive renderings. How, for example, wasMcGee so confident in extracting theword "absolute" from the sub-text of "ettu as mis ta robe de présence" ("andyou put on your robe of absolute pres-ence") except with a bit of "inside infor-mation"? Obviously, of course, there waslittle either of them could do with "lescheveux, les ch'veux les ch'veux" withits auditory pun on "hair" and "wish"except to go to "hair hair hair." Whatmakes Small Horses and Intimate Beastssuch a convincing rendition of Garneau's"hairy warmth" is McGee's own abilityto harness the energies of colloquialspeech, to make "engueuelent" mean" l a m b a s t i n g " and " m o l l e s " mean"shabby," and get away with it. The re-sult is a fresh, lively and highly readabletext.

In the atmosphere of cultural détentewhich characterizes Québec at present,the art of translation, though still notthriving to the degree that it should, is atleast going about its painstaking businesswith new vigour and determination.These two Véhicule editions are out-standing examples of the art of transla-tion, making available in eloquent Eng-lish two very different and very readablevoices from Québec.

PHILIP LANTHIER

BODY & LANGUAGEIn the Feminine: Women and Words. Long-

spoon, $9.50. . . RUTHVEN. Feminist Literary Studies.

Cambridge Univ. Press, $8.95.

T H E WOMEN AND WORDS conference heldin Vancouver in 1983 has become some what of a legend. Writers, editors, aca demics from across the country gatheredto explore their experiences as womenwhose lives, livelihoods and identities areembedded in the uses and meanings oflanguage. "The question is," said Alice,"whether you can make words mean somany different things." "T h e questionis," said H umpty D umpty, "which is tobe master — that's all." But Alice wouldhave to wait, for as long as grammar andsyntax, educational institutions and dis tributions systems were controlled by oth ers — men, if you were a woman ; whitesif you were a Black : WASPS if you werean ethnic minority, and heterosexuals ifyou were a lesbian — she would be out side. Women are, as Louky Bersianik putit, "born on the wrong side of language."

All of the major grievances were airedat the conference. Women writers areunderpaid and underpublished ; womenacademics are undertenured ; womencritics and women actresses are unem ployed. Motherhood presents no prob lems if you have money, daycare andcan sleep standing up. Th e gatekeepersin universities who shape the curriculaand the editors of professional journalswho enforce the canons are androcentricby training and conviction. I n short, itwas the litany of substantive bias, profes sional discrimination and lifestyle over load that has been the cornerstone offeminist criticism. By now it is familiar;nevertheless, it bears repeating.

Four years later and in retrospectwhat stands out about the conference isthe enormous vitality of women from

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Quebec writing in French. Barbara God-ard who translates many of the new Que-bec writers — and who, incidentally, hascontributed a very intelligent piece onthe creativity of translating — observesthat anglophone writers are more ori-ented toward their bodies, while franco-phones toward language itself. Is this theinfluence on the latter of contemporaryFrench criticism, the "deconstruction-ists," or is it the fact that francophonesin Canada have had to fight for the sur-vival of their language and for the rightto use it? Have Quebec politics madethem more conscious of language ascommunication ?

Quebec politics have created a veryspecial relationship between writer andreader. Phyllis Webb, for example, writesfor herself in response, she says, to amuse, while Pol Pelletier and NicoleBrossard have committed audiences withwhom their relationships are close, vola-tile, and, often without aesthetic distance.It is the audience that has willed the newpoets and playwrights into existence, nota muse, not a single, individual, privatevoice. That difference is crucial not onlyfor the artist or performer but for theacademic as well. Andrea Lebowitz isconcerned that feminists in academe maywin the battle, but lose the war if theyestablish the legitimacy of feminist criti-cism but cut off their lifeline with ordi-nary women who read for a variety ofmotives, good and bad, and seek a varietyof gratifications, pure and impure. Shespeaks of a new feminist elitism.

But a new feminist elitism is still a longway off, for there is no consensus yetabout the specificity of the feminist voice— content, style, genre — or the feministnorms of evaluation. Both writers andscholars in this collection have tried todefine what they mean by feminist art.For some it means rediscovering womenwriters and giving them their proper duein literary history; for some it is being

free to write about a pregnancy as adistinctively female experience; for oth-ers it is the open, non-linear structure ofa short story as in the work of AliceMunro (according to Lorraine Weir).It has a subversive function yet celebratesthe sexuality of women; it is nonviolentand about nonviolence, yet it can alsohumanize violence. The vagueness and,often, contradictory nature of these state-ments reflects the fragmentary form ofthe contributions in the book, but it alsoindicates the current state of the art. Itis particularly difficult for Canadianwomen to isolate the feminine in a soci-ety which is less gendered than mostEuropean societies are. In any case, it isbecoming more and more clear that thefeminine aesthetic is not a unitary, mono-lithic one. "Writing in the feminine,"France Theoret says, "is a plural lan-guage, and it is necessary to aim for apluralist logic if we are to give an ac-count of it."

The more systematic efforts to definea feminist literary aesthetic are reviewedby K. K. Ruthven in a short, highlyreadable analysis. Unlike many papersand books on the same subject whichlook either at the French scholars —Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig, Cixous — orthe Americans — Showalter, Kolodny,Simpson, Ellmann — Ruthven bringsthem together without playing off oneagainst the other. Feminist Literary Stud-ies includes also a discussion of androgy-nous writing to which Virginia Woolfaspired and which is still seen by manyas an alternative to the more restrictiveboundaries of women's writing. But, de-spite the care and balance in his discus-sion of the major thinkers in the debate,Ruthven offers no solution; the majorparadigms remain: the European withits roots in linguistics, the American withits roots in social structures.

The wisdom of how to live with dif-ferences may ultimately be the great gift

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of women to the world of scholarship.Meanwhile, both of the books discussedhere provide a good introduction to thecurrent reconstruction of knowledge be-gun by feminists. It is an unfinishedagenda.

THELMA MGGORMACK

RESIDENT & ALIENGEORGE BOWERiNG, ed., Sheila Watson and

"The Double Hook." Golden Dog, $12.95.BLANCHE H. GELFANT, Women Writing in

America: Voices in Collage. Univ. Press ofNew England, n.p.

Two VERY DIFFERENT BOOKS are herewed by the magic of book-reviewing as-signment. To Canadian literature en-thusiasts, of greatest interest — at leaston the surface — is Sheila Watson and"The Double Hook," a collection ofsomewhat time-worn critical essays andreviews about Watson's singular text.George Bowering, who edited the volumeand provided an "Afterword" in theform of his 1981 essay "Sheila Watson,Trickster," calls The Double Hook "thewatershed of contemporary Canadian fic-tion," and there are few among the con-tributors who would disagree with thecompliment. The volume contains sev-eral brief personal notes, five interest-ingly forward-thinking book reviews, andfourteen essays, many of which are takenfrom familiar thematic studies (Atwood,Moss, Mandel, Jones, Northey). Bower-ing even includes that most accessible ofpieces, the New Canadian Library intro-duction by John Grube.

As an addition to the peregrinating"Critical Views on Canadian Writers"series, the collection will be welcomed asuseful and convenient by students wholike what criticism they read to beprepackaged and pre-arranged. Anyonecoming upon The Double Hook un-awares, perhaps fresh from a summer of

light reading, will find comforting direc-tions here. As a scholarly text, however,the book is of small interest. It lacks abibliography. It provides no descriptiveoverview of the available criticism. Itcontains nothing written since 1981(most of the material belongs to the1970's) and its essays are all by Canadiancritics. In noting the latter fact as a kindof limitation, I do not ignore the amplesigns here offered of scholarly energywithin the country. It is simply to saythat for all its attention in Canada, TheDouble Hook, to judge by this collection,has been too little noticed abroad. For abook so deliberately modernist, writer-conscious, and revolutionary ("Mrs. Wat-son," notes Bowering, "was not muchinterested in a revolution in the Cana-dian tradition. She has always felt hertradition to be defined by what sheread"), this is a curious fate. Both in itsessays and its bibliography, the recentlypublished Gaining Ground: EuropeanCritics on Canadian Literature indicatesvirtually no interest abroad in The Dou-ble Hook. It thus awaits a later date anda more mature international attention tothe development of Canadian literaturebefore we have perspectives upon thisbook other than our own.

By contrast to Bowering's collection,Blanche Gelfant's Women Writing inAmerica: Voices in Collage has onlymarginal connections to Canadian writ-ing. It offers, however, a more stimulat-ing collection of essays that have, atleast by implication, applicability to thework of many Canadian women writers.Gelfant, who teaches at Dartmouth Col-lege, has long been recognized as a criti-cal mind to be reckoned with in the fieldof American literature. In particular, herbook on the city in American fiction andher revisionalist, thought-provoking essayon Willa Cather, "The Forgotten Reap-ing Hook: Sex in My Jntonia," havewon her enduring respect. In stylistic ele-

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gance and quality of analysis, her criti-cal writing stands out from the run ofjourneyman-like presentation that toooften characterizes the Bowering volume.In Women Writing Gelfant includesmuch of her previous writing (thoughthe text curiously includes no record ofthe dates and locations of earlier appear-ances) . One finds both her My Antonio.essay and what appears to be a newCather piece, "Movement and Melody:The Disembodiment of Lucy Gayheart,"in which Gelfant challenges prevailingcritical views of this later work (LucyGayheart [1935]) by arguing that Gather,always a romanticist, found in her delib-erate use of the material of the popularnovel "a bold and unexpected way ofconfronting her welling doubts about thepermanence of [her] writing." The "col-lage" also includes essays on Grace Paley(a special Gelfant exemplar), Ann Beat-tie, Jean Stafford, Tillie Olsen, MeridelLe Sueur, Margaret Mitchell, Mary Aus-ten, and Katherine Anne Porter. The soleexception to this idiosyncratic gatheringof American women is Ethel Wilson.

Originally introduced to Wilson's workthrough a Willa Cather connection, Gel-fant contributed a paper to the EthelWilson Symposium held at the Univer-sity of Ottawa in 1981. Entitled "TheHidden Mines in Ethel Wilson's Land-scape (or an American Cat Among Ca-nadian Falcons)," her study, as her coysubtitle suggests, is a candidly Americanresponse. "When I compared Wilsonwith American male writers like ErnestHemingway and Theodore Dreiser," shewrites, "I saw how pervasively I deal, asa critic, with violence, uncertainty, andnihilistic visions of life, and with thewriter's quest for a language consonantwith an American landscape that is al-ways being discovered or created, that isalways new. When I compared Wilsonwith American women writers like WillaCather, I realized how precariously I

balance idealism against bleak disillusion-ment in discussing the literary treatmentof such ordinary events as courtship,marriage, family gatherings — eventsthat usually shape women's lives." EthelWilson thus becomes in the collection akind of touchstone. While Gelfant's con-cern is the "confluence" of "Americanmotifs and women's experience," Wil-son's work helps her to see her subjectmore precisely.

But what does Gelfant in her felineAmericanness make of Ethel Wilson andof Canadian women writing generally?Except for brief mention of Canada'sseveral "excellent women writers," Wil-son is her sole focus and one must won-der whether Wilson alone, given suchalternatives as Laurence, Munro, Royand the "modish" Margaret Atwood, issufficient basis for the kind of comparisonundertaken. Moreover, how difficult is itfor an avowedly "American" critic toadapt to the assumptions and nuancesthat guide the sensibility of an Anglo-Canadian like Wilson?

Finding much to praise in the serenityand elegance of Wilson's style, her hu-mour, and her heroines' aptitude for sur-vival and "Providential rescue," Gelfantfinds that "the truth of her women ishard to define." She balks uneasily attheir gentility, their apparent lack of pas-sion, their acceptance of traditional roles(she finds them "appealingly regres-sive"), and their innocence. Comment-ing on Maggie Lloyd and Lilly (TheEquations of Love), Gelfant writes, "Ilike the desire of Wilson's women forself-possession, and I am not alwayspleased at their acquiescence to a ser-vant's role, no matter how much I ad-mire the order they bring into others'lives and, by this means, into their own."In Wilson's portrayals of her heroines,Gelfant misses a "sense of the new" andof deeply felt personal struggle (as inDreiser), of grim inevitability (as in

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Wharton), of "absorbing interest in [her]characters" (as in Cather), of crucialthings forever lost (as in Hemingway andFitzgerald). Wilson's "manner seemsalien to American writers," more akin tothe manner of Virginia Woolf and, inparticular, to certain aspects of To theLighthouse.

Thus, for all her admiration of EthelWilson, Gelfant confesses to uncertaintyand unease of response. She seems to missnot only what might be called the juiceshe is accustomed to in American letters,but many of the signals that underlieWilson's assumptions and responses, inbrief the differentiations in commitmentto ideas of order, social identity, and in-dividual liberty that have made Cana-dian experience in the "new land" dif-ferent from American response. Gelfant'sessay is a particular challenge to Cana-dian readers, for in adopting an ap-proach that is on the one hand personaland national and on the other scholarlyand richly allusive, she invites Canadiansto see Wilson in a new and, in manyways, a compelling light. Thus interested,we may well on our own apply the ques-tions she raises about other Americanwomen writers to writers, male and fe-male, north of the 49th parallel.

MICHAEL PETERMAN

THE IMMORALISTSCOTT sYMONs, Helmet of Flesh. McClelland

& Stewart, $24.95.

IN THE "Preface to 'The Reverberator'"Henry James mentions that in readingover two of his early stories he realizedthat with the passing of years they had"become in the highest degree documen-tary for myself." If we understand "docu-mentary" as synonymous with "autobio-graphical" — a substitution James mightnot accept — then we have an accurateenough hint of why Scott Symons' third

novel, Helmet of Flesh, delivers so muchless than both its dust jacket and blink-ered narrator promise. Symons' mainproblem in this novel of a homosexualCanadian writer's journey to contem-porary Morocco is that he is unable toachieve any intellectual and emotionaldistance between himself as narrator andhis hero York Mackenzie. As a result heleaves the reader with the impressionthat the author could not decide whetherHelmet of Flesh, despite its highly styl-ized set scenes, the florid hot-house styleand the too obvious striving for literaryeffects, is autobiography or fiction.

That the book is transparently auto-biographical should be obvious to anyonefamiliar either with Symons' earlier for-gotten and forgettable novels, Placed'Armes and Civic Square, and withCharles Taylor's sympathetic chapter onSymons in Six Portraits: A CanadianPattern. In all three novels Symons re-veals that he can not imagine a set ofevents other than those that have hap-pened to him or a protagonist differentfrom himself. As a result his novels al-ways leave me with the impression thatthey are edited transcriptions of note-books and diaries in which the author isless concerned with re-imagining his ownlife in the form of a fictional re-enact-ment than with describing what had hap-pened to him and, not incidentally,justifying in the form of a set of positivemoral judgments, his behaviour in vari-ous relationships. In Helmet of Fleshthat justification appears as a tacit com-plicity between the third person narratorand his central character. As RolandBarthes pointed out, one of the ways inwhich we can discover a narrator's emo-tional and ideological allegiances is toreplace, in his narration, a character'sname with the first person singular. Thesubstitution that seems to be the right"fit" will indicate a tacit relationship be-tween author/narrator/character. If we

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do this with the dialogue free paragraphsof Helmet of Flesh we discover that theirnarrator's point of view — his attitudes,emotions and ideas — is identical withthe entries from York Mackenzie's jour nals and with the views he articulates indialogues with others.

I emphasize this issue not simply toquibble over generic distinctions but be cause the question of the author/ nar rator's relationship to his main characterseems to me of particular importance inany novel which, like Helmet of Flesh,has an ideological or polemical intentionbehind it. This is evident even in thededication whose slightly shaky Latin in forms the reader that the book is for allthose desiring a better country — "Desi derantes [sic] Meliorem Patriam." Thenarrator's description of York Mackenzie(the name is deftly suggestive), the ac tion in Morocco, and the journal entriesinterspersed throughout the text made itclear from the start that the story ofMackenzie's journey to Morocco is to beread realistically and symbolically. Onthe former level, we have the story of awell connected and supposedly talentedmiddle aged Torontonian running awayfrom his young male lover and theirhome in N ewfoundland. The journey toN orth Africa is thus a means of findingrespite from an intense but also wearyingrelationship and from a Canadian societyevery aspect of which Mackenzie de spises. If Helmet of Flesh had been con tent simply to tell this story as effectivelyas possible then my complaints about itwould have been primarily stylistic andformal. For example, the dialogue isawkward, the English characters arestereotypes out of post war Punch, andthe supposedly liberated Moroccans aredescribed in figures and terms alreadydated when G ide wrote L'lmmoralisteand that could provide an interestingfootnote to a revised edition of EdwardSaid's Occidentalism. The main prob

lem, however, lies in the astonishing dis crepancy between what the narrator tellsus about Mackenzie and what the novelshows. If we listen to the narrator's tell ing then Mackenzie is a radical conserva tive vehemently at odds with the twen tieth century's liberalism and secular hu manism and convinced that Westerncivilization is ultimately a gynarchy, thatis, a society in which males have beenrepressed, even emotionally and sexuallycastrated by their Puritanical women. Ifwe pay attention to the tale, on the otherhand, we see a slightly pathetic, anxiousand confused homosexual desperate tojustify his predilection for young Moroc can boys and his neurotic hatred ofwomen with a confused view of sexualitythat is ultimately little more than anintellectual sublimation of his own situa tion.

Whenever the novel generalizes on thebasis of Mackenzie's case or treats hisdilemma as representative or symbolic, itraises questions requiring critical re sponses going beyond style, form, co herence and credibility of plot. Thereader recognizes that more is at issuethan a particular set of fictional events.T h u s when M acken zie asserts th at"Women having ruled (invisibly) foryears, are now rioting for their freedom. . ." or that the Moroccan way of life inwhich women remain cloistered whilethe men are free is the necessary antidoteto Canadian society, or that the relativelycasual homosexual coupling Mackenzieenjoys is ( ι ) different from the sexualityof the gay world he despises and (2) apossible solution to the debilitating sexualmalaise of the West — in all these casesthe reader is justified in asking common sensical if uncomfortable questions in theface of which the text's brittle polemicalassertiveness collapses. And with that col lapse are revealed two crucial flaws inthe novel's presentation of Mackenzie'scase.

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All of the narrator's bluster and bluffabout the extent to which Mackenzie hasbeen persecuted by his society for beinga homosexual cannot hide the fact thathis persecution has its origins not in hishomosexuality but in a love affair witha young boy, a minor. Mackenzie's self-pitying and whining lament that the Ca-nadian gynarchy will not let him fulfilhimself amounts to little more than thefact that the boy's mother and Macken-zie's ex-wife tried to bring the affair toan end. As D. H. Lawrence would haveput it had he written about Symons inStudies in Classic American Literature,"boo hoo."

Second, whatever may be the virtuesof Mackenzie's and Symons' new eroti-cism — and its genealogy goes backthrough Genet, Reich, Lawrence, Gideand Whitman — it is fairly obvious thatreverence for the male "helmet of flesh"and the new uninhibited love resultingfrom it involves a fundamental hatred ofwomen. It is not coincidental that thenovel's main and supporting charactersare all men, that Moroccan women areeither silent or invisible and that, withone exception, North American womenare castrating bitches. Homosexualkitsch, like its feminist counterpart, isable to deal with only one sex; the otheris sacrificed to the exigencies of an ideo-logical polemic. Had Symons writtenL'Immoraliste Marceline's illness anddeath would have taken place behindclosed doors and a guiltless Michel wouldhave been shown preaching a sermonon sensuality and homosexuality to hisstartled but sympathetic friends.

Needless to say the implied compari-son with L'Immoraliste is inappropriatesince it is obvious that Symons is simplynot talented enough a novelist to be ourGide; perhaps the best he can aspire tois being a Canadian Edward Carpenter.

SAM SOLECKI

SEEKER & FINDERR. MURRAY SCHAFER, Dicamus et Labyrinthos:

A Philologist's Notebook. Arcana Editions,$8.00.

BILL BIS SETT, Canada Gees Mate For Life.Talonbooks, $7.95.

JOHN v. HICKS, Rootless Tree. Turnstone,$12.95.

BOTH AS A WRITER and as a composer,R. Murray Schäfer has a longstandinginterest in ancient myths and texts, astwo compositions on the Ariadne story{La Testa d'Adriane and The Crown ofAriadne) and his book The ChaldeanInscription show. Dicamus et Labyrin-thos (the title is from Pliny and means"let us also speak of labyrinths") is anelaborate and intriguing investigation ofthe Minotaur legend, cast in the form ofthe notebook of a philologist who (be-fore he disappeared) had set himself thetask of translating a text written in whatSchäfer calls Ectocretan. (Schafer'sname, incidentally, appears nowhere inthis book.) In the introduction, a fic-tional archaeologist explains how a seriesof nineteen inscribed tablets were foundin 1938 at a site called Magia Tribia, andhow the inscriptions had resisted deci-pherment, despite a series of attempts,until the present notebook was discoveredamong the author's papers. Schäfer hascleverly introduced a small element offiction into what is largely the true his-tory of the twentieth-century discoveryof the Mycenean and Minoan cultures.The introduction relies heavily on JohnChadwick's book The Decipherment ofLinear B, although some facts and namesare slightly altered. Schafer's tabletsfound in 1938 at Magia Tribia nearPachino rest in fact on the discovery in1939 of tablets at Epano Englianos nearNavarino; Schafer's Bedrich Stepanovichand his book Les inscriptions ectocré-toises, Essai de déchiffrement are actuallyBedrich Hrozny and his book Les ins-

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criptions Cretoises; H . H . Kretchmer isthe Bulgarian scholar Vladimir G eorgiev;and so on. Readers can if they wish re cover much of this from the third chap ter of G hadwick's book, and various de tails throughout the rest of Dicamus havebeen excavated from the Chadwick text.

The text of the notebook proper is fas cinating, clever, and convincingly prop ped up with references to numerousauthorities both ancient and modern.F rom the first, one realizes that there ismore at stake here than the mere deci pherment of a mysterious script. (Theauthor is hopeful that the tablets will beliterary, in spite of the fact that the Lin ear texts were lists of accounts only.)"C an a translator ever tell the t ruth?"asks the philologist a few pages after hehad pondered on a recently discoveredG reek inscription: "T h e more the seek ers, the fewer the finders." As the de cipherment gradually unfolds it becomesapparent that the search for the key toEctocretan, and to the crucial knowledgeof what the struggle with the M inotaurmeant (which it is hoped the tablets willreveal) is an elaborated metaphor for thesearch for transfigurement, or knowledge,or the mystery of life. In the end, thephilologist discovers that the script is acypher invented by D aedalus, that sym bolic figure of "the humanly possible,"and that far from revealing the secret ofthe labyrinth, the text breaks off justbefore the crucial encounter. Further more, the searcher is himself consumedby his own research (or his own text) :he narrates at the end a dream in whichhe meets the minotaur, and his paththrough the labyrinth ends in a splash ofblood. The philologist has come upagainst the limited ability of art and sci ence to unravel human experience. If Imay alter slightly the inscription on thewall of San Michèle Maggiore at Pavia(quoted by Schäfer at one point) : Auc-

tor intravit et monstrum biforme eumnecavit.

Canada Gees Mate For Life is bill bis-sett's 50-somethingth book. In the twentyyears since the publication of his firstcollection, bissett has built up an enor-mous oeuvre whose bulk and generalspirit are more impressive than are indi-vidual poems. One finishes a bissett bookwith a strong sense of his continuingcommitment to countercultural values,his playfulness, his determination to keepa fresh and original eye and mind onthings; one does not come away from abissett book with a list of a half dozenindisputably fine poems that stand outabove their companions. Though inmany respects unlike him, bissett in thisway resembles Raymond Souster. Whatcounts finally is a body of work of un-arguable importance rather than a smallnumber of masterpieces.

The comparison with Souster is not asunlikely as it may seem at first. LikeSouster, bissett sometimes writes littlepoems containing wry observations hehas made about everyday events in hislife. The orthography aside, "whn primeministr diefenbaker went" could almostbe a Souster poem :

into spiriti was sitting in restaurant up northlooking out at th meadow th sheepη poneesi herd th radio sayhis bodee wud tour canada ina train so peopul η him cudsee each othr for th lasttimeth train went from Ontariowher it startid thru manitobato Saskatchewan wher itstoppdyet anothr viewuv geographee

bissett's other much used form, the talkpoem, is on the other hand less souster

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ian. Pieces like the title poem ("we wersitting around up north talking 2,000feet above see levl in th karibu") , or"canyun uv th flying mattresses," or"hold on to yr typwritr" are in essencespiels, and represent bissett at his mostcharming. Who can resist poems that be gin "god dont make me eet anothr bigmac η strawberee milk shake" or "viet nam veterans ar hunting sasquatch northuv hope be"? These poems occasionallyramble on to exasperating length, butone accepts such unselectedness as partof his poetic habits. Canada Gees MateFor Life is vintage bissett.

John V. Hicks's first book, Now Is aFar Country, was published in 1978when he was 71. Rootless Tree is hisfourth collection, and it continues in thetranquil, meditative mood of its prede cessors. I t seems perhaps a shameful re proach to make of a poet who waited solong for book publication, but it seemsto me that this new book suffers from itssize. There are 91 poems here, some ofthem in several sections, and eventuallythe poems begin to pall. Many individualpoems work well, and even some of thosewhich are not wholly successful containarresting lines or images. There is, how ever, a sameness of style and voice whichover the course of 155 pages becomeswearisome. Hicks's poems are resolutelyadjectival, and though their music has adistinctive quality, many are marred bya slightly old fashioned sense of poeticdiction ("I t is a warmth and a goodfeeding, / and accepted company, morejoy's whorl / than I found ever in yourcountry. / More I may not tell ; you mustwait out / your hours till whether I comeagain ") . This would be less apparent,and less aggravating, in a shorter book,and I cannot help but think that Hicks'spublishers would have done better byhim if they had pruned Rootless Tree bya third.

BRUCE WH ITEM AN

UP IN THE AIRR AC H E L WYATT, Time in the Air. Anansi,

$9 95

AIR TRAVEL SEEMS TO be becoming morepopular in fiction as well as in everydaylife. I t was an important narrative com ponent in Atwood's Bodily Harm andLodge's Changing Places and SmallWorld as it is in Rachel Wyatt's latestnovel; indeed it seems to provide morespaces for fantasizing than travel by roadused to for Kerouac or N abokov in Lo lita. Wyatt's novel begins up in the airwith her male protagonist smiling ("H ehad spent roughly three thousand, threehundred and seventy three hours in theair so far") and ends with him makinga perfect landing. The facts that this isa different flight, that he is changed nowand no longer the centre of the action,and that the novel has moved away fromrealism to something close to fantasy arenot allowed to disturb the narrativeshape, which is that of the journey com pleted. Actually the only thing that iscompleted is the novel itself, for the stor ies of all Wyatt's characters are left inthe air in this inventive comic novelwhich draws attention to its own inven tiveness through its intricate and artifi cial structure.

The novel tells the story of the ad ventures of Sidney / Alex Snowden, abusinessman with a double life, who, likehis business enterprise, has two bases —one in Toronto and one in Leeds, York shire. While in Toronto he lives (as Sid ney) with his mistress Jill, a televisionproducer, and while in Leeds (nowAlex) he lives with his wife Zoe, a his torian, and their twin sons; in betweenhe flies the Atlantic and feels exploitedbecause his women "expect miraclesevery damn time." A common enoughsituation in a male novel and from thebeginning the reader might expect Snow

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den to be heading for a nervous collapse— as indeed he probably would if all theattention were focussed on him. But it isnot, for this is a woman's novel and awittily feminist one where the women inSnowden's life not only express their ownpoints of view but actually come to dom-inate the action. Snowden's adventurespale into an endless repetition of patri-archal attitudes while the adventures ofJill and Zoe, assisted by Jill's motherAlice and the wise woman Serena (alsoa television personality) reveal excitingnew possibilities in their lives as theyboth leave Sidney/Alex behind. Jillleaves her television work in Toronto to"be brilliant and shine" as the highpriestess of a secret Yorkshire sisterhood,the Wise Women of the Well, and Zoein an elaborate double act of changingplaces goes to Canada where two pos-sibilities open to her — one in televisionand one in extramural history studies atMcMaster. Both are poised on the edgeof possibly glorious futures in the finalsection of a narrative that spins out intowish-fulfilment fantasy for all. Even forSnowden the contours of desire arerounded out as, bereft of wife and mis-tress and his former complacency, he istaken under the wing of Serena, theglamorous mother-lover for whom he hasalways longed. His former women mayassume their freedom but for him, "Anew, steadier way of life loomed ahead.Sidney Snowden, divested of wife andmistress and assorted dreams, was nolonger a flying man. And Serena was tobe his helpmeet, eternally with him." Awryly comic ending to this story of sexualpolitics where roles seem to have beenreversed. (But what of Serena's wisdomin choosing Sidney?)

Like Jill the television producer, Wyatttoo has a good eye for visuals and "seesthings framed and in sequence." Shestructures her multivoiced novel with thekind of dramatic economy that she has

learned from writing over fifty radioplays for the CBC and the BBC since theearly 1970's. This novel might have beencalled Time in/on the Air (except thatthis would have been too ponderouslyexplicit for Wyatt) for it is about mediaentertainment quite as much as it isabout flying. Every scene is carefullyscripted, and there is a neatly self-reflex-ive moment when Jill in the studio "be-came the script, she was words, she wasvisuals, she was time, she was essence.This was her work." As it is the work ofWyatt the novelist. The dimensions ofunreality and artifice associated withtelevision programmes, with their on-screen/off-screen divisions of life, theirdirectives of 'Roll' or 'Cut,' and the con-stant possibilities for editing, are also thedimensions within which this fictionworks, shifting as it does between coun-tries and points of view and between themodes of realism and fantasy. Narrativeartifice is most obvious in the elaboratepatterning of doubles — Sidney/Alex'stwo names and double life and his dualEnglish-Canadian inheritance, two coun-tries, two women in his life (who doubleto become four), twin sons, Jill's andZoe's double choices, not to mention dou-ble crossing as an important survivalstrategy. The doubles game is played outin the structure of the middle sectionafter the shattering of comfortable illu-sions with Zoe's transatlantic phone callto Jill, "I want to speak to Alex please,Alex Snowden, my husband. I knowthat's where he is." What follows is asequence of time slots alternating be-tween Canada and England throughoutone day (Thursday, which has an occultsignificance in the narrative as well)where Jill, Zoe and Sidney/Alex reactto their domestic crisis in ways that areboth characteristic and unexpected.Through these disruptions the way isprepared, not for resolution but for theconnections and new directions taken to-

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wards wish-fulfilment in the final section.Whether the promises will be fulfilled orremain the illusions of another mediaevent is left up in the air. Is Snowdenon the air at the end, even as his planeis landing? We cannot be sure.

It is characteristic of Wyatt's fictionthat for all its comic fantasizing it paysattention to a wide range of human feel-ings and genuine dilemmas. This novelis a family romance rewritten in an in-tricately complicated modern way wheretraditional values like marital fidelity andthe relationships between parents andchildren are being challenged by the in-fluences of modern technology and mod-ern ideologies. It is strongly feminist in itscritique of Snowden's limited masculinevalues and in its endorsement of women'spower and women's secret heritage en-coded in the sisterhood of the well-wor-shippers (their book is titled The WiseWomen of Early Britain). When Zoegives the book to Jill at Toronto airport(not knowing who she is), Jill's flash ofrecognition confirms a female bondingwhich is stated directly, seriously and invery human terms, "She wanted to takeher by the arm and lead her to the near-est seat and have a conversation thatreached far back in both their lives, andbeyond, into the history of all women."But that desire cannot be fulfilled be-cause real life with its pressures of cir-cumstance works differently. The nar-rative makes it plain that there are limitsto freedom for women and for men, butthat these limits need not always be theobstacles that tradition has made them.The novel seriously proposes a redefini-tion of limits and a reassessment of mas-culine/feminine stereotypes by its comicstrategies of wish-fulfilment fantasy.

But fantasies they plainly are, and asthe readers make the perfect landingwith Snowden and Serena at the end, wehave to acknowledge the fictiveness ofthe novel's world. Like the television

shows produced by Jill, presented bySerena and got on the air freakishly byZoe, it is an entertainment (where "en-tertainment" has its double sense ofamusing and also entertaining new pos-sibilities). The time of reading has alsobeen "Time in the Air."

CORAL ANN HOWELLS

FAMILY CONTINUUMCARLA L. PETERSON, The Determined Reader:

Gender and Culture in the Novel fromNapoleon to Victoria. Rutgers Univ. Press,$25.00.

SHBRRiLL MACLAREN, Braehead: Three Found-ing Families in Nineteenth Century Canada.McClelland & Stewart, $24.95.

JUDITH TERRY, Miss Abigail's Part or Version& Diversion. Macmillan, $19.95.

O N FIRST SIGHT these three works ap-pear to bear little in common except tothe most ardent reviewer. However, theobvious differences of literary theory, his-tory and fiction are less telling than theshared concerns: the problematic rela-tionship between writing/reading/re-ceived knowledge and the experience ofliving; the influence of culture; the fa-milial drama of children and parents;the concern for understanding the past,both personal and cultural, in order tofind meaning in the present; the interestin traditional narrative patterns as bothobjects of study and structuring devices.Finally, all three authors address a gen-eral audience. While hoping to satisfythe specialist, they remain accessible tothe generalist through a careful manage-ment of style, terminology and format.

In The Determined Reader, Petersonbegins with the observation that innu-merable fictional protagonists are avidreaders, seeking escape and solutions inbooks. In studying these characters, shehopes to trace more general attitudes to-ward the act of reading, as well as the

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role reading has in determining the reso-lution of the quest for identity, self-actualization, and happiness. Petersonstarts with a review of our culture's am-biguous relationship to the written word— Plato's remedy and poison — andthen focuses her study on the nineteenth-century novel.

This period is chosen for scrutiny sincethe motif of the reader gained new im-petus with the Romantic Movement.From an initial Romantic enthusiasm forthe possibility of a new language whichcould offer an understanding of natureand the past and regeneration throughthat knowledge, Peterson traces themovement to pessimism in the later partof the century, particularly in Hardy whohas lost belief in historical knowledgeand the quest for origins.

Peterson also tries to see the ways inwhich female and male authors differ intheir attitudes, and the ways in whichFrench and English authors employ themotif of reading. As a feminist critic, sheuses the "method of radical comparativ-ism" of Myra Jehlen rather than the"gynocriticism" of Elaine Showalter inan effort to understand character, andthe ways in which female and male au-thors adapt and adopt attitudes towardreading, writing and knowledge.

Interestingly, Peterson argues that twowomen, Mme. de Staël through the nar-rator of Corinne ou l'Italie and CharlotteBrontë through the narrator/protagonistof Jane Eyre, come closest to achievingharmony and freedom through their re-vision of texts and re-reading of theworld. In so doing, these authors affirmwomen's right and ability to control cul-ture and the possibility for radically alter-ing the lives of women. All the otherauthors studied (Balzac, Dickens, Sten-dhal, Flaubert, Eliot and Hardy), al-though differing in their attitudes to-ward the liberating possibilities of knowl-edge, are seen to fail to imagine a

protagonist capable of escape throughknowledge.

Throughout the study, three narrativestructures emerge as the organizing prin-ciple for the novels: the Bildungsroman,the picaresque and the spiritual auto-biography. In discussing the cultural dif-ferences in applying these paradigms,Peterson suggests that the English novelis always more concerned with socialintegration and reconciliation, althoughthe possibility of achieving these ends isincreasingly denied and replaced by amovement toward interiority and regres-sion, while the French novel eschews thesocial in favour of imagining the triumphof the superior protagonist inspired by aNapoleonic will. However, the "radicalcomparison" of cultures is left entirely tothe reader, since English and Frenchworks are studied in separate chapters.The comparison of female and malewriters fares better, particularly in thechapter on Jane Eyre and David Copper-field. In particular, Peterson insists uponthe importance of the mediating role ofJane Eyre as narrator, interpreting herlife and quest. Peterson suggests that thetriumph of the actor Jane liberates thewriter, who in turn uses her writing todocument and disseminate her revision-ary life. Such success is not seen to occurin David Copperfield.

Equally interesting is the chapter onStendhal and Flaubert. Peterson arguesthat these two authors "abandoned maleforms of heroism" and "turned to theirheroines . . . seeking in them the possibili-ties of artistic and heroic self-realiza-tion," for they recognize in the female,the other, their own sense of alienationfrom patriarchal culture. Further, Peter-son sees these female characters as repre-sentations of the Dionysian artist, andtheir failures as the author's "final com-ment on the Romantic aspiration towardunity, reconciliation, and synthesis."

While unity, reconciliation and syn-

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thesis may seem impossible to the writersof nineteenth-century fiction, MacLar-en's narrative of three Scottish familieswho pioneered Canada affirms suchgoals. She suggests that her book's"strength lies not in individual renownbut within a spirit which binds the fam-ily continuum. In sharing their story,the Crosses, the Drevers and the Mac-leods have provided us with some histori-cal vision of two nations, and perhapswith a glimpse of our own ancestries,whatever they are." However, the dramaof three families, who were importantsettlers and founders in Upper Canada,Lower Canada and the Red River, islittle more than a family history.

Compulsive letter writers by trainingand necessity, the families offered Mac-Laren a massive amount of primary ma-terial on which to draw. Equally com-mitted to education, the families insistedupon education for their children, but aneducation radically different for girls andboys. In addition, as the generations pro-gressed, training for the males turnedfrom an emphasis on a classical educa-tion to an insistence on the need fortechnical and technological training inagriculture, animal husbandry and en-gineering. The pattern of education isitself a reflection of the family's fortunesbased initially on cultural backgroundand later on material achievement.

Structured as the quest of each gen-eration for experience and success, thiswork is patterned by the actions of thesons, whose conflicts with and rebellionagainst their fathers are finally reconciledin expansion of the family fortunes inthe west. The author chooses to traceclosely those sons who seek to escapepaternal hegemony and to find personaladventure. The unsettled frontier givesthem a literal space within which to findfathers. Female members of the familyattract attention only when they displaythe fortitude and courage necessary in

the mates of such heroic figures. Thusdespite initial rebellion and inevitableseparation, all individuals are seen aswedded to the imperatives and neces-sities of the families, which by coinci-dences of fate are joined together in themarriage of Ernest Cross and HelenDrever Macleod.

Along the way, the reader is immersedin details of geography and adventure.Since one of the Cross sons settled inWyoming while his brother pioneered Al-berta, the work promises the possibilityof an interesting radical comparison ofthe history of the settlement of the Cana-dian and American west. However, thework fails to deliver on this promise.Equally tantalizing is the chance to un-derstand the causes for the growth ofregionalism. Although frequently alludedto, regional hostilities are never exploredin any detail. Again and again, the bookturns from the social drama of nationbuilding to the family drama of fathersand sons. In telling this story, MacLarenacts only as compiler. Always sympa-thetic, at times an apologist, she neveranalyzes the impact, particularly nega-tive, of the families on the developmentof Canadian culture, and her assertionthat we can all see shadows of our ances-tors in these actors, particularly if we didnot happen to come from the empirewhich controlled Canada, is tenuous atbest. While a reader may turn to thiswork for interesting incident and suc-cessful endings, at least as measured bymaterial wealth, she will come away littlethe wiser about the larger history of Can-ada.

The narrator of the novel Miss Abi-gail's Part does, however, emerge a wiseras well as richer person. Subtitled 'Ver-sion and Diversion,' the novel is a re-vision of Jane Austen's Mansfield Parkwritten from the point of view of JaneHartwell, lady's maid. But Jane is also apicaresque hero in her own right. Dis-

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playing many of the characteristics ofPeterson's determined reader, Jane is anorphan educated above her station. Em-ploying her knowledge, Jane offers acritique of those above stairs and oftenspeaks for her gender and class. This isall highly amusing, especially if you hap-pen to agree with Hartwell's interpreta-tion of Austen's characters, for example,the assertion that Fanny "was pale, mild,somewhat insipid and much put upon."

Turning from books to action to com-plete her education, Jane indulges in ro-mantic dalliance with Henry and therebygains sexual knowledge. Rather thanbeing destroyed by her fall from virtue,Jane, like a true picaro, capitalizes onchance and runs away with a politicalradical, who also happens to be a scenepainter employed for the disastrous ama-teur theatricals at the Park. Pursued bybounty hunters, they escape only to haveJane fall, literally, among thieves, whointroduce her to even more exotic formsof carnal knowledge. Always resourceful,Jane again escapes and learns yet an-other script, this time dramatic, whichleads her to fame and fortune on thestage. The plot closes inevitably withmarriage, as Jane finds a reasonable, edu-cated aristocrat, who has the good senseto marry her without fencing her in. LikeJane Eyre, Jane Hartwell turns from thelife of action back to the life of writing,and, as an instructing narrator, sets outto record her quest and to present itstriumphs and truth.

Judith Terry is well aware of the nar-rative structures of the novel, and putsthem to good use in her novel. She is alsofamiliar with the detail of life below andabove stairs in Austen's time, and usesfiction to convey many of the facts ofhistory. As such, the novel is an interest-ing social history as well as an amusingtale. Like many picaresque novels, char-acter is at times sacrificed to setting andincident. While Jane may be a-historical

and surprisingly unmarked by her cul-ture, she does allow her twentieth-century author an opportunity to exploreconditions of gender and class which areoften invisible in the novels of Austen'stime.

Although it would be inadvisable tooverburden the meaning of this novel, itdoes raise again the questions addressedby all these works. In an echo of JaneEyre, Jane Hartwell tells us that, as amature woman, she began to ponder thequestions of gender and class, rich andpoor, child and parent, past and present,and "to seek the answers with a measureof independence." Seeking the answersto these questions is the common groundfor all three works.

ANDREA LEBOWITZ

HEART STRINGSTED FERGUSON, Sentimental Journey: An Oral

History of Train Travel in Canada. Dou-bleday, $22.95.

ROBERT H. HAHN, None of the Roads WerePaved. Fitzhenry & Whiteside, $15.00.

"FOLK ART" WOULD BE the formal termfor these two informal books. Ted Fer-guson's Sentimental Journey is like a vastbutton collection. It presents over twohundred and sixty anecdotes of railwaytravel in Canada — reminiscences offood and weather and disaster and roy-alty — from as many unidentified story-tellers. Each tale is bright and colourful;the whole collection is unmatched andonly roughly sorted. Robert Hahn's Noneof the Roads were Paved, on the otherhand, is more like a quilt. Bits of familyanecdote are banded together by thecharacterization of "Dad"; the patchesof story are strong in themselves, sym-metrically shaped, and unified by thenarrator's way of telling.

Hahn's father propelled his familyfrom Eatonia, Saskatchewan, to the

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northern edge of the 1920's frontier, thenback through the prairies to Ontario andfinally to New York and wartime showbusiness. "Dad" was a Kroetsch char-acter: undertaker, car-dealer, repairman,bootlegger (nothing like a hearse for run-ning the Montana border ! ), swapper,and impressario. He traded his buildingskills for music lessons for his children,and then traded their musical talents fora family career in small-time entertain-ment. Hahn suggests candidly the grow-ing complexity of sibling rivalry and gen-erational friction, as the "HarmonyKids" moved through the rodeos, thebar-rooms, the service-club meetings,playing, singing, and dancing, underDad's orders.

Each chapter is cut to the shape ofanecdote: each reads as though it hadbeen told many times, keeping familymemories vivid, and making them intoacutely felt moments of initiation, con-frontation, and triumph. These are stor-ies of people who sound like Mitchell'sSaint Sammy, or like Laurence's NickKazlik. The stories suggest both the ma-terial that our prairie writers have foundavailable, and also the narrative voicesthey have heard, the kind of pitch to anaudience that has been second nature tothem.

To turn back to Ted Ferguson's bookis to experience reduced interest. Therailway story in Canada is a tremendousone, and this should be one way to tellit: by clusters of anecdotes, gathered inBrandon and Sudbury, Sutton and Ham-ilton, Dawson Creek and Moncton. Thevery names in the stories give the kindof pleasure that children find in DennisLee's Jelly Belly rhymes. The motifs thatmake up the chapter headings promiseto work well: "battling the elements,""the sporting life," "the war years," "theturbulent Turbo" — most of us recognizethe aptness of such groupings by a surgeof personal memories that could footnote

each chapter. Many Canadians remem-ber stories of the colourful people whoselives were somehow linked with railwaytravel: Harry McLean, John Diefen-baker, King Clancy, Fred Sloman of the"school-on-wheels." But somehow thewhole collection doesn't work, over thelong haul. No really engaging voicessound, no really surprising touches ofregional diction or time-tied detail pullthe heart-strings. And if folk art doesn'twork in that way its force is gone.

The problem perhaps is that Fer-guson's method as well as his material isfolksy. His introduction tells us nothingof his methods of interviewing, of re-cording the original versions of the taleshe heard, or of selecting and editing thefinal versions. Fair enough, in a book de-signed for general interest. But even thegeneral reader will lose some of the realpleasure of oral history, because of theextent of silent editing. A sample ofverbatim transcription, complete with"urns," and run-on sentences, and repe-titions and hesitations, would add arough authenticity. And you don't haveto be a social historian to find the pro-cess of collection suspect. Ferguson knewwhat he wanted: "I tried a dozen dif-ferent sources looking for someone whohad been on a harvest special," he says.Not a good method, and in this case notone to produce a valid report. The neigh-bour who eventually produced the re-quired reminiscence believed that theharvest excursions ended around 1930.Many easterners could tell a differentstory: McGill graduates still remembergoing from Montreal to Regina on thewartime harvest excursions, in 1942, forinstance, under the alcoholic chaperon-age of that engaging academic, ProfessorCulliton. Or the war brides story, touch-ingly told by the Brigadier who chap-eroned them — was this chosen in lieu oftales told by the brides themselves?(They're still an articulate and available

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group. ) The whole book would be betterif it followed, discreetly and unfussily,more canons of oral history. As it is — anice bunch of buttons, but many of themare a little too smooth. Yet, like theHahn book, these folk stories do stirmemories worth preserving, both of Ca-nadian travel and of Canadian tale-tellers.

ELIZABETH WATERSTON

CRITICALPROGRAMMESRONALD BINNS, Malcolm Lowry. Methuen,

$5-95-KERRY MC SWEENEY, Four Contemporary Nov-

elists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, JohnFowles, V. S. Naipaul. McGill-Queen'sUniv. Press, $24.95.

T H E VERY LOOK and shape of these twobooks signal some of the contrasts thatwe find within; indeed, prompt thereader to consider the possibility of somekind of comparative reaction. RonaldBinns' is a thin paperback, about pocketsize, with a crisply inked black, whiteand red cover hinting at urgency of re-sponse. Kerry McSweeney's is a sturdycloth-bound volume of standard size witha mutely coloured grey, white and reddust jacket inviting in the reader a cer-tain solemnity of response. In each case(and let me say right away that we havetwo good studies here, however differ-ent) , tone implied by surface featuresbetrays something of tone of voice within.

Binns dashes gaily and engaginglyabout, dancing here and there amongstand astride current critical attitudes, al-most flaunting an eclectic and informedpost-modern critical flair as he elucidatespieces of Malcolm Lowry's life and, moreextensively, Lowry's work, published andunpublished alike. McSweeney, occasion-ally willing to acknowledge the influence

of contemporary criticism either upon hisown work or upon the novelists withwhom he is concerned — Angus Wilson,Brian Moore, John Fowles, V. S. Naipaul— often seems barely able to endurethose very instances and, when it comesto open preference (or prejudice), es-chews anything smacking of the criticalfashions offered by structuralism, orsemiotics, as he proceeds deftly, tena-ciously, carefully — indeed, cautiouslyand conservatively, when judged byBinns' greater derring-do — closely read-ing the many novels which constitute hismaterial.

McSweeney, with his far longer list ofworks, relies on a systematic — essentiallycomparative — close reading of succes-sive texts, preferring to vary in form onlya little from chapter to chapter, sub-section to sub-section, in his discussionof theme, structure, character, and tech-nique. He begins with Wilson, consider-ing him not only as novelist of mannersand as social realist, but also as investi-gator into man's moral condition, par-ticularly into what McSweeney refers toas "the dilemmas of liberal humanistswho are forced to confront the reality ofevil without and within." McSweeneybrings to the work of what must be theleast known of his subjects, Brian Moore,an assessment focussing on what he seesas the cumulative richness withinMoore's work as it progresses throughtwelve novels; he finds special assurancein the representational quality in Moore's(as also in the other three writers') fic-tion, and sets it in the context of thetechnically conservative Moore's nega-tive attitudes — his "anti anti-roman"stance — toward much contemporaryfiction. Fowles seems to offer McSweeneythe richest field for investigation andanalysis: it is Fowles whom McSweeneymost relishes as he writes. Though Mc-Sweeney exults in what he thinks of asFowles' conservative aesthetic, his ample

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exploration of Fowles as stylist and tech-nician makes him seem a little harsh inusing Fowles — without much of anyqualification or question — to launch anattack (again) on the nouveau romanand its many relatives which involve somuch self-exploration of art as art. InNaipaul's work (again as in that of theothers) McSweeney praises the writer'saim to "communicate" (a term Mc-Sweeney likes to use in relation to hispreference for representational art) andcriticizes novelists in whom the concernfor "style and technical perfection" seemsto predominate over any obvious societalconcerns.

Although he is sometimes boxed in byhis own structure, McSweeney spreadshis analysis evenly to all the clearly iden-tified corners of each of his subjects inturn, with a tone more controlled, lessobviously vigorous, less pressing thanBinns'. Where McSweeney actually losesground and flirts with the possibility ofa reductive treatment of his material isin his repetitive pursuit of categories tooartificially, too obsessively sustained. Atthe same time, the rigorously maintainedstructure of his project provides a kindof linear clarity the reader misses inBinns' seemingly more random ap-proaches to various kinds of fiction. Mc-Sweeney allows no gaps, no snap judg-ments; Binns risks, and willingly extends,both.

Binns, touching on many but not com-mitted to any critical programmes(though Marx and Freud keep makingappearances alongside other kin), neatlyavoids the pitfalls of using critical pos-tures which might simply close in upontheir own mode of discourse without eversaying very much about the literary textsat hand. He conveys a sense of warmlyembracing worlds wider than his sub-ject's, and of using those worlds to en-large his subject, and, in the process, hisreader. McSweeney, sometimes miffed at

the very existence of critical postureswhich revel, for example, in the "pyro-technics" of writing (such as JohnBarth's), prefers to incorporate his re-spective novelists' own statements aboutlife and literature in the formulation ofcentral parts of his thesis, in the map-ping out of his terrain. Sometimes heuses these sources — valuable enough asleads, though dangerous when appliedliterally — a little too passively, however;he takes the writers too much at theirword, takes without sufficient cautiontheir statements of intention, in his effortto admire and assess and place theirwork.

Binns, placing Lowry in the anti-realisttradition and ascribing to him a role oflonely, pioneering metafictionalist pursu-ing a fiction of "fracture, disintegration,warring moods and tendencies," opensfor Lowry students doors McSweeneyprefers to shut. In urging on his readeran expanded and expanding critical viewof Lowry, Binns reveals that Lowry'swork can endlessly reward, and with-stand, a growing legion of critical en-quiries. Ironically enough, in the endBinns' opening of doors to shed freshcritical light is actually confined to roomsthat even McSweeney (with his reiter-ated interest in humanity) feels at homein, by insisting that Lowry's is a "human-centered experimentalism."

Even non-print technologies such ascinema are seen — like current criticalideologies — as threats by McSweeney,opportunities by Binns. For example,Binns suggests that cinema providedLowry with one of many metaphorical orconceptual models for expanding hisrange as a writer, that cinema in factstimulates the novelist, contributes to thegrowth of the novel. Indeed, for BinnsLowry's film-script based on the novel ofa fellow artist (Tender Is the Night byF. Scott Fitzgerald) represents a majorand important stage in Lowry's develop-

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ment as a writer. Binns aptly describesthe (soon to be published) script as "akind of hybrid metafiction which decon structs the Fitzgerald novel and remakesit in the image of one by Malcolm Lowry.. . . When it is . . . published i t . . . canonly boost Lowry's reputation." Mc Sweeney is altogether fearful of litera ture's connections with cinema and, ac cepting at face value references to thetyranny of film upon the passive viewer,or to the fragmentation of modern manby the medium of film (while the novel"offers an approach to the possibility ofwholeness" ) , reiterates arguments oftenrehearsed in literary reviews as early as1920. Of course, these arguments —though most have been long eclipsed —have some truth in them, but surely Mc Sweeney is too categorical, too dogmatic,in his application of these truths.

U nderlining Binns' interpretation ofLowry is a political reading — interweav ing (oddly, perhaps, for a critic trying tokeep some distance between life and art)the stages of Lowry's political attach ments with the stages of his writing.Binns stresses Lowry's drift away fromleft leaning politics partly by pointing tothe contrast between Lowry's marriageof the 1930's (to Jan G abrial) and hismarriage of the 1940's and 1950's (toMargerie Bonner). Political attitudes ofthe 1930's, Binns suggests, gave Lowry aoneness with his material which he wasalmost unable to recapture after writingUnder the Volcano. But Binns, howevershrewd in freshly placing Lowry as manand artist within wide frames of refer ence (whether in terms of critical idiom,the context of cinema, or the influence ofpolitics, for example), sometimes giveshis subject short shrift of his own kind.For example, when he says that forLowry "these two characters representthe poles of human possibility — whetherto be actively part of society, fighting tochange it, or whether to be outside it

altogether as addict, visionary and drop out," he is on the verge of caricaturingLowry.

Certainly both critics, however dis similar their responses, are alert to the"problematic nature of fictional form inour time" (to quote from McSweeney'sreference to Bergonzi) ; and a compari son of their vastly different stances ascritics suggests something of the proble matic nature — and the richness and va riety — of the form of criticism in ourtime. McSweeney might very well enjoyreading Binns, for Binns has in the endemployed contemporary critical formsconservatively, however effectively. Mc Sweeney is too shrill in eschewing suchtechniques. Yet, ironically enough, it isMcSweeney who borrows from post modern fictional codes when he insertshimself fairly intrusively into his owntext, intervening, for example, to describecaustically the very process by which itwas appraised by a reader when it wasstill in manuscript form. Does Mc Sweeney thereby claim the last chuckle?

McSweeney's study — unlike Binns' —ends with an index, thereby remindingus that it can lay claim to a degree ofencyclopedic breadth of analysis. I t in vites the reader who will return timeafter time, seeking out commentaryevenly distributed title by title. Binns'book awaits the writer who will carry onthe conversation.

PAUL TIESSEN

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LAZAROV1TCHTO LAYTONELSPETH CAMERON, Irving Layton, a Portrait.

Stoddart, n.p.

IT IS ALL SUMMED up on pages 452-457.We learn that like "many Jewish immi-grants to North America, [Layton] hadmade an important contribution to thearts and to culture." He won prizes. Etc.His poems are a "truly remarkableachievement": "roughly fifteen areworld-class poems. . . ." "Another thirtyfive are extremely good." Etc. "In hisbest work, he does not employ coarse lan-guage." "As a lover, Layton was excit-ing, bold, all-consuming, tender. . . ." "Itis as a father that he has been most vul-nerable." Etc. "He proved himself theperpetual child."

Thus, and with a little more of thesame, Elspeth Cameron sums up IrvingLayton. But why, after 450 pages, isthere this need for a condensed Layton?Not, I think, just to close off the book.Not just to retain (or re-establish) thetidy voice. It is, rather, a compensationfor the fact that she had lost track of hersubject some 100 pages earlier — perhapsas early as the chapter "The Day AvivaCame to Paris" (pages 305-307; the yearwas 1959). Granted, her subject was onthe move. But somewhere along the wayCameron lost the authorial voice whichshe had established in the earlier part ofthe book. Her predicament raises somequestion for us about biographical writ-ing, especially on prominent authors, onsubjects like Layton whose life is alreadyinscribed in writing.

Irving Layton, a Portrait provides, forabout 300 pages, if not a model at leastan organized representation of a life thatwas already authorized as culturally sig-nificant. "Irving Layton" had alreadybeen invented : the life, the life-style, the

name (something more than just the in-vented "Layton" from "Lazarovitch" ) .The biographer of an already culturallyestablished figure has, at the very least,a doubled task: the invented must bere-invented. A given life must be repro-duced in a "closed" text, in this case theframed portrait, and given again. Bakh-tin's term "heteroglossia" takes us to theproblem: "all utterances are heteroglotin that they are functions of a matrix offorces practically impossible to recoup,and therefore impossible to resolve." Thepossibilities for achieving objectivity areslim indeed.

In Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form,Ira Nadel has argued persuasively thatbiographical writing is, in special ways,fiction. Within the fictional mode of bio-graphical writing, we expect somethingresembling objectivity, an authority es-tablished not by facts but by perspectiveand discourse. Cameron provides muchfactual material, and for awhile herwriting provides the perspective neces-sary to create such authority. But for anumber of reasons — her own position,her subject, the cultural congruities andincongruities residing in herself and inher subject — she fails to maintain herdistance, to maintain her perspective, herown authority. Perhaps Cameron herselfknows that it would have been better topublish a different book, Irving Layton:the Early Years. Her archaeological proj-ect would not then have left so muchdebris.

Biographical writing has its specificconventional modes: the exemplary life,the growth of the writer's mind, the lifeand work (or times) of X, the "casestudy" of Y. (Nadel provides a valuablediscussion of the problem.) Cameronchose one of the most demanding con-ventions, the "life and work," almost"life and times," model. Authority in thismode is established by, among other pow-ers, patience, "sheer plod," combined

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with the awareness of cultural factors,including ideological factors, that con-struct a life: selection, arrangement,omission, connection, all within someplan. For the early years, Cameron car-ries out this procedure with deliberation.The plan is in place, if somewhat awk-wardly, at the beginning: it is that ofdocumenting the transformation of thesubject, the movement — seemingly in-evitable (fictionally considered) —fromIsrael Lazarovitch to Irving Layton.

Let it be said: there are wonderfulre-creations in this book. The documen-tation of family situation, early schooling,the immigrant community in Montreal,the influence of certain teachers, theearly reading, his study of politics, therelation with Suzanne Rosenberg, thepolitical activism, the attraction to andrevulsion from institutionalized learning,and the steady movement towards be-coming "Layton" — these provide in-sight not only into the subject, but intothe forces of Montreal's intellectual andliterary (and anglophone) culture. Cam-eron rightly documents Layton's study ofpolitics, but she does not demonstrate anadequacy of political and ideological in-sight into what the issues are. This is thecase with her treatment of Layton's re-lation to Nietzsche. She sloughs off ideo-logical references when they are the for-mative material for the kind of biogra-phy that she is writing. The put-down ofLayton's M.A. thesis ("fuzzy" because,for example, he "argued that Nietzscheand Marx were similar") is too slick. Tomake her point, Cameron needs to showwhat grounds of similarity Layton putforth. There are similarities. Cameron'sjejune ideological references mar her fre-quently informative discourse. In her"Preface" (written last, we assume), sherefers to Layton's career as a zig-zag in-scribed best by Zorro's "Z." This cheap-ens the effort from the start (and itmarks, of course, the fate of her own

discourse), but it does set up the pos-sibility (the missed opportunity) of usingNietzsche's Zarathustra, an emblem whocould have led her into the kind of seri-ous life-writing, the kind of critique, thatis finally missing from this book.

The point here is not to note specificfailures, but rather to emphasize thecomplexity of writing about a life thathas to a considerable degree already beeninvented, in a sense, already written. Thebook is conceptually at odds with theparticular talents that Cameron has:gathering information, getting people totalk openly to her, organizing a difficultproject, persistency in tracing possibleleads, becoming an authority over detail,mastering the mysteries of annotation.Had her model been consistent with hertalent, then we could have had a coher-ent book. She would have done well totake an example from her colleague,G. E. Bentley, Jr., whose Blake Recordsprovides the guidelines for what, ideally,ought first to be done, before the ar-chaeological site has been cluttered.

In the biography of a poet, there mustbe an accounting of the poems, of thepoet's own reading of her or his life.Cameron's forte is not textual interpreta-tion. Poems fit most often into thisbiography as pieces of documentation:"Here's an event. Here's a poem aboutit!" This failure of interpretative power,by omission and commission, is conspicu-ous in the treatment afforded "A TallMan Executes a Jig." This is identified as"one of his best poems." Its narrative"approximates Shakespearian blankverse." (Why or how it approximatesShakespearian blank verse we are left towonder.) The dying snake is noted.There is a summary discussion of "exe-cution," and then the conclusive sum-ming up: "To attain aesthetic beautyand stature, Layton's poem suggests, thepoet must be an immoral hypocrite." The

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thought that this will be quoted in stu-dent essays is too much to bear.

The reading that Cameron offers ofthis poem, coming as it does at what Ihave already noted as a turning point inthe book, marks the move from the au-thority of disclosure, which is the biog-rapher's position, to her own authorial,interpretative disapproval which charac-terizes the later part of the book. It willbe interesting to see which way Cameronmoves next : I hope that it will be towardthe kind of serious biographical writingthat she has, at times, shown herself ableto do.

BEN JONES

DIAMOND& DAYDREAMw. p. KiNSELLA, The Iowa Baseball Confed-

eracy. Collins, $19.95.

LIKE W. P. KINSELLA'S first novel, Shoe-less Joe, this book defies easy description.To call either work "just" a baseballnovel would not do it justice, for bothdeal with far more than the game; theyare about life itself, the bittersweet quali-ties of loves lost and time past, and inthe new book a marathon game in Iowabecomes a metaphor for the physical andspiritual struggles of the human condi-tion. The Iowa Baseball Confederacyconjures up memories of such diverseworks as "Back to the Future," OurTown, The Wizard of Oz, Faust, LakeWobegone Days, One Flew Over theCuckoo's Nest, and "Dear Hearts andGentle People." Mostly, however, it re-minds me of Shoeless Joe's mix of sub-jects: love, family, baseball, religion,mystery, local colour, Indian lore, his-tory, time, magic.

To enjoy this book fully, you must be-lieve — or want to believe — that magic

is possible, that the immutable forces oftime and death can and should be chal-lenged. If you don't, you probably won'taccept the outlandish premise of thenovel: a man named Gideon Clarkeattempts to demonstrate memory in-herited from his father, namely that the1908 Chicago Cubs, contrary to all sur-viving records, really did play a fantasticexhibition game against a collection ofIowa All-Stars. Seventy years after thefact, Gideon sneaks through a "crack intime" to relive the epic struggle that tookplace in a tiny town on the outskirts ofIowa City.

Magic in this novel affects time, place,and action. It is startling enough thatGideon is able to travel back in time,but what at first appears to be an in-nocent yearning to experience the pastturns out to be a struggle to the deathwith death and the ravages of time. Fromthe beginning, when Gideon's father re-counts the "one moment in which youwould like to live forever. . . . One mo-ment when you'd like to be frozen intime," to the end, when Gideon hopes,"Perhaps there does not have to be anymore death. Perhaps time can be de-feated," time and death prompt the fas-cinating revelations of this novel.

The magic of place shapes Iowa Cityand its fictional neighbour, Onamata,formerly called Big Inning. Residents ofIowa City (Johnson County) — and theCanadian Kinsella is one of them, divid-ing his time between there and WhiteRock, B.C. — speak of a certain "magic"which pervades the area, much as didGideon's father, who was "always talk-ing of the magic in the air."

The magic of action is the sport ofbaseball. Here as elsewhere, Kinsellalyrically praises the great game, butagain, baseball is the means not the end.Baseball is the perfect medium throughwhich to illumine the magic and mysteryof human existence.

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Name me a more perfect game! Name mea game with more possibilities for magic,wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo, enchantment, ob-session, possession. There's always time fordaydreaming, time to create your own illu-sions at the ballpark. I bet there isn't amagician anywhere who doesn't love base-ball. Take the layout. No mere mortalcould have dreamed up the dimensions ofa baseball field. No man could be that per-fect. Abner Doubleday, if he did indeedinvent the game, must have received divineguidance.

When does a dream become a quest,and a quest become an obsession? Thisquestion is central to the novel. Gideonand his father are obsessed with provingtheir theory, defeating time, and rewrit-ing history. His friend Stan alwaysdreamed of making the big leagues, buthis success against the Cubs in Iowa turnsthe dream to an obsession : eventually heis ready to leave his faithful wife Gloria"behind" in the future. The Indiannamed Drifting Away is obsessed withdefeating time by restoring his dead wifeto life, and his will collides with that ofthe ancestral spirits who insist on theirown obsessions. What links all of thesecharacters is the song "I Shall Not BeMoved." This is the favourite hymn ofBig Inning/Onamata believers and thewatchword of the caricatured Twelve-Hour Church of Time Immemorial. Thechurch members have their obsessions,too — "Iowa stubbornness" and bizarrereligious customs. It takes the flood, light-ning, and death of the apocalyptic forty-day ballgame to bring them all to a senseof tolerance and self-sacrifice.

If the book were not so well paced,one could easily be inundated by theabundance of stimuli, but the novel'sstructure, with only a few exceptions,precludes that. The plot is roughly di-vided into thirds, not exactly correspond-ing to the three parts called "The Warm-up," "The Game," and "Post-gameShow." Each segment addresses the ques-tions facing the narrator: Was there

really a league called The IBC? Did itsall-star team play the champion Cubs?Can one go back in time? As these ques-tions are answered, others arise, intro-ducing a new stage of the novel andkeeping the reader wondering until therapid denouement: Will Gideon be ableto change history? Will he get to staywith his love, Sarah? Can he and Stanreturn to 1978? Who will win the biggame, and what forces are at work pro-longing the action?

The tale is reported in the first personby Gideon Clarke, but segments of hisfather's book on the Baseball Confed-eracy are reproduced in italics, and puta-tive articles from the Iowa City Citizen,which nowhere mention the conspiracy,are interspersed in the narrative. Scornedby an unbelieving public but absolutelypositive that the league existed, Gideongains the reader's sympathy and supportas he strives to prove his contention.When a dying man confirms Gideon'sbelief, we share the narrator's satisfac-tion that his intuition was correct andjoin him in slipping through the knotholein time which admits us to the ballparkat Big Inning, Iowa.

This is the transition from the firstpart of the novel to the second. Themove from the second to the third partoccurs when Drifting Away, the Sac-FoxIndian who holds the key to the contest,tells Gideon, "I will tell you about thegame, the whys and wherefores of it."His revelations, however, are gradual,and the reader must wait until the endof the book for enlightenment. It is onlythen, as we yearn for the denouement,that the novel shows its major weakness.

The game is too long and the explana-tion for it too complex and confusing, atleast on first reading. In creating moresuspense than in Shoeless Joe, Kinsellahas sacrificed some of the clarity andsubtleness that marked the former novel.His otherwise delightful propensity for

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fantasy and innovation becomes so bi-zarre that the reader, who was willing to"believe," begins to question the faith.Whereas slipping through cracks in timeis an exquisite idea, watching Leonardoda Vinci float in on a balloon and claimto have invented baseball is not. NamingGideon's sister Enola Gay might be cute,especially when she turns out to be anurban guerilla, a "bomber," but animat-ing an Iowa City statue called The BlackAngel and putting her in right fieldagainst the Cubs is distracting. Therecould have been less time spent on theIndian lore and on Gideon's love affairwith Sarah. Both play an important rolebut, like the game, would be more effec-tive if condensed.

When Kinsella writes in his last chap-ters, "The game slogs on," and "Thegame sputters along," the reader istempted to say, "Yes, and so does thenovel." That would be clever but unfair,for The Iowa Basehall Confederacy is anextremely entertaining book. But Shoe-less Joe is the proverbial tough act tofollow. If Shoeless Joe is, as some be-lieve, the greatest baseball novel ever,then The Iowa Baseball Confederacy isnot far behind.

ALLEN E. HYE

DE SE DIREIRENE BELLEAU & GILLES DORION, eds . , Les

oeuvres de creation et le français au qué-bec, Tome III. Editeur officiel du Québec,n.p.

T H I S IS THE THIRD volume of proceed-ings of a conference titled Language andSociety in Quebec. The conference, heldin 1982, was co-sponsored by the reviewQuébec français, the Quebec Associationof Teachers of French and the Conseilde la langue française. The text includestwelve sections, each treating a differentarea of Quebec's cultural life: comic

strips, song, literary criticism, the legendand short story, children's literature,pedagogy, poetry, the novel, the téléro-man, science fiction, minority cultures,and feminist literature. There was aworkshop on theatre at the conference,but it was not included in this volume,for reasons which are not explained.

The keynote speaker was Victor-LevyBeaulieu. His remarks are provocative inthe extreme. He accuses Quebec of beingprovincial, traditional, banal, and "neu-tralisé." According to him, Quebec suf-fers from "l'absence d'un véritable projetcollectif, tant politique que social et re-ligieux." He refers to the province as "cemonde arrêté, enfermé et moisi" andaffirms that the only true writers Quebechas produced are Hubert Aquin andJacques Ferron. For Beaulieu, "le Que-bec, ce n'est pas un pays, mais une cho-rale!" He concludes by announcing hisintention to return to writing, "puisqueécrire est un désespoir, bien sûr, maisun désespoir entreprenant, radical etjoyeux."

The remainder of the presentationsare less polemical and more scholarly.Gilles Dorion, for example, on the sub-ject of the novel, discerns two groups ofwriters since 1970: those, like JacquesGodbout, who are concerned with politi-cal questions, and those, like Marie-Claire Biais, who write about social andpersonal issues. He notes, however, thatthese differences are more apparent thanreal and uses the writing of Yves Beau-chemin to illustrate his point : "Cet écri-vain traduit bien la double orientationdes romans de la dernière décennie: lesproblèmes de la collectivité québécoise etles préoccupations de l'individu." UnlikeVictor-Lévy Beaulieu, Gilles Dorion isimpressed with Quebec's literary life andis optimistic about its future : "Le romanest devenu très florissant et il contribueà accorder à la littérature québécoise unevoix singulièrement puissante et une au-

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tonomie indiscutable parmi les littéra-tures de langue français."

Noël Audet's piece on language is thestuff of which Victor-Levy Beaulieu'sworst nightmares are made. Audet arguesfor continental French as the languageof Quebec and the mainstay of the Que-bec novel. However, he recognizes thatthe novelist must be free to use all thelinguistic resources at his disposal : "Dansce sens, les langues d'une collectivité sontcomme un orchestre sous le doigt du ro-mancier, orchestre dont il faut savoirharmoniser les voix selon ce que l'on veutdire." Audet dismisses as myth the notionthat Quebec has the power to impose"joual" on the French-speaking world,since it isn't even common to all of Que-bec. He concludes urging Quebec writersto use "nos parlers comme une richesse etnon comme le signal d'une indigencelinguistique que l'on essaie de faire passerpour un droit sacré."

Gabrielle Poulin's contribution, "L'Es-pace romanesque: un territoire à défen-dre," is a spirited defence of the writer'sartistic integrity and his struggle to ex-press himself amidst commercial consid-erations which sometimes seem over-whelming and tend to dominate discus-sions about literature. For Gabrielle Pou-lin, if publishers must be concerned withsales at home and abroad, the properterritory for the writer's concern is thecentre of himself which he explores whenhe puts pen to paper. That is the terri-tory to defend.

The collection is a lively and diversi-fied series of presentations which repre-sents modern Quebec. In the words ofone of the editors, "ces multiples facettesde l'écriture québécoise manifestent unevolonté collective de s'affirmer, de senommer, de se dire avec une foi et unevigueur sans cesse renouvelées."

PAUL G. SOCKEN

MEANINGFULNONSENSEELIZABETH CLEAVER, The Enchanted Caribou.

Oxford Univ. Press, $8.95.ROBERT HEiDBREDER, Don't Eat Spiders, illus.

Karen Patkau. Oxford Univ. Press, $9.95.ALLEN MORGAN, Le Camion, illus. Michael

Martchenko, trans. Raymonde Longval-Ducreux. Editions La courte échelle, $5.95.

ROBERT MUNSCH, Le Dodo, illus. MichaelMartchenko, trans. Raymonde Longval-Ducreux. Editions La courte échelle, $5.95.

DON oicKLE, Edgar Potato, illus. Sue Skaalen.Ragweed, $4.95.

IF "WE ARE ALL poets when we read apoem well," then children's books oughtto be particularly sensitive to the kind ofpoetic creation their books permit. Anillogical, facile, condescending book cre-ates its own appropriate reader; an im-aginative, demanding book creates a verydifferent one. Whether in response torhythm, dialogue, humour, or illustra-tion, reading demands that a child par-ticipate in the text, and given that theirintended audience differs so remarkablyfrom their creators, children's authorsshould be particularly sensitive to ques-tions of participation. Even nonsensemust respect its reader. What is thebook's attitude towards the child, howdoes the book involve the child, makinghim or her in Carlyle's sense a poet, sen-sitive to the meaning of the universe?

One certain way to create the childpoet/reader is through humour and illus-tration. La courte échelle has just pub-lished translations by Raymonde Long-val-Ducreux of Robert Munsch's Morti-mer and Allen Morgan's Matthew andthe Midnight Tow Truck. Both textspreserve the original illustrations by Mi-chael Martchenko. In Le Dodo the per-spective is that of the adult outsider.What does one do with a child who re-fuses to sleep but persists in singing atthe top of his lungs? Munsch and Mart-

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chenko's response is to exaggerate thesituation and laugh at both the child andthe tormented adults. With each threat,the child's song grows more exuberantuntil after his seventeen brothers andsisters warn him, his song fills the room.Martchenko's illustration shows musicnotes upsetting the bed, the lamp, thecurtains, even the teddy bear. The policeare then called in, and the next illustra-tion parodies the criminal's interrogationas their bright flashlights seemingly in-timidate tiny naked Simon (Mortimerin the English version) and his teddy.Martchenko even adds a detail not men-tioned in the prose, a frightened Simonhiding under the blankets as the policedepart. But the joke is that no one wins.Upstairs Simon continues to sing; down-stairs everyone screams, and Simon bored,finally falls asleep. Perhaps if anyonewins, it is Simon, still blessed with thechild's ability to ignore noise.

Le Camion tells its story from a child'sperspective, the fantasy of a little boywho loves two things above all, liquoriceand toy trucks. His daytime frustrationprovokes his midnight adventure/dreamin which he helps a tow truck driver dohis work. The driver not only appreciateshis help; he shows that Mathieu's valuesare his own, for his lunch box is full ofred liquorice: "La réglisse rouge c'estbon, ça donne de gros muscles." Thedriver even tows trucks for his own col-lection and when he gets two similarones, he trades them. The magic thatchildren's fantasy allows explains howthe driver keeps a collection; he takesMathieu to a magic carwash that shrinkscars. By the end of his adventure,Mathieu's initial sadness has disappeared ;he has also learned how to protect hismother's car from the midnight towtrucks by sticking a piece of liquoriceunder the windshield wiper, and evenbetter, his mother believes him. In thefinal illustration, mother and child walk

away both clutching their magic tokens,red liquorice.

Young children's books seem obsessedwith all kinds of food as seen in the titlesof two other books, Edgar Potato andDon't Eat Spiders. Unlike Wilbur the pigin Charlotte's Web, Edgar the potatowants to be eaten but is fearful that hisexceptional size makes him unlovableand therefore undesirable: "'Who wouldever want you, Edgar? . . . You'll betough and pulpy.'" Obviously a childsubstitute in his yearning for acceptanceand friendship, Edgar is even shownwearing a diaper. This all seems verycute until we think about a child's pos-sible relationship to such a text. Concen-trating on the loneliness of the unhappypotato, Don Oickle does not pursue thepeculiar implications of these vain po-tatoes wanting to be devoured. Obviouslyin Oickle's universe, as is likely in ours,vegetables exist to be eaten. The ludi-crous vanity of potatoes fantasizing theirultimate appearance — baked, fried, orinstant — is not fully explored when Ed-gar gets his wish and wins a contest at acountry fair. The triumph frees him fromhis sense of inferiority, but what happensto prize-winning potatoes? The analogycan only go so far, leaving a story neces-sarily incomplete and unsatisfactory, forwhat child identifying with Edgar wantsto be eaten?

Don't Eat Spiders is far more success-ful in respecting a child's relation to thetext, and exploring the meaning of eat-ing and being eaten. Robert Heidbreder'srhythmic nonsense poetry is reminiscentof Dennis Lee with its attention to Cana-dian place and detail ("The Casa LomaDragon" and the polar bear at Churchill,Manitoba) as well as its belief that fearand food are the two children's topicsalways popular, especially in conjunctionwith a few naughty words. So "the barebear fell / on his big bum bum" and"Ellie the Elephant" ends with "YUK!"

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Some poems are essentially children'sjokes as in the ending of "Hippopota-mus" :

but you don't see wheelson a Hippopotamus —UNLESS SHE'S ROLLER SKATING!

Some poems work through titillation, ex-ploring the unacceptable, as in the titlepoem where the child ignores the father'swarning and eats a spider, a brave act ofdefiance and curiosity that leaves himmiserably transformed. Adults never an-swer children's questions — had Daddyexplained why he should not eat spiders,would the child have listened? We willnever know, but the child spider certainlygives us sufficient reason not to indulge:"Cause if you eat spiders / You mighteat ME!" Always the child reader ismade part of the text: the dinosaur birdwho gobbles children in "Bird's Nest" islooking for him; the child trapped insidea polar bear in "Polar Bear Snow" ap-peals for help; "Here Comes the Witch"and "The Giant Snail" both approachthe reader. In all of these poems, thechild is either eaten or barely escapesbeing eaten. Comedy results from the ex-pression of the unspeakable fear. Only"Sticky Maple Syrup" reverses the pat-tern, as Heidbreder explores anotherchildhood food fear, the unacceptablebut avoidable dilemma of making a mess.In the poem the mess has spread "Fromsea to sticky sea." Karen Patkau's illus-tration gives us a child in bed beingrolled by splendid waves of syrup. Thespeaker vows never to be trapped by a"grizzly bear who's hungry / For mymaple syrup feet" and thus finds justifi-cation to do the politely taboo, lick upmaple syrup "Wherever you may be."

Elizabeth Cleaver's The EnchantedCaribou raises the issue of definition. Al-though children are implied in Cleaver'snotes on how to construct shadow pup-pets, the book is a children's book only

through our mistaken assumption thatchildren alone want to read books withillustrations. If that is true, so much theworse for the adults, for The EnchantedCaribou, both prose and illustration,would seem to fit Carlyle's view of thetrue book, the one in tune with the spiri-tual nature of the universe, the one thatinspires us to wonder and a recognitionof order. If citing Carlyle seems incon-gruous in a review of children's books,we should recall that Carlyle bitterlylamented that in his time this true seeingwas frequently relegated to the world ofchildhood. Yet Cleaver's story aboutartistic creation and the power of lan-guage should be appreciated by adultstoo. Her spare prose and black and whiteillustrations create a permanence of thistale about the caribou, a feeling aboutthe significance of all our actions quitedifferent from the silliness of Edgar Po-tato. Children deserve more books likeThe Enchanted Caribou and fewer likeEdgar Potato with its implicitly trivialconcept of children's literature. There isnonsense and then there is meaningfulnonsense, the story that takes us beyondsense into wonder and poetry. A bookjust good enough for children is not goodenough.

ADRIENNE KERTZER

POET-CONFESSORL. R. EARLY, Archibald Lampman. Twayne,

n.p.

L. R. EARLY'S Archibald Lampman isthe first book-length critical study of oneof the most important and interestingfigures in Canada's literary history.Early's book is a well-written and gen-erally intelligent work, providing manyvaluable insights into Lampman's poetry.However, Early's study is also limitedand deficient in a number of important

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ways that give it preliminary rather thana definitive status.

Early's first biographical chapter is oneof the weakest in the book. It consists ofa largely pedestrian summary of factsabout Lampman's life and literary ca-reer. Early has not adequately related hissubject to the socio-economic and cul-tural matrix of late nineteenth-centuryCanada. Neither has the critic made asufficient attempt to analyze Lampman'scharacter and motivations, to probe intothe more intimate areas of his life, suchas his relationship with Katherine Wad-dell. These shortcomings result in arather stodgy account of an extremelyinteresting man. They likewise leave usinadequately prepared to understand therelationships between Lampman's poetryand his life, a possibly serious deficiencyin dealing with an artist who wrotelargely in the Romantic "confessional"mode.

Early's next chapter deals first with theinfluence upon Lampman of English Ro-manticism, the critic stressing the cen-tral importance for Lampman's verse ofWordsworth and Keats. Early is cer-tainly correct in seeing these two poets asdecisive for Lampman's art, and he dis-cusses the various aspects of their influ-ence in an intelligent, informed manner.However, the critic's stress here andthroughout his book upon the signifi-cance of the Romantics for Lampmanis unfortunately at the expense of aproper appreciation of other influencesupon the poet. Early says nothing con-cerning the possible impact upon Lamp-man of the New England Transcenden-talists, who surely form a bridge bothhistorically and geographically betweenthe Confederation poets and the EnglishRomantics. Early also underestimatesand sometimes unjustly stigmatizes theinfluence upon Lampman of the majorVictorians. For example, the poet doubt-less derived his ideas about elective sex-

ual affinity at least partly from Browning,while Tennyson was an obviously signifi-cant and often beneficial influence uponLampman's poetic style. In "The Storyof an Affinity" and elsewhere, there area number of striking passages that recallthe Laureate in their cadence and/ortheir felicity and exactness of descriptivephrase :

The meadow with its braid of marguerites,That ran like glittering water in the windHe passed unseen. The tireless bob-o-link,Poised on the topmost spray of some young

elm,Or fluttering far above the flowered grass,Showered gaily on an unobservant earHis motley music of swift flutes and bells.

Finally, something should have been saidabout Lampman's relationship to latenineteenth-century Aestheticism, to the"fin-de-siècle" temper.

Early's next five chapters deal succes-sively with Lampman's nature poems, hisverse devoted to political and socialthemes, his love poetry, and the lastpieces written during the years 1896-99.In general, Early displays an intelligent,judicious, and cultivated mind. His anal-yses are almost always solid and helpful,and provide frequent insight. For ex-ample, his brief discussion of "the imageof a prolonged high noon" as it relatesto some of Lampman's early nature po-ems is excellent. So is Early's treatmentof "The Story of an Affinity," a neg-lected piece in which the critic discoversmuch to merit respectful attention. Forinstance, Early finds in the poem a richmythopoeic synthesis of redactions of theOdysseus story and Biblical/Mil tonic ac-counts of man's fall and redemption.Sometimes, however, Early's discussionswould have benefited from being pushedfurther, from more intellectual risk-tak-ing. The critic might also have paidmuch more attention to Lampman's con-summate skill with metre, sound "colour"and the like: while Lampman's "paint-

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erly" bent is obvious in his verse (anaspect of his art to which Early doesmore than justice), the poet was likewisemasterful in handling the "musical" as-pects of his form.

Early's commentaries upon Lamp-man's best-known works vary in theirvalue. The critic's treatment of "Heat"is adequate, but he fails to combine hisown good insights with those of previouscritics to synthesize a definitive interpre-tation of this rich and complex poem.Early might, for example, have pursuedmy own previous hints about the influ-ence on "Heat" of Coleridge's theoriesconcerning the imagination. The criticobviously dislikes "At the Long Sault. . . ," and to me he does this fine andmoving poem a major injustice in at-tempting to dismiss it as conventionaland largely lacking in significance. Onthe other hand, Early's analysis of apiece he finds inspiring, "The City of theEnd of Things," is excellent. His treat-ment of the poem in terms of psychologi-cal forces that shape civilizations is illu-minating indeed. He is less successful indealing with "The Frogs." He could havesaid more about the complex implica-tions of the poem's central symbol (thefrogs for example combining a sexual/Dionysian with a spiritual/Apolloniansignificance), and have noted Lamp-man's echoing of Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters."

Archibald Lampman is by no meansunworthy as the first full-length study ofan important Canadian writer. The de-ficiencies of Early's work stem in partfrom a certain intellectual narrownessand naivete, and doubtless also from therestrictions of the Twayne format. Bothof these impediments to Early's expres-sion of his very real critical gifts canfortunately be remedied in the future.Early is capable of writing a major bookon Lampman, and it is to be hoped he

will do so after further thought andstudy.

JOHN OWER

CONSERVATISMEROBERT LALONDE, Une Belle journée d'avance.

Seuil, $14.95.MONIQUE LAROUCHE-THIBAULT, Amorosa. Bo-

réal, n.p.JACQUES SAVOIE, Le récif du prince. Boréal,

$10.95.

CES TROIS ROMANS étant parus presqueau même moment, et comportant encommun certains traits thématiques etstylistiques, on peut, avec prudence, leslire comme témoignant, dans une cer-taine mesure, de l'état du roman qué-bécois de l'époque, voire des valeurs etquestions qui travaillaient alors la so-ciété québécoise. Le trait commun prin-cipal nous semble être — malgré l'appa-rente hardiesse de thèmes comme l'in-ceste et l'avortement — un conservatismeidéologique et stylistique: par certainsde leurs aspects thématiques ou stylis-tiques ces romans manifestent un attache-ment à des valeurs traditionnelles.

Par exemple, Une Belle journée d'a-vance et Le Récif du Prince comportentle thème de l'amour conjugal fortementvalorisé (on ne sait si le "je" et la "tu"du premier sont mariés, mais ils formentun couple qui tient à durer, puisqu'ilss'évertuent fort agréablement à fonderune famille). Tout dans Une Belle jour-née d'avance chante le couple "je" et"tu," son amour, son bonheur; mais aussiceux des parents du "je," Gertrude etMaurice, qui s'aimaient tant qu'ils onttenu à mourir ensemble. D'autres couplesdans ce roman (Rachel et Leopold, Mal-vina et Sam) sont malheureux parcequ'ils n'ont pas su vivre l'amour et lebonheur conjugaux, fait qui valorise en-core ceux-ci. Dans Le Récif du PrinceTania écrit une lettre à son mari Fran-

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coeur: même si elle lui raconte son aven-ture avec un autre, Tania y dit toujoursplus fortement son amour pour son mari,et on sent que le couple se reformera,plus solide que jamais, quand Tania re-viendra. A cette valeur traditionnelle del'amour conjugal, s'ajoute le thème del'amour et de l'unité familiaux. L'héroïnedu Récif du Prince, Vassilie, longtempsamoureuse de son père, sent à la fin duroman que celui-ci appartient inélucta-blement à Tania. Vassilie part donc enFrance décidée a découvrir l'amour etla sexualité avec l'amant que Tania vientd'y quitter; mais on sent qu'une fois queVassilie aura triomphé des problèmes quelui imposent ses rapports avec ses pa-rents (amour incestueux pour le père,sentiment d'infériorité par rapport à lamère), la famille connaîtra un nouvel etplus heureux équilibre. "Je" et "tu" dansUne Belle journée d'avance veulent fon-der une famille; en outre, le narrateurveut renouer avec ses parents décédés,qu'il aime d'émouvante façon. "Je" écritun livre dans lequel il raconte, à l'aidede sa "mémoire imaginante," la journée,voire le moment de sa propre conception,allant jusqu'à s'identifier au désir quihabite ses parents, au baiser qu'ils échan-gent, à leurs salive, sueur, souffle; il sedit oeuf dans le ventre de sa mère etraconte même sa fécondation par lablanche masse de sperme paternel! Ilrecrée ses parents jeunes, beaux, dési-rants, amoureux — comme lui-même;c'est à dire qu'il en fait à la fois desparents et son frère, sa soeur.

Amorosa valorise implicitement le cou-ple et la famille en dépeignant avec uneironie mordante une société dans laquelleils sont difficiles à créer et à vivre, pro-blématiques dans plus d'un sens. Dans lepremier chapitre, une jeune femme ra-conte à la première personne sa brèveliaison avec un homme égoïste et dur quil'a abandonnée dès qu'elle s'est décou-verte enceinte, ce qui amène la femme à

se retrouver dans une clinique d'avorte-ments clandestins avec quatre autresfemmes. Les quatre chapitres suivantsracontent à la troisième personne l'his-toire des autres femmes pour expliquercomment elles en sont arrivées là:"L'Elégante," suite à un viol; "La Ta-nagra" parce qu'elle ne veut pas subirles contraintes de la maternité (l'enfantsemble impossible dans l'univers de lamère, puisque celle-ci habite le bordelque fréquentait son père, avec qui elle aconnu une longue liaison incestueuse,avant que la mort du père et sa ruinen'ait obligé sa fille à y travailler; c'est làqu'elle a rencontré son amant, bellâtrelouche qui ressemble beaucoup au pèredisparu . ..) ; "La Boutonneuse," femmelaide mais riche doit se faire avorterparce que sinon son mari divorcerait(homosexuel, il l'a épousée pour son ar-gent, ne lui a fait l'amour qu'une seulefois, et ne tient nullement à devenirpère) ; "La Grosse Toffe" se fait avorterpar révolte contre son statut de femme-prisonnière au foyer. Les hommes appa-raissent donc les principaux empêcheursdu bonheur conjugal et familial, maisnon les seuls.

Dans ce dernier chapitre, le premierpersonnage reprend la narration et re-late son avortement cauchemardesque.Ce roman présente une vision d'ensem-ble négative de l'avortement clandestin,aussi bien en tant qu'intervention qu'enraison des mobiles et circonstances quiamènent des femmes à y avoir recours.On ne saurait dire toutefois qu'il valo-rise l'avortement légal, qu'il n'évoquepoint. Amorosa se présente surtoutcomme un conte philosophique illustrantla vérité d'un passage de Laborit placéen exergue, et selon lequel la liberté, lebonheur n'existent pas; ce roman jetteun regard sans complaisance sur la so-ciété contemporaine.

Si Le Récif du Prince et Amorosa uti-lisent le thème contemporain de l'inceste

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de façon un peu racoleuse et commer-ciale, le premier emploie bien le thèmede la famille médiatique : Tania et Fran-coeur travaillent pour une chaîne detélévision et souvent ne sont vus par leursconjoint et enfants qu'au petit écran! Lacontemporanéité de thèmes tels que l'in-ceste, l'avortement, et l'influence de latélé font peut-être partie de la dimensioncommerciale de ces romans, terme utiliséici avec une valeur descriptive plutôt quepéjorative; cette dimension commercialefait partie du conservatisme de ces ro-mans, en ce sens qu'elle témoigne d'uneconception peu avant-gardiste du livreen tant que marchandise â vendre plutôtque texte à structurer à des fins purementesthétiques. Cette dimension commer-ciale n'est pas absente d'Une Belle jour-née d'avance, roman québécois publié enFrance et soigneusement conçu pourplaire au marché français. Il y a, biensûr, la thématique, chérie des Français,de la nostalgie et de la recherche dupassé et de la magie de l'enfance. Enoutre, ce roman comporte fortement destraits qui, selon Jacqueline Gérols {LeRoman québécois en France) sont at-tendus du roman québécois par le publicfrançais. Une Belle journée d'avance of-fre l'exotisme de la nature et des per-sonnages canadiens: lacs, forêts, ours,cerfs, un métis bon sauvage, une "sau-vagesse" à la sexualité libre et dévorante.Gérols démontre qu'outre l'exotisme géo-graphique et humain, le lecteur françaisrecherche dans le roman québécois uncertain exotisme stylistique: ce romancomporte des recherches stylistiques in-téressantes — le "je" se scinde en deuxpuisque le "je" qui écrit "le livre" yconfie la voix narrative au "je" d'uneautre époque de son existence, quand iln'était que désir de ses parents, oeuf desa mère, ce qui permettra la scène inu-sitée présentant la fécondation et sessuites de l'intérieur. La focalisation mul-tiple est menée avec habileté et permet

aux différentes histoires — les deux prin-cipales (celle du "je" et du "tu" au pré-sent; celle, en 1946, des activités de Ger-trude et de Maurice le jour de la con-ception du "je") et les secondaires (cellesqui arrivent aux divers personnages, ycompris un chien dont les sensations et lapsychologie sont longuement analysées)— d'alterner sans transition, mais sansconfusion.

A d'autres égards toutefois, l'écritured'Une Belle journée d'avance obéit auconservatisme esthétique: c'est vrai deseffets d'exotisme canadien, de l'emploid'images-clichés telles que celle du "so-leil or fondu" répétée à satiété; et del'ensemble de l'effet-poésie provenant destechniques d'évocation du monde naturelet humain, techniques qui font une largeplace aux images-clichés. L'écriture desdeux autres romans est encore plus con-servatrice, nonobstant la présence desthèmes de l'inceste et de l'avortement et,dans Le Récif, un épisode agréablementbizarre dans un théâtre abandonné. Ceconservatisme stylistique fait sans doutepartie de la dimension commerciale deces romans (au moins Lalonde a-t-ilcompris qu'un habile mélange de re-cherches et de tradition scripturales at-tirerait plus de lecteurs que le conserva-tisme pur) tout comme la langue de cesromans, où règne presque exclusivementun français international.

Rien d'étonnant à ce que ces trois ro-mans manifestent un certain conserva-tisme idéologique et esthétique à uneépoque où le conservatisme politiquetriomphait dans les principaux pays oc-cidentaux. Sur le plan esthétique, UneBelle journée d'avance est de loin le meil-leur; tous pourraient s'avérer pédagogi-quement utiles dans des universités cana-diennes (je songe aux anglophones dansles remarques suivantes) : celui de Savoiepourrait fort bien être étudié en pre-mière année, celui de Larouche-Thibaulten deuxième année, et celui de Lalonde

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en troisième ou quatrième année, parexemple.

NEIL . BISH OP

IMPERFECTCONQUESTSj . L. LEPROHON, The Manor House of De

Villeray, ed. Robert Sorfleet. Journal of Ca nadian Fiction, no. 34, $6.00.

MME Ε. BERTH., Le Tour du Québec par deuxenfants. Liberté 163 (February 1986),$8.00.

FROM SEVERAL POINTS of view, these twobooks have much in common. Both areshort novels; each takes up the wholenumber of a periodical which otherwisenormally publishes shorter pieces of criti-cism and creative writing; both are sup-posedly written by women ; and both dealwith national issues pertaining to Que-bec. The two novels also deal with thepressure of historical realities on theeveryday lives of relatively uncompli-cated people. Leprohon writes aboutthese realities in English in a romance setin the later eighteenth century, and Bertildoes so in French in a satire on contem-porary linguistic issues in Québec.

Elsewhere, the differences between thetwo books are striking. If anything, it isnot the century between their composi-tions that sets the books apart, but theirrespective tones. Leprohon's book is oneof the earliest Canadian novels in Eng-lish. It appeared serialized in the Mon-treal Family Herald in 1859 and i860,and its pages are replete with the quietromanticism and the gilt-edged feelingsof affection and loyalty that coloured thefrontier rainbow dreams of colonial Can-ada. Bertil's book (if, in fact, Bertil ex-ists) is a late twentieth century allegori-cal satire about language, class, socialprétentions and the vanity of nationaldreams. The contrast in genre between

the two books is therefore almost abso-lute.

But despite the contrast, the two booksshare one powerful idea. They both dealstrongly with the desire for cultural sur-vival of a vanquished race against whicha conquest was never anything more thanmilitary. In the background is the com-mon historical theme that the conquestwreaked by one culturally and politicallysophisticated race on another leaves allbut its immediate military problems un-resolved.

The theme of the imperfect conquestis dominant in both books. In TheManor House of De Villeray, the themeis responsible for many of the types ofcharacters and many of the circum-stances behind the novel's plot. In LeTour du Québec par deux enfants, thetheme is the source itself of the dreamof the Québécoise grandmother (exiled inManitoba in childhood) of someday find-ing again "le coeur vibrant du Québec."This search for the vibrant heart of theprovince is the central and unifying ideaof Bertil's book. The perfection of thehopes, dreams, and desires of the char-acters of both books throws into reliefthe utter imperfection of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century conquests of Eu-ropean wars which provoked them. Inthe name of their respective glories, theimperial powers tried to subjugate oneanother's settlers in the various NewWorlds scattered about the globe, and abattlefield won was so often a culturalwar born.

And yet the stories of these two novelshave little in common. The ManorHouse of De Villeray, written by aMontreal-born woman of Irish-Catholicdescent, and published a century and aquarter ago, is a sad love story of yet acentury earlier. The fall of Quebec tothe English is its background. Its in-trigue is the parentally arranged engage-ment of a beautiful young aristocrat, the

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newly orphaned seigneuresse Blanche ofthe fief of De Villeray, to a sincere youngFrench officer, Gustave De Montarville.The problem of the lovers is that Blanchefeels that she does not yet know how tolove De Montarville, and she wants tolearn how before she marries him; andhe, in the meantime, falls desperately inlove with the paysanne Rose Lauzon,whom Blanche has brought up as hersister and social equal. Rose reciprocatesDe Montarville's feelings, cruelly torn bydivided loyalties to mistress and lover. Inthe ensuing struggle, true love wins out.Injured in a useless duel over Rose's hon-our at the moment that the battle of thePlains of Abraham is fought, De Mon-tarville recuperates and marries her. Heand Rose board a French vessel carryingaway the departing conquered local ad-ministrators of New France to permanentexile in France. Blanche, her beauty nowdisfigured by an attack of smallpox, re-mains alone in the conquered colony, andv/ill later leave most of her manorial pos-sessions to the children of De Montar-ville and Rose. In the context of thebackground colonial war, though per-meated by the gilt-edged emotions of theromance, Blanche's stock nineteenth-century character does achieve epic pro-portion, however little. The personal hu-man condition is symptomatic of a muchlarger universal quest. Blanche turnsLeprohon's novel into something farmore significant than historical romanceitself. The dream of a nation dies as itscourage is born, and Blanche's charactermanages to put the message across.

By contrast, Le Tour du Québec parDeux Enfants is a satiric spoof, and isbiting in spite of its broad comedy. Thenovel has supposedly just been written byMme Ε. Bertil and published as a sep arate number of the periodical Libertéin the face of a most urgent need toeducate school-aged Québécois childrenin patriotism. The young Québécois have

suposedly lost their patriotism under con-ditions that the mock preface does notclearly explain, but that the satire of thefollowing main part of the work iden-tifies as the post-independence referen-dum torpor that has settled on theprovince.

The name E. Bertil is a configurationof the letters of the title of the periodical,and the one lonely entry for the surnamein the Montreal telephone books does notanswer to the existence of an author. Thestory of the novel by this probably anony-mous author is that of a St-Boniface boyJulien, aged twelve, and his sixteen-year-old sister Sophie who are first orphanedof their parents and later also of theirgrandmother who harbours them. On herdeathbed, the grandmother who wasborn in Quebec expresses her dying wishto the children that they should not weartheir lives away in futility trying to befrancophones in Manitoba. She urgesthem to go East on her small legacy inorder to find "the vibrant heart of Que-bec . . ." where they can be their nationalselves in peace. The last wish is also theold lady's last spoken phrase. The chil-dren's father was killed in their yetyounger days because he couldn't under-stand an anglophone foreman's warningshout to avoid a moving steamshovel,and the two children set out for Québecto avenge the destiny of their father'sincomprehension.

The journey that leads Julien andSophie from St. Boniface to Winnipegand Ottawa by Via Rail, and then fromOttawa to Trois-Rivières, the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean, the Gaspé Peninsula, Qué-bec City, and then finally Montreal in avariety of hitchhiked and other benevo-lent vehicles, is peppered with viciouslysatiric encounters. All the English-Cana-dian and Québécois national types comein for a beating.

The monsters up to the Ontario borderare practically all Anglo-Saxons. First

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there is the collective anglo figure of thebilingual Via Rail in which everybody,including the French-Canadians, speakonly English. There is also Mary Borde-leau, the anglophone widow of a Franco-Ontarian who belonged to a generationof francophones for whom marryingEnglish was a step up on the social lad-der. In a taxi ride from the Ottawa CNstation, Mary robs Sophie and Julien ofthe last of their grandmother's money forno other reason than to make theirsearch for "the vibrant heart of Québec"as painful as possible.

Once across the border in the prom-ised land of post-referendum Quebec,Julien and Sophie meet the figures(sometimes real people) and types whosurvived into the 1980's out of the 1970'sand 1960's. There is the New-New LeftCatholic priest who preaches the jargonof "l'épanouissement" and "la libérationde l'ego," and who lives his "mam-melized" religion in nude romps with hismarried friends. By way of the statues ofthe famous Curé Labelle in St-Jeromeand of the rebel Louis-Joseph Papineauin Montebello, the children arrive at Re-pentigny between Montreal and Trois-Rivières. There, Sophie and Julien areundertaken as a cause by a collection ofRotarians for whom advertised charity isa handy ladder for social climbing. Withtheir clean-cut accountants' looks andtheir bitchy well-dressed wives, the Ro-tarians resemble a gathering of the Que-bec Liberal Party.

As their quest for the vibrant heart ofQuébec becomes more and more known,Sophie and Julien become famous andmake the newspapers. They end up insuburban Outremont in the heart ofMontreal, the poshest French residentialarea in the whole of Quebec, whereMayor Jerome Choquette, who was Min-ister of Justice in Robert Bourassa's gov-ernment during the FLQ crisis in 1970,receives them at a couple of extraordi-

nary receptions. In attendance are noless than the editor of Liberté; the for-mer editor of Le Devoir, Jean-LouisRoy; Camil Laurin, the author of Que-bec's language Bill 101; Pierre Trudeau;and one of Quebec's earliest indepen-dentists, Pierre Bourgeault. In the near-distance, during the last open-air partyfor Sophie and Julien, an English-speak-ing Greek immigrant couple, with theirsix French-speaking children, cannotunderstand why all those Frenchmen im-migrated to Canada if they wanted tospeak French (under Bill 101, immigrantchildren have to go to French schools).

Although neither The Manor Houseof De Villeray nor Le Tour du Québecpar deux enfants will create new direc-tions in English-Canadian and Québécoisliterature, they are nevertheless sympto-matic of a number of literary currents.It is the first time that The Manor Houseof De Villeray is published in Englishunder a single cover, and its appearancein a critical edition suggests an uncom-promising interest in the English Cana-dian literary past. Sorfleet's editing ispragmatic and wise, and his introductionis excellent on the text, the romance,and the history of the novel. The editionof this little novel, which was publishedin a French translation as early as 1861,reveals a whole aspect of the literary sen-sibility of English Canada in the face ofQuébec history in the last century.

Le Tour du Québec par Deux Enfantsalso bespeaks a kind of revelation. Na-tional destiny like all destiny appears alittle senseless. The distinctions betweenthe good, the bad, the beautiful, and theugly are considerably blurred. In thissatire, there is a prevailing feeling of theimminence of chaos, and the satirist'syardstick is disturbingly obscure in thebackground of humanity's uncorrectedfoibles.

ANTHONY RASPA

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DRAMA SUMMARYELAINE F. NARDOCCHio, Theatre and Politics

in Modern Québec. University of AlbertaPress, $21.00.

IN HER "INTRODUCTION," Elaine Nar-docchio claims that Theatre and Politicsin Modern Québec "is intended as ageneral source book and ready guide"which "strives to provide a systematicand informative overview of the socio-political nature and evolution of theatrein French Québec." She should haveadded that it is written for students whodo not read French and know nothingabout Québec. French professors, dramascholars, and theatre professionals willfind very little of interest in this briefstudy.

Chapter I, "Politics, Religion, and theEarly Theatre: From New France toEarly Canada," sketches the history offrancophone theatre from "Le Théâtrede Neptune" (1606) through the 1930's.Professor Nardocchio has obviously readthe extensive corpus of Québec theatrehistory. However, in attempting to sum-marize a vast amount of material, theauthor has written a thumbnail sketchwhich does not do justice to the subject.Her short, simple sentences and short,choppy paragraphs give the impressionof research notecards shuffled and writ-ten up in (more or less) chronologicalorder. In this background chapter, shedescribes the Catholic Church's powerover the cultural life of New France, theamateur nature of early French-speakingtheatre, and the reliance on the conti-nental repertoire. In tracing the growthof indigenous francophone theatre, shepoints to the nineteenth-century vogueof historical dramas and to the nation-alistic tendencies of French-Canadianplaywrights.

Chapter II, "The Duplessis Era: Fromthe Dark Ages to a Coming of Age,"

concentrates on theatres, actors, direc-tors, and playwrights leading the French-Canadian drama movement in the for-ties, fifties, and early sixties. Nardocchiodescribes the formation of various theatrecompanies as a necessary first step towardthe professionalization of theatre in Qué-bec. Once there were trained actors, di-rectors, designers, etc., the stage was setfor dramatic authors like Gratien Géli-nas, Félix Leclerc, Eloi de Grandmont,Paul Toupin, Jacques Languirand, andMarcel Dubé. At a time when the con-servative government of Maurice Du-plessis, together with the Church, wasfighting a rearguard action against theforces of modernization, industrialization,and urbanization, French-Canadian the-atre reflected the tensions and conflictswhich accompanied social changes.

Chapter III, "The Quiet Revolution:Nationalism and Québec Drama," sum-marizes the cultural ferment of the six-ties, linking political change and theatri-cal activity. Nardocchio catalogues thetheatre groups and experimental com-panies which were important in the six-ties, comments on the form and contentof a number of plays, and then spotlightsRobert Gurik, Françoise Loranger, andMichel Tremblay. Professor Nardocchioseems more comfortable dealing with thepolitically charged plays of the sixties.The plot summaries of this chapter willmake interesting reading for those un-familiar with the material.

Chapter IV, "Theatre in ModernQuébec: Permanence and Change," doc-uments the explosion of theatrical activ-ity in the seventies. Amateurs, children,feminists, revolutionaries, poets, and the-atre professionals were writing and per-forming plays in school gymnasiums,summer theatres, cafés-théâtres, and the-atres all over the province. Nardocchiogeneralizes about the form and contentof the new Québécois theatre and thenanalyzes the work of Jean Barbeau and

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Jean-Claude Germain in more detail. Al-though noting the anti-feminist tone ofCitrouille, Nardocchio chooses to glossover Barbeau's misogyny. Because thischapter brings the history of Québectheatre only up to 1980, it seems some-what incomplete. The contributions ofthe Théâtre expérimental des femmes,the Nouveau Théâtre expérimental, Ma-rie Laberge, Jovette Marchessault, René-Daniel Dubois, Normand Chaurette, andothers are neglected. While ProfessorNardocchio never claimed that her studywas a comprehensive guide to theatre inmodern Québec, one must question thedecision to draw the line at 1980.

A more serious criticism must be madeof those who should have proofread thetext. This slim volume contains an un-acceptable number of spelling mistakes,inconsistencies, and missed accent marks.There are over forty typographical er-rors. The first page spells "Québécois"with a mistake: "Québécois." On somepages, one name is spelled two differ-ent ways: "Roulx" — "Roux" (p. 25).French words, names, and titles aremangled so badly that a francophonereader could take offence. On page 83,for example, Jean-Claude Germain's Siles Sansoucis s'en soucient, ces Sansoucis-ci s'en soucieront-ils? is written Si lessousoucis s'en soucient, ces sancousis-cis'en soucieront-ils?

Anglophones with an interest in Qué-bec and a reading knowledge of Frenchshould not bother with Theatre and Poli-tics in Modern Québec. Those who can-not read the superior works of Québécoisdrama, historians and critics will bedisappointed by Professor Nardocchio'sstudy. It is not the "lively" and "timely""indispensable" guide promised by Eu-gene Benson's "Foreword."

JANE MOSS

PAST FORMULAJOY FIELDING, The Deep End. Doubleday,

$ΐ9·95·CH RISTOPH ER PAWLING, ed., Popular Fiction

and Social Change. Macmillan, £4.95.

W H Y WO U L D SE R I O U S SC H OLAR S wastetheir time studying "minor" authors likeF. Pohl and C. Kornbluth who wrotescience fiction in the 1950's or "trash"like domestic stories in low priced wom en's magazines when they could bestudying seventeenth century poetry, afar more academically respectable andprofessionally rewarding endeavour? Theeight British lecturers in sociology, com munication studies, and English featuredin Popular Fiction and Social Changeargue that traditional literary criticism istoo restrictive and needs to be supple mented. Pawling points out:

To the disinterested, non literary specialistthe neglect of those texts which have cap tured the interest of wide sections of thereading public must seem a little strange.. . . literary criticism should be looking for ward to the moment when it is able toaccount for the whole of literary culture,and not just that segment which has beencanonised within the academic institution.

Popular Fiction and Social Change be gins to redress that critical imbalance byfocusing on general trends and specificauthors or works in science fiction, ro mance, thrillers, best sellers, and fantasyfiction.

One of the challenges inherent in edit ing any collection of disparate articles isfinding a coherent framework. PopularFiction and Social Change holds togetherbecause all of the authors examine theirsubjects from a shared theoretical as sumption :

popular fiction both reflects social mean ings/ mores and, perhaps more importantly,intervenes in the life of society by organis ing and interpreting experiences which havepreviously been subjected to only partial

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reflection. Thus, to 'understand' popularfiction is to examine it as a form of cul-tural production and as a process of mean-ing creation which offers a particular wayof thinking and feeling about one's rela-tionship to oneself, to others, and to societyas a whole.

Each author, therefore, attempts to showhow the main characters and plots intheir genres both reinforce and under-mine social realities. For example, Rosa-lind Brunt explains the appeal of Bar-bara Cartland's romances by examiningthe tension between Cartland's overtaffirmation of traditional sex roles, love,and marriage and her covert indictmentof the harsh economic realities womenface.

Unfortunately, the strength of Pawl-ing's collection — its emphasis on pop-ular culture as a complicated ideologicalprocess rather than a unidirectionalproduct — is also its weakness. Surely weknow by now that fiction is not a simplereflection of reality. We need to go be-yond this essential but elementary as-sumption to explore new questions. Mostnotably, we need to study the interactionbetween readers and texts. In his usefuland clearly written introduction, Pawl-ing indicates that he deliberately choseto omit analyses of readers' interpreta-tions. I think that decision was a serioustheoretical error. One of the authors in-cluded in the volume, Bridget Fowler,perfectly summarizes the problem ofignoring readers: "A problem exists,clearly as to how precisely these storiesare interpreted. When we say . . . that astory really deals with the problem ofsocial order, or conflict, is this how thereaders perceive it?" Rather than dealwith this dilemma, Fowler backs off witha bland acceptance of ignorance: "Wedo not yet know what assessment of thestories is made by the readers nor howfar the general world-view of the authorsbecomes part of the mental apparatus of

the readers." It is not sufficient to admitour ignorance: we must do somethingabout it. How can one seriously study "aprocess of meaning creation" withoutexamining the key recipients/creators inthat process?

Joy Fielding's seventh novel, The DeepEnd, is a suspense novel that could verywell be a subject for Jerry Palmer whocontributed the article on thrillers to thePawling collection. Applying his analysisto her novel is an interesting exercisebecause it reveals a problem with bothPalmer's analysis and Fielding's novel.

In The Deep End, Joanne Hunter'sorderly life is falling apart. Her husbandhas left her; her teenage daughters arebeing difficult; her best friend is seriouslyill; her beloved grandfather is fadingaway in a nursing home; and, to top itall off, she is getting threatening phonecalls from the Suburban Strangler whowarns her that she is the next victim. Noone, including the reader, quite believesher about the phone calls and Joanneherself wonders if she is going crazy.

Fielding is a skilled storyteller and shesustains suspense, enlivened by touches ofhumour, throughout the novel. After anawkward, overwritten first chapter, thenarrative goes into a smoothly writtenfifteen-chapter flashback before return-ing to the present for the remainder ofthe story. Fielding handles these transi-tions well, incorporating even flashbackswithin flashbacks with ease. She capablycreates a pervasive mood of suspicion sothat the reader shares Joanne's appre-hensions about nearly everyone she knowsor meets.

So far Fielding conforms to Palmer'sdefinition of a thriller: thriller suspenseconsists of experiencing everything fromthe point of view of the hero; the heronever starts the action; he always reactsto prior aggression; the hero undertakesto solve a heinous, mysterious crime likemurder which is a major threat to the

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social order. On the next criterion, how-ever, Fielding and Palmer part com-pany: the hero is distinguished from theother characters by his professionalismand his success. Palmer comments : "Pro-fessionalism consists of the capacity forplanning, in a flexible manner, for learn-ing from experience, for improving faston the basis of experience." While Jo-anne Hunter develops these characteris-tics by the end of the novel, initially shefalls far short of being a hero. In athriller, we are supposed to side whole-heartedly, exclusively, with the hero butJoanne's fumbling, apologetic lack ofself-confidence so annoys the reader thatempathy is difficult. By the time she hasmisplaced her keys and set off a falseburglar alarm time and time again, thereader is ready to join forces with theSuburban Strangler. Fielding has writtenabout this type of rather brittle, self-pitying woman before ; she needs to moveon and create a strong female hero frombeginning to end.

On the other hand, Fielding's charac-terizations reveal the problem with Palm-er's criterion for a thriller. Does his useof the term "hero" mean that, by defini-tion, thrillers can only feature male mainprotagonists? If he were to reply, "Ofcourse not, I used the term genericallyto include females," then we must ques-tion whether or not the model itself, andnot just the language, is sexist. It couldbe that Fielding and other womenthriller writers are altering the genre bycreating more fallible human heroes andheroines in the place of the superheroeswho have reigned supreme before. Field-ing gives as much time and space to de-veloping her heroine's relationships withfriends and family as she does to gener-ating suspense. This, too, could be a re-vision of the old thriller formula with itsemphasis on "action." If "professional-ism" means being flexible and learningfast from experience, I would urge both

Fielding and Palmer to be more "pro-fessional" — to infuse their insightful,competent work with new perspectivesand life.

MARGARET JENSEN

ITALIAN-MADEJOSEPH piVATO, ed., Contrasts. Guernica

Editions, $14.95.

THIS COLLECTION OF TEN critical essaysby Italian-Canadian authors proves to bean invaluable contribution to research inItalian-Canadian writing; they providea wide spectrum of perceptions into whathas become, in the last decade, an im-portant field of Canadian Studies. Theessays cover many literary, social, andthematic concerns, but their methodologyis predominantly comparative since Ital-ian-Canadian writing is strongly influ-enced by English, French, and Italianliterary traditions. Even though the criti-cal approach which Pivato adopts is themost appropriate one for tackling thethematic and linguistic complexities ofItalian-Canadian writing and placing itin a world context "which transcendsthe parochial, the provincial and na-tional boundaries," it does not seem tojustify his generalization that "The nar-row environmentalist biases of currentCanadian literary criticism are not sup-ported by the essays in this collection."Canadian criticism has, in the past dec-ade or so, been experiencing a radicaltransformation from traditionally privi-leged thematic and sociological concerns,to structuralist and post-structuralist ap-proaches which are often influenced byEuropean and American literary theoriesthat transcend any "narrow environmen-talist biases." The very openness of Ca-nadian criticism towards new and ex-perimental writing practices has createda literary space where a wide variety of

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texts, including ethnic ones, are givenfull critical attention. Indeed, had thesituation of current literary criticismbeen the narrow environmental onewhich Pivato makes it out to be, his vol-ume Contrasts would never have beenpublished.

Pivato's opening essay provides a use-ful excursus into the works of the majortheorists of comparative criticism. Amongthese is E. D. Blodgett's Configuration(1982), one of the first studies to openthe way for serious critical examinationof ethnic literature. Pivato's diachronicaccount of comparative criticism beginsin the 1890's with Charles G. D. Rob-erts, whose poetic skills enabled him torender the original French works intofaithful and literally valid English ver-sions, and closes with Ronald Suther-land's and D. G. Jones' work in the1970's and 1980's. Pivato's view is thatuntil the 1980's Canadian literary criti-cism had been dominated by 'anglocen-trism,' but that this was a historical phasewhich critics had to go through andcome to terms with before minority eth-nic literatures could begin to be takeninto consideration. So when Pivato at-tacks such texts as John Moss's Patternsof Isolation and Laurie Ricou's VerticalM an I Horizontal World as "narrow read-ings of Canadian writing" because theiremphasis fell on English works, he isreading these critical texts from a mid-1980's and not from an early 1970's pointof view; the two literary historical con-texts are very different. In the early1970's ethnic writing had yet to find thevoice it has found in the 1980's, and so itwas not in a position to receive the criti-cal attention it is receiving today.

One of the most famous and accom-plished Italian-Canadian writers today isFrank Paci, whose trilogy on the Italianimmigrants has perhaps been one of themost influential contributions to the rec-ognition of the ethnic dimension in fic-

tion. In his article, "Tasks of the Cana-dian Novelist writing on ImmigrantThemes," Paci emphasizes the impor-tance of the particular as a vehicle tounderstanding the universal, the micro-cosm which reflects the macrocosm. Bychoosing an image of three concentriccircles to illustrate his thesis, he placesthe tasks of the novelist in general withinthe wider one; in a smaller circle onefinds the tasks of the Canadian writer,within which is enclosed the final circleof the writer tackling immigrant themes.All three circles are fluid and overlapone into the other, but only through theouter circle one can reach the inner one,and vice versa. This image is a revealingone because applied to Paci's writing itis self-reflective: he is at the same timea writer, a Canadian, and an immigrantcommitted to building up a realistic ac-count of characters within a specific so-cial and historical context. For Paci themajor task of a novelist is to 'presentreality,' but in his concept of reality tra-ditional definitions are stretched in orderto embrace concepts of fantasy and themarvellous, so that it becomes a form ofrealism which reaches the depths of hu-man consciousness. Paci recognizes thatthe strongest influences in his works havebeen Margaret Laurence, whose novelshe deeply admires and from whom hehas acquired the concept of 'compassion'as a guiding principle when creating hischaracters, and his ethnic origins, whichinspired his three novels, The Italians,Black Madonna, and The Father. Hisbackground provided him with such im-portant themes as the self-sacrifice offirst-generation immigrant parents, theinevitable clash between the old worldand the new world expressed through theconflict between two generations, thesimplicity of a peasant culture as op-posed to the corrupt sophistication of anAnglo/American one, the problem of ac-

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quiring fluency in an alien language andthe strength of family ties.

G. D. Minni's article, "The ShortStory as an Ethnic Genre," shows howsome of the characteristic features ofshort story writing are typical of ethnicfiction as well. Minni sets up a series ofcorrespondences between the short storyand ethnic writing, the most importantof which are the presence of marginalpeople who are lonely, nostalgic, feel ex-iled from their roots, experience identitycrises, suffer from feelings of inexplicableregret, and have different values andviewpoints from the norm. The mostcommon theme is usually alienation orthe corollary one of characters who havedifferent emotional terms of reference.Minni's contribution is particularly use-ful in a Canadian literary context, wherethe short story genre is diffuse and wherean ethnic dimension is just beginning toshow. Minni's range of examples, drawnfrom the works of Robert Kroetsch,Gaterina Edwards, John Metcalf, AnneHebert, Benato Donati, and others,clearly situates Italian-Canadian writingas an ethnic genre within a wider con-text of anglophone and francophonewriting and, ultimately, within an inter-national literary tradition.

An original structuralist approach istaken by Roberta Schiff-Zamarro whoisolates the figure of the mother in FrankPaci's Black Madonna, evaluating herimportance in a community (like theItalian) woven together by the unit ofthe family. Schiff-Zamarro analyzes thebinary structure of Black Madonna inwhich the two conflicting and parallelrelationships of father/son and mother/daughter predominate, and she exploresthe latter on two levels : on the first oneshe sees the relationship as a quest forself-identity which the daughter Marieachieves through a gradual process ofrejection/acceptance of her mother. Ona second and more symbolic level Marie's

quest is seen as a search for the greatMother figure, or the female principle,which was overshadowed by the adventof the patriarchal order. Patriarchaldominance came about with the rise ofJudeo-Christian societies, when a radi-cal subversion of the Great Goddessmyth took place. At this stage of its his-torical development the figure of theGreat Mother had a threefold nature:she was a white goddess of birth andgrowth, a red goddess of battle and love,and a black goddess of death and divini-zation. In Christian mythology the triplegoddess is supplanted by a triple god, theFather, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, andthe person of Mary, mother of God, sur-vives. Mary is now identified with thefigure of the Great Mother, and herblack connotation derives from theHecate phase connected with death andthe underworld. In Paci's novel Assuntais the Black Madonna, the mother whois also a monster who becomes an ob-stacle in Marie's quest for an Anglo-Canadian identity and physical appear-ance.

In their article "Death Between TwoCultures: Italian Canadian Poetry," Al-exandre Amprimoz and Sante Visellianalyze dominant images of death anddeparture, suffering and blood, in someof the most prominent Italian-Canadianpoets like Pier Giorgio di Cicco, FulvioCaccia, Mario Fraticelli, and evaluatetheir attempts to transform the values oftheir native culture into a new literarylanguage. The authors illustrate theirthesis with examples from many poemswhich touch the depths of pain, loss, andsuffering, experienced by a generation ofimmigrants who are forced to leave theirbeloved mother country and venture to anew land where the unknown languageisolated them in an existence whoseprincipal metaphor was one of emotionalsuffering and physical sickness.

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One of the most acclaimed Italian-Canadian poets to emerge from this fer-tile ethnic context is Mary di Michèle.Robert Billings examines the cultural andsocial contexts which led to the birth ofan Italian-Canadian group of poets inthe 1970's and 1980's, identifying theimportant influence which Roo Borson,Susan Glickman, Bronwen Wallace, andCarolyn Smart had on them, and locatesMary di Michele's development as apoet, the first one being her "academic,objective phase" when she wrote Tree ofAugust (1978). This collection of poetryshows the author's search for her ownvoice and form, and she is successful infinding it in those poems which deal withher Italian family. In some of these ear-lier poems one finds the germs of herfuture writing, personal events presentedin a straightforward manner and bathedin the light of emotions. Her later col-lections, Bread and Chocolate (1980),and Mimosa and Other Poems (1981),find her exorcising her family ghosts andcoming to terms with her experienceas a first-generation Italian immigrantdaughter, and all its ensuing conflictsand strifes. Di Michèle uses the tech-nique of identifying the past and thepresent with the third and first personvoice, thus giving a dialogic structure toher poems where the self either reflectsitself in a series of fragmented and alter-nating visions, or is split into the visionof two sisters whose dialectic relationshipbecomes the dramatic narrative of herpoems. Her later collections, NecessarySugar (1983) and Moon Sharks show amovement to a confessional form in thekey of feminist awareness.

In "The Italian Writer and Lan-guage" Fulvio Caccia applies to minor-ity literature a trilinguistic model bor-rowed from Henry Gobard, to reveal thecomplexities of a writer's relationshipwith language. The three languages arethe vernacular, which is of rural or eth-

nic origin, vehicular language, which be-longs to the social infrastructures inwhich the subject is situated, and mythiclanguage, which belongs to religion andarchetypal structures. The distribution ofthese languages varies from one socialgroup to the other, and they play animportant role in the development of awriter's poetics.

The context of Quebec as a historical,cultural, linguistic, and literary space inwhich a great number of Italian writersmust come to terms with in order to beable to create their own literary traditionis dealt with by Antonio D'Alfonso andFilippo Salvatore in their two usefularticles which close the anthology.

Exile is the dominant condition whichcharacterizes all immigrants and has fea-tured in Italian literature since Dantewrote his Divine Comedy. Pivato out-lines the most important Italian authorswho have dealt with this issue, and thenfocuses on the different ways in whichItalian-Canadian writers have grappledwith this concept. For Romano Porti-carini, who lives and writes in BritishColumbia, exile means the detachmentfrom home which is associated with anidyllic childhood. Canada thus becomesthe land of adulthood, reality, and dis-illusionment. Marie Ardizzi's protagonistNora in Made in Italy needs to keepalive an illusory internal subjective real-ity connected with childhood in order tobe able to survive in a harsh exteriorreality. However, for Ardizzi the ulti-mate condition of exile is the breakdownof communication between an inner re-ality which has not been able to adaptitself to and change with the times of anouter reality. Pivato concludes with theobservation that a significant shift is be-ginning to take place in Italian-Cana-dian writing which no longer sees theNew World as a land of exile, but as aPromised Land that has freed immi-grants from poverty and has given them

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a new home. Pivato quotes RobertKroetsch's statement: "We haven't gotan identity until somebody tells our story.The fiction makes us real." As linguisticand cultural barriers between the oldworld and the new world are beginningto break down, Italian-Canadian authorsare putting together for the immigrantsand their children an identity and a newsense of reality toward which they havebeen grappling for decades.

Pivato's collection of essays closes witha bibliography which shows how diversi-fied Italian-Canadian writing has be-come. There are three language lists, onefor works in English which is also thelongest one, one for works in Italian,and a third one for works in French.There is a final list of literary and histori-cal studies published both in Canada andin Europe, which provides the researcherwith useful background on the subject.

GIOVANNI BONANNO

DISCOURS-FLEUVENADINE MACKENZIE, Le coupeur de tètes.

Saint-Boniface, Manitoba: Éditions desPlaines, $7.95.

GILLES VALAIS, Les deux soeurs. Éditions desPlaines, n.p.

CES DEUX LIVRES canadiens-français horsQuébec s'ajoutent à la presque cinquan-taine de livres déjà publiés par les Édi-tions des Plaines et nous font comprendreque la francophonie canadienne, horsQuébec, est bien vivante, en voie de s'af-firmer toujours davantage. C'est certaine-ment quelque chose dont il faut se ré-jouir et les Conseils des Arts provincialet fédéral font bien d'appuyer ce mouve-ment de leur aide financière. C'est en lapratiquant que la culture se renouvelle etse développe.

Des deux livres, et ceci malgré tout leféminisme que je partage avec Nadine

MacKenzie (sauf en ce qui concerne sonapparent mépris pour la femme aufoyer) et taut d'autres, je préfère celuide Gilles Valais. Valais, qui avait déjàpublié un récit intitulé Les deux frères,est sans aucun doute à présent le meil-leur des deux écrivains. MacKenzie qui apourtant, elle aussi, déjà publié plusieursouvrages, n'a pas encore réussi à se dé-barrasser d'un certain style un peu ma-niéré et précieux. Ce style ressemble àcelui qui anime parfais les émissions deRadio-Canada, pour laquelle MacKenzietravaille. C'est un style un peu trop en-joué, malicieux, méticuleux (oh! ces pas-sés simples et ces subjonctifs de l'impar-fait!), bref, artificiel. En écriture, ce styleva contre l'attention du lecteur, contreson plaisir du texte. Du moins, c'est làmon avis.

MacKenzie a, dans Le coupeur detêtes, suffisamment de bons élémentspour un roman d'initiation solide. Ils'agit dans son récit d'une femme dans laquarantaine, en instance de divorce,forcée de retourner sur le marché dutravail, avec toutes les difficultés qui s'ensuivent: recherche d'un emploi qui luipermettra de s'occuper quand même deses deux enfants, timidité à vaincre, con-fiance en elle-même ébranlée par le faitque son mari se soit tourné vers unefemme de carrière plus jeune qu'elle . . .en plus du divorce lui-même avec sesaspects dégradants y compris la guerreautour de la garde des enfants. Mac-Kenzie a donné à cette femme une amiesolide, prête à la sontenir, sorte de guidevers une vie nouvelle.

Mais au lieu d'écrire un roman d'ini-tiation, qui certes aurait pu intéresser aumoins un public féminion, MacKenzie,pensant peut-être que cela serait tropsimple, introduit dans son histoire un"coupeur de têtes," jeune homme fouqui se dit homme d'affaires mais est envérité escroc, menteur, obsédé sexuel,pervers animé d'une étrange foi reli-

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gieuse et, de plus, assassin de femmesseules. Ajoutez-y un mari égoïste, despoliciers maladroits et vous vous trouvezdevant une histoire rocambolesque à sou-hait qui vous distraira peut-être pendantquelques heures, mais qui n'est pas vrai-ment, et ceci est dommage car NadineMacKenzie a certainement du talent,une oeuvre littéraire.

Notons en plus qu'il y a certaines co-quilles dans ce texte dont la présentationparaît pourtant à première vue claire etsoigneuse: transferré au lieu de trans-féré; cueillers au lieu de cuillers; unesonnerie qui résonne au lieu de sonnertout simplement etc. Cela fait tachedans un livre agréable à l'oeil. Il est re-grettable que les Éditions des Plainesn'aient pas pu éviter de telles erreurs. Etce qu'il y a de bizarre, c'est que dansLes deux soeurs, livre que je trouve doncmeilleur, je n'aie rien détecté de tel.

Deux nouvelles constituent le recueilde Gilles Valais, Les deux soeurs. Lapremière, du même titre que le volume,conte, un peu à la manière de GabrielleRoy (celle de La petite poule d'eau),l'histoire et le développement de deuxjeunes filles du Nord manitobain. Cha-cune a un talent: Martine chante etcoud à merveille, Gemma est intelligenteet studieuse. Mais les deux vont aban-donner toute idée de carrière personnellepour se consacrer l'une, Martine, à unmari professeur, l'autre, Gemma, à leurpère devenu sénile. Et Martine, qui avaitautrefois détesté les aspirations intellec-tuelles de sa soeur, subit maintenant lesdiscours de son mari, alors que Gemma,qui n'avait pas voulu être ménagère, estdevenue la garde/cuisinière/infirmièred'un vieux malade. Deux sorts étranges,observés par un narrateur sensible etdiscret qui n'émet aucun jugement.

Le personnage de ce narrateur permetune écriture assez proche lu monologueretours en arrière, les questions parfoislaissées sans réponse. Le lecteur ou la

intérieur, donc une écriture qui coule,favorise la description et la réflexion, leslectrice peut y mettre du sien, les person-nages prennent forme dans son imagina-tion, puisque rien de trop précis ne luiest imposé.

Dans la deuxième nouvelle, "Lettre deMaud," Valais a opté pour la formeépistolaire. Maud écrit à Steve, cama-rade d'études, mentor. Elle ne sait pasvers quel pays lointain celui-ci est parti,mais elle retrace pour lui, pour elle-même et pour nous les principales étapesde sa propre vie. Fille d'immigrés euro-péens, elle a fait, contre la volonté de samère, des études, s'est éloignée de sapetite ville natale où "trop de dimanchesavaient tendu leurs fils d'araignée." Ellea travaillé, voyagé, regardé le mondeavec curiosité.

C'est un monde où elle, en tant quefrancophone, est minoritaire et où d'au-tres minorités — russes, ukrainiens, men-nonites, huttérites, doukhobors — se doi-vent de lutter contre l'assimilation queleur imposent les anglophones. C'est cettelutte précisément qui rend chaque groupefier de son état, de sa langue, de sescoutumes, de sa religion. Pour Maud, la"résistance à l'assimilation" des franco-manitobains se résume par le fait que laconclusion d'une chanson apprise au pen-sionnat, ". . . leurs enfants élevés parleurs ennemis . . .," ne pourrait jamaiss'appliquer à eux. La chanson fait plutôtallusion aux

compatriotes qui vivaient dans les Etats . . .ils parlaient une langue mêlée, portaientdes vêtements extravagants, se bourraientde saucisses et de whisky, peut-être mêmen'avaient-ils plus de religion . . . ils étaientassimilés, des bâtards, c'était fini, on pou-vait leur appliquer cette conclusion. . . .

Maud affirme qu'on peut jouir d'êtreune minorité, y trouver une source d'ins-piration et d'enthousiasme. Elle observele rôle que jouent les initiatives person-nelles dans cette lutte constante, l'impor-

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tance des écoles et de la radio franco-phones, ainsi que des "vieilles vertus."

Venue de la région de Winnipeg, villedont le nom, comme nous l'apprend Va-lais, signifie "eau boueuse," Maud va serendre dans l'Est du pays, faire la con-naissance d'un Québec où elle se sentiradéplacée, étrangère et où elle va donc serendre compte que le Manitoba est sonpays. Y retournera-t-elle ou bien finira-t-elle par se laisser assimiler per la mondequébécois? Valais ne nous le dit pas, nouslaisse libre d'imaginer la suite.

La forme épistolaire, tout comme lemonologue intérieur, permet de nouveauun discours-fleuve, avec rapides, chutes,affluents. Valais utilise les deux formesavec aisance et un évident plaisir qui finitpar devenir celui du lecteur. Les deuxsoeurs est un beau livre, un de ceux quifont que les Éditions des Plaines méri-tent notre respect et notre intérêt.

MARGUERITE ANDERSEN

ON STRATEGIESROBERT KROETSCH & REINGARD M. NISCHIK,

eds., Gaining Ground: European Critics onCanadian Literature. NeWest Press, $21.95;pa. $11.95.

SERIOUS READERS OF Canadian literaturehave cause to be grateful to RobertKroetsch and Reingard Nischik for fo-cusing attention in Gaining Ground onsignificant studies of the subject currentlybeing produced by European scholars.Although it has been an open secretamong academic specialists for the pastdecade that the study of Canadian lit-erature is a minor growth industry inEuropean universities, this is the firstbook to describe and illustrate the phe-nomenon in a reasonably comprehensivefashion. And it must be said at the out-set that the book is a good one: dividedinto two sections, it not only offers a

timely survey of the state of Canadianliterary studies in about twenty Euro-pean countries, but also presents evi-dence of the scope and maturity of schol-arly interest in the form of seventeencritical essays.

In "New Horizons: Canadian Litera-ture in Europe," Dr. Nischik explains thegenesis and development of Canadianliterary studies in the countries where itcommands the most attention: France,Italy, and West Germany. She points tothe success of individual scholars in thesecountries in initiating and developingcourses for high schools and universities,up to the graduate level, and in specialprojects, such as Walter Pache's develop-ment of an inter-library loan base forCanadian journals at Cologne Univer-sity, and the marathon translation workdone by Amleto Lorenzini in Rome. Shealso notes the growth of Canadian Stud-ies Centres such as those at the Univer-sities of Bordeaux, Dijon, and Rouen,the proliferation of Canadian StudiesAssociations, and the increasingly fre-quent conferences on both general andspecialized aspects of Canadian writing.

There is also a useful survey of Cana-dian Studies in the United Kingdom;and we learn that, curiously, Britishscholars seem more interested in French-Canadian writing than in Anglo-Cana-dian literature, a situation that is re-versed in France. There are brieferdescriptions of the interest in Canadianliterature in Scandinavia, the Low Coun-tries, Austria, Switzerland, and EasternEurope, with names and university affili-ations of prominent scholars. There isalso a 300-item bibliography, divided byscholars' nationalities and entitled "Eu-ropean Publications on Canadian Lit-erature," which gives an indication ofthe range and focus of European schol-arship in the last ten years or so.

Early in her survey, Dr. Nischik offersperceptive observations on the nature of

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current European scholarship. She pointsout, for example, that since Canadianliterature is a foreign literature to Euro-pean readers, it has rarely been seen inthe thematic context often favoured byCanadian critics, and can never, ofcourse, be "regarded as a means of 'see-ing ourselves.'" Instead, "the critical ap-proach . . . has often been more textual.Individual works have been regarded asaesthetic artifacts rather than as socio-logical and socio-psychological docu-ments," and the prevailing critical trendis to analyze narrative strategies, or moregenerally, to look at structural and tech-nical aspects of the works. Europeancritics also favour subjecting Canadianworks to comparative or generic study:"more distant from the works in pointof language, cultural background, andpersonal concern, European scholarshave felt freer from the beginning to putspecific Canadian works into a larger in-ternational context than has been thehabit in Canada itself."

The critical approaches found in theessays included in this collection givecredence to Dr. Nischik's observations.(It should be pointed out here that theeditors made no restrictions as to subjectmatter or approach when they contactedpotential contributors.) Twelve of theseventeen essays offer either a closeanalysis of text or narrative technique,or subject the creative works to a com-parative or generic consideration, whilethree others straddle the two approaches,adapting elements of each as they help toilluminate particular works.

Gaining Ground begins and finisheswith remarkably strong essays. SimoneVauthier's "The Dubious Battle of Story-Telling: Narrative Strategies in Timo-thy Findley's The Wars" which opensthe volume, is in one sense the ideal criti-cal study. Through incisive analysis andlucid presentation it provokes the readernot only to reread the novel carefully,

but to rethink the larger question ofeffective narrative strategies in fiction.Problems of authority posed by the co-existence of two narrative strands in thenovel, for example, are examined in aclosely reasoned and convincing analysisof Findley's complex narrative tech-niques. A later essay in the collection,Walter Pache's '"The Fiction Makes UsReal' : Aspects of Postmodernism in Can-ada," examines the related narrative ex-periments of Robert Kroetsch (particu-larly in The Studhorse Man and GoneIndian) and George Bowering (in Burn-ing Water). In doing so, Pache arguesthat "the rejection of literary conven-tions, patterns of thought, and old valuesystems clearly implies more than a newstructure for the narrative text. It be-comes a means of giving a new 'voice' toCanadian fiction." Vauthier would un-doubtedly agree.

Other explorations of narrative tech-nique in the work of contemporary Ca-nadian novelists (a group the Europeancritics overwhelmingly favour), includestudies of Rudy Wiebe by WolfgangKloos, "Narrative Modes and Forms ofLiterary Perception in Rudy Wiebe'sThe Scorched-Wood People," and PierreSpriet, "Structure and Meaning in RudyWiebe's My Lovely Enemy." The latteressay is intriguing for its insights into therelationship between Wiebe's latest noveland earlier works in terms of "the rejec-tion of rational sense which informs MyLovely Enemy . . . [and] the refusal oflogical or conventional meaning de-tected" elsewhere in his fiction. In an-other essay, "Narrative Technique inAritha van Herk's Novels," ReingardNischik offers a rather tentative compari-son of techniques employed in Judithand The Tent Peg; while Michel Fabrelooks in detail at some of the short stor-ies of Mavis Gallant and their "complexjuxtapositions of points of view" in"Orphan's Progress,' Reader's Progress:

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Voice and Understatement in MavisGallant's Stories." Both Paul Goetschand Coral Ann Howells examine the fic-tion of Margaret Atwood. Goetsch's es-say, "Life Before Man as a Novel ofManners," is a lucid interpretation ofone of the novel's central hypotheses,that "even in a so-called liberated age,every kind of human relationship, in-cluding sexual, is subject to rules." How-ells takes a different approach, revealingways in which "contradictory discourses[involving fantasy and reality] generatemultiple meanings" in Atwood's text inSurfacing and Bodily Harm (as well asin Alice Munro's Lives of Girls andWomen and Who Do You Think YouAre?).

Criticism of French-Canadian writingis represented by only two essays: Ros-marin Heidenreich's "Aspects of Inde-terminacy in Hubert Aquin's Trou deMémoire" and Cedric May's "Form andStructure in Les Iles de la nuit by AlainGrandbois." Noncontemporary literaturein English receives almost as little atten-tion, although Karla El-Hassan's essay onLeacock, "Reflections on the SpecialUnity of Stephen Leacock's SunshineSketches of a Little Town" is interestingfor its treatment of the Sketches as aprecursor of "the linked short stories orshort story ensembles which at presentare very common in Anglo-Canadian lit-erature"; and Rudolf Bader's study ofGrove, "Frederick Philip Grove and Na-turalism Reconsidered," offers some pro-vocative observations on The Master ofthe Mill.

The final essay in Gaining Ground,Eva-Marie Kröller's fascinating studyentitled "Nineteenth-Century Canadiansand the Rhine Valley," is in its way asstriking as Vauthier's opening piece. Arefreshingly original study, it charts thepatterns in reactions and attitudes gen-erated by visits to the Rhineland by anumber of prominent nineteenth-century

Canadians, beginning with Joseph Howein 1838. The essays offers a backdrop tocontemporary pieces such as Layton's"Rhine Boat Trip" and Gallant's storiesin The Pegnitz Junction; but equallyimportant is its testimony to the long-standing tradition of intellectual ex-changes between Canada and Europe. Itis a tradition to which the essay, andGaining Ground in its entirety, make avaluable contribution.

STANLEY S. ATHERTON

VOICE OF ONE'S OWNSUSAN MUSGRAVE, Cocktails at the Mauso-

leum. McClelland & Stewart, $9.95.

A PRECOCIOUS WRITER who published inthe Malchat Review (sic, from the Mc-Clelland & Stewart publicity) at seven-teen and issued a volume of poems atnineteen, Susan Musgrave at 35 has al-ready written a dozen books and made anotable contribution to Canadian poetry.It hardly seems necessary for her pub-lisher to re-issue or "roll over" the ear-lier verse of such a productive poet insuposedly "new" collections. Eight of thepoems in Cocktails at the Mausoleumappeared in Tarts and Muggers (1982),which itself mined four of her earliervolumes — but at least that identified it-self as "Poems New and Selected," whichthis does not. A browser who gets insidethe meaningless cover and the inaccurateback-cover blurb will not learn of theoverlap until page 151 (the last page).

So much for the publisher. The poetone encounters here is partly the resul-tant of previous selves (sea-witch, man-burier), partly an evolving persona, hu-manized by time and pain, that I thinkwill prove more sympathetic and likeablethan either. At first Musgrave practiseda kind of West Coast necromancy inwords, stirring a blend of dreams, moon,

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fantasy, and native lore. Like most stylesand spells, these worked at some timesand not at others. Set next to the presentvolume, Songs of the Sea Witch ( 1970)looks obscure and overly dependent onsnake-slime, while Grave-Dirt and Se-lected Strawberries (1973) invokes apower of Haida material — at its worsta kind of easy shlik — without managingto transmute it into poetry. Yet Entranceof the Celebrant (1972) is clearly thework of a genuine talent, at least in"Birthstone" and "Dog Star," which aremade of typical under-thirty Musgravematerials: night, spirits, dreams, anddeath. "Facing Moons" introduced the"moon of constant sleep inside / sleep,moon that I am," which rarely sets forher.

These preoccupations culminate inThe Impstone (1976). "I was born with/ witch-power and / two wings," shewrites: "Somebody cut them off" ("AllWill Fall") ; "The old frog-moon / laysher eggs in my heart," says the personaof the fine "Mourning Song." Otherwise,though, sorcery does not correlate highlywith equality, which is found instead inhumane and intelligible work like "OGrave Where Is Thy Victory" andthe beautiful "Chiaroscuro." A Man toMarry, A Man to Bury (1979) is a simi-lar mélange: Musgrave often writes ofdreams and moons, but only "Woodcut-ter, River-God and I" turns magical sub-ject into magical artifact, while "A Curi-ous Centurion" and the strong, cold"Fishing on a Snowy Evening" succeedwithout recourse to the preternatural.Here she breaks through the type-castingand finds a second voice.

In the present collection, the moon-witch of the western isles still dreams,but generally that mode is less importantnow; Musgrave continues to broaden herappeal. The first section, for example,"Coming Into Town, Cold," documentsthe Canadian encounter with Latin, es-

pecially southern cultures. Here — andto some extent elsewhere in the volume— the crucial polarity is not nature/supernature but self/other, and I wouldargue that the most patently autobio-graphical poems — or even parts of po-ems — are the least successful. The sec-tion's title-poem and "Supposing YouHave Nowhere to Go" are particularlylimited by chit-chat about the poet's age,financial problems, and low opinion ofMiami; they are lineated journal entries.(Of the eight poems that I wish shehad withheld, five are lessened by thiskind of self-indulgence.) On the otherhand, where she submerges herself inthe human condition, as in "Hunchbackon the Buga Road," "Ordinary People,"and "The Unconsidered Life," she is apoet.

I am the bride withworms around her heartand a skull bursting with goodnesslike a church goblet.

This is not the " I" of "I'm over twenty-nine."

These are three of the nine poems (inthis collection of five or six dozen) thatI would use to convince anyone of Mus-grave's talent. Three more are "roll-overs" from Tarts and Muggers (thefour "timely" Queen Charlotte Islandpoems all appeared there), so there is nopoint in discussing them here. The lastthree touchstones are the title-piece andtwo poems in the final section. "Cock-tails at the Mausoleum" is both a typi-cally wacky piece of Musgrave fantasyand her Ode to Melancholy; cocktailstaste better at the mausoleum, but deathstares from the bottom of the glass.

I decided long agothat death was not serious, but nowwith a jewelled hand something tugged,and I felt the cold earthrising to meet me.

Finally, when "you" (a late entry)

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"sucked the spicy liquor from my / lastsmall breath," drinking intertwines withthe other kind of dying — shades of JohnDonne. Beyond the literary echoes, Mus-grave's own maturing voice is clear:

I wasthinking of love spent, and grief thatgropes slowly like a tendril. . . .

"I Do Not Know. . ." (etc.) is a re-markably successful "exorcism" of (welearn from Musgrave's notes) HowardNemerov's "Death and the Maiden."Nemerov himself — or Roethke orHughes, other objects of homage —would not spurn such a phrase as "acompass of blood in the heart's / wreck-age," though it is not all that good. Boththis and "You Didn't Fit," however,seem to me deeply humane poems aboutcoming to terms with parents, time, mad-ness, and self. In the first, shrinks try to"cut the / stubborn mother from mywomb"; in the second, the poet's vividdream of her father's not fitting his coffinbecomes a symbol for both of their lives :"neither of us fit." Here Musgrave hasoutgrown the cuteness and extrahumanobscurity that marks some of her youngpoems. "I Do Not Know" is a paringdown to essentials:

I think of the choices we madealong the way, how thingscame to pass, or happened,what brings us finally together.

The years will make sense of it.

These are not her most "poetic" lines,but they make immediate contact, withthe warmth of a sympathetic friend whohas been through it.

When Musgrave is off, she is usually, Isuggested, being merely personal, thoughonce, in "Eaglet Tricks," she seems tooimitative. Her other weakness is too littledetachment from prose — i.e., insuffi-cient revision — which shows up as flac-cid diction in, for example, "Three

Witches Go for Lunch in Elora." Herear is not flawless; she needs to judge, toedit, to purge, as every good poet does.Robert Graves, to whom she once madea pilgrimage, would be one healthy guruin this respect. Another she long agochose herself — in "Skookumchuk" fromThe Impstone:

I guess it's inmy bloodto want to be likeEmily Carr

It takes some work to move that desirefrom the blood to the hand. What isclear is that in Musgrave's case the re-sult will be worth the effort. One coulddo worse than be the Emily Carr ofpoetry.

RICHARD BEVIS

VAN LITGARY GEDDES, ed., Vancouver: Soul of a

City. Douglas & Mclntyre, $24.95.ALLAN SAFARiK, ed., Vancouver Poetry. Pole-

star, $12.95.

T H E EDITORS OF BOTH these Vancouvercentennial anthologies, according to theirintroductions, seek the city's identity inits literature. Geddes, through a selectionof poetry and prose, tries to capture the"soul of a city" ; Safarik, through poetry,the city's "heart and pulse."

Geddes begins his search for the city'ssoul with himself. His account of hisVancouver roots and subsequent writingcareer in his introduction, however, ismore concerned with his own identitythan Vancouver's, and since he includesin his anthology numerous writers whoseroots lie elsewhere, his emphasis on theimportance of Vancouver origins is asirrelevant as it is self-indulgent. Whenhe turns to other writers he singles outthose who, he finds, share his own "halfurban pastoral, half Bosch nightmare"vision of the city, a judgment that leads

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not to close analysis of the writing in theanthology but to asides on Social Creditanti-intellectualism and the role of thewriter in such a milieu. Brief concludingreferences to the city's one hundredthbirthday and probable literary future donot compensate for the lack of focusthroughout.

The anthology itself, striving for com-prehensiveness and popular appeal,achieves only length and unevenness.The ninety selections are grouped the-matically under nine eye-catching head-ings such as "Real Estate in Paradise"and "The Race that Never Ends," thelatter dealing with the city's ethnic com-munities. Too many prose selections, likeSir Robert Borden's telegram expressinghis party's racist labour and immigrationpolicies, consist of brief one- or two-lineexcerpts wrenched from context and of-fered with unhelpful or no editorial com-ment. Other selections, such as the ex-cerpt from Margaret Laurence's TheDiviners and stories by Jane Rule andAudrey Thomas, seem to owe their inclu-sion to their writers' reputations ratherthan to their portrayal of Vancouver.Reputation and popular taste seem tohave influenced the choice of poetry aswell; it ranges in quality and tone fromthe sentimental rhetoric of Pauline John-son to the social criticism of Al Purdy, sothat the reader must sift through muchsecond-rate material to find the worth-while.

Geddes' inclusion of Pauline Johnsonand Eric Nicol brings to mind R. E.Waiters' similar concessions to populartaste in his British Columbia: a Centen-nial Anthology ( 1958), but Geddes' slap-dash editing falls far short of Watters'more scholarly approach. Whereas theopening section of Waiters' anthologyconsists of journal and newspaper ex-cerpts covering British Columbia's firsthundred years, only a few scattered se-lections in Geddes' — such as Yun Ho

Chang's memorable account of his lifein turn-of-the-century Vancouver — of-fer glimpses of an older city. UnlikeWatters also, Geddes provides relativelylittle bibliographical information: his'notes on contributors' list titles andgive some bibliographical data, but sel-dom identify the work from which aspecific excerpt is taken, or supply itsdate.

Since the material in the anthology isarranged thematically rather than chron-ologically and since portrayals of earlyVancouver are rare, the city shows littlesense of passing time. All too often itlacks a sense of place as well, since Ged-des has chosen a large number of worksthat explore the human psyche (usuallythe writer's own) in a generalized orinterior setting that could be anywherein the modern world. Thus Vancouverseems to have no real identity at all.

Safarik's "informal history" of Van-couver poetry, on the other hand, pro-vides structure and focus for his questfor the city's identity. Beginning in the1910's with the founding of the Vancou-ver Poetry Society and ending in the1970's with a list of currently active poetsand publishers, Safarik's introductorysurvey is objectively, although somewhatawkwardly, written and appropriatelyillustrated in the anthology by the firstVancouver Poetry Society Chapbook(1925), the Ryerson Poetry Chapbookof 1936, and individual poems of previ-ous and subsequent decades. As the po-etry evolves from late Victorian to mod-ern and postmodern, so the perceptionof the city varies from, for example, theFirst World War fervour of Alice M.Winlow to the post-Second World Wardetachment of Tom Wayman.

Safarik's flexibility in handling the his-torical structure keeps the anthologyfrom becoming a dry academic docu-ment. After the 1930's he modifies strictchronology to bring together poems treat-

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ing a particular time period or subject,such as wartime Vancouver as experi-enced by Al Purdy and Joy Kogawa, orOakalla by bill bissett and Peter Trower.More importantly, an underlying concernwith "the human condition" in the citysupplies the selections with a commontheme which gives coherence to thechanging poetic styles and accounts forthe presence of "historical curiosities"whose subject matter, despite the medi-ocre verse, reveals the long tradition ofsocial criticism in Vancouver poetry. An-other editorial plus is a sense of humour :poems by Al Purdy and Red Lane ad-mirably demonstrate that good poetrycan be both funny and serious.

The main flaw in the editing lies inthe sometimes sketchy documentation.The Vancouver Poetry Society Chapbookconcludes with a brief account of its pub-lication and a briefer reference to theimmediately following Ryerson Chap-book, but since no comparable note con-cludes the latter, the reader has only the1936 date after Anne Marriott's poem tomark the end of the sequence. Dates ofcomposition and/or of publication of in-dividual poems, and birth and deathdates in the notes on contributors, arealso lacking. Despite these flaws Safarik'santhology is a worthwhile centennialtribute to Vancouver. His workmanlikeapproach to his subject offers more con-vincing and satisfying insight into thecity than does Geddes' egocentric ran-domness — and at a fraction of the price.

MARGARET DOYLE

STILL HEROWILLIAM R. HUNT, Stef: A Biography of

Vilhjalmur Stefansson. University of Brit-ish Columbia Press, $29.95.

W E ARE FREQUENTLY TOLD that we nolonger have heroes. The explanation maybe that people's expectations are no

longer what they once were. Too oftenvenerated figures, when subjected to closescrutiny, prove to have feet of clay likethe rest of us.

Polar exploration once seemed majes-tic in the symbolic struggle of managainst the elements, an in extremislaboratory in which true mettle could betested. Unfortunately various reapprais-als of the great figures associated with ithave revealed undignified competitive-ness and back-biting. It has seriouslybeen questioned whether Frederick Cookever scaled Mt. McKinley and it was notRobert E. Peary but his Black compan-ion, Matt Henson, who actually reachedthe Pole — information that Peary's fam-ily strenuously tried to suppress.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962)was subjected to prolonged harassmentduring his lifetime, but he has been for-tunate enough to find a biographer whohas managed to defend him without ten-dentiousness. William R. Hunt tells hisstory in a reassuringly low-keyed way."Stef" was born in Manitoba of Ice-landic parents who soon moved to SouthDakota. At the University of North Da-kota Stef was known as a bright, out-spoken student — so outspoken that itwas suggested by the authorities that hemove somewhere else. At Harvard hebecame interested in anthropology, andin 1906 he was assigned to the Anglo-American Polar Expedition in which histask was to make an ethnological studyof the Mackenzie River Eskimos.

His great advantage was that he waswilling to accept the Eskimos on theirown terms and to learn from them. Un-like Peary, he took the trouble to learntheir language and, despite his dislike ofseafood, he accustomed himself to a fishdiet and mastered their hunting tech-niques. Above everything else, he ob-served every aspect of their culture withmeticulous attention. As a result he re-turned from his first visit to the Arctic

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with the conviction that attention shouldbe paid to its people and their resourcesrather than to exploration alone.

On his famous journey of 1909, ac-companied by Rudolph Anderson (laterhis implacable enemy), he discovered theCopper Eskimo people of Victoria Is-land. These people used copper imple-ments, and their colouring was muchfairer than any Eskimos yet encountered.He was intrigued by the possibility thatthey might be descendants of the Vikingcolony established in Greenland in theMiddle Ages.

When Stef returned to New York hisaccount of Eskimos with blue eyes andrusty hair was greeted with derision inmany quarters, but this discovery madehim into a celebrity. It initiated a seriesof books and widespread lecture tourswhich continued for the rest of his life.Hunt does not make it sufficiently clearhow valid his views were.

His subsequent forays into the Arcticwere to prove just as controversial. Themost notorious of these expeditions wasthe Karluk disaster of 1913. The expe-dition, sponsored by the Canadian gov-ernment, set out to make a comprehen-sive survey of the central arctic coast aswell as to explore terra incognita. Stefreally worked best on his own, and thepreparations for the ambitious under-taking were somewhat chaotic. The ex-pedition divided into two sections, thenorthern group headed by Stefansson,supported by a brigantine originally usedfor fishing. While Stef went ashore witha hunting party near Port Barrow on thewestern Arctic, a fierce storm blew up,the Karluk went adrift, and in theghastly months that followed, the shipwas sunk and most of the members of thecrew died. Stef was accused of hiringinexperienced men and taking on an un-seaworthy vessel. In defence of Stef,Hunt maintains that he had the best andonly men and equipment available.

The issue that roused most ire amongStef's critics was his espousal of "thefriendly Arctic" which became somethingof a crusade with him. After five and ahalf years of continuous polar serviceduring which he had lived on game andfish and had discovered approximately100,000 square miles of unknown terri-tory, he claimed that living in the Arcticpresented no difficulties so long as oneadapted to the habits of the natives. Hisopposition came from white supremacistsand those who feared that his common-sense approach would undermine themyths of arctic heroism. Hunt could havemade much more of Stef's prescience.

His book is disappointing in its lack ofpsychological analysis. There must havebeen something about the man that madeit difficult for other people to work withhim. At times Hunt admits that heshowed poor leadership and irritated hismen unnecessarily by his arrogant atti-tude. Was he a man of real probity? Whydid he never acknowledge his Eskimochild? Hunt maintains a polite distancefrom his subject, even careful not to be-come involved in the disputes of longago. His book does not make excitingreading and the maps are not sufficientlydetailed. Nevertheless, it is a sober, sen-sible book, and Stef would undoubtedlyhave been pleased.

PHYLLIS GROSSKURTH

RUNE-WRITERDAVID WILLIAMS, Eye of the Father. House of

Anansi Press, $12.95.

T H I S NOVEL COMPLETES Williams' Lac-jardin Trilogy, which also includes TheBurning Wood (1975) and The RiverHorsemen (1981). The stories and char-acters of all three novels are discrete, thenovels being linked only by the centralimportance of symbolic patterning ineach and by their settings, although only

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one part of Eye of the Father is actuallyset near Lac jardin Lake.

Of the three novels, this last is theboldest in concept and execution. Wil-liams' story is surrounded, most oftenironically, with large figures and patternsfrom Norse mythology. One-eyed Othin(Odin) is omnipresent, and almostequally important are Sigurd, Loki, andBaldr, who give their names respectivelyto the three major divisions of the novel.Williams also begins each of these threeparts with a runic letter, the ancientmeaning of which suggests the centralsignificance of the action within thatpart. Hence, in the first part the runedenotes man; in the second part the runesuggests necessity, compulsion, and dis-tress; and in the final part the rune des-ignates homeland or native land.

The story itself concerns the life anddeath of Magnus Vangdal, the 'father'of the title, as well as the bewilderedstruggles of his wife and two daughtersand, subsequently, of his grandson tocome to terms with this man who hasmarked all of their lives so viciously. Itis the story of a young man, born inHardanger, Norway, who, after beingseduced by an already pregnant girl,Gyda, flees his homeland to escape beingforced into marriage. His exile takes himto New York, to Duluth, Minnesota, andeventually, after gambling away hisfather-in-law's farm in central Minne-sota, on to the Lacjardin district of Sas-katchewan, and finally to Rossland andTrail, B.C., where he dies.

Before marrying Hilda Gunnar, all ofMagnus' experiences with women con-vince him that women are deceitful, sohe is unable to accept that his wife isindeed faithful to him and that hisdaughters, Sigfrid and Christine, are ac-tually his. His early experiences warp hischaracter until he incessantly brutalizeshis wife and all those around him as hedrinks, gambles, whores, and searches for

the elusive fortune that he believes hewill discover in 'Amerika.'

The ironic overtones of the Norsemyths begin to assert themselves whenMagnus assumes the surname Sigurdsonand climbs through a circle of fire torescue Hilda (Brynhild?), whom he thenmarries in order to get her father's farm.Although he may have started life withthe potential of Sigurd's son, he quicklyis turned into a Loki figure and wreaksdestruction within his lower abode. Thisirony ends with Magnus' death fromcancer of the bowels, penniless after yearsof mining for gold in the Rossland mine.

The real tragedy of the story lies withthe patient, self-sacrificing Hilda, whogives up all her own aspirations to herlove of Magnus and who gets nothingbut heartache and loneliness in return.Her story, told in a moving, unself-griev-ing first person, is a memorably powerfulone, and one effect of it is to make thesubsequent accounts of Christine Good-man, Hilda's younger daughter, and ofWayne Goodman, the grandson, some-what pale by comparison.

It is Wayne's story, though, that com-pletes the overall design of the novel. Heis a young professor of Icelandic atthe University of Saskatchewan and isdriven, as his mother and aunt havebeen, to come to terms with his deadgrandfather. He even considers a trip toTrail to somehow confront Magnus, buthe grows to realize that such a questwould be fruitless. He and his wife,Karen, discover their capacity for lovewhile adopting a child, and this newawareness allows Wayne to lay the ghostof his grandfather to rest. After a re-markable scene in which Wayne hallu-cinates that he sees the old man in theform of Odin, hanging by his feet andwrithing in agony because of the woundin his side, and turning his vacant eyesocket toward Wayne, Wayne is able toaccept his own responsobility for main-

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taining love in his world and to stopusing his grandfather as a sort of scape-goat for his own weaknesses. In a cli-mactic passage near the end of the novel,Wayne says, "'Karen, I don't need to goto Trail. My grandad's not there. He'swaiting in the book I have to finish. He'ssure to see me get my share of pain. Butmaybe we can see to it that our son getsnone.'"

If Williams' Eye of the Father is thebook that Wayne has to finish, then trulyWayne has found his grandfather and,in doing so, has also achieved a sort ofrebirth, a life of his own beyond hisgrandfather's 'eye' that has not been pos-sible for his mother, his aunt, or hisgrandmother. The Baldr figure of thelast section would seem to sanction thisoptimism since Baldr was, in the Norsemyths, the primary figure in the rebirthof the gods. It is as though Wayne him-self becomes the Odin figure, writhingon the world-ash tree Yggdrasil, reach-ing in his agony to the ground to pluckup the runes that will restore him andgive him even greater wisdom. Hence,are the runes that begin each section ofthe novel those that Wayne has securedand articulated?

It is impossible for any brief commenton Williams' novel to do justice to itsrichness of texture and its imaginativeforce. For example, one immediate prob-lem that faced the author was that ofhow to have Magnus tell his part of thenarrative when the character at thatpoint knew no English. Williams solvesthis problem by giving us Magnus' recol-lections and his dialogue with other WestScandinavian speakers in English, butusing blanks to indicate actual Englishwords that Magnus hears but cannotunderstand. Such presentation leads toconsiderable humour in scenes such asMagnus' encounter with the immigrationofficer at Ellis Island after his ship hasreached New York.

The techniques of the novel, as well asits Norse trappings, provide considerableand unusual challenge to the reader, butthe result, as with Williams' other novels,is that the reader comes to feel an activeparticipant in the creative experience ofthe novel. It is as though the reader, too,is struggling to take up and compose therunes which lie on the ground for thetaking.

WILLIAM LATTA

BONDS OF DIGNITYM. o. HESSE, Gabrielle Roy. Twayne, $30.00.

PROFESSOR HESSE'S BOOK is a useful in-troduction to the works of Gabrielle Royfor those who know nothing about theauthor and her writing and who read noFrench. It is written in English and allquotations are in English, with the origi-nal French provided in the notes.

"The Development of a Writer" givesa very brief outline of Gabrielle Roy'sbackground and career. There follows achapter on "The Urban Novels" (Bon-heur d'occasion and Alexandre Chene-vert) and one titled "Idyllic Interludes,"which presents La Petite poule d'eau andCet Eté qui chantait. Mention is made,in the latter chapter, of the children'sstories, Ma Vache Bossie and Courte-Queue, "A Pilgrimage to the Past" is astudy of Rue Deschambault and LaRoute d'Altamont. "An Artist's Credo"is devoted to La Montagne secrète. LaRiviere sans repos is treated in a chaptertitled "Worlds in Conflict." Un Jardinau bout du monde and Ces Enfants dema vie are grouped together under therubric "The Canadian Mosaic." The six-page "Summary" is a brave and by andlarge successful attempt to put into focussome of the themes discussed in the bodyof the text. The bibliography is very briefand selective but the choices are reliable.

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A closer proofreading would have un-covered the occasional lapse. GabrielleRoy's death is duly noted but at anotherpoint she is said to be leading "a lifedevoted almost exclusively to her art."

Each chapter consists for the most partof an account of the critical reception ofthe works in question and a detailed plotsummary. There is some room, however,for analysis and commentary. The im-portance of the themes of childhood andmemory is well illustrated in the discus-sion of Rue Deschambault and La Routed'Altamont, there is a sensitive presen-tation of La Petite poule d'eau and CetEté qui chantait, but the comments onAlexandre Chenevert are disappointing.Hesse does not appreciate the revelationand transformation at Lac Vert andmisses the profound message concerningthe individual's opportunity for self-dis-covery and regeneration. The chapter onLa Montagne secrète affords Hesse anopportunity to discuss Gabrielle Roy'sunderstanding of the artist's vision androle in society. The artist's calling im-poses a solitary life and, yet, one thatultimately creates bonds of solidarity withthe reader.

The brevity accorded each text is morecruelly felt in some cases than in others.The two pages dedicated to Ces Enfantsde ma vie are simply too few to yieldanything but the most superficial plotsummary for one of Gabrielle Roy's trulyimpressive works.

Hesse correctly emphasizes GabrielleRoy as the Canadian writer most con-cerned with the Canadian mosaic andunreservedly sympathetic to Canada'snew settlers and the homeless. The"stranger" is, for Gabrielle Roy, a meta-phor expressing the human condition.Hesse makes the point directly: "It ismeaningless to speak of 'strangers' for itapplies to no one or every one."

In the summary, the author of thisstudy places Gabrielle Roy in the con-

text of French-Canadian literary historybut stresses the universality of her writ-ing. Her works are concerned with hu-man dignity and the ideal of fellowship,and her characters embody the strugglefor the realization of that dream. Hesserepeats Donald Cameron's observationthat what one finds in Gabrielle Roy iswisdom, in spite of the fact that she is anintuitive, rather than an intellectual,writer.

Hesse notes that Gabrielle Roy's workswhich take place in the past are primar-ily idealistic and Utopian, whereas theones situated in the contemporary periodare mostly "realistic." She presents Ga-brielle Roy's fiction in terms of a seriesof dualities — the ideal and the real, theprairie and Quebec, life and death, selfand others — but there is, nevertheless,an essential, underlying unity. One finds,in the final analysis, a bond between theauthor and her readers that extends be-yond that relationship to represent thelink between the individual and his fel-low man.

This volume does not so much consti-tute an addition to the increasingly var-ied critical material on Gabrielle Roy asan opportunity for English-Canadian andAmerican readers to acquaint themselveswith one of Canada's best writers. Mor-decai Richler once commented sardoni-cally that Canadian literature is the onlyworld literature to be read exclusively inCanada. Any serious attempt to remedythat situation should be welcome.

PAUL SOCKEN

SHALLOW GRIEFSDAVID GiLMOUR, Bach on Tuesday. Coach

House, $12.50.

IMAGINE A DILUTED mixture of Lowry'sUnder the Volcano and Salinger'sCatcher in the Rye and you have the

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feel of David Gilmour's first novel, Backon Tuesday. After a disagreement withhis ex-wife J.; Eugene, the self-pityingnarrator, steals his five-year-old daughterFranny from school and flees with her toJamaica, where in a long drunken nightof wandering from bar to bar he revealshis sorry life story of self-destructive self-indulgences. Like all the anti-heroes ofthis kind of male romance, Eugene is achildish and violent misogynist whoproves incredibly attractive to women.He had to work hard at driving J. away— through a string of affairs with beauti-ful women — but is now hurt at havingsucceeded. In the course of his Jamaicandark night of the soul, another attractiveand successful woman offers herself tohim. It's all too predictable. He knowsall the stories have already been writtenand he will never be as important toanyone as he wants to be: "You're notthe new kid on the block anymore.There's no reason to believe that thenext one will be different from the lastone." Even his jaded nihilism has beenanticipated. As J. has explained to him:"No grief, no matter how shallow, lastsforever."

This is a defensive book. It has all theanswers. Anticipating the objection thatthere are no characters, it explains thatcharacters are nothing but fictions, rolesassumed and cast off like costumes. An-ticipating the objection that nothing hap-pens, it makes that disappointment itscentral theme: "It felt as if I'd spent mylife stealing out of white rooms to walkdown dark roads — and every time I'mconvinced that some night I'm going tostumble across something, a happiness asbig as the sun. But it's a lie of course.There's nothing out there." There isnothing here but patterns of words andimages, some fin de siècle world-weari-ness, some Wildean wisecracks, somemuted adolescent angst — and a lot ofanxiety of influence.

What else could you expect from anovel about two English students, whosehappy memories include meeting inShakespeare class and studying togetherfor a Chaucer exam? The novel evenparodies its immersion in a sea of cliché.When Lily, Eugene's latest conquest, askswhat he is writing (in response to a liethat impresses even him — he has toldher he is here to write a book), he an-swers: "it's about a guy who comes tothe tropics and loses his marbles." Lilyoffers: "Like what's his name's book.""Yeah, exactly," he answers. Even thatcriticism, then, has been denied me. Hehas said it before I could. This is likewhat's his name's book. And it's not abad approximation. Gilmour handlespacing well. Back on Tuesday is sensitiveto language, drunk on images, steeped inliterary traditions (chiefly American andEuropean) — but it has nothing to say.

Trapped in the narrator's solipsism,Toronto is reduced to "an ugly house onan ugly street" and Jamaica, to the ex-patriate's nightmare in paradise. This isa determinedly "universal" novel, locat-ing its universalism in the consciousnessof the middle-class i960's male, forwhom life's greatest tragedies have beenthe death of John Lennon and the pres-sures to grow up. Using the combativelanguage of this genre of fiction to de-scribe his decision to phone J. and giveup Franny — "There comes a time whenyou've got to stop ducking and take apunch and Tuesday morning, that's whenI took mine" — he finds, in an appall-ingly inappropriate simile for the 18hours of his self-induced ordeal, that"We must have looked like war veterans,J. and I." A lot of talent has producedan empty book.

DIANA BRYDON

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DUST BOWLTO NEVER LANDANDREAS SCHROEDER, Dustship Glory. Double-

day, $19.95.

Dustship Glory does not bear the slight-est taint of pedantry, yet it is one of thoserare, fine novels from which we learnmuch, and learn it joyously. Subtly, webecome aware, as we read and reflectupon Andreas Schroeder's perfectly pro-portioned documentary novel, that wehave grown because our awareness ofmany things has enlarged — of parochialthings, including the life of Finnish im-migrants to North America, the conflictsamong constituent groups of rural com-munities, the vast scope of the Prairie(which Schroeder captures in powerfulsea imagery) and its effect on the spirit,the struggle to survive on the Prairiethrough the twin plagues of dust bowland Great Depression, bureaucratic in-sentience, and compassion. Above all, wefinish Dustship Glory knowing moreabout catholic matters — about the hu-man soul, about marriage, love, andfriendship, about pride, untutored gen-ius, even monomania — than we knewbefore.

Schroeder's protagonist is a represen-tation of the historical Finnish-CanadianTom Sukanen, who actually did spendthe Depression years in southern Sas-katchewan building and all but puttingthe finishing touches on a sizeable sea-worthy freighter a nightmare away fromthe sea. The novel's documentary formatis a series of interviews with family,friends, and acquaintances of Sukanen(through Schroeder's fine sense of lan-guage, each speaks in an appropriatelydistinctive voice ), interspersed amongchapters of sensitive interpretation anddescription by the omniscient investi-gator. The pattern permits the illusionof more or less objective reporting, and

the "true" Tom Sukanen emerges slowlyfrom the happy patchwork of contradic-tory perceptions of him, as well as fromhis own myriad eccentricities. "Theman's a harmless eccentric,.. . and thisone's a natural born frustrated engineerto boot," insists Thorndike, one of thefew sympathetic neighbours, with anEnglish tolerance for eccentricity. "Aw,let's face it," comments Clay Jackson, alocal with an opposite view, "he weren'tnuthin' but a ringading nutcase." Thebroadly comic chapter comprising aninterview with Avro Sukanen, Tom'spuffed-up, malapropian nephew, is aloneworth the price of the novel as he dis-cusses his uncle's "abominational" be-haviour approvingly.

At face value, Sukanen's actions tendto support a derogatory view of him. Asan immigrant to rural Minnesota, Suka-nen, who is nothing if not direct, getsinto difficulty with the law by acciden-tally breaking the back of his partner inan icy marriage as he claims what heassumes to be his conjugal right. What-ever that says about him, his trek to hisnew home in Canada tells volumes. Al-ways a navigation buff who wears acompass around his neck, he walks,swims, and shoulders his way the six-hundred miles to Manybones, Saskatch-ewan, across roads, fields, and rivers ina line astonishing for its unswerving per-fection. We trifle with such men andtheir dreams only at our peril.

The interview technique also allowsSchroeder to achieve effective dramaticirony. For example, to one of the infor-mants, Margaret Hollington, Sukanen'snaming of his fantastic ship Sontianen,Finnish for "dung-beetle," is a questionof "cheap theatrics," designed by the ob-sessive old crank to play all of the localpeople for "monumental fools." Weknow that there is more to it than orner-iness, however. We have been present atthe moment when, having himself just

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come through a tornado that kills aneighbour's family, he comes across adung-beetle that he cannot destroy bysmothering with sand, stomping, or burn-ing; so closely (and rightly!) does heidentify with that indomitable little sur-vivor that on the instant he decides toname the cargo steamer — in which hehas invested his soul — for it.

Our admiration for Sukanen growsover the course of the novel in spite of,sometimes because of, his detractors.Next to him they are small people whoexist or go under without vision. Moreand more he comes to acquire — to us,not to them — the stature of Old Testa-ment prophet. In that hellish time andplace, unwashed and increasingly un-clothed, railing madly against womenand the government, he is utterly in hiselement. Almost infinitely resourceful, hemakes do with practically anything.While all the others are cursing the rav-aging locusts, he finds them a blessing:"I have-it now lunch any time I hun-gry." Able to trade, scavenge, invent,build all he needs for the ship, he knowsto smear himself with horse manure tokeep off the flies, and to lubricate hispathetic deadman winch, with which hemust inch the vessel fifteen miles to thenearest water, with the grease of crushedsnails and slugs.

But his greatest invention is the dreamof the freighter which his attackers seeas a threat to their sense of order andeven his defenders cannot begin to un-derstand. "A ship in a dust-storm. That'sthe kind of sense he wanted us to be-lieve," complains the irate Mrs. Thorn-dike. Yes, we come to realize, and thatis the only kind of sense that makes sensein the central circumstances of theirlives. "Much Madness is divinest Sense,"as Emily Dickenson told us. His beliefthat government relief is to be avoidedbecause it contains poison may be meta-phorically true. And he does have an

ingenious plan to get his ship to the sea.With the mystical star chart he hasdrawn on the ceiling of his poor tower-house, with his treasured compass, it doesnot matter that he is planning to sail hismythic Grockersland on the Arctic Seaor to the Sea of Malagar in the southernhemisphere or back to Finland. Once you"Demur — you're straightway danger-ous — / And handled with a Chain —."It only matters that the Sontianen isa-building when nothing else is a-build-ing among those God-forsaken couleesand prairies, and that one dream soarswhere no other can kick free of the sand,and that Andreas Schroeder shows usthat so well.

ALAN SHUCARD

FROST SHADOWSRICHARD LUSH, A Manual for Lying Down.

Wolsak & Wynn, $7.00.PATRICIA YOUNG, Melancholy Ain't No Baby.

Ragweed, $8.95.COLIN MORTON, This won't last forever. Long-

spoon, $7.00.DALE ziEROTH, When the Stones fly up.

Anansi, $8.95.

T H E COVER OF COLIN MORTON'S Thiswon't last forever bears a photograph ofa typewriter festooned with icicles. Thismay not be a common sight in Canada,but for an outsider like myself it suggestsa lot about a country which is so arcticas to seem almost mythical. Whereas thedominant images in Australia are thesea, the bush, and the desert — all hotand highly coloured — Canada seems tolive in the shadow of frost, threatened bythe blank erasure of snow.

When the frost strikes, though, it canbe the same in both countries. RichardLush's collection starts with a series ofpoems detailing the breakup of a mar-riage because of a lesbian relationship.The hurt, the bewilderment, and the

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anger are caught in poems which evadeself-pity. Lush's strength is in buildingpictures, in subtle and economical dram-atisations of complex situations in non-dramatic language:

This is a name day andsleet begins to tick at the window.The kitchen woman whispers, "I'm sorry."Man and child leave. And there areno words for what has happened.

The awareness that no words will reallydo causes Lush to be wary of their se-ductions, frugal in his choice. The re-sult is an eloquent plainness which issophisticated and very assured. Thistransforms vulnerability into poignancy,in a poetry where glimpses reveal morethan acres of gazing.

The poems of Richard Lush that Ifind least satisfying are those exploringa new love. It seems hard, today, towrite fully satisfying love lyrics. Perhapsit always was. Colin Morton does hisbest, but his efforts just go to prove howdifficult it is without the conventionsthat sustained earlier love poets. Hispoems seem superfluous: if the relation-ship is as good as they suggest, then it isa lot better than the poems. It may beanother case of there being "no wordsfor what has happened." But Morton hasother strengths. "Waking up in the1960s" will chill the blood of anyone intheir forties with its acute hindsight; andhis playful way with language producesa hilarious variation on Hamlet's solilo-quy:

To be or not to be: that is the quickstep;whether 'tis nobler in the minimum to

sufferthe slip-ups and arsenic of outrageous

foundlingsor to take armistice against a seam of

trout. . . .

"Inventory" and "Poem without Shame"are among a number of other poemswhich show a lively and quirky talentwhose curiosity about language is also a

way of seeing things freshly. Although itis an uneven book, its title This won'tlast forever, while true, is unnecessarilydeprecating.

Patricia Young's Melancholy Ain't NoBaby ranges less widely. Like many otherwomen poets, she writes about what isclose up, so close to home that many mencannot even see it:

The absolute terrorof living like this. With food on the table,wine in the fridge, a good man in my bed.

Her perspective illuminates common ex-perience, not only from a woman's pointof view but also from a child's. Menwrite of their love with a gratitude thatsets it aside from the business of living.But for Patricia Young love is somethingwhich presents its own problems — chil-dren, purpose, identity — and has to becoped with daily. Moreover it is imbri-cated with the one language which hasto make do for all things. Her poetry islively, unsettling, and very attractive.

Dale Zieroth's When the Stones fly upis, from an outsider's point of view, themost obviously Canadian in setting andtopography. Yet for me it is the leastrewarding. Strangely, these poems aboutchildhood on the prairies are little dif-ferent from many others about child-hood in small country towns in verydifferent parts of the world. "1956: Theold Lutheran pastor" — one of the bestin this collection — could as readily havebeen written in South Australia, wherethere is a large German emigrant pop-ulation. These poems delineate the newtrans-national imaginative territory —nostalgia, which is much the same every-where and, by definition, offering littlethat is new. Which goes to show that be-ing faithful to local detail is not enough,unless that faith is tempered by a radicalcuriosity. Zieroth is not untouched bythat, and some of his poems explore be-hind the scenery of the scene. But Pa-

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tricia Young's view of domesticity is notonly closer to home, but also far lessfamiliar and more exciting.

ANDREW TAYLOR

OVER & OVERBARBARA K. LATHAM & ROBERTA J. PAZDRO,

eds., Not Just Pin Money — Selected Essayson the History of Women's Work in BritishColumbia. Camosun College, $12.00.

RICHARD THOMAS WRIGHT, Overlanders. West-ern Producer Prairie Books, n.p.

T H E S E TWO BOOKS appear to have littlein common and essentially this is true.Pin Money is entirely about women'sexperiences in British Columbia; Over-landers is 99.99% about men's experi-ences in the Gold Rush days. Overland-ers is more or less a continuous narrativebased on diaries, news items, and letters;Pin Money is a collection of papers givenat the Women's History in British Co-lumbia Conference in 1984. Overlandersis more sure of its goal and for that rea-son is more successful; Pin Money editorsadmit that "its audience is neither ho-mogeneous nor predictable." Still, sinceboth deal with history, I found readingthem together enlightening if only be-cause the fact that history is largely amale account of the past is the raisond'être of Pin Money and is self-con-sciously alluded to in Overlanders. Moreabout that later.

I read Pin Money first and wentthrough various stages of deep interest,annoyance, and frustration. It is a veryuneven collection and it is far too long.I am beginning to have doubts about theacademic habit of publishing conferencepapers anyway. Orally presented papersthat anticipate audience participation aredifferent from articles or essays preparedfor journals. But perhaps the biggestproblem is that the editors, in this case,have included materials that differ

greatly in quality and kind. The so-called"essay" on women MLA's, for instance,is not an essay. It consists of brief biog-raphies with photos but lacks focus oranalysis; "Postscript: Women in WhoseH o n o u r B.C. Schools H a v e BeenNamed," described as "tables" by theauthor and "preliminary results of aproject" (though I don't know how itcan be both pre- and post-), seems in-appropriate in this collection because itis without context. Other essays sufferbecause they repeat the obvious. Perhapsthe authors would respond that what tosome is obvious is news to others, but(although my knowledge of women'sstudies is not profound) I came acrosslittle that surprised or informed me.What I kept hoping for and all too oftendidn't find was interpretation or analysisor any sort of theoretical approach to thematerial. A lot of groundwork has beendone (and must continue) but where dothe historians go from there? What dothey make of their findings? Now thatthere is proof that women have beenexploited, disenfranchised, abused, de-nied fundamental rights, have most oftendone this or that depending on race andclass and era, what comes next? Dowomen just go on collecting more andmore data?

The essay "When You Don't Knowthe Language. . . ," on the history ofNative Indian women, was one of theessays that for various reasons was worthpublishing (which is not to say otherswere not worth presenting at a confer-ence) . Mitchell and Franklin alert thereader to the importance of an analyticalapproach to historical information. "Crit-ical assessment" and "new directions"are announced as goals by the authors.The remark that "matriarchies were con-cocted by males to provide justificationfor the way the world is and ought to be— truly patriarchial and male domi-nated" challenges assumptions and sug-

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gests a re-evaluation of research alreadydone. Pazdro's "From Pastels to Chisel:The Changing Role of B.C. WomenArtists" places her biographies in a widercontext: "The question that is more im-portant than the individual achievementsof these women artists is why they havebeen misrepresented and ignored andwhat this treatment reveals about art his-tory."

Margaret Conrad in her introductoryessay "Sundays Always Make Me Thinkof Home . . ." (are the often incrediblylong titles another indication of the ori-gin of the material?) remarks that "Vir-tually every historical topic is evaluateddifferently when seen through the eyes ofwomen." I wondered if I was too con-scious of this when I was reading Over-landers but, like a bolt from the blue,Richard Thomas Wright reveals his sen-sitivity to the implied criticism in thatview and interrupts his narrative to lec-ture a bit on it. He is somewhat exercisedby the attention given "Catherine Schu-bert's travel" (an overlander or just thewife of an overlander?) and remarks "ifshe is given heroine status for walkingthe plains while pregnant, the samestatus should be accorded inany otherMétis and Indian women." But surelythat principle applies equally to the men.What these mostly white, male overland-ers have done is nothing more than Me-tis men or Indian men have done — infact they have done it often enough to beguides for the white men. The two para-graphs which follow are uncharacteris-tically muddled including puzzling andgratuitous remarks like that on the re-lationship between men (Overlander?Elizabethan? Victorian?) being "a cul-tural bonding that resulted in a certainamount of homosexuality that was not'buggery'."

Fortunately Wright avoids philosophiz-ing in most of the book. He succeedsquite brilliantly in weaving together the

many accounts left by overlanders intoa continuous and engaging story. Thereis bound to be a certain amount of repe-tition — men knee-deep in mud draggingoxen to firm ground, mosquitoes, rain,snow, hunger — they were the commonlot but personalities do emerge. For NovaScotians the narrative by Joseph A.Wheelock of Bridgetown (typo in book)will be of special interest but it is alsoamong the best. The amazing and per-haps amusing conclusion to the typicallyfive- to seven-month arduous adventurewest was that relatively few of the menactually ended up panning gold. The ex-penses of the overland route came toabout one hundred dollars but, ironically,the mining tools were the only articles"found to be unnecessary."

KATHLEEN TUDOR

EXCESSESPIER GIORGIO Di cicco, Post-Sixties Nocturne.

Fiddlehead, $6.95.BRUCE WHiTEMAN, The Invisible World Is in

Decline. Coach House, $6.95.STEVEN SMITH, Blind Zone. Aya Press, $8.00.THERE'S NO POINT in mincing words:Pier Georgio di Cicco's latest collection(his tenth since 1977) is disappointing.Quality is not necessarily contingentupon lack of quantity — there is noguarantee that those poets who publishvery little will be the best — but there isa danger in publishing too much toosoon without giving the work a chanceto "set" so the author can evaluate it asobjectively as he can. Writers are not tobe castigated for a large output, only apoor one.

When I reviewed The Tough Ro-mance a number of years ago, I said thatdi Cicco's work had "both the strengthof sincerity and the integrity of talent."The same can not be said about Post-

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Sixties Nocturne. The post-sixties post-mortems (the book could well be sub-titled Baby Boomer's Lament) are, forthe most part, too commonplace to beinteresting. Di Cicco is self-conscious,aware that he's a poet with a capital P.He writes out of a fashionable and now,for him, habitual pose: that of the poetas hip-talking seer and social critic.

He also has an annoying tendency tojump from one idea, one image, to an-other without providing adequate bridgesfor the reader. For example:

Who would want to brave things in thecold? How many

jackasses does it take to have lunch andreport on the

latest Salt Talks?We saw Peter Pan flying low on the land,

and Popeye andDaffy Duck crying like madmen in the

comic book sky.

Surprising and difficult leaps are not un-common in contemporary poetry (ErinMouré's work comes immediately tomind), and there's not a thing wrongwith them — so long as they make sense.I suspect that in di Cicco's case the leapsare indications of a lack of craftsman-ship.

Di Cicco can sound good, but if onetakes the time to look at what's beingsaid, one notices a conspicuous lack ofmeaning :

I pretzel my fears, I have and alwayswill like some mad rover. I hear thegong tonight, as any other night —the cold, the shallow winter air. . . .

Pretzeled fears, mad rovers, gongs, coldweather — where is the connection here,the unity?

And then there's the "cuteness" withwhich the book abounds:

I have two hundred dollars in the bankand

think of writing about Charleston. Thebank

teller tells me my account is on hold. Iexplain to her that I'm learning Martian

dialectsand live on Mars.As for di Cicco's juxtaposition of slang

and the sublime (the coarsely colloquialand the lyrically elevated), it makes forsome wonderful lines when it works —which it often doesn't, mainly becauseof the problems discussed above.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in Post-Sixties Nocturne is the rampant excess:too much of too much. Di Cicco has anenergetic imagination, but it needs to bechannelled into more carefully revisedand edited writing.

Bruce Whiteman's The Invisible WorldIs in Decline, a sequence of 39 prosepoems, is in some respects as excessive asdi Cicco's book. Whiteman relies on anoverwhelming dose of scientific jargon,reminiscent of Christopher Dewdney(who, incidentally, edited this volume),to hammer home the point that the selfin modern society is being smothered bythe world's "invasion" — informationoverload. Bio-babble, techno-babble, bab-ble of all kinds — language becomes analienator. All this terminology is effec-tive, up to a point. It forces the readerto experience the confusion and frustra-tion the poet is trying to convey. How-ever, a whole book of this is tedious, con-trived, and unrelentingly intellectual.

It is dangerous for a writer to letlanguage dominate so completely. Forinstance :

Its spherical harmonic is a rational integralhomogeneous function of the three variables

of sex,birth and death. At any given point

equidistantfrom its centre a man has the blessed

impressionof stillness in the midst of a polymorphouspromiscuous rattletrap universe.

Or how about:He was responding like a remote-sensing

device to

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the black quadrilateral suggestiveness of theearth and an image from heaven relayed

by thetrigonometry of direct triangulation. The

multitudinous layers of the Homeric cityrose like

increasingly decadent elaborations of aninhuman

perception. But like all memory itculminated in

death and total loss, a whiteout.

After reading this type of thing, I aminclined to agree with Whiteman whenhe says "Language is over all our heads."It sure is in this book.

In Blind Zone by Steven Smith lan-guage is once again seemingly more im-portant than what is being said. Gert-rude Stein would be proud of Smith's"'portrait' for steve mccaffery,"

portrait is a/ is a picture/ is a Stephen/pic

ture a Stephen/ a source/ a sound/ a sourcebe

yond/ is a sound beyond source/ beyondpictur

e/ beyond a sound/ beyond imagining/ animage

and John Cage would probably empha-thize with the inspiration behind the twopoems dedicated to him: "This Is aPoem About Sound," which is a blankpage, and "alterations" which I quote infull: "pr*p#r!d p=&n%." (No, theseare not typographical errors.)

And a whole host of bad writers coulduse the opening of the "white cycle"sequence as justification for publishingtheir own work: "anyway / (a new whiteyawn) / wishing / you want negatives /many say hand / see a hand here / writ-ing."

So very little goes such a long way:64 pages to be exact.

EVA TIHANYI

=00=

HUMANE VISIONSHIRLEY NEUMAN, ed., Another Country:

Writings by and about Henry Kreisel. Ne-West, $19.95/9.95-

T H I S BOOK HOLDS OUT three differentkinds of interest to its readers. First, butnot necessarily most important, is thesampling of Henry Kreisel's uncollectedcreative writing, some juvenilia (poems,short stories, fragments from a novel)by the young internee of the 1940's, aradio play from the 1960's, and a coupleof short stories from the 1980's. Secondis an assortment of literary, cultural, andsocial criticism. The most interesting,witty, imaginative, and wise is by HenryKreisel himself: essays, letters, and talkswhich explore the problems facing animmigrant writer in the Canadian cul-tural scene and which range over a vari-ety of authors, Canadian and European,whose example and inspiration helpedKreisel to find his own voice. More fa-miliar fare, by comparison, is the selec-tion of critical articles by other scholarswho offer explications and assessments ofthe whole body of Kreisel's achievementsas a writer.

The third focus of interest — and thisis what makes the book worth readingand re-reading — is the bringing togetherof a rich selection of autobiographicalmaterials which dramatize for us in de-tail and vividly the life, especially theinner life, of a remarkable man who,over a period of forty years, has made amajor contribution going beyond litera-ture and criticism to his adopted Canada.

The earliest writing certainly remainsjuvenilia in its naivete and technicalawkwardness. But it is nevertheless ad-mirable for its precociousness, the prod-uct of an adolescent Austrian Jew, fugi-tive from Nazism, eagerly struggling toexpress himself in the unpropitious con-ditions of internment, and driven by apowerful urge to do so in a foreign lan-

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guage whose literature he had barely be-gun to discover. What the fiction showsmost clearly is Kreisel's early commit-ment to the study of human character insituations of stress, where moral andspiritual challenges are encountered, andpowerful basic emotions are endured. Hisattraction to the simplicity and clarity offable is also evident, as is his reliance onsymbolism and symbolic action to mani-fest inner reality. Indeed, although thelater stories and novels demonstrate amuch greater control over the techniquesof realism, like their predecessors theycontinue to suggest to the reader thatverisimilitude, the carefully constructedpersuasiveness of observed details thatring true, is for Kreisel not a virtue torank with the kinds of moral truth thata shaped tale can communicate. Readingearly or late Kreisel we often find our-selves wanting to suspend our disbelieffor the sake of what we can learn aboutthe human condition.

It is this sacrifice of superficial con-sistency for underlying power that temptsKreisel's critics, and even Kreisel him-self, to be apologetic sometimes. Theyseem to believe that there are ways ofapproaching the novels and short storiesthat will remove a recurring sense of un-easiness with the realistic texture. Butthe limitations even of mature works likeThe Rich Man and The Betrayal aresimpler to ignore than to argue away,just as those who find the Biblical par-ables illuminating and moving are un-likely to question whether dialogue orsettings are entirely convincing. It is notby accident that the two principal mod-els Kreisel found to help him enter thestream of English language writing andCanadian literary culture, Joseph Con-rad and A. M. Klein, also pay only lipservice to the conventions of realism.

Understandably, Klein had more tooffer than Conrad, though Kreisel pon-ders with insight the different motives

and methods that brought that greatPolish predecessor into the heart of Eng-lish literature. "Conrad's solution of howto deal with the raw materials of hisexperience could not be mine. It wasA. M. Klein who showed me how onecould use, without self-consciousness, thematerial that came from a specificallyEuropean and Jewish experience." Howquickly and fully Kreisel seems to haverecognized the necessity for him to be-come Canadian without ever abandoningthe "strength and vividness" of his deep-est roots.

It is Henry Kreisel's personal story,sketched in, supplemented, recapitulated,consolidated in section after section dat-ing from the 1940's to the 1980's, thatAnother Country tells so eloquently. Theintense, idealistic Jewish refugee boyclings to his sense of the value of art andliterature as the expression of the great-ness of the human spirit, in the confinesof internment in England and Canada;freed, he plunges into the stream ofCanadian social and cultural life andagainst all odds swims strongly to the topof the educational system; he achievessuccess as a creative writer and as aprofessor and active citizen of the socialand academic community. All the whilehe never forgets the dark forces of evilwhich decimated Jewry and drove himand his family into exile, which nearlydestroyed civilization, which at times ap-pear all too close to doing so still. Andall the while he studies, compassionatelybroods over, keeps flowing freely, thedeep stream of human passions, espe-cially the need to give and receive love,which is the only real counterbalance tothat evil. It is a voice concentrated bythe painful experience of absolutes in thecrucible of modern times, but speaking apowerful affirmation, that reaches usclearly and simply from the life and workof Henry Kreisel.

F. w. WATT

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ANYBODY HOMEBYRNA BARCLAY, The Last Echo. NeWest,

$19-95/7-95·NANCY BAUER, Wise-Ears. Oberon, $12.95.

THESE TWO NOVELS struggle with im-portant themes, but are ultimately un-able, as Columbus failed to find hisshort-cut to the Orient, to find a directroute to the heart. For opposite reasons,having to do with density and craft, thetwo authors recognize their countries onthe map but don't quite take us there.It is feminine territory, fertile landstaked for storytelling, populated bywomen with the energy and tempera-ment to give and sustain life.

The Last Echo is the sound of hoovesbeating on the wooden floors of a burn-ing house as the horses of Revelation aretranslated into lemmings rising from theashes of the old world to scamper off tothe new. It is also heartbeat, the impetusto undertake and survive the quest fornew beginnings in the New Jerusalem.Byrna Barclay's novel, legato movementin The Livelong Quartet, the story ofSwedish settlement in a Saskatchewantown, is the synthesis of Genesis andRevelation, symbolic language recordingthe transplanting of hope in the Prom-ised Land. Certainly this is not an origi-nal response to the prairie which, morethan any other region in Canada, seemsto have inspired in writers an archetypalresponse, the language and metaphor oftraditional mythologies.

At the centre of this novel, a songspielin the oral tradition of Homer and Chau-cer, rich in humour and visual detail, isthe earth-mother refracted in the coloursof four Swedish daughters, mares withthe strength and grace of Biblical horses.Their song is re-creation and it bubblesfrom instinct.

Inside the music box; a ring set withthree runic stones. I hold it up to the sun

but it does not catch light. Stone is onlystone in Livelong. I slide it on my weddingfinger, twist and turn it, making a wish:"Canada. Now I am for that place."

Barclay's prose is rich in sensual detail.It has the line and colour of paintingsby Breughel. What is missing is thedeeper resonance that comes from acloser identification with the intelligenceand feeling of her characters. Somehowwe are distracted by the wealth of gor-geous detail, the wood carving and em-broidery that catches the eye and dis-engages the heart and intellect. They arecolourful shapes in a fairytale gestalt,passionate and real as far as we areallowed to penetrate the surface of in-tuition. We just want to know them bet-ter. There is such a richness in thisprose, we are left with a longing to knowone heart carved in a proliferation ofsinging clocks.

Wise-Ears, a novel by Nancy Bauer,is very nicely gift-wrapped in fine paperwith an appropriate cover painting byMaxwell Bates. Inside, there is somethingbreakable, the glass heart of a middle-aged woman seeking her own truth inthe kind of therapeutic activity our cul-ture seems to oblige us to undertake.Sophie espouses good causes and con-tinues to fret over children who havealready dropped their first feathers andgratefully flown the coop.

Much of this novel is excelsior shavedto protect its fragile centre. Unfortu-nately, like the stuffed lives of womenlike Sophie, much of it is banal, the spin-ning of threads that lead nowhere nearthe truth. Sophie's letter-writing andforays into the kitchen are self-consciousattempts at creativity. We feel sorry forher but find ourselves dozing off into thatgood night as she avoids her real rageand pain with the usual anodynes.

Occasionally we jerk awake longenough to wish her off her broadeningderrière as her sexless soap opera lists

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off into dreamland. The only perk is ason who just might liven things up bycoming out of the closet and enraginghis male parent. Unfortunately, just intime, he switches the channel to redeem-ing heterosexuality, saving Sophie andletting us lapse back into lethargy. Goodold Edmund.

The novel reads like one of Sophie'sprojects, activity contrived to take theedge off boredom. We never get to herheart of darkness, so busy are we tickingoff the daily lists.

On 8 and g June, Sophie sat at the kitchentable all morning worrying. What kind ofproject could she do that would makesense at the end of July? On 20 June shesat again now desperate. Redecorating wasout. Some self-improvement project? Loseweight? Swim every day? Memorize poetry?Learn the names of wildflowers? Crochetan Afghan, maybe a crib-sized one. Some-how none of her ideas seemed importantenough to justify the build-up she hadgiven her project.

Amen.LINDA ROGERS

ART WESTMARILYN BAKER, The Winnipeg School of Art.

Univ. of Manitoba Press, $16.50.BRUCE HAiG, Paul Kane Artist. Detselig En-

terprises, $10.95.

T H E S E BOOKS ARE historical accounts ofhow painting can develop and grow in apioneer setting, where populations aresmall and resources seemingly nonexis-tent. The first, by Marilyn Baker, is asort of expanded catalogue, which docu-ments the founding and development ofthe Winnipeg School of Art from 1913,when it was founded, to 1934, three yearsafter Lemoine Fitzgerald became its prin-cipal. The occasion for publication wasan exhibition, "The Early Years" (heldin 1977), which not only gathered up thework done by Winnipeg artists during

the first twenty years of the WinnipegSchool, but also set out "to investigatethe relationship between art educationand the art produced at that time." Italso includes biographies of all the stu-dents and teachers who studied andtaught at the school during those forma-tive years. Not less interesting are thenotes about the citizens who were asso-ciated with the school — men and womenwho must have believed in the possibilityof art, even in a remote provincial citywhose chief concerns were money, wheat,and settlement. I happen to have beenone of the children who attended Satur-day morning classes in 1927-28, and Istill remember a beautiful Christmascard from Lemoine Fitzgerald, who, ifhe did not actually teach my class, musthave at least visited it.

Predictably, the first directors of theschool were British or American, andLemoine Fitzgerald, appointed principalin 1929, was the first local and only sec-ond Canadian artist to head the school.The other Canadian was Franz Johnston,a member of the Group of Seven, whohad been principal from 1921 to 1924.Fitzgerald was no jumper-onto-band-wagons; although he had managed tostudy in New York for a year and totravel all over Canada and the UnitedStates, he came back to paint the snow-filled backyards and sun-glittered roofs ofWinnipeg, and to exhibit the work ofArthur Lismer, Lawren Harris, andJ. E. H. Macdonald. At a time whenCanada was still very much of a colonialoutpost and a country with no flag of itsown, he believed that these painterswould stimulate the students, and theirwork would help them to realize the pos-sibilities of their own Canadian subjects.In 1932 Fitzgerald joined the Group ofSeven and remained the principal ofthe Winnipeg School of Art until 1949.Among the students who attended theWinnipeg School are such well-known

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artists as Philip Surrey, Charles Comfort,William Winter, and Irene Hemsworth.There are many others, illustrators andteachers, who — judging by the paintingsreproduced here — deserve to be betterknown than they are: Cyril Barraud,Beth Ballantyne, Lars Haukaness, andGeorge Overton.

This is a rich book, full of interestingand important facts and beautiful illus-trations, but it suffers from the attemptto do too much — to be both an all-encompassing history and a contempo-rary tribute, as well as a catalogue andan interpretation. The double columnlayout and the fitful organization makeit hard to read and follow, and the fre-quent lapses into newspeak with the useof such words as "art-wise" and "up-coming" are unforgivable. Yet in spiteof these faults, The Winnipeg School ofArt provides a wonderful source-book forfuture researchers, and impresses all of uswith the stubborn and persistent beliefin art and art education that promptedthe citizens of Winnipeg to set up, tostruggle for, and to support a school inthe wilds and isolation of their prairiecity. That is what civilization is all about.

And civilization takes courage toachieve. Paul Kane, as he emerges fromthe pages of Bruce Haig's Paul KaneArtist, must have had plenty of courageof the physical sort to follow the routethat Haig traces. Published under theauspices of the Alberta Historical Re-sources Foundation, this study is one of aseries, "Following Historic Trails." Haig,an explorer and former teacher, is thefounder of a program which gives stu-dents the opportunity to follow historictrails as part of their curriculum. Indeed,this book is mostly a well-researched,carefully annotated map of Paul Kane'sroutes. With the help of Haig's maps, theart explorer can figure out just when andwhere Kane found his encampments,canoes, buffalo and Indian subjects be-

tween 1846 and 1848 when he made hiswestern journeys.

Unfortunately, from my point of view,the author's technical interests and travelroutes largely overshadow the human as-pects and psychological motivations ofKane's journeys. One is left with a com-pass, a how-to-follow Kane, and a lot offragmentary bits of information whichsomehow never come together to showus either a man or a painter. One is alsoleft with a sense of wonder that Kaneaccomplished these difficult forays intowhat are still today impenetrable, moun-tainous, and mosquito-ridden wilds; andalso amazement at how the author fol-lowed him there. Haig is certainly a cou-rageous explorer, but it takes a differentkind of courage and a more enduringimaginative effort to make a writer.

MIRIAM WADDINGTON

TRIAL BY EXPERIENCEANNE MARRIOTT, Letters from Some Islands.

Mosaic Press, $8.95.LEONA GOM, Private Properties. Sono Nis,

$6.95.ANNE MARRIOTT'S BOOK is divided intofive sections. Two are single works; theother three are cohesive groups of poems.Marriott is particularly concerned withtravel and landscape. But travel inevit-ably reminds her of the British Columbiashe has left behind, and of her childhoodthere, as in "The Danish Sketches" of thefirst section, where vivid scenes of Den-mark often lead to meditations on Can-ada and the past. Marriott seems to havetaken the theory of the objective corre-lative to heart (she began writing in the1930's when it was so influential). Placefor her becomes a set of metaphors foremotions or relationships, and this pre-vents the travel poems from becomingmere postcards or anecdotes. One divi-

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sion of the book is actually called "Notesand Postcards," but — to take the firstpoem and the last — in "Ironwood: Eastof Indio" a desert tree becomes an imageof the self after a trial by experience, andin "The Black Rocks of Oregon" harshimagery of sea and rock is emblematic ofgrief and loss.

Trial by experience: Marriott countslosses in this book. The loss of youth, theloss of love. A vanished marriage hauntsthe poems. Marriott's experience as ahuman being and artist has not made herglib. The poems are direct in style andfeeling; vulnerable. Not confessional inany sensational way. The reader is movedaesthetically — by diction, line sense, andabove all imagery — and emotionally.The poems in the "Travels in NorthAmerica" section are especially intense."Summer Rivers" and "Interstate Five,"elegies for lost love, are noteworthy : theywork through their correlatives in a per-fectly natural (perfectly artful) way.

There are failures in the book."Golden Gate Libretto" provides somesnapshots of San Francisco that do notseem important enough. And the titlesequence, a kind of poetic diary keptwhile waiting for a love letter, does notwork as a coherent sequence. There aretoo many gaps, too much brooding andanxiety rendered in flat lines. Recurringmotifs (dreams, sea images, architecturalmetaphors) try to bind the poems to-gether, but there is not enough context.Waiting for a letter is a kind of plot, butnot a very tight one. Fortunately, thebook can survive a weak section : on bal-ance, its strengths are conspicuous.

Leona Gom has written so well abouther background in rural Alberta that wemight overlook her range as a poet. Sheis also a brilliant satirist and a sophisti-cated student of urban life and its dis-contents — and of suburban life, too.Private Properties begins with a sectioncalled " . . . keeping in shape." Aerobic

dancing, trendiest of trends, is an excel-lent vehicle for Gom's satire. The prac-tice embodies some common obsessionsamong the upscale: appearance, fancyclothing, the quest for self-improvement.The aerobic poems modulate into com-ments on home-owning, marriage, andinvestments. Gom has just the tools fordealing with these topics: understate-ment, overstatement, and the revealingmetaphor (arthritis as a symbol for anaging house) used in the right propor-tions.

The middle section, " . . . a better revo-lutionary," deals with women's issues:rape, toxic shock, pornography, batteredwives. The humour of the first sectionfades, of course, but the satirical gift doesnot. My problem with some of the poemsis that they seem willed rather than im-agined. I am thinking particularly of"Aprons," "Matricide" (about witchesand misogyny) and "Grade Three"(where a child learns that men create artwhile women create crafts). I am moreconvinced by poems like "Silver WeddingAnniversary" and "The Neighboour"(about a voyeur), poems in which Gomhas created convincing characters as wellas typical situations. The last poem in thegroup, a witty reply to the question of"What Women Want," is not about char-acters or even a situation, but it showsGom's sharp wit:

not much/everything.a bra not as sadistic as it looks,peace on earth, not getting our periodsin rush-hour traffic, a few good friends,remembering our postal codes,the elimination of rape, growing oldwithout poverty, wearing sleeveless blousesand unshaved armpits and not caring,children by choice, never having to fakeorgasm or interest in hockey, workwe enjoy, size twelve thighs,crossing off everything on the list,that's about it/that's a beginning.

The mixture of seriousness and humouris just right.

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In the final section, ". . . warm vin-egar," the poet indulges herself a bit.The humour grows raucous in the threepoems about mice that turn up in oddplaces, and "Dogfood" makes comedyout of the possibility of eating man's(humanity's) best friend. There arepoems that seem quite personal in spiteof the overworked second person narra-tion. This section is not so unified as theothers, but its contents fit the concernsand tones of the rest of the book. Thelast poem, "Growth," suggests that thebook as a whole is an affirmation of lifein a society whose obsessions range fromthe trivial (aerobics) to the deadly seri-ous (the abuse of women). Leona Gomtakes the measure of these obsessions veryintelligently, giving due weight to each.

BERT ALM ON

CASTLESOF CHILDHOODLOUISE MAHEUx-FORCiER, A Forest for Zoe.

Trans. David Lobdell. Oberon, $12.95.Deep in the heel of the Italian boot,

somewhere between the port of Bari andthe city of the tarantella, at that pointwhere there is just enough room to turnaround between the shores of one sea andthose of another, a tiny village languishesbeneath the hot blue sky, out of sight ofboth bodies of water. . . . The name of thevillage is Alberobello.

T H I S IS THE WAY her story "should havebegun," thinks a young woman writerstruggling with a personal narrativetaken over by the obsessive presence ofher childhood friend Zoe. Because of Zoe,the conventional introduction with itsromantic cliché of the young couplehoneymooning in Italy is abandoned.The fictional narrator's unsuccessful at-tempt to write the traditional romanceallows Louise Maheux-Forcier to exam-

ine the process of writing a novel — atheme that has become a commonplaceamong new works of fiction.

The nature of narrative is not, how-ever, the essential subject of this slightnovel, published in 1969 in French asUne Forêt pour Zoé and winner of theGovernor General's Award for fiction in1970. Like a work of Marie-Glaire Biaisor Alice Munro, it is an exploration ofnascent sexuality. In a series of impres-sionistic tableaux, it looks back on theprotagonist's erotic encounters with otherwomen — her eccentric piano teacherMia, her convent friend Marie, herphotographer friend Isis, and especiallyher childhood love Zoe, who hovers overall Thérèse's relationships. In her dis-embodied presence, Zoe represents theauthentic life that Thérèse cannot live.At the end of the novel, a red-headeddoll resembling Zoe, symbolic relic ofThérèse's childhood, is found by her hus-band in Thérèse's bed.

Maheux-Forcier's first novel Amadouwas published in 1963, followed in 1964by L'Ile joyeuse, and in 1969 by UneForêt pour Zoé. The author describedthe latter as the centre panel of a trip-tych having a single theme or obsession,and this central novel takes the explora-tion of sexual attraction back into earlychildhood. In Amadou, Maheux-Forcierinsisted on the novelty of her subject,quoting Tagore: "Le chant que je de-vais chanter / N'a pas été chanté jus-qu'à ce jour"; the love of Nathalie andAnne is not represented as abnormal.For Anne, the narrator's fifteen-year-oldlover, evil lies only in acting against herown nature, while good is doing what herwhole being desires. The presence ofmale lovers in the novels, especially ofStéphane in L'Ile joyeuse, indicates thatthese are not exclusively lesbian relation-ships, and a walnut tree in A Forest forZoe symbolizes Thérèse's enigmatic vo-luptuous nature: "I am like the walnut

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tree whose twin blossoms borrow theirgender from both sexes."

Thérèse, like Anne, extols pleasure, butsees that "once it has been sanctionedand sanctified, once it has received soci-ety's blessing," it becomes a fraud. She isacutely aware of hypocrisy, as are theother protagonists of Maheux-Forcier'snovels and the author herself. Life, saysMaheux-Forcier, "est un tissu d'appa-rences derrière quoi la réalité se cache,"the writer's particular virtue being thathe tries to tear off that mask. When pub-lished in 1969, Une Forêt pour Zoé wasa more daring protest against sexualhypocrisy than it seems now when Thé-rèse (in the 1986 translation) protests:

I can't stand the thought of people marry-ing. I can't stand the thought that thepleasures of the bridal chamber should beextolled by the very ones who denouncethem outside that sanctified setting, thoughthey may date from the period in earlychildhood when it would have been un-thinkable that they should be sanctified atall.

Maheux-Forcier's revelations of the real-ity behind the mask make her a socialsatirist in the classical sense.

It is hard to classify these slight novels,or to see them as resolving the problemsencountered by modern writers in han-dling fictional narrative. On the otherhand, Maheux-Forcier's style is at oncelucid and lyrical. It is beautifully ren-dered into English by David Lobdell,leaving the reader with the hauntingsense of the loveliness of irrecoverablechildhood evoked in one of the thematicpoems that separate the chapters:

In the light of the setting sunthe queen sat weepingbefore the ruins of the castle.Someone said to her:You have a hundred castlesMore lovely than this one.The queen spurred her mountand fled the scene with a wail:More lovely than the castle of childhood?

MARGARET BELCHER

IN PRINCIPIODOUGLAS LOCHHEAD, Tiger in the Skull: New

and Selected Poems, 1959-1985. Fiddle-head/Gooselane, $12.95.

RAYMOND sousTER, It Takes All Kinds.Oberon, n.p.

PATRICIA DEMERS, ed., The Creating Word:Papers from an International Conference onthe Learning and Teaching of English inthe 1980s. Univ. of Alberta, $24.95.

" I N THE BEGINNING was the Word," saysthe Evangelist. Ever since they inventedliterature, poets and story-tellers havebeen pleased to see themselves as imi-tators of God the Creator, at whoseWord chaos became a universe. The con-ceit is easy, but these three books showthat acting on it may be a differentmatter.

Raymond Souster, in It Takes AllKinds, makes, or remakes, a world bydumping a load of empty words into it.In a ramble called "Parts of a Year:Entries From an '84 Engagement Calen-dar," Souster complains, apparently ofhis own lot in life :

Some days you scribble down three poems,then you may have to waita whole miserable weekbefore the next one's given you.

And he announces that, as an infant:the first short cries I gavemy purest, truest poem.

Perhaps the thrice-daily scribblings andbabyhood wails are poems to Souster andhis nearest and dearest, but to strangersthey are mental meanderings, unbur-nished by craftsmanship, emotional in-tensity, or evidence of thought. The To-ronto street poems, the baseball poems,and some of the soldier poems have alittle life, partly because of Souster's abil-ity to quote speech and partly becausethey relate to concrete things and specificevents. But most of the effusions in ItTakes All Kinds are flaccid. Clichés blur

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description and deflate passion, exclama-tion marks replace emotion, and Souster'scareless use of specific terms wouldweaken even newspaper prose. His lackof thought shows up embarrassingly in"Full Moon," in which his subject is anAlex Colville serigraph the actual titleof which is "New Moon" (Souster alsodescribes the "Full Moon" as "scythe-like") and in "The Regina Manifesto:A Found Poem," where Souster takescredit for the poetic qualities of a docu-ment that is a stylistic descendant ofevangelical preaching and the KingJames Bible.

Souster would "give my eye-teeth rightnow / just to have written any stanza /of Tantramar Revisited." His envy of SirCharles G. D. Roberts contrasts withDouglas Lochhead's sense of involve-ment in literary continuity. In a poemfrom High Marsh Road (1980) repub-lished in Tiger in the Skull, Lochheadshows his connection with tradition:

the total glimpse of it [truth] as Robertstook to Tantramar.using his telescopehis eye revisited.now I search thesame dikes for details of shore-birds,the weirs hold straggler ducks.it isgood to have such footsteps

Charles G.D.Roberts, pince-nez and tails, flieslike an angel by Stanley Spencer overthis place

The poems in Tiger in the Skull arecarefully crafted, the centrifugal force ofthought and emotion almost, but neverquite, escaping the centripetal control ofform and technique. Like Roberts, Loch-head has the rare ability to write simplyabout ordinary things and yet provokethe reader to new insights and emotions.Perhaps the most amazing feat of thissort is "The soft doves appear," in whichimage-making and description gentlyforce reconsideration of, yes, pigeons.Lochhead's poems about romantic or sex-

ual love are, thanks to his technical con-trol, tense with emotion.

The Creating Word consists of elevenintellectually uneven and tenuously re-lated conference papers. "The Teachingof Poetry," by Robin Skelton, and "Cre-ative Writing: Can It Be Taught?" byRudy Wiebe, seem unpremeditated andsolipsistic. John Dixon and Martha Kingwrite about teaching "language arts" toyoungsters to enhance psychological de-velopment. Kenneth Smillie puts intoperspective the craze for computer-assisted learning and "computer literacy"in elementary and high schools. RowlandMcMaster and Norman Page both writebrilliantly, McMaster about Great Ex-pectations and Page about The Mill onthe Floss, but their essays are almost un-related to the stated topic, as is SusanJackel's "Canadian Literature in theSecondary Curriculum," a well-docu-mented and insightful history and de-scription of, and prescription for, theteaching of Canadian literature in Al-berta schools.

The first three essays in The CreatingWord are thoroughly researched andcarefully considered responses to thetopic by scholars of international stand-ing. In "Construing and Deconstruct-ing," M. H. Abrams relates the philoso-phy of Jacques Derrida to the radicalskepticism of David Hume and rehearsesJ. Hillis Miller's reading of Words-worth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"to describe and demonstrate deconstruc-tionism. Then, in outlining his reserva-tions about practising and teaching de-constructive criticism, Abrams explainseven more clearly the nature and uses ofthis discipline. Louise M. Rosenblatt callsdeconstructionists "basically anti-human-ist" in "The Literary Transaction." Bydisregarding the emotional impact andhuman interest of literature, she argues,they disregard the reader. In Rosenblatt'sview, a work of literature is "evoked" by

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the reader in "transaction" with the text,rather than inherent in the text itself,although she tries to dissociate herselffrom the subjectivism of reader-responsetheory. Rosenblatt articulates her posi-tion skilfully, but she is not a carefulwriter. She uses "inner ear" to mean "themind's ear," and her metaphors confuseher to the extent that she wants readers"to handle . . . reverberations" and torange around a fulcrum while bringingcircles of contexts to bear on an aestheticevent.

"Rhetoric and Rightness: Some Fal-lacies in a Science of Language," byJacques Barzun, begins the book. Barzunargues that there are objective standardsfor English that must be both observedand taught if English is to continue itscourse as "the most flexible as well as therichest language on earth." He recom-mends standard Latin-based grammar,conscious vocabulary development, andthe teaching of students by instructorswho are themselves competent writers."Rhetoric and Rightness" could replace"Politics and the English Language" onuniversity reading lists; Barzun's recom-mendations are much like Orwell's, buthe is a learned man, his arguments arelogical, and his essay is itself a model ofeffective organization and clear writing.As for literary theory, Barzun says, "Par-adox is piled on pedantry when thosewho undertake to expound literature de-cline to make themselves understood.""Rhetoric and Rightness" gets to theheart of "the Creating Word," and it isby itself worth the price of the book.

LAUREL B0ONE

CD

LA VUECOMPARATISTEMAX DORSiNViLLE, Le Pays natal. Nouvelles

Editions Africaines, $12.00.

GET OUVRAGE, COMME l'annonce l'auteur,est un ensemble d'essais ou d'articles ( 13au total dont 5 parus dans CanadianLiterature et constituant autant de cha-pitres divisés en trois parties de fort iné-gale longueur) regroupés sous le signethématique du Pays natal. Conseil: pourne pas être déçu, prendre dans son sensle plus fort la remarque de l'auteur enla Préface: "Ces essais . . . sont des ins-tances dialectiques forcément soumisesaux temps forts ou faibles de leur paru-tion initiale." Entendre par là que l'u-nité et l'équilibre de l'ensemble paraî-tront peut-être peu évidents à certains.

La première et la deuxième parties,respectivement consacrées aux Antilles età l'Afrique, le chapitre II ("Québecnoir") de la troisième partie et enfin laPostface ("Le mythe du nègre dans leslittératures américaines") semblent lesplus directement pertinents au sujetévoqué par le titre et tel qu'on s'attend àle voir abordé dans un ouvrage publiéaux ΝΕΑ; le reste de la troisième partie,de loin la plus étoffée est consacré uni-quement au Québec et accuse davantageson âge.

On comprendra que nous dispensionssous peine de faire de Γ "auto allumagecritique" d'évaluer les chapitres V et VIqui sont eux-mêmes des comptes-rendusparus au demeurant dans Canadian Lit-erature (Summer 1974; Spring 1980).

Sur les Antilles, c'est Césaire qui sertde référence centrale, avec les notions deRetour et de Pays natal et le phénomènede la "réception" cher aux comparatistes.S'étant d'abord démarqué avec force deR. Wellek dont il rejette avec raison les aprioris culturels occidentalistes réduc-

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teurs, l'auteur estime nécessaire de privi-légier, pour l'étude des littératures duTiers Monde, une approche critique te-nant compte des facteurs historiques etsocio-économiques (en particulier la Dé-colonisation, la Guerre Froide, le sous-développement) qui président à leurémergence.

De la dépendance économique conju-guée à la servitude linguistique, naît chezl'écrivain colonisé la prise de consciencede l'exil qui le tient éloigné de son peu-ple: il se mute bientôt en "bouche" desmalheurs de sa race (par exemple Cé-saire dans le Cahier). Indigénisme, Afro-cubanisme, Négritude sont autant d'é-tapes sur le chemin de cette prise deconscience qui débouche sur l'écrituretiers mondiste au centre de laquelle jouela thématique du retour que l'auteur voitcomme un parallèle du mythe de la chutedans la pensée occidentale. Ici, recourscomparatiste quasi inévitable sur le planoù se situe Dorsinville à Defoe et Con-rad dont les héros se rachètent, se "blan-chissent" par la traversée et la mise envaleur du désert noir. L'enfant prodiguenoir — et l'auteur le démarque fort heu-reusement en fin d'essai de l'enfant dumythe biblique — l'enfant prodigue noir,rentré au pays doit, pour être authen-tique, assumer à la fois son acculturation(par la colonisation) et le malheur deson peuple opprimé à l'intérieur d'uneesthétique "justifiable de la matière deson art et du vécu qu'il traduit," en d'au-tres termes, une esthétique de l'authen-ticité et de l'existence. Mission malaiséeque l'auteur illustre de façon convain-cante par des exemples tirés de diverscorpus (Caraïbes, Afrique noire, Amé-rique latine, et surtout Césaire dont leCahier est abondamment utilisé).

On aimera le détour par le mythique(le mythique fondateur de R. Wellek)au coeur d'un essai qui pose l'histoirecontemporaine comme fondement de la

seule distinction qui soit opératoire lors-qu'il s'agit de littératures du TiersMonde: celle qui existe en littératuresdominées et dominantes. Dans "Pays,parole, négritude" un parallèle au-jourd'hui fort documenté est établi entrela poésie de la Négritude et celle duQuébec, nées toutes deux aux mêmessources de l'exil et de l'aliénation, toutesdeux braquées sur la notion de pays àretrouver et à libérer, toutes deux déçueset repliées maintenant (cas de Chamber-land, Préfontaine, Césaire à l'appui) surdes "redites" et sur "l'hermétisme et l'in-tériorisation finale de l'engagement." Untel jugement paraît excessif, quelquequinze ans plus tard, aussi bien pourCésaire que pour la poésie québécoise, sidiverse et si dynamique. Et si "redites"il y a, il semble bien que ce soit Senghorqui s'y livre, et précisément parce que saNégritude reste étonnamment indéçuepar l'échec politique et socio-économiquedes indépendances.

La question de la réception de Césaireau Québec, abordée dans deux essais,repose sur les mêmes prémisses: la situa-tion historique existentielle de colonisécommune au Québécois et à l'hommenoir. Mais la réception critique (univer-sitaire en gros) reste loin derrière la ré-ception des écrivains: Vallières, Miron,Préfontaine, Chamberland, J. G. Pilonont lu Césaire qui est un phare pour lagénération du malaise québécois. L'ac-cueil réservé à Césaire s'explique claire-ment, selon l'auteur, dans une approchecomparatiste. On retiendra surtout latrès pertinente observation — qui de-manderait à être développée — sur larécupération, par tout langage critiquespécifique à une culture, de l'objet deréflexion qui a son origine dans une autreculture. C'est là, à notre avis, tout leproblème de la pertinence de l'outil cri-tique blanc tel que le pose une grandepartie de l'intelligentsia négro-africained'aujourd'hui (cf. Mudimbé, etc.).

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A l'Afrique (Tiers Monde) revient laportion congrue (18 pages seulement)de l'ouvrage. Sur la toile de fond de l'exilvécu, soit comme privation et éloigne-ment du pays, soit comme propédeutiquedu retour, sont affirmées la continuitéafricaine et la pratique salvatrice du"marronnage." Ce cantique nous paraîtun peu chargé de parti-pris euphoriqueet ne rend pas à Depestre ce qui lui estdû, à savoir l'idée de "marronnage idéo-logique." L'Afrique est vue ensuite suces-sivement comme asile fécond pour lesécrivains haïtiens qui y trouvent refugevers la fin des années 60 ( essai no. 2 ),puis comme terre de l'ambiguïté cultu-relle, religieuse, politique (essai no. 3) àtravers quelques grands romanciers noirsd'expression française et anglaise. Sur leQuébec (troisième partie) des réflexionsaujourd'hui fort connues sur nationa-lisme et littérature, parallèles Québec-Tiers Monde, recentrement du théâtrequébécois contemporain et problématiquedu livre québécois.

Dans la Postface l'auteur retourne auprojet initial pour conclure sur l'évidenceque l'image juste et réelle de l'hommenoir s'écrit en Afrique dans le romanafricain et non dans les Amériques ju-gées incapables de concevoir le vécu noiren dehors du mythe raciste.

Pour conclure à notre tour: un livredont la lecture est utile et dont les effetssont le mieux perceptibles lorsque l'au-teur explicite un point de vue compara-tiste sur l'écriture négro-africaine ou an-tillaise. Par contre on trouvera sans peineque le fil thématique qui relie ces diversessais est par endroits bien ténu, ce quienlève à l'unité et à la force de persua-sion de l'ensemble. Par ailleurs, on re-grettera vivement l'absence d'une biblio-graphie ou même d'un index des nomscités.

C. BOUYGUES

STUFFEDWITH LEGENDSANTONINE MAILLET, The Devil is Loose!

Philip Stratford, trans. Lester & OrpenDennys, $21.95.

T H E DUST JACKET describes The Devilis Loose! as "a rollicking tale of smug-gling and romance." Set in the era ofprohibition in the early 1930's, the storycentres on the bootlegging activities ofthe "smuggleress" heroine, Crache-à-Pic,mistress of the Sea Cow, and her arch-rival Dieudonné whom she invariablyoutwits. Acadian New Brunswick isevoked in a roll-call of place-names:Grand-Digue, Pré-d'en-Haut, Champ-doré, Bois-Joli, Cocagne, Village-des-Trois-Maisons, Anse-aux-Outardes,Sainte-Marie-des-Cotes; with on thehorizon the "faraway islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon," source of the finewines and cognacs destined for the tablesof the President of the United States orChicago gangsters. Crache-à-Pic is de-scribed in Harlequin romance terms —"a long-legged girl with a turned upnose, a mane of windswept blonde hair,and a pair of blue eyes that would takeyour breath away," who, however, "spatand swore like a man."

Maillet self-consciously uses folkloristicmaterial, style, and structure, "the oldstorytellers' sacks stuffed with legendsof the sea." The narrator, Clovis-à-Clovis, "Clovis-son-of-Clovis-the-black-smith," learned "the trade of story-tellingfrom the forge, instead of blacksmith-ing," the forge being the centre of villagegossip and legend. "Old Clovis knowswords. . . . Knows them as well as thefleas in his shirt." There is much em-phasis on oral tradition:

It was Old Clovis told the story to myfather. He remembered it all happening.But they say that when he cocked an eyeat the ways of the world his left pupil was

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more elastic than his right. Not only that„but his tongue was so rough and his gulletso rasping that words lost a vowel or two, orgot their consonants jumbled as they camethrough. In passing it on to me, my fatherhad no choice but to plane the sentencesdown and scour the phrases clean of mossand verdigris. And now I in turn pass onthis true story to you, stripped of all verbalornament or twist of wit.

Maillet's diction is not "stripped of allverbal ornament"; on the contrary, sheoften strains for literary effect: "the redball leaps to the eastern horizon andstrikes the sea like a gong." The bookseems overwritten. Repeated motifs, suchas the veering of the weathercock signal-ling a change of fortune, or the reiteratedphrase "The devil is loose!" after awhilebecome tiresome and heavy-handed. The"ballet" of the cows in the nuns' pasture,drunk on bootlegged wine and cognacfrom St. Pierre, should be funnier thanit is. Maillet falls between two stools —the straining after literary effect, clever-ness, showing off as a writer; and thestraining after authentic folklore and oraltradition. The book is pulled between thetwo styles and becomes artificial andforced.

Maillet is perhaps more effective atthe pathetic than the "rollicking." Twoimages stand out: the homeless wan-derer, Ti-Louis the Whistler, seekingrefuge in a barn on Christmas Eve,being warmed and watched over by theanimals; and the pièta of Crache-à-Picprotectively cradling her epileptic brotherin her arms.

ROBERTA BUCHANAN

COMIC SOLUTIONSHOWARD ENGEL, A City Called July. Viking,

$18.95.

WITTY CONVERSATIONS, fast-paced ac-tion, and entertaining characters — theseare the elements of Howard Engel's mys-

tery novels. Add to that a sense of placeand an affection for Toronto's Jewishcommunity, and one has mystery fictionthat can interest the literary critic as wellas the general reader. Four previousBenny Cooperman novels — The SuicideMurders, The Ransom Game, MurderSees the Light, and Murder on Location— have made Engel's intuitive privateinvestigator a Canadian institution, asort of Canadian version of Columbo,the energetic, rather disorganized, andyet obviously good-hearted detective pop-ularized by the American actor PeterFalk.

A City Called July deals with yet an-other crime solved by the bumblingCooperman, whose intelligence and goodhumour extricate him from some difficultand embarrassing situations. Refusing totake himself too seriously, Coopermanassures the reader that "I'm a profes-sional private investigator as well as amember of the Jewish community. It'slike talking to the doctor. Practically thesame thing." Nevertheless, his skills asan investigator leave much to be desired,though he is a master, when necessary, ofevasive action: "I splashed my way outof there fast, nearly skinning the Olds ona silver Audi driving through the gate."Cooperman's eye for detail and ability tosee the humorous side of situations keepus interested as the witty, accident-pronedetective lurches from one crisis to an-other. This investigator likes readingmysteries because of "the way things hap-pened bang-bang-bang one after theother. Nobody ever sits around listeningto the shadows growing longer." Andwhat Cooperman likes in his own readingis certainly found in Engel's imaginativerendering of the detective's latest mock-heroic adventure.

The story concerns the mysterious dis-appearance of Larry Geller, a local law-yer who has departed with several mil-lion dollars in investments, savings, and

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mortgages entrusted to him by ingenuousclients. During the search for Geller,whose body is eventually discovered in arecently poured concrete footing, Coop-erman interviews Geller's brothers,Nathan and Sid, as well as other mem-bers of the Geller family, and surveys anextensive network of friends linked toLarry Geller's business interests. Sud-denly the investigation uncovers twoother murder victims: Nathan Gellerand Wally Moore, a friend and businessassociate. And Cooperman wonders:"What possible motive can connect alow-lifer like Wally Moore and a fancysculptor like Geller?" Ultimately, as onewould expect in this tightly plottednovel, the murderer turns out to be afamily member, Debbie Geller, who hasbeen divorced from Sid and has thenturned to Larry. (Sid, fortunately, is stillalive at the novel's dénouement.) Ap-parently, after leaving Sid, Debbie hasdiscovered a "main chance, an entry intothe big time" — specifically, Larry's planto abscond with his clients' money. WhenLarry converts his stolen goods into dia-monds, she murders him, leaves his bodyin wet concrete ("that short stopover atthe construction shack") and when oth-ers become curious after Cooperman be-gins his investigation, murders them aswell. At the end of A City Called July,Cooperman remarks that Debbie was"bored by the ordinary lives most peoplearound her were living. She always hada short attention span."

That is about as far as the psychologi-cal analysis goes, but then in a detectivenovel anything more complex wouldprobably be inappropriate. Indeed, muchof the book seems to exist on the surface :witty, accurate, and exceedingly enter-taining dialogue; details of the Jewishcommunity that are very visual :

The place hadn't changed much sincemy bar mitzvah. The long pews were stainedthe same walnut brown as the wood trim

on the cream-painted walls. The skylightstill showed symbolic beasts painted in areedy style in faded yellow and green onthe four sides of the rectangle. The ark atthe front was closed and covered with awine-coloured velvet curtain.

In the context of this world, Cooper-man's reveries are ingenious and com-pelling. His mind, as he describes it, is"a whole graveyard of tombstones," andmany of these relate to his Jewish back-ground. His other world is North Ameri-can popular culture: heartburn, televi-sion, glamour magazines, and junk food.His comments about this environmentare also very funny and certainly add anabsurd dimension to a rather peculiardetective story.

A City Called July includes severalclever variations on the traditional detec-tive novel. Cooperman discovers one clueby using the re-dial feature on Larry Gel-ler's telephone. Larry himself finally de-cides to convert to diamonds, but Debbiecarries the process one step further: sheconceals the diamonds by freezing themin an ice-cube tray. As Cooperman at-tempts to unravel this "fine web of in-trigue," he meets a vast array of charac-ters — most, it seems, named Geller —who give detailed explanations of theirdealings with the departed Larry. Sincethere is little character development, it issometimes difficult to separate their per-sonalities; and, since Cooperman is, bydefinition, not given to psychologicalanalysis, it is sometimes difficult to knowexactly what these people are like. Al-though the novel largely avoids stocksituations, there are several : a lawyer ab-sconding with his clients' money; a bribe(offered to Cooperman but returned) ;and the usual collection of characterswho could be in any American policedrama.

Yet the clarity of the writing and con-trol of plot more than compensate for afew minor shortcomings. In addition to

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the attractive character of Cooperman,what emerges is a warm profile of aToronto Jewish community, a portraitone might expect more in MordecaiRichler's work than in a detective novel.Indeed, in some of its self-criticism ACity Called July might even be consid-ered a partial, if rather gentle, satire onthat community. It is certainly no acci-dent that The Suicide Murders andMurder Sees the Light have successfullybeen made into films, for Engel is askilled screenwriter, and the devices offilm — accurate dialogue, visual mon-tages, rapidly shifting scenes — are asobvious in A City Called July as they arein Richler's novels. In a recent reviewof the film of Murder Sees the Light,John Guff wrote that "it is virtually im-possible not to like [Engel's] character, around-shouldered, pot-bellied little guywho klutzes from clue to clue and solvescrimes almost in spite of himself." Andjust as one cannot help liking BennyGooperman, one cannot help liking thislatest detective novel by Howard Engel,a novelist whose use of the detectivegenre comes very close to art.

RODERICK W. HARVEY

LANGUAGES OF EXILEHALLVARD DAHLIE, Varieties of Exiles: the

Canadian Experience. Univ. of British Co-lumbia, $22.50.

KERBY A. MILLER, Emigrants and Exiles. Ox-ford, $48.95.The language of the exile muffles a cry, itdoesn't ever shout. . . . Our present age isone of exile. How can one avoid sinkinginto the mire of common sense, if not bybecoming a stranger to one's own country,language, sex and identity? Writing is im-possible without some kind of exile. . . . Ifmeaning exists in the state of exile, it never-theless finds no incarnation, and is cease-lessly produced and destroyed in geographi-cal or discursive transformations.

JULIA KRISTEVA IN A 1977 essay gives adefinition of exile similar to the oneDahlie deduces from Ovid: "genuineexile is a permanent condition character-ized by dislocation, alienation, and dis-possession." But he limits his study se-verely to "writers who have physicallymoved to or from Canada, as long asthey have communicated a substantialimaginative or artistic perception of therealities and/or myths about Canada."Although he protests that his approachis "basically quite uncomplicated andstraightforward," that last clause isfraught with problems of definition andjudgment. Rather than enter the fraylike Kristeva, armed with the vocabularyof current literary theory, Dahlie choosesto remain traditional and therefore riskstriviality since his strictures are so arbi-trarily imposed. The muddiness is appar-ent at the end of his introductory chapterwhen he explains that he has limitedhimself to "fifteen or so" writers, fromFrances Brooke to Josef Skvorecky, butthen concludes: "my major concern ismore to demonstrate that the phenome-non of exile has been a frequently recur-ring element in Canadian literature."Beyond the level of truism, that largeclaim needs to be argued by more thana reference to fifteen books.

Clearly I find worrying aspects toDahlie's methodology. When he gets onto practical criticism — plot summarythen geographical mapmaking — he issolid enough, but these days one expectsa livelier texture to criticism than solid-ity. One might begin by carping at thetypographical errors, sometimes three toa page, but more disturbing are impré-cisions exacerbated by orotund parsing:"Though he modifies his views towardsCanada according to the fluctuations inhis relationships with Emily, the outcomeof the novel [The History of Emily Mon-tague] dictates the centrality of this atti-tude in Brooke's overall vision." Dahlie

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is also clearly unwilling to countenancetextual play, seeing Jameson's classicalallusions as "disruptions" to the narrativeflow of her journal.

The earlier part of the book is moresuccessful within Dahlie's prescriptions.An excellent survey of Duncan's British-American-Canadian novels is weakenedonly by the lame conclusion that "Can-ada remained for her . . . a little bit spe-cial." There is a good chapter on Salver-son and Grove, though he might havepicked up on Grove's statement that hewas an exile from people who "meta-phorically, spoke my language"; and heidentifies Levine's "recycled" dilemmas.But Dahlie's preoccupation with author("it is at times difficult to distinguishbetween protagonist and author") andplace ("exiles in a sense must alwayscreate a new reality out of nothing")rather than language, is increasingly un-suited to more contemporary authors andto the conclusion arrived at rather tor-tuously through Lowry, Lewis, and oth-ers, that modern exile has to do withexistential angst and the dissolution ofnations. The approach really comes un-stuck with Mavis Gallant, whose pro-vocative notion that marriage instigatesa kind of exile is ignored in favour of,again, geography; yet "it is of courseindividuals rather than national typesthat Gallant is concerned with, andtherefore it is risky to generalize."

Especially in the latter half of thisstudy one can sense a perceptive criticyearning to escape his self-spun theoreti-cal straitjacket, particularly with thestylistically and philosophically rich fic-tions of Brian Moore, Clark Blaise, andJosef Skvorecky. His analysis of The En-gineer of Human Souls, in the contextof a section on academic exiles, is espe-cially promising. I hope Dahlie goes onto write more in this vein, to considerwhat Lowry called "this migraine ofalienation" as a controlling element in

the prose and pattern of most post-colonial novelists.

At first glance, 568 pages seem like toomuch blarney with which to offer thethesis that "Irish-American homesickness,alienation, and nationalism were rootedultimately in a traditional Irish Catholicworldview which predisposed Irish emi-grants to perceive or at least justify them-selves not as voluntary, ambitious emi-grants but as involuntary, nonresponsible'exiles,' compelled to leave home byforces beyond individual control, particu-larly by British and landlord oppression."But Professor Miller weaves together sta-tistics and ballads in a totally convincingand beguiling way. His concluding chap-ter on American wakes epitomises histhesis and method ; Malthusian cycles areset within folk ritual and oral history, ashe teases out the causes and implicationsof the Irish regarding the westward jour-ney as one towards death.

The book traces Irish emigration toNorth America from 1600 to 1900, con-stantly returning to the primal mythestablished by the seventeenth-centuryGaelic bards that Ireland was a fallen,betrayed Eden which would one day berestored. The myth was used in variousways by the Irish Catholic clergy, na-tionalists, Irish-American patriots, andthe emigrants themselves, to justify eithertheir successes or their failures. "BloodyBess and cursed Cromwell," it seems, hada lot to answer for in the Old World andthe New. Miller's vast research amplifieshis theme always in the direction of ironyand paradox, never obfuscation.

Canada appears only marginally, as inthe fact of James Buchanan, an Irish-born British consul who sent 3,000 coun-trymen from New York to frontier settle-ments in Upper Canada in 1819, or the65% of the 400,000 emigrants between1828 and 1837 who went to Canadarather than the U.S. But, read in con-junction with Dahlie's book, it actually

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gives a more complex picture of the"exile" than does the latter's literature.One sees that the potato famine, in itself,does little to explain Irish emigration.The facts, of course, continue to bogglethe mind: between 1845-55, 1.5 millionimmigrants to the U.S., 340,000 to Brit-ish North America. But Miller gives thebig picture, from local agricultural boomsand busts to the effects of transportednationalism in the New World. Of thelast, Miller concludes that the Irish-American nationalists were lucky theAnglo-Irish War of 1916-21 happenedwhen it did, since support, which wasbased on the myth of betrayal and op-pression, was on the wane.

Miller rarely allows himself a stylisticflourish, preferring to balance his co-pious factual details with letters andpoetry; but he does allow himself onedelightful thrust at the very end of hisexhaustive chronicle: "By 1923, exceptfor the continuing trickle of embitteredCatholic emigrants from Northern Ire-land, the long, dark winter of Irish exilein America was over. The golden sum-mer of Irish-American tourism was aboutto begin."

DAVID DOWLING

STORY POSTPONEDAUDREY THOMAS, Goodbye Harold, Good

Luck. Penguin Viking, $17.95.

O N C E AGAIN AUDREY THOMAS createscompelling images: a man offering awoman a captured hummingbird to hold,another man tearing a tentacle off anoctopus and throwing it to a girl whowinds it around her wrist "like some hor-rible bracelet," a set of children's sandalsin graduated sizes, a jar full of babyteeth, a message appearing magically ona steamy hotel mirror. Once again wemove through her literary landscapes:Ghana, Galiano, Edinburgh, Greece. And

once again Thomas shows her commandof a variety of styles.

George Bowering has attempted tocategorize Thomas's work on the basis ofstyle, suggesting in the Audrey Thomasissue of A Room of One's Own (March1986) and in his "Introductory Notes"to Fiction of Contemporary Canada thatsome of her fiction is well crafted andsatisfying, "mimetic, if not autobiograph-ical to the extreme" and the rest "self-reflexive and discontinuous," even "dar-ing" and "odd." Needless to say, Bower-ing prefers the odd to the well crafted.Using a time-honoured tactic, he createsa duality and promotes one over theother. Of course, he knows better, but isattempting a little affirmative action, try-ing to right an imbalance in the widerCanadian literary world where conven-tional writing gets more attention than itdeserves. Thomas, partly because she isoften experimental, partly because shewas born in the United States, and partlybecause she writes in British Columbia,has certainly been undervalued. But itdoes her an injustice to suggest her workis all one thing or another.

In this collection, the overtly experi-mental works are, in fact, weaker thanthose that might be labelled mimetic orautobiographical. Take, for example, thefairy tale "The Princess and the Zuc-chini" : the Prince is turned into a giantzucchini; the princess doesn't buy his"happily ever after" line, so she cookshim for dinner. But she's still in thekitchen, and she's not very nice. Thefeminist implications are far more com-plex than "ha, got you"; readers are in-tended to puzzle. "One Size Fits All,""The Man With Clam Eyes," and "Com-pulsory Figures" are also intellectually,rather than emotionally engaging. InGoodbye Harold, Good Luck, the suc-cessful stories are rather those where theidea of a single or certain reality is strictlyqualified, not because the narrator is

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crazy or prescient or playing games, butbecause of shifts in point of view, suddeninsights, coincidental juxtapositions ofsimilar messages, doubled or layered nar-ration. Often the main narrator is awoman like Thomas, with children, with"ordinary" middle-class problems, fears,and responses.

One story, "Breaking the Ice," is su-perficially a "woman's magazine" story:divorced woman spends Christmas with-out her children, doubly depressed be-cause a man she has recently met hasn'tcalled. One of her daughters arrives forNew Year's, so does the man with hisdaughter, and all get along splendidly : itwould be easy to call the story banaland superficial. But like Alice Munro,Thomas is not really interested in plotanyway. The romantic conventions in"Breaking the Ice" are heavily qualifiedby discussions of a cat stalking birds andby the bellowing of mating sea lion bullson the nearby rocks. The narrator insiststo all who are concerned about her thatshe is "Perfectly all right," noting to her-self that this of course means "PerfectlyAll Wrong." She dresses up to visit theneighbours so they won't suspect her mis-ery. The present unhappy Christmas isoverlaid by happy past memories andpotentially happy planned future ones.At one point, the narrator considersphoning the man and putting him offbecause her daughter protests, a thoughtthat produces the potential for an un-happy, rather than a happy ending. Thehappy lovemaking is overlaid by worryabout "Who would leave first?" Thestory is built out of layer after layer ofpossibility, like a lacquer box, so that thestory is, paradoxically, both profoundand superficial. Of course, some readerswill see only the happy ending; otherswill notice that to break ice is potentiallyto drown in icy water.

Another story, "Relics," begins with agypsy telling die fortune of a woman

visiting the boarding house in Scotlandwhere she lived when she was a student.She discovers that Morag, the womanwho used to run it, has been decapitatedin a car accident. Her memories of herfirst lovers are intermingled with herrealization of how nasty she and all thestudents were to Morag, who scraped by,exhausted by the housework. She remem-bers one moment where Morag tried totalk to her, and hints at the possibility ofa different story for both of them.

The title story is about a mother anddaughter travelling, a situation commonto several stories. In this one, the nar-rator, Francine, is trying to decidewhether to leave her husband, a demand-ing perfectionist. In a hotel, whereEmily, the daughter, has been taking abath, the words of the title appear "writ-ten by somebody's finger or with a pieceof soap." This handwriting on the mirrorbrings out the ghostly story of anotherunhappy couple, and, indeed, the storiesof all the people in that room, to hauntthe "real" story.

All the stories are haunted by what wedon't see and can't know, even about thelives of those closest to us. "MotheringSunday," reveals the dark side of mother-daughter relations, as the narrator thinksof her mother: "I have wounded hermany times; she has wounded me. Wedon't talk about this. We send each otherletters and greeting cards and presents;we worry about one another. We won-der." Sitting alone in a restaurant onMother's Day, the narrator thinks ofeverything that gets left out of the myth :"No blood, no bloody Mary in the nativ-ity accounts. Immaculate conception, im-maculate delivery. We mothers knowbetter, sitting here with our legs under-neath the table, sitting here sipping ourdrinks, picking at the expensive food."(Note the stories crammed into the sim-ple phrase "with our legs underneath thetable.")

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And so I would like to suggest whyBowering's categories don't work. Be-cause women have been on the "wrongside" of the duality for so long, they aremore concerned with what gets left outof stories, usually, than with what getsput in. But both sides need to be there:

Francine had seen a button in a women'sbookstore.

THEY SENT ONE MAN TO THE MOONWHY CAN'T THEY SEND THEM ALL?

It was funny, but not really. Would Emilygrow up hating men? The woman on thetrain was worried about some adult puttinghis arm around her daughter; what hap-pened if the opposite were true, never ahug or a kiss?

The same pattern appears in one ofThomas's earlier stories, "Initram" (thatis, "Martini" in a mirror), where a sep-arated woman travels to Vancouver totell her story to her friend Lydia, onlyto discover that Lydia has also separated.Lydia's story is "both moving and bi-zarre" ; the narrator feels that Lydia has"put something over" on her. The nar-rator's story has to be postponed, andthis is the emotional point of the story.

Putting in both sides, then, does notmean forging a harmonious whole, as intraditional stories. Rather it means re-vealing how one story exists at the ex-pense of another — indeed, how storiesproliferate, endless voices drowning eachother out, contradicting each other. Thevitality of this collection lies in Thomas'sability to write "mimetic" and "autobio-graphical" stories that constantly revealthemselves as partial, inadequate, andunresolved: that is, as "self-reflexive anddiscontinuous."

MARGERY FEE

BUGS, BATTLES& BALLETVERONICA TENNANT, On Stage, Please. Mc-

Clelland & Stewart, $3.95.GREGORY SASS, Redcoat. Porcupine's Quill,

$7-95-DAVID SUZUKI 4 BARBARA HEHNER, Looking at

Insects. Stoddard, $8.95.

THAT THREE BOOKS which severally fea-ture bugs, battles, and ballet might betreated in a single commentary corrobo-rates a fact particularly fundamental tothe development of children's literatureover the past few decades in Canada:authors and publishers have considerablywidened their net to appeal to the diver-sity of interests of the television-nurturedyoung audiences of the 1980's. In addi-tion to exploring diverse subject matter,these three paperbacks for young Cana-dians reflect three distinctive subgenreswhich collectively represent the majorportion of books published for childrentoday; namely, informational books, his-torical fiction, and realistic fiction.

Looking at Insects is the second bookby David Suzuki and Barbara Hehner inthe Stoddard Young Readers series, andlike its forerunner (Looking at Plants,1985), it follows a prescriptive formulawhich deftly balances general scientificinformation, intriguing details, and sim-ple "hands-on" experiments. To thecredit of the two writers (there is noindication of their respective contribu-tions), this balance is accomplished withan ease which belies the burden of didac-ticism which all information books carry,and while the book's format, scope, sim-plified drawings, and vocabulary level in-dicate that the work is primarily tar-getted at inquisitive youngsters, readersof any age would both enjoy and benefitfrom the book (including parents in needof a refresher course on insects). As forthe tone of the book, readers familiar

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with Suzuki's engaging television personawill detect here the same blend of in formed authority, gentle humour, andpervasive respect for all creatures.

The organization of the material essen tially defines its primary audience, mov ing as it does through a general overviewand description of insects, on to specificson insect orders, including moths andbutterflies, beetles, bees, ants, and finally,to a closing chapter on the "distant cous ins" of insects, spiders. The book does notoverwhelm the young reader with toomuch information (at least there is noconscious sense that this is occurring),yet it covers pertinent details such asbasic insect physiologies, metamorphoses,defence mechanisms, and specialized be havioural patterns. Enveloping these sci entific details is a perspective whichDavid Suzuki seems particularly skilledat imparting: far from being the creepiecrawlies of which nightmares are made,insects are a fascinating and integral partof the world around us. The acceptanceand curiosity fostered in the young readerare complemented by the some 25 "some thing to do" sections interspersed throughthe book. These sections give simplifiedscientific practicums on things such asmeasuring a caterpillar's appetite orstarting an ant colony, and following atenet of all superior information booksfor children, include safety rules (for theprotection of all participants, includingthe insects) and a call for adult super vision when required.

Of course all books for children mustultimately interest the child if they aregoing to be read, and it is instructive tosee, when regarding the numerous genreswhich fall under the rubric of children'sliterature, how G regory Sass, writing his torical fiction, relies on strategies andmethods unique to that particular genreto attract his audience. In Redcoat, Sasssucceeds in transporting his reader backto the early years of the 1800's, and he

accomplishes this first and foremost bycreating an eminently believable charac ter with whom the young reader canidentify. Once this identification occurs,the same historical details and back ground material which many young read ers would reject in a history text, becomeintegral props in a compelling story.

Shadrach Byfield is a young, idealisticScot who, because of his family's pov erty, runs away from home at age 13 tojoin the military and, as he himself putsit, not to return until he "had lived to bea man ." By the time Shadrach does re turn to his Lowlands home after fightingfor G eneral Brock in a distant, cold landin the War of 1812, the young reader hasaccompanied him through a stint in aDickensian styled workhouse and theperils of his premature soldiering whichfeatures, along with numerous lesser dis comforts, his capture at the hands ofIndians, his being wounded and maimedin battle, and his being wrongfullyflogged as a deserter.

Shadrach's progresses are no roman ticized romp through the pages of his tory, however, and few adolescent readers(most historical fiction is written forchildren over ι ο years of age ) would missSass's concern with the realities of pov erty, social injustice, and war. Because ofhis poverty, Shadrach is inexorably vic timized by institutions common to anyage; namely, those representing educa tion, law, and finally, order (here sym bolized by the British infantry). What thehistorical setting does (and this is skilfullybuilt up by Sass's judicious use of lan guage, topical reference points, and de tails of clothing and food, is to frameand crystallize Shadrach's struggles whichrender them at once a product of theperiod and a parable which carries arelevance today.

As the summary of Redcoat suggests,like most works of historical fiction, it isan adventure story, and like so many of

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these, has war as its focus. But Sass goesbeyond merely using this focus as an easyaccess to his young audience and Shad-rach's experiences are not merely graftedonto the setting. Rather, they evolvenaturally and credibly from the historicalbackdrop. Moreover, as implied above,both the details of plot and the develop-ment of the novel's two main characters(Shadrach's fortunes are fatefully en-tangled with those of a cruel and amoralacquaintance throughout the book) com-bine to underscore themes which tran-scend the immediate historical setting.Shadrach Byfield's story is, in its widestapplication, a quest story, and his grailturns out to be an understanding of him-self, an appreciation of his heritage andfamily, and the knowledge that while hedid live to be a man, he did so not byfighting for General Brock in Canada,but by returning to his Lowlands roots.

Veronica Tennant's On Stage, Please(published first in hardcover in 1977)has now been released, as the book's pro-motional bulletin states, "in an inexpen-sive mass market format" in the hopethat it might "delight yet another gen-eration of aspiring ballet dancers." Thatthis new edition, which suffers only mini-mally from the compromises of inferiorpaper and print and which succeeds incapturing the beauty of Rita Briansky'soriginal illustrations, should be new fareto another generation of readers just adecade after its first publication, be-speaks not only of the market realities inchildren's literature, but also of the factthat for serious ballet students, trainingbegins at about age 10.

On Stage, Please is best categorized ascontemporary realistic fiction. It is a con-vincing insight into the world of ballet —convincing because this is not simply anarid guidebook for aspiring ballerinas. Itis, instead, an expertly crafted novelwhich is certain to keep the child read-ing, and to do so, refreshingly, not in

spite of its literary distinctions, but be-cause of them. On a narrative level, thestory traces the career of Jennifer Allen,a ballet-loving girl of 10 years, from herarrival in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, afterher family emigrated from England,through the challenges, frustrations, andtriumphs of the first six months of herstudies at the "Professional School ofBallet" in Toronto. On a secondary level,the book treats of a theme with whichmost young readers can identify: theneed for acceptance and to be regardedas competent. Veronica Tennant probesthis theme with an eye for both the de-tail and the aura of the ballet worldwhich perhaps only intimate exposurecan bring (Tennant graduated fromCanada's National Ballet School in 1964and joined the National Ballet Companyas principal dancer in 1965 ).

Jennifer Allen's favourite ballet is Cin-derella, and it is this story which in turnmetaphorically reflects her beginning ca-reer. After numerous setbacks (includingthe dubious ministrations of a cigar-smoking, overweight instructor in SaultSte. Marie and an injury suffered at theschool in Toronto), Jennifer begins torealize her ambitions to become a dancerguided by the advice of an older friendat the school (the fairy godmother par-allel is inviting) and her own genuinelove for ballet. Along the way, Jenniferexperiences the inevitable uncertaintiesabout her talents and commitment, butshe presses on, learns about the discipline,perseverance, and sheer hard work re-quired of a ballerina, until she "discoversher dream" when she is one of the twostudents chosen to dance in the Perform-ing Company's Christmas production of,appropriately enough, Cinderella. Thestrength of On Stage, Please is that whileit is informative, it is also subtly insight-ful, and while the young reader learns ofpirouettes, barres, and pointes shoes, theplot, characters, and attendant threads of

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the story are gracefully woven by Veron-ica Tennant to suggest resonances towhich all young readers might relate.

JAMES GELLERT

CONFEDERATIONPOETSDUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT, Powassan's Drum:

Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott, eds. Ray-mond Souster & Douglas Lochhead. Te-cumseh, $7.95.

BLISS CARMAN, Windflower: Poems of BlissCarman, eds. Raymond Souster & DouglasLochhead. Tecumseh, $9.95.

MURIEL MILLER, Bliss Carman: Quest & Re-volt. Jesperson Press, $36.00.

THAT TECUMSEH PRESS has decided topublish reading editions of the selectedpoems of Duncan Campbell Scott andBliss Carman is commendable. As mem-bers of the so-called Confederation groupof poets, both Scott and Carman areimportant figures in the development ofCanadian poetry. Until now, however, ithas proved difficult to locate substantialselections of their work in print. For BlissCarman one had to go back to LomePierce's anthology of 1954 or the RobertSorfleet edition of 1976. For Scott it wasa matter of using E. K. Brown's SelectedPoems of 1951 or Tecumseh's earlierSelected Poetry of 1974, edited by GlennClever. This paucity of texts has meantthat all too often readers know Scott andCarman only through a few well-knownanthology pieces.

While Powassan's Drum and Wind-flower offer readers a generous selectionof the poetry of Scott and Carman, thevolumes prove far from ideal. They havebeen cheaply produced: the font for theScott edition is too small for easy read-ing, and the Carman volume is inked sodarkly that each line appears empha-sized. Indeed, it looks as though Tecum-

seh Press intended the volumes as interimeditions for the new reader. They werecertainly not produced with the seriousstudent in mind, since they contain nei-ther notes nor bibliography. In Tecum-seh's earlier edition of Scott's poetry, theeditor at least gave some indication ofthe chronological progression and sup-plied a brief biographical note. This timethe editors have chosen to present thepoems in vague thematic groupings,which suggest a fin de siècle preciosity.Moreover, the double introductions byRaymond Souster and Douglas Lochheadare largely uncritical. Both Souster andLochhead mention that they read Scottand Carman when they were young, andthey claim to have been influenced bythem, but they offer little evidence ofhow and why the poets remain importanttoday. Tecumseh's decision to publisheditions with no historical backgroundmay well prompt readers to ask whatCarman and Scott mean to them as poetsonce the protective lens of "historicalimportance" has been removed.

By far the more interesting volume isthe Scott selection, Powassan's Drum.The editors chose to begin with sevenIndian and Metis poems which capturethe plight of these peoples poised be-tween different cultures and time periods.These poems are undoubtedly amongScott's most original. Yet when seen inthe midst of the current debate aboutnative and ethnic rights and cultures,they appear somewhat dated. While Scottsympathizes with the individual caughtbetween cultures, he also believes in akind of Coleridgean moral evolution.From this evolutionary perspective, thenative people are seen as essentially"savage," redeemed only when they moveupwards to a "higher" state of spiritualunderstanding. Consequently, Scott tendsto undermine the essential dignity of theindividual by dissolving it in a higherspiritualism, a problem for all those im-

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bued with idealist or historicist perspec-tives.

For the contemporary reader, much ofwhat follows Scott's Indian and Metispoems seems weak, with numerous land-scape lyrics containing virtually no Ca-nadian features; indeed, few detailedfeatures of any kind. In these pretty butinsipid poems, Scott offers pictures of thechanging seasons, which then allow him,rather abrutly in most cases, to posit hisintuition that a "diviner thing" or a"peace deeper than peace" exists behind"the changeful hour." These are largelyamateur pieces, although a number suchas "The Ghost's Story" and "Afterwards"offer some piquancy.

With poems such as "In the CountryChurchyard," dedicated to Scott's father,Powassan's Drum begins to reveal a newdirection, indicating that one of Scott'sstrengths derives from his handling of thelonger poem in which he introduces hisuncertainty about the nature of romanticabsolutes. This strength develops furtherin "The Height of Land" where Scott,following his Wordsworthian model, fi-nally combines his meditations with ac-tually perceived landscape details. Herehe ends with the question of whetherman will eventually evolve beyond hispresent condition — confined to brief,ecstatic sensations about the meaning ofthe universe — to a comprehensive intel-lectual knowledge based on an under-standing of divine law which allows for"closer commune with divinity." Takenas a whole, Powassan's Drum leaves theimpression that Scott overworks themoonlight-and-roses motif, that he toooften indulges in derivative language.Still, in his Indian poems, and especiallywith the hesitations in which he coucheshis later work, one feels that here was agenuine poet in the making.

In Windflower, however, a wholly dif-ferent impression emerges: Carman ap-pears largely as a popular versifier in love

with his own music. While it is possibleat times to be caught up in his boyishexuberance about the open road, andwhile the swing and delight of his op-timism can be enjoyed for short periods,yet to give oneself over to Carman proveslargely an act of nostalgia. A surprisinglysmall number of poems prove worthkeeping, and these are mostly poems ofmood which capture Carman's own vio-lent swings of feeling. "Low Tide onGrand Pré," "The Eavesdropper," and afew of the Sappho poems stand out asquite exceptional. All too frequently Car-man's image of man's life as a journeyalong a narrow road hedges his visionround so that the poems cannot expandinto the open countryside on either side.Obsessed with the God-figure who waitsin various allegorical disguises at the endof life, Carman turns everything alongthe path into trite and standardized im-agery. He rarely seems to look at whathe describes, with the result that thesymbol overtakes and overwhelms theparticular.

Given Carman's enormous reputationin his own day, and the fact that heseems to be sinking rapidly in contem-porary esteem, the appearance of a newbiography appears serendipitous. MurielMiller probably knows more about Car-man than anyone else alive today, for shehas been writing about him for most ofher life. Bliss Carman: Quest & Revoltis intended as "a replacement" for her1935 biography with Ryerson Press —Bliss Carman: A Portrait. For this newbiography, Miller has collected an enor-mous amount of additional informationabout Carman's life. At times it seems asthough one could retrace every foot ofCarman's many journeys across NorthAmerica. While Miller offers an excellentdiarylike account of Carman's activities— his employment, his friendships, andhis love affairs — she throws little light

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on his poetry or his ideas. Indeed, thevolume is almost resolutely anti-intellec-tual, barely mentioning the various ideasand movements with which Carman wasinvolved. The New England Transcen-dental movement, for example, greatlyinfluenced Carman's thought, yet this isonly briefly touched upon. Similarly, Mil-ler discusses at length Carman's involve-ment with Mary Perry King in a schoolof Delsartean acting, yet never describesthe Delsartean methods. In lookingthrough Miller's index for Carman's in-dividual poems, one realizes that she dis-cusses only a few, and says little aboutthem.

Even more damaging for a biography,Miller so immerses herself in the detailsof Carman's life that it becomes difficultto gain an overview of Carman's charac-ter. One sees his proclivity for hurlinghimself into romantic affairs as well assomething of his personal reserve, butthe two fail to coalesce into a portrait ofCarman. At one point Miller quotes Car-man as saying that for a biography "atrue photograph of the exterior person iswhat is needed. The pose, the bearing,the motion, the stride, the voice andtone, a trick of the eye, a habit of thehand all mean so much." Unfortunately,Miller does not succeed in creating this"true photograph," in bringing the manto life.

While her painstaking research is ad-mirable, and her tracing of Carman'ssteps will no doubt be of help to futurescholars, in the end, one senses that, forMiller, this biography has been a labourof love, but a love that drowns Carmanthe man and the artist in a sea of details.A pity, for Carman's lyricism, if it is tobe appreciated today, needs new insights,new techniques for reading. That, andthe highlighting of a brighter brush.

RONALD HATCH

MURDER & LIESERIC WRIGHT, A Single Death. Collins, $1995.TIMOTHY FiNDLEY, The Telling of Lies: A

Mystery. Viking, $19.95.

E. L. DocTOROw ONCE SAID of fictionwriters: "ours is the only professionforced to admit that it lies — and thatbestows upon us the mantle of honesty."Perhaps it is the overt playing with liesand honesty, as well as with such basicsas life and death, that makes the mysterystory an important form of postmodernfiction. The detective story is alive andwell in all its forms in Canada today,from the straightforward and gripping"good read" to the complex and intricatepostmodern playing with convention.

The more popular version is most ad-mirably represented by Eric Wright's lat-est novel, A Single Death, another storyfeaturing Inspector Charlie Salter of theMetropolitan Toronto Police. The fine,exciting plotting is matched by delightfulwry humour and complex characteriza-tion that makes you care about the majorplayers in this drama, a drama that is asmuch about marriage and separation, theloneliness of life alone and the dangersof intimacy, as it is about murder andlying. For all its humour and well-crafteduse of the detective story conventions,this is a novel that touches on and illu-minates the major themes of most con-temporary literature: gender and familyrelations, aging and death, generationaland class conflict (within a "classless"capitalist society), the paradox of thehaunting, inescapable past and yet theurgent need for a sense of history — bothpersonal and public — so vividly soughtin our postindustrial urban society.

And these too are the themes of Tim-othy Findley's The Telling of Lies.Though carefully subtitled A Mystery,this is a very self-reflexive, metafictionalkind of mystery, sharing as much with

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the work of Borges and Robbe-Grillet aswith that of Wright. As the archetypicalinvestigation of the nature and existenceof lies, the murder mystery or detectivestory is, in fact, a very popular "marker"of metafictionality today. In other words,it is a readily recognized way of signallingto the reader the conventionality andfictionality of what she is reading. It isitself a most self-conscious genre: thinkof all those little ironies uttered by char-acters within such novels about how"things like this only happen in detectivestories, never in life" — that is, art! Butthe other characteristic of the genre thatmakes it so apt for metafictional pur-poses is the importance it overtly accordsto the hermeneutic act of interpreting.The detective story reader is the para-digm for all readers: she is a detectivetracing clues. The author is both creatorand murderer, according to this meta-phor, which is obviously set up by a playon words: the plot of narrative and theplot to kill. In Murder in the Dark, Mar-garet Atwood spoofs this somewhat, end-ing with a new Cretan paradox Doc-torow would enjoy: "by the rules of thegame, I always lie. Now: do you believeme?"

To lie, then, is to fictionalize. In Find-ley's other novels, this same equation hadarisen: the debate between Quinn andFreiburg in Famous Last Words over thetruth-status of Mauberley's writing onthe wall is carried out in these sameterms that equate the act of narration orwriting with that of telling falsehoods aseasily as truths. In The Wars, photo-graphs also partook of the same ambiva-lent power to reveal the truth and to lie.In The Telling of Lies, then, we are infamiliar Findley territory, a morally am-biguous world where the past alwaysconditions the present. The narrator isone Vanessa Van Home, a well-knownAmerican garden designer and sometime

photographer. Her very self-consciousdiary-writing, which we read, has beendirectly occasioned by death: the murderof pharmaceutical magnate, Calder Mad-dox, and the impending "death" of theNew England summer resort, the AuroraSands Hotel (conveniently, ASH forshort), where she has spent almost all ofher 60 summers — except for those spentin a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp at"Bandung" during the war. The plotshifts between, on the one hand, Nessa'spresent-time attempts to discover bothCalder's murderer and also the reasonfor the high-powered American govern-mental silencing of the murder and, onthe other, her memories of Bandung, ofgrowing up in prison, of the commandingofficer, Colonel Norimitsu, who wasequally responsible for her father's deathand for teaching her about compassionand the beauty of formal gardens.Throughout the narrative, Nessa is moreobserver than participant, as she recordsevents with either her camera or her pen.She is a most unwilling detective, whoresists engagement in the moral and her-meneutic "game" until personal devotionand friendship intervene.

She is also a most unwilling writer, awoman with a visual imagination and afinely honed sense of moral ambiguitywho distrusts language, while acknowl-edging her reliance upon it. She writesof the brutalizing experience in thecamp:

I dislike the word unmoved. It is like theword hate. They do not always tell — aswords — precisely what is meant. I do notmean that Mother was cold or cruel whenit came to other people's sorrows and pain— and certainly nothing of the kind whenanyone died. Unmoved, in prison terms,means something else; and perhaps it meanssomething it cannot mean anywhere but ina prison. It meant, in Mother's case — andin the case of countless others, myself in-cluded — that feeling was masked. It wasnot withheld. Even masked sounds cold. Itwas not.

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Context is all. This remark occurs in apassage which marks the centre or coreof the novel. In the context of a detectivestory such a passage might feel strange;yet, in The Telling of Lies it feels not inthe least incongruous, and this probablypoints to the different kind of (meta-fictive) mystery which this novel repre-sents. This passage is an extended medi-tation on lies and truth, death and aging,life and living — all in the context ofour investment of history in places andpeople. The final solution to the murdertoo goes beyond neat plot resolution tooffer a timely political (and Canadian)twist, a warning and a revenge thathover over our reading like the bizarreand mysterious iceberg which appears inJuly in the harbour outside the ASH.

A hermeneutic puzzle or a grippingread: whichever you see as the reasonfor reading detective stories, you will notbe disappointed with either of these nov-els, different as they are. There seemslittle doubt, however, that The Telling ofLies must be read in the context of thoseother contemporary postmodern meta-fictions which paradoxically exploit andsubvert the murder mystery conventions,novels like Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor,Patrick Siiskind's Perfume, or even Ga-briel Garcia Màrquez's Chronicle of aDeath Foretold.

LINDA HUTCHEON

MACHINEROMANESQUEW O N RivARD, Les silences du corbeau. Boréal,

$Ι5·95·FUYANT U N E DECEPTION amoureuse at tachée au nom de ses deux amantesFrançois et Clara, un Québécois nomméAlexandre se réfugie dans un ashram àPondichéry. Il s'y retrouve aux piedsd'une jeune "mère" qui devrait le récon-

cilier avec lui-même et avec la vie. Lessilences du corbeau, troisième romand'Yvon Rivard, se présente donc commeun journal en trois Carnets rédigés parAlex. Son cheminement ne sera pas soli-taire mais intégré, de mauvaise grâce ilfaut le dire, à un groupe de disciplesvenus chercher quelque révélation auprèsde la mère.

Apparemment c'est une double quêtequ'Alexandre poursuit en sol indien:recherche de soi, surtout de son enfanceen Mauricie et recherche du visage de sesfemmes. En fait il s'agit d'une seule etmême démarche. Alex ne cherche per-sonne d'autre que lui-même. Son plaisirde faire la lessive et sa manie de se laverles mains sont symboliques de cette atten-tion obsessive à soi. Par là, le livre estune nouvelle prise de vue du narcissismecontemporain mis en scène cette fois dansle cadre conventionnel du trip indien.Alexandre ne s'implique dans rien maisil est complètement et détestablementcentré sur lui-même. Pour la forme, il sepose toutes ces questions profondes "toutde suite les grandes questions, c'est ça lanuit" qui ont (im)mobilisé sa généra-tion, celle qui s'interroge aussi dansMaryse. Cependant, il ne se penche au-dessus de ces questions qu'en autantqu'elles lui renvoient sa chère image etqu'elles s'intègrent à son introspectionbien douillette.

Car Alexandre, fils de la psychanalyseet de la sémiotique, introspecte et inter-prète furieusement. On sent dans toutesses interventions cette volonté globale etimpérieuse de tout interpréter pour quetout ait un sens, soit signifiant/signifié/significatif de quelque chose. A la fin,tant de soupçon existentiel provoque unecertaine lassitude chez le lecteur qui vou-drait que le récit avance sans tout cedécodage.

Puisqu'il s'agit de sa propre aventure,il n'y a donc dans le roman qu'un seulvrai personnage et c'est Alex. Les autres

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ne sont là que comme confidents du nar-rateur. Le style du journal est celui quilui convient le mieux et ce sont d'ailleursles plus belles pages du roman. Dansl'utilisation du discours rapporté, deschoses vues et entendues Rivard est à sonmeilleur et c'est là qu'Alex est le plus envoix, quand il n'a pas besoin de briller etqu'il cesse d'interroger son miroir.

Si le personnage d'Alexandre se tientbien, il n'en est pas de même du choeurdes personnages secondaires qui ne sontque des esquisses et des clichés: défro-qués, homosexuel, artiste, adepte du YiKing. Ceux-ci sont décrits avec tous leslieux communs idoines et placés dans lessituations les plus prévisibles. J'en pren-drai comme exemple l'agression de Peter,l'homosexuel, et le dialogue de feuilletonqui s'ensuit entre lui et Alexandre.

Une technique répétitive utilise cespersonnages secondaires comme mode denarration circulaire qui exprime les dif-férentes opinions, les différents points devue. Un exemple de cette utilisation despersonnages secondaires comme faire-valoir du narrateur apparaît dans cespassages fréquents où l'auteur fait parlerchacun à tour de rôle de façon systé-matique.

Au souper, le nouveau régime d'austérité àété l'objet d'unelongue discussion où se sont affrontés lesjansénistes et lesquiétistes. Véronique a paru

particulièrementaffectée par laperspective d'une telle séparation. Elle necomprenait pas. . . .Thérèse . . . l'a rassurée en disant que.. . . François doutaitfort. . . . Louis lui a fait remarquer . . . ,ce à quoi Françoisa rétorqué. . . . Hermann partegeait l'avis deMère. . . . Peter a violemment rejeté lacomparaison d'Hermann. . . .

Après quelques applications de cettetechnique, le procédé est trop apparentet le récit apparaît comme superficielle-ment articulé puisqu'en fait c'est toujours

Alex qui mentalement fait le tour dusujet en donnant la parole à ses propresvoix intérieures. Il n'y a donc pas dedialogues mais seulement un long mono-logue et la typographie trop évidemmentdialogique de certaines pages a quelquechose de si forcé que ni les gros carac-tères ni les vastes plages blanches n'em-portent l'adhésion du lecteur.

Cette distanciation du trop spirituelAlex par rapport à ce qui se vit à l'Ash-ram nous le rend difficilement crédiblequand il plonge dans son drame person-nel, la seule véritable quête dans laquelleil soit vraiment impliqué. Les femmesqu'il aime il ne les rejoint qu'à traversdes photos et des cartes postales où ellesse fondent l'une dans l'autre pour se per-dre elles aussi dans son questionnementperpétuel. L'insensibilité d'Alex se re-tourne alors contre lui. Sa douleur nenous touche pas. La mémoire de son en-fance en Mauricie est le seul lieu où il yait encore une certain émotion et de lasincérité. Hors de ce lieu d'authenticitéAlex a tout le factice de sa culturespirituelle ramassée dans les proverbes etles sentences qu'il cite à tout propos.

A première lecture, le livre offre uneapparence de simplicité qui pourraitépouser un dépouillement intérieur ré-sultant de la démarche spirituelle. Cetteimpression ne dure pas. Sous la simpli-cité de la surface percent les ressorts del'écriture qui font que le livre est tropécrit. Comme ton général, il y a un dis-cours ironique, léger qui donne lieu àquelques réussites dans certains rap-prochements inattendues jaillis de l'ima-ginaire cultivé et débridé d'Alex. Exem-ple: l'apparition impromptue de MariaChapdelaine à la fin d'une conversationavec Thérèse:

Thérèse s'est mise à fixer un point invisibleau-dessus de la table et, avant même que jepuisse détourner la conversation sur unautre sujet, elle a commencé à moudre ensilence les trois ou quatre mots de son

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mantra. Elle était désormais seule, au boutde quelques minutes, je me suis retiré sansqu'elle s'en aperçoive. Maria ensevelissaitsous les Avé le corps de François Paradis,ma mère séchait discrètement ses larmes enattendant le retour du printemps, le retourde mon père. . . . Si le paradis existe, ce nepeut être que pour toutes ces femmes quiprient, qui pleurent.

Au total, Les silences du corbeau estun roman brillant, éblouissant même parendroit comme son personnage principal.Le motif du corbeau qui traverse commeune figure fantastique les journéesd'Alexandre offre un bon exemple desressources d'invention dont Rivard estcapable. Tel qu'il est, le livre demeuresuperficiel, une sorte de machine roma-nesque exacte, sans souffle et sans espace,comme un exercice littéraire. L'attentionest provoquée par les variations de ton,par les changements d'interlocuteursdans les dialogues, bref par les procédésde la narration. Mais à ce niveau, toutest contenu dans les cinquante premièrespages et pour la suite du roman, la ma-chine ronronne sur sa lancée.

JACQUES JULIEN

HITLER'S LETTERw. GÜNTHER PLAUT, The Letter. McClelland

& Stewart, $22.95.

THE SUBJECT OF THIS short novel inter-ests me very much; yet I found it dis-appointing. Its essential subject is Hitler's"Final Solution," the mad effort to de-stroy every Jew within the Third Reich.The theme is still powerful and relevant,but the action in Plaut's fiction is onlyintermittently gripping and suspenseful.One can seldom become wholly involvedwith the lives of the characters, perhapsbecause of their predictability and Plaut'sleaning heavily on coincidence. Certainlythe heroine, Helga Raben, is interesting,dynamic, and believable. Jewish by birth,

she is at risk from adolescence onward inNazi Germany; she is in love with a Naziarmy officer, Rolf Baumgarten, who fromthe autumn of 1939 is surreptitiously apart of an underground anti-Hitlerclique.

The violence of Nazi Germany arrivesearly in the novel: in November 1938,during the first pogrom, Helga's father'sfactory is seized, her mother raped; bothparents commit suicide (as did real-lifefriends of the author) while Helga is inEngland. After her return to Germanyshe is compelled, with her lover's help,to adopt a new identity. Soon, plausibly,The Letter comes into her hands. It is amemo from Adolf Hitler to HermanGoring, explicitly commanding the im-plementation of the Final Solution: "Iwant the Jews to disappear from the faceof Europe." Helga smuggles the letter toSwitzerland, with the aid of an Americanmilitary attaché, Ken Driscoll, withwhom she also falls in love; subsequentlyNazi operatives attempt to retrieve theletter, fearing that if its contents areknown outside of Germany, the image ofthe Führer may be tarnished, especiallyin America. The letter, deposited in abank vault in Bern, is traced to Helga,who flees to America, where she worksas a translator and propaganda agent,accompanied by Driscoll. (In the mean-while, her German lover, Baumgarten,has disappeared into the no-man's landof Poland.) Helga is unable to arouseany American interest in the plight ofmillions of German Jews in Nazi concen-tration camps. Even an interview with anoncommittal President Roosevelt is un-helpful. Nazi agents in the U.S.A. abductDriscoll and ship him by U-boat to aconcentration camp in Germany, wherehe stoically endures much suffering.

In Germany, readers of The Lettermeet, at least briefly, the major figuresin the Nazi high command: Goring,Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann, and

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although we hear much about Adolf Hit-ler, Günther Plaut unaccountably neverputs him on the fictional stage. In time,the whereabouts of both Driscoll andBaumgarten is discovered, creating a ro-mantic dilemma for both Helga and thenovelist. In a time-honoured tradition,Plaut solves the problem on the last pageof the book. The war comes to its bloodyconclusion, with, inevitably, an emphasison the extermination of six million Jews.One would think that, after the suicideof Hitler and the defeat of the Nazis, theletter would have no further value. Notso, for Plaut has the most dedicatedNazis determine to carry on, from SouthAmerica or other safe havens, the causeof a greater Germany ; hence, the deifica-tion of their defeated Führer must befurthered by the seizure and destructionof the incriminating letter. I can only sayhere that Plaut's disposition of the letteris unsatisfying and unconvincing.

This was a novel that I could bear toput down. Only occasionally was it pow-erful; it lacked the passionate intensitythat one might expect from an authorwhose family was in part destroyed bythe Third Reich. (Plaut himself settledin the U.S.A. in 1935; in 1961 he movedto Toronto, where he served for manyyears as rabbi of Holy Blossom Syna-gogue.) A reader may be irritated withPlaut's frequent moralizing. He will notallow the reader to draw his own con-clusions from a situation; he nudges himin the direction that he must go. In thisbrief illustration Heydrich is at a con-cert: "[His] Iron Cross . . . was earned forhis valor in torturing prisoners and dis-patching Jews, Gypsies and other un-wanted creatures to premature deaths."Plaut's occasionally slangy style seems in-appropriate to the period and the serious-ness of the book.

It is inevitable to compare The Letterwith another recent Canadian novel onthe same subject, Sylvia Fraser's Berlin

Solstice (1984). If Plaut read this novel,it influenced him little. Fraser's is a muchmore powerful and substantial book; ithas a wider focus, with a greater imme-diacy in descriptions of ruthlessness andcruelty, with more dynamic characteriza-tion and dialogue. Indeed, Fraser's indig-nation seems more intense than Plaut's.Berlin Solstice is also superior to Plaut'snovel in its willingness to make AdolfHitler and his associates central to thestory line. These men seem here to beimportant to the themes and motivations,whereas in The Letter the Nazi hier-archy is always peripheral. The Letter isperhaps an exorcism of old ghosts froma distance of four decades; it has a sig-nificant value in a somewhat quiet, un-impassioned way as a reminder of aterrible period in human history, nowbeyond the memory of a high percentageof the population of Canada.

ROBERT G. LAWRENCE

WRITING LIFEJOHN . LEE, Hired Hands. Brick Books,

$7.50.MARIA JACOBS, What Feathers Are For. Mo

saic Press, $8.95.

I N Hired Hands John Lee undertakes topresent a life and portrait of moronicfarm hand, Tom. We follow his careerfrom cradle to grave through a series oflyrics interspersed by a number of shortprose passages headed "T h e Well," astructural device that refers to the initialepisode of the book in which the pro tagonist is dunked head first into a wellfor peeing his bed. This, or perhaps alater episode in which he falls on hishead off a roof, is the source of Tom'smental deficiency. The narrator is theson of the farmer who has hired Tom.The account seems rooted in reality, butthe narrative voice does occasionally soar,perhaps inappropriately :

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Poems are twisting at his headlike fingerson a stem-windertrying to wind his life up.

The basis of this conceit is that Tomcollects old clocks and watches. But this"poeticizing" does not always work. Itseems more a literary indulgence than afurthering of our understanding of Tom.And this points to the main problem ofthe book : are we getting Tom, or are wegetting an imaginative youth's romanticview of a lovable retardate? Lee wantsus to have both, but some blurring offocus emerges. Sometimes Tom's view-point is conveyed not by his, but by thepoet's way of thinking:

He rememberswhat he likes —not what happenedor isor will bebut what he likes.He is constantly-writing and rewritinghis lifefor he remembers perfectlywhat didn't happen and whyand why.

By the time you have figured this out,is it really Tom's thoughts? It might beperfectly accurate, in a way, but not inTom's way. The poem is successful whenthe viewpoint shifts to the observer:

When he plays harmonicahis eyes get wildI've seen that lookin a sheep's eyeswhen its head is caughtin a fence.

So the problem is one of distance and thetemptation to go beyond the experienceitself:

Tom watches the TVfrom another room.He can barely seethrough the smoke from his Trump cigarlike Hecatesquinting through a fog.

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Despite these reservations we do get asense of Tom's simplicity and isolationas well as the affection which he inspiresin the narrator/poet. Perhaps this is allwe have a right to expect. There cannotbe much personal interaction, givenTom's handicap. And the book is oftenvery funny. In fact the humour is han-dled with complete success. Tom's failedattempt at courting and his visit to afortuneteller in town, among other pas-sages, are deftly executed. The bookneeds cutting, but its heart is sound. Theillustrations by Michel Binette are finedrawings, but do not always suggestTom's oddity.

Maria Jacobs's second collection ofpoems offers explorations of love, authen-tic or illusory, many in retrospect, ofhuman relationships in general as well aspoems of observations and fantasy. Thispoet's writing has a directness which isappealing. She does not indulge in verbalconundrums or brain-twisting conceits.She likes to get to the point right off, hitor miss. Her hits are very good:

I still see youformal blazer and tiemy letters and photographin your outstretched handreturning me to myself.

Sometimes she misses, as with this tangleof tropes:

With one foot firmlyin the romantic traditionthe other in quicksandwe are not well equippedto take charge of our lives.

This poem seems to be about fidelity —about how it can get boring:

Ask anyone — me for exampleleaving home now and thento see what my feathers are forbut back again inevitablyto my indispensable husbandready to be groundedfor my irrelevant leanings.

The Hecate reference is surely unneeded. But the poem doesn't come to grips with

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the real issue that underlies these vaguesuggestions. Yet it ends well (except forthe last line) :

I would fight like anythingto be liberatedonlythere is no oppressor.Or else I am he.

Despite her unsureness in places, thispoet is always interesting and honest.Having quoted her at her worst, it isonly fair to add that certain passagesmore than compensate for the weak-nesses. "Mid-life" complements "Strad-dling" and suggests that Jacobs has adeeper understanding of the long-termhuman commitment than she does ofromantic dreams:

We search in other eyeseince yours reflectwhat you must catch in mine:the shaded side, Augustgusts of resentmentagainst the steady flowtroubling our surfacesbelow which we see nothing.

This writing combines directness andsimplicity with great subtlety of feeling.Jacobs's unevenness comes from hertotal involvement in the experiences sheis depicting — she dives to the depthsand comes up with mud or a pearl. Thewriting never takes precedence over whatshe is writing about. Jacobs explores herinvolvement in human relationships witha vitality that conveys both depths andheights. In certain passages of unaffectedfinesse she excels with an enviable na-tural grace.

ARTHUR ADAMSON

ROMAN HEARTBEATANTONIO D'ALFONSO, The Other Shore. Guer-

nica, $20.00; pa. $9.95.PASQUALE VERDiccHio, Moving Landscape.

Guernica, $17.50; pa. $6.95.

the accent is Celtic,the "ths" are perfect

the heartbeat, Roman.ALEXANDRE AMPRIMOZ

GUERNICA EDITIONS' Essential Poets Ser-ies has since 1978 given Italo-Canadianpoets a forum in which to exchange, givea name to, and make known their sharedexperience. That experience (also docu-mented in a flurry of 1970's novels,poetry anthologies, and literary journals)can be best summed up as "the biculturalsensibility," which Pier Giorgio Di Gicconoted is shared by an ever-growing num-ber of New Canadian writers who arescattered all about the country. Perhapsone should refer to a tricultural sensibil-ity, taking into account Canada's twoofficial languages.

There is no question Di Cicco's "sen-sibility" exists. However, here are severalas yet unanswered questions with whichthe sympathetic reader should approachItalo-Canadian writing: who thought toimpose the "Italo-Canadian" label in thefirst place — the group of writers whobanded together, or a faceless and indif-ferent Canadian literary establishment?To what purpose might this literarylobby best be applied? What languageshould the writers speak among them-selves, and in their work? Is there anItalo-Canadian tradition offering richimages through which writers may ex-plore and express new-found identity, ora jumble of subjective experiences inac-cessible to the reader who either does notunderstand, or wish to understand, amicroexamination of cultural back-ground.

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To these questions a tremulous "It de-pends. . . ." The fact is, as with any artform, it is up to the individual artist tomake powerful feelings as real as possibleto the reader/spectator. The search forself is a necessary process through whichthe writer on the cultural margin passes,to fit into, or just "be," in the NewWorld. Joseph Pivato, in an article en-titled "The Arrival of Italian-CanadianWriting," quotes Robert Kroetsch's pithycomment: "The fiction makes us real."Italo-Canadian writers are and havebeen compelled to write about confusedfeelings of rootlessnes, frustration, andnostalgia brought upon them by "exile,""marginalization," "invisibility," "cul-tural death," "assimilation," "voiceless-ness."

For Italo-Canadian poets in particular,the dangers of mixing poetry and polem-ics is the other side of the opportunity tosense a long-awaited belonging. In someunsuccessful Italo-Canadian writing,therefore, unwanted and clanking liter-ary tropes can be found, what PasqualeVerdicchio describes as a "particularcanon : . . . your mother in her mourningclothes, your father laying bricks, yourfirst trip back to Italy." Antonio D'Al-fonso suggests, "If Italian writers in thiscountry wish to be taken seriously, theywill have to work very seriously at tryingto render intelligible their complex tra-ditions not only to other peoples in thisland but to themselves."

All that having been said, D'Alfonso'snew book of poetry, The Other Shore,"A notebook without a beginning, with-out an end, only a flowing towardsbeing," fails to involve the reader emo-tionally in the difficult struggle with dis-location, with what D'Alfonso elsewheredescribes as the "search for balance be-tween the natural and the cultural, theOld and New World, between the pastand the present, between Italy and Can-ada. . . ." That failure arises specifically

from D'Alfonso's choice of form. Unlikethe lyrical Black Tongue (1983), TheOther Shore is, as the coverline suggests,a "notebook" of prose-poem perceptionsorganized into seven lengthy sections.The poet's aperçus are punctuated byhaunting, grainy black and white photo-graphs of passageways, stairs, doorways,taken by the author while in Italy. Thebook's divisions, it becomes clear, charta voyage of self-discovery, starting par-ticularly with "L'Uomo Solo," acrossoceans of memory and longing to home-land "Guglionesi," and back again to theinner self, "To Criticize Oneself." Thevoice that emerges from the diarylikeentries speaks in the vernacular, andgenerally steers clear of poetic effects.The result is either a flat, featurelesstone, in which the poet reflects to him-self and to the overhearing reader

The cultures of being whatbeing can never again be. Here orthere: cultureless identity. The Italianculture: what does it mean to be Italiantoday if you live outside Italy? "Ifyou don't live in Italy, you're not Italian."What does such a phrase mean?

or voluminous rhetoric. And then thesentences do not hold the obvious inten-sity of the poet's unreined-in emotion:

Words rot in my mouth, no text possi-ble on the beauty of the coming toin this world. Not in Vietnam, not inNicaragua, not in the hamburger standas clean as a new valium container. Notin my dress you cannot distinguish frommy work-clothes. Not in a flavourlessstew — melting pot of frigidity.

Furthermore, D 'Alfonso's journey ofdiscovery is frequently too personal —what with overwrought reportage oflove making, a string of dedications tofriends and fellow writers, homage tocertain family members — and reducesthe reader to a stay at home voyeur,when he really wants to be on the jour ney too.

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The poems in West Coast writer/editor/translator Pasquale Verdicchio'sMoving Landscape (his first collection)are admirable, especially for their em-phatic visual appeal. Quick flashes ofrich, intense thought are expressed inimages that get to the essence of "things,"as in "Fish":

Moon tears in sea skinconverse creatureswalled by currentsscale senses

gills, fins motion secrets

New phosphorescencetapering into fin lobevanishes with darkness

Many of Verdicchio's poems, in fact,have a kind of picaresque quality (mov-ing landscapes), as his gaze is fixed, andthen lifted, and then fixed again on an-other point of the map. Startling pic-tures appear, as in "Barcelona" :

There is no flamenco echoing in thesestreets

anymore :the accent is all that is left.Picasso women, white powdered faces and

twistedeyes,

stare and follow their noses up alleys.

Addressing the question of culturalidentity, Verdicchio applies the sametechnique, or way of seeing, to advan-tage, and so we are compelled to seewith him into the tableaux of presentand past, "the dreams / which ancestorscarved in stone / and described in jew-els" :

Arms of Etruscan figureswhose loins spawned words of gold and

silverfrom the sperm of mystery which spilledinto the Arno and down to the sea.

their eyes closed in damp excavations,arms embracing the memorywe hold of them.

The title poem, the longest and lastin the collection, does battle with thecomplexities of belonging and yet notbelonging in the New World — the Italo-Canadian (or immigrant) condition.Verdicchio laments his "ready-made his-tory," the frustrations of "functioning asan absence," and of living in "this city,not my city, any city." He mourns, aboveall, the fickleness and shortcomings oflanguage that, in the end, "must go ondeceiving."

LOUISE MGKINNEY

NOVEL HERSTORYDALE SPENDER, Mothers of the Novel.

Methuen, $25.00.

RESURRECTING FORGOTTEN or neglectedwomen writers and arguing for their in-clusion in the literary mainstream areamong the most valuable undertakings offeminist scholars. Dale Spender has sur-veyed women novelists before Jane Aus-ten and produced an all-out attack onWalter Allen, Ian Watt, and other his-torians of the novel in English who havelimited themselves to male writers. Spen-der's statistics are rough but impressive:well over one hundred women and onlyabout thirty men were producing fictionfrom the sixteenth to the end of theeighteenth century. Her argument ischronological and qualitative as well asquantitative; why is Eliza Hay woodcalled the "female Defoe" when she gotthere first with significant innovations inthe novel? Why isn't Defoe the "maleHaywood"? Why does Richardson getthe credit for his limited male percep-tions of female character in epistolaryform when women had been publishingtheir female perceptions in epistolaryform for decades?

These and other questions accompanybiographical, critical, and bibliographicalmaterial on the women novelists, twenty-

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two of whom are singled out for rela-tively detailed consideration. As well,Spender examines significant elements inthe world of letters as they affectedwomen: literacy, publishing practices,circulating libraries, access to bookstores,the making and unmaking of literaryreputation. The scope of her book isambitious.

Spender devoted "almost two years"to the preparation of this book and shethanks numerous friends and colleaguesfor their assistance. It is greatly to beregretted that her haste and her depen-dence on others have resulted in an un-reliable piece of work. As a referencebook, it is only as good as its many sec-ondary sources, which range from theimpeccable (Patricia Köster), to the un-even (Janet Todd), to the outdated(B. G. MacCarthy). Among other mis-takes, some novels are wrongly dated, in-cluding two by Frances Brooke, lists oftitles and editions are sometimes incom-plete, names and titles are occasionallymisspelled, reprintings of "lost" novelshave been overlooked — and grammati-cal errors obtrude. Some standard ref-erence works have not been consultedand much recent scholarship has beenignored; Spender has been satisfied, forinstance, with B. G. MacCarthy's 1944discussion of Lady Mary "Wroath" in-stead of consulting Josephine Roberts'srecent work on Lady Mary Wroth. Inher pages on Eliza Haywood's FemaleSpectator, Spender stitches together quo-tations and unacknowledged paraphrasesfrom two critical sources, and, ratherthan going to the text of the FemaleSpectator itself, takes her Haywood quo-tations exclusively from those sametwo sources, including the ludicrous er-ror "lubrications" for "lucubrations."Throughout Mothers of the Novel, heavyand uncritical reliance on an erratic col-lection of seocndary sources, often in-sufficiently acknowledged, reduces the

scholarly quality of the book, while thelarge number of those sources casts doubton the degree of critical neglect thatSpender claims these women novelistshave suffered. However, where little pre-vious criticism is available, as in the caseof Mary Brunton, that claim is justifiedand Spender's work is original and use-ful, despite her practice of "skipping"Brunton's passages of overt Christianmoralizing, which Spender dislikes. Andit is useful to have the full range of wom-en's fiction — that is, the history of mostof the mainstream of the English novel— brought together in one book, how-ever tiresome the repeated attacks onmale historians become. Mothers of theNovel serves a valuable purpose as theflagship of Pandora's fleet of reprints ofnovels by women currently being pub-lished — a most welcome project. Onecan only wish the flagship had beenmade shipshape.

ANN MESSENGER

DRAMATIC FRINGENANCY BELL with DIANE BESSAi, ed., Five

from the Fringe: A Selection of Five PlaysFirst Performed at the Fringe TheatreEvent. NeWest, $6.00.

CHRISTOPHER INNÉS, Politics and the Play-wright: George Ryga. Simon & Pierre,$11.95.

CANADA'S MOST GENUINE and successfultheatre festival is undoubtedly the FringeFestival, a nine-day event in August thathas been taking place annually in theOld Strathcona district of Edmontonsince 1982. The festival has grown in sizeand popularity since its first year, whenfounder and organizer Brian Paisleyscheduled forty-five plays in five per-formance areas, to 1986 when it featuredone hundred and fifty plays in thirteenspaces from theatres to warehouses,stores, schools, hotels, and streets. Ticket

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sales have surpassed expectations everyyear, from 7,500 for the First FringeTheatre Event to 135,000 for Fringe theFifth ; each year it has doubled the num-ber of tickets sold the previous year.

The loose organization and warm wel-come to any theatre group accounts forthe festival's attraction. There is no settheme or grand design, and groups areaccepted on a first-come, first-servedbasis; they pay a small registration fee,are provided with a technician, and keepthe money they take in at the box office.Such an open policy has attracted per-formers and companies from across Can-ada and abroad, and has featured playsthat have gone on to play far beyond theborders of Alberta: Charles Tidler'sStraight Ahead I Blind Dancers, MichaelBurrell's Hess, and Janet Feindel's AParticular Class of Women.

This success has prompted NeWestPress to publish the collection of one-actplays, Five from the Fringe. The shortestand the best — One Beautiful Eveningby Edmonton's Small Change Theatre— is from the first Fringe. It is a simpleand heart-warming story about an elderlywoman and man who meet at a com-munity bingo hall; though they neverwin a game, they do win each other andgo off arm-in-arm at the end of thenight. The inherent sentimentality ofsuch a tale is blunted by the humourand distanced by the masks and mime inthe play; the only characters who speakare the announcer and some of thosewho do win. Life After Hockey is a one-man play by Kenneth Brown dealingwith an enduring element in the experi-ence of Canadian boys and men. RinkRat Brown, a husband and father overthirty years of age, relives his boyhooddays on the rink and fantasizes abouttaking Mike Bossy's place to score theovertime goal in the 1984 Canada Cupfinal against the U.S.S.R. But the playdoes not probe deeply enough into the

Canadian psyche and is undercut by thegimmickry of inserting the voice ofWayne Gretzky, "a godlike voice fromabove," and the Red Army chorus, andby a silly ending that has Guy Lafleurmaking a comeback with the MapleLeafs and inviting Brown to play on hisline. Cut! by Lyle Victor Albert is aneven sillier play, whose title the editorsmight well have applied to the play it-self. Based on the premise of bringingtogether characters rejected from well-known plays, it might have sparkled likeStoppard's Rosencrantz and GuildensternAre Dead, but it does not. The rejectedcharacters — Clyde, Prince of Denmarkand Hamlet's brother; Fiddleditch, anelderly Victorian butler; Nippletitus, thesister of Oedipus; Mrs. Kowalski, themother of Stanley; and Joey, a rejectfrom a modern musical, Hey, Dud!!!(with all three exclamation marks) —have some clever and witty exchanges,but too many are predictable and deriva-tive. The final flat joke is the appearanceof Godot — an old man in baggy py-jamas who has been moaning in thewings throughout — when all the othershave left the stage. Eating a cucumbersandwich, the remnant from anotherplay, he looks out at the audience andsays, "Where is everybody?" If the audi-ence were wise, he would be referring tothem.

Plays with greater possibilities thanthese two fantasies are two realisticdramas about the plight of the Métisand native Indians respectively. The Be-trayal by Laurier Gareau concerns a con-frontation between Gabriel Dumont andthe parish priest at Batoche, Julien Mou-lin, O.M.I., in 1905, the year before Du-mont's death. Told from Dumont's pointof view, it condemns the role of thepriests at the battle of Batoche, and sup-ports Dumont's questionable belief thatbut for the betrayal of the clergy theMétis would have won the battle. The

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French/Métis dialogue between the twomen helps recreate this imagined mo-ment in Canadian history. May we hopethat Gareau or someone else will write afull-length play on Dumont as Coulter,Dorge, and others have done for Riel.The Land Called Morning, by John Sel-kirk with Gordon Selkirk, is a series ofvignettes about four Crée teenagers inSaskatchewan. This is an age group ofour native people not often seen on thestage. Despite the suicide of one of thecharacters and a sentimentalized ending,we are given a positive view of theirprospects for a good life, with a littlehelp from Emily Dickinson's poem, "Willthere really be a morning," which givesan added dimension to the lyric nature ofthe play.

One Alberta-born playwright who hasgone far from the Fringe is George Ryga,the subject of Christopher Innes's Poli-tics and the Playwright, the first in aSimon & Pierre series, The CanadianDramatist. Innes has written an impor-tant book that surveys Ryga's career as aplaywright but also looks at his poems,novels, short stories, film scripts, andoratorios. It focuses on Ryga's changingpolitical and dramatic vision from Indian(1964) to the recently performed Para-celsus (1986). In seven chapters Inneslooks briefly at Ryga's Ukrainian originsin northern Alberta, his short stories,early novels, and Indian, devotes lengthychapters to The Ecstasy of Rita Joe andCaptives of the Faceless Drummer, andthen goes on to show the evolution ofthe playwright's craft and vision in sep-arate chapters on his dramaturgy, hisattempts to create a Canadian mythol-ogy, and his place in the alternativetheatre in Canada. Using unpublishedmanuscripts from the Ryga collection atthe University of Calgary as well asRyga's published work, interviews andletters, Innes gives a broad and probingportrait of the most provocative of

English-Canadian playwrights. The por-trait is not always sympathetic, particu-larly in Innes's presentation of Ryga asthe creator of his own image of the artistas martyr. "Ryga," he says, "began cre-ating the persona of an artistic outsider,persecuted for his political convictions,"and though he cites some examples fromRyga's career, they are not conclusiveand may lead to an unfair questioning ofRyga's commitment to the cause of thepoor and underprivileged.

Innes's analysis of the two major playsin his study are detailed and full of in-sight, too detailed at times. With accessto the manuscripts he compares all sixversions of Rita Joe up to the final oneat the National Arts Centre directed byDavid Gardner, which was used for thepublished text. A closer analysis of thattext and its impact on the Canadianstage and theatregoer would be moreuseful and interesting. Innes recountedin enough detail the controversy sur-rounding the Vancouver Playhouse re-jection of Captives to provoke a spiritedresponse from Peter Hay, the theatre'sdramaturge at the time, in Theatre His-tory in Canada (Spring 1986). Respond-ing to Innes's chapter in that journal,"The Psychology of Politics," Hay calledhis rebuttal "The Psychology of Distor-tion." Regardless of whose version ismore exact, the controversy and the im-age of the playwright that emerged fromit "contributed to Ryga's relative ostra-cization in the last decade." If Hay'sversion of the events is correct we shouldlook forward to a fuller account in hisbiography of Ryga, announced in Cana-dian Theatre Review (Summer 1979)with an excerpt, "George Ryga: The Be-ginnings of a Biography."

Innes uses his wide background inmodern theatre to give a perspective onRyga's dramaturgy. He shows Ryga'ssearch for a form of his own, and dis-cusses how Ryga's work differs from ex-

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pressionism, epic theatre, naturalism, anddocumentary. In bringing many Euro-pean and American playwrights to bearon the plays of Ryga, Innes was not in-hibited by what he calls, "the pressure tolimit the frame of reference solely toCanadian comparisons." But he mighthave made more of the French-Canadiancomparisons for his purposes. He citesJean-Claude Germain for whom, as forRyga, "history is the self-justification ofthose in power." Innes, and Ryga too,might well look at other French-Cana-dian dramatists — Gélinas, Gurik, Trem-blay, Loranger — to see how an op-pressed people have expressed themselveson the stage. The feminizing of Ger-maine's (sic) proper name throughoutthe book, and the incorrect page refer-ence to him in the index, suggest moreattention might have been paid to modelscloser to home.

Nevertheless, Innes shows well the im-portance and development of Ryga's aimto create a Canadian myth, and how hedoes that, especially in his later plays,by dramatizing the working-class hero.Though that is too narrow a view, Rygahas committed himself to it in his recentplays and in his involvement with com-munity theatre groups that have beenperforming and touring them in his homeprovince of British Columbia.

Some minor shortcomings detract fromthe usefulness of Innes's work. He in-cludes only one photograph, of Rygahimself, and regrets that "visual ma-terial from Ryga's Vancouver produc-tions proved to be unavailable." Thisbeing the case, photographs from otherproductions would surely have beenappreciated. Quotations from severalsources are often included under onefootnote, which makes the effort of iden-tifying them more arduous than it shouldbe. Innes dismisses the need for a sep-arate bibliography because these detailsare given in the Endnotes. This is pre-

sumably for the sake of economy, but it isa false economy that is no service to stu-dents and scholars looking for primaryand secondary sources by and aboutRyga. Economy enough was gained bythe compact print and large pages ofthis slim volume.

One final irony emerges from eventsafter the publication of Politics and thePlaywright. The Vancouver Playhouse,in conjunction with Expo '87, decided tomount the premiere of Paracelsus, four-teen years after it was completed andthirteen after that theatre's rejection ofCaptives. Despite a lavish productiondirected by John Juliani, the play wasnot a critical or popular success. Innes'sbook shows that yet another setbackshould not deter Ryga, whose politicalwill and dramatic vision will spur himon to invent new forms of drama in cre-ating a Canadian mythology. Perhaps heshould consider the Fringe Festival;that's where his people are.

JAMES NOONAN

MISSION TO CHINAALVYN j . AUSTIN, Saving China: Canadian

Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom 1888-'959- Univ. of Toronto Press, $27.50.

BY I 919 THERE WERE 175 Christian mis-sion organizations in China whose staffsincluded 321 missionaries from the Ca-nadian Methodist, Presbyterian, andAnglican churches, and more affiliatedwith other groups. In a few years RomanCatholic missionaries would go out fromQuebec. In the face of opposition, pov-erty, and disease these people foundedchurches, schools, hospitals, orphanages,printing presses, and newspapers — aprocess that began in 1888 and endedfor all but a few in 1951. Alvyn J. Austin,the son of China missionaries from On-tario, has written a lively and detailed

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account of these emissaries of Christian-ity and Canadian culture. Saving Chinais well written, edited and printed, andbased on interviews and mission archives.Its approach is biographical and his-torical, with a focus on the missionariesthemselves, their backgrounds, activities,and attitudes. Austin's approach is sym-pathetic, yet objective; he understandsreligious motivation, but points out thenarrow egotism of some, as well as theextent to which missionaries relied onthe support of colonial powers in China.

The author's view of China itself isdeliberately limited. As he says in thepreface, "I have tried to present theChinese not necessarily as they were butas Canadian missionaries saw them andreported them in letters home." This isclear enough, but the result is a fragmen-tary and distorted view, with Chinaglimpsed hurriedly between the cracks ofnarratives about missionaries and theirinternal politics. In the period covered,China was in worse shape than it hadbeen for centuries, because of overpopu-lation, administrative corruption, andinvasions of Britain, France, Russia, Ger-many, and Japan. The missionaries cameunprepared, idealistic, and self-righteous.Most Chinese resented them; their workwas slow and difficult, and their spousesand children died of diseases. The resultis a jaundiced view of China that Aus-tin's disclaimers do not offset.

Given this limitation, the book is abalanced discussion of missionaries fromall the major Canadian churches, dis-cussed in the historical context of thelarger mission movement. There is in-teresting information here on the per-spective of Quebec Catholic missionaries,some of whom felt a certain familiaritybetween Chinese villages and their own,and identified with Chinese dislike of theBritish. Austin also notes the importantrole of women, who made up two-thirdsof the missionaries in the field. They

were concerned with the social and edu-cational liberation of Chinese women aswell as with the salvation of their souls.Half of the missionary women were un-married, so they also developed a new,high profile vocation for Canadianwomen. The impetus for Quebec mis-sions came from societies founded bySister Délia Tétreault in the late-nine-teenth century. But the real puzzle posedthroughout this book for those at a secu-lar distance is, "why did they go?" Whatin the world were these people doing inChina, a civilization far more ancientthan their own? What a combination ofreligious fervour and cultural arrogance,of ethical dedication and sheer foolish-ness! And yet they did some good, bothfor the Chinese and for Canada, whoseinvolvement with the larger world wasstimulated by their appeals.

Alvyn Austin has done well what heset out to do. The next step is to inte-grate this material into the larger realmof cross-cultural interaction, and fromthere use it to better understand our-selves.

DANIEL L. OVERMYER

MUNRO'S PROGRESSALICE MUNRO, The Progress of Love. McClel-

land & Stewart, $22.95.

SOME YEARS AGO, while being inter-viewed for Jill Gardiner's 1973 NewBrunswick M.A. thesis, Alice Munrospoke about her use of retrospective nar-rators and the problems they confrontin her stories, saying that as we growolder: "life becomes even more mysteri-ous and difficult," so that "writing is theart of approach and recognition. I be-lieve that we don't solve these things —in fact our explanations take us furtheraway." The Progress of Love, Munro'ssixth collection since she began publish-

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ing during the 1950's, everywhere dis-plays its author's unequalled maturity,her unerring control of her materials,and of their multitude of interconnec-tions. It leaves its reader enraptured —over the stories as narratives, certainly,but more than that, over their humandetail and most of all over the uncom-promising Tightness of the feelings theydescribe, define, depict and, finally, con-vey. Yet at the same time, and in keepingwith her sense of the mysteries of being,Munro's insights here are both more am-bivalent and more technically complexthan those she has offered previously.

One does not so much review this col-lection as savour its delicacies. In "Es-kimo," which tells of a doctor's recep-tionist/mistress, Mary Joe embarks on aplane over the Pacific. Amid the strangethings she sees and dreams while aloft,we are offered this recollection of herdoctor, a snippet of their relationship:

He liked her when the braces were stillon. They were on the first time he madelove to her. She turned her head aside, con-scious that a mouthful of metal might notbe pleasing. He shut his eyes, and she won-dered if it might be for that reason. Latershe learned that he always closed his eyes.He doesn't want to be reminded of himselfat such times, and probably not of her,either. His is a fierce but solitary relish.

When the narrator of the title story,now a divorced real-estate agent, visitsthe house she grew up in, her memoriescause her to lash out at an off-handedremark made by Bob Marks, the man sheis with. He immediately apologizes and,in a conciliatory follow-up, asks "'Wasthis your room when you were a littlegirl?'" This question is equally inac-curate, but the narrator acquiesces so asto smooth things over. She then explainsto herself, and to us:

And I thought it would be just as well tolet him think that. I said yes, yes, it wasmy room when I was a little girl. It wasjust as well to make up right away. Mo-

ments of kindness and reconciliation areworth having, even if the parting has tocome sooner or later. I wonder if thosemoments aren't more valued, and delib-erately gone after, in the setups some peoplelike myself have now, than they were inthose old marriages, where love andgrudges could be growing underground, soconfused and stubborn, it must have seemedthey had forever.

Trudy, the protagonist in "Circle ofPrayer," recalls her feelings after Dan,her husband, left her for another woman.She holds these feelings suspended intandem with a memory she has of Dan'smother playing the piano in the ram-shackle hotel where the older womanlived, and where Dan and Trudy, yearsbefore, had spent their honeymoon.Munro describes Trudy's wonder:

Why does Trudy now remember thismoment? She sees her young self lookingin the window at the old woman playingthe piano. The dim room, with its oversizebeams and fireplace and lonely leatherchairs. The clattering, faltering, persistentpiano music. Trudy remembers that soclearly and it seems she stood outside herown body, which ached then from the pun-ishing pleasures of love. She stood outsideher own happiness in a tide of sadness. Andthe opposite thing happened the morningDan left. Then she stood outside her ownunhappiness in a tide of what seemed un-reasonably like love. But it was the samething, really, when you got outside. Whatare those times that stand out, clear patchesin your life — what do they have to do withit? They aren't exactly promises. Breathingspaces. Is that all?

Reading passages such as these in con-text, we first notice family resemblanceswith other Munro stories — in subject,technique, tone, and effect — but thematurity of these stories eclipses earlierefforts and even exceeds those in TheMoons of Jupiter (1982). "Jesse andMeribeth," for example, which tells ofthe connections between two girlhoodbest friends, is related in subject andtreatment to "Boys and Girls," "RedDress—1946," and "The Shining

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Houses" from Dance of the HappyShades (1968) as well as Lives of Girlsand Women (1971). At the same time,Munro is extending her range; "TheMoon in the Orange Street SkatingRink" has a nostalgic air about it as itmatter-of-factly tells the histories of twobrothers from the farm boarding in townto attend business school. Calmly and ingreat detail, Munro recounts their activi-ties, the difficulties which lead to theirsudden flight from the town, and even-tually—from the perspective gained alifetime later — she offers a seemingsense of resolution. Beautifully done, thestory is unlike most of Munro's otherwork. Another, "A Queer Streak," dealsalso in familiar materials — weaving theinterlayered relations and connections offour generations together — but it doesso at much greater length.

But more than such comparisons, TheProgress of Love offers both greater com-plexity and, oddly enough, greater un-certainty than we have seen before: notuncertainty of purpose, control, or detail,but rather uncertainty of meaning or un-certainty of being — these stories offer acomplex wonder at the strangeness of itall. In the passage from "Eskimo," forinstance, the paragraph builds matter-of-factly to the telling descriptive line —"His is a fierce but solitary relish" —which is so precise and right in its focus.Yet such a detail, which encapsulates thedoctor's stern, Ontario-WASP demean-our, is offered only incidentally, asnapped, subtle phrase. In the narrativeitself, Mary Jo either misunderstands ormisperceives a scene between two fellow-passengers on her Tahiti-bound plane, anEskimo man and a teen-aged métis girlhe is travelling with. After she experi-ences considerable vexation over theirdisagreement, offers to help the girl,and finally sleeps through some bizarredreams that include these passengers,Mary Jo awakens to find that: "Some-

how a pillow and a blanket have beenprovided for her as well. The man andthe girl across the aisle are asleep withtheir mouths open, and Mary Jo is liftedto the surface by their dust of eloquent,innocent snores." Munro concludes "Es-kimo": "This is the beginning of herholiday." While generally still offeringsome sense of an ending in The Progressof Love — defined by a suitable summaryparagraph — Munro now seems, mostovertly here in "Eskimo," loath to saywhat it all means.

But if not composed explicitly to con-vey the fragility of being and of under-standing, the stories here proclaim Mun-ro's uncertainties by their structures, andby her masterful interweaving of eventsdisparate in time, yet inescapable in con-nection, and so in personal resonance.Two differences are striking in this col-lection : Munro's more usual use of thethird person, evident since Who Do YouThink You Are? (1978), has persistedand these stories, more than ever, reflecther return to Huron County. Indeed,they seem to offer us southwestern On-tario in something of the same wayDance of the Happy Shades does, butbalanced now by an older narrative per-spective : we no longer see Huron countyfrom the point of view of one growingaway and going away from her homeplace — the stories in The Progress ofLove encompass more time, offering usthe longer view, often the cradle-to-middle-age perspective of a returned na-tive. From her earliest stories, Munro'snarrative perspective has graduallygrown older, so here many characters,like Mary Jo, have personal histories —and so perspectives of time and space —roughly equivalent to Munro's own:forty or fifty years of age, born in ruralOntario, living there still or living thereagain, divorced, remarried, preoccupiedwith spouses and mature children, andgrowing older (though not yet old).

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These characters, whose perceptionsand perspective M unro recreates throughthat emphatic yet detached way she has,share a comomn task. Their "real work"in their stories, as the narrator in "MilesCity, M ontana, " says, is "a sort of woo ing of distant parts" of themselves. Per haps the most complex story in the col lection, "Miles City" interweaves thenarrator's childhood memories of a youngacquaintance who drowned, with morerecent memories of her own daughter'snear drowning on a family holiday. Thenarrator interconnects memory with inci dent and with perspective upon her for mer self and upon her now formermarriage, marvelling, in the words ofanother M unro narrator, at "all this lifegoing on ." In these stories we approachthe mystery of being, follow the narrativewooing of self and, in the end, if wedon 't achieve understanding, we empha tically recognize life — as it is lived, felt,and wondered about. Through them,Alice M unro's "real work" proclaims inevery way the precise delicacy of herapproach, recognition, and progress.

ROBERT THACKER

FOLKTALESELLIOTT . GOSE, JR., The World of the Irish

Wonder Tale: An Introduction to the Studyof Fairy Tales. U niv. of Toronto Press,$12.95.

GERMAIN LEMIEUX, Les Vieux m'ont conté,vol. 23. Bellarmin, $20.00.

THESE WORKS REFLECT polar differencesof approach to the study of folktales inCanada, and like most highly polarizedstudies their respective virtues and vicesmay be readily underlined. To beginwith the more challenging of the two,Gose's The World of the Irish WonderTale is introspective and speculative;Lemieux's is down-to-earth and practi-cal.

Gose is a literary scholar; through lit-erature he has discovered folktales. HisPreface informs us of his belief that folk-tales bear within them "unconscious,compensatory images, promptings whichseek conscious recognition. . . . Unlike thefolklorist [whom he mistakenly believesto be preoccupied with the "typical"], Ihave tried to find not the most typicalbut the most compelling version of a par-ticular tale." In order to elucidate themeanings and messages of his selection oftales, he has adopted a seemingly eclecticset of theoretical approaches, the insightsfrom which he applies as his "sense of itsparticular structure and theme seemed todictate." The particular approaches Gosefavours include the ritualistic — which"helps to suggest the animistic way ofthinking that also informs wonder tales";the psychoanalytic, making use of bothFreudian and Jungian views; structural-ist, drawing both on Vladimir Propp andTzvetan Todorov's perceptions; and to alesser extent, insights from comparativemythology, comparative religion, and thecross-cultural studies of anthropology.All these disciplines are, however, "ad-juncts to my own literary approach. I aminterested in how the narratives work,how characters become involved in con-flicts, how plots embody themes, and howreaders are implicitly involved in a pro-cess with psychological consequences."

One of the failings of folklore scholar-ship until the 1960's was its lack of con-cern with interpretation of the abundantdata accumulated over the preceding150 years; not that there had not beennumerous interpretive forays made, butmost had been based on what proved tobe ultimately groundless and unprovabletheories. One of the areas that provokedthe greatest ire of international folkloristswas the psychoanalytic; most of thosewho applied Freudian theory to folktaleanalysis were readily able to prove what-ever points they wished to prove, to dem-

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onstrate that such-and-such a tale was aclear example of the Oedipus theme, butin a manner which smacked of readinginto, not out of, the tales. In short, psy-choanalysts have tended to rely on idealexamples of tales upon which to basetheir interpretations, and have generallyfailed to base their analyses on a largebody of comparative data. Folkloriststended to provide the comparative data,but to avoid overly speculative interpre-tations. Gose has also restricted himselfto select texts which will serve to illus-trate his theses, and has, moreover, com-pressed, condensed, and taken episodesout of context.

There is a considerable body of litera-ture devoted to attacks on the varioustheoretical stances Gose adopts (and, inall fairness, a similarly large body of sup-portive studies). The plethora of oppos-ing views simply confirms the speculativenature of many of them : one man's opin-ion is just as valid as another's ; but to beuseful, conclusions must be drawn whichwill inform the reader, offering insightsof many kinds, helping an individualstimulate his or her intellectual activity.This has always been an aim of literarycriticism, and the themes Gose explores— "Acts of Truth," "Self-transformationand Alienation," "Aspiration and Iden-tity," "Love and Violence," "Healingand Wholeness," "Destiny and Fate," toname some of the chapter titles — areall matters which concern the thinkingindividual and which form the focus ofmuch creative literature.

Apart from a few perfunctory remarksabout the oral style of some of the Irishnarrators whose narratives eventually be-came the subject of this study, Gose no-where acknowledges the fact that "won-der tales" or Märchen can still be col-lected in living oral tradition, with thesame complexity of theme and plot, thesame variety of narrative style and dra-matic performance as he associates with

the former Irish tradition whose tales hedraws upon. Such an approach not onlystresses the literary applications of folk-tale study, it also stresses frequent schol-arly neglect of the actual storytellers,people who may well be illiterate orsemi-literate, but who have been over thecenturies the active transmitters not onlyof the tales but of the aesthetic criteriaassociated with their transmission. Tothink of storytellers as the unwittingbearers of uncut diamonds, the value ofwhich the scholar alone can appreciate(a nineteenth-century view which hasendured well into the twentieth), is anunwitting act of cultural elitism; butworse, it ignores the considerable re-search undertaken during the last twentyyears or so by folklorists attempting toelicit from the tale-bearers themselvestheir views and interpretations of thetales they transmit. For the "folk" under-stand their tales and interpret them, in-elegantly perhaps, possibly without com-plex theoretical stances to back them;surely, any interpretation of such talesshould at the very least take into accountthe views of the storytellers themselves.Professor Gose's study is, in the finalanalysis, an example of the divorce be-tween the collector and interpreter ofdata collected in a living context, andthe dilettante interpreter who chooses themost appealing or useful approaches toserve very personal ends.

It is not wrong to adopt such an ap-proach; artists and authors and othersmay make such use of the human copy-right as they see fit. But it is anotherthing again to present the creative use offolklore as "An Introduction to the Studyof Fairy Tales." Gose's knowledge of thefield is limited to a few pertinent areas,but insofar as any "Introduction" willprovide an adequate historical survey ofthe scholarship, covering at least themajor schools of thought, the work is, atbest, mistitled. An approach that dwells

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on abstract themes alone is incomplete,and ignores the human context fromwhich they spring. A number of minorbibliographical errors betray Gose's datedfamiliarity with folktale scholarship, butthe work is certainly interesting and pro-vocative.

Germain Lemieux's Les Vieux m'ontconté, twenty-third volume in a serieswhich will include at least thirty such,is, to use a folk idiom, a different kettleof fish entirely from Gose's. This particu-lar contribution includes six folktaleswhich conclude Lemieux's presentationof the repertoire of Antoine Landry, anative of the Gaspé where he was bornin 1871. Sailor, lumberjack, fisherman,carpenter, Antoine Landry was also an"official storyteller" in the lumbercamps;shortly before his death he claimed toknow about 250 versions of folktales; oneof his sons considered this a modest esti-mation. Most of the volumes in this col-lection consist of the repertoires ofstorytellers gifted or not-so-gifted, pref-aced by brief biographical notes on thenarrators.

Father Lemieux began collecting folk-tales some forty years ago, eventuallyproducing a doctoral dissertation underLaval University's Luc Lacourcière. La-courcière, and the majority of his stu-dents, were comparatists concerned withquestions of dissemination and variationof folktale texts. Their work was in thetradition of the so-called Finnish historic-geographic school which had elaborateda. methodology originally designed, at theend of the nineteenth century, to helpsolve questions of origins. Such problemsrarely motivate contemporary folkloristswho, since the late 1950's, have begun toexplore new issues using, amongst others,some of the theoretical and methodologi-cal approaches adopted by Gose. Le-mieux's work has always been primarilyone of collection and publication of datain the context, broadly speaking, of the

Finnish method. In this respect he hasnot been concerned with interpreting hisdata, and this is today a major criticismthat can be levelled at his research; onthe other hand, one does not expect, withall due respect to Lemieux, to teach anold dog new tricks; it is enough indeedto trust that a septuagenarian will beable to complete his life's work, andmake available to scholars what is un-doubtedly the largest published collectionof French-Canadian folktales.

There are nonetheless weaknesses inthe series. The tales are given the mostsummary of identifications according tothe Aarne-Thompson catalogue of inter-national folktales, The Types of the Folk-tale. No attempt is made to provide listsof motifs according to the widely usedwork by Stith Thompson, the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (the most re-cent co-ordinates of which were appar-ently not known to Gose). Instead thereader is offered an analytical indexwhich attempts to replace motif num-bers. Admittedly, to provide motif num-bers for the many tales in the serieswould be a time-consuming task; theyare, however, expected by internationalfolktale scholars.

In one respect, Lemieux has departedfrom the Laval school of folktale publi-cation, and in this he is to be com-mended. Folktale specialists trained atLaval were text-oriented. In comparativematters, the text is primordial, and con-cern with textual accuracy did not in-clude fidelity to the spoken word.Contemporary folkloristics is much pre-occupied with performance theory andrelated matters, and this concern de-mands a method of transcription whichreflects as accurately and as legibly aspossible the actual verbal utterance. La-val scholars have been mainly concernedwith the narrative content of texts and,under pressure from colleagues in lin-guistics, resort to phonetic transcriptions

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which are readily accessible only to theinitiated. Thus, a typical folktale pub-lished by a Laval-trained scholar stand-ardizes and deforms the oral text; it istherefore impossible to talk, for example,about matters of style.

Lemieux devised his own system oftranscribing the oral text. While his sys-tem is cumbersome and might readily berefined, it has the virtue of attemptingto provide a close approximation ofwhat was actually said. Thus, futurescholars will be able to do more thansimply study the content of his tales. Hissystem does require some practice tomaster, but to the serious scholar it is byno means a daunting task.

His awareness of that problem, how-ever, partly inspired Father Lemieux toprovide, following each original text, arevised and standardized version. Schol-ars will find this unnecessary, and themethod doubles the size of each volume.But Lemieux also wanted to make histexts available to a much wider public,and so attempts to kill two birds withone stone.

GERALD THOMAS

FULL STOPSALi-jANNA WHYTE, Economic Sex. Coach

House, $i 1.95.

T H I S IS A FIRST NOVEL by a womanwriter whom Coach House Press coylyidentifies as "a somewhat mysteriouswriter" who is "now thirty years of ageand lives in northern Ontario." Since thenovel is largely about identity, it is per-haps a deliberate joke that the authorshould conceal her identity.

The story is of Sarah Stauton, a blue-blood Ontarian in her late twenties andworking in the publishing trade in To-ronto. She is a contemporary woman —working out at the University of Torontogym without paying dues, juggling three

male relations at the same time, andsporting the attitude toward sexual en-counters of any healthy philanderingmale: get what you can out of the rela-tionship and then move on. The narra-tion focuses on one week during whichshe reminisces over her entire biography,discovers she is pregnant, and has anabotion. Following the abortion she dis-owns her materialistic bourgeois past andthe metapyhsics of the "Mind/Bodysplit," renouncing her identification withRich, Powerful People and vowing tolisten to her body, and to no longer useit for the ends identified by her greedymind.

The novel is a first-person narration,largely retrospective. It begins with Sarahdining with Nicholas while dispassion-ately and critically observing both himand herself. During the following weekof psycho-narrated interior monologuewe learn Sarah's entire biography. She isa Stauton, a wealthy Ontario Lakeshorefamily. The portrait of Ontario societydoes not ring true. And Sarah seems tohave been doomed to encounter onlystereotypes throughout her life. Thereare some twenty-two named charactersincluding a manipulative mother andself-sacrificing father, a lecherous uncle,a series of phallocentric youths and men,and a comprehensive set of femalefriends: the plastic American, the EarthVirgin, the athlete, the poor ethnic, theearnest suburbanite child, and the NewWoman. Sarah herself is a New Womanstill imprisoned in the nets of class andsocial ambition. The novel releases herfrom these tangles by means of Nicholas,a crass, wealthy, philandering Americanwithout any redeeming features that Icould discern. Nonetheless, cold, calcu-lating Sarah falls hopelessly in love withhim — only to be cast off like an oldshoe. Sarah's pregnancy is not a seriousproblem in the relationship, for she read-ily obtains an abortion. However, con-

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fronted with her body's "betrayal," Sarah,for the first time in her life, confrontsherself, a union of mind and body. Themeaning of the experience is conveyedby a following scene in which Sarah sitsin her bath with the shower pouring overher: "Sitting in the pond. In the water.Breathing easy. Comfortable. Warm. Atiny fetus in the world womb." The con-trast to this is Nicholas's remark whenshe asks him for affection — even geni-tal affection: "It's all economic sex."Despite all of this Sarah inexplicablycontinues to long for Nicholas.

The greatest difficulty I had with Eco-nomic Sex arose from its prose style.Whyte has decided to represent Sarah'sstream of consciousness by the scrupulousavoidance of sentences, and the liberaluse of the full stop. The passage I havecited is typical of the entire novel. Sucha telegraphic style certainly slows downthe reader, and does catch the fragmen-tary nature of Sarah's psyche. But 200pages of isolated noun clusters is a bittrying. Thematically the novel left me alittle puzzled, and — even more damag-ing — a little bored. The difficulty, Ithink, is that Sarah and all the othercharacters never rise above stereotype.Sarah herself and the minor charactersappear to be introduced primarily to"cover" this or that thematic topic essen-tial to The Great Canadian FeministNovel. (Although I must admit thatthere is not a single allusion to lesbiansor French Canadians.) The characteri-zation and incident are so pro forma thatI found myself wondering if the novelwas not an allegory rather than a repre-sentative fiction. Sarah's genuine love forher American beau Nicholas is so poorlymotivated that I was tempted to con-clude that it was meant to be read alle-gorically as an account of American-Canadian relations. Sarah, perhaps, isthe female Canadian victim willinglyplowed by the male American predator,

and cast aside when his interest turns toMexico.

As an account of the life of the NewWoman, Economic Sex is not withoutinterest, and certainly it is a serious at-tempt to engage serious moral and socialissues. For this reader those concernswere unnecessarily blurred and marginal-ized by the effort to incorporate an as-sessment of an imaginary Ontario classstructure, of Canadian-American rela-tions, and of consumerism. In short, thenovel reads as if the author were deter-mined to include it in everything she hadto say about women, the middle class,Canada, the U.S.A., history, and meta-physics. If she has a lot to say, it mustlook superficial when compressed into200 pages. If she hasn't something newto say on every topic, it must look trivialand hackneyed. Alas, the novel tumblesinto one or the other of these pits.

LEON SURETTE

CRISIS OF FAITHRAMSAY COOK, The Regenerators: Social Criti-

cism in Late Victorian English Canada.Univ. of Toronto Press, $15.95.

T H E "CRISIS OF FAITH" engendered by achanging world view and the assaults onthe Scriptures mounted by "scientific"historians left believers in Canada as else-where to hunt for new certainties. Somefound them in their moral and socialconvictions. These fill most of RamsayCook's book; but there were others whomhe notices as well, including spiritualistsand those who itched to use psychiatryon the soul itself.

Cook is a social and intellectual his-torian. That is to say that his book isconcerned with certain events in a pro-cess of social change, chiefly deliberateattempts to mould public opinion. Ap-parently Canada was "Victorian" long

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after Victoria, and Cook, who begins inthe mid-nineteenth century, works hisway through the Mackenzie King era.He tells his story mainly through thelives of a cast of characters whose eccen-tricities and zest clearly delight him. Wemeet social reformers (Salem Bland, J. S.Woodsworth and, yes, Mackenzie King,who occupies most of a chapter), phi-losophers (John Clark Murray, JohnWatson, and George Paxton Young), amystical psychiatrist (Richard M.Bucke), and two spiritualists (BenjaminFish Austin and Flora MacDonald Deni-son). In the background there are a fewdreary spoilsports — Anglican tradition-alists, Methodist fundamentalists, andvague purveyors of moral uplift whofound all the intellectual excitement de-plorable. There was even Sir WilliamDawson, a man who opposed Darwin,objected to the "integrated" education ofwomen, and fought battles with JohnClark Murray, the social-gospel philoso-pher of the hour. But the role of the nay-sayers, naturally enough, is relativelysmall in the story which is, after all,about the "regenerators." The title istaken from a satire in the CanadianMagazine of 1893 probably written byS. T. Wood but, though Cook does notthink that religion did get "regenerated"(the large Protestant denominations arein more trouble now than they were inthe late-nineteenth century), he does notmean to satirize his characters.

Some of the regenerators were out-right failures. Spiritualism did not catchon even as well in Canada as it did inBritain and the United States, but mostof those mentioned by Cook played iden-tifiable roles in bringing us the world wehave today. Bucke was a pioneer — notjust in Canada — in the physical treat-ment of mental illness. His general thesisthat sick minds imply bodily disturbancecarried the day, even if his specific prac-tices and his theories about morality and

the sympathetic nervous system are for-gotten. He makes me think of The Clock-work Orange, but in his profession he issomething of a hero. Mackenzie King'svision was fuzzy, but he lived to be ableto recognize its realization — fuzz andall. J. S. Woodsworth is still a name to bereckoned with.

Cook tells his story well. We can sensethe delight with which Watson putsdown the social Darwinists for "applyingEvolution to a wholly different class ofcats," and appreciate the absolute if sui-cidal integrity of the Rev. Mr. Austin ashe defends himself against a charge ofheresy based on spiritualism by remind-ing the Methodist assembly of the sound-ness of their other enemy, the "highercritics." We watch the misty mind ofMackenzie King work its way unerringlyfrom socialism to the support of Rocke-feller, and worry along with J. S. Woods-worth as he confronts the Protestantmind in Gibson's Landing, British Co-lumbia, and wrestles hopelessly with itsattachment to capitalism and the Im-perial Cause in the First World War.

The chapter on Mackenzie King ismuch the sanest and most intelligible ac-count we have of that curious mind.Cook can even make Henry Georgesound plausible, but he does not succeedin getting us to understand how many ofthe social gospellers could, at the sametime, tie a whole movement to proposi-tions they found in the New Testamentand welcome the critical attempts toshow how unreliable the New Testamentreally was. And the mind boggles atCook's account of the beliefs of W. D.Le Sueur, one of the founding fathers ofour public service, who "was a defenderof Auguste Comte's positivism, CharlesDarwin's theory of natural selection, andHerbert Spencer's materialistic ethics. . . .He was also an admirer of St. Beuve,Matthew Arnold . . . and Ralph WaldoEmerson." One recalls Leacock's head-

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less horseman and Canadians will not besurprised to learn of Le Sueur's role inthe development of their Post Office.

This is a good book to curl up with ona chilly night and a good book in itself,but an analysis of its structure raises afew doubts. I have two worries: one isabout its omission of specifically Cana-dian ideas (as opposed to ideas borrowedby Canadians) and the other is aboutthe way in which the material is ab-stracted from its context. Cook describesa Canada in which ideas essentially flowin from abroad and Canadians react tothem in ways which closely parallel theAmericans and the British. The mainproblems he examines are those posed byevolution and the "higher" criticism ofthe Bible. Bucke did have some veryoriginal ideas, but few other characterswho receive extended treatment fromCook did. And even many of Bucke'sideas were borrowed from outside. Infact, however, there were some whollyCanadian elements in our intellectuallife. George Blewett, a Canadian-bornphilosopher who does not get mentioned,went to Alberta as a young Methodistminister in the 1890's and came awaydisturbed both by what was being doneto the Indians and to a fragile environ-ment. His The Study of Nature and theVision of God (1907) reflects somepurely Canadian concerns which turnedhim away from orthodox Methodism. Hedid have an effect, however, on laterCanadian Methodism. There are otherCanadian elements in the shift in reli-gious belief, too. The distribution of pop-ulation created small isolated commu-nities in which one could not maintainnumerous denominations. It did have animpact on the "de-doctrinalization" ofreligion.

Even more important is the relation ofreligion and literature in Canada, andyet, though Dickens and Matthew Ar-nold get mentioned, Canadian literature

is largely ignored. There are specific in-teresting problems which thus do not ap-pear. E. J. Pratt was perhaps no Vic-torian (but was Mackenzie King?), yethe published his Studies in Pauline Es-chatology in 1917 — well within the timeframe of this book. He had his own wayof dealing with Biblical veracity — a waywhich rings true in a Canadian tradition— and it echoes in his poems and in thekinds of imagery which struck home toa good many Canadians. His way of ty-ing religion to nature is an alternativeto the reorderings which Cook discusses.To omit such things is to make us seemmore colonial than we really were.

The second doubt arises from the factthat Canadian Protestantism never ex-isted in a vacuum, as did British Protes-tantism in an era when Catholics were atiny and generally impoverished minor-ity, or American Protestantism whenmost Catholics were immigrant workers.Religious thought in Canada thereforegets distorted when one tells the storywith the Catholics left out. Their effecton Protestantism was often negative, butnot always.

To say, more, however, Cook mightalso have had to say less — for his essayis about the maximum length for a man-ageable book. No doubt there are otherbooks to be written, but, for now, we canbe grateful for this one.

LESLIE ARMOUR

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PRAIRIE LOVECAROL FAIRBANKS, Prairie Women: Images in

American and Canadian Fiction. Yale Univ.Press, $22.00.

T H I S BOOK, WRITTEN by an Englishteacher at the University of Wisconsin,Eau Glaire, is sometimes illuminating orprovocative. It is also often strangely dis-satisfying. Nevertheless, its exploration ofpopular literature, images and themes inwomen's fiction, prairie writers, and theinterrelationship of history and literaturewill interest a variety of readers.

Fairbanks sets out to determine wom-en's vision as recorded in over 120 workswritten by prairie women over the pastcentury. "The small facts of women'sversions of experience," she asserts,"when analyzed and interpreted as struc-tures of signification, lead to a new visionof women's roles in the cultures of Can-ada and the United States." No longer iswoman solely "reluctant pioneer" ora "worn and resigned, but determined"figure. Numerous images emerge, likelysome variant of Prairie Victim, PrairieAngel, or Frontier Hero. Chapter head-ings — "Women and the Prairie Land-scape," "First Wave Women," "WhiteWomen and Indians," "Second WaveWomen," "The Prairie Town," "PrairieBorn, Prairie Bred" — suggest the scopeof Fairbanks's exploration.

The author's task is formidable, espe-cially since she attempts not only to dis-cuss fictional images and relate them tohistorical knowledge, but also to use in-terpretations and concepts from thesocial sciences. This latter effort, it mightbe briefly noted, is perhaps most effec-tively realized in her use of "structuresof signification" from the work of an-thropologist Clifford Geertz. Fairbanks'sbook is partially successful, adding to the"revisioning" of prairie women alreadyunderway, particularly in the hands of

American scholars like Julie Roy Jeffrey,Glenda Riley, Elizabeth Hampsten, andSusan Armitage.

The authors chosen by Fairbanks arewomen who have been directly identifiedwith the prairies and sought to depictwomen's experiences there. Interestingly,Canadian women predominate (thirty-four of sixty-six). The well-known"good" writers are frequently Canadian— established figures like Margaret Lau-rence and Gabrielle Roy and relativenewcomers like Sharon Butala, BarbaraSapergia, and Aritha Van Herk — butincluded also are Americans like WillaCather and the now-prominent LouiseErdrich. Most authors, Canadian orAmerican, are obscure, often deservedlyso. For Fairbanks, who seeks to exploreas fully as possible women's versions ofexperience, such writers are crucial. Asa historian, I welcome such examination.The question is, how well done is thetask.

Fairbanks's most startling contention islikely her argument that women's re-sponse to the prairies has often beenpositive. While demonstrating that thisawareness is present also in some worksby male novelists, she focuses upon thefemale vision. "Love of the prairie land-scape," she writes, is "a dominant struc-ture of signification" in fiction pennedby prairie women writers. Her analysisof women's response to the land calls tomind Annette Kolodny's The Land Be-fore Her: Fantasy and Experience of theAmerican Frontiers, 1630-1860. Bothwriters, for example, explore the ways inwhich the notion of prairie as garden wasused to establish a sense of place forwomen, and Fairbanks, though critical ofKolodny, can be said to take up whereshe ends. She examines in detail howwomen in subsequent decades experi-enced the land. Many positive relation-ships emerged: "The prairie is rich inassociations with home ground, erotic

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experiences, imagination and creativity;it is a sacred place, sometimes linkedwith psychic healing, a place of onenesswith nature." In another vein, the prairiehas meant opportunity, even liberation,for some women. Here Fairbanks em-phasizes the important role of the city,which, rejected by some, was a welcomehaven for others.

Women, then, could embrace theprairies as land and as opportunity. Fair-banks's evidence, culled largely from acentury of fiction, is irrefutable, but sheovergeneralizes. Moreover, positive por-trayal often came only decades aftersettlement.

Her explanation of how "limitlessvastness" became "familiar, friendly, andeven intimate" is intriguing — and pro-vocative. Attitudes shape perceptions, theauthor argues. Woman has been social-ized into expert accommodationist, andher sense of space and relationships givesrise to what Fairbanks describes as afeminine — and positive — version ofNorthrop Frye's "garrison mentality."Unlike man, who needs to conquer orcontrol, she accepts the land on its ownterms. She becomes "'garmented withspace,'" projecting onto the prairie "thepotential to clothe and protect her." Sur-vival, even triumph, is the outcome. Fair-banks's explanation has an eco-feministtinge: "A sense of the secrets of life isat the heart of women's optimism. Beliefin renewal and rebirth underlies the sur-vival instinct." In this identification ofwomen with nature and discussion of itsimpact, the author overgeneralizes. Incontrast is her awareness that "accom-modationism" is a cultural fact of lifenot necessarily limited to women.

Central to her exploration is Fair-banks's heroic effort to relate fictionalimages and historical reality. Debatesabout the nature of reality, historical orotherwise, or the truthfulness of fictioncan be raucous. My own position is that

relatively accurate, though incomplete,knowledge of the past can be acquiredand fiction may be "true to life." Whatfiction, though, can serve as historicaltruth? A novel or short story may illu-minate contemporary reality; that is, itmay provide insights about the era inwhich it was written. Included in Fair-banks's study, however, are works writ-ten by a later generation long after thefact.

As sources of historical truth, then,Fairbanks's fictional works sometimesneed to be used cautiously. Even so, herdiscussion has value. She provides de-tailed analysis of women's experiences interms of "structures of signification"found in the fiction — journey, work,farm or homestead, ordeal and isolation,satisfactions, female relationships. Shefinds, by the way, no national differences,except for a persisting sense of prairie inCanada. Contrasts with historical ac-counts suggest the limitations of fiction,history, and our current state of knowl-edge. Her heavy reliance upon Americansources is inevitable, given the literature'smore extensive development. Neverthe-less, some Canadian references are ig-nored. Eliane Leslau Silverman's workon Alberta women is an example. Andwhy, in her discussion of Kate SimpsonHayes, historical example of liberatedwoman and cultural giant (and lover ofNicholas Flood Davin), does Fairbankscite Ken Mitchell's play, Davin: ThePolitician, while omitting C. B. Koester'sMr. Davin, M.P.: A Biography of Nich-olas Flood Davin, which has the mostaccurate information? It is unnerving,furthermore, to find her describing MariaCampbell's Halfbreed as a novel.

Fairbanks's book, though, is a majorattempt to relate fiction and history, andcontributes to our growing awareness ofthe numerous images of prairie women,real or fictional. Her exploration willdoubtless startle, even upset, many liter-

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ary scholars. She sometimes challengescommon interpretations of familiar fic-tional characters and assumptions of con-ventional literary criticism. The result ofher book, I hope, will be additional re-search in literature and history onwomen, especially Canadian women —and men. As Fairbanks notes, we needalso to examine anew men's images and"versions of experiences."

ANN LEGER ANDERSON

UNE VOIXONTARIENNEHELENE BRODEUR, Chroniques du Nouvel-

Ontario. 3 tomes. Prise de Parole, n.p.

Nous SOMMES TÉMOINS ces dernièresannées d'un essor remarquable d'une lit-térature canadienne-française qui n'est niquébécoise ni acadienne: celle de l'On-tario. Avec ses Chroniques du Nouvel-Ontario, Hélène Brodeur vient ajoutersa voix à cette expression littéraire crois-sante qui réclame son dû face à son cou-sin plus prestigieux. Cette trilogie (LaQuête d'Alexandre, Entre l'aube et lejour, Les Routes incertaines) raconte, defaçon parfois touchante, le peuplementde l'Ontario du Nord par des colonsvenus du Québec et leurs coups dechance et leurs déboires à travers les an-nées. L'auteur a voulu "faire revivre uneépoque révolue de l'histoire de l'Ontario-Nord" en relatant des événements qu'elleprétend être vrais. Au lieu de suivre uneintrigue centrale, l'oeuvre entière nousprésente plutôt des scènes de la vie, desséquences dont le fil conducteur est as-suré par certains motifs-clé: l'amour, lefeu, la religion, la politique, la nature etle fait français en Ontario.

Le premier tome, dont l'action se dé-roule durant les années 1913-16, doncpeu après l'arrivée des premiers colons

dans cette région, se divise en trois par-ties. La première raconte l'histoired'Alexandre Sellier, jeune Québécois des-tiné à la prêtrise, qui arrive en Ontariodu Nord à la recherche de son frère, donttoute trace avait disparu à la suite d'unfeu de forêt catastrophique. Esprit insou-mis, curieux et courageux, Alex remet enquestion sa vocation religieuse et sescroyances auparavant si solides. Ceci per-met à l'auteur de procéder à un réquisi-toire de l'hypocrisie, de l'orgueil et del'intolérance qui caractérisaient l'Eglisecatholique. Dans cette première partie,Hélène Brodeur nous fait sentir la ten-sion qui existait entre Protestants et Ca-tholiques, entre Anglais et Français. Ellecritique vivement les attitudes bigotes etintolérantes qui créent une abîme entreles deux groupes et semble rejeter tout leblâme sur l'Eglise. Le bon sens commundu bûcheron, qui prêche le seul Evan-gile de la tolérance, ou du médecin quilutte contre le fanatisme et l'orthodoxie,contraste éloquemment avec les idéesétroites et préjugées des ecclésiastiques.

La deuxième partie de ce tome nousprésente Rose, Anglaise venue en Onta-rio pour y vivre avec son frère. Mal ser-vie en amour par son mari, elle tournerases yeux vers le jeune Alex, d'où le di-lemme moral de ce dernier. Troublé parson émoi pour Rose, par sa formationreligieuse et par ses rêves erotiques, ilessaie en vain de refouler ses sentiments.L'inévitable se produit: Rose et Alexconsomment leur amour pendant l'ab-sence du mari. Le feu de la passion mon-tante des deux amoureux est suggéré defaçon métaphorique par la chaleur mon-tante de l'été torride et par l'incendie quien résulte. Le feu, leitmotif qui avaitdéclenché toute l'action au début dulivre, la boucle aussi. Le premier tomefinira donc par un feu de forêt désas-treux où Alex sauvera la vie à sa maî-tresse. C'est d'ailleurs leur survie au beaumilieu du sinistre qui le convainc défini-

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tivement de se consacrer à la prêtrise etd'établir une mission en Afrique. Mais cequ'il ignore au moment de son départ,c'est que Rose est enceinte de lui.

Le deuxième tome fait un saut en avantjusqu'aux années 1930-36, au début dela crise. La caméra est maintenant bra-quée sur la génération suivante et enparticulier sur Donald, fils de Rose etd'Alex, sur Rose-de-Lima et Germain,enfants du voisin de Rose, et sur Jean-Pierre Debrettigny, fils d'un autre voisin.L'auteur raconte les histoires respectivesde ces amis d'enfance et l'entrecroise-ment inévitable. Il s'agit surtout de l'a-mour constant et inébranlable de Rose-de-Lima pour Donald, amour qui resteratoujours sans réponse.

L'auteur y continue de développer unautre motif qui avait une place non né-gligeable dans le premier tome: la rela-tion haine-amour que l'on entretient avecl'Ontario du Nord. On ne cesse de lemaudire à cause des nombreuses épreu-ves qu'il inflige: dur labeur, incendiesdévastateurs, froid perçant en hiver, cha-leur étouffante et insectes piquants enété. Mais il exerce en même temps unesorte d'envoûtement et l'amour évidentavec lequel l'auteur le décrit trahit unprofond rattachement à ce pays si sou-vent inhospitalier. Dans les deux pre-miers tomes, elle met l'accent sur cettedichotomie : la nature, entité parfois hos-tile, voire meurtrière, a en même tempsun effet salutaire.

Par ailleurs, les histoires de Donald etde Jean-Pierre permettent à l'auteur des'en prendre aux gens ambitieux et or-gueilleux. Les deux amis ont chacun uneespèce d'"ange gardien" qui se chargepersonnellement de l'éduquer et de leformer. Mais leur motif est loin d'êtrealtruiste. La tante de Jean-Pierre veutqu'il devienne médecin seulement pourassurer que le nom Debrettigny figure denouveau parmi ceux de cette profession.Parvenue au plus haut degré, elle ne voit

que la rentabilité d'une action ou d'uneamitié. Pour Donald, c'est encore pire,car son Pygmalion n'est même pas unparent. Les Gray, parents d'un de sesamis, l'enlèvent pratiquement à ses pa-rents et en font un deuxième fils. Ambi-tieux, riches et influents, les Gray ontd'autres ambitions pour Donald que cel-les que la pauvreté de ses parents pour-rait lui offrir, et savent que sa gloireéventuelle rejaillera sur eux.

Le troisième volet du triptyque, LesRoutes incertaines, présente au lecteurquelques différences par rapport aux au-tres en ce qui concerne l'enchaînementdu récit. Entre les tomes I et II, il yavait un saut de quatorze ans, mais avecle troisième, on commence là où on avaitterminé à la fin du tome II, en 1936. Unedeuxième différence tient au passage dutemps. On sautera des étapes (la guerre,les années cinquante) pour terminer versla fin des années soixante. Et, enfin, aulieu de changer de génération, l'auteurlaisse sur scène les mêmes acteurs. Rose-de-Lima continuera de vivre un amournon réciproque pour Donald alors quece dernier, réussissant brillamment unecarrière parfaitement prévue et orches-trée par les Gray, finira par devenir Pre-mier ministre du Canada. Jean-Pierre,quant à lui, sera évincé par sa tante à lasuite d'une aventure amoureuse qui ledétourne de ses études. Plus tard danssa vie, il rencontrera Rose-de-Limaaprès une longue période sans l'avoir vueet ensemble ils feront un voyage en On-tario du Nord après plusieurs annéesd'absence. Ce "retour aux sources"n'aura pas qu'un effet bénéfique sur leuresprit; il provoquera en outre la nais-sance de l'amour entre eux, confirmantainsi l'influence salutaire de la nature.Enfin, l'auteur boucle la boucle en fai-sant revenir sur scène Alexandre Sellier,absent dès après la fin du premier tome,maintenant vieux missionnaire en Afri-que. Il y accueille Donald, son fils in-

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soupçonné, lors d'une visite officielle dece dernier, situation un peu tirée par lescheveux, il faut l'admettre, mais qui nemanque pas de suspense et dont la con-clusion surprendra.

Celui qui entreprend d'écrire un ro-man-fleuve s'expose nécessairement à desproblèmes d'ordre structural. Avec troistomes et un total de plus de neuf centspages, il n'est pas toujours facile demaintenir de façon cohérente tous les filsdes diverses histoires et d'en suivre tousles développements. Il n'est donc pas sur-prenant de constater dans les Chroniquesun air décousu, quelques redites et, par-fois, une certaine lourdeur. Ceci est dûen partie à deux procédés narratifs aux-quels Hélène Brodeur a souvent recourspar la bouche d'un narrateur omnipré-sent: la prolepse ( "Jean-Pierre ne croyaitpas si bien dire. Il allait vite s'aperce-voir de la distance . . . qui séparait Vald'Argent de Montréal"), et l'analepse:("Rien qu'à évoquer ce souvenir elle serev i t . . . " ) . Pour nous donner l'informa-tion qu'elle juge nécessaire, son narrateurfait souvent des apartés où il racontel'arrière-fond d'une telle situation, résu-mant brièvement les événements qui ymènent. Cependant, ces apartés devien-nent parfois trops longs et ne sont pastoujours nécessaires (par exemple, l'his-toire du chemin de fer en Ontario duNord). En fait, il y a d'une part beau-coup de détails que l'auteur aurait pulaisser de côté sans nuire à la trame durécit, et d'autre part des détails non ré-glés. Il en résulte que le récit s'étend tropet l'auteur n'arrive pas à tout boucler.L'histoire de Germain, par exemple, setermine prématurément, sans conclusionsatisfaisante. De plus, on voit souvent oùl'auteur veut en venir, car ses allusionssont à peine voilées. On sait bien d'a-vance, par exemple, qu'il y aura un feude forêt dans le premier tome; l'allusionflagrante à la page 53 n'en est qu'unindice parmi d'autres. Ces deux procédés

narratifs trahissent assez manifestementla présence très sentie du narrateur. Noussommes conscients que l'on nous raconteune histoire bel et bien finie, dans unpassé récent. On nous le rappelle cons-tamment, d'où le titre du recueil, doit-onassumer. Il y a en outre ici et là quelquesaccrocs, des invraisemblances et des mé-taphores et comparisons un tant soit peubanales. Par exemple, la sauvagesse"énigmatique" qui se laisse prendre estcomme "la bonne terre qui se laisse fouil-ler par la charrue."

Mises à part ces quelques critiques, onpeut dire qu'Hélène Brodeur nous livreici trois récits fort divertissants, liés lesuns aux autres, certes, mais qui se tien-nent indépendamment aussi. Sans pré-tention, sans grandiloquence, elle traitedu thème éternel de l'amour impossibletout en évoquant un pays trop peu connude la plupart des Canadiens et en décri-vant les efforts des Canadiens françaispour s'y établir tout en gardant leur lan-gue et leur culture. C'est là, en effet,dans sa description du beau pays rude del'Ontario du Nord, que son oeuvre brillele plus par sa vigueur et par son lyrisme.

MARK BENSON

INSALATA MISTAII Veltro: Le Relazioni tra l'Italia e il Can-

ada, gennaio-aprile/maggio-agosto 1985,$40.00.

T H E CANADA OF FRANGESCO CERLONE'S1764 play Gl'Inglesi in America, sia ilSelvaggio is planted with palms and cy presses and presided over by a PrinceArensbergh, Lord of the Savages, whomakes his first entrance at the head of acaravan of camels. D espite his Teutonicname, the Prince is black, making him ason of Caliban. Yet, as Piero del N egropoints out, the source of the play is notdirectly The Tempest but G oldoni's

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Bella Selvaggia. The picture of Canadawhich Cerlone's play provides is not un-like the one that emerges from the pagesof Pietro Chiara's 1768 novel La donnaehe non si trova (the source of whichwas the Italian translation of Williamand Edmund Burke's An Account of theEuropean Settlements in America). Al-though the novel is set in the period1740-1760, it (like the play) makes noreference to the events of 1759, eventhough they were largely responsible formaking Canada into a topos of the Euro-pean imagination.

Del Negro's article (which coversmuch the same ground as his 1975 and1979 essays listed in the notes) is one ofthe most informative among those in thistwo-volume collection devoted to the his-torical and cultural ties between Italyand Canada. The result is something ofan insalata mista; the unevenness derivesa good deal from the goal of the editorsto "promote" a greater awareness of thepresence of Italy in world culture. Thisfervour has been communicated (attimes) too strongly, and exaggeratedstatements are made: Pasquale Janniniclaims the pervasive influence of Futu-rismo on Québec culture (although hisprincipal source, André Bourassa's Sur-réalisme et littérature québécoise, pro-vides no support for this assertion) ;Michelangelo Picone's exclamatory prosestates that Canada has been a "fertileterrain" for "the most refined hermeneu-tic experiments" in Dante criticism.

The variation in quality is evident inthe historical contributions, among whichthe most interesting concern the earliestrelations between the two countries.Thus we find that accounts of the voy-ages of Verrazano and Cartier weremade known in Italy by the 1556 publi-cation, in Venice, of Ramusio's collectionof travel accounts, Delle navigationi etviaggi. Five years later a translation ap-peared (again in Venice) of Thevet's

Les Singularitez ; three years before this,Nicolo Zeno had published his Commen-tarii, but already history had hypertro-phied into myth, Zeno's voyage being awell-constructed fake (as Del Negro putsit). By 1625 a political connection hadbeen established through the arm of theVatican known as Propaganda Fide; itis thanks to its archives that records ofthe early relations between the two coun-tries have been preserved. Much of theresearch in these archives has been doneby Luca Codignola (who is not, how-ever, represented by an article). Indeed,the historical essays do not go far beyondthe terrain already mapped in the essaysedited by Codignola and published in1978 (Canadiana: as petti della storia edella letteratura canadese) ; 1979 (Cana-diana: storia e storiografia canadese) ;and 1983 (Canada: problemi di storiacanadese).

Like the essays on history, those oncultural relations vary widely in quality;a number of them have the function ofimparting information to the Italian au-dience, and do not represent originalresearch. The name of Giacomo (laterJames) Forneri fittingly occurs morethan once in this section, for he intro-duced the study of Italian at the Univer-sity of Toronto in 1853. No mention,however, is made of A. A. Nobile, whoselist of subscribers to his various works onItalian culture comprise a who's who ofUpper Canada in the late-nineteenthcentury.

The essays on cultural relations inevit-ably raise the issue of canon, as Eva-Marie Kröller notes in her article onnineteenth-century English-Canadiantravellers to Italy. Kröller points out thatthe Literary History of Canada includesonly those travel accounts which speak ofCanada, as if affinities with Europe wereirrelevant to Canadian culture. As Kröl-ler argues, Canadian culture can be con-sidered a product of the dialogue be-

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tween Old World and New. Her exten-sive research indicates that culturalawareness of Italy in Canada was signifi-cant in the nineteenth century, as articlesin The Week (Toronto; 1883-1896) in-dicate. Abroad, the Canadian traveller(often a woman, unlike her Quebeccounterpart) tended to interpret whatshe saw, as opposed to the Québec trav-eller, who tended towards an impersonalrecitation of facts. Kröller traces thisattitude to the tradition of Protestantindividualism. By contrast, Québec travelaccounts often repeated details verbatimfrom other sources (which was appar-ently not that uncommon, as James deMule's brilliant parody, The DodgeClub; or, Italy in 185g, indicates).

Another nineteenth-century travellerto Italy, Napoléon Bourassa, was con-cerned not at all with the Italy that wasthere, but with the Italy that was not. AsNovella Novelli points out, modern Italywas for Bourassa merely the decadentremnant of Rome's glory. Similarly,Earle Birney's twentieth-century travelsto Italy were primarily literary. In a de-lightful vignette, "Io e l'ltalia," he re-lates that he first encountered Latium inthe person of his boyhood chum, TubbyPasquale. Later he visited Italy underthe aegis of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccac-cio while he was studying Chaucer.Then, at Berkeley on a fellowship, heexplored Cavalcanti, Bruno, Leopardi,zabaglione, and some Sicilian swearwords he learned in San Francisco's Lit-tle Italy. Only in 1958, and then againin 1963, did he set foot in those otherinvisible cities: Rome, Florence, Pisa,Siena. . .

At about the same time that Birneywas making his first trip to Italy, thesecond great wave of Italian immigrantswas establishing itself in Canada. One ofthe most interesting results of that trans-lation was the invention of a Canadian-ized Italian (or was it an Italianized

Canadian?) known as Italiese. Gian-renzo Clivio provides a small lexicon ofthis language, showing how it differsfrom standard Italian. Thus, basementbecomes "basamento" rather than theItalian "seminterrato" ; carpet becomes"carpetto" and not "tappetto." And Ican remember my uncle saying "checcia-besa" for catch basin, though he droppedthe final "a" to make the word conformto his dialect.

Taken as an insieme, these two vol-umes indicate that the relations betweenthe two countries merit more than theambassadorial gush with which they be-gin. While much original research re-mains to be done (as Stelio Cro's discov-ery of an unknown letter by Bressaniindicates), we have, nevertheless, comefar from the stereotypes of James S.Woodsworth's Strangers Within OurGates (1909) and the effusiveness ofJohn Murray Gibbon's Canadian Mosaic(1938). It is in this direction of under-standing the heterogeneity of Canadiancultural phenomena that II Veltromoves: "e sua nazion sarà tra feltro efeltro."

RICHARD CAVELL

THEATRE ENCOREROCH CARRIER, L'ours et le kangourou. Stanké,

n.p.JEAN DAiGLE, Au septième ciel. Editions du

Noroît, $10.95.L'ours et le kangourou is a dialogue(divided into sixteen chapters) between"Roch," the bear, and "Chris," the kan-garoo. It has attributes of the novel, thetheatre, and the travel journal. As theytravel about Australia, each of the twocompanions vies with the other in tellingtall tales about his own country and inprovoking his interlocutor with the ab-sence or presence of the oddities expectedby the "informed" tourist. Roch, after

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five days in Australia, has not yet seen akangaroo — "Est-ce qu'ils existent vrai-ment, ces insectes?" Chris spent a wholewinter in Canada without seeing a singleMountie, and lived in daily fear of open-ing his door to find a bear staring at him.Roch counters that bears were inventedby the same ministry which invented theR.C.M.P.

The two travelling companions teaseeach other about language. Both Aus-tralians and Québécois like to draw outthe pronunciation of their respective lan-guage. Chris thinks that natives of themother country (England or France)have to compress their language in orderto keep it within the boundaries of suchsmall territories. Each inevitably comesaround to applying his ironic view of theworld to his own culture. Reproachedwith faulty logic, Roch asks indignantlywhat is logic — he's from Quebec ! "Etrequébécois, c'est pouvoir dire oui et nonà la fois; c'est pouvoir être conservateuret libéral en même temps; c'est pouvoirêtre fédéraliste et séparatiste ensem-ble. . . . "

Chris and Roch discuss a dizzying ar-ray of topics from politics to biology andfrom religion to the "big bang," treatingmost of them with irreverence and hu-mour. Virtually no theme strays far fromtopics of current concern. It is perhapsin the imaginative and light-heartedtreatment of serious topics that fictiontakes hold, rather than in constructionof the plot and narrative of a traditionalnovel. Roch expresses admiration to haverun into the "most famous Australianpoet," H. D. Hope, urinating like anordinary human being in a public men'sroom. In response to Chris's suspicionthat he is making fun of Australianpoetry, Roch protests that the poets ofthe "mother countries" never engage insuch natural functions — "A-t-on déjàvu pisser Shakespeare ou Victor Hugo?"It would be a serious misreading to take

this as sarcasm directed at the "greatwriters" rather than at affected attitudesof "superiority." Perhaps, in a desperateacademic attempt to categorize RochCarrier's dialogic tall story, we shouldsay that it is a fast-moving, humorouscommentary on contemporary attitudestoward "reality," uninhibited by slavishadherence to "truth" or any other sacredcows. It is worth an hour or two of read-ing time by anyone with the least degreeof awareness that the colonialist/colo-nized mentality affects persons of variousestates, careers, religions, sexual outlooks,and political dispositions.

Jean Daigle does not write with thefree-wheeling irreverence and facility ofRoch Carrier, and he never touches di-rectly on political themes. His theatrehas repeatedly been described as "psycho-drama." Daigle's first full-length play,Coup de sang, was published only in1976, although he had been writing sincethe late 1960's. The third play, Le juge-ment dernier (Théâtre Port Royal, Mon-treal, 1979), was criticized for its un-wieldy use of difficult-to-follow flash-backs. The earnest excavation of theunlovely and unloving past of parents isevocative not only of Chekhov's theatrebut also of Eugene O'Neill's probing intofamily violence and alcoholism in U.S.drama.

Between his early dramas and thismost recent "comedy," Daigle has cer-tainly evolved in his theatrical writing.Au septième ciel, his sixth play, takes usthrough the complications of autumnallove and engagement. The play turnsaround the doubts and desires of twogentlemen of sixty-five, Albert and Ed-mond, who are engaged to Yvette andRose (fifty-five years young), the pro-prietors of a rest home. While the themesof misunderstanding between lovers andthe fears of a "convinced bachelor" (Ed-mond) upon contemplating marriage forthe first time at a relatively advanced

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age yield the comic situations and re-partee which we associate with summertheatre in Quebec, there is genuine hu-mour of language and some poetry inDaigle's writing. Albert is a world-wisebachelor who enjoys verbal parry andthrust. He is impatient with the engage-ment ritual — he would prefer to "tastethe wedding cake" before marriage. Inwrathful reaction to the precipitous de-parture of a faithless companion, Evan-geline, a friend of the two fiancées, de-cides to reconstruct the French language— "j'utiliserai plus jamais un mot mas-culin" — and she proceeds to feminizeall masculine words : "Faites-moi la plai-sir de retourner dans la jardin, je veuxpas vous voir la bout de la nez seule-ment" (my italics).

There is a good possibility that thesuccess of Michel Tremblay's Les bellessoeurs in 1968, with its scandalous use ofjoual had an impact on the dramaticcareer of the young Jean Daigle. To hiscredit, it should be noted that Daigledid not jump on the bandwagon to tryto capitalize on Tremblay's success.Daigle's characters in fact bring popularlanguage to the stage also, but it is clearlyand realistically based on the spokenFrench of a small provincial town, hav-ing little or no connection with the popu-lar language of Montreal or with theliterary and theatrical modishness of"joual" in the late 1960's. Jean Daigleis a craftsman of the theatre who hasbeen working slowly and deliberately fornearly twenty years producing theatrewhich may be viewed and re-viewed withincreasing respect for the human state-ment that it makes.

CARROL F. COATES

TELLINGSROBERT CURRIE, Learning on the Job. Oberon,

$11.95.JANE MUNRO, The Trees Just Moved Into a

Season of Other Shapes, Quarry, $8.95.KEN NORRis, In the Spirit of the Times. The

Muses' Company, $6.95.STEVE NOYÉS, Backing Into Heaven. Turn-

stone, $7.95.

LOVING AND WRITING have often been thesubjects of poetry as poets ask not onlywhat it is to love but also what it is towrite "I love." This relation betweenwhat French psychoanalyst Julia Kris-teva might call desire and language hasbeen worried over recently in Canadianpoetics. Theorist, novelist, poet RobertKroetsch articulates his awareness of theproblem in a 1981 interview with ShirleyNeuman :

I realize that I fall in love by saying I fallin love. But I also know that I then havefallen in love. You know, I have an upsetstomach and can't sleep at night, I writelove letters . . . and all the crazy things alover does.

More recently, in her latest book ofpoems, Jane Munro also acknowledgesthe uneasy relation between the wordswe have to speak about love and ourexperience of it when she writes of twolovers who "haven't learned enough yetabout the many kinds of telling, in love."As different as Jane Munro's book isfrom recent books by Robert Currie, KenNorris, and Steve Noyes, at some pointthey each struggle with or in the relationbetween language and loving, whethertheir poems speak of a love for others,for words, or for the ways that our wordsgive us access to our "others." Somepoems tell us of the many kinds of love;others that, as Kristeva writes, "love isspoken, and that is all it is."

The poems in Robert Currie's Learn-ing on the Job speak, with humour andinsight, of the different kinds of love a

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man feels for wife ("The Trouble WithMarriage is Getting to Sleep"), children("Thank God it Ends at 10:30"), andfriends ("This Poem Says What itMeans"). There are poems that registerthe anguish of unrequited love ("In theWaiting-Room" ) and of physical desire("Learning on the Job"). "In the Wait-ing-Room" is a particularly interestingpoem that speaks of waiting as the con-dition of desire, absence as the positionof the loving subject :

You sit curled behind a magazineeyes moving left to righttongue playing with your lower lipWere this a crowded roomI could stand it and understandwhy you don't notice mebut the room is emptythough I am in it.

Also addressing the problem of the posi-tion of the writing lover, "Last Night"speaks of the "learning on the job," thelearning about love that goes on while apoet writes a love poem. It is the poet'suneasiness about writing about love thatproduces some of the most interestinglines :

As I woke up this morningI began to dream a poemsaw it forming in the darknessof a night that you had warmedBut haunted by your memoryI couldn't find a wayto force the words on paperwanting more to be with you.

Currie's is not always a poetry of absenceof this kind ; but when his poems do con-front the experience of writing what can-not be written about love they are poign-ant and compelling.

The poems in Jane Munro's The TreesJust Moved Into a Season of OtherShapes also wrestle with the paradoxthat a poet often writes of not being ableto write. "Sermon on the Mount" speaksof "the sacred and horny romp, / re-dundant as all get out, treating eachother / that way we can never quite

say." Having said what it says it cannot,with these words the poem ends. ButMunro's poems also attempt anotherkind of telling — by allowing a few care-fully placed words to produce a multi-plicity of meanings. "Birds," the series ofshort poems which opens the book, re-calls Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems in itsstark, rhythmic simplicity. Telling, inthese poems, is taken from the speakingvoice and given to the seemingly arbi-trary arrangement of words on a page.The final poem of the sequence retells(because the poem of the first part isrepeated in italics) an earlier "story,"pointing out how the same words meandifferently in new contexts :

one flew awayfromone flew awaytowhy would a bird depart?a bird will flyfromandto

one flewawaythe bird knew

In its punning and word (bird?) play,this poem tells also of a love for words.

Munro's long poem "Creek Bed,"which follows "Birds" in the book, speaksof a difficult love between mother anddaughter — difficult both to experienceand to write about. The creek becomes ametaphor for both the mother and thepoem that is trying to be written:

creekblithering over a stuck logbends its restless tongueto the deadfallarguing against its finish

Other poems in the collection speak ofthe love sister has for sister ("WomanClothed By the Sun") and of the lovethat occurs (or fails to occur) betweenlovers ("As Windows Shape Light").

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Often there is the recognition that thereare "worlds / we'll never touch / whatwe touch / are the frames / in ourminds" — the words with which westruggle to grasp a world.

The speaking voice in Ken Norris's Inthe Spirit of the Times also recognizesthat "there are pages to fill, there is alife to live; / somehow they are con-nected." Norris's poems suggest that thepoet writes out of a love both for wordsand for the experience which words seemto offer: "I want to say it and I want tostop / saying it." But his poems are bal-anced precariously between despair andidealism, between having only words, andhaving all that words seem to make pos-sible. If I can adapt lines from "TheEdge," these poems are "walking thethin line between / cynicism and ro-mance." The final and longest poem ofthe collection, "Poem for Katherine toRead on Her Twentieth Birthday," self-reflexively posits the poet writing at an-other precarious edge — in a presenttense that is at once future and pastbecause, as the poet says, "it gets soconfusing when I try to write about life,Katherine" :

iWe all stood on the other side of the glass:

Richard and Deirdre, who had to alternatecoming up

to the maternity ward because one of themhad to stay

downstairswith Nicholas, who was seven weeks old

and who perhapsyou've grown up

knowing

The speaker of this poem tells us that heis "wrestling with the spirits of these darktimes / trying to clear a space for you"but what he is also doing is clearing aspace for himself and his words. As thepoem "Reach Me" argues, "I wanted tomake / something beautiful out of mysadness and my sense / of the personallytragic." Along with the romanticized

poetic " I" comes the sense that it is onlyin words that " I" speak; "what we reallyknow is inconsistency and moments /without cues."

Steve Noyes's Backing Into Heaven isamong the most flamboyantly "self-centred of the four books. Al Purdywrites on the cover, "he flows, he dances,he's alive, and accomplishes all three atonce." But just who is the "he" of thepoems? At one moment "he" is a loverwriting in the absence of a beloved:"Walking a loss / strung from my / head/ . . . stand as I / do now / where youhave gone." At other times "he" is paro-dying the "I"-as-Canadian poet:

I wanted to write aboutthe subliminal landscape"the inconceivable white of Canada"you know the sort of thinghoweverdue to poor poetic planningthe flight's at nightand I have to dream it backwardsfrom the nothing.

These poems recall that the telling is inand about words, not "life" : "I will startimmediately / from nothing and forget /all movies books last words" he writes in"Learning to Die"; but of course it isthe "movies books last words" that arethe poem. Noyes is a poet for whom sig-nifiers often have a playful relation tosignifieds. "Julie / Or Ten Feet" speaksof a woman "going off the road / and inthe river, / right between a rock and tree/ ten feet apart either / would havestopped her." As the poem continues, thespeaking voice realizes that he and hiswife "are sitting / about ten feet apart."He asks, playfully, "Were you close toher?" The humour in this poem is notcaused by Julie's tragically comic death,but by the words which tell more thanher story. The words, not the life, in-terest both poet and reader. Similarly,the poem "Four Dollars" also suggeststhat meaning is always contextual :

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four dollarsmean this to mea pack of cigarettesthree coffeeone poor studenttalking talking talking

Again the words offer the occasion of thepoem.

As varied in voice, style, and subjectas four books of poetry obviously shouldbe, each of these books offers examplesof the many kinds of telling, in love.Some poems read easily because they arewritten with and in many voices; othersask more of us; many of the most pro-vocative poems tell their stories with anuncanny awareness that it is the tellingthat matters. Norris writes that "whatmay save us is our love." Perhaps it isnot only the loving but also the writingthat makes all the difference.

SUSAN RUDY DORSCHT

COMME UN VENTFRANCOIS DESNOYERS, Derrière le silence.

Triptyque, $8.00.PATRICK COPPENS, Enfants d'Hermès. Trip-

tyque, $8.00.DANIEL GUENETTE, Empiècements. Triptyque,

$8.00.JEAN FOREST, Des Fleurs pour Harlequin.

Triptyque, $8.00.T H E S E FOUR COLLECTIONS push the ex-pressive power of language to its limitsand carry the reader to the frontiers ofthe ineffable and the inexpressible. Eachpoet bids us enter the hermetic universeof his unique vision of the world. Eachone, in his own way, transforms — ordeforms — the French language in orderto give us a glimpse of that universe.

The title of Desnoyers' collection re-veals his sense of the inexpressibility ofhis poetic experience. The idea of silencehaunts the poet, and he dwells obsessivelyon the difficulties of interpersonal com-munication. This is the most lyrical of

the four collections, the poet expressingas much by the melodic rhythms of hisphrasings as through words. His chantsexplore the great metaphysical themes,like love, absence, and death, which havealways haunted poets. In each poem, thepoetic speaker addresses his beloved andtries to inspire in her a response to hisemotional urgings. Desnoyers reveals aRomantic's sensitivity to external Nature,and the latter provides the objective cor-relative to his feelings and thoughts. "Etje t'ai aimé / comme un vent cherchantrefuge / au verre parfumé des roses.""La terre est une excroissance du si-lence." The poet is aware of the mysteri-ous message which the cosmos is tryingto communicate to the lovers. "Et j'aisenti brumeuse la beauté du murmure /que nous accordions aux plantes et auxarbres." "Ne refuse pas d'écouter cesarbres . . . j 'ai appris le langage deséclairs." Desnoyers does not flaunt na-tionalism, but his hibernal landscape ofsnowy mountains and fir trees is an evo-cation of the Québec countryside whichis all the more eloquent for being dis-creet.

Like Mallarmé, Desnoyers is seeking akind of Orphic vision of the universe. Ashis editor points out, the poet is movedby "le désir gravidique de mettre à dé-couvert la face obscure du monde." Heachieves mastery over the world by hum-bly making himself totally open to theother. "La conscience . . . naît ainsi sur lemode d'une connaissance élémentaire quiconsiste en l'attention du voir et de l'en-tendre les plus purs."

Patrick Coppens combines the artforms of drawing and poetry in a synes-thetic whole. Twelve individuals eachprovide the subject for pictorial sketches(by Mino Bonan) and accompanyingverbal ones (including the irregular son-net, "Laurent"). The collection impressesthe reader as something of a post-Surrealist joke. The tone is one of mock-

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ery, directed toward the characters, thereader, and the work itself. What thesefictional personages have in common isthat each is an outcast, a révolté, a seekerof the unknown, and an incarnation ofthe anguish of the human condition."Mal du siècle, mal de vivre. Mal detous les siècles."

Empiècements, as its title suggests, ispoetry based on the verbal decompositionand reconstruction of reality. A modernUlysses, Daniel Guénette sets off on aquest for unknown meaning. One way ofaccomplishing his mission is in the lovingexchange with another person: "un flanccontre le mien / se dévoilant fit sourdrele monde / langages se liant découvrantau-delà." The poet, however, often has afeeling of discouraged isolation, anawareness of the impossibility of com-munication and comprehension. He ishaunted by a sense of sterility: "je de-meure, celui qui ne sait et n'arrive àrien, / seul." The poet's Odyssey ends infailure and frustration: "ne pouvantpresque tracer une ligne droite de pa-roles / trancher en deux quelque objetdu monde / en lire quoi que ce soit /cause sans effet." He can at best give apiecemeal suggestion, miraculous butfragmentary, of truth and being: "Tels,ces mots / placés un peu de travers / enretenant d'autres qu'ils taisent / sous unphrasé coulant de roches."

While in the three works already dis-cussed, language is explored as a possiblemeans of giving voice to the poet's world-view, in Des Fleurs pour Harlequin itbecomes the poet's major preoccupation.Forest's poems, though beautiful in them-selves as verbal structures, constitute atthe same time a meta-linguistic artpoétique. Forest makes clear repeatedlythat the language of poetry is notthe rational instrument of expressionemployed, for example, by literarycritics, politicians, and other "preach-ers." The poet thus rejects any concep-

tion of a poésie engagée which would befor him a contradiction in terms. Hisonly fatherland or motherland is lan-guage and the realm beyond to which itpoints: "POÉSIE quand on ne recon-naît plus le pays / les modulations de laMère / et qu'on avance seul, en unecontrée de mots, / hérissé, tendu versAUTRE CHOSE." He also distinguishespoetry from imaginative literature, likenovels and movies. For him, poetry is amystical evocation of an essential realitywhich lies just beyond the reach of hu-man language: "Le poème récite l'in-sistance de ce qui sous les fracas des fan-fares tente de rejoindre Dieu. Il aspire àl'impossible silence, jamais accordé. Toutest encore à dire." Rimbaud is Forest'sideal of the poet, who is an inspiredprophet, a visionary. The poet attemptsto distil into fragmentary verbal formshis contact with the infinite. The poembecomes a deconstruction of reality andwords in order to liberate true being:"Le sujet ne s'articule jamais que depuisles décombres dont il naît, et qui sur luis'entassent." Poetry is for Forest a totalexperience which takes hold of both themind and body of the poet and his read-ers: "Que le sens de l'écriture réside /dans sa chair / elle-même / Que lire estun acte de chair à chair / à prendre aumot à mot." The acts of writing andreading constitute breaks in the surfaceof visible reality and create an openinginto the transcendent.

JAMES P. GILROY

LOYALISTSJ O H N & MONICA LADELL, Inheritance: On-

tario's Century Farms Past and Present.Dundurn Press, $16.95.

NEIL MACKINNON, This Unfriendly Soil: TheLoyalist Experience in Nova Scotia 1783-1791. McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, $27.50.

T H E LADELL HUSBAND AND WIFE teampresent a tribute to Ontario's farming

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community in their story of forty-twocentury farms both past and present. Tobe designated a century farm a propertymust have been in possession of the samefamily for at least one hundred years;many can boast a history of family own-ership since before Confederation, whilesome can go back further to the begin-nings of settlement. When Upper Can-ada was founded by Loyalist settlers in1791 a mere handful of 10,000 souls wasliving in that vast area. Originally fromthe American colonies, the Loyalists hadmigrated from Quebec as they wantedBritish institutions, and disliked the sys-tem of government and land tenure inexistence there. Most of the families in-terviewed are of Anglo-Saxon back-ground, while at least a quarter cantrace a Loyalist ancestry.

The oral history the Ladells have tran-scribed makes for interesting reading, forthese families have known triumph andfailure, and have handed their storydown from generation to generation;century farm families of six generationsare common, while a few go back eightgenerations or more. This book empha-sizes the continuity of those with tena-cious ties to the land and stresses thereality of inevitable change, for it allowsthe families to bring their story up-to-date with present problems and concerns.Loss of productive land because of risingpopulation, encroaching urbanization,and pollution, all pose a threat; youngpeople leave the farms for the city, andcentury farms pass out of the control ofthe original families. While presenting nostatistical evidence, the authors claimthat each year an increasing number ofcentury farms go under. My complaintwith Inheritance is that the backgroundchapters, which seek to set the context,do not integrate smoothly into the "inter-view" sections at the end of each chap-ter: more care should have been takenin organizing the format, even though

the book is intended as a popular andnot a scholarly work.

Neil Mackinnon has drawn upon thelatest research in his scholarly study ofthe Loyalist experience in Nova Scotia.He shows clearly that the influx of 20,000refugees in a single year was a muchmore complex experience than standardLoyalist hagiography would have us be-lieve. This work complements WalterStewart's recent popular history whichemphasizes the bitter in-fighting amongthe Loyalists. En masse they were a di-verse group of different ethnic, social,and religious backgrounds, who hadcome from every corner of the UnitedStates; the only thing that gave thema semblance of unity was loyalty to theCrown; they are far removed from thegenteel martyrs of Loyalist mythology.As the author reminds us: "One cantake the notion of a typical Loyalist atti-tude only so far, for there was no typicalLoyalist."

They were a microcosm of the pre-revolutionary world they had left. Quiterightly the author notes the class con-flicts among them: "With their sense ofclass, status and privilege, and their con-tempt for the lower classes . . . they werefar closer to the oligarchy in Halifaxthan the common refugee." He also notestheir uneasy relationship with nativeNova Scotians, who not only profiteeredat the expense of the newcomers, butwere far from being as antagonistic totheir American neighbours in the NewEngland states as many of the Loyalistswould have liked. He details the priva-tions and frustrations of the Loyalists ina harsh new environment, and theirproblems with Governor Parr and theauthorities with respect to the provisionof emergency British aid and land settle-ment. Britain was seen as "their reluctantbenefactor" and there was a good dealof souring in the imperial tie.

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Beyond noting the black slave elementamong the Loyalists, Mackinnon onlyseems to hint at their ethnic diversity,instead of giving this serious question theattention it merits. The thoughtfulreader might well wonder if the extensiverecords of the Loyalist Claims Commis-sion can throw any light on the ethnicdiversity of the Loyalists in Nova Scotia.Most interested readers will find theNote on Sources quite inadequate, andwould prefer a more detailed bibliogra-phy; otherwise the book is well docu-mented with adequate footnotes and isattractively produced.

CLIFFORD G. HOLLAND

STILL LIFESGiLEAN DOUGLAS, Kodachromes at Midday.

Sono Nis, $6.95.ANNE CAMPBELL, Death is an Anxious Mother.

Thistledown, $8.95.joy KOGAWA, Woman in the Woods. Mosaic,

$8.95·GILEAN DOUGLAS IN Kodachromes atMidday celebrates love and nature,speaks of man's transience, and his con-frontation with death, in traditionalrhyme and metre. These poems recallthe rhythm and diction of Walter de laMare, John Masefield, and English Ro-mantic poets. While there is a certainpleasure in the sound of these poems,one does not have a new sense of lan-guage as Douglas's poems are interwovenwith such clichés as "fragrant hourswhich our love was bright in," and "thelaughing stream." There is too much of"the calm where a heart may rest."These poems are snapshots of experience,not deep explorations of loneliness, fear,and passion expressed in an individuallanguage. However, what separatesDouglas's poetry from a sentimental tra-ditional poetry is the interplay of soundpatterns, and her use of hypnotic

rhythms that give the poetry genuinelyrical qualities:

What shall I say of autumnThat I have never said?With ardent maples burningBeside our marriage bedAnd golden poplars shiningUpon your russet head,I shall not speak of autumnBut kiss your mouth instead.

In Anne Campbell's Death is an Anx-ious Mother there is a sense of contem-porary idiom, the rougher texture ofeveryday speech. These poems are ar-ranged into phases of a cycle beginningwith memories of the speaker's child-hood, moving through changing states oflove, and ending in self-affirmation, ex-pressed in the freedom of the prairie.Sometimes her images are too stereo-typed, as when she describes isolation inmarriage: "two good people / always /ships in the night / passing." However,in a goodbye poem to her husband,"Terse Note," she uses a leaner line, andcreates a fine contrapuntal effect by jux-taposing polite surface reactions withpowerful underlying feelings of separa-tion.

While Campbell's language has an in-formal quality of speech, it also possessesa sense of ritual as she tries to make thereader apprehend the sculptural integrityof her experience in "Living Room" :

Little altarsI build all around

plateplace first onecandle or glass

on my mantlesill or shelf

introduce an otherand another then shift

them aroundshape space

In this poem Campbell becomes a shap-ing spirit as she expresses the relationshipof things in her life and creates thepoem's translucent landscape.

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Joy Kogawa's Woman in the Woodscontains simple, powerful poetry that ex-plores political, psychological, and na-tural warfare. It is the almost inaudibleand nearly invisible presences that con-cern her:

Faint as in a dreamis the voice that callsfrom the bellyof the wall.

Her synthetic vision emphasizes the ef-fects of exploiters: Egyptian Vultures,social climbing tarantulas, Nebuchad-nezzar, and the cruel researcher. Kogawawrites of the victimizer and the victim:sometimes it is man who is the victim ofthe "insects" within his head, while othertimes it is man, the killer, who destroys acommunity of wildlife creatures to makeway for a "future shopping cemetery."Kogawa tries to break down the rigiddichotomy of man and nature by chang-ing the natural order so that one sees theatmosphere as dense or blood comingfrom a stone.

Kogawa's language is more excitingthan Douglas's or Campbell's because shedraws on a wider range of resources. In"Old Woman in Housekeeping Room"she uses syntax, sound patterns, and sym-bols to illustrate the tenuous condition ofpeople in their worlds:

Feeble star raysleave the surface of her slow turninghoping to find out there in the nightsomeone that needsher needing light.But stars die, she knowseventually the spinning endslights sputter across uninhabited moonsand people who once were neededno longer are.

Kogawa's voice, like Campbell's, is col-loquial, yet she creates a world that isanimated with myth and dream, a mix-ture of grotesque fairytales and night-marish realities. In one of the strongestpoems of the book, "Minerals from

Stone," she evokes the process of thepoet's search for truth by using sculp-tural imagery along with mythical andpsychological elements :

For many yearsandrogynous with truthI molded fact and fantasyand where they metmade the crossroads home.

Through the paradoxes of the speaker'sevolution she has learned to build herhouse in shadows and gained strengthand independence so that she can "eatminerals / straight from stone."

Kogawa not only is concerned withmoments of intense and austere con-sciousness, but also is aware of the pro-cesses of nature, of "how the blossomsare falling." A minor weakness in thiscollection is that there are not more ofthese moments to throw into relief thedarker landscapes. But Woman in theWoods is a strong book where Kogawapresents the world not in snapshots, butthrough her own special time-lapse po-etics. She captures the changing condi-tions of both violence and beauty, anduses the complex lens of her language tofocus on the nearly invisible features ofour physical and spiritual topographies.

LAURENCE HUTCHMAN

PARODY & LEGACYLINDA HUTCHEON, A Theory of Parody.

Methuen, $12.95.MAX BRAiTHWAiTE, All The Way Home. Mc-

Clelland & Stewart, $19.95.IAN DENNIS, Bagdad: A Romance. Macmillan,

$17-95-NOEL HUDSON, Mobile Homes. Polestar Press,

$9-95-IN A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheondescribes parody as a strikingly contem-porary genre that gives a postmodernworld access to the legacy of the pastwhile encouraging ironic distance from

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and therefore reformulation of that past.To differentiate it from the closely alliedforms of satire and irony, Hutcheon em-phasizes that parody foregrounds differ-ence over repetition and aims toward theintramural rather than the extramural.Throughout the six chapters (whichrange from definitions of parody, to itspragmatic range, to the central paradoxof parody, to parody's shared codes, tothe parodie text's relation to the world),Hutcheon concentrates on parody's recla-mation of the past "with difference."While somewhat conservative, parodyallows the present room of its own.

Although problems in using sharedcontemporary cultural codes sometimesforce parody closer to perversion than tosubversion, Hutcheon, I think correctly,claims parody as a postmodern genre parexcellence. Because it is self-reflexive andoperates with dependent meaning, likeother postmodern forms it contradictsessentialism. And it obliges a triple read-ing competence — linguistic, rhetorical,and ideological. Hutcheon's most impor-tant argument, however, is that parodyde-marginalizes literature and theory byconnecting art with the world. By usingsatire (which always observes and com-ments on the world), by combining pop-ular and elite cultures, by accepting theauthority of the past while insisting onart's right to transgress, and by encourag-ing the sharing of reading codes, parodybrings into play many current debates onthe status of the subject, on the notionof reference, and on concepts of objec-tivity and closure.

As this too-condensed summary sug-gests, A Theory of Parody is an ambitiousstudy. It is particularly valuable as aprovocative response to current aestheticrealities. And it is filled with a wide-ranging sample of examples from the vis-ual arts, from architecture, from music,and from literature and cinema. Hutch-eon's incorporation of various current

theories (for example, feminist theory)and her references to Canadian literatureas well as other world literatures areof considerable political importance. Ifat times the rapid listing of illustrationsconfuses a reader already struggling tofollow the on-going argument, quibblingabout excessive illustration detracts fromthe importance of using a thoroughlyinterdisciplinary perspective. To illumi-nate contemporary life, as this book un-dertakes to do, to show how cultural,artistic, social, and ideological codes mustbe shared by creator and respondent(Hutcheon analyzes form and semiotics,creation as well as response), to illumi-nate a playful genre that moves any-where from anger to mocking fun, muchpostmodern expression needs to be inves-tigated.

Hutcheon's writing would certainlybenefit from a less highly condensed style.In a work this difficult, the reader needsmore direction, more summary, and moredescription. I also think that a more dis-cursive style would help demonstrateparody's idiosyncracies. As it stands,Hutcheon leans heavily toward usingparody synonymously with the term"postmodern," undercutting parody's dis-tinctiveness. As well, some of the theo-retical language needs fuller explanation,not because the terms are jargon, butbecause they have been used so oftenthey need reinterpretation from Hutch-eon's own point of view ("ideological";"historicize" ; "validation"). All thisaside, Hutcheon's refusal to be caught upin either/or thinking and her consequentemphasis on paradox are of crucial politi-cal importance. By breaking down divi-sions between élite and popular cultures,between tradition and innovation, evenamong disciplines, she aligns herself withpostmodern movements that re-situateart within the everyday world.

Hutcheon's investigation of the ways inwhich the present uses and transforms

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the legacies of the past, suggest variousconnections with three recent fictions.The least satisfying of them is MaxBraithwaite's All the Way Home. Thisnovel nostalgically contrasts a westernCanadian past with a present somewhatambivalently associated with easternCanada and a much wealthier westernCanada. At 65, Hugh Windmar, a suc-cessful, unmarried Toronto playwright,returns to his Saskatchewan home toshare holidays with his parents and fivesiblings (a sixth brother has died).Through conversations among familymembers, and through the artificial de-vice of extended tape recordings of thevoice of William Henry, the father, re-calling his past, and the voice of Martha,the mother, recalling hers (both are be-ing interviewed by one of their children),the reader is given considerable detailabout the difficulties Canadian farmersfaced in starting farms during the De-pression. The anguish of two world warsis also present in these parental voices.

At the same time, from his quite root-less perspective, Hugh learns about thestrength, playfulness, daring, and imagi-nation of parents he has learned to thinkof as dull. His slight transformation —the only one in the novel — allows himto reformulate his past so that it nolonger restrictively hangs about his neck.But the lesson is muted for the reader.Throughout, excessive stereotyping (theinarticulate, silent father; the nurturing,generous, virtuous mother; the asexualdaughter with three academic doctorates ;the loud, blustering farmer-brother, withhis self-conscious use of bad grammar)belittles Hugh's struggle (indeed, he tooseems a stereotype of the westerner'sopinion of the easterner: effete, cold,and exaggeratedly intellectual) and al-ienates the reader from the conflictdramatized. Although Braithwaite care-fully touches base with contemporarydiscussions of subjects like feminism, and

acknowledges the importance of eco-nomic changes in western Canada, thenovel fails to dramatize enough the dia-logue between past and present, betweenold and new selves. In playing off pastagainst present, Braithwaite allows nos-talgia to win.

Ian Dennis's novel uses the past moreeffectively. In the fantasy, Bagdad (PartOne of The Prince of Stars in the Cavernof Time), he parodies The ArabianNights, focusing particularly on tales andtheir telling. Situated in a country laidout in a map at the beginning of thenovel — such names as "Trackless Waste"and "The Further East" alert the readerto Dennis's parodie aims and remind usthat the orient is a western construction— we are, in the stories to follow, intro-duced to a whacky political group, "TheRipe Fruit Party," whose main drink issherbert and whose favourite saying is:"It is as it is." The stories are connected,naturally, by a search, in this case for"that which is within." Having set up astructure and some characters, Dennisproceeds with the fun. The adventuresinclude the hanging of the ModerateMan (see current policy in the Mid-East) , stories of the Burned Man and thePurple Man, the story of the origins ofthe leader of the Ripe Fruit Party, whois notable for believing that "[LJife islong, art short," the story of Alladin andthe Magic Warehouse, a witty moderni-zation of "Alladin's Lamp," and so onthrough various oriental tales in whichappear such out-of-place figures as civilservants. It concludes with the story ofThe Never-Harvested Field, which self-referentially emphasizes anticipation overperformance.

Indeed, throughout, Dennis has funwith current literary theory, particularlyas it applies to narrative. Ironic remarkslike "many a word has been spoken withno signifying about it," self-evident oneslike "the story begins, proceeds and then

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ends," and naïve questions like "Couldn'twe just have the beginnings of stories?"combine to create a playful text that ful-fils some of Hutcheon's requirements forparody. She suggests that "parody can,inadvertently perhaps, serve anotheruseful function today: it can call intoquestion the temptation toward themonlithic [sic] in modern theory." Al-though Dennis's novel periodically over-steps itself, wallowing in silliness andlosing the reader in a series of confusingreferences, on the whole it is an effectiveexample of intertextuality (The ArabianNights in particular), of genre parody(the current fascination with fantasy),and of satire (literary theory) that cre-ates some dialogue between the past andthe present.

Finally, the nine stories that make upNoel Hudson's Mobile Homes demon-strate story-telling at its best. Each storyinvestigates novelty as it attempts to fititself into past structures. Hudson hasdeveloped a number of authentic voicesto narrate the various stories, and hasused the effective metaphor of "mobilehomes" to comment on the vagaries ofcontemporary life. From the first story,whose narrator works in a mobile homefactory and believes that "work is on theway out, the future is leisure time,"through a story of the west where Rooter,the buffalo, rather than roaming, "buf-fafloats," to a trailer family who covertheir walls with American flags, baldeagles, and crossed muskets, these storiesare bizarre, vivid, witty, and often mov-ing. They are stories that counteract nos-talgic views of the past, stories that flirtwith many of the forms Hutcheon sees asclose to parody — "burlesque, travesty,pastiche, plagiarism, quotation and allu-sion." While the word "homes" suggeststhat the stories recognize a stable past,the word "mobile" implies revolutionarypotential. And, indeed, each story estab-lishes an idiosyncratic spatial and tem-

poral balance. Marble bird baths, iguana,and vacuum cleaner salesmen residequite naturally together, in homes thatare sometimes "squeezed to fit, a housesqueezed into a Velveeta cheese box," inlandscapes that hover between "classicJurassic" and outer space. Noel Hudsonhas succeeded in making his out-of-the-way characters speak for contemporarylife while, at the same time, remindinghis readers of past legacies.

LORNA IRVINE

APPASSIONATAFERDINAND ECKHARDT, Music from Within: a

Biography of the Composer S. C. Eckhardt-Gramatté. Univ. of Manitoba Press, $20.00.

PICK AS YOUR HEROINE a musician ofextraordinary talent, fiercely indepen-dent, almost untameable, "outwardly de-cisive and self-assured, inwardly inse-cure." Match her in marriage first witha young expressionist artist suffering fromlung disease and, after his early death,with an art historian who enters her lifeas the painter's posthumous cataloguerand promoter and who, after exerting astabilizing influence on her for over 40years, becomes her own posthumouscataloguer and promoter. Choose as lo-cales Moscow, Whiteway (a communalsettlement along Tolstoyan principles inEngland), Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and, forthe last 20 years, Winnipeg. Weave insuch varied themes as the woman ascomposer, the uneasy partnership of mu-sician and painter, the struggle for recog-nition, survival under the Hitler regime,and adjustment to life in Canada. Intro-duce historical personages from Leo Tol-stoy and Tsar Nicholas II to ArturSchnabel, Marc Chagall, Leopold Sto-kowski, Glenn Gould, and Sir ErnestMacMillan. And spice your narrativewith mystery (who was her father?),

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melodrama (her mother throws herselfbefore the Tsar's horse to gain supportin her marital-legal battle), and dramaticcoincidence (no sooner has the artist-husband revealed "you shall have me foronly one more year" than a telegramannounces "Famous orchestra conductorLeopold Stokowski wants to hear you.. . . Gome immediately").

What does all this add up to? A 700-page epic suffering from an improbableplot? A treatise about modern music,feminism, and the artist's place in societyin the guise of a novel? Nothing of thesort; it is the meticulously researchedtrue-to-life story of the musician Sophie-Carmen ("Sonia") Eckhardt-Gramatté,a lady with five residences, four surnames(born Fridman, alias Maurice, marriedto Gramatté then to Eckhardt), threelanguages, two instruments (a virtuosoon the piano and violin who would playthe Appassionato, and the Kreutzer So-nata in the same recital), and one con-suming ambition, to be a great composer.The fascinating story, from her birth,presumably in Moscow in 1899, to herdeath after an accident while visiting inStuttgart in 1974, is recounted by herdevoted widower with warmth, humour,and compassion. Eckhardt, the formerdirector of the Winnipeg Art Gallery,brings a historian's critical skill to hisexamination of the rich source materialand is objective enough to recognize lessadmirable qualities in her character, suchas a certain lack of tact and modesty.Thus several generous benefactors inBerlin, who encouraged her to succeed asa virtuoso rather than starve as a com-poser, became estranged from her. Andyet it was precisely her unshakeable be-lief in her talent to compose that helpedher to survive decades of insecurity, emo-tional turmoil, and shortlived successes.The story does have a happy ending, forinner peace, domestic comfort, and hand-some recognition came during her 20

years in Canada. One cannot help re-membering in this context that femalecomposers have always been an acceptedpart of the Canadian cultural fabric,from Emma Lajeunesse, Susie Harrison,and Gena Branscombe through JeanCoulthard, Barbara Pentland, and VioletArcher to Norma Beecroft, MichelineCoulombe Saint-Marcoux, and AlexinaLouie.

An art historian is not a music criticand Eckhardt wisely limits the discussionof his wife's compositions to the circum-stances of their creation and their recep-tion by actual or potential performers.He also quotes some of Sonia's self-assessments as a composer. Often her in-sights are beautifully lucid:

In the end I would rather trust the laws ofnature than the man-made ones. The workwhich constantly has to solve new problemscreates a new form. It is the task whichproduces the form, not man. The humanmind has to obey the task and not vice-versa.

Written in "the late 1930's" after she hadbegun honing her compositional tech-nique under Max Trapp, the same letterincludes another passage worth framing:

I shall never write again as genuinely andas nicely as I did before, because now Iam too aware. . . . I never wrote immaturelyor childishly but I was a child at heart andmy compositions were free of affectation. . . .I was a poet in music but now I am aknowledgeable composer. . . . Now I simplyput one note after another, while before,oh before, my heart would weep. I couldhear the weeping and play it.

If the book does little to analyzeEckhardt-Gramatté's music and to placeit in the context of twentieth-centurystyles, it does demonstrate throughout itspages the sad problem of so many con-temporary composers, to have to spendtoo much time and energy in self-pro-motion. Why is it so difficult for newworks, even the finest ones, to assume a

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performance life on their own momen-tum? Why did the 1929-30 United Statesperformances under Stokowski and Stocknot induce a dozen German orchestrasto play Sonia's music? Ideally, new worksought to become known by havingpleased score-exploring performers andunderstanding audiences, rather than by"marketing techniques." Too often thequestion "Who will do something tomake my music known?" becomes anobsession; egocentricity and bitternessare likely to result. In April 1942 Soniawrites :

Until now, I was so naive as to believe thatone could go directly to a musician and themusic, good music, would speak for itself.But now I set aside that foolish misunder-standing once and for all. You can onlyreach musicians the long way, eitherthrough extortion or through giving per-sonal advantage. But not just through themusic.

One must not forget that each new com-position competes against a hundred con-temporary and a thousand established orrediscovered ones and that score-readingor comprehension after a single listeningopportunity is often extremely difficult.Fortunately there are enlightened per-formers who do examine new scores andperform the ones they like, and since1942 national music centres have takenover many of the promotional and quasi-publishing functions while internationaljuries for festivals or competitions andbroadcasting organizations provide ameasure of objective expert evaluation.

A subject deserves either no biographyat all or at least two, one expressing thatperson's or an intimate's view of life"from within" and one, or more, provid-ing society's view of the subject. Al-though Ferdinand Eckhardt goes someway to combining both approaches,there is a challenge for a musician andpsychologist to explore further along sev-eral paths. Obviously a critical guide to

the compositions is needed. And threecircumstances that must have had a pro-found effect on the shaping of Sonia'sgrowth as human being and artist de-serve elucidation : her fatherless upbring-ing, her lack of schoolmates, and the de-lay of expert instruction or supervisionin composition until her middle thirties.Were these disadvantages turned intoassets, did they promote individualitywhile retarding self-control? One mightalso probe for an explanation why onlya minuscule part of her works are forvoice. Could this have something to dowith the fact she was never allowed tomature completely in the use of any onelanguage? English was her first and lastlanguage, French the language of herchildhood and conversation with hermother, but German, her daily environ-ment for over 40 years, she had taken uponly as a teenager.

The design of the book, with its boldprint and black leaves separating chap-ters, is very attractive. In addition to ashort list of works and recordings and anindex, there are six reproductions ofWalter Gramatté's pictures of his wife,30 photos from her childhood to heryears in Canada, and specimen pages ofher handwriting. Errors are few, butthree deserve mention: the cellist is Ed-ward Bisha, not Edmund Bishe; Sir Er-nest MacMillan's wife was Lady Elsie,not Louise; and Sonia's Berlin addressfor over 12 years was Neue Winterfeldt-strasse, not Wintersfeldt, an error re-peated several times. The book originallywas written in German, with all quota-tions from letters, diaries, and other notesleft in the languages they were written in.The author's own translation into Eng-lish was then edited and condensed byGerald Bowler of the University of Mani-toba and the Canadian Nazarene College.The condensation achieves a good bal-ance; if there is one regret about the

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editing, it is that the original languageof quoted excerpts is not indicated. Itwould be interesting to know which let-ters or, since she sometimes switchedfrom one language to another in mid-stream, which passages were written bySonia in English and which were trans-lated from her French or German.

The last chapter is an "Epilogue : TheSearch for Sonia's Father" which shedsmore speculation than light on the mys-tery of the composer's father. The originof my acquaintance with the composeris my private "Sonia mystery" and alsoone that will never be solved. It is certainenough that my conscious introductionto her and Ferdinand took place in themid-1960's when they dropped in at theCBC music library in Toronto (my placeof work at the time) and she placed her-self on top of my desk, unleashing a tor-rent of information about her music. Itwas only some time later that we discov-ered that we had lived in the same dis-trict of Berlin for over 12 years, half ofthat time a mere 150 metres apart, al-though from my parents' apartment totheirs one would have walked a Z-shapedroute. I often played in "the little parkwhere we would sit on a bench on hotsummer evenings," I often boarded thesubway train there, and I crossed theNeue Winterfeldtstrasse a stone's throwfrom their residence some 3,000 timeson my way to or from school. Is it pos-sible that I did not become aware of the"little woman with her assertive manner,determined voice and rather accentuatedmovements" walking with the tall manwith the friendly face ? Curiously enough,we left Berlin at the same time : on June1, 1939, the Eckhardts went to Vienna;11 days later I went to London. Neigh-bours without knowing it, we would fi-nally meet in far-away Canada 25 yearslater.

HELMUT KALLMANN

POLITICS& PARADISEMARIE JAKOBER, Sandinista: A Novel of

Nicaragua. New Star Books, $8.95.

I N A SEEMINGLY IRRELEVANT episode,Jadine, the author surrogate of Sandi-nista, describes her brother's suicide inKerry Heights, Pennsylvania:

What you could do was walk out onto Mc-Kinley bridge at three a.m. and feel thecold that came from the water and thesteel mills and the remorseless eyes of carsthat came from nowhere and passed intonothing; what you could not do was standthere and look at it all and say fuck youand walk into the river. You couldn't dothat and expect a decent burial.

Eryn's death, lodged firmly in Jadine'ssubconscious, becomes a recurring motifin the novel, warning the reader to lookfor patterns beyond the narrative. How-ever, the more immediate relevance ofthe suicide becomes evident, severalpages later, when we are told that San-dino, the leader of the Nicaraguan rebels,was shot and buried under the runwaysof the Las Mercedes airport. Both areheretics, with one essential difference:one refuses to accept while the other de-cides to change. And the desire tochange, to resist in the face of insuper-able odds, becomes the subject matter ofSandinista.

Set in Managua, Marie Jakober's noveltraces the relentless onslaught of the San-dinistas against the desperate and ruth-less Somoza regime of the 1970's. Whatseems at first like the suicidal defiance ofa band of scattered rebels soon becomes apeople's movement, drawing its strengthfrom the shantytowns, the barrios, theclergy, and even the new rich. Like somany political novels of this century,Sandinista, too, portrays the "terriblebeauty" of a revolutionary movement.

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The ring of verisimilitude that charac-terizes the work is implicit in the titleitself. A novel that calls itself Sandinistais, willy-nilly, committed to a referentialmode. In fact, it is the abundance of in-formation, the meticulous attention todetail, combined with a compelling se-quentiality, that contribute so much tothe force of the novel. As the narrativefocus moves from one end of the socialladder to the other, the reader glimpsesthe dismal poverty of the barrios, the bar-barism of the National Guard, the flam-boyant wealth of Milan Valdez, thededication of Father Pepe, the agony ofthe mothers of Hamelin, the total com-mitment of the rebels — all of whichcontribute to the Weltanschauung of thenovel.

The multiplicity of the novel is heldtogether by its linearity, which in turnfalls back on causality. In a work thatfocuses so heavily on the October offen-sive of 1977, causality is perhaps as in-evitable as it is necessary. But both theauthor and the reader are aware that thehistorical reality runs counter to the cau-sality of the novel. Even if the text affirmsthe precarious power of the Somoza dic-tatorship and describes the gradual dis-integration of Daniel and his friends, thereader never forgets that Somoza's daysare numbered. And the novel succeedsnot in spite of this duality but becauseof it.

As the reader becomes increasingly re-sponsive to this and other deliberate gapsin the referential mode, he also becomesaware of the margins of the text. Whatthe novel leaves partially explored nowinvites attention. Eryn's suicide and Ja-dine's presence in the novel, for instance,now acquire significance. Jadine, the ex-patriate Nicaraguan from the States on avisit to Managua, enlists as a volunteer inFather Pepe's clinic. Significantly, she isgiven the task of writing letters to thewestern world describing the suffering of

the country. Even as Jadine attempts todo so in purely métonymie language, sherecognizes the futility of her endeavour.Language, she discovers, obeys its ownrules and obscures or subverts the realityshe so painstakingly tries to convey.

It is no surprise, then, that the textwhich admits its own limitations oftenresorts to paradox. The city of Managua,for example, is "greening with weeds"and contains "streets of shacks and streetsof riches and streets of weeds." Daniel'smemory of Pilar is "like a song, like awound." The characters, too, are often abundle of contradictions. Colonel Davilo,the chief of the National Guard, secretlyadmires the single-mindedness of theSandinistas. Valerian, whose idealismtriggers the imagination of the rebels,carries the secret guilt of all the lives lostunder his direction.

Paradox thus establishes the dichotomybetween pretence and reality, thereby re-iterating that the neat categorizationbetween good and evil in the novel is,after all, no more than a ploy. Like theIntercontinental Hotel which looks likea Mayan pyramid, designed by "some-body who had never seen a real one,"the political reality of the novel becomesvaguely inadequate. The armed resis-tance never loses its hold on the reader,but what the novel appears to de-empha-size becomes, for the reader, a centre offocus.

In its meditative and digressive mo-ments the novel explores its dominantconcern: the quest for identity. All themajor characters in the novel, regardlessof age, class, or ideological commitment,are caught in the same desire to seek inthe midst of turmoil a sense of identity.When Daniel sings "of the fields and theshanties, of women who made clay potsand men who made shoes" or when Ja-dine wonders "how the earth that youcould sleep on without even a blanketcould ever hurt you," one remembers

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Eryn and his gesture of negation in a"homeless" world.

In symbolic terms, this preoccupationwith identity is mirrored in two houses:one, owned by Valdez, represents every-thing money can buy; and the other,owned by Lidia, serves as a hideout forthe Sandinistas. Both houses are describedin terms that suggest, either ostentatiouslyor obliquely, an earthly paradise. In thefinal analysis, both prove futile. Valdez'smansion is opulent, but maintained by abrute power that creates an atmospherein which one hears "Chopin wanderingbewildered in the palm trees." Lidia'shome is a place of mutuality and passion-ate love, but is watched over by a cynicalEduardo and is totally defenceless againstthe wrath of the National Guard. Inboth cases, the metaphor of paradise iscreated, tested and finally dissolved.

Sandinista offers no comforting solu-tions. At best, it stresses the urgency ofthe quest. What is certain, however, isthat for the author of the tendentiousnovel The Mind Gods, this work marksa new phase, a welcome change ofdirection.

C. KANAGANAYAKAM

COLUMNS OF DARKGEORGE FALUDY, Selected Poems: 1933-1980,

ed. & trans. Robin Skelton. McClelland &Stewart, $12.95.

I N I933, WHEN GEORGE FALUDY wastwenty-three years old, "The Ballad ofGeorge Faludy's Only Love" appeared onthe front page of the Sunday supplementof Budapest's leading liberal newspaper.It marked, we are told in a brief bio-graphical note, his initial literary success.One can see why the poem would haveappeal. It is very much a clever youngman's somewhat cynical view of love.There is the assumption of a world-

weary pose as this young man, who isidentified by the initials GF, living inVienna, "that desolate city," has his firstpassionate encounter with a girl calledNatasha "in the grey room of a pension."

Natasha murmured at dawn, as they laytogether,

"Well, now, you are not a virgin either!"Very shortly GF ran out of money;even on red-letter days his shirt collars were

dirty,but she, a student of medicine,shrugged off all those who asked questions

about him,washed his shirts, and brushed his coat,and listened to everything he went on

about.In bed they sometimes discussed Chekhov,her each small breast like an orange cut in

half.

Eventually they come to a parting of theways. GF, showing not the slightest emo-tion, sees her off at the railway station."On the way home he bought chestnutsand forgot her."

Two other women, Metta and Fritzie,serve his needs for awhile, then areabandoned and quickly forgotten. Thefourth woman he meets, Eva Scherff, en-snares him, but she is "cold, capricious,and wholly mean." She tortures andteases him, and withholds "her dearbody, tight-sheathed in its silken dress, /which every other idiot could possess."But it is this woman, a typical belle damesans merci, whom he can never forget,"never, never, never."

All kinds of echoes in this poem remindus of the fin de siècle poets of England,France, and Austria. One can imagineBeardsley illustrating it, though Beards-ley's line was perhaps a bit too elegant.Faludy's poems of the years 1933 to 1935all have the aura of decadence aboutthem. Even the titles of many of thesepoems, "To Celia, My Faithless Love"and "Danse Macabre," for example, re-mind us of the melodies we first heardin the 1890's, although now somewhat

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coarser, more astringent than thosesounded by earlier poets who sang totheir Celias:

I came upon her on a day of summerwhen the sweating cheeks of the golden sunhung like a greasy bum above the water.The blue sky held no clouds at all, not one.I had not played the violin betweena woman's thighs so long that when we

touchedhot honey filled our laps and rapture rushedupon us; as the night began to thickenI broke branches from a lilac bushand little tremblings blessed our naked skin.

So the attitudes of the fin de siècleare now expressed in the modern poeticidiom that developed in the 1920's and1930's. But within this context the char-acteristic voice of George Faludy clearlyemerges. I use the English version of hisfirst name. What the voice of GyörgyFaludy sounds like I am unfortunatelyunable to say. Faludy is a poet who makesme wish that I knew Hungarian, buteven in translation the personal, uniquesignature of the artist is manifest. There'sno mistaking it. I made the test of com-paring the work of the various trans-lators who have contributed to this vol-ume. For though Robin Skelton is re-sponsible, "in collaboration with theauthor," for the majority of the transla-tions in the Selected Poems, there arealso translations by no fewer than tenothers, and in all the translations it isclearly the same poet whose voice wehear. It is a strong voice, tough and col-loquial. The voice is most characteristicwhen it speaks in long poems where thelines are flexible and sinewy, the imagesprecisely observed, and experience ren-dered directly. In the best and mostmemorable Faludy poems everything al-ways happens NOW, before our eyes, evenwhen events long past are recalled andbrooded upon, as in the marvellous "ToMy Father" (1971), or in "Vienna,1930" where he recalls, in 1956, the citywhere he had lived as a student and des-

perately wanted to become a publishedpoet. In one of his most searing poems,"The Execution of Imre Nagy" (1958),he renders powerfully, only two yearsafter the event, the last moment of thedoomed leader of the Hungarian uprisingin 1956:

The end. He guessed it would be hardbut by now it made no difference— the door opened : cursing,the goons jumped on him with iron bars,crushed his shouldersand broke his armsand then placed a leather strapunder his chin and tied it around his headso that standing under the gallowshe wouldn't be able to say Magyarorszag,and they kicked him along the corridorand he stumbled, half blindwithout his pince-nez, then pityinglyhe looked around the courtyardbut couldn't make out the hangman'sfrightened face, nor Kâdârwho stood there cowering, drunk,flanked by two Russian officers.

By the time Faludy writes of ImreNagy's death, he had himself experiencedsome of the special hells that thewretched ideologues of our century havebeen so prolific in creating. It is one ofFaludy's great achievements that he hasborne witness to the degradations of ourtime and has maintained his own moralintegrity. His poetry is a kind of spiritualautobiography, but it transcends themerely personal. Faludy's fate is sharedby millions of others and by speaking ofwhat he has witnessed and of what hehas suffered, he gives them a voice also.

When Faludy was writing his earlypoems and creating the youthful, some-what cynical persona of young GF, Eu-rope was already burning. Hitler, Mus-solini, and Stalin were strutting on thestage and clerico-fascist secondary actorslike Dolfuss in Austria, Horthy in Hun-gary, and Franco in Spain were alreadyplaying supporting roles in the unfoldingtragedy. How all-consuming the firewould become was still, in the early

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1930's, quite unthinkable. Certainly, wehave no inkling in the early poems trans-lated here of the conflagration that wasto consume Europe barely a decade later.It is only in a brief biographical sketchat the end of this volume that we are toldthat Faludy was "passionately opposed toNicholas Horthy's regime in Hungary be-cause of its fascist sympathies," and that"in 1933 [he] began to express his viewsin a series of poems which he describedas 'free' translations of the Frenchmedieval poet François Villon. Whilesome of these poems were derived fromVillon, a good many of them wereFaludy's own creations." It is a pity thatwe don't have at least some of these textsin this volume. By the end of the 1930's,at any rate, barely forestalling imprison-ment, Faludy had fled from Hungary toFrance and after the fall of France foundhimself a refugee in Morocco.

The poems of the period 1940-41 re-veal a personality very different from theGF who first appeared in the poems of1933 and 1934. Gone is the assumptionof the easy cynicism of a man of theworld. In the North African poems asophisticated Central European encoun-ters an alien civilization:

Death swarms here.And if you're young, you're his special

darling:he enters the bed at climax,he takes the next chair at meals.Yet everything I used to love at homeis altered here, become so muchirrelevant window-dressing. Boring. Fake.And what, back there, disgusted me — thisvicious, barbarous country —is more like final truth.

In "Promenade at Dusk" and in"Death of a Chleuch Dancer" there areviolent confrontations; in the love poems("Alba One," "On the Tower of theKasbah," for instance), the sensuality ofthe early poems is still there, but without

the affectation and without the cleverposing. The sensuality is raw now:

We're closing in,two ruthless duellists, and from heel

to thighyou spread yourself in challenge: well,

can Inail shut the curious lips of your shell

— and win?The moon attends in the garden, through

the palms,flushing our pillow with its coppery light.Grapple me, clutch my neck with both

hands, tight:trumpet our love's defiance to the night.You're whimpering now, as I begin to bitethe parched and wispy dark beneath your

arm.We follow Faludy as he moves from

North Africa to the United States andreturns finally to Hungary after the endof the war, only to come quickly intoconflict with the brutal Stalinist regimeof the immediate post-war era. "I had adream of a free country, / but woke to aSoviet colony."

Our sadist quisling with the headof an ostrich egg has gothis eye on me. He wants me dead.

Although Faludy wasn't killed, he wasimprisoned in 1950 and remained inprison until 1953 when, after Stalin'sdeath, he was released. Some of the mostinteresting poems in the collection, writ-ten in various prisons, record the experi-ence. They are distinguished by a clarityof perception and a precision of expres-sion. They are never self-pitying, andthough they do of course deal with theappalling conditions of prison life, themain interest of these poems is in theircontemplative, reflective nature. Shut inby prison walls, made anonymous ("Allprisoners are the same; / a body is just abody"), the mind turns to contemplatethe human condition. This involves arecalling and necessary re-ordering of thepast ("Prison Letter to a Grande Dameof Yore," "Solitary Confinement") and

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an effort to discern a pattern, perhapseven some meaning in what must oftenseem an arbitrary, cruelly indifferentworld ("Soliloquy on Life and D eath,""Western Australia").

The arbitrariness of existence is under lined when Faludy, together with his wifeand son, leaves H ungary once more andfinds refuge in London, only to watch hiswife die of cancer in 1963. This, too, isrecorded, characteristically in a numberof love poems, and these are among themost moving poems Faludy has written.Like the prison poems, these poems arewithout self pity. N o false sentiment in vades the text, and like the prison poemsthey both record and reflect upon thenature of existence :

There is no mercy. If I leaptafter you I 'd be denied.No voice echoes my lament.None stir upon the other side.Life turns to dust, the world's one talean empty shell without the snail.

At last, if the poems can be used asevidence, Faludy finds a safe haven inCanada. In 1970, at the age of sixty, hesettles in Toronto. The storms and ago nies of a representative Central Europeanlife in the first and middle decades of thetwentieth century are now mercifully inthe past. H e has left us a record of themin powerful poems of experience trans formed and made permanent in thesmithy of the imagination.

From 1966 onwards philosophical con templation, though never absent fromFaludy's poetry, becomes more central,and Faludy seems increasingly to haveused the sonnet as the form most suitablefor condensing the essence of experience.At the same time, the young Faludy,lover of women and of the world, andthe Faludy outraged by the venality ofhuman behaviour, is still there, lookingover the shoulder of the old poet who, atthe age of seventy, pays his respect toPetronius whom he has worshipped for

fifty years because he was able to create"gaiety, radiance, beauty, / although heknew the columns of the dark / werealready blocking gates and doors."

H EN RY KREISEL

LILLY & WILLIEHEATHER ROBERTSON, Lily: A Rhapsody in

Red. James Lorimer, $24.95.

Lily: A Rhapsody in Red is the secondvolume in H eather Robertson's trilogy"Th e King Years." Like the first, Willie:A Romance (1983), it is an imaginative,daring, and frequently hilarious blend ofhistorical fact and flamboyant fiction.Basing her narratives on meticulous his torical research, Robertson employs thetechniques of the political satirist and thenovelist to recreate a time of social andpolitical turmoil. I n so doing, Robertsonexplores not only the issues and events ofCanadian history during the modern era,but also the issues which have come topreoccupy many writers and literarytheorists in our "postmodernist" age. In corporating historical documents within afictional narrative, inventing private livesfor public figures, intertwining the livesof actual historical people with those offictitious characters, Robertson exploresthe problematical relations between factand fiction, writing and reality.

The temporal framework for "T h eKing Years" is provided by the publicrecord of events in Canadian history dur ing the period of William Lyon Macken zie King's political career. Willie: A Ro mance covers the period 1914 to 1918,the years of the G reat War and of King'spolitical apprenticeship. Lily: A Rhap sody in Red covers the years 1919 toJ935) period during which Kingemerged as the dominant force in Cana dian politics. Robertson approaches thepublic record from the private side to

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produce a satirical exposé of hypocrisyand corruption in our political systemand reveal the inadequacy of our politicalculture in the face of the profound socialand economic dislocations of the post-First World War era. At the centre of thepolitical structure sits the enigmatic fig-ure of Wm. L. M. King. As she didin Willie, in which King is a major actorin the plot, in Lily, Robertson presentsKing mainly through his own words. Al-though he plays little part in the actionof Lily, King's presence is always felt.Our awareness of his central role is main-tained by excerpts from his diaries (writ-ten as private journals, now part of thepublic record) which are inserted at in-tervals throughout the text.

Both Willie and Lily have large castsof characters, "real" and fictional. InLily we meet, in addition to King, suchactual historical personages as Nellie Mc-Glung, Vincent Massey, Norman Beth-une, and Edward, Prince of Wales. Weencounter an obnoxious young GordonSinclair, and an even less appealingHarry Houdini. The fictional charactersinclude a mysterious man named Essel-wein who appears throughout the storyin a variety of guises — Communist Partyorganizer, RGMP officer, Nazi — and theCoolican family: Jack, whose career en-compasses professional hockey, gold-mining, stock market manipulation,bootlegging, aviation, and the CanadianSenate, among other things; Christina,alias "Mr. Legion," a madwoman whocures the insane, sometime medium toKing, and prophet of apocalypse; andLily, sister of Jack, daughter of Christina,professional photographer, and secretwife of Willie King.

Lily is the major protagonist in bothnovels: her voice, her perception andinterpretation of the dizzying welter ofcharacters and events bring coherence tothe story. The title Lily: A Rhapsody inRed alludes to Lily's somewhat irregular

involvement with the Communist Partyof Canada. In the first part of the novel,"Way Up North," the activities of theparty, which include a successful butshort-lived revolution in Kirkland Lake,are treated farcically; in the second sec-tion, "Way Out West," as the Depressiondeepens, the humour blackens. A secon-dary plot emerges in this second part ofthe book. Basing her reconstruction ofcharacter and event as always on histori-cal documentation — in this case news-paper accounts and transcripts of twosensational Edmonton trials — Robertsonrecounts the tale of the downfall of theBrownlee government in Alberta. It is asordid story of abuse of power, seduction,and exploitation; leavened by Robert-son's satiric wit, it affords opportunityfor telling remarks on the rights, orrather the lack of rights, accordedwomen under Canadian law during the1930's.

Through Lily, who is an artist figure,Robertson explores the potential of artboth to illuminate and to distort reality.As a photographer, Lily knows that apicture can lie; she is highly skilled inthe techniques of photographic misrep-resentation. As a writer, she consciouslyavoids the temptation to follow the nar-rative path of least resistance. She is sus-picious of the devices we employ to helpourselves see more clearly. Reflecting onthe bookishness of the men in her life,and on their dependence upon eyeglassesto enhance their vision, Lily "saw howirrevocably [her] life had been shaped bymen who looked at life obliquely, througha lens, in the pool of the printed page:too careful, or afraid, to look it in theeye." Lily herself looks at life through acamera's lens and uses the medium oflanguage in her attempts to make senseof it all. But at least she is aware of thepotential of both lens and language todeflect our gaze from reality, and shestruggles to face experience directly.

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Above all, Lily has an eye for the ab-surd. Her voice gives the novel its re-markable energy, and makes reading it avastly entertaining experience, even asthe story/history raises profoundly dis-turbing issues. Lily: A Rhapsody in Redends, characteristically, on a note of blackhumour, as Lily prepares to leave forGermany as a member of King's en-tourage: "Everyone is going to Berlinthese days. It's the 'in' thing to visit Hit-ler, like visiting the Matterhorn." Wemay anticipate that the third and finalvolume of "The King Years" will be asamusing, as absorbing, and as disquietingas the first two.

LINDA LAMONT-STEWART

MEDIA WOMENSUSAN CREAN, Newsworthy: The Lives of

Media Women. Stoddart, $24.95.

THOSE WHO REGULARLY view BarbaraFrum hosting Canada's most prestigiouscurrent affairs program and note themany crisply professional women report-ing the national news may be forgivenfor believing that Canadian women jour-nalists have achieved equality in the newsmedia. Susan Crean's purpose in writingNewsworthy: The Lives of Media Womenis to ask whether women are more thana highly visible minority in the mediabusiness and to examine the history ofwomen in Canadian journalism.

A media woman herself, havingworked in newspapers, magazines, andcurrent affairs television, Crean is a well-placed observer. Her interviews withmore than one hundred of her colleaguesrepresent the experience of women in allbranches of journalism. Each chapterhighlights the personal style and careerhistory of a handful of successful womenin a specific field — newspaper colum-nists, radio broadcasters, or television

newsreaders, for example — who thendiscuss their lives and their work. Crean'sstyle is chatty and colloquial, giving thereader plenty of background colour andbackroom gossip. Not surprisingly, shewrites as a journalist rather than scholar.As a result, the book resembles a seriesof magazine articles which is given con-tinuity by Crean's middle-of-the-roadfeminist perspective.

Although Crean claims that her re-search has given her "a sense of the cen-tury old history of women journalists inCanada," she demonstrates a typicaljournalist's concentration on the presentand the living. While her chapter on thefirst women journalists introduces thebest known turn-of-the-century figures —Sara Jeannette Duncan, Kit Coleman,Gaetane de Montreuil, and Cora Hind— it ignores the less-famous and perhapsless-brilliant women who nevertheless es-tablished journalism as a respectable pro-fession for women during the 1910's and1920's. Repeated references to Cora Hindmay pay tribute to an early pioneer, butthey fail to document in depth how aCanadian tradition of women in journal-ism developed.

Crean is more successful in tracingwomen's contribution to the media sinceWorld War II. Through the recollectionsof present-day journalists such as Eliza-beth Gray, she shows how, for three gen-erations, media women have nurturedtheir successors' careers. Moreover, as in-creasing numbers of women gained afoothold in Canadian media they beganto influence what would be consideredworthy of public attention. At the sametime, a female presence became an essen-tial status symbol for commercial radiostations and for current affairs televisionprograms eager to prove their broad-mindedness and to enlarge their audi-ences. In tracing women's infiltrationinto all branches of Canadian media,

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Crean provides an alternative guide torecent Canadian cultural history.

It is hardly remarkable that mostmedia women built their careers in tra-ditionally female, lower status depart-ments such as the society column or day-time broadcasting. In common withmany feminists, Grean is ambivalentabout this female ghetto in journalism.On one hand she reserves her highestpraise for women who made it in thetraditionally male mainstream as "hardnews" gatherers, political interviewers,and foreign correspondents. Yet, on theother hand, Crean recognizes that womencould create a more innovative and con-troversial style of journalism in the wom-en's section because there they were lessclosely scrutinized by powerful and con-servative editors or producers.

In the final analysis Newsworthy ispredominantly a collection of female suc-cess stories. Naturally, headliners such asBarbara Frum and Jan Tennant are"newsworthy" in a way that obscure as-sistant producers and behind-the-scenesresearchers are not. Nevertheless, Crean'sconcentration on the vocal and the vis-ible few weakens her assertion thatwomen have not achieved the authoritythey deserve in the media world. Whileshe does point out the difficulties thesewomen have surmounted — discrimina-tion, sexual harassment, absence of ma-ternity leave, and limits to advancement— her subjects are not ordinary womendoing typical media jobs. Crean's centralargument is that the high profile of a fewCanadian women journalists obscures thelow status of the many. Yet her bookmay prove most popular with readerspursuing a backstage look at some fa-mous names. Ironically, it is through thisinterest in the media star system that themyth of the influence of media women inCanada is perpetuated.

MARJ ORY LANG

CIRCLE GAMESARiTHA VAN HERK, No Fixed Address. Mc-

Clelland & Stewart, $19.95.MARY BURNS, Suburbs of the Arctic Circle.

Penumbra, $9.95.H. R. PERCY, A Model Lover. Stoddart, $12.95.IN ATWOOD'S POEM "The Circle Game,"children are mechanically engaged in acircular dance about which Atwood is-sues the following warning: "we mightmistake this / tranced moving for joy /but there is no joy in it." In the threebooks discussed here a similar circlegame is enacted; under the guise ofchild's play the fertile imagination fromwhich stories are born is thwarted. Theresult is as disturbing as the deadeningdance: there are no stories adequate tothe situations of individuals presented inthese books.

No Fixed Address follows the bizarrelife of Arachne, a definite non-yuppywho rebels against stereotypical defini-tions of women both in her work (as busdriver and then as travelling salesperson )and in her interpersonal relations (mostpointedly in her insatiable desire for cas-ual sex). It is one of Arachne's sexualpartners, the eighty-year-old Josef, whogives Arachne a copper plate on whichhe has shaped figures, "imprisoned inmotion," caught in a "relentless andcomically sad" "circular dance." Arachnedoes not ask what the "grotesque" figuresmean; her response is instead to laughout loud.

The implications of this dance do notaffect Arachne; her "main difficulty liesin keeping herself amused" and not inquestioning from whence that amuse-ment comes. Nevertheless, it at first ap-pears that she may have escaped the stul-tifying rhythm of the dance by virtue ofher refusal to be circumscribed and fixedby the story (her memories are "erasedand erased") or by place.

But No Fixed Address is a difficult

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book to pin down. Its two endings point,on the one hand, to a "roadless world";on the other, to the statement: "therewill be no end to this road." There iseither an endless road or no road at all.Similarly, Arachne appropriates her free dom in the personal gesture of sheddingher underwear (underwear in this novelis a metaphor for the repression ofwomen) while at the same time under mining this gesture in her public profes sion as underwear salesperson, thus per petuating the system she attempts toundo. Contradictions like these add depthto the text but they also boggle any de cisive interpretation. In the end thestructure strains and, despite the enter taining and engaging style, the image ofwomen presented between the lines is tooclose to the pathetic copper figures forcomfort: relentless and comically sad.

In contrast to the baffling movement ofArachne, the characters in Mary Burns'scollection of short stories Suburbs of theArctic Circle are very much rooted inplace, and their sense of self comes fromthis sense of place. There is an oppositionset up between the people in the smallnorthern town where these stories are forthe most part situated and those who areon the "Outside." This dichotomy alonecreates an understanding of self (in re action to what it is not) that is muchmore firmly grounded than anything wesee in No Fixed Address.

Burns provides a sensitive portrayal ofthat compelling small town curiosity be cause she couples it with the equally in sistent desire not to know, the desire notto tell a story. In the title story the cluesto a crime are slowly unravelled in anattempt to piece together the truth. Butas the story progresses it becomes clearthat in fact no one really wants to hearwhat happened. This same idea is re peated again and again, most notably in"T h e M en on My Window." Knowingthe story signals an involvement, and

consequently a responsibility, that manycharacters wish to avoid. The desire notto tell the story is approached from adifferent angle in "Collected Bear Stor ies." H ere telling the story causes theintensity of the actual event — confron tation with a bear — to fade. The nar rator, "afraid to lose it [the reality of theexperience] all together [ ' ]," stops tell ing the story.

Burns, however, does keep telling thestory and she does so surprisingly wellgiven the limitations of her always sim ple and unpretentious style. The move ment of the first story, which traces theslow collapsing inward of one small town,parallels the structure of the collection asa whole: each story moves closer to avery concrete centre, the arctic circle,that is reached in the final story. Theattempted experimentation ("A JointCommunique," for example) is not suc cessful and the unvaried tone becomes abit tiresome but the insights into isola tion, place, and story are worth making.

H . R. Percy's The Model Lover fallssomewhere between Van H erk's opposi tion to that which fixes (the story andplace) and Burns's opposition to thatwhich distorts (the story). Percy's char acters try to make art work for them, tomake art not only adequate to their ex perience but also to surpass it, to articu late an inarticulate silence, all that "twoshynesses could not say." G iven the am bitiousness of this aim it is not surprisingthat the attempt repeatedly ends in fail ure. In fact, seven of the eighteen storiesthat are collected here deal explicitlywith art (music, architecture, and sculp ture) and in each story the desired "ar t "object is either flawed, destroyed, or in complete.

In "Afterglow," one of the experimen tal (and less successful) stories, Percywrites somewhat presumptuously: "F orwhat was being reduced to ashes therewas not merely the erotic dream [a

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carved nude that a boy had made] butthe soul of the artist he knew he shouldhave been." This statement points notonly to the destroyed art object but alsoto the connection between art andlove/eros which it made explicit whenPercy states that "art and love both"must attempt the impossible. This rela-tionship is neatly conveyed in the titlewhich suggests both an ideal (model)lover, and one who loves toy models (al-though in this book they are elevated toan art form) ; both are meanings whichmodulate and shape the telling of thesotry. But again neither the toy modelnor the ideal lover are ever realized.

In each text characters are, in one wayor another, arrested in the relentlessdance, a dance which the story (imagina-tion) is in no position to challenge ordisplace. In general, Van Herk's andBurns's characters react negatively tohearing the story while Percy's charactersunsuccessfully tell the story (or createthe work of art). If the prisoning rhythmis to be broken it can probably only be inthe activity of telling, in listening to whatis told, and in the acceptance of respon-sibility that an informed telling demands.Nevertheless, Arachne's response is stilltempting: laughter and irreverence.

BARBARA LECKIE

FOUR POETSGERALD HILL, Heartwood. Thistledown, $7.95.MARK FRUTKiN, The Alchemy of Clouds. Fid-

dlehead: Goose Lane, $6.95.PAT JASPER, Recycling. Fiddlehead: Goose

Lane, $7.95.MAGGIE HELwiG, Tongues of Men and Angels.

Oberon, $9.95.

IN Heartwood, GERALD HILL'S first collec-tion of poems, the influence of the landthe poet grew up in is subtle but per-vasive. The poems communicate a sense

of spaciousness and restlessness. Theytend to focus on things moving andfree — jets, clouds, balloons, and birdseagles, hawks, pelicans, budgies — andthey express their predominant moodthrough phrases like "I floated," "Isoared," "my arms float." In the openingpoem, "A Boy's Time, How He MarksIt," a boy digging in the dirt fantasizesabout flying with the Golden Hawks, anair force aerobatic team. If his face ispressed against the earth, it is only to"sight / along a runway" he's con-structed; what he wants is "to be / abovethe earth." In his imagination, he "flies /like a white hand reaching / for theblue." If there's a lot of digging in theground going on in these poems, it's ofa pretty superficial nature — childrenplaying, people gardening; as with theboy, the longing is to be "above theearth" and, quite clearly, free of it. In"Anecdote of Sadness and Flight," a hu-morous and oddly poignant lyric, Dave'sbudgie alludes to its having "broke /through the silver door / high over Nel-son." Dave himself was apparently mak-ing plans to leave Nelson but, as the birdobserves, "I broke free / and beat you toit." In "Anecdote of the Eagle," thespeaker is plucked gently from his canoeby an eagle and carried high above theland to see as "an eagle sees." As in somany of his other poems, Hill lets hisimagination soar freely. What he offers isflight in the process as well as theproduct.

The restless unifying impulse in Heart-wood is expressed in various intricatelyconnected ways. Like the imagination,memory offers ascent and freedom fromthe land. In "The Grid Roads," peoplereminiscing become hawks: "For a mo-ment our bodies lighten / and the birchfalls away." There are pleasant memoriesof distant places, love in Cape Cod inone poem, lovers in another, paintingeach other's bodies under "the rusting /

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fronds of palm trees." Love itself offersfreedom. In "Bob Tells Phoebe about herSkin," the speaker declares "I am wing"and describes how his pleasure is to"skim / over" his love's body; in makinglove to her he traces "loops and slow /currents in the coloured air."

Though the desire for freedom fromthe land is strong in Heartwood, the pre-vailing mood is light. Hill's humour isuniquely whimsical in nature. The open-ing line of "Anecdote of Sadness andFlight" is typical : "This is your budgiespeaking, Dave." "Pelican Air" offers adelightful series of glimpses into a peli-can-centred universe. There is some gen-tle irony in "If Lafleur Never PlaysAgain," one of two good hockey poemsin the collection. Nearing the end of hisbrilliant career, Lafleur declares "I donot fear injury. My hair is famous fromMoscow to Nanaimo. / I'm thirty-three."In "Labour Day, Unemployed," theirony is sharper. In search of work, thespeaker finds himself having to deal witha priggish Manpower official who alsohappens to be a former schoolmate of hislittle sister. The man wonders disapprov-ingly at the life the speaker has led:

You've been there so far away?Doing all these other things?Why not remain still, in this heatand rise in the normal manner upwardstowards the hot sky, the hot jobsas I have done.

Perhaps "Labour Day, Unemployed" of-fers the key to the collection as a whole.Poems like "The Cyclone Season" and"Heartwood" express some apprehensionabout the harshness of the prairie en-vironment; however, it may not be theprairie itself as much as the prevailingethic of its inhabitants which has sentthe poet soaring, rising in his own way asopposed to the "normal manner."

Appropriately in a collection of poemswhich take us up into the air as theseoften do, the language throughout is light

and tough. The imagery is imaginativeand often pleasantly surprising. A youngwoman turning twenty-one muses on hersituation: "my skin is where the goldencats lick." The images also suggest clearlyenough that the poet knows his ownworld well; in the prairie winter night,"puck sounds hang / like chunks in theair." Though there are spots in thesepoems where the humour falters or thelanguage becomes obscure, this is a goodcollection. The poems are innovativewithout being pretentious and they workwell together.

The Alchemy of Clouds is a small bookoffering Mark Frutkin's second collectionof poems. Exotic in both its setting andlanguage, it reveals in the poet a roman-tic vision of the world and his art. In"Exile," he expresses his concern that athome his poetic sensibility grows duller,more stagnant; he has come to see hisfamiliar world "more like a mountain /than a stream, / more like a stone." Hisresponse is self-imposed exile. He sets outinto the larger world with the intentionof "learning how to walk the highway /joining the braided voices of men." Mostof his poems are descriptive and focus onsuch faraway places as Paris, India, andAfrica. They have a marked Eastern feelabout them; the imagery is as sensuousas the places described while the tone isformal and contained. As well, the poemsare rich in their colours and wide in theirexpanse, yet economical in their lan-guage. This tension between extrava-gance and restraint marks the best ofFrutkin's work:

Evening song.Sun setting in the throat of a bird.Orange warbling.Pure water in the glass turns dark.Everything turns dark.Night blooms.

Frutkin's view of Appollinaire's po-etry, "brilliant tight poems / like a smallwindow," seems to suggest his own ideal.

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His idea is to capture the mystery of anintense moment and reveal it as suc-cinctly as possible. When he is successful,the poems are strong, as can be seen in"Indian Miniatures," "River of Dreams,"or the delightful lyric, "Duchamp's Hat."Sometimes, though, a softness in the lan-guage and a slight straining for the pro-found becomes apparent. One is a littleuncomfortable with lines like

never shall I know every treeon these hillsnever shall I learn preciselyhow we are woven from this forest.

Nonetheless, the strong poems in thebook more than offset the weak, and thelast section, in particular, is worth specialmention. Here, in a small group of verygood poems, Frutkin's subject is theFrench poet Appollinaire. Poems like"What Appollinaire's Friends Said AboutHim," "Bells," and "Bracelets" retain thevirtues of poems in the first sections,economy, intensity, and perceptiveness ;as well, they are stronger for the delicateirony present, more restrained, and betterunified. Though there are many othergood poems in The Alchemy of Clouds,this small section alone makes this collec-tion worth reading.

After Heartwood and The Alchemy ofClouds, Pat Jasper's first collection ofpoems lands us rather abruptly back ina more familiar world. Less exotic in itssetting and moods, Recycling is con-cerned with the "small close spaces" ofthe family — with domestic relationships,crises, and patterns — and with comingto terms with time. These poems do notoffer ways of escape from the day-to-dayworld but the view that there is no es-cape. It there are refuges, they offer onlybrief respite (though they are no less im-portant for that) : a hiding place "be-neath an old wooden bridge," a "hotbath," a "year's supply of Neil SimonMovies." The book is autobiographical

in its feel, focusing on a woman's mem-ories of childhood and of her havingchildren of her own. Domestic crises aretriggered by such things as alcoholism,juvenile delinqency, shell shock, politicalactivism, mental breakdown, and a smallboy's broken arm. As well, the poet isconcerned with the power of time bothto destroy and to heal.

All of the poems in Recycling are in-teresting and many are quite strong.Where the collection seems a little weakis in some of the poems furthest from thepresent; too often these lapse into littlemore than a recounting of events. Thelanguage becomes too prosey and thepoems go a little flat. The reader's re-sponse is more to the crisis involved thanthe way in which it is conveyed. Perhapsin dealing with these early memories, thepoet has unconsciously given away herhaving already come to terms with them.This seems to be suggested by some ofthe poems set in the present. These dealwith the speaker's feelings in the presenttoward events of the past and the mem-bers of her family involved. What may beclearly seen is a truce — undeclared butpromising nonetheless — with the mem-bers of her family and with life itself. Allof these poems in the last section arestrong but two are outstanding, "To MyDaughter, Ironing On Christmas Eve"and "Late Afternoon in Ghincoteague"in which the speaker and her agingalcoholic father go crab-fishing together.Having learned about the problems ofraising a family, she is wryly content withsmall talk to "skirt the edges of deeperwater." Having learned as well about theneed for refuges, she understands that hisdrinking helps make him "numb enoughto face the night ahead" and she reachesto "help him up." In the end, the readeris left with a woman much wiser for herexperience and willingness to settle forsmall victories.

The structure of this book has been

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given special attention; each of the foursections focuses on a different period inthe speaker's life. As well, the concludinglines in the last two poems provide afeeling of her life coming full circle andaffirm the book's note of wary optimism.Here the poet portrays herself as some-thing of a girl again and even after allshe has gone through, one happier thanshe was first time around. There isalso an underlying ironic note sustainedthroughout in the poet's frequent refer-ence to her activism in the idealistic1960's. In the end she is content withthese smaller victories in a smaller the-atre.

Maggie Helwig's The Tongues of Menand Angels is a startling and demandingbook. It is thoroughly fascinating in itsunusual subject matter and flawless in itsexecution. The poet is particularly adeptat making use of imagery, pace, and shortand broken lines for dramatic effect. Intwo series of connected poems, her sub-jects are John Dee (astrologer to QueenElizabeth) and Johannes Kepler, bothsixteenth-century scientists who devotedthemselves to searching the heavens, Deeto know God and Kepler to destroy Himthrough mathematics and then to resur-rect Him through music. What MaggieHelwig focuses on is the intensity of thequest and the peril of penetrating toonear truth and too far beyond the limitsof other men's knowledge. As well, she isconcerned with the terrible price men arewilling to pay — and do pay — in pursuitof their heavenly and earthly desires.

In "Dr. Dee & the Angels" the dramais unfaltering. In a series of short lyricsinterspersed with dramatic interludes, thelearned Dr. Dee possesses a crystal whichenables him to make contact with theheavenly spirits. Through his skryer,Edward Kelley, "crystal of the crystal,"Dee becomes increasingly caught up withthe angels, working his way ever nearer"the secret / of all secret names." How-

ever, it is not the Doctor's quest that isat the focal point of these poems but thetrials of his wife Jane. Watchful as wellas beautiful, she is apprehensive from thebeginning about her husband's dealingsboth with the spirits and the "dark-faced" skryer who makes them acces-sible. External events help build thedrama. Dee and his small entourage facepoverty, hunger, political impediments,many hard journeys by sea and land;they travel through the winter to Grakow,later to the castle of the "half-mad Em-peror in Prague," then from city to cityfleeing a warrant for their arrest issuedby Rome. However, the main source ofthe mounting intensity in the poems andof the cause of the problems with theangels is the dark side of the skryer'snature. Unlike Dee, whose powerful de-sire is to know the heavens, the equallypassionate Kelley is hungry for things ofthis world — gold and the Doctor'sgolden-haired wife. Her despair for herchildren's welfare and her loneliness withher husband "afloat with the angels"growing ever stronger, Jane is alwaysaware of the skryer watching her, his"deep eyes around her like / a pair ofhungry dogs." Kelley's hatred of his ownwife Joan (whom the angels have com-manded him to marry) and her aware-ness of his feelings add to the tension.The poems reach their dramatic climaxwhen Kelley reveals the dreadful natureof what he claims is God's command tothe four of them. This leads to a suddenexplosion of tension in two brilliantlyconceived scenes of violent action in thefourth-to-last and last lyrics in the se-quence; in between, the nightmarishopening vision in the "Prologue" of Dr.Dee trapped inside his own crystal ismade comprehensible.

"The Dream of Joh. Kepler" is a dra-matic monologue and, if it is lessdramatic than "Dr. Dee & the Angels,"it is more moving because of the reader's

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greater intimacy with the central figure.As Dee's has done, Kepler's work, even-tually leads him to Prague. If he faresbetter than Dee under Rudolf II andrises to become the "famous Doctor," heis well aware of his humble origins as the"prince of mud" and of the murky na-ture of his early education. His embit-tered mother, accused later in her life ofwitchcraft, was his first teacher. Shepassed on to her son her dark knowledge,part of which was "how to hurt withnumbers" and prophesied that one dayhe would "wear a magic crown." Per-haps ironically, perhaps because of thislegacy, Kepler becomes the "ImperialMathematician." If Dee's ambition is toreach God to know his secrets, Kepler's(inspired by Copernicus) is to "clean theuniverse," to attain to "God in a calcu-lation" — in effect to destroy him and"bear His crown." However ambitiousand relentless he is in his quest, he is notmalicious in his motivation and he be-gins to have doubts about his work as hecomes to see how it deprives life of itsvalue and purpose: "Be / is a word with-out meaning." His "new astronomy"leaves him with a hollow sense of victoryand "alone. / A winter king / beneath ashattered throne."

Taking us deep into Kepler's mind,this poem gives us a different perspectiveon themes presented as well in "Dr. Dee& the Angels," the brilliance and relent-lessness of these early men of science aswell as their isolation and doubts. Thesepoems ultimately concern their efforts tosave their souls. Both sequences in thisbook are hauntingly beautiful. As well,they are slightly unnerving. There seemsto be something of the skryer about Mag-gie Helwig herself. Her gaze seems for-midably penetrating and her language asterse and high-pitched as might be ex-pected of someone communicating for-bidden visions.

RANDALL MAGGS

ELSEWHEREThe Dictionary of Imaginary Places appearedfirst in ig8o; in an expanded paperback for-mat, edited by Alberto Manguel and GianniGuadalupi (Lester & Orpen Dennys, $19.95),it takes its readers on another charmed voyageinto the spaces of the fanciful and the un-known (though not, as it happens, far intoscience fiction). The book is easy to use, indictionary format. Places from Laputa andXanadu to the Land of the Kosekins findspace here — and the new edition adds some150 or so new entries, drawn from the worksof Atwood, Findley, Guy Gavriel Kay, Eco,Hoffman, and others. The editors treat theworld of the imagination with seriousness —the book is full of maps, diagrams, and cogentsummaries of the social habits of the denizensof imaginary worlds — but also with wit.There is enough of the contemporary travelguide about the book to read it as satire aswell. For many reasons, then, it's a browser'sdelight. Coincidentally, Viking Penguin haspublished a hardbound, colour-illustrated En-cyclopedia of Things That Never Were, ed.Michael Page and Robert Ingpen ($24.95).This book also offers adventures, but they're ofa more impressionistic sort, and the book'sformat is harder to use. The editors cast theirnet over a smaller territory (no Canadianshere, and no detailed maps) ; Australian inorigin, the book does offer a few South Pacificreferences. While paying reference to Maorimyth, however, it offers no glimpse of nativeAmerican myth; while listing Brobdingnagand Lilliput, it leaves out Oz. The colour de-signs, moreover, are moody, romantic, andEurocentric: the heroes are predominantlywhite, the forces of the Otherworlds dark.The procedure of explanation is more narra-tive than descriptive; the editors retell stories.They seek, too, to categorize "Things" — bymeans of the natural territory in which theThings live: the Cosmos, the Ground, theWater and Air, the Night, the Wonderland,and one territory called Magic and Scienceand Invention. Inevitably, the borderlandsblur. But the Encyclopedia tells us of goblinsand beasts; the Dictionary takes us elsewhereand nowhere. Miraculously, the two bookscomplement each other. w.N.

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THE STORY OF ANAFFINITY: LAMPMAN'S"THE FROGS" ANDTENNYSON'S "THELOTOS EATERS"WH E N DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT praisedRoberts's verse for speaking to "the Ca nadian reader . . . attuned to Tennyson. . . [and] Keats, "1 he could just as wellhave been referring to Lampman. Bothof these English poets had a particularlyimportant influence upon Lampman inwriting "Th e F rogs" (1887). However,even at this relatively early point in hiscareer, the young Canadian was no ser vile imitator of either Tennyson orKeats. Lampman was (to use H aroldBloom's term) a "strong"2 enough talentto organically assimilate his British men tors' work for his own artistic purposes.Such a creative use of Lampman's mas ters is very well described by L. R. Earlyin discussing the influence of Keats upon"The F rogs":

In "The Frogs" Lampman makes Keatsnot so much his model as his resource.While this poem strongly evokes the Eng lish poet's work, its echoes are more thana mere reflection of Lampman's taste: theyform a meaningful pattern of allusion.3

Lampman in "T h e F rogs" likewise sys tematically and elaborately weaves a"meaningful pattern of allusion" to Ten nyson's "Th e Lotos Eaters."4 That pat tern is compounded from multiple echoeswhich perhaps by design are singly notobvious enough to make "T h e Frogs"seem derivative. However, Lampman's

reiterated hints do gradually catch theattention of the reader "attuned to Ten nyson." Such a reader becomes aware onreflection that Lampman in "T h e F rogs"has established a highly significant systemof reference to "T h e Lotos Eaters."

Lampman begins creating his "pat ternof allusion" to "Th e Lotos Eaters" in thefirst sonnet of "Th e F rogs" with repeatedif unobtrusive cross references to Tenny son's piece. Thus, the Canadian poet de scribes his frogs in 1.3 as "F lutists oflands where beauty had no change," in1.5 as "Sweet murmurers of everlastingrest," and in 1.13 as "Ever at rest be neath life's change and stir."5 Lampmanin these lines stresses precisely the twoattributes of lotos land that appeal mostto Odysseus's weary mariners: immuta bility and ease. Th at Lampman intendshis reiterated mention of those two quali ties to bring Tennyson's lotos land spe cifically to mind is indicated by theCanadian poet's statement in 11.7 8 thatfor the frogs, the sun is "But ever sunkenhalf way toward the west." This ofcourse recalls lotos land where "it seemedalways afternoon,"6 where "T h e charmedsunset linger'd low adown / I n the redWest" ("The Lotos Eaters," 11.19 20).Less obviously, Lampman's description ofthe frogs in 11.1 2 as "Breathers of wis dom won without a quest, / Quain t un couth dreamers" verbally echoes 1.6 of"Th e Lotos Eaters" : "Breathing like onethat hath a weary dream" [italics mine].

In Sonnet 1 of "Th e Frogs," Lamp man thus rather subtly establishes a "pat tern of allusion" to "T h e Lotos Eaters."As a result, Lampman's reader should bealerted to notice how Sonnets 2 4 of"The F rogs" recall Tennyson's poem inemphasizing three of its most prominentsymbolic motifs. These are water im agery, vegetat ion , an d the cyclicalrhythms of nature. Sonnets 2 4 of "Th eFrogs" likewise resemble "T h e Lotos Eaters" with their ambiance of a magical

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enchantment, in which dream and realitymerge. The third sonnet of "The Frogs"is particularly reminiscent of Tennyson'spoem with its water imagery and its at-mosphere of enchanted reverie:

All the day long, wherever pools might beAmong the golden meadows, where the airStood in a dream, as it were moored thereFor ever in a noon-tide reverie,Or where the birds made riot of their gleeIn the still woods, and the hot sun shone

down,Crossed with warm lucent shadows on the

brownLeaf-paven pools, that bubbled dreamily,

Or far away in whispering river meadsAnd watery marshes where the brooding

noon,Full with the wonder of its own sweet boon,Nestled and slept among the noiseless reeds,Ye sat and murmured, motionless as they,With eyes that dreamed beyond the night

and day.

The landscape of Sonnet 3 provides asdoes Tennyson's lotos-land an appropri-ate setting for a twofold regression. Thisinvolves ( 1 ) man's reabsorption into pri-mal nature, his return to her most primi-tive levels of existence as represented byvegetation and water, and ( 2 ), in Freud-ian terms, a retreat to prenatal ease,security and bliss. The outcome of sucha dual reversion (intimated throughLampman's frogs as evolutionally primi-tive creatures floating embryo-like inwater)7 is presented by Sonnet 5 of "TheFrogs" in terms strikingly reminiscent of"The Lotos-Eaters" :

And slowly as we heard you, day by day,The stillness of enchanted reveriesBound brain and spirit and half-closèd eyes,In some divine sweet wonder-dream astray;To us no sorrow or upreared dismayNor any discord came, but evermoreThe voices of mankind, the outer roar,Grew strange and murmurous, faint and far

away.

Morning and noon and midnightexquisitely,

Rapt with your voices, this alone we knew,

Cities might change and fall, and menmight die,

Secure were we, content to dream with youThat change and pain are shadows faint

and fleet,And dreams are real, and life is only sweet.

Like the drug-induced "music" (11.46and 50) which lulls Tennyson's lotos-eaters, the hypnotically enchanting songof the frogs produced for Lampman ablissful sense of release from the nega-tivities of human existence. In this re-gard, Lampman follows Tennyson in em-phasizing as particular "sorrowfs]" ofman's lot disturbance, strife or "discord,""change," and mortality. To escape suchwoes through regression is paradoxicallyseen by both Lampman and Ulysses's er-rant crewmen as part of an elevation toa "divine" transcendence ("The Lotos-Eaters," 11.153-55). This last congru-ence is underlined by the parallel be-tween 1.11 of Lampman's Sonnet 5 and1.161 of "The Lotos-Eaters." Just as theCanadian poet seemed in his "divine . . .dream" to have escaped a world in which"Cities might. . . fall," so the lotos-eatersbelieve that, like the Olympian gods,they are above such human tragedies as"flaming towns." The various correspon-dences just detailed between "The Lotos-Eaters" and Sonnet 5 of "The Frogs"are underscored by the way 11.6-8 of thelatter echo (using in two cases identicalwordings italicized below) 11.31 -34 ofTennyson's piece:

but evermoreThe voices of mankind, the outer roar,Grew strange and murmurous, faint and

far away.

to him the gushing of the waveFar far away did seem to mourn and raveOn alien shores; and if his fellow spake,His voice was thin, as voices from the

grave;

Lampman's repeated allusions to "TheLotos-Eaters" throughout "The Frogs"point to the importance for the latter of

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the central thematic antithesis of Tenny son's poem. That opposition is establishedby the Laureate through the antiphonalsemi choruses of his lotos eaters. Theodd numbered advocate an easeful self indulgence in the pleasures of a drug induced state of dreamy enchantment.This entails the twofold regression dis cussed above, a reversion which produces( ι ) an empathetic identification withnature bringing an acute appreciation ofher manifold beauties, (2) a blissful feel ing of release from suffering, stress, andupheaval, and (3) a withdrawal frompractical, social, and ethical engagement.The lotos eaters try to justify this lastretreat in their even numbered semi choruses. They maintain the "toil" neces sary to "war with evil," to "settle orderonce again" ("The Lotos Eaters," 11.60,94, and 127) is not just painfully fa tiguing, but likewise futile and meaning less. However, those very arguments sug gest an ideal contrary to the mariners'withdrawal from moral and social com mitment. This is the characteristicallyVictorian ethic of "manly" dedication tostrenuous goal directed effort involvingthe moral responsibility to set the worldright.

Both the viewpoint of the lotos eatersthemselves and Tennyson's antitheticalethos were deeply meaningful to Lamp man. Each accorded with different as pects of his complex (and perhaps self contradictory) poetic personality.8 Theoutlook voiced by Ulysses' truant sailorswas consonant with several facets ofLampman's artistic psyche that were ex pressed in "Th e Frogs." The most im portant of these was the Keatsian sen sibility equally attuned to the painfulnegativities of life and to a sensuous/spiritual appreciation of nature's beau ties. I n this connection, "Ode to aN ightingale" could have provided forLampman when writing "T h e Frogs" anumber of links between his own inspira

tion and "The Lotos Eaters." Just asKeats is rapt by the nightingale's song,so Lampman was enchanted by the hyp notic thrilling of his frogs and the lotos eaters are charmed by a drug induced"music." Moreover, Keats in his stanzas4 and 5 undergoes the same twofold re gression to nature's lower levels (sug gested again by vegetation) and to pre natal bliss as do Lampman and Ulysses'truant mariners. Like both, Keats attainsan empathy with nature that involves anenhanced appreciation of her beauties.Like both again, the Romantic poetseems to transcend time and to achievea divine status as he ecstatically identifieswith his "immortal Bird" (1.61). Lastly,"Ode to a N ightingale" recalls both"The Frogs" and "Th e Lotos Eaters" inthat its author (if indeed only temporar ily) escapes the woes of humanity. Inthis regard, Keats emphasizes the same"weariness . . . fever, and . . . fret" (1.23) ,the same mutability and mortality, as doLampman and Tennyson.

The outlook of Tennyson's lotos eaterswould have struck responsive chords notonly with Lampman the Keatsian, butalso with two other sides of his poeticpersonality important for "Th e Frogs."These are the world weary Arnoldianand the fin-de-siècle aesthete (the lattercombining the refined hedonism of Paterwith an aesthetic/mystical idealism).Both strains in the creator of "TheFrogs" are expressed in that piece inways recalling the viewpoint of Ulysses'wayward shipmates. Thus, Lampman inhis Arnoldian role seeks refreshmentafter the stresses of civilization throughretreat to nature, while Lampman theaesthete eschews worldly concerns infavour of an entranced contemplation ofbeauty. However, although the attitudesof the lotos-eaters variously accordedwith Lampman's sensibility, their outlookwould likewise have conflicted with hispronounced vein of Victorian moral

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earnestness.9 Such a trait may have madeLampman in writing "T h e F rogs" bothsensitive and in part sympathetic to theethic of strenuous engagement impliedby the lotos eaters' even numbered semi choruses. Regarded in those moral terms,the point of view of Ulysses' sailors andits close counterpart in "T h e F rogs" con stitute a shirking of responsibility andmanly exertion in effete self indulgence.F urthermore, when set against the press ing exigencies connected with moralcommitment, the bliss of lotos land mightseem illusory.

That such considerations may form anironic subtext in "T h e F rogs" has re cently been indicated at some length byD . M . R. Bentley in his article "Watch ful D ream and Sweet U n rest . . ." (Part , pp. 6 8). To Bentley's arguments, Iwould add two further suggestions of therelevance of Tennyson's Victorian ethosto "Th e Frogs." Both are significantlyprovided by features of Lampman's son nets that recall "T h e Lotos Eaters."These are ( ι ) the Canadian poet's usethroughout "The F rogs" of the pasttense, and (2) his employment of "we"in Sonnets 2 and 5 when referring tothose poems' speakers. The former fol lows Tennyson's practice in the stanzasin t roducin g his lotos eaters' "C h o r icSong," while the latter parallels the mar iners' choruses themselves.

By using the past tense, both Tennysonand Lampman prime their audiences foran ethical awareness in two ways. Theseare first by distancing the reader fromthe seductive immediacy of a powerfulenchantment, and secondly by intimatingsuch a "dream " was merely a temporaryescape from painful realities. Lampman'semployment of "we" further points to wards Ten n yson 's Victorian ethosthrough suggesting Sonnets 2 and 5 of"T h e F rogs" present a collective outlook.This has in the context of "T h e F rogs"as influenced by "T h e Lotos Eaters" two

parallel associations: with the chorusesof Ulysses' mariners as advocating a dualregression, and with the chorus of Lamp man's frogs as primitive "embryonic"amphibians. Such a double linking withreversion of the "we" of Sonnets 2 and 5would render ironically significant Lamp man's abandonment after Sonnet 1 ofthe pronoun " I . " Its absence would in timate the poet's lapse from the consciousand responsible human individuality inwhich one faces life's painful problemsand moral duties. A partial "fall" fromthat mental state, which is the psychicvehicle of Tennyson's Victorian ethic, issuggested in Sonnet 5. The "we" of thepoem are immersed in "enchanted rev eries," which bind "brain and spirit andhalf-closèd eyes" (11.2-3, italics mine).Lampman in the last phrase could bepunningly referring not only to the organof sight, but also to the pronoun " I" asindicating a sense of personal identity.The "we" of Sonnet 5 may have thuspartially lost the individuality which is aprerequisite for adult ethical conscious-ness.

Lampman's elaborate but unobtrusive"pattern of allusion" to "The Lotos-Eaters" may represent a compromise be-tween conflicting feelings in the Cana-dian poet. On the one hand, Lampmanas both a connoisseur of verse and thechild of a provincial Victorian culturewould doubtless have cherished a gooddeal of enthusiasm and reverence forTennyson. He would probably haveshared the belief of many contemporariesthat the Laureate was at once a greatmodern master and a worthy scion of agreat and venerable tradition (suggestedin "The Lotos-Eaters" by that poem'sHomeric paternity). More specifically,Lampman would have found expressedwith lyric genius in "The Lotos-Eaters"an in some ways kindred sensibility. Forall of these reasons, Lampman wouldgladly have availed himself of Tenny-

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son's masterwork as both a "model" anda "resource." The Canadian poet wouldhave done so all the more readily forbeing self consciously a literary novice asyet unsure of his own direction and pow ers. In this regard, Lampman could havegained from following Tennyson a senseof support and orientation allaying the"anxiety of creative uncertainty" thathaunts many beginning artists.

However, Lampman may well havesimultaneously been inspired with a two fold "anxiety of influence"10 by Tenny son. In this connection, Lampman couldhave felt overshadowed ( ι ) as a juniortyro by an already revered master and( 2 ) as the provincial artist of a relativelyuncultivated recent colony11 by a literary"institution" of the great mother coun try. Such a double insecurity respectingTennyson could have moved Lampmanin "T h e F rogs" to assert both a personaland national literary identity. H e mayindirectly affirm the first by keeping theLaureate's influence from being in anyparticular instance too obvious. Lamp man likewise suggests a nationalistic lit erary consciousness in "T h e Frogs" bytranslating his expression of interestsshared with Tennyson from a Classicaland Mediterranean to a Canadian set ting. Through these tactics, Lampmanwas able in "Th e F rogs" to use the Lau reate as a "resource" while maintaininghis independence as an "individual tal en t" and as a Canadian writer.

N OTES1 Duncan Campbell Scott, "A Decade of Ca

nadian Poetry," in Lorraine McMullen, ed.,Twentieth Century Essays on Confedera tion Literature (Ottawa: Tecumseh Press,1976), p. i n .

2 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influ ence (London: Oxford University Press,>973)> Ρ 2ΐ.

3 L. R. Early, Archibald Lampman (Boston:Twayne, 1986), p. 63.

* D. M. R. Bentley has noted that "The

Lotos Eaters" was one of Lam pm an 's"points of departure" in writing "TheFrogs." See Bentley, "Watchful Dreamsand Sweet U nrest: An Essay on the Visionof Archibald Lampman," Part I I , Studiesin Canadian Literature, 7, no. 1 (1982),p. 7. While Bentley does not pursue thispoint, he concludes as does the presentstudy that Lampman is aware in "TheFrogs" of the "deficiencies" as well as the"attractions" of "escapism" (Bentley, p.16).

5 Quotations from "The Frogs" are uniformwith the text in Douglas Lochhead, ed.,The Poems of Archibald Lampman (To ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974),pp. 7 10.

6 Quotations from "The Lotos Eaters" areuniform with the text in Poems of Tenny son, i82g i868 (London: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1929), pp. 91 95.

7 Such symbolism becomes more apparent inview of Lampman's characterization of na ture in Sonnets 1 and 2 in maternal terms.

8 Early delineates such an artistic characterthroughout his study. See especially Early,pp. 29 39.

9 Such a strain in Lampman's poetic char acter found particularly powerful expres sion in "The Story of an Affinity" (1893 94). I t is perhaps significant for the presentstudy that (as Early notes, p. 121) Lamp man relates his protagonist's strenuousquest for personal development to thehomeward journey of Odysseus.

1 0 For this critical term, see Bloom, op. cit.1 1 That Lampman as a young man had strong

negative feelings about Canada as a cul tural environment is indicated in his de scription of his initial response to Roberts'sOrion and Other Poems. See Early, p. 5.

J O H N OWER

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OPINIONS & NOTES

ON THE VERGE* * * * LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY, Anne . . .La Maison aux pignons verts, trans. Henri-Dominique Paratte, Ruth Macdonald, andDavid Macdonald. Ragweed Press, $12.95.Among the funniest movies I have seen areJohn Wayne westerns dubbed into French, inwhich a torrent of eloquence squeezes its waypast the hero's terse and barely moving lips.No such inconsistencies afflict the Frenchtranslation of Anne of Green Gables, pub-lished in the wake of the CBC/PBS televisionproduction and apparently the first completetranslation into French, although the book hasappeared in more than forty languages sinceit was first published. Anne's richly texturedlanguage translates well into French; her fa-vourite phrases like "a kindred spirit" and "abosom-friend" are rendered smoothly into"une amie de coeur" and "une âme soeur," asis her "I am in the depths of despair," whichbecomes "Je suis en proie du désespoir le plustotal." It is only when Anne's retorts hingeon one barbed word, or when she elicits re-sponse from taciturn Matthew that the effectcannot be reproduced as well. Anne's verdicton Mrs. Peter Blewett — "She looks exactlylike a . . . gimlet" appears as "Elle ressemble. . . à une queue de cochon pour percer destrous," and Matthew's embarrassed "Well,now, I dunno" becomes a rather more gar-rulous "Eh, bien, disons, euh, j'sais pas." Buton the whole, this is an accomplished transla-tion, well worth "à ranger dans sa bibliothè-que à côté du Grand Meaulnes et du PetitPrince." E.-M.K.

* * * VICTOR HOWARD w i t h MAC REYNOLDS,The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. $8.95;Lionel Groulx, The Iron Wedge. $8.95. Carle-ton Library Series: Oxford Univ. Press. Thesimultaneous publication of these two minorclassics of Canadian socio-political history em-phasizes the polarities of Canadian attitudes.The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion shows theCanadian left of the 1930's in its heroic andunself-critical extremity, and Lionel Groulx'sL'Appel de la Race (which translator MichelGaulin, using Groulx's original title, calls TheIron Wedge) displays some of the least pleas-ant aspects of right-wing Québécois national-ism. The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion tellswhat is at the same time an admirable and apathetic story. Howard gives full and propercredit to the courage and idealism of the menwho went to Spain and fought in the Inter-national Brigades, but he does not emphasize

how much they were unknowingly manipu-lated in the interests of Stalinist foreign pol-icy, nor does he acknowledge sufficiently thatthe Brigades were not the only units in whichforeign volunteers fought for the Republic.Many people fought, like Orwell, for thePOUM or for the anarchists, and probablyhad a better idea of the realities of the situa-tion than the International Brigaders. Still,within its limitations it is a good narrative ofa small current of Canadian history too muchneglected. The Abbé Groulx was a man totallylacking in fictional gifts who attempted toincorporate a highly racist doctrine into anovel. He handles human relations with thesentimental crudity of a Victorian writer offormula fiction, and his message — that theFrench culture in Canada can only be sus-tained if there is no mingling of races — todayseems appalling, and would probably so ap-pear to the most enthusiastic Péquiste. Wehave, one hopes, advanced a little beyond suchcrude thinking.

G.w.

*** CAROL SHLOSS, Invisible Light: Pho-tography and the American Writer 184.0-1Q40.Oxford Univ. Press, $37.50. Photography,initially celebrated as a medium of absoluteversimilitude, was soon discovered to be assubject to manipulation as other forms of art.Some of Barnardo's photographs of destituteVictorian children for instance were revealedto be artificial studio creations, as was the"newsphoto" of Emperor Maximillian's execu-tion in Mexico. Carol Shloss explores thesocial and political responsibilities of docu-mentary photography, and links her observa-tions to perspectival complexities in nine-teenth and twentieth-century literature. Morespecifically, she focuses on Nathaniel Haw-thorne and the daguerrotype, the collaborationbetween Henry James and Alvin LangdonCoburn (photographer of the frontispieces inthe New York edition of James' works), na-turalism in Theodore Dreiser, Alfred Stieglitz,and Jacob Riis, John Dos Passos's experimentsin verbal montage and the Soviet cinema,phenomenology and social reportage in JamesAgee and Walker Evans as well as John Stein-beck and Dorothea Lange, Norman Mailerand combat photography by Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa. Influenced by JohnBerger, Shloss considers the photographer aspotentially in collusion with those in poweragainst the dispossessed. Even if the photogra-pher's goal is ostentatiously benevolent as insocial documentation, his intrusion and aes-thetic distance may violate his object's initia-

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tive and self respect. In contrast, scrupulousattention to the potentially exploitative natureof their work distinguishes James Agee andWalker Evans's work on Southern sharecrop pers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, abook which has also been named as one of thesources for Alice Munro's self reflexive real ism. As Shloss's bibliography indicates, herconclusions are supported by extensive schol arship; however, Invisible Light absorbs im pressive amounts of criticism while remainingadmirably fluent and generally accessible. Agood selection of photographs is included.

E. M. K.

AN YON E writing or teaching about Canada'sIndians must read Bruce G. Trigger's Nativesand Newcomers: Canada's "Heroic Age" Re considered (McGill Queen's, $35.00). Trig ger's ambitious aim is to write into Canadianhistory (from European discovery to 1663) thepeoples who were almost invisible in what wewere taught in G rade 8 and again in History200. The book is crucial for its putting Cana dian natives at the centre of its study of theintricate relationships among economic, reli gious, political, and military movements, andfor the sheer density of its information, ma terial hitherto obscured and ignored. Nativesand Newcomers is particularly attractive tostudents of literature, because Trigger contin ually sees history as a literary enterprise, sub ject to narrative considerations, and shaped bythe fashions, ideologies and fictional conven tions of its time.

Douglas Cole's Captured Heritage: TheScramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts(Douglas & Mclntyre, $24.95) i s much nar rower in scope, but the novelty of its approachis gratifying. For example, the fury a readersenses at these magnificently talented tribes be ing deprived of their own cultural artefacts,and of Canada's being dependent on the U.S.and Europe for a knowledge of its own aes thetic background, is repeatedly curbed byCole's judicious claims that museologists savedsomething that otherwise would be lost en tirely, and that the international awareness of,and contact with Canadian ethnology is agreat benefit to the country and potentially toits Indian people.

The artefacts preserved have obviously beenvital to Bill Reid, the artist and environmen talist whose career has been synonymous withthe revival of Northwest Coast Indian art.In Bill Reid: Beyond the Essential Form(Univ. of British Columbia Press, $12.95),Karen Duffek comments carefully on the cop ies and adaptations of earlier pieces which

made Reid an artist; her notes on theessential tension between copyist and inno vator, between high realism and H aida styli zation create an illuminating context withinwhich to evaluate Reid's work. In the sameseries is Marjorie H alpin's Jack Shadbolt andthe Coastal Indian Image (Univ. of BritishColumbia Press, $12.95), a n equally interest ing and colourful introduction to a companionartist who makes still more innovative use ofIndian motifs. The work of neither Reid norShadbolt appears in Ralph T. Coe's Lost andFound Traditions: Native American Art 1Q65 '985 (Univ. of Washington Press, $45.00),a lavish tribute to contemporary Indian artfound outside museums, but the author's ex tensive comments on the possibility of a newnative art (including many Canadian exam ples) are nicely complementary. At the core ofthe discussion, points out, is the very con cept of tradition itself. "The Anglo world in sists on viewing tradition as an entity, as abody of information that is almost tactile. . . .The Indian view is that tradition, like time,cannot be measured. I t exists within every thing, a sort of wholeness or allness that mantouches, or establishes contact with."

These are books originating to accompanymuseum exhibitions where texts go well be yond their value as catalogue notes. In the

Both titles are availablein film and video for mats. Purchase price:

16mm $455.00VHS $ 80.00U Matic $100.00

IRVING LAYTON:AN INTRODUCTIONA candid portrait of poet IrvingLayton as writer, teacher and pri vate individual. The film affordsglimpses of Layton s intense ap proach to life and the close con nection Petween his life and art.A classroom adaptation of Poet:Irving Layton Observed.27 minutes 27 seconds

A TALL M ANEXECUTES A JIGBY IRVING LAYTONIrving Layton reads and explainsthe poem widely considered tobe his masterpiece. In this fas cinating "conversation," Laytontalks of how he transforms fleet ing experiences into art. An ex tremely valuable film for litera ture studies.25 minutes 58 seconds

National OfficeFilm Board national du filmof Canada du Canada

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same category is Robert Stacey's Western Sun light: C. W. Jefferys on the Canadian Prairies( Mendel Art Gallery, n.p. ), a catalogue whosereproductions are disappointing, but whose50 page well documented biography extends toa history of prairie painting, particularly en riched by the author's sensitivity to musicaland literary analogies. Much less thorough isGeorge Moppett's Robert Newton Hurley: ANotebook (Mendel Art Gallery, n.p.)> a n in troduction to one of Jefferys' important suc cessors. Hurley is the key figure in the develop ment of the iconography of the grain elevator;Moppett illuminates Hurley's attention togeometry and shadow, with sensitive analyti cal comments attached to several of the repro ductions. Prairie art of a different form is re covered in William James: Selected Photo graphs 1 1 (Mendel Art Gallery, n.p.)— indeed, the catalogue contains a short essayby G rant Arnold considering the problem ofconflicting aesthetic and social contexts forinterpreting photographic images: are thesephotographs art? Nonetheless, I found theseworks of one of Saskatchewan's most impor tant photographers, which this book intro duced to me, give great pleasure both for theiraesthetics and for their social information.Especially impressive are sweeping panoramasreproduced in foldout, a difficult format whichseems especially fitted to prairiescapes. Manyof James's photographs, perhaps surprisingly,depict the lumbering industry, also subject forWilmer Gold's Logging As It Was: A Pic torial History of Logging on Vancouver Island(Sono Nis, $34.95), which has some ploddingwriting, and some confused oral histories, butsome excellent, often blown up, photographs,especially those, such as chokermen settingchokers, which give visual definition to thepeculiarly specialized language of this industry.

Another version, more contemporary, of thewesternmost province is Donald Blake's TwoPolitical Worlds: Parties and Voting in BritishColumbia (UBC Press, $19.95) whose par ticular observations are more fascinating thanits blandly generalized conclusions. Blake'sbook reveals surprising ambiguities in Federaland Provincial political behaviour, showing,for example, how class lines are followed inprovincial voting but not in federal. TwoPolitical Worlds gives fascinating detail aboutBritish Columbia as a state of mind, but itsmajor contribution is its differentiation of thesubject of federal provincial domains of in fluence (or perception of same) from the sub ject of provincial or regional alienation. I t

redefines alienation in the Canadian context,emphasizing it as a positive political influence.

L.R.

Robert Prévost explains that in glancingthrough a Montreal telephone directory, hecounted 4,612 entries for the name Tremblay,most of them affixed to male first nameswhereas the "demoiselles . . . ont immolé leuridentité sur Vautel du conjugo." In his Qué-bécoises d'hier et d'aujourd'hui: Profils de 375femmes hors du commun (Stanké, $14.95)Prévost sets out to fill that gap by presenting,in alphabetical order, a pot-pourri of bio-graphical sketches. The result is less a usefulhandbook than a series of often quirky ortantalizingly uninformative entries rangingfrom Marie-Anne Boucher-Martineau, the old-est known Québéboise, to Annette-EglantineCoderre, who earned a doctorate at 87, toSuzanne Blais-Grenier, sometime Minister ofEnvironment Canada, to Marie-Claire Biais,author of the first "roman québécois publié enChine." Intriguing however are the numerousentries on women associated with the 1837Rebellion: when the Theatre Passe Muraillecollective researched their play 1837, theylargely had to invent the role of women, asno pertinent materials could be found. A moremethodical kind of handbook is Antoine Ga-borieau's A l'Ecoute des Franco-Manitobains(Editions des Plaines, n.p.), a glossary ofManitoba French compiled with the intentionof teaching "une gamme plus étendue d'u-sages, de communiquer dans les conditions lesplus diverses." Besides archaisms and dialectwords, Gaborieau lists a staggering number ofanglicisms. Although he speaks of Franco-Manitobans as overwhelmed by a strongEnglish-speaking majority, however, he alsosuggests that a sentence like "la sloche danslaquelle on est stoqué" brings to life "lesimages d'un vécu, . . . les fibres profondes d'unpassé." Similarly concerned with preservingthe Franco-Manitoban heritage is Chapeaubas: Réminiscences de la vie théâtrale et mu-sicale du Manitoba français (Editions du Blé,$15.00), with contributions by Marius Benoist,Martial Caron, Pauline Boutai, and RolandMahé. Profusely illustrated, this third volumeof Les Cahiers d'histoire de la Société histo-rique de Saint-Boniface is a lively contribu-tion to the study of regional culture. Anotherpocket of French-Canadian culture, theFranco-Albertans of the Peace River country,dominates the stories in Jean Pariseau's Lescontes de mon patelin (Editions des Plaines,n.p.), which, together with sometimes Rabelai-

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sian illustrations, presents an often delightfulchronicle of life among the pioneers.

E. M.K.

Entries on Callaghan and Vanderhaeghe fea ture in Gale's Contemporary Literary Criti cism, vol. 41 ($90.00) ; the series surveys andexcerpts critical literature. More overtly biblio graphic is John Bell's Canuck Comics (MatrixBooks, $12.95), a book containing lively his tories of the publishing of English andFrench language comic books in Canada, to gether with a preliminary listing of titles, aprice guide, and an introductory essay byH arlan Ellison. In another bibliography, Rob ert Georges and Stephen Stern have assem bled American and Canadian Immigrant andEthnic Folklore (G arland, $91.00), an anno tated guide to critical commentary, fuller onAmerican than Canadian sources because of"limited access" to Canadian materials. Thefifth edition of Holman's excellent A Hand book to Literature, newly compiled by W.Harmon (Collier Macmillan, $21.50), ex tends its coverage to some of the terms ofcontemporary critical theory. In a differentkind of reassessment, C. Peter Ripley's TheBlack Abolitionist Papers, vol. I I (Canada,1830 1865), (U n iv. of N orth C arolina,$35.00), is a valuable contribution to blackhistory in Canada. Primarily an edited collec tion of essays, letters, editorials, and speechesfrom various sources — all on the subject ofblack survival, educational and social oppor tunities in Canada, and the cause of abolition— the book also historically surveys the emer gence of black Canadian communities. Wind sor, especially — with the journalism of Henryand Mary Bibb, James T. Holly, and MaryAnn Shadd Cary — achieved special promi nence. The appearance of a book such as thisis long overdue, but it only begins to redressone of the several imbalances of our currentnotion of cultural history. One further collec tion of interest assembles the proceedings of a1984 conference sponsored and published bythe Science Council of Canada, which ad dresses the role of the social sciences both inshaping and in describing public policy:Social Science in Canada: Stagnation or Re generation?; of particular interest are threetalks about the future, agendas for organiza tion, and reflections of the disciplinary poten tial for taking control or for lapsing into irrele vance. W.N.

*** . . MCKiixop, Contours of CanadianThought. Univ. of Toronto Press, $12.95. AsA. B. McKillop (who is also the author of

A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiryand Canadian Thought in the Victorian Eraand the editor of A Critical Spirit: TheThought of William Dawson Lesueur) pointsout in the essays, lectures, and prefaces col lected in Contours of Canadian Thought,intellectual history as a discipline has devel oped with some difficulty in Canada becausescholarly concern with the country's colonialpast seemed an admission of its dependenceand imitativeness, hence of its cultural in feriority. But, McKillop argues, "there is thenecessity to view Canada's long held 'colonial'status as a constitutional phenomenon ratherthan a source of intellectual shame" and "todelineate neither to condemn — nor to cele brate — the contours of that past." In admir ably lucid prose, these essays outline the pio neering work already accomplished by CarlBerger, Ramsay Cook, Richard Allen, Mi chiel Horn, William Westfall, Allan Smith,S. E. D. Shortt, and Douglas Owram, chart ing the enormous — and fascinating — terri tory still to be covered, and presenting a num ber of exemplary studies demonstrating thedefinition and method of the field. There ismuch of interest here to the literary historianas well, for McKillop includes such works asEli Mandel's Contexts of Canadian Criticism

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OPIN ION S & N OTES

and D . G. Jones's Butterfly on Rock in hisanalyses, explores contemporary literature aspart of the general intellectual climate, andstudies periodicals like the Canadian Forumas barometers of cultural change. Drawing onS. F . Wise's seminal essay "Sermon Literatureand Canadian Intellectual History," McKillopalso speaks of the study of rhetoric as an im portant, but greatly neglected, field. In acountry where much literary criticism, bothin English and in French, has been dominatedby clergymen, such a study promises valuableresults. E. M. .

** The Forty Ninth and Other Parallels:Contemporary Canadian Perspectives, ed. Da vid Staines. Univ. of Massachusetts Press,$10.50. The aim of this anthology is to pre sent the similarities and differences betweenCanadians and Americans; it is written byCanadians, but published under the auspicesof a group of New England institutions callingthemselves the Five Colleges. Perhaps it willhelp to enlighten a few academically inclinedAmericans about what makes Canada a dis tinct political and cultural community. ForCanadians it is largely old hat, with twoformer Liberal cabinet ministers lustily blow ing their own political trumpets, a formerParti Québécois minister making the expectedjustifications of Bill 101, and Walter Stewartpredictably but eloquently destroying the argu-ments of those who try to present journalismas a profession with high ideals rather thanas a worthy trade. Bob Rae writes interestinglyon the reasons why socialist parties thriveabove but not below the forty-ninth parallel.The only piece relating to arts of any kind isa sound essay by Robert Kroetsch on thenameless protagonist as a significant and dis-tinctive figure in Canadian fiction.

G.w.* JOHN FRASER, Telling Tales. Collins,$19.95. There are some judgments that writ-ers drag down on themselves, as John Fraserdoes in these insubstantial recollections of Ca-nadian celebrities. Fraser is known for oneinformative book, The Chinese, which wasmostly read for its interesting content — anearly look at post-Cultural Revolution China— by people who had little idea of style, andwhich for this reason was a best-seller. Thatsuccess led Fraser to believe he was a realwriter, who could take his place in the literaryheritage, and he begins Telling Tales by com-paring himself to John Aubrey of the BriefLives. It is true enough that Aubrey at timesdid drop into anecdotal banality, but he did

not write in quite the same vein of self-complacent triviality as Fraser does, name-dropping his way indiscriminately among thefamous and the fatuous. Still, one could passover Aubrey if Fraser did not later on coylyassure us: "Hazlitt is my inspiration and Or-well my guide." Hazlitt who said — andproved it — "I never wrote a line that lickedthe dust?" Orwell, that uncompromising manwho called for "prose like a window pane" ?Fraser's writing may not lick the dust, but itlicks less palatable surfaces in its sometimesshameless flattery of pretentious nonentities.And where, in all this immature gossip, arethe window panes of Orwellian decency andlight?

G.W.

LAST PAGEOLD AGE, writes John Blight in Holiday seasonnets (UQP, Α$ΐ4 95), recalling the pres ence of a young woman, provides "a safe fencewithin which, yesterday, we viewed the gar den." I t seems a phrase distanced from thepresent by literary convention as well as bytime, by attitude and by presumption. ThePenguin Book of Australian Women Poets($12.95), e d · Susan Hampton and KateLlewellyn, is full of poems resistant to justsuch conventions. A collection of works by 89women, from aboriginal and convict songs tocontemporary lyrics, the book is politicalthroughout, objecting to the marginalizing offemale roles and the transformation of womeninto things. "I 'm not a fucking painting / thatneeds to be told what it looks like," writes G igRyan; and elsewhere: "H is cubist drawingsare lying everywhere / between the drippingvirgin and his male despair, / that suffers,seeing nothing. . . ." The aboriginal lamentsof Kath Walker and Charmaine Papertalk G reen: these, too, are political. And whileJud it h Rodriguez dances motherhood in"Eskimo occasion," Jennifer Maiden moresolemnly intones the intricate dances of prom ise and trust: "N o / one but I can see, andyou have come / here, and here is nothingyou can mourn. I t / isn't to the gates that Iescort you, but / it isn't to escape that youhave come." Such perspectives are not thesole voice of Australian poetry. In Poetry NewZealand, vol. 6, ed. Elizabeth Coffin (JohnMclndoe, $10.50), Kerrin Sharpe writes of"The N ature of Appearances" — of livingwhere the "air is crazy / with butterflies," and

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of leaving nevertheless to read the "Conser vationist" hawk as "compassionate." Publicimages shape the limits of identity. But publicimages can also be resisted.

Angels of Fire, ed. Sylvia Paskin et al. —subtitled "an anthology of radical poetry inthe '80s" (Chatto/ H arcourt Brace Jovano vich, $21.95) —defines "radical" in relatedterms. It's perhaps a sign of the current stateof British poetry (and cultural politics) thatthe predominant voices of protest are those ofracial and ethnic minorities: of John Agard,for example, or Valerie Bloom, or GraceNichols — though Bloom and Nichols appearin a section entitles "H eretic women." Thepoet taken as a model for the book (despitethese contexts?) is Rimbaud; there's an oddhint here of resistance as a romantic attitude.But the poems — not always in discontinuousor vernacular forms — attend more readily tothe cynicism of isms and ologies. "We havehandled butterflies with tongs and said: 'Thisis nothing but fragments'," writes Alan Jack son, trying to purge himself of irony in orderto reaffirm the future.

Canada, too, shares in these perspectives.Paula Burnett's meticulously edited The Pen guin Book of Caribbean Verse in English($12.95) —vj'iui notes and a substantial intro duction — tells of slavery and imitation andthe resistance to various kinds of emotionallandlord. Among the poets collected are sev eral with Canadian connections, includingJudy Miles and Dionne Brand. Elsewhere, theMuses' Company (of Ste Anne de Bellevue,Quebec) has issued Mohammed S. Togane'sstriking collection of The Bottle and the Bush man, reiterating the diversity of contemporaryCanadian literature. The African backgroundto these poems is neither exoticism nor simplesetting; it's a political frame: "A Short Les son in Comparative Languages" illustrateswith wry amusement how bland a culturalpresumption can be, especially when it meetsthe language of political experience.

Some attempts to recover earlier writersstem in part from the issues that engenderrereading. Ruth G ilbert's Collected Poems(Brick Row, NZ$16.95) reintroduces a post war poet who could still see beauty in thename of sandalwood, and Pan in suburbia.Ursula BethelPs prewar poems come togetherin Collected Poems (Oxford, N Z$19.95), af firming a still more confident faith in Chris tian grace and the salve of nature. Such a con servative trust in place, speech, and observa tion has not disappeared from contemporarypoetry — witness Andrew Taylor's Travelling

(U QP, Α$ ΐ4·95): "This is the weather /dolphins come, weaving / their intermittentprint / between our world and theirs / thenvanishing, a dark and leaping / language,going somewhere, leaving / us here, pointing,wondering, alert." Such uncertainty is notnecessarily debilitating, nor unaccompanied bywit, and still other works — Chris Wallace Crabbe's The Amorous Cannibal (Oxford,£ 4.50) —t ake up the theme of travel (ofpotential alienation, potential discovery) withwry voice and passionate understatement. BillManhire, in Zoetropes (Allen & Unwin,N Z$9.95), writes of "The poor . . . as passion ate as charity, surviving in everything theyspend." But the travels are as often forays intosystem in search of meaning as they are sim ple observations of activity. Cornells Vleeskens'The Day the River (U QP, A$g.9s) effectivelyreconstructs convict history; Michael Jackson'sGoing On (John Mclndoe, NZ$9.95) balancesrecollections of a lost New Zealand againstobservations of a surviving Europe; MichaelH a r lo w' s Vlaminck's Tie ( Au c kla n d ,NZ$13.00) imagines its way past Freud andJung into musical process and polemic force.The Samoan poet Albert Wendt's Shaman ofVisions (Oxford, NZ$11.50) also visits Eu rope briefly — but to perceive the failure ofconventional modes of representation: in"Montmartre," the poetic persona sings "Poly nesian songs / with a Tahitian trio / whohaven't stepped out / of G auguin's paintings."The new world, in some sense, is a way ofretrieving an older one, as Wendt's title poemexplains, rejecting the limits of Europeanmyth making: "Shaman of Visions, in wordsis the silence / before Taga Waalagi createdthe dawn of solitude. / We measure ourselvesagainst our words. / . . . / shaman of Visions,/ we'll not live under / the dark side of Plutoafraid / of evening as much as death. / sha man of Visions, when we die disperse / everyparticle of our dust into the dawn / whichgave birth to the first word."

For Maori writer Keri Hulme, Lost Posses sions (Victoria University Press, NZ$8.95) ls

less sanguine about the possibility of retrieval.H er long poem/ short story — the generic am bivalence is part of the resistance to receivedlimits — tells in note form of a man's incar ceration. What does limitation do? the storyasks: it denies a sense of time, it changes atti tudes toward silence and paper, or constrainsthe logic of understanding — all of which ac quire another reverberation through the bu reaucratic paper that provides the story's clos ing frame. Here a nameless bureaucrat's words

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