COFlTEIms VOLUME 18 NUMBER 8

Naval Kaur Khalsa 1943-1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .._.............................. 6REtiEW ESSAYTalea from the CabooseMordecai Richlefs dew novel, Solomon Gunky Was Here. proves that the

caustic satirist has lost neither e&e nor zip. By Leon Rooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .WOFlK IN PRGGRESSl&iting For a SignPoenzs~m (1 taew maauscti~t by Lorna Cmeiw _.__.....,.......,...........................INTERVIEWMaskandManInn’ng Layton needs strong emotions - rage, anger, disgust, mnlire” and

&Rberrrtely provokes his w&s toget what he calls his *emotionalvitamins. n By David Hornet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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FEATURE REVIEWS

.%ori rolica ml rzcc~,ficttmI, Mn@tm,, ardpodly . . . . . . ..______.................................................. aBud&k Meditatik~s on Desire, by .%a F’enby _______________._.............................................. 23The House Is not a Home, by Efik Nicker; Shadow of Heaven: The Life

of Leak Pearson. Volume One 1897-1948, byJokn Ewlisk;Uniinished Journey: The Lewis Family, by Cawwon .%ith ,..,..__._______.__............... 23

ll19 “‘den ‘Ilwead, by..4~n copcrona _________....,,,,,,..................,,,,,......................................... 26Wanhog for Democrew, by&k Sdulirr .,,,,,,,,,.......___......................................................... 26Best Canadian Essa~g 1989, &cd by DDrrglnr Fdbrrling .._............ _._._.__________....... 27&,‘ing &Ivies, by Andrew Wn-&,, ,,,,,,,,,,,...._....,.,,,,,,,,,,..............,.,,,,,, .____._________ __............... 26One Hundred Mookeys: The Tiiomph of Popular Wisdom in

Canadian PoIitIcs, by Rob&M- La .,,,,,,.____________......................................................... 28Fro,,, the Belly of a F@ing Wh&, by By*no Gnrrloy . . ..________________................................... 30A,, Innocent Ryetamk, by Ii. R. F’eny ..______________........................,,,,..................................... 31Imrenting the Future: Reflections on Science, Technology and Nature,

byDovidSHnrki . . . . . . . . . . . . .._.......................................................................................................... 31The Voice of the Crane. by David Gun __.._..,..,...______............................................................. 32

FIeld Notes, R&b& Wake Silver Domzld Carwon @cc& 01 Ike lilrrory [ifi 018 iMrrrrcr olR&kard && Watching the Wat&lwr& In wkosc voice or wicrr dors the wrilrrsprOk?:l7ra RIol Li(a ofL.e&zrs Fzrkops oar wiokg no longer r@~rawlr. bul is. rrdity ........................ 1

Ihe Written Word. by I. I% f. Ounn ........................................................................................ 7Gii Books, by AI P&y ......................................................................................................... 33Film Notes, by Moth Wo&? .................................................................................................. 35Fimirls, by L,,,yv JomcsFnndr

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Received ............................................................................................................................... 39&\%t No. 142, by Bany Baldwin .............................................................................. 39CanLit Arro&c, by Mmy D. %i#zrr ................................................................................... 40

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EDITOR: Oons CowanMANAGING EDITOR: Garbam Carey IADVISORY EDITOR: Brian Fm’mttLAYOUT: Ann Mane A/digbierf

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Herbert Hildedeyi

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He was a writer of snbtlefyand sensitivity, and he loved

langtdage in all its firmsA;,d how MU ,~a tell me >wn lw+&Or soy foryou lbat tha SW doraY shrine?

THE PLAYWFCIGHT sits on the hmt Sun-deck. his shoulders forward, his headtilted back, his eyes closed. giving every-1hin.g io the song. Wendell Boyle sits atthe piano on the deck above, driving outgreat crasXw chords, and Kent Stetsonsings.

Below, in the garde”. a knot &peoplestays close to the fire and the cobs ofswet new corn. glasses of wine in theirhands. talking quietly or staring into thefire or singing along.

This is a c&e for R&hard Goal. wholived and loved and worked in this renovated farmhouse with his wife, the artistHilda Woolaough. It is the kind of wakeR&bard would have wanted - a finewarm party on a crisp August evening inRose Valley, Prince Edward Island. aparty that brings together lill kinds ofold friends from the many worldsR&hard inhabited. Friends in govern-ment, friends from the university,

friends from the community. friendsfrom (above al0 the arts.

Computer artists and curators, poetsand painters, impresarios and editors.Fiddles and penny-whistles. guitars, thepiano. Barbecued trout, zucchini salad,shrimp dip, homebaked rolls. Hilda is aphenomenal cook, and everyone elsebrought something. Blueberry buckle.liver pate, broiled chicken, fresh greenbeans, strawberry mousse.

Good stories, laughter, and contmver-sy. A Capella singing. A little beer and abottomless supply of wine. Bats zingingoverhead where hummingbirds llew thisa~?emoon. flowers lit by torchlight, thedark meen of the smwe trees. and asmall&h moon. _

And eood talk everywhere. flowingover thg sundecks. down into the gar-den back into the house.

Rishard would have loved it.R&hard Go01 was born in London in

1931. He lived in South Africa. attendedschool in Scotland, studied in Torontoand Hamilton, taught in Regina. Jamaica,Charlottetown. There was a marriagesomewhere that I knew nothing about,and a dark and lovely daughter I metbriefly in a Charlottetown garde”. Therewas his passionate pursuit of Hilda, be-fore whose Mexican studio he once appeared still wearing his longjohns fromRegina. Ijust tlwt@t I’d d?vp in, he said.You bastard, she said later, I could hauebem in bed with ~mmm~.But you weren’t, he grinned. And whocould resist such assiduous courtship?They married; and in 1967 they movedwith Hilda’s children to Charlottetown.where R&hard taught political scienceat the University of P.E.I. There theywere truly at home, and they nevermoved again - though they travelledwidely during sabbaticals and vacations,living at various times in Mexico, the Ca-nary Islands, Europe, India.

They were an enormously generous,forceful, talented couple, and their im-pact on their beloved island home wasenduring. Hilda devoted years to the re

vlval of the Island’s handlcmft traditionsand to the establishment of innovativegalleries. ,R&shard founded a news-magazine, The Square Deal, and a llter-ary press and sponsored an endless se-ries of visits and public readings forwriters he admired. He taught politicsthrough the study of literature, eucour-aged and published Maritime writers,criticized and appraised the region’sartists. implored and hectored and cn-ioled government agencies for betterarts support.

In 1985. largely at R&hard’s insis-tence, the univ&ity created a titer-ii-residence position. He the” bombardedme with letters, phone calls, and mes-sages. Would I come to P.E.I.? For varl-ous reasons, I was reluctant. but.R&shard systematically abraded my re-sistance. In the end I went - and I WSSglad, too; the year at U.P.E.I. was rl&.productive, and satisrying.

By then R&hard and Hilda had movedto an old farmhouse in Rose Valley,which they renovated themselves - ahome stuffed with their eclectic colleotioii of books and works of art, a houseof ComIortable chairs and wood StoVeS,eascadii plants and a hospitable table.They added a wing with a’bright, spa-cious upstairs studiocum-bedroom. anda deck running halhvay around the set-ond story. R&hard had largely witb-draw” from university affairs and publiccontroversies; all he wanted to do, hesaid, was to write. and he proposed totake early retirement on a modest pen-sion to make that possible.

He was a writer of bamque subtletyand sensltivily, and he loved language inall its forms - books, plays, poems. let-tures, commentaries. polemics, letters,tabletalk, gossip, anecdote. (His reper-toire included a marvellous imitation of aheavily accented South African munici-.pal politician talki.ng about ‘shitty affairsat the Shitty Council.“) His writing ismarked by a vast range of experienceand perception, and a passionate love ofllle in all its forms. He was no strangerto racism, and his burning denunciationsof privilege, stupidity. bureaucracy, andthe abuse of power were a joy to his al-lies and a marvel to his opponents.

At his wake. a friend remarked that wecould “sense” his spirit among us.

‘No.” I said. ‘You wouldn’t have tosense it. If it’s not talking, it’s notR&hard.”

But in fact his voice had less rangethan it deserved. His complex@, and theremoteness of his fictional settings -South Africa, for instance, in his prizewinning novel Efice and his posthumous

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Capetown Coolie - restricted his audi-ence, aa did bll frequent focus on PrinceEdward Island. At his best, he was amarvelloos stoxyteller. but his failureswere the obverse of his virtues. Some-times, it seemed, he chiselled bis bookstoo carefully, sacrificed momentum tothe precision of his detailing, lost thestory in the servics of the voice.

And then he lost his voice altogether.In the summer of 1988 he was ill, listlessand weak, and in August, Pat Lane-higuest - took him to the hospital. Hehad had a stroke. and he would be hospi-talized for three months. He came homefor the ThanksgivIng holiday - and fourdays later another stroke, much moresevere, simply erased half his brain,leaving him speechless and paralyaed. Ina Halifax hospital, he hovered for somedays behveen Ille and death.

The doctors thought he would neverleave the hospital. By Christmas. Hildahad him back in Rose Valley for week-ends. A month later he was home tostay. She built a &foot plywood rampfrom the house to the car and for fourmonths devoted up to seven hours dailysimply to grepan%g him for the day.

‘R&hard couldn’t speak, but thatdidn’t mean he couldn’t communicatedsays R&hard’s neighbour and protd&.the poet Leon Berrouard. R&hardtaught himself to sing without words, en-tertaining Hilda wltb jam riffs and oldpop songs. Hilda laughs when she re-calls how they managed: R&shard, UDable to remember the location or pur-pose of elechic liiht switches, wheelinghimself into a darkened room and point-ing imperiously upward at the light 6x-turs. Hilda carefully reteaching himhow to a&eve the miracle of liiht.

“We had a hvo-ande-half-hour row onetime.” she says. “Can you imagine it?R&hard couldn’t speak - but the waylie whipped that wheelchair around ex-pressed smythirrg he wanted to say.”

During those four months, Heine-mann accepted Cafietourn Coolie for 1990puhlieation. while tbe P.E.I. Arts Counciland the provincial government conferreda special award on R&hard for his aer-vices to literature. At the reception, sayaHilda, ‘he roared around the room in hiwheelchair, wearing his cap - naturally

and getting loads of attention. HeloVea it”

On April 29, R&hard and Hikla wentinto Charlottetown with Leon and KarenBerrouard to attend a screening at theConfederation Centi of films by Rick,Hancock, a filmmaker Reeard’had al-ways admired and supported. He wasclearly on the mend, and he conld evenspeak a few words. When they gothome, Hikla poured a drink of wine for

the other three, and R&hard mimed thathe wanted one too. No. said Hilda,you’re not allowed to drink tie. But itwas good red tine, not nameless plonk,and R&hard was not about to be denied.

‘Oh, come on!” he said, and Hildarelented.

Next day he suffered a thii stroke,and tlxy bpth knew he was-dying. Theysaid their goodbyes. When R&hardbegan to choke, Hilda took hbn to hospl-tal.Hediedinheraims.

“He looked beautiful, absolutelynoble,” Hilda remembers. “He lookedlike a prince.” She kIssed hi goodbye.It was May Day. He was 87.

And now, in August, his friends havegathered to celebrate R&shard’s complet-ed life, Hilda’s new beginning. To signalthat. Hilda built hvo more sundecks thissummer, and now, as Wendell Boyledraws chords and melodies from thepiano, Kent Stetson sings, and I lookaround. We are all, in a sense, pmti&s:we have all benetited tirn the affectionand respect that R&shard and Hildaspread wttb such prodigious liberality.The fihn script of Kent Stetson’s play, AWarm Wired irr China, has just reachedsecond draft. Marc Gallant’s new bookwill be published in six countries. Thewiters here include Joseph Sherman,J. J. Steinfeld, Leon Berrouard, JimHornby: young people, many of them,when R&hard befriended them, writerswho might never have persisted or pubIished without R&shard’s faith andafktion.

I am clad to have his writimz. and Iwill return to it often, as a way;f keeping his memory fresh and green. But iothe end it is the man. my friend R&hardGoal, that I mourn and honour: hiscourage, his humour, his ceaseless en-gagement with the burning moral quwtions of his day. Above all. I honow hlslove for truth and beauty, his devotion tothose who displayed, however modestly,the creative fire that alone partially re-deems the cruelty, blindness, and greedthat mark our species’ passage throughthe living whole around us. *

After R&hard’s cremation, his frfendaand family drank his favourlte cham-pagne and poured a tot in the waterwhile they committed his ashes to thestream that flow by the house in RoseValley. That small private ceremonymarked the reunion of hii body wftb theliving whole from which it sprang; butbis goodness had moved out to enrl& itlow before his bodr flared andaumIbled.

Kent Stetson sings. We all sing. AndR&hard’s spitit, somewhere, stops talk-log, just briefly, to hear us.

- SILVERDONALD CAMERON

Ipsilence is the betrayal of self amI speaking the betrayalof otkers, what is a writer to do? At the very least,

eke can admit arld examine the problem

SOMETIUES the unbidden comes andbegins a poem. To speak of tkr w&k-wwfs wkick foiled” (from “Ameijoas’?.When the line came to me. it seemed torefer to the rhetoric of the mouth, thevoice that makes us feel our self-ness.That connection behveen “voice” and“being” Jacques Derrlda derided as thedesire for presence, linear time, andtranscendence. (Unlike writfag, which isahvays a doubling, for it articulates dii-ference. putting our notions of ‘pres-ence” (the effacement of difference) intoradical question).

I thii the mfre means something dllfewnt to women; we more readily usethe voice as dialogic or polyvocal (thephilosophical work of Lute higaray andJulia Krlsteva in France, the theoreticaland tictlonal work of Gail Scott in Quebw. or the poetry of Marlene NourbesePhilip in Canada, to give some exam-ples). more relational than constitutiveof a univorral meaning or self. The resultfor many of us is that we see the voicenot just as articulation of the self, but aslink or thread with those others whomwe inhabit. who inhabit us, who caressus with their voices and bodies, and thevzeather in which they came to us. Whatrec;onances there are in what we ‘identt-fy” as the Voice”! Yet this women’s viewis not the one that has predominated lo asocial order that valorizes the individual.

Still. I think. the voice and self areconstituted and articulated only in rela-tiun to other “beings” (which could in-clude wheat or trees, these beings). Yetthwe links we have with each other sreconstrained or covered ovw by habits ofspeaking and perception. In poetry,these habits can result In (for one tblla poetry of the observer, by which Imean the poetic voice observing andcommenting on an external world. I’mmore interested in the mowmm~ of thelinkages or threads than in the ob-served/observer, polarized at each“end.” If you conceal these threads be-tizeen us. setting up and isolating the po-etic voice as “observer,” I believe theresonances are diminished. Certain de-structions become possible.

The poetry of the observer can bewritten by anybody; all it takes, they say,is “imagination. freedom of the’ imagina-tion.” But even given this imagination. lfthe voice of the observer ls urqrcstioncd- the ideology it bears, the values andculture it canies -what is really beingconveyed? It is said that sob-texts arestronger than the surface texts or mean-ing: one subtext here, I believe, is thedominance of the uoicc-~hat-sgcaks overthat which it observes. However lovinglythe description is accomplished.

The posture of a univocal voice is whatbothers me as well in the poetic inmge.The base of poetry is the power of im-ages, remember that? But it seems theimage often represses more than it con-veys - the expression of one ‘sight;suppresses contradictory or anti-rhyth-mic others. In this, to me, is the limita-tion of the lyric form, and the triumph ofa social order that thrives by exclusionrather than inclusion. That thrives bynot reflecting contradictions, not ques-tioning the voice’s carrying of ideology,its authorI& and prlvllege.

But must the desire to write, asks thecharacter in the East German writerChrista Wolfs novel The Accident. al-ways be accompanied by destruction?

.the intervening writing process, soAked about in the affirmative. alwaysintervenes in the livesofpeople, personswho become affected by the writing,who are bound to feel observed, pinneddown, categmired. misjudged, or worsestill. betrayed. always kept at a distanq.in any case, for the sake of an appropn-ate formulation. and for that I know noother remedy but silence, which trans.fers the ill from without to within, whichmeans less consideration for oneselfthsn for others, in other words. self-be-trsyal again.

But betrayal of what self? For awoman. who is offen outside the watch-words (even the word ‘poet” must .bemodified by ‘woman” to include her).the seams of the construction of a selfare clear. The women whose work in-spires me have been looking at thoseseams from various angles in their wit-

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ing, and maybe itls in this, in looking atthe seams, at one’s own seams, at the so-&J order we’ve internalized, out loud inthe poem, that can help “remedy” (forthere is no ‘rem~ the destruction.

To convey more than it represses. Ithimk the image must double back on it-self, exceed tbe visual, the observed: in-volving the litanous body, perhaps, andnot the visual, or changing the angle orspeed of movement Rxceed the visual?Perhaps just break through our internalcensoling of the visible. Due to the limit-ed area of visual attentiveness we have,thanks to the l inks betweenbrain/eye/language. From wheresprings, as well, the control of the voice,giving us that sense of presence Derridatalked about Which is to me simply a IPpression. a constructing of the self, ofwatchwords that fail so many of us:women, “minorities” (the word its&supposes dominance of the speaking voice),and the poor.

What I can’t 6gure out is why so muchpoetry suffers still from a kind of hysteri-cal tilure to see the seams of the con-struction. Some even return to a formal-ism (as the editors ‘of the recentanthology Poets 88. for example, note Intheir introduction) unseen in SO years or

more, where the voice is unquestionedand “the image” comes from the glory ofthe “centred” imagination. Without ad-miting openly the singular voice Cthestruggle to have our voices heard” aaone poet told me) bears the silence ofmany others. And the alternative is notthe silence of the writer. as ChristaWolfs character despairs. To borrowfrom signs carried by PLWAs &opleLiving with AIDS) at the Montreal Inter-national Conference on AIDS: Silenceequals death.

Instead, to write. if we could, con-sciously, but without betrayal . . : with-out layering a new “self,” equally pmb-lematic and unquestioned, over the old.To speak of the watchwords which failedis to admit, at least, tbe problem, and toask as well what kind of world we willhave at&ward. The imagination is, alas,not pore, but contains a social structurein the speaking voice. Admitting and ex-amining rather thaq defending the posi-tion of observer is critical. So that thepoem can go on, and it does: ‘To sgwk of4hs watchwords whkh faikd’ and Be ikfinitasimaf chasm of hope, cut into theverrhicle.” For beyond tbe watchwords,and their failure (for they must fail),hope lies. - BRIN MOURE

Tke world has become so &&se in oicr eyes tkatit is impossiblefir a mere book to imitate it

TRE NATURE of the real is always a mat-ter for argument and it is a pretty goodargument for the pm&e of fiction -probably tbe best possible argument forthe practice of fiction.

Robert Kmetsch, our main westernwriting hero, said that the fiction makesus real. We repeat that lovable saw everychance we get, especially at meetings ofwriters and critics Kmetsch wants us tostart there. not to make of hi remarkthe summing-up of an argument.

People often quote what appears to bethe Author’s Intention found early in mynovel Bumf?lg Ivoter: ‘speaking togetherto make up a history, a real historical fic-tion.” That was intended to be advice asto the begimdng of a project called thewiting and reading of that book.

Of course any serious witing is an at-tempt to investigate tbe real. Rmile Zola

was hying to do that, John DOS Passeswas trying to do that, and RobertKmetsch is t@og to do that Zola invent-ed realism, based on laboratory science,to do it DOS Paws imitated the munedi-ated camera eye to do it when Kmetscbhas a bunch of loony Canadian prairiemen build a toweling lighthouse madeof ice a thousand miles from the nearestocean, he’s after the real.

Now I will tell you who is not after thereal. Writers who write books or t&vi-sion shows with the intention of salis&-ing their audiences are not interested inthe real. They are acting out fantasies,their own fantasies of the Hollywoodwriter’s Monte Carlo life aod their audi-ence’s soap opera &moon life. The au-dience is there. waiting to be fooled.They name their children after the pec-pie in soap operas and drugstore titilla-

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tio” romance paperbacks: Tiffany andShaxm. Jessica and Chad.

Still. televlsio” - and all the other in-formation technology in the hands of theuneducated - has shaken the world ofthe serious writer. Realism. for instance,

. is now a heroic, doomed adventure, because the world is so diffuse in OUT eyesthat it is impossible for a mere book toimitate it The class structure and antag-onisms that gave rise to realism are stillthere. That world suwlves. But we cullno lon_ger limit a world and try to rcpresent it, to use Henry James’s verb.

So what CM v:e do instead? We can hyto make a text rather than try%g to represent a world. A text is potentially un-limited. There are only 26 letters in theEnglish languagg, and sometimes sameof them are redundant. But they can becombined in what appears to any reason-able mind as an infinite number ofSVUCWS.

Is this playing around. as opposed tothe serious world of Emile Zola? Try toimagine any complex invention that wenow seem to rely on - the airplane. thehydroelectric dam. tbe microwave. thekidney dialysis machine - hy to imag-ine our making one of them without thecombing of26 letters.

A liction is made in a similar way. Fiotion as a word was made itself, from

parts in various European languages.meaning made up. meaning built.

The most real thing in the world is a”English sentence. l’he hand that signedthe paper felled a city. Writers alwaysnotice very early in their lives the rela-tionship behveen the word sentence asfound in a written text and the word sen-tenee as found in a wbni”al court WhenI used tbe adjective ‘serious” in front ofthe word “witef earlier, that ws what Ihad in mind. When he commits hiswords to paper he is committing seriousness, as lf he were the judge making herdecision.

People should be as serious whenthey are “amini their children. Or build-ing their children.

Some serious readers might wonderabout my talking of potential infinity inthe building of a text. They will say thatwe are now bei”g forced to think of theearth as finite, of its resources as endan-gered by sprawling. wastefoJ idiots. Howcao someone talk about potential infinityin a world such as this?

My reply is simple and careful. Youneed not hy to represent a finite worldby means of a limited literature. You canlook on your 26 letters as the parts of apattern that can be made in time as largeand varied as the universe. It can gmwin front of you like a new big ba”g. But

you will prove your care aad your seri-ousnesa doling the application of everyadditional letter.

Every additional letter.If you still want to talk about mime&.

here it is. The care that you desire fromthe mortals on this earth. the steps “ecessary to keep this planet alive. can beimitated by the writer who knows thatshe is at the back edge of a potentiallyllmiiless structure &de of letters. Makea sloppy syllable and it will be in the systern for who knows how long. What isthe half-life of a bad metaphor?

I k”ow that poorly wittexl fiction wludisappear under the midden in time. Iknow that no one will be reading ourdrugstore books with the counter-dis-play b.osoms on the covers in a hundredyears. That is not what I em thinkingabout I am thing about the relation-ship of fiction and the real. I am thinkingthis: that person who watches soap operas and reads bodice-rippers has al-ready show” a carelessness toward theecology of words. Can we expect thatperson to take the Amazonian rain forestseriously?

If you want to write about the Anwo-nian tin forest to make your point aboqtreality, all right. Just be careful whereyou are lea6 those words, will you?

-GEORGE BOWERNG

So begins Rick Salutin’s brilliant studyof what happened in Canadian politics in 1988

-one of the most emotional, divisive.andimportant years in our history.

DAXU. iiAtJR iiHALSA was 46 when shedied last summer after a four-yearstruggle with cancer. She left a legacyof joy for children, a picture-bookworld filled with the vivid sights,sounds, smells, and colours of her ownchildhood territory. Her first story-buok, Tales of o Cantbli#g Grandma.published in 19%. was an affectionateportrait of a rebellious grandmotherand the little girl she protected and ad-vised. Five more books appeared in thenext four years. and each in turn wasincluded in “‘best” lists and nominatedfor awards.

N&a was born Marcia Schoenfeldin Queens. New York City. Her earliestambition was to be an artist. Lace theparents of the unnamed little girl inTalcs of a Caarlhg Grmdnzo. Dayal’sparents both worked. and she spenther days with her grandmother, whobecame the greatest influence in therhild’s life. When Dayal was eight, hergrandmother - her protector andfriend -died. The loss was traumatic;st that point, Khalsa considered, heremotional life was over. She channelledall her energies into observation andlearning. She read through the local li-brary shelves, subject by subject ac-quiring a vast knowledge of geographyand art history.

She also paid close attention to herwroundings. and her detailed recol-,ections of the social and culturalnoms of the 1950s are powerfully evf-lent in her books. A close friend and‘410~ artist, Yvonne Lammerich. hasspoken of her ‘phenomenal memory.she remembered the slightest detailsiom her childhood. Ail her stories arerue. although they are a bit exaggetat-?d. lbe houses, interiors, and streets

.,/---r-

D@KawKfuk~

are exactly as they were in the 50s and’60s. The books on the shelves are thetitles Dayal loved, the art on the wailsis the same.”

After utdvershy, Rhaisa became a social worker in New York City, -thenworked as a copywriter in advertising.Some of her early writing was for liter-ary magazines. She studied art in NewYork, and although she was attracted.to large-scale abstract painting, Dayalfound herself doing small drawings,the work that would eventually illuotrate her children’s books.

The pictures for her books were al-ways completed before she began writ-ing the story. Afy Faraily Vncotior(1988) captured the kitsch of Florida,then and now. Plastic flamingoes, theorange HoJo mof. the used-car dealer-ships, and the tacky motel moms areportrayed in all their tidi-blown splen-dour. Her drawings could be as wittyas her conversation, and she liked topoke fun at revered icons: her cover il-lustration for I Wmt a Dog (1987) is asend-up of George Seurat’s Sunday Af-ternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte.”

filled with heavenly hounds at rest on ahay day. Dayal Raur Rhalsa obviouslyremembered what really matters tcchildren,” observed Debbie Rogosin,executive director of the CanadianChildren’s Book Centre. “She had achild’seye view of what happens in achild’s world. Her teats are filled with awarmth that touches both children andadults.”

In the mid-19708 Marcia Schoenfeidjoined a Sikh ashram and becamehyal Kaur Kbslsa AUhough she hadno children of her own, she tended thebabies and young children duringmany summers spent in a Sikhwomen’s camp in New Mexico. Her un-derstanding of early childhood and herdesire to rediscover her own family ledher at last to wRing and painting forchildren, and the list of Rhaisa titles,once begun, grew quickly. A child In-somniac dazzled readers in Sleepers(1988). Mrs. Pelligrino introducedpizza to the neighbourhood in HerrPIem Grow to Oar Toaw (1989). and intz! (1989) a naughty dog became a

To the many admirers of her work,Rhalsa was a mysterious, gentle, whiteturbaned tigure, an author about whomthey knew little; to those who knew herwell Dayal was a humorous, contempla-tive, introspective person who soughtthe positive influences in life. She lovedcountry music. mck’n roil, Italian food,and cowboys. ‘Dayal was inspired bythe American cowboy’s free spirit andhis style,” says Lammerich. In thespring of 1990 Dayal R&r Rhalsa’sCowboy D~sams will be published (byTundra, publisher of all her books) as afitting tribute to Kbalsa’s passion forthe joy of childhood.

During the final months of Dayai’sillness, a friend read to her nightlyfrom her favourlte book, 7%~ Wind intka Willows. “She identitied with Toad,”recalls Lammerich. “He’s the rebelwho does what he wants, but at thesame time he’s the sweet, kind onewho helps others, and he’s honest:Dayal’s perfect match.”

-uNDAcRAtwELD

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-_

te 9Wky memory work was& all bad

By I. ML Owen

ARcIwlC FOIiMs: The Tories dotb jroks~too r;wch. “A/OS.” be quotbs. She wad&not. 0 de&b, wberefiwe art thy sting?Anyone who wants to use an archaicform. whether for elevated or (as ismore usual) for humorous effect. reallyowht to know what the form stands for.If you have read Shakespeare or Milton,or the 1611 Bible, it seems impossiblenot to know; yet the examples above areslighdy adapted from errors I have seencommitted, mostly by well-educatedprofessional writers, over the last fewmonths. So perhaps it’s necessary togive some guidance.

There have been three big changes inthe conjugation of English verbs. Wehave dropped tbe second-person singu-lar noon Ibos and the verb forms thatwent with it: me now use the pluralforms (sot! . . .) as singular. The old present and past second-person singularforms of the verb lo be were Iborc art andthan tiwt or wad, and in other verbs thesecond-person forms regularly ended in-est or -s1: tborr goes& tborr bast, Uosrhodst. In the third-person present (not inthe past) tense the ending was -etb or 41,which we have now changed to -s.Shakespeare wote in the hansitionsl pericd, and could stitch from one form tothe other according to the me& “It blcs-Seth him that giuss and him that takes.”Qr?orh is a curious case; it’s the third-per-son singular tbrm of the present tease ofthe Old English verb cwe#~an. Ito say,”which otherwise disappeared early fromthe laaguge, sod somewhere along theline qtzotb moved from the present to tbepast tense. He quotb means “he said.”and there’s no such form as quok

As for zc1iewXwv, it means %hy,” not‘where.” I can’t count how many timesI’ve seen one of the most familiar linesfrom Roritm crud Juliet misquoted by theinsertion of an extra comma - 0Rozwo, Rorweo, wherefore art thou,Romeo? - by people who clearly thinkJuliet’s le&g over the balcony wonder-ing where the hell he’s got to. In fsct, ofcourse, she’s saying wbe&we art tbow

Romeo? - asking why he had to be RMontagu, Esq., and thus her hereditaxyenemy.

To revert to the confusion over the oldverb forms, perhaps it!s especially rifenow because people now in their 40s andyounger entered school at a time whenthe educators had decided that memoribing verse was “rote learning” and there-fore by de6nition evil. People in my gen-eration had to memorize regularly, andonce you’ve done that for a dozen yearsor so it’s pretty well impossible to getthese thii wrong. Perhaps thii is alsowhy almost all hosts of CBC music pm-grams give Juliet three syllables insteadof two -Julie Et - which makes it im-possible to scan.any line of the play inwhich the name occurs: ‘3 is the east,and Julie Et is the sun.” That is quite offthe point of the written word, bat I’vewanted to get it off my chest for a longtime.

AWKWARD CONSIXUCTIONS: Here’s agood example of the gmmmatically car-rect sentence that!s abominable to read,from the catalogue of last September’sFestival of Festivals in Toronto: Since #ede&b of Miwgucbi and Ozu, tbe o&g ofKwosazoo, Ibe relatioe iu&ivi& of Oshi-nzo, and wilb the enegtion of Itanri,Ju&ansrc cinema seems to bsoe lost itsvoice. You’d think it would have beeneasier to write, for instance: Sirrce Mi-zogncbi and Oen died asd Kwosawe hasgmzon older, while Oskima bes been lessaclive, Japanese cinema seems to baeelost ifs voice - except fir the worb ofRami. That’s a little shorter, and a greatdeal easier to read.

ADVERBIAL POSITION: ,I often changeother people’s sentences by movingtheir adverbs and adverbial phases tobetter positions. Luckily they don’t oftennotice, so that I’m not called on to ex-plain. Many times I do it by brute in-stinct rather than the light of reason; butI’m still hoping to formulate a principleand report on it here. In the meantime, Imust pass on to you immediately this

specimen from “Letter from Queen’sPark,” a communication from my repre-sentative in the Ontario legislature., 7was pleased,” he says, “to participate inthe ReadingTent set up by Frontier Col-lege to pmmote literacy ot Qrceenk porkon Canada Day.” Well, it’s a start, but itmight be still better if our legislatorscould be literate every day of the year.RUN-ON SENTENCES: ‘I don’t koow whatthese are. Morton S. Rspp. a frequentwriter of letters to the Globe and Mail,lately rebuked John Allemang. the“Word Play’ columnist, for writing:Being notoriously poor lirtguists, ourtongwe cannot abeays cony out iobat owgood will intends, but we hy. Dr. Rappsays: IThe quotation gives us a danglingparticiple and a run-on sentence, all inone. Not bad for a dds work!” Certainlybeing is a dangling participle. unlessAllemang means that our tongues arepoor linguists. But whays a run-on sen-tence. and, if this is one, why is it bad?Are we not allowed to tack new clausesonto sentences by means of conjunctionssuch a$ and and but? It seems very lbnit-ing. I seek instruction: can anyone en-lighten me? q

Don Morrow et ai

From Ned HanIan to theDobm inquiry, thisinformative account

$acee the development ofour favourite sports.

Paper $P995

Oxford Canada

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I AU writing the best poemsof my life: they will make myname,” Sylvia Plath comidedin a letter to her mother inOctober. 1932. She was livbtgin Devon. England. with hertvzo young children: her mar-riage to the British poet TedHughes had fallen apart; shewas brin_ging forth (at the astonishing rate of one a day)the dricl poems that would,indeed. secure her place in2Oth-century English litera-ture. And a few months later,at the age of 30. she wouldcommit suicide.

Anne Stevenson draws onprivate correspondence,Plaib’s journal entries, and awalth of anecdote fromfriends and acquaintauces toshape Eitter Fame: A Lifeof Sylviu Plath (Houghton>,Bftlin tVikhrg/Penguin). 448psges. $27.95 cloth). Plath is afascinating subject, a woman\vho laboured to project theimage of “‘a nice, bright_ giftedAmerican girl” even while shewrote of the terribing ragethat lay underneath it (“I havea violence in me that is hot asdeath-blood”). Stevensonwiles well. and her insightsinto Plath’s work are im-mensely valuable. But in try-ing lo redress what she terms“misunderstandings” aboutthe poet’s life - chiefly theamount of blame for herbreakdovm directed at Iiugh-es - Stevenson produces anaccount that is itself strlkhrglyow-sidcd. She ackuowledges.for instant. that Plath’s laterjouruals are unfortunately “nolonger available”: she refrainsfrom mentioning that Ted

Hughes destroyed them.Though compelling and vivid,Bitter Fume pmves the impobsibility of giving au ‘objective”sumumry of a Ill, especiallyone as fraught with contmver-sy as Plaths. -B.C.

TBQUCH One’s Company(Mosaic. 200 pages, $24.95doth, $12.95 paper) is CeraklLynch’s first collection ofshort Action. it is by no meansthe work of au inexperiencedwriter. The stories, all set iuSarnia. Ontario, are orlgbml.varied. and delightful. Someinclude the same characters,but these links are looseenough to make the book aoaesthetic whole without tum-ing it into a novel manqu4.Underlying the occasionallybleak surface is a good-na-

the hun.wi condition and auirrepressible sense of fun.The faint aroma of Larry, Dar-ryl, and Darryl adds a layer ofhilarity (and pathos) to ‘TheLumbs,” although the story’sdidactic frame should disap-pear. The hvo stories aboutWanda and Ronald Stuart,funny and sad at the sametime, show insight into humannature confined within thebonds of holy matrimony -and insight born of thosebonds. “Spice Cake,” wrench-ingly pathetic, is at the sametime unforgettably comic.Laughing in the face of deathis not new, hut Gerald Lynchmauages to make it seem so.

- L B .

0 0 0

ANGER and violence are neverfar below the surface in thenovels and short stories of theAmerican writer RussellBanks, and it takes littleprovocation to bring them tothe surface. In AEliction (McClelland & Stewart. 355pages, 326.95 cloth), Banks’ssixth novel, the narrator,Rolfe Whitehouse. traces thefirst few weeks of deer-hunt--

ing season in rural NewHampshire during which hisbrother, Wade, a bitter mtd-die-aged alcoholic and di-vorced father, is finallypushed over tbe line to acts ofviolence and vengeance hecannot control.

Wade has become a ritgitlvebecause of his actions (notspecified until near the end ofthe book) and Rolfe is ob-sessed with learning how theviolence that lurks in theWhitehouse family surfacedin him as it had in their father,another hitter alcoholic whobeat them as children and stillkeeps them in a psychologicalstranglehold even after hisdeath.

Through Rolfe, Banks pre-sents Wade to us as a strangely familiar creature: proud ofbis skiUs and embmmssed byhis faults, not unaware of hisdestiny but powerless to stopit. Wade is both a convbmlngsocial portrait and a mirror ofour secret fears. &Hction is ahauntingly beautiful novelthat probes with sensitNityand surprising humour theways in which people intllctpain on themselves and thosethey love without ever mean-ing to. -li.S.

000

A VARIATION on the theme oforal history, Thg Parcelfrom Chicken Street andOther Stories (DC Books,187 pages, $14.95 paper) wascompiled by Fran Pono-marenko from anecdotes andtales told to her by her friendLudmilla Bereshko. ‘and attimes those of other people.”Bereshko was born in theUkraine, “either in 1905 or1909.” endured ‘the years offear and term? there and wasplaced in an Austrian forced-labour camp during the Ger-man occupation.-She wasnever able to learn what be-came of her husband andsons, and after the war shecame to Canada and marriedagain, “though not legally.”Her stories are a mbrture of

strong emotions and grim re-alism. with a dash of highcomedy thrown in. Thougheach tends to revolve aroundvarious crises in the Ukrabai-an immigrant community liv-ing on “Chicken Street” inMontreal, there is a larger uu-dercurrent to them as well:the fearsome history that theolder immigrants share andfrom which they are deter-mined to protect their off-spring. often with comic re-sults. These are also storiesabout survival, for, asBereshko ‘herself often said,*Life is bitter, but one has tolive.” - P . B .

000

ANN DIAMOND is not a prolific short-story writer: herfirst collection, Snakebite(Cormorant, 150 pages,.$10.95 paper), includes 10 sto-ries written over the lastdecade. If this lengthy periodof crystallization has not pro-duced a full array of epony-mow gems, it has at least pol-ished them well. Two - tbetitle story and the final one,“Jupiter’s Trsnsit? - are de&nitely wxtb the wait

Diamond’s stories all fea-ture women protagonists, andmost are set in Montreal. Shehasagiftforliu~thebaualand the extraordinary in con-vbudng ways: a child’s dreamsoverlap observations of hermother’s prejudice, a lesbianwho plans to throw her coffeecup at the Pope faints andvomits instead, and then isgiven a plastic rose by an on-looker. In tone, Diamond ismorea realist than a magic realist, but her mastery of thebasic skill of short stmy con-struction - kno&ug what toleave out - allows her tomake the jump between hergenerally wry. earthy characters to extraordinary out-comes and epiphanies. Shealso se&s some of the tellingparadoxes of contemporarylife: New Age capitalists, forexample, peddling miracleherbal diets, or Angles hying

:

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to define themselves in mili-tantly francophone Quebec.

The limits she still faces srea certain flatness of style -too many of the stories soundalike. although their charac-ters and atmospheres differ- and a rather restrictedrange of heroines. Except forthe five-year-old in ‘Snake-bite.” the women are uniform-ly white and in young middleage. Perhaps working on abroader spectrum of humani-ty should be on Diamond’snext l&year plan. -J. 0.

WHO AM I? is the underlyingquestion asked by many ofthe immigrants or children ofimmigrants heard from inWorlds Apa& New Immi-grant Voices (Cormorant,430 pages, $14.95 paper),Milly Chamn’s sequel to herpopular Eetswu Tat0 Worf&an oral history of the immi-grant experience.

Chamn. herself the daogh-ter of Hun,Tarian-Czechoslo-vakian immigrants, presentsinterviews with a dozen otherimmigrants, most now livingin Montreal. as well as a fewshort stories, personal remi-niscences, and even a poemon the subject of displace-ment.

Not surprisingly, despitemost of the participants’ re-peated deckoations of love forCanada, sincerely felt and ex-pressed, there is a certainmistfu1 ambivalence behindtheir stories.

Most of the reminiscencesconcentrate more on thecwld lefi behind, often underpainful circumstances, yetthere is a nagging feeling thatno matter how dreadful liewas in Europe during the war,in Ethiopia or Morocco orTurkey as a persecuted. mi-nority, or China during theCultural Revolution, some-thing vital to the immii~spersonal identity has beensacrificed. In this bookCharon helps to rescue andpreserve that identity withtact and sensitivity. -N.S

000

THE TITLE of Stephen Home’sGhost Camps @IeWe& 276pages, $24.95 cloth, S14.96paper) comes from the name8iven Assiniboine lodges aban-doned by all but the dead &era smallpox plague. but thebook extends the idea to in-clude hvo often voicelessfringes of Canada, the northand the rural west. Home’spurpose in these 17 essays isclear: to make his readers seethat a solid sense of Canadianculture arises out of under-standing what is usually seenas peripheral to Canadian life,past and present In four pas-sionate but clear-headed es-says about the history of nativeCanadians, alone and in rela-tion to Europeans, he destroysrosy notions about both races.“fhose who trade the painhdtroth of their past for the ro-mantic myth that sustains pipsent stereotypes,” he warns,“soon tind they have no past at’all - and that is the sure pathto colhaal oblivion.” In live es-says about escape from deathby “Earth, Air, Fire andWater,” and six about buildersand preservers of their homeland, he demonsbates his CODviction that ‘citizens are thestuff of their own history.” Per-haps it is vain to hope thatGkosi Catnps could make a diiference in the way we see our-selves, but that hope is hard tosuppress. -LB.

BRUCE WHITRMAN’s extend-ed prose poem - of whichBook I appeared in 1984 -extends to The InvisibleWor ld I s i n Dec l ine(Books II to IV) (CoachHouse Press, 52 pages, $12.95paper). He writes in repeateddeclarative sentences in astyle that implodes academicessay and erotic apostrophe.His phrasing (“That language

could1

e localized in thefrontal obe of the left hemi-sphere of the brain seemed tohi an idea that was both ma-terialistic and insane”) recallsChristopher Dewdney, whonot coincidentally edited thebook.

This book imagines lan-8uage as “the invisible world.”Language is also a metaphorfor Iii. Attempts are made tointerrelate the problematicbody, the relentless mind, thetoo-soon-relenting heart. Sexrecurs, but cannot overcomelanguage (a woman whoimagines she is giving the 8iftof fellatio is according to thenarrator only “building an an-tilexical explosion in him”)..There are undoubtedly bril-liant pa-8 in here, but notmuch of a sense of humour.There are undoubtedly toomany arcane words, and toomany loads of learning on theslender back of this particularpoetry camel. Perhaps self-ref-erentisl and cerebral poetry isa dead end

Nature comes and goes.Isidore Ducasse makes an appearance in one section, al-though he was more tim in LesCtmts d e Maldomr. T h e s e -ries does intens@ towards theend of the last book. Perhaps,like Ducasse (Lautiamont)Whiteman will find his truereaders in a later em. PerhapsI missed the point. Perhaps itwas invisible. -J.O.

IN Running to Paradise(Little. Brown. 151 pages,$9.95 paper), a reissue of abook that first appeared 25years ago, Kildare Dobbscompresses his life into; a sequence of vignettes that areoften tinny in the sharp butcomfortable way of illustra-tions in an old-fashioned chil-dren’s book. He takes us fromthe Ireland of his youth to theRoyal Navy of 1942, to % hotday on the river Cam” in thesummer of 1946, to Africa,and then to Canada. Eachepisode is animated by a per-son or an event, and each ispresented in a bold, impressiqnistic, and extremely read-

able slyle. In the e& part ofthe book, where Dobbs is ob-viously s!ruggling with nostal-gia, there is a touch of thathorrible thing the “Englishhomorisr; but by the time hegets to the Second World Warthe toffee and watercolourside of his prose has disappeared. He describes a stormat sea, a man being tlogged inAfrica, the peculiar shame ofbeing an imperial Big Man,and then the quite differentshame of being a salesman. Atthe close - perhaps becausethese brief vignettes haveended up encapsulating a life- sadness creeps in. Dobbsactually says very little abouthimself. yet it is remarkablehow vivid - and ultimately~;yk~lancholy - this short_

-B.S

IF YOU look in the mirror andbite on a Lifesaver in thedark, you’ll see flashes ofbluegreen light. This is theenergy released by cleavingmolecular bonds in the sugarcrystal. Wintergreen worksbest

In 40 per cent of us, eatingasparagus generates especial-ly pungent urine, but only 10per cent of us can smell it

When you see snow onyour television, some of thewhite flecks are the signatureof photons, particles of lightthat have been flittingthrough the universe sincethe Big Bang. about 15 billionyears ago.

Jay Ingram, host of CBC’s‘Quirks and Quarks,” pack-

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ages science like candy. TheScience of Everyday Lifef.Viking. 210 pages, $19.95cloth) is a bargain pack of 24eesty. tangy, wonderfullyreadable short essays on theoddities beneath the blandsurface of the commonplace.

Most science is so awidlywritten that laymen turnaway, repelled not by the subject but the form, but Ingramis a master. Another morsel:

Midges mate in mid-air.While they couple at one end,the female of some speciesenjoys a grisly lunch at theother. She inserts her pro-boscis in the male’s head andsocks him dry as they fall tothe ground. The male is evi-dently too randy to notice.

This is everyday Iii? - L J.

JAPAV has enjoyed tittering.even adulatory, media cover-age during the last decade, ebpecially in the business press.In Japan. The BlightedBlossom (New Star Books,

300 pages. $25.95 cloth), RoyThomas argues that Japan’sastounding success is partmyth, part illusion.

O_ne myth_ is Fat Japaceseworkers are loyal drones, happily committing their entireworking lives to the good ofbenevolent corporations. Infact, Thomas insists. mahy aretrapped by an intricate systemof social controls.

000

PITY the poor tomato. Bredfor durability (not necessarilytastiness), gassed so that itwill ripen on schedule. the~. . .tomato is emblematic of what

Part of the illusion is thatwhile Japan is wealthy and

is wrong with the food industry, according to Ftpm Land

powerful, most of.its citizens to Mouth: Understandingdo not share in that aftluence. T h e F o o d S y s t e m ( N CSince 1948. Japan has been Press, 160 pages, $14.95virtually a one-party state paper). Brewster tieen ar-ruled by a business clique. goes that agribusiness is notMuch of the wealth getssucked up in hugely inflated

only wasteful andiecologicsllyharmful; because profit is its

dues of real estate and food.Housing is generaUy dreadfuland Japanese pay about eighttimes as much as wc do forrice. For all the fabled Orien-tal veneration of age. Thomasargues that the old are treatedcruelly in Japan. So arc pris-oners, dissidents, and the

.mentally ill.Thomas is almost unrelent-

ingly critical. The bookamounts to a well-rosaarchedlist of shortcomings, informa-tive but discouraging. - L J.

priority, food ‘has value onlyinsofar as it cao be traded inand speculated on.”

This book is really a cri-tique of the logic of a marketeconomy, and of our coltore’sreliance on technology tosolve all its problems. Hencewe have seed companies thatdevelop hybrid plants able toresist the pesticides that theyalso manufacture; irradiationof food (what Kneea calls “atechnology in need of a mar-ket”); and research to pro-duce a tomato that doesn’twinkle and thus has a longershe&life.

There’s plenty of food forserious thought here. al-though some of Kneen’s alter-natives to the present systemseem too idealistic - or toodrastic - to be practical.

- B . C .

PrePared by Pat Barclay,Laurel Boons, BarbaraCarey, Lmwenct? Jacb.wn.

John Oygkton. h’onnam S&unison, and Bruce .%muin.

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REVIEW ESSAYI

Zet me put it this way. Canada is not somuck a comtry as a holding tank filled withthe disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples’

s

OLOMONGURSKYwas here.L.ike’ Kikoy was. Like Joey Hersh. St

L i Urbaio Street’s avenging horse-mao who tailed the Nazi Joseph Men-gele through the South Americanwilds, was here. Like a new history ofthe tribe of Judah on these shores ishere. Like five pounds of manuscript,well over 200.000 words, are here, andyou’d best have your notepads at theready. This book, entertaining thoughit is. summons you to research it asyou read ir

The novel tracks four generations ofempire-building Gurskys, flaggingdovm over a hundred minor and majorcharacters in the process, as itleaphgs from the present to that timewhen the Inuit presided over the farnorth and Sir John Franklin’s 1845search for a Northwest Passage endedcith hi ships at freeze in Arctic ice.

Ephraim is the first of countless chsr-acters in this novel to take up the Habraic cudgels in one way or another.by fair means and fool.

Recall, as Richler would have us do,the words the Lord said unto hisprophet, Jeremiah: ‘I am a father to Is-rael, and Epbmim is my firstborn . . .Behold, the day comes, saith the Lord,that I will sow the house of Israel andthe house of Judah with the seed ofman.”

Ephraim wastes no time io gettingdown to itl. . . When the first evening star appeared they saw the little dark men.

Enter Ephraim Gursky. sole sor-viwr of the expedition.

First Canadian Jew.*Dandelions . ..Diiusouthereaod

rid iog the wiod we take root there.” R‘Who will sing our songs, Moishe?”

Ricbler has Gitel Kugglemass ask,windiog down &om her latest shoplii-ing spree at Holt Renfrew. “Does any-body care about our stories now?”

Fresh from Newgate prison andblessed with a wondrously originalcriminal mind, the indomitable

.,‘.a .’

i1’,‘I

‘? ’ :,L.. !,

beating on skin dams. parading theirwomen before them, to the entry bm-nel of Epbraim’s igloo. Epbraim appeared. wearing a black silk tophatand hinged white shawl with verticalblack stripes. Then the little menstepped forward one by one. thrustingtheir women before them. extollingtheir merits in an animated manner.Oblivious of the cold, a young womanraised her sealskin parka and jiggledher bare breasts. . . l&ally Ephrsimpointed at one, nodded at another,and they quickly scrambled into hisigloo.

Epbraim, Shaman of the North, has

,_._ - _._--. -.-------- ..$$jldmdmaimr

..--....__. .--- - ---- I- ____ l__ll.. -..- .-_ . . .-_-. - ._._. ._- _~ _.. .

founded himself a church, and whitesettlers vdtnesslng the above spectaclefrom their snorvcdin perch atop theCrosby Hotel have this to say:

‘Well. I’ll be damned.”%%atevcr them MilIenarlans is it’s

sure as shit a lot more fun than whatwe’ve got”

One hundred years later. Inuit arcstill carrying the name - Corsky,Gurskee. Gurski, Girsky, Goorsky -as they entertain visiting British myal-ty with their throat singing Cratherlike dry gsrglii”j, and Ephralm andhis descendants have altered foreverthe Canadian mosaic. These descen-dants, whose stories are interwoventhroughout the novel, come chiefly inthe form of three brothers, Bernard,Solomon, and Morrie, who vie for con-trol of the massively wealthy liquorcompany created out of their bootleg-ger pmfits during Prohibition.

Let me put it this way. Canada is notso much a country as a holding tanktilled wltb the disgruntled progeny ofdefeated peoples. French-Canadiansconsumed by self-pity: the descen-dants of Scats who ged the Duke ofCumberland; Irish the famine; andJews, the Bkick Hundreds. Then thereare the peasants from the Ukraine,Poland. Italy and Greece, convenientto grow wheat and dig out the ore andwing the hammers and run therestaurants. but otherwise to be keptin their place. Most of us are still hud-dled tight lo the border, loaklng intothe candy store wIndow, scared by theAmerlcsos on one side and the bushon the other. And now that we arehere, prospering, we do our damnbest to exclude more ill-bred newcorn-ers. because they remind us of ourown mean origins in the draper’s shopin Inverness or tbe slrtctl or the bog.

Is the Department of Immigrationlistening? Readers of Co.&sare, of TheAP~rcuficcrffip ofDaddy Xrauitz, of themasterful St. Urba~ak Hur8eomu. impatient with thll writer’s absence fromthe novel scene since the 1983 JoshttoThw n;ld Now. need not worry thatthe caustic satirist, the iconoclastic di-viner, the storyteller as social critic, asmoralist with a skeet-shooter’s eye,here in this, his most Canadian novel,has lost either edge or alp.

Nor. for that matter, has he aban-doned his bred-in-the-bone compul-sion for irreverent character portray-als that discomfit some in the Jewishcommunity or bestir discussions ofanti-Semitism, as happened with

Duddy Km& and other of this writ-er’s works. Finncophones - and, un.demtandably, some feminiits. perhapshomosexuals, certainly some wcstern-ers, and Anglo-Montrealers - mayfeel the occasional shot of ire as well.Lewis and Clarke, Fremont hoo ha.my grandpappy Ephraim was right upthere wlvith them . . . Westmount oyoey. It doesn’t fool me that they get

into a skirt once a year for the St An-drew’s Ball, pretending they comefrom quality and that they didn’t getthe shit kicked out of them at Cullo-den.

And the Frenchies? The higher oneof them holds his oerfumed nose inthe air the more likely it is that hisgreat-grandma was a figa ds mi. a lit-tle whore shipped over by the khrg sothat she could marry a soldier’andhave twenty-five kids before she wasforty To this day you know what aFrench-Canadian family gives thedaughter for a wedding present she’sonly sixteen years old? Hold on toyour hat, fella. They send her to adentist to have all her teeth yankedout.. . Well the Gurskys didn’t comehere steerage fleeing from somedrecky &tell. My family was estab-lished here before Canada even became a country.

. . . Every family has a cmss to bear,a skeleton in the closet, that’s Iife.Eleanor Roosevelt, she’s been to ourhouse, you know. Couldn’t her fatherafford a dentist? Her teeth. Oy wy.Her people were in the opium trade inChina, but you woukin’t read that inl7zc Ladies' Horns Journal or wherevershe wrote “My Day.” Joe Kennedywas a whoremaster from day one andhe swindled Gloria Swanson. but theynever sang about that in Camelot.Take King George V even, an OBEwas too good for me. One of his sonswas a hopeless drunk, another was abum-fucker and a drug addict, and‘that dumbbell the Duke of Windsorhe threw in tbe sponge for a tart. Youwant the Duke and Duchess for acharity ball. you rent them like a tuxfrom TipTop.This is that coarse, brusque; dy-

namo Bernard talking, head man atMcTavlsh Distillers, as he staves offheart attacks, contends with the ma-nipulations of his viper son (“that puta,Lionel’) - as he grapples with andmaligns his dead brother SolomontEphraim’s chosen one), and combatsmysterious company takeover at-tempts from Zurich.

“I’m going to die, Miss 0,” he says

to his secretary, Miss O’Brien.‘Would you like me to do your wee

nie now?”Or consider the world from the

point of view of the novel’s one honestman, Bert Smith, who, as a youngliquor agent for Ottnwa. rctirsed to bebought off by the booze-runningGurskys and spends the balance of hislife yearning for the scale of justice toright itself.

He did not have to worry about Jaws.on the street that he lived on in lowestWestmount,. just this side of the rall-road tracks. The street of peelingmorning houses with rotting. lopsidedporches was altogether too poor forthat lot Even so. there was no sbort-age of trash. Noisy Greek inunlgrsntscultivating tomato plants in rockbsrdback yards. Swarthy, fart-filled Ital-ians. Forlorn French-Canadian factorygirls splllidg over $4.99 plastic chairsfmm Miracle Mart, yammering to .each other. West Indians with that ar-rogant stride that made you want tobelt them one. Polacks, Portuguese.“Happily . . . we will not live longenough to see Canada become a mon-grel&d country.”

Is Immigration listening? .“The concern, deeply felt,” Rlchlk

writes, wickedly concluding this paa-

mong&iidnaturally to Smith, an Anglo-Saxonwesterner, born and bred.” This beinga statement that lines up withSolomon’s earlier observatIon:%iscountry had no tap root. Insteadthere’s Bert Smith. The very essence.”

“If Canada had a soul,” muses anoth-er character, “. . . then it wasn’t to befound in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetownor Parlllent Hill, but in the Cabooseand thousands of bars lie it that knitthe country together from Peggy’sCove, Nova Scotia, to tbe far side ofVancouver Island.” Rlchler’s fictionhas ahvays shown the author’s fond-ness for boozy personalities, and inSolomon CunRy he has gone to thesource ln composing a narrative aboutthe family that created a sprawling fi-nancial empire out of its bootleggerorigins. How much tbe novel borrowsfrom the famous Bronfman family,which in real lie is often reputed tohave done the same, will be a topic upfor grabs, though there arc some sur-face similarities - the Russian orl-pins, early hotel and real estata invcst-

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ments in the west, energeticmarketing of spirits during Prohibitionyears, squabbles within the family forcontrol, to name just a few.

Hanging out in the Caboose, whenhe isn’t in Yellowknii or such polaroutposts as Tulugaqtitut (Ephraim’sold stomping ground), or in Englandor Montreal, or dug in at his favouredcabin overlooking Lake Memphrema-gog in the Eastern Townships -wherever his obsession takes him -is Moses Berger, the alcoholic intel-lectual whom Richler has chosen tohold together this strong-out novel.

In chapter two, we meet Moses, theson of an arrogant, failed Montrealpoet who had sold his soul to BernardGursky. Moses is searching his cabinfor his favourite fishing fly anddcylling on the Gurskys, and particu-larly on Solomon, whose exploitsMoses has been tracking since theage of 11. when his father to-ok him toa Gursky child’s birthday party. Bynovel’s end. when Moses finds his fly,he has illuminated much of the myotery surrounding Solomon’s lie andraised the curtain on a man not con-tent to live just once. ‘Living twice,maybe three times, is the best re-venge,” goes the book’s epigraph, andit is this idea that gives Richler someof his best fun.

In 1956, in Oxford on a RhodesScholarship, in Blackwell’s bookshop,Moses has this exchange with a mannamed Sir Hyman Eaplansky (in appropriating this name Richler is likelyespressing an appreciation forLeonard Q. Ross’s 7% Education ofyppm aa *$, *K*= ** *l*@ *,t)):

“I road your essay on Yrddish ety-mology in E~~otrrttw.” he [Sir Hymanjsaid. “BxceUenf I thought”

?hank you.”So I hope you won’t take offence if

I point out a small error. I fear youmissed the mark oo the origin of‘like.’ Mind you, so did Partridge,who cites 1935 as the year of its firstusage in English. As I’m sure youknow, Mencken mentioned it as earlyas 1919 in hisllawiruu Laagkagc.”

“I thought I said as much.”“Yes But you suggest the word was

introduced by German Jews as a pejo-rative term for immigrants from thesI~&ti, because so many of their namesended in ‘s!# or ‘ski.’ Hence ‘ky-MS’and then ‘kikes.’ Actually the wordoriginated on Eilis Island. where iilit-crates wre asked to sign entry fomtswith an ‘K This the Jews refused todo. makktg a circle or a ?dkel’ instead,

and soon the inspector took to callingthem ldkelehs’ and fitialiy ‘k&s.’ ”The key reference here is the

Mencken one, for we have previouslyseen Solomon exchanging witticisms,and being photographed, with Menck-en; Sir Hyman, who comes with his.own ancestry, has looped over hi armSolomon’s old malacca cane. Is SirHymao then Solomon in disguise, hav-ing found his revenge? Is his the mysterious Zurich interest out to take overMcTavish? The alert reader will tum-ble to this, though Richler plays outthe suing. Over the three quarters ofthe novel yet to come, Richler sug-gests a good deal about Sir Hyman,much of it in a playful vein not to betaken too seriously - Who made thelast call to Marilyn? Who erased the 16minutes in Nixon’s Watergate tape? -but by the end Sir Hyman’s works sreto be seen in much the same way we

viewed those of St. U~boin’s JoeyHer&, the Avenging Horseman. Theidea, though it is not dramatically ren-dered to the extent one might wish,imparts a new strength to the narra-tive of Solmnpr Gursky Was Here andelevates the novel’s worth anothernotch or hvo. Sir Hyman, we learn. secretly provided an air force for thenewly proclaimed state of Israel. Nearthe close of the novel. living yet anoth-er time fhii four61 incarnation, by mycount). Solomon, now in his 80s. isfunding and organizing the raid on En-tebbe to free a planeload of Israelihostages hijacked by the PopularFront for the Liberation of Palestine.

The bootlegger has come a longway, and altogether atoned for whatwas unsavoury in his past - though acertain integrity, and loyalty to hispeople, was ingrained at the start.While Bernard and his sleazy side-kick, Harvey Schwark (“who .nevermet a rich man he didn’t like”). wereaddii new labels to McTavish booze,Solomon had a cot in his office and hisear to the short wave. As Hitler strodeover Europe, Solomon was petitioningOttawa on behalf of the Jews and buy-ing land in the Laurentians where therefugees might settle. “- Unsavory,shifty-eyed little strangers,” in theopinion of Bernard. ‘What are we buy-ing?”

“Eikes,” Solomon replies.There you have it: Mchler as offend-

er and defender of the faith. Richlerm out new territory, but not yetstabling the reliable horse. It!s good tohave him back. q

CaltsGodkh

__, _ ._ .;”

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A RElWRD OP WRNlNG

SiGNNYG GIRLG

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.WORK I/U PROGRESS

when I met you it was as ifI was living in a house by the sea.Waves sprayed the windows,slapped the wooden steps.Yet I opened tbe doorand a white horse stood there.He walked through the rooms,swinging his head from side to side,his hooves leaving half moonsof sand on the floor.

or drags seaweed Tom tbe shore,ankles feathered, great hooves wide as platters.

He wasn’t you,that didn’t matter. He looked at meand we knew each other. That nightI wanted to live. I wantedto live in a house where the doorswings on hinges smooth as the seaand a white horse stands,

Make what you will of this. This waswalling for a sign.

the most natural thing I’ve ever done,opening the door, moving asidefor the horse to come in.

Not that you were he. He was simplya horse, nothing more,

Come in. I said,and that was the start of it,the horse, the light, the electric air.Somewhere you were walking toward me,the door to my Iii swinging open,the sea, the sea and its riderless horse

tbe gentle tind that pulls a wagon waiting to come in.

who’d rather spend time in the kitchenthan on his parapet of clouds

e messages they want to leave thinks this is a grocery listshe left for him. He sends

Across the blue of flax it writesa seraph to find each item,

tke eqwarimity of bones,though he knows the& nothing in heaven

across the yard, between house and barn,.with a cloven hoof or mad gold eyes.

the optic ofem. Scholars Tom the university,’rabbis and monks arrive with heavy tomes

Tomorrow, he thinks, I’ll tell

of explication, computer codes and charts.Magpie these words.

As they set up their tents underneathThey can fill a head with wonder.

the power lines the magpie drags its tail,So full of import and such sweet intent,

ispterstices of sorrow. This must bea whole life unfolding

one of the meater wds.in the sounds they make.

they all ag&, he ii so &yptic. Take the first wordcustard.

In heaven hi wife the sparrowwalks across her breadboardon tiny feet. In the flowher tracks say C&I&,bisnttt. goat’s milk. The god,

Wbo baked it?he must ask his wife.Who ate it?Was it good?

- .--.. __,- __.___ ,~~ __--,.. _.~~ -- _.-- i._“_ __ ______.~- _-.-~-.--_ -,.. - -._

JIthn at city half the people turned into typewitersand the other half into lypists. No one had a choice,you just woke up and there you were, one or the

other.The ones who underwent the most radical

transformation(the typewiters, of course) went to their bedswith the others as cbmoanions. sweet nurses of

keyboards.of the double space, of margins and tabs. Heads on

pillows.the typewiters who had lost the art of speaking,opened their mouths and curled back their lipslike a dog just before he bites. The typistsstruck the keys of teeth, their fingers followinga pattern the mouths seemed to dictate in a secretlanguage that spoke only to the typists’ hands.0 vzhat stories those rewriters had to tell!What alphabets of misery rose Tom the bowels,what veins of laughter, what dictionaries of sorrowspilled from the wombs, the scrotums, what

tendernessthe eyes had to sing. Even the youngest typewriteron earth only a few days, had so much tenderness to

tellthe typists could get no sleep. Faithful to the end,fingers worn, one by one they all dropped deadfrom exhaustion. no one left but the typewriterslying still and mute in their beds. Mouths hangingopen, they dreamed commas, exclamation points,

apostrophes,they dreamed enough quotation marksto surround every wordever said.

He tells my motherlast night he dreamed of dying.Did you meet anyone you know? she asks.No, he said. He only made it halfway there.

She is trying not to hold himback, she unwinds from his hands,turning her ring three times as she leaveshis mom. as ifa charm will let him go,transfo~ the man she knows into a biimaking its way by starsor a salmon that knowsin its fine articulation of boneswhere the stream will lead.

Poor human flesh,so lost and wandering. Halfway therea bird will push its small heartthrough a cloudy sky, only the Dog Starbreaking through. Impatient, my fathertries to remember what his tleshmust know, the ancient map of stars,tongues of water speakingthe gravel of his spawning bed.

Mother, knowing he is gonefrom the place her body made for him,wishes she could dream amanof fins and feathers.Alone in their double bed,asleep under stars, she tamsand turns her ring.

_ .

Bzfore the milwa~ wwo btiilt, what tooh thep l a c e ofstations i n p e o p l e ’ s d r e a m s ?

-John Berger

sonday morning, seven a.m. Alreadythere are tracks in the snow.a calligraphy of catstraced in the alley. Their blueideograms read like a Chinese text,up and down. ‘With a small hroomI sweep the windshield.I am driving to the station,meeting a train.

On the platform I want my mother to be there,as she was. standing with trvo loaves of breadin a bmwn bag, a suitcase with a broken lockat her feet I want her to have comefrom a different country, to have crossedall thls snow. the train pulling her furtherinto winter and another time.

At the place where she is goinga cat walks across the yard,placing its hack paws preciselywhere the front have been:A man who could be my fathersweeps the steps with ao old curling bmom.his name printed on the handle.

By the time he has finished,the top step is filled with snow.He sweeps and sweepsfor he knows my mother has no boots.When she anives she’ll be wearinga velvetbat, and on her feether wedding shoes.

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- F’hyllis Webb

~hecawofacrowandonehorseneighing. Beyond the row of pinesthe sound of a truckturning distanceinto something you cao hear.

A thirteen-striped ground squirrelmoves low to the earth. the meadow’slittle monk, illuminatorof grassy texts. Now I amneither man nor womsn, onlyanother sound the wind picks upon its journey to the sea.Iphigenia. waiting.

The crow calls its shadowfrom the trees as it sails pastInside each blade of grass,inside each word. I can hearone heart beating.

Tdo ay we clean the windows for Carolinethough she’ll never know, lying in

her hospital bed, small, wizened childof forty-seven: ancient, embryonic.

This morning the light was so brilliant(water or air?) it floated the house. Almost

too much to hold in the eye. (Caroline’s eyes -drugged, rolled back, as if

she looked inside, saw the madcells growing.) In this morning’s liiht

anythins could have happened,proclaimed itself: an Angel of Death

or Mercy. A fox-priest A thunderbirdwith lightning io ita beak. Only

the neighbow’s cat, mev&g on the steps,wanting to be fed, his orange fur

a planet the sir turns around. luminousmoons with no edges, no end. It is

a good day to die. To clean the windows.Water in a blue bucket The smell of vinegar

on our hands. Everything that makes ushuman, makes us animal, makes us want to live,

presses against the cold glasslooking out or in.

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Gmadiam see me through a fog of misunderstanding. . .

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of the opera. I%3 a real person’

I KVING LAYTON’s first book, Hereand Ab’os, was published in 1945.His most recenL W&f Gaoss6erries:

The Selected Lett& of Irving Layton(edited by Francis Mansbridge). waspublished last month by Macmillan. Inbetween, over the years, there havebeen more than 40 books - poetry,essays, polemic. autobiography, in-cluding d Red Carpet for the Sun(1959). A WiId Peculiar Joy: SelectedPoems 19451982 (1982). and Waitingfir the dhsk.zh (1985.). The poet andpublic literary figure is well known: ei-ther reviled or applauded, dependiigon the phase and ihe critic Less com-mon currency, perhaps, is the man be-hind the mask, the disguise that, asLayton &ely admits, he himself creat-ed. Recently, on a cheerful autumnmorning over cigars, coffee, andcognac at the Montreal home heshares with his wife, Anna, Irving Lay-ton talked to David Homel about hislife. not only as a poet, but as a teacherand a social and religious thinker.

Dfic: l%?ht do yurr tlzink is the fnte oftke post&&o Jewish writer? YoungorJeleisk witws are f&cd with a set ofthemes that are quite dif/ereat from theoxs pn and your contempomries kevadealt with. Do yororc tkitik they kave tlaefire of their predecessor?Imiq+ytourItaughtatHeraliah,aJews hrgh school, for about 10 years.Then I taught at the Jewish Public Li-brary. I come out of this milieu, and

I’ve had the opportunity to observewhat’s happened to the Jewish ghetto- the Jewish communibr. There rb achange, there is a difference. Theolder generation, myself and A. M.Klein for example, was very much in-fluenced by the idea of a Jewish com-munity. Our interests were muchbroader, and there was a radical ele-ment Socialist ideas, the internationalLadies Garment Workers, all came outof that That radical element is gone.Stalin took care of that Now, the focusis on Israel. There has been a greatnarrowirrg of interests, and thacs refleeted in Jewish writers in Canada

and the United States. The old iutema-iionalism, the old idealism. the human-ism that Jews had emphasized formany yebrs - that emphasis is gone.The emphasis now is on survivai, andthat means the future of Israel and thefate of the Jews in liiht of the Holo-caust In my time as a teacher, I sawthat the Jewish students did not havethat intellectual curiosiiy and zest theyused to be known for.BiC: l%ere’s a kind of mou*nfrclnessamong some Jewisk atiters about tksiroum seculasieation, about how thdy’velost the power and nourishment of theold imagety.Layton: They’ve lost more than theimagery; they’ve lost their Biblicalmom.

.

BiC: At one point you had an inter&in reclaiming Jesus for the Jews. Is tkatsom~~hingyou still think about?Layton: Of course, though not withthe same fervour. I’m not a born-nChristian, after all! But Jesus was aHebrew prophet If it weren’t for StPaul and the twist he gave to Jesus’teachings, his teachings would havebeen acknowledged as completely He-braic. Jesus was not a Christian; hewas a Jew. Everydung he taught camestrictly out of Judaism. Jesus neversaid anything that you wouldn’t fiod inthe other Hebrew prophets. If itweren’t for St. Paul. . .J3iC: In much of your work, you talkabout Jews and Gentiles. Do you Rave .any more tkoughts on that conpict?

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Layton: Along with wanting to reclaimJesus for the Jews, the other thing Iwanted to do was to call the Gentilesto repentance. That’s part of my He-brew heritage; tbags what Jesus andthe other Hebrew prophets tried to do.They wanted to bring the guilty andthe not-so-innocent to ao awareness ofwhat they had done. For me, the cardi-nal sin, the crime of our epoch, is theHolocaust. This was deliberate mur-der: it was not war. I wanted to call theGentiles to sn awareness that this hadbeen aone not only by the Germans,but by all those who stood by impassively, including the United States andCanada. The story is too well knownnow for me to have to repeat itEiG: All writere, and perhaps morepoets thaiz fictioir to&x, have a publicperemu, sod much hae beeu made o fyam A pzrblic persona has Mary uee&0;~s caz be imxic abont it, or 088 catibelieve iv it coi~rpktely. Or both.Layton: My persona is a disguise Iadopted many years ago when I tirstrealized that the poet didn’t count inour society. There’s room for every-one else in society but the poet He’san outsider, there’s no connection between him and society. I realiid thateven lf I wrote great poems, I wouldn’t

change that a bit - I’d still be an out-sider, and somewhat ridiculous in theeyes of hard-working people intent onraising a family and holding down ajob and making money. But I did notwant to be consigned to that position. Iwas determined to make people awarethat there was a poet in their midst.They would not realize that’even lf Iwrote the greatest sonnets in theworld. But if I did something ridicu-lous, if I lowered my pants at the cor-ner of saint Catherine and Peel, thenthey’d notice me. Once I had their at-tention, maybe I could get them toread some of my poems. And itworked quite effectively.BiC: But now yo+ dosz’t need thatimage (IS much or at all - or does apoet always need it?Layton: Now I don’t need it; I’mknown in this country. That has agood and an annoying side. of course.BiC: Soyourdiegniee too&&&%un: It certainly worked insofar asit made not only me as a poet, but po-etry in general, known. I put Canadianpoetry on the map by putting myselfon the map. I made the Canadian publie aware that there were poets in theirmidst. If you had been here Xl or 40years ago, a poet meant less than noth-ing. Less than horse manure, if youdon’t mind my saying. I rememberseeing all of A M. Klein’s books re-malndered. You’d be lucky to sell 50copies. The same was true of FrankScott and all the other poets. I was de-termined to change that. Especiallybecause I happen to believe that poet-ry is the health and sanity of any com-munity. I’m very fanatical about theplace of poetry ln any healthy society.I was determined to take strong mea-sures. And it worked.BiC: You talk about Mein and ScotiThose must have been heady days inCanadian poetry.Layton: Montreal was where modempoetry was born, with people likeFrank Scott and Louis Dudek andJohn Sutherland labouring in God’svineyard to make it happen.EtiC: What about the wtithzgecens heretoday - V we ca~ avoid ma&g easycompatiotis between then and now?&ton: Montreal is still a centre forpoetry. There’s David Solway, a con-siderable younger poet. and MichaelHarris. And Peter Van Toorn andAnne Cimon and the Nooeo Maehessboys.BE: Yosr’ve done II +t of teacking. Obviorc)ily, you’re not one of those poetswho believe that poetry and the claee-

mom don? mix.Layton: I’ve been a teacher for as longas I’ve been a ooet There’s no contra-diction, though I won’t generalize.Some poets like Leonard Cohen andAl Purdy just couldn’t make it asteachers. I happen to be something ofa ham, and I happen to be didactic bynature. I like instructing. I get a plea-sure &om givbrg people information.BiC: Reading thmrrgh purr 1977 NewDirections collection, I realized I wasreadirPg rhymed poeby, and that I hard-ty knew how to do that arqy mom. Ittaks a kind of ear, and sys, tkat we’velost. perhaps. Wht happened to rhyme?Layton: After Walt Whitman, therewas a great change toward writing inas conversational a style as possible.And when you’re speaking, you don’tspontaneously burst into rhyme. Nel-ther do you in modern poetry. Rhymeis one of the curlicues that fell by thewayside.BiC: But you did mite tiymeipoeby.Iayton: I did because it came natural-ly. A&r all, I’m one of thP older gener-ation. I was aware of Whitman andliked him a great deal as a poet, but Iwasn’t prepared to throw everythingout That was one of my qusrrels withWilliam Carlos Williams, who wrote avery kind introduction for my Im-pmoed Birzoculars. I nastily wrote hi- and I’m sorry I did that, I didn’tknonr he’d just had his fourth stroke- that while I liked him as a man andfor what he had done for poetry, therewasn’t much music in his work. I lookfor music, and I also look for meta-physics ln poetry. I look for thoughtThe great emphasis lo American poet-ry and writing is experience, not re-flection or thought. l’d been’ broughtup on John Donne and Wordsworthand Shelley, and they valued reflec-tion, and so do I. That’s what I wrotehim. The same argument went on inmy correspondence with Robert Cree-ley. Those letters sre in Indng Laytonaad Robert Creeley: The Complete COT-respondence. which is going to be published by McGill-Queen’s Press.BiC: So it was no “No ideas but intkinge”fo*you?Lwtmx That limits the scooe of ideasbyme. I don’t know if you know thewhole story, but I was adopted by theBlack Mountain boys. Creeley was thefirst one to publish me - an Ameri-can, not a Canadian. That’ll never beforgotten! Charles Olson wrote me 10or 15 letters. and I wrote back, andnow Ted Hunter at Simon Fraser Uni-versity has brought out that corre-

/ ,

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