Powers of Observation by George Woodcock (review)

HUMANITIES 163 masculine in orientation as Layton will fail to receive a fair reading or hearing in the immediate future. This would be unfortunate, since even when he plays some ofhis more predictable roles, Layton is never less than intelligent, engaged, interesting , and always capable of surprising. The letters dealing with romanticism , Marxism, modernism, and film, for example, reveal an absolutely individual sensibility distinguished by a passionate intelligence. For those interested in discovering a less public, less combative poet, the late letters to Harriet Bernstein about the custody of their daughter reveal a side of Layton few would have suspected after reading Cameron's biography. Layton's letters may not be in the same class as Gustave Haubert's, D.H. Lawrence's, or William James's, but they are among the most interesting yet published in Canada. (sAM SOLECKI) George Woodcock. Powers of Observation Quarry Press. 124. $12.95 paper Half-way through this collection of his recent essays, George Woodcock writes: 'Perhaps because our vast country cries out for description, and for reflection on the descriptions, Canadian writers have been inclined to write essays.' Woodcock cites Grove, MacLennan, and Haig-Brown as examples, and couldwell have cited himself. Throughout his longwriting career he has successfully continued what he calls in the foreword 'the tradition of one of the great English-language genres, that of the occasional essay.' The particular variant of the form he practises here is the short reflective piece of around three pages, once known in France as the 'feuilleton' and in England as the 'middle' (so called because it provided a respite for the magazine reader in the middle oflonger articles or stories). For Woodcock the key to his genre is its paradoxical combination of 'brevity of form with breadth of reference and speculation.' The vast potential scope of such a formula is focused by the writer's personality, though in Woodcock's case the personality seems as various as the experiences he describes. In the course of this volume we encounter a succession of selves, including the Winnipeg infant, the English schoolboy , and the Vancouver writer. Woodcock's stress on his Canadian nativity and identity is balanced in this collection by nostalgia for his English boyhood. In one essay, Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad' provokes a poignant longing for 'the blue remembered hills' of Shropshire, the county where he grew up. At one point in his life, when he was writing the first volume of his autobiography, Woodcock planned to return permanently to Shropshire, and only gave up the idea at the last moment, 164 LEITERS IN CANADA 1989 realizing how different the modem landscape would be from his memories of the 1920s. In another essay he compares the Guy Fawkes Day bonfires and fireworks, recollected from boyhood, with North American Ballowe'en, though he explains that the latter is actually more traditional: the English holiday celebrates the failure of Fawkes's attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and is an early example of the politicizing of a religious festival. Autobiographical essays are interspersedwith travel essays and critical essays; some pieces offer a mixture of two or all three. Sometimes Woodcock travels in the steps of a previous writer and compares the experiences; he visits Robert Louis Stevenson's Samos, and is even accorded the title the natives originally gave Stevenson: Tusitala, the Teller of Tales. In China, Woodcock's literary companion is Li Po, who provides the model for a birthday celebration of drinking rice spirit in the moonlight. Patrick Leigh Fermor is the inspiration for winter travel in Europe, and Woodcock is eloquent about the benefits of staying in the greatcapitals outside the touristseason: the relatively few visitors become honorary citizens, and enjoy the cities' full cultural life to a much greater extent than the summer crowds. Woodcock uses the essayform to take the reader outofthe mainstream, off the beaten track. He illuminates the minor writer, the neglected text, the long-forgotten memory, the out-of-the-way place, the odd moment. What is the secret of his success with topics that in other hands might seem mere curiosities? To me it is his ability to find rich significance in...