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MONTREAL STORYTELLERS 443 Justin Brooke, Jacques Raverat, Gwen and Frances Darwin, Ka Cox, and the Olivier sisters. If such names do not now ring tumultuous bells, there are reasons. Delany cites a 1909 Brooke letter as a virtual 'Neo-pagan manifesto' - 'We'll be children seventy-years, instead of seven. We'll live Romance, not talk of it' - but the rebellion against Victorian restraints embarrassingly recalls the flutterings of Peter Pan. Comparing the Neo-pagans with the less unstable Bloomsbury Group, Delany attributes the Pagans' early dissolution largely to 'sexual dynamics' that prohibited easy friendship. His alternate explanation seems, however, more convincing: 'Part of their fragility as a group derived from simple inferiority of character and talent ... ; in the long run, they had less to build on.' The book's most attractive quality is the sceptical scrutiny which Delany levels not only at the Neo-pagans as a set but at Brooke as an individual. Of Brooke's 'picturesque exile in Grantchester,' three miles from Cambridge, he says: 'People who really want to be hermits should not take lodgings in a charming spot within anhour's stroll from scores ofacquaintances.' His commenton Brooke's affair with a Tahitian girl, Taatamata, rings true: 'Inevitably, he achieved his only real sensual happiness with a woman who was as far removed from his mother as it was possible to get.' Delany, who wrote the valuable earlier study D. H. lAwrence's Nightmare, traces some intriguing parallels between Brooke and Lawrence, that other over-mothered artist. One wonders whether Lawrence's name for his alter-ego in Women in Love - Rupert Birkin - is a mordant allusion to the most famous literary victim of the Great War. 'One can smell death in Rupert/ Lawrence wrote dismissively of Brooke in 1916; yet the fictional Rupert he was then creating also leans dangerously towards death. Delany reproduces a letter of 1912 from Brooke to James Strachey, describing in painful detail a homosexual plunge of several years earlier. 'It was,' Delany comments, 'probably the most revealing letter he ever wrote.' Delany's repeated insistence on this sort of 'revelation,' however, threatens to unbalance his engaging study. How much, one wonders, does his scrupulous dating of the consummation of the hectic affair between Brooke and Ka Cox really add to one's intimate knowledge of these people and their milieu? Whether or not sexual dilemmas provide the 'key' to Brooke's complicated emotional problems, they certainly do highlight the sadness mixed in with the 'Heaven of Laughter and Bodies and Flowers and Love and People and Sun and Wind' that Brooke and his fellow Pagans strove so ingenuously and ineffectually to reach. Montreal Storytellers DOUGLAS ROLLINS J.R. (Tim) Struthers, ed. The Montreal Story Tellers: Memoirs, Photographs, Critical Essays Vehicule Press 1985. 225. $14.00 paper In 1971 five writers living in Montreal - John Metcalf, Hugh Hood, Raymond Fraser, Clark Blaise, and Ray Smith - came together to form the Montreal Story 444 DOUGLAS ROLLINS TellerFiction Performance Group. It was Metcalf's belief that ifpoets could read to audiences and get paid, there was no reason why prose writers could not be at leastas successful doing the same, while cultivating a potential readership among the younger generation. The group members decided that if they were going to promote Canadian prose to as large an audience as possible, the obvious place to start was in high schools, colleges, and universities. Over the next five years they read before a variety of audiences in high schools, but were virtually ignored by the universities, even in their own city. Clearly the academic establishment lacked, among other things, vision. While only Hugh Hood could have been seen as having an established reputation in 1971, the other members of the group had already displayed significant promise. Sixteen years later Hood, Metcalf, Blaise, and Smith are widely acknowledged as being among Canada's most important contemporary writers. Not surprisingly, the most interesting parts of Struthers's compilation are the memoirs by the writers themselves. The lengthy pieces by Hood and Metcalf are rich in humour, anecdote, and deft thumbnail portraits; they also contain telling reflections on the nature of the art to which the writers have...

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