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CAMERON/LAYTON 467 incompr~hensible du texte de M. ReMrioux (dernieres lignes de la p 51); une erreur('le pirate' plutot que 'Ie piratage'? p '76, n 3); et quelques coquilles. Peu de chose, somme toute. L'essentiel est preserve: les lettres de Zola sont camme auparavant presentees, annotees, contextualisees avec sain. Elspeth Cameron and Irving Layton PATRICIA KEENEY SMITH Elspeth Cameron. Irving Layton: A Portrait Stoddart. 518. $28.95 Irving Layton. Waiting for the Messiah McClelland and Stewart. 264. $24.95 Having had one of the first words on Elspeth Cameron's biography of Irving Layton in the Canadian Forum ofNovember 1985, I may here also claim the dubious distinction of having one of the last words on the question of that poet's suitability as a subject for biography or autobiography. It is now public knowledge that layton's response to the Cameron biography is unrelentingly negative, damning it for factual error and rampant anti-Semitism. Having written what I believe to have been a rational and balanced review of that work, and having functioned as a conscientious critic ofLayton's poetry for many years, I am now placed among the ranks of a blind literary establishment systematically determined to defame this artist. So saith Irving Layton. The literary row, fought on public and private fronts around the Cameron book and to a lesser degree around layton's first volume of memoirs, provides a singular opportunity to investigate the nature and purpose of both biography and autobiography. In limited space one can only outline the perilous adventure of documenting this particular life, shaping it in any way other than Layton's own poems do. What the Cameron biography gives is flavour. We get the curious folkways of early Rumanian beginnings, the spit and fire and earthy reality of Layton's energetic mother, the spiritual asceticism of his religious father. Cameron has done her research into the early Jewish immigration patterns of Montreal and has recreated the city ofcolourful vitality that shaped boy into artist. She understands his intellectual evolution, his involvement in politics and economics, his paSSion for history, his inspiration as a teacher, and his fabled generosity towards ,tudents and admirers. Cameron does not flinch from makingpronouncements on Layton as lover, husband, and father. Life with Betty Sutherland is fully, even iulsomely, portrayed; life with second long-term mate Aviva reads a little like People magazine. But for understanding the life, especially the amorous episodes, :here is much more to be gained from the poems themselves: 'r Know the Dark and UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER ) , SPRING 1987 468 PATRICIA KEENEY SMITH Hovering Moth,' with its strange, smouldering imagery of devouring female; 'Maxie,' Layton's proud and wistful evocation ofhis growing son; 'The Day Aviva Came to Paris: with its boisterous stuffing of bloody history into one shapely and adorable ass. Cameron is not good on the poems, but she does tell a good story. Even though her reconstruction reads too much like a movie script at times, even though she speculates and sensationaHzes, you want to know more. But do you want to know more for the right reason? Layton's life is a good story, full of pain and triumph and pig-headedness and foolishness and bravery, like anybody's life. He was a thoroughly engaged citizen and thinker during some momentous periods of history, as many have been. His great difference is that he turned most of his story to poetry, the best of which is marked by passion and by moral and prophetic fervour. Unless you know the poetry, the life seems absurd. It is the poetry that redeems the life. But neither the Cameron biography nor Layton's own memoirs deal sufficiently with that interconnection. Autobiography can, of course, give us the subject's mind at work on an interpretation of its own life. While this may be a solipsistic exercise, it can beafascinating one, especially ifthe mind is interesting. 1 In Waiting for the Messiah, Layton looks a long way back, and the distance gives him an untypically cool perspective. It also means that he can slip into attitudes that have become all too familiar, whether deriving from his...

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