Taking Sides: The Collected Social and Political Writings by Irving Layton (review)

HUMANITIES 447 delight and fascinate him.' At the same time, the form gave him a chance to try out ideas for his novels and to have the benefit of 'a quicker way' of telling the truth. There are worthwhile moments aplenty in these pieces, whether Maclennan considers the pleasures of tennis or man's need for God in the twentieth century. It is with the more recent material, the articles and more frequent addresses since Scotchman's Return, that The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan is something of a disappointment. These later pieces are longer, more sprawling, and less carefully edited. They are marked by considerable repetition of idea and evidence. They lack the crispness, the capacity for surprise and delight, and the deftness of touch of the earlier work. Two reasons for this come to mind. First, there is the important role Dorothy Duncan played in editing and blue-pencilling Maclennan's first two volumes of essays. Secondly, Maclennan - both by admission and in approach - seems a more worried, old-fashioned, and somewhat desperate writer. He appears too often to be grasping for intellectual straws in his struggle to come to grips with problems he had previously analysed perceptively. The chronological presentation Elspeth Cameron has chosen for the collection proves in this sense a disservice to her subject, leaving the reader not so much with a sense of diminished complexity or insight but with an awareness of a slip in control and precision. The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan is also a disappointment as a scholarly resource. The editor does little with her material other than present it. She notes in her introduction that she has unearthed some four hundred essays, but she appends no list. Her introduction is too brief to be other than laudatory and her prefaces to the individual essays more often than not simply summarize what is to follow. Nor does she offer a rationale for her selections. Why not include, for instance, a few of Maclennan's insightful essays on American writers like 'Homage to Hemingway' and 'Rebels Against the American Dream'? As a Canadian always interested in but sceptical of America Maclennan brought to the study of American letters a particularly acute awareness of its direction and worth. However, as a book for the general reading public The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan is a welcome arrival. It makes available to the contemporary reader a generally representative and highly interesting look at Hugh Maclennan's substantial achievement in non-fiction writing . (MICHAEL PETERMAN) Irving Layton. Taking Sides: The Collected Social and Political Writings Mosaic Press. 222. $10.00 cloth, $4.95 paper The subtitle of this book, 'The Collected Social and Political Writings: suggests that it offers a complete collection of layton's social and political 448 LETrERS IN CANADA 1978 comments. Such is not the case. Taking Sides gathers together some early political articles from the thirties; an edited version of Layton's thesis on Harold Laski (MA McGill 1946); various comments on the poet and poetry; reports of travels in Israel, Germany, and India; numerous letters to the editor (mostly to The Montreal Star and later The Globe and Mail [Toronto]); and a final section of personal observations undated and titled 'Ruminations.' As such, this book supplements two of Layton's earlier collections. Much of the Israeli travel material included here seems to have been edited out of The Whole Bloody Bird: Obs, Aphs & Pomes (1969). Similarly, some of the essays and letters to the editor are those not included in or written since Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton (1972 ) . To read Taking Sides is to conclude that Layton has accepted without reservation Shelley's dictum that the poet is the unacknowledged legislator of mankind. To read a little more attentively is to recognize that he assumes the stance of the prophetic poet because he views society as 'diseased' and man as little more than a sick predator. The implicit and Freudian metaphor which links together the two parts of this vision is perhaps that of man as a 'dis-eased' animal. As Layton remarks in 1963, 'history is a melancholy record of human viciousness ... Man is a sick animal and...