E.J. Pratt on His Life and Poetry by Susan Gingell (review)

HUMANITIES 451 Grove's work; Grove now feels sufficiently settled to portray Ontario society and draw his characters locally. This may be true of Two Generations (1939); the characterization and social description in the children's novel, however, are unrealistic and undeveloped. On the other hand, Rubio is probably correct that the Broadus family represents Grove's own attitudes to family life and parenthood; and her description of how Grove altered and borrowed from his Simcoe, Ontario experience for this novel is interesting and informative. (HENRY MAKOW) Susan Gingell, editor. E.J. Pratt on His Life and Poetry University of Toronto Press. xlix, 218. $)0.00 Despite the central place Pratt has long held in Canadian poetic history, little primary scholarship has yet been published- no complete poetry, no authorized biography, no correspondence, and until now no scholarly edition of the prose. 'The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt' is under way, however, and it makes an auspicious debut with this admirable presentation of Pratt's prose commentaries on his own life and poetry. The other essential works in Pratt studies will follow in due course, induding the long-awaited biography. It seems likely that Susan Gingell's book will mark the beginning of a period of reassessment for Canada's best-known but not necessarily best-appreciated poet. The task Gingell undertook was to survey the mass of prose selfcommentary Pratt left behind in typescript and manuscript form from the quarter-century or so of his publishing career; to bring order to the chaos of this often indecipherable, overlapping, and undated material; and to present it to the reader in a convenient and useful arrangement. Her success in the face of great difficulties is to have produced a highly readable book- her immense labours are now where they belong, behind the scenes - full of lively and engaging insights into the poet's life and mind and into the background of individual poems. The revelations offered by these commentaries are never of a confessional nature. The consistently impersonal character of the poems carries over into the accounts of their making, which generally reinforce our sense of a smiling public man who can speak autobiographically with detachment and good humour, but who prefers to lose himself in the processofsharinghis relish for the subject matter ofhis poems. Sometimes Pratt's breezy public manner may send a reader back to the poem under discussion with the feeling that the art has been trivialized by the occasion: 'When I was notified by the Department of Education: Pratt tells a school audience, with more than a little double-edged mockery, 'that The Titanic was to be a matriculation text and that it would be in such distinguished company as the bold Sir Bedivere and the"man with the 452 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 long grey beard and glitterin' eye", well, I would have blushed to the roots of my hair - if that had been a physical possibility' (pp 105-6). More often the poet's self-commentary strengthens and clarifies the general impressions made on us by the poetry: as for example when he asserts that 'dynamos, lathes, drills, and turbines are just as much material for poetry as lilies and carnations and cuckoos ...,' and that 'Science has always been to me ... a form of poetry' (pp 24-26). Or when, in his vivid account of the writing of The Roosevelt and the Antinoe, he takes us with him aboard the Roosevelt, resting in New York harbour, and shows how he brought that great sea-rescue drama alive for himself, through painstaking study and on-the-scenes re-enactment, before he was able to do the same for us, in what may well be his finest single poem. Occasionally in a phrase or two he can take us with startling simplicity into the centre of his poetic imagination: 'the more we find ourselves in the presence of sacrificial deeds, the closer we get to the heart of life and the heart of the universe' (p 128). At least once Pratt raises doubts about the accuracy of his comments, though evidently not in Gingell's mind. She writes on p xxvii: 'To have the context of...