Against the Odds: The Public Life and Times of Louis Rasminsky by Bruce Muirhead (review)

500 LETTERS IN CANADA "999 over her husband's face. "Ladies and gentlemen" - he gestured ... "my assistant." The salute was a loving one; what she had done to elicit it was to flood Vladimir Nabokov in light.' 'My assistant' also puts the event into the language of magic. Vera was essential to Nabokov's creativity. No Vera, no light. Although the gesture was playful, he set his watch in Switzerland to her time when she travelled. Had she died first, he might have said, as she did to Dmitri, 'Let's rent an airplane and crash.' But this is subjunctive. Schiff rarely speculates. She concentrates mainly on what she knows and she has gone to a great deal of trouble to know it. Some of what we know has troubled those who query Vera's apparent submersion of herself in her husband, but as she herself said, in a remark Schiff quotes, 'Most of the time the truth is different from the way things look.' Her biography records the way, delicately hints at the truth, but leaves what Nabokov called the 'real plot' to the instructed intuition of her readers. (PATRICIA BROCKMANN) Bruce Muirhead. Against the Odds: The Public Life and Times of LOllis Rasminsloj University of Toronto Press. x, 382. $45.00 Biography is the most widely read form of history. Its popularity stems from the emphasis on the human side of history, an approach to which readers can easily relate. But biography is one of the trickiest types of history to write well, which explains why there are few really good biographies. There are two basic challenges. The first is obvious: to explain what makes the subject tick. The biographer should make sense of the person, understanding his or her thoughts, values, principles, personal life, and character. This will allow the reader to be emotionally as well as intellectually engaged with the subject. When the reader puts down the book, the subject should be familiar. Second, the historian must fill in the historical context in two ways.The subject illuminates the time in which he or she lived, and in that respect is a means to a broader understanding of the past, and the past must be understood to comprehend the forces that shaped the individual. It is a tall order. There is no question that Louis Rasminsky, governor of.the Bank of Canada from 1961 to "973, is a worthy subject of a biography. He did interesting things, met fascinating and important people, lived through most of a century of rapid change (lgo8-<)8), and had a real impact on the world of international finance. Bruce Muirhead'snew biography focuses on Rasminsky's public career. The reader can discern from that career that Rasminsky was earnest, principled (although it is not clear what specific principles drove him), hard-working, orderly, endowed with a formidable intellect. He also comes across as humourless, aloof, and cold, pOSSibly a result of the material the historian selected, or more important, left 0llt. By HUMANITIES 501 concentrating on his public life - at the League of Nations in the 1930s, at Canada's Foreign Exchange Control Board during the Second World War and later at the Bank of Canada, as well as his appointment as Canada's executive director to the International Monetary Fund - Muirhead has omitted many of the events, details, and facts that would help the reader to make sense of Rasminsky. The most revealing moment in this biography, and the most compelling chapter in the book, examines Rasminsky's deep disappointment when he was passed over for the position of governor of . the Bank of Canada in '954, a job he clearly coveted, sought, and believed he more than deserved. In this fleeting moment, the reader has a sense of Rasminsky's self-confidence, ambition, and demoralization. He is fully human, a man with whom the reader can empathize. Alas, for the most part, the man and his life rarely intersect. The result is an incomplete picture of Rasminsky, more line drawing than personal portrait. There is one aspect of Rasminsky's public life that Muirhead glosses over: his activism in the Jewish community after his retirement from the bank. Close scrutiny would have reinforced a theme that M1lirhead introduces early on in the biography and which pops up a few times along the way and appears again in the conclusion: that Rasminsky had to battle against anti-Semitism. The importance of Rasminsky's triumph over prejudice is implied in the title of the book: Against the Odds. There can be little doubt that Rasminsky faced prejudice, something to which he would be particularly vulnerable as a civil servant. And yet the reader has little understanding of the impact of anti-Semitism on Rasminsky or his professional success. Muirhead does not examine the history of antiSemitism in Canada, nor does he explain how anti-Semitism shaped Rasminsky. In short, Muirhead overlooked one important way in which a biography of his public career could have gone to the heart of Rasminsky as well as illuminated the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Canada. As it is, the full story of Rasminsky, part of the history of Canada, remains to be told. (FRANCINE MC KENZIE) David Boyd and Imre Salusmszky, editors. Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works University of Toronto Press. xxiv, 164. $65.00, $26.95 Rereading Frye is the second volume of a series of Frye Studies published by the University of Toronto Press. In a preface to the book, Alvin Lee, the general editor of Northrop Frye's Collected Works, suggests that it is time to reread Frye both in order to assert his continuing relevance and because of the abundance ofnew material which is available to scholars. Rereading Frye contains eight essays by scholars who have all made Significant contributions to the study of Frye; most of the essays make use of the unpublished ...