Fiction

460 tq LEITERS IN CANADA: I959 standards become clear, and contemporary critics may as well accept the myopia which their near-sighted perspective forces on them. Then again, poetry is ofmajor importance in the cuiture, and therefore in the history, ofa country, especially ofa country that is still struggling for articulateness. The appearance of a fme new book of poems in Canada is a historical event, and its readers should be aware that they are participating in history. To develop such awareness it is an advantage to have a relatively limited cultural horizon. Ubi bene, ibi patria: the centre of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of. The last ten reviews have recorded what T. S. Eliot calls the horror, the boredom, and the glory of their subject: writing them has been of immense profit to me, and some, I hope, to my readers. But if! could go on doing such a job indefinitely it would not have been worth doing in the first place. At a certain point diminishing returns set in for both reviewer and reader. No poet has written more good poetry in Canada in the last decade than Irving Layton, yet Mr. Layton hasjust announced that he is dead, and that a new Mr. Layton is to rise from his ashes. If so, new critics should welcome him, as well as other newcomers, should find different reasons for helping established poets to defend their establishments , should respond to new currents in imaginative life and to new needs in society. The critic to whom falls the enviable task of studying Canadian poetry in the sixties will, I trust, be dealing with a fully matured culture, no longer preoccupied with the empty nnpoetics ofCanadianism, but with the genuine tasks of creative power. For the poets of the next decade will have the immense advantage of the tradition set up by the poets of the last one, whose imaginative feats, as far as this critic is concerned , have been, like the less destructive efforts of Milton's Samson, "not without wonder or delight beheld." FICTION / F. W. Watt Canadian novelists have never been noted for their technical ingennity or their love of bold experimentation. In the history of Canadian fiction, simple realists have perished by the dozen in that sterile desert ofart about which Mr. T. S. Eliot long ago saw fit to issue one ofhis sterner admoni- FIOION tq 461 tions: "the desert ofexact likeness to the reality which is perceived by the most commonplace mind." A larger number, equally innocent of technique , thinking to escape this desert have merely embraced the empty mirages of historical romance. One third of the novels of 1959 choose to risk this alternative. Among the others-those which take as their point of departure a recognizable and immediate here-and-now-a few never rise out of the most banal realism, but a half-dozen or more are notable for their energetic, even feverish, efforts to escape the trap ofthe ordinary, the commonplace, the hum-drum. The Canadian novelist is getting more agile and wily every year, and when he fails his failures are more instructive . Two of the three most successful novels of the year have some real claim to technical originality. Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night (Macmillan, pp. x, 373, $3.95) is the most traditional of the three, paradoxically so, since MacLennan has recently asserted its formal originality: "I spent more than six years learning how to shape a new bottle for a new kind of wine.... I ... discovered new techniques I had previously known nothing about." He contemplated something new in characterization, "a book which would not depend on character-in-action, but on spirit-in-action," and something new in the author's relation to his material: "I would not write a clinical book." (Canadian Literature, 3, Winter, 1960, p. 39.) Apparently MacLennan is referring here, first, to the point of view from which The Watch unfolds-not clinical detachment, but intimate involvement, the hero George Stewart (perhaps a semi-autobiographical figure) speaking directly to the reader about his deepest insights...