Alan Crawley and Contemporary Verse by Joan McCullagh, and: The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction by Margot Northey (review)

HUMANITIES 47' commentary is intended to provide a kind of spiritual biography, charting Klein's 'quest for a modern faith' from its first departure out of the haven of parochial orthodoxy, through the confusing 'cross-currents of contemporary Jewish thought: to an openness to if not a settled acceptance of 'a belief in the immanence of God' and in a 'natural evolutionary process' which is 'divine.' There are two limitations to this story, interesting as the attempt to tell it is. First, it is primarily based on readings of the poems, which are necessarily open to question. Sometimes the readings are illuminating and persuasive. At other times they seem more tendentious. 'The writings here referred to indicate a repeated reversal of Klein's beliefs: the author laments at one point. But she fails to take this hint that perhaps she is expecting too much, or the wrong thing, from the poetry - building too detailed and exact an inner narrative on what may be a freer, more exploratory, more dramatic donning and doffing of costumes by the poetic imagination. Second, if Fischer's spiritual biography is to be coherent and complete it must bring within its scope, or at least point forward to, the last mysterious phase of Klein's life. If anything , In Search of Jerusalem, with its full depiction of the range and vitality of Klein's heritage, makes the poet's 'twenty years' silence' all the more sadly enigmatic. (F.W. WATT) Joan McCullagh. Alan Crawley and Contemporary Verse, with a Foreword by Dorothy Livesay. University of British Columbia Press. xxvi, 92. $11.00 Margot Northey. The Haunted Wilderness: The Got1lie and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. viii, 132. $12.50 cloth, $4.95 paper Two recent books of criticism, Joan McCullagh's Alan Crawley and Contemporary Verse and Margot Northey's The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction, demonstrate the advantages and dangers of forays into largely unexplored territories of Canadian literature . Alan Crawley and Contemporary Verse is an original study of a neglected area introducing Alan Crawley and the Canadian little magazine he edited during the forties. A solidly researched study, it still bears some marks of the thesis from which it emerged; none the less it is a creditable book. This is largely because McCullagh marshals her arguments well; she has interviewed contributors, consulted letters, and compiled a subject-author index to the 39 issues of Contemporary Verse which ran from September 1941 to the combined Fall-Winter issue of 1952. This index will open up the magazine for future scholarship. McCullagh also quotes liberally from letters and personal interviews, allowing the poets who contributed to the magazine to speak for them- 472 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 selves. P.K. Page recalls that the first issue of the magazine 'did not say a particular loud "boo" to the pink tea pretties but it was loud enough for one of their wags to dub it Contemptible Verse in a moment ofirritation. That was pOSSibly its first real victory.' When Crawley'S last attempt to hold the magazine together failed for lack of good poetry to publish, F.R. Scott wrote soberly: 'Nothing can quite take its place: but 'of one thing you can be sure: through it you have become part of the literary history of Canada, and you have the gratitude of a whole generation of poets.' It is McCullagh's thesis that Contemporary Verse was more instrumental in the development of a Canadian modernism than current critical opinion allows. In particular, she objects to the placing of the Montreal little magazines, Preview and First Statement, at the centre of the modern movement by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada. She argues that the Montreal little magazines were 'coterie' publications, catering to contributors from eastern Canada , whereas Contemporary Verse held a genuinely 'eclectic' policy, publishing verse from throughout the country. Moreover, many of the more important younger poets of the period, notably jay Macpherson, james Reaney, and Daryl Hine first published in Contemporary Verse. Thus she maintains that it was in the pages of the Vancouver-based little magazine that modernism...