The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955–1980 by Joel Deshaye (review)

Deploying the resources of cultural theory, literary history, biographical research, and close reading, Joel Deshaye makes a generally persuasive case that from 1955 to about 1980 a small number of Canadian poets enjoyed the benefits and resisted the repercussions of a star status unmatched by both their predecessors and successors. Six poets – Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Al Purdy, and Margaret Atwood – are identified as forming this constellation, but only the first four are selected for detailed examination, with Purdy and Atwood excluded because they did not write poems engaged with the issue of celebrity. The book’s central argument is that the poetry of Layton, Cohen, Ondaatje, and MacEwen enacts an identity crisis caused by these authors’ ambivalence about celebrity and its effects on their private lives and public careers. Each is shown to have been rewarded by, constrained by, complicit with, and resistant to the formidable forces of public attention that constitute the experience of stardom.

While this argument is well grounded, its framing and the rationale for its focus are in some ways problematic. Certainly the six poets in question enjoyed a far greater measure of public attention than the typical modernist poet, of whom A.M. Klein wrote only a few years previously: “We are only sure that from our real society / he has disappeared; he simply does not count.” But as Klein’s “disappeared” implies, the situation was not always thus. Arguably, a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian poets, such as Pauline Johnson, Robert Service, Bliss Carman, and Charles G.D. Roberts, achieved genuine celebrity commensurate with the cultural forces and institutions of their time, and later poets such as bpNichol, Dionne Brand, and Anne Carson have attained high profiles in the rapidly evolving media environment of recent decades. Also, Deshaye’s claim that the era of celebrity for Layton and his contemporaries was ended by the ascendancy of the novel as a rival literary form is questionable. Novelists such as Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, and Margaret Laurence had ample public attention during that era, and the waning of Canadian nationalism following the 1960s, with the growing tendency of poets to identify more closely with region, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and avant-garde poetics, likely played a more decisive part in altering the terms of poetic stardom than competition with the novel did. Finally, there is no compelling theoretical reason to limit this study to poets and poems. If the central issue is the characteristic operation, or perhaps pathology, of literary celebrity, and if celebrity is vested in writers rather than literary forms, then the restricted focus of this book seems less necessary than convenient. Certainly the analysis would be enriched by an examination of Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter (1976) and Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976), novels expressly concerned with the ramifications of celebrity. In fact, Deshaye included Coming through Slaughter in the 2010 McGill dissertation on which his book is based, and in this book he does find room to discuss MacEwen’s novel Julian the Magician (1962). It appears, then, that in the journey from thesis to book certain opportunities were foreclosed for practical reasons, and the analysis is felt at times to chafe against these limits.

The substantial value of The Metaphor of Celebrity lies in its eight central chapters on the careers of Layton, Cohen, Ondaatje, and MacEwen. As Deshaye demonstrates, their “representations of stardom in Canadian poetry tend to be negative, partly because stardom magnifies publicity and involves the cultural depreciation of the value of privacy and the related sense of self.” Layton pursued literary stardom through force of personality, appearances in the popular media, and the courting of controversy but came to fear its transience and constraints. Cohen built a multi-faceted career that became increasingly commercial in scope, expressed his sense of a masochistic relation to his audience, and sought to sustain his creative freedom through embracing “various positions...