A. M. Klein: The Story of the Poet (review)

Book Reviews 117 A. M. Klein: The Story ofthe Poet, by Zailig Pollock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 324 pp. $60.00 (c); $25.95 (P). Abraham Moses Klein, acknowledged as one of Canada's greatest poets, and certainly the most important figure in Canadian Jewish literature, died in 1972. As ifin illustration of the old chestnut that artists only get their due after they die, the poet has fmally been receiving the attention which, ironically, might have prevented the kind of mental depression into which he sank seventeen years before his death at 63. The process ofbelated recognition began with a Klein Symposium at the University of Ottawa in 1974. Miriam Waddington's edition ofKlein's Collected Poems appeared shortly after. It was followed by an ever-increasing number ofpublished conference papers andjournal articles, along withmany Masters and Doctoral theses. This growing interest in Klein received an enormous boost from David Kaufman's excellent, though melancholy, 1978 National Film Board film on the poet, and from the publication ofUsher Caplan's lucid biography, Like One Theit Dreamed (1982). In 1982 also, the University of Toronto Press began publishing, under the editorship of the Klein Committee founded after the Symposium, all of Klein's published and unpublished works. Seven volumes have appeared, including a new definitive and annotated two-volume Complete Poems ofA. M. Klein. The only other Canadian poet to receive the same attention from the University of Toronto Press was E. 1. Pratt. It is honor and recognition for Klein from Canada's literary establishment unprecedented for any Canadian Jewish writer and reflects both Klein's achievement and his enormous influence on Canadian, and especially Canadian Jewish, literature. Now that the work offinding all the "tangible" data ofthe poet's life and ofcollating and publishing his "reuvre" is completed, Klein studies have entered the next stage, that of interpreting his work, and this is proving a complex, perhaps ultimately impossible task. The truth is that it is not only the growing awareness ofKlein's achievement which has been responsible for this developing Klein industry; at the center of this interest lies the kind ofmystery that always feeds offthe endless fascination with genius, especially when that genius does not quite fulfill its promise. What made Klein suddenly stop writing, and his other "careers"-law, editing, public relations for Sam Bronfman and Seagram'swhen he was only 45 and at the height ofhis powers, seventeen years before his death? Trying to answer that question is an important, ifflawed, new study by Zailig Pollock, A. M. Klein: The Story of the Poet. Professor Pollock, who teaches English at Trent University, Peterborough, has chaired the Klein Committee since the early 1980s and now brings to the attempt to unravel the mystery an impressive knowledge ofthe Klein material and an interesting thesis. He is convinced that at the core of Klein's poetry and fiction lies a repeated motif which Professor Pollock 'calls "the story ofthe Poet," hence the subtitle ofhis book. This "story," which Klein repeats in different form as his definition ofhimself as artist changes, 118 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 Pollock defines as "a vision of the One in the Many." Pollock's aim is to look for the "one" formula that will explain the enigma ofKlein, and he fmds it in the failure ofKlein's recurring motifofthe story ofthe poet. The author theorizes that it was Klein's inability to resolve a deep personal conflict. Klein wanted above all, Pollock feels, to fulfill the role of poet as explicator of Jewish destiny to his people, providing them with some reassurance that. there was a benevolent unifYing principle at work even in this most chaotic and tragic century in Jewish history. Unfortunately , this ambition clashed with his concurrent attraction to some aspects of"modemity," in spite ofits anti-traditionalism and its frequent existential nihilism. As Professor Pollock correctly points out, the former gave Klein roots and structure but exacted perhaps too much conformity to community demands, while the latter offered artistic freedom without, however, a defming universal assurance of continuity or the sense of community which Klein also craved. In failing to reconcile these contradictory"forces, claims...