Letter to the Past: An Autobiography by George Woodcock (review)

HUMANITIES 469 All that has been said before (represented, in fragments, by our fragments of voices) about influence, game, myth, narration and ancillary topics is enmazed in this labyrinth.... The voices (ours, theirs) are fragmented by the labyrinth they build: doubleness is in the origin and the end, in the material and the form. The pleasure of such mazewalking is in the unexpected glance, in the elusive quickness of insight, in the sudden shifts and twists of discourse that open before us at each turn, each intersection. I quote at length because these words convey the tone and consciousness informing the entire interview. Although I find the language and its implied ideology expressed with a certain pretentiousness here, it needs to be said that for all its posturing (its intentional posturing, I suspect), Labyrinths reveals a great deal about Kroetsch's literary and theoretical perspectives. He is, after all, a writer who can assert that 'postmodern writers' are involved in a 'virtual mocking of the exegetical act' while at the same time arguing that 'Criticism is really a version of story.... Itis the story of our search for story. That's why criticism is so exciting. Not because it provides answers, but because it is a version of story: In his support of a poetics of process, Kroetsch shuns those 'answers' that announce the product-oriented stance; but Labyrinths also demonstrates Kroetsch's ongoing attraction to the 'bric-a.-brac of heirloom' models of traditional narrative forms. The tensions in Kroetsch's poetry and fiction, the interview suggests, are in many ways the product of his desire to recognize influence and to destroy it, to impose narrative coherence while asserting that such coherence can never be imposed. These same tensions , and the uncertainty they evoke, give Labyrinths its peculiar power. It is an open-ended, serious/playful sourcebook that allows us to understand some of the many ways in which Kroetsch has fictionalized himself into becoming a 'magister labyrinthorum' - the man we think we know as one of Canada's most important writers. (ROBERT LECKER) George Woodcock. Letter to the Past: An Autobiography Fitzhenry and Whiteside 1')82. )2). $21.95 The first volume of George Woodcock's autobiography, dealing with his life in England from 1912 to '949, is a fine example of the kind of 'self-life-writing' that features 'bios' or objective reportage of the life; the author's goal is to win the reader's good faith in the factual and emotional truth of his tale. Woodcock succeeds through a subtly detaIled evocation of his personal life and its social and historical contexts. The autobiography of any writer brings to a culmination the development of style and sensibility which it describes. Refined over a lifetime, Woodcock's version of Orwell's 'prose like a windowpane' - more allusive than Orwell's and less pithy - is a vehicle finely honed for portraying the external world with accuracy and nuance. Every page of Letter contains a superb clarity of observation, rooted, Woodcock notes, in an admiration for the lucidity of the great nineteenth-century naturalists and travel-writers. The 'graphe' or style is perfectly suited to the emphasis on narrative cohesion and thoroughness. Most inviting of the worlds brought to life here is the idyllic Salopian village of Market Drayton where, between the ages offive and seventeen, Woodcock spent his summer holidays with his grandparents. The village, with its agrarian Market Day and nearby woods and fishing ponds, nurtured interests in local culture and Utopian myths. At eighteen Woodcock embraced William Morris's socialism, rejecting the grasping business practices and family tyranny of his summertime host, the Tory and Anglican Samuel Woodcock. A better model was found in his mother's father, a Baptist and Lloyd George Liberal who maintained a small farm and seventeenth-century cottage at the far end of the village from Samuel's untilled land and new brick house. Outside this pre-industrial retreat were less comforting worlds: the embittering poverty ofhis parents' terrace flatin Thames-side Marlow;the down-at-heels imperialism of Sir William Borlase's grammar school (its grounds echoing with the history of Shelley and Godwin); the dusty inefficiency of the...