Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada by George Woodcock (review)

148 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into the straggling, struggling, multicultUIal nation of the present. Responding to Whalley's emphasis on the importance of personal cadence, we can trace in Ross's idiom and ideolect a development that offers a remarkable parallel to that of Canada itself. Iwish someone had performed the minor editorial function of updating earlier contributions. For instance, the introduction to Over Prairie Trails reproduces misinformation about Frederick Philip Grove's biography that has been disproved for over a decade. A footnote containing the results of more recent scholarship would have prevented Ross from seeming old-fashioned or out of touch - which are the last adjectives that anyone could properly apply to him. But that is a small point. More important is the recognition that Ross is an eloquent and sensitive writer whose example, in terms of verbal precision and mature critical response, was rarely equalled by those whom he invited to contribute NCLintroductions . The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions is full of hints, insights, and enviable common sense about aspects of both OUI literature and our culture. Jack McClelland, who had to be pushed into the risk that resulted in NCL, deserves OUI gratitude in pushing (one suspects) a reluctant Malcolm Ross into collecting and arranging the wisdom of a humane Canadian liIe. (w.). KEITH) George Woodcock. Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada Douglas and Mcintyre 1985. 207. $12.95 paper About the same time as the Massey Commission issued its Report on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Science in '95', A.J.M. Smith was writing in his Introduction to the Oxford Book ofCanadian Verse about the 'colonial habit of mind: which he described as setting 'the great good place not in its future but somewhere outside its own borders, somewhere beyond its possibilities.' The Massey Commission report, and subsequent developments in the arts in Canada over the past thirty years, have been part of a process of moving beyond this kind of colonial disability to shape distinctly Canadian desperations and desires, and to express possibilities informed by Canadian experiences. But along with this process has come an increasingly complex set of relationships between individual imaginations and collective aspirations, or between the state and the arts. George Woodcock's book provides a thoughtful account of these developments and some proposals for new initiatives to maintain the autonomy of creative enterprise. He has a passionate belief that all governmental activity in some measure cages OUI freedom, but he is also sufficiently wise to know that just as the artistic imagination does not draw nice limits around its territory, neither does the political imagination. And so the story he tells is one of alternating blessings and curses, with devils and angels often wearing masks. Woodcock sees the cultural activism of Trudeau liberalism as a particular menace, but his discussion moves well beyond specific circumstances to some general questions, of which the most important is deceptively simple. Do we perceive the arts as marginal or central? The answer, for many of us, is that the arts are certainly central to life in a civil society; but at the same time, we are often very uncertain about what their relationship should be to other central concerns, whether moral or practical. Furthermore, relationships between identity and nationality complicate any disengagement of individual creativity from collective purpose, which means that the state and the arts, to use Woodcock's figure, sometimes end up in bed together. Woodcock's book touches on the fundamental character of these relationships , but in its admirably practical way it is more specifically concerned with how to find grace in a fallen world. Regarding new initiatives to provide artists with a measure of economic security which will flow from their own work rather than be imposed upon them, he has some useful suggestions: a public lending right, which would provide payment for library use of books (and is now being implemented, in a somewhat diminished form); a droit de suite, or tax on the secondary sales of works of art as a form of royalty to the artist, based say on the difference between the most recent and the...