Earle Birney: A Life by Elspeth Cameron (review)

230 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 The prose is serviceable rather than graceful, and Wilson's encyclopedic coverage may become tedious in her extensive lists of literary allusions or motifs. Perhaps such lists might have been relegated to footnotes, leaving the text less cluttered and more readable. This is a book to be read by the scholar in conjunction with the novels. Sherrill Grace argues that Atwood's work is a 'violent duality.' Wilson's skilful reading demonstrates how Atwood exploits the double-sidedness of the folk- and fairy-tale intertexts. Characters suffer great privation and evil, but are rewarded with 'release from externally imposed patterns '" [and] with the possibility of transformation.' Wilson's reading of Life before Man is especially noteworthy, for based on fairy-tale intertexts, she discovers hope and transformation even in a novel most readers find bleak and despairing. Wilson demonstrates persuasively how 'deconstructing confining scripts for women, Atwood's literary and visual texts lay bare the muted and subversive subtexts of phallocentric mythology, restoring the displaced Hecate (often in her Medusa guise) to her context and allowing us to see her hidden face.' Wilson's book has changed the way we read Atwood. (KAREN F. STEIN) Elspeth Cameron. Earle Birney: A Life Viking Penguin. xxii, 685. $35.00 cloth Birney's life has been long, spanning such historical events as the Great Depression, both World Wars, the post-Stalinist era, and the American Vietnam engagement. It has also spanned the heyday of Canadian modernism (which flourishes somewhat later than its European and American counterparts, from the 1930s to the 1960s), and has been paradigmatic of the same. Like his peers, who include A.M. Klein, E.}. Pratt, F.R. Scott, P.K. Page, Dorothy Livesay, and Irving Layton, Birney does battle with a genteel Victorian cum Edwardian tradition dominating public perceptions of what poetry should be and represented by the Canadian Authors Association. Like them as well, he opts for the international artistic strategies of centralization and intensification, but also like them he departs from the latent aestheticism of these, through strong moral and often political commitments. Finally, he also shares with his peers the need to find supplementary work to provide the livelihood that writing itself will not give to a degree that post-1960 and post-granting-agency writers would find hard to conceive. It has to be said that though the employment may not have been ideal, Birney was fortunate in comparison to others in finding security in a university English department for some twenty years. Elspeth Cameron deftly charts both Birney's rootedness in and his struggles within such historical circumstances. There is a pattern of HUMANITIES 231 restlessness and multiple commitments, not always compatible or possible within such practical constraints as time: to scholarship and/or poetry and/or politics, to poetry or fiction, to writing or editing, to the tomes in the British Museum Reading Room and the streets of London, to the university or the army, to Canada and to foreign travel, to writing about both, and to an amazing variety of poetic styles and stances, from the High Modern to sound and concrete poetry. There is a parallel in personal relationships, both in comradeship and sexual love. The life is rich in friendships, but there are some notable fractures of these: with Roy Daniells or Frank Davey, for example. There are notorious feuds, both with such former friends or with those for whom hostility is virtually immediate (Robin Skelton). And Birney's active pre-marital love life continues in a series of affairs (with two sometimes being juggled at once) after his 1935 union with Esther Bull Heiger (they marry in 1940) and until his 1973 union with Wailan Low. (Birney had an understanding of an 'open' marriage with Esther, but this arrangement, symmetrical in theory, was not so in practice, and she ultimately rejected it.) The picture that emerges is by no means entirely attractive. Extraordinary in generosity and idealism as well as energy, Birney is also shown to be self-absorbed and opportunistic, both in personal relations and in his career. He shows a driving hunger not only for poetic achievementand this is a necessary obsession...