Challenges, Projects, Texts: Canadian Editing/Défis, Projets et Textes dans L’édition Critique au Canada ed. by John Lennox and Janet M. Paterson (review)

224 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 gling writer to the magnificent poet whose achievements began only in his middle years (and shows no sign of faltering as Purdy moves into his seventies). Purdy reflects on this development, which is an unusual pattern for a poet, at the end of 'The Bad Times,' but he seems able only to hint at what enabled his late mastery of craft and voice: I published Poems for All tile Annettes in 1962. And regard this book as a watershed in my own development. But I don't like the word development, which sounds like a boxer or a pole vaulter prepping for a big athletic meet. However, I admit to being almost fully aware of the changes taking place in my own mental equipment, changes that were partly the result of discontent with nearly everything about myself. The previous six-year period was one of turmoil and radical change, as I've intimated. If, therefore, Reaching for the Beauford Sea is not a book about the making of a poet's mind, it nonetheless remains a readable account of a Canadian life and of the struggle it takes to begin a literary career. Certainly, that image of one of Canada's most distinguished poets scavenging in a dumpster will remain with me for a long time. Purdy's capturing of such moments without offering larger explanatory patterns may partly be a sign that this life is still unfinished. But mostly it is evidence (if any is needed) that Purdy'S strengths lie not in his skill at narrating history but in his ability to capture the real life of that history, the immediacy of everyday life. (RUSSELL BROWN) Challenges, Projects, Texts: Canadia11 Editil1g/Defis, Projets et Textes dans L'edition Critique au Canada John Lennox and Janet M. Paterson, editors. AMS Press. $29.95 Challenges, Projects, Texts is the proceedings of the twenty-fifth Conference on Editorial Problems (1989) which annually convenes distinguished scholars on topics in editing. This bilingual volume contains a range of essays on subjects ranging from editing the Stepsure Letters to sorting out the 'textual' remains of Hubert Aquin. The best articles are the first two, one by Jacques Allard on organizing the scholarly editing of the collected works of Aquin, with examples drawn from the individual work he is editing, Le Prochain episode, and one by Sherrill Grace on editing the letters of Malcolm Lowry. Both Allard and Grace raise the problem of classification: Aquin's remains included audio-visual works, and scripts for those works, which represent a rela-:tively new genre for editors; Lowry's 'letters' include those woven into his fiction, both fabricated and derived from 'real' correspondence, dead HUMANITIES 225 letters, and poem-letters. Perhaps most interesting in these articles is the way in which Allard and Grace employ Aquin and Lowry to solve problems in editorial procedure and theory which the former encounter. For example, Grace takes from Lowry's treatment of the letter as a fictive genre, and fiction as an epistolary genre, a flexible definition of the letter based not upon written form, but on type of speech-act. I have reservations about redefining writing as speech, and in this essay I grew positively queasy when at the end Grace concludes with a letter from herself to Lowry: 'No, I don't await your reply, and yet ... I half expect to hear from you.' Nevertheless, speech-act theory seems to have given Grace a good schema for sorting the Lowry letters. Allard has a different problem to deal with, which he calls the 'mythe aquiniene' and which in many ways works against the agenda of the editorial scholars on the project, who are committed to recovering the historical and material aspects of the production of each work. Allard goes to Le Prochain episode to underline Aquin's sense of writing, and history, as anti-mythic, dynamic, and materialist , thus finding the rationale for editorial scholarship in the work itself. ' Zailig Pollock's article on editing the notebooks of A.M. Klein, and Jean-Louis Major's essay on the diary of Henriette Dessaulles, provide interesting information about the editing of these works and...