Silence Made Visible. Howard O’Hagan and Tay John ed. by Margery Fee (review)

200 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 intensely 'centripetal' motion means that it functions less successfully 'centrifugally': this is illustrated by Christian's underplayed account of Grant's interactions with the New Left and organized Canadian nationalism , and his tendency to see the adaptation and secularization of Grant's ideas as a misappropriation or deviation. Other studies than Christian's will be needed to fully assess the impact of George Grant, and the operation of Grant's work in the world. (HEATHER MURRAY) Margery Fee, editor. Silence Made Visible. Howard O'Hagan and Tay John ECW Press 1992. 160. $25.00 paper When Franklin Davey McDowell's first novel, The Champlain Road, won the Governor-General's Prize for fiction in 1939, the book had already been acclaimed in the 11 November 1939 issue of Saturday Night as 'without any doubt a Canadian classic.' Although McDowell's historical romance of the conquest of Huronia is now forgotten, another first novel of that year, Howard O'Hagan's Yay Jolm, has belatedly achieved the status predicted for McDowell's book. Margery Fee's collection of information , documents, and criticism related to O'Hagan and Tay John offers a valuable perspective on the history of the novel's production and reception, and it offers factual information which will be of substantial use to O'Hagan's biographer - a critical biography representing perhaps the next stage in his incorporation into a canon of English-Canadian literature. Silence Made Visible offers material falling into six broad categories. First, a chronology compiled by the editor and Peter James Clark confirms and amplifies upon a 1977 article by Gary Geddes that has previously been the best source of biographical information on O'Hagan. A solicited and somewhat tangential letter from Lovat Dickson follows this chronology, along with a more useful 1979 interview with O'Hagan by Keith Maillard. Three previously uncollected pieces of fictional and journalistic juvenilia come next, and with their settings and references to Australia, Argentina, Fiji, and the Falklands, they remind us that O'Hagan spent three of the eight decades of his life outside of Canada. Finally, the first half of the book chronicles O'Hagan's involvement with the Berkeley Arts Club, which he joined four years after moving to California in 1934. Minutes of club discussions of intellectual issues and productions were recorded by members as 'chronicles,' and three of O'Hagan's witty and inventive accounts survive. E.W. Strong provides_an essential memoir to contextualize these brief jeux d'espirit, and, as the editor notes, they anticipate some of the habits of mind and art emerging in O'Hagan's later work. The second half of this collection focuses more directly on Tay John through five (mostly brief) articles and an annotated bibliography of all HUMANmES 201 of O'Hagan's work. W.J. Keith explores several exatnples of O'Hagan's revising and reworking of narratives as these evolve 'from oral yarn to written fiction.' Margery Fee traces the publishing history of Tay John, detailing the apparently authorial emendations in the first edition. Ralph Maud's ethnographic notes argue that O'Hagan's claim 'to ethnographic validity, is, on the whole, sound.' In contrast to the 'notes and queries' style of these latter inclusions, two final articles explore O'Hagan's novel in the light of a couple of current reading practices. Margery Fee contrasts the reception history of Tay John and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and demonstrates persuasively that, although O'Hagan's novel was favourably and prominently reviewed in Great Britain, Canadian reviewers, both in 1939 and in the early 19605 when the book was reissued, most often saw confusion and intrusive artifice where poststructuralist critics have seen sophisticated parody and intricate metafiction. Thus, it was Lowry's aggressively international novel that served teachers of Canadian literature in the 19608 as an example of the fictional avant-garde, and O'Hagan was not even granted a mention in the first edition of the Literary History of Canada in 1965. As Richard Arnold's annotated bibliography illustrates, poets and novelists such as D.G. Jones, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Gary Geddes, and P.K. Page led critics...