E.K. Brown: A Study in Conflict by Laura Smyth Groening (review)

232 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 Laura Smyth Groening. E.K. Brown: A Study in Conflict University of Toronto Press 1993. 235. $35.00 cloth Laura Smyth Groening's biography of Edward Killoran Brown recalls to our attention an outstanding Canadian critic. Known for his interest in Canadian poetry and for his work on Matthew Arnold's life and essays, Brown's most important contribution to general literary studies may lie in his analysis of a group of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction writers. Taken together, his studies of Henry James, Edith Wharton, E.M. Forster, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf can now be seen as a selection of those modernists who reshaped, rather than rejected, the Victorian novel and its focus on the world of women. Groening, glossing over much of this work, has chosen to present Brown in a narrower focus and shapes her portrait in terms of his involvement with Canadian culture and literature. In fact, she so emphasizes this aspect of his activities that she tells us, 'his biography is ... the story of Canada's intellectual coming of age.' Although casting an individual's life as an allegory of his culture's development may seem over-ingenious, Groening is not entirely misrepresenting Brown's place. One of the first critics to write a book-length study of Canadian literature, Brown made an important contribution to Canadian culture. In particular, he focused attention on the ways in which Canada's sense of identity and independence have been shaped by its relationship not only to Britain but also to the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, Brown's essays, which culminated in the 1943 publication of his book On Canadian Poetry (a book as much on Canadian culture as on its poetry), and his editorial activity (centring around his involvement with the Canadian Forum, the University ofToronto Quarterly, and Ryerson Press) gave coherence to concerns about the effects of colonialism on Canada, concerns, that, while previously existing, had never been laid out in such a thoughtful and consistent fashion. Brown believed not only that Canada suffered from the dominance of British culture, but that it was also effectively colonized by America and its cultural products. In other words, he helped to formulate in Canada the beginnings of what we now call post-colonialism. Arguing that Canadians embraced external cultural products and showed a deep indifference to Canadian ideas, literature, and criticism, Brown asserted that they behaved as colonial subjects, lacking the will to establish themselves as an independent people. In his writings on Canada, he therefore made it his duty as critic to show readers that they did indeed have a literature and a tradition, one rooted in the poetry of the Confederation writers and growing in strength as new writers emerged. However, although Brown is important to the development of Canadian literature and criticism, Groening's decision to turn Brown's biography simply into the outworn story of Canada's 'maturation' distorts both HUMANITIES 233 Brown's contribution to the history of Canadian culture and the shape of his career. He was not the centre of efforts to create a dynamic Canadian culture, nor was Canada the only focal point of his activities. Brown's post-secondary education was divided between the University of Toronto and the Sorbonne; his critical interests took in British and American, as wellas Canadian, writers; and his teaching was split between early years at the Universities of Toronto and of Manitoba and later positions at Cornell and the University of Chicago. Although he wrote about Canadian literature and culture throughout his career, the bulk of his later research and publication focused on writers from elsewhere - particularly Arnold and Cather - and on the novel as a form. Thus, if Brown's intellectual history really does parallel that of Canada, the reader might well conclude that the maturation of Canadian culture is the story of internationalization. Groening's emphasis on the Canadian aspects of Brown's career may be a good one as far as the readership she envisioned is concerned. The problems this text presents may not arise so much from its content as from its form. One comes...