Nothing But Brush Strokes: Selected Prose by Phyllis Webb (review)

328 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 personal struggle with the generally cheerful and unproblematic nature of the mature paintings themselves. In what ways are Ewen's torments voiced here? More - or less - needs to be said about this matter. Matthew Teitelbaum's essay on Ewen's paintings and artistic milieu is clearly organized and written. His comparison of the differing practices in Montreal and London, Ontario, is exemplary. My only regret is that he did not discuss the artist within a wider North American context, for Ewen certainly is not the first or only artist fascinated with the epic or sublime in nature. As an aside, I also wish that Teitelbaum, as chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario, had explained the gallery's reasoning in adding so many of Ewen's works to its collection. Jasper Johns once quipped that in America artists are the servants of the rich. In Canada, it might be argued, they are the servants of the cultural bureaucracy. Is this healthy? Some discussion of this matter would be useful. The chronology that follows Teitelbaum's essay is commendable, and includes quotes from the artist and reviewers that shed additional light on Ewen's art. (CHRISTOPHER VARLEY) Phyllis Webb. Nothing But Brush Strokes: Selected Prose The Writer as Critic Series. NeWest Press 1.995. 156. $15.95 Phyllis Webb's Nothing But Brush Strokes is the fifth book in a new series called The Writer as Critic, published by NeWest Press under the general editorship of Smaro Karnboureli. I have always wondered why there seemed to be so few good books on Canadian poetics. By collecting the essays of noted poets, this series solves that absence, and does so wonderfully . Nothing But Brush Strokes is an extraordinary book. Webb'5 essays read like intimate conversations. She writes as thoughshe were imagining her reader in the same room, overhearing her thoughts as she sits brooding, telling herself: 'Phyllis, lay it on the line.' In fact, she begins her preface with the disarming invitation: 'May I have the pleasure of your company?' Listening in, we marvel at the subtlety of this original mind spinning ideas like spiders' silk. There is a wonderful inventiveness, trickster-like and quixotic, to her thought, and she is always loath to overexplain , so that her insights dazzle like flashes of silver caught in the net. One keeps reading compulsively. In an age when criticism has been seduced by self-satisfied abstractions, she returns us to the pleasure of language. Although the essays range from 1971 to 199.5, they are not organized chronologically. The collection begins with a piece called 'The Drover's Wife - Again,' first published in New Zealand in 1992, and we are inunediately plunged into a -'delicious disharmony' with no idea where we are being led. Webb seems to have read a story by the Australian writer HUMANITIES 329 Murray Bail and fallen in love with a phrase from one of his character~, the absconding wife: 'I am just going round the corner.' Placed first, her essaypoeminvites us to seeher, the writer/ critic, as disappearingjustaround the comer, light as a brush stroke: 'Well, aren't we all.' That gesture that pulls us in and deliberately unsettles is the signature of this book. You will get nowhere with it unless you channel all your intuition and allow the book to read you. If you do, you will be reminded of the pleasure of the life of the mind, for its own sake. There are too many fine essays to refer to them all, but I would mention three that are particularly brilliant: 'Waterlily and Multifoliate Rose: Cyclic Notions in Proust,' 'Up the Ladder: Notes on the Creative Process/ and 'A Correspondence.' The first is her conversation with Marcel Proust, via Dante. Which Proust? Thehighly compounded authorial 'I' of Ala recherchedu, temps perdu identified by the initial M. whom Proust once calls Marcel and who would be a writer? Or the writer himself with his game of irony which 'turns back on itself to stimulate the authentic, subjective, non-fictive?' Thinking of Proust 's game, of the procrastinating author who refused to write the book that the author is writing, Webb...