Chapters in a Lucky Life by Clara Thomas (review)

HUMANITIES 511 ing body of cultural expression. The art-life form of Al Purdy's poetry swims and prospers deep within the collaborative embrace of such currents , feeding from their creative nutrients and, in its own shape-shiftings that come from Purdy's remarkable openness to new experiences and intonations , prefiguring their directions. O.A. WAINWRIGHT) Clara Thomas. Chapters in a Lucky Life Borealis. 352. $24.95 Clara Thomas is one of our pioneers, both as a woman in Canadian academia and as a student and promoter of Canadian literature. When she started graduate studies in 1949, she knew only one woman who had a fulltime appointment in English in an Ontario university. That was Flora Roy at Waterloo Lutheran, who encouraged her academic aspirations at a time when women might well get MAs but were considered 'poor candidates for the higher degree.' At that date, of course, neither Canadian Literature nor Canadian Studies existed as an academic reality. Now an undiminished eighty, Clara Thomas has written a delightful memoir that includes a rare first-person account of prewar and postwar experiences in the university system in Canada. Chapters in a Lucky Life also describes lovingly what it was like growing up in small-town Ontario just after the First World War. In addition, this book recounts another topic not much recorded, the life of a young Canadian woman in the 1940S and 1950s. Admittedly, the 'lucky' subject of the book was not quite a typical young woman of those days. Very bright, very pretty, she wanted to marry well and to nurture a family - and also to earn a doctorate. All of which she did. Clara Thomas writes, 'Truth to tell, I had become a scholar in my last two years at Western, and, always obsessive, wanted only two things- to marry Morley [Thomas] and to go to Graduate School at some as yet unknown time in the future.' In due course, these ambitions were achieved. In 1944, she produced her Master's thesis and, shortly afterwards, her first son. She then moved on, gently but irresistibly, to a dissertation on Anna Jameson and a position as one of the first two women hired at the newIy founded York University. In the process she survived, with aplomb though also with some resentment, the difficulties then encountered by women who pursued learning. For example, an old academic friend was furious when, armed with her MA from the University of Western Ontario, young Mrs Thomas had the impertinence to apply for a doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. You want to compete with your husband, he told her, and - it was 1949 - she dutifully withdrew the application. In 'the conservative fifties: she recalls, she was 'an easy prey for guilt' and accepted that she could not 512 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 attend Northrop Frye's famous lectures because she would have had to arrange baby-sitting for her two small children. We also learn, hearteningly, of generosity and helpfulness from the legendary patriarchs of literary studies in Canada. William Henry Deacon facilitated Clara Thomas's MA thesis and made possible its publication as Canadian Novelists (an achievement, she records endearingly, that she forgot to mention to her colleagues at York University). A.5.P. Woodhouse responded cordially to her first, hastily withdrawn application to his graduate program at the University of Toronto. When she finally enrolled, seven years later, she notes, 'my welcoming by both Woodhouse and Frye was much more genial than I expected and totally contrary to the current mythology.' Here she reveals a degree of trepidation more often concealed in an account that, as the title suggests, is likely to credit luck rather than intelligence and hard work with the many successes described. We 'may think we know better as we evaluate a life that, like Clara Thomas herself, continues to awe and to charm. (NAOMI BLACK) Eve Blau. The Architecture oj Red VielHln 1919-1934 MIT Press. xviii, 510. us $60.00 For those with little familiarity with the complexities of twentieth-century architectural history, this impressively researched study of 1920S socialist housing in the former Austro-Hungarian Imperial capital may be a bit forbidding. In...