Milton Acorn: In Love and Anger by Richard Lemm (review)

HUMANITIES 523 Impressive in all these relationships is his ability to maintain his integrity despite the conflicting personal demands and the maelstrom of. work. Impressive also is the fact that while running a business, often by the seat of his financial pants, McClelland was able to conceive projects like the New Canadian Library and the Canadian Centenary Library. Failure to discuss the last is one of the few important gaps in King's otherwise remarkably thorough account. And while he does justice to what one might call McClelland's visionary side, he's also very good on the strengths and weaknesses of the businessman . Like all charismatic individuals, McClelland was weak on translating charisma into routine, and he never did manage to delegate authority successfully or to balance the books. Although it may not have been clear in December ''185, when he sold the company to Avie Bennett, McClelland had found a successor not only willing to continueand to develop his major projects but also able to negotiate successfully the balance sheet. After offering an often informed and detailed account of the financial side of M&S, King concludes that 'it is unlikely anyone could have made money undertaking the first-ever creation of an exclusively Canadian list on a large scale. ... McClelland did the best possible job, given the situation he faced.' TItis is convincing. As is his biography's suggestion that when history demands to examine a publisher'S books, it won't ask for the financial statement but for the volumes on the shelves. By that standard, McClelland's life is a triumph, and King's book has done it justice. (SAM SOLECKI) Richard Lemm. Milton Aeon/: 111 Love and Anger Carleton University Press. xii. 280. $34-95 A few years ago I reviewed Chris Gudgeon'S Ollt ofThis World: The Natllral History of Milton Acorn. Much of the energy in Gudgeon'S book was devoted to saving Acorn from unjust neglect. But here is a second biographical study, just three years later. This is unusually plush treatment for a Canadian poet, although as I said in that earlier review, Acorn deserves it. Lernm writes from an island-centred universe. A professor at the University of Prince Edward Island, he has a clear and careful view of the importance of this world which Acorn came from and which he obsessed over throughout his life. As well as defining Acorn's family and friends, especially the people who might be called his primary caregivers, such as the poet Reshard Gool and the artist Hilda Woolnough, Lernm does an excellent job of defining the politics of island life as Acorn knew it. Acorn saw himself as a mythic hero, a bard, and it was thus appropriate that he saw the island as a mythic garden which needed protection from the dangers of capitalism. No Anne of Green Gables theme park for him. 524 LETTERS IN CANADA '999 As Lemm shows, Acorn's sense of class was similar. He rejected his rather unremarkable middle-class heritage and turned himself into the champion of the working class. Lemm traces the many apocryphal stories about Acorn, most apparently created by Acorn, and where possible corrects them. The process becomes slightly comical, as Acorn's autobiographical imagination was dearly far too powerful for any biographer to catch up. Lemm depicts a much less forgotten poet than Gudgeon does. Part of this is simply that Gudgeon's thesis required an abandoned poet while Lemm is not driven by myths, except to correct them. Also, Gudgeon never met Acorn, but Lemm has fond recollections of a human, not just a legend. Perhaps more important, PEl emphatically remembers Acorn and Lemm looks at the work through a PEl lens. It is intriguing what a contrast there is between these two books. Out of This World is idiosyncratic and, as Lemm never tires of pointing out, often wrong in its minutiae. Yet the book is also almost as weird as Acorn himself, with strange turns and absurd phrases such as 'Thoroughly Modern Miltie.' On the other hand, Milton Acorn: In Love and Anger is just as earnest as the title, and also just as lacking in imagination. It seems...