Among the Lions: A Lamb in the Literary Jungle by Harold Horwood (review)

354 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 seem especially to illustrate an important aspect of Eastwood=s >doubleness= mentioned earlier by Beard but not here: the openness of his films (as Hollywood products B and I use the term non-pejoratively) to differing interpretations depending on the differing ideological values of their viewers. Eastwood=s major films could be argued to highlight, because of the controversial issues (such as violent justice and gender roles) with which they are concerned, Hollywood=s deliberate, ongoing attempts to accommodate conflicting points of view. Eastwood=s films, as Beard remarks about Pale Rider, seem to emphasize such conflicts rather than attempt to conceal them. Beard defines his book as a >collection= of thoughts and readings rather than as a systematic survey, and at times the sections overlap, while a few films seem nevertheless treated perfunctorily simply for the sake of partial inclusiveness. The non-chronological approach also lessens the impact of some of the chapters, given the book=s opening placement of Eastwood=s films within the context of changing American values over time. Almost everything, however, is intellectually stimulating, even when provoking (at least from this reader) an emphatic protest (for example: at the characterizing of what Beard calls films of >virtual classicism= as presenting an impossibly >simple and innocent= world; at the lament that Hollywood today has style without content; at the book=s own final conflicted view of Eastwood as simultaneously deliberate artist and non-thoughtful primitive). The book should generate productive arguments: about individual Eastwood films and the overall shape of the actor/director=s career, about the drift of Hollywood especially in the 1970s and 1990s, and about cinematic doubleness more generally. Most certainly Beard has made a significant addition to the growing critical acknowledgment of Eastwood=s importance in American filmmaking since 1960: both as a reflection of American social and cinematic values and as an ambiguous commentator on them. (ANNE LANCASHIRE) Harold Horwood. Among the Lions: A Lamb in the Literary Jungle Killick Press. viii, 252. $15.95 Harold Horwood is a figure of considerable importance in the political and cultural history of Newfoundland. This second volume of his memoirs opens in 1956, as Horwood is preparing to give up journalism and become a full-time writer. As editor of the St John=s Evening Telegram, he had been one of the leaders of opposition to the egregious Joseph Smallwood, a thankless task for which he, like others, suffered police harassment for years afterwards. While Newfoundland had produced some distinguished writers, no one had attempted to earn a living solely as a writer, and for that alone he should be of interest to literary historians. Horwood went on to HUMANITIES 355 produce twenty-six books, including novels, biographies, histories, and travel works. In the first and most attractive part of the book, Horwood describes >something too lasting and important to call friendship,= his relationship with Farley Mowat. He describes their voyages around the coast of Newfoundland in the days before highways and television opened up remote bays and outports to the modern world. Some of their ports of call even now remain obscure, such as Richard=s Harbour and Middle Goblin. He describes shortening sail in a rising wind: >there was some compensation in the thought that I was doing what my ancestors had done for hundreds of years, and that I might be the last Newfoundlander handling sails on a small ship in a storm.= Horwood provides brief portraits of other writers with whom he formed friendships, such as Graeme Gibson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Alice Munro, as well as an account of the early struggles of the Writers= Union, of which he was co-founder and later president. He writes at some length about Margaret Laurence, who, after Mowat, seems to have been his closest friend among Canadian writers. Despite great admiration for her work, he describes her concern for moral profundities as >pretentious=; he dismisses the >convenient myth= that >novels are something much more important than mere entertainment.= However, it is hard to reconcile this claim with an earlier one: >I have tried to appeal to a small circle of readers with tastes and interests close to...