Duncan Campbell Scott: Addresses, Essays, and Reviews ed. by Leslie Ritchie (review)

282 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 historian then uses for interpretation. In doing this they remind us that science, like history, is not value free. (SERENA KESHAVJEE) Leslie Ritchie, editor. Duncan Campbell Scott: Addresses, Essays, and Reviews. 2 volumes Canadian Poetry Press. Volume 1: xlii, 326; volume 2: 350. $75.00 Readers, critics, and scholars of Canadian literature will be most grateful for this gift from David Bentley=s Canadian Poetry Press series PostConfederation Poetry: Texts and Contexts. The complete Scott non-fictional prose, expertly edited by Leslie Ritchie, is already the eighth number in the young series, of which Bentley is also general editor. I say >gift= because of the inexpensive price of $75.00. For their money, readers get two hefty volumes of generously readable type including all of Scott=s non-fictional prose (a cultural treasure), Stan Dragland=s extensively informed and wellwritten introduction, and some 150 pages of expansive editorial notes. (To give fresh sense to the word >quibble=: two things readers might miss are a picture of Scott and, despite the information contained in the introduction and notes, a biographical sketch.) I suspect that these volumes are produced on a comparative shoestring budget (compared, say, to that of the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts at Carleton University), and yet they emerge showing as high production values and as exhaustive a scholarship as anyone could desire. That bespeaks remarkable (and characteristic) devotion on the part of Bentley, Ritchie, the staff of volunteers at Canadian Poetry Press, and the University of Western Ontario (which, along with SSHRCC, helps fund the series). For a review of an academic book, the foregoing might be considered the beginning of a >rave= or even as >gushing.= So be it. The facts remain: Scott is one of our most important writers, and for the first time we have his complete non-fictional prose in handsomely produced, scholarly editions at a bargain price. Where else does that happen in publishing? If ever a celebratory and grateful review were in order, this is the occasion. That said, my appreciation of Stan Dragland=s introduction is not unqualified. Undoubtedly Dragland is the leading authority on Scott=s writing, and here he offers many of his well-turned insights. To take but one example: in his illustrative use of the companion poems >The Sea by the Wood= and >The Wood by the Sea,= Dragland summarizes in a fresh way his view of the tension that has long been recognized as definitive of Scott=s poetry: >Personified sea and wood each wish to dissolve in the other, to be forgiven its own weary responsibilities; the single-minded stance of each cancels that of the other; longing for singleness and stasis is unsatisfied. The wood-sea force-field of irresolution is the yearning tension at the heart of Scott=s thinking when his thinking is poetry.= I would add only that HUMANITIES 283 Dragland=s qualification of Scott=s thinking is mistakenly delimiting. Whether or not the non-fiction expresses Scott=s characteristic tension is a question readers must answer for themselves (I think it does, if not within each individual work, then across a number of essays), but there should be no question that Scott=s fiction is as rife with irresolution, and as resistant to simplification, as is his poetry. Dragland=s book-length study of Scott=s poetic and bureaucratic involvement with Indian Affairs, Floating Voice (1994), provides as considered and readable an exploration of the poetry about and issues surrounding the negotiation of Treaty Number 9 (with the James Bay Indians at the beginning of the last century) as is likely to be written. In the introduction to the volumes under review, the thinking in Floating Voice apparently still suffuses Dragland=s mind. But if the collected non-fictional prose tells us anything about Scott, it=s that he was much more than the government official who negotiated some treaties and helped write our government=s Indian Affairs policy in the first part of the twentieth century. It would seem, though, that that aspect of Scott has become Dragland=s idée fixe, and it has been worth dwelling on at this length only...