A Magpie Life: Growing a Writer by George Bowering (review)

humanities 551 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 is right to see more ideological conflict in The Sacrifice than Panofsky does. Zichy adds to this discussion in his essay on the Lurianic overtones of Crackpot because his reading of Hoda contrasts sharply with that of Panofsky and, implicitly, Pennee. >What price has Hoda paid for her survival if it has brought her here?= he asks. >Those boys she has screwed do not have any love for her, no matter how she might rationalize it, and her cooperation with them only makes her an object of mockery and contempt in the community.= Compare Panofsky, in a strikingly different passage, in which she argues that Hoda is, on the contrary, accepted by her community in a way that Laiah, in The Sacrifice, never was: >Hoda serves the therapeutic and sexual needs of her customers, many of whom regard her as their friend. Hoda refuses to be excluded and participates as a secular member of the Jewish community.= The character of Hoda, Wiseman=s life-affirming, comically generous prostitute, has proved a conundrum for Wiseman critics, and clearly the debate over her continues. The key here, too, one suspects is that characteristic Wiseman stance: tension. It is this tension that Panofsky=s Adele Wiseman: Essays on Her Works offers readers to ponder: the tension in Wiseman between the philosophical inquirer and the nononsense puncturer of illusions, between Wiseman the hopeful believer in salvation through a devotion to art lovingly made, and Wiseman the rueful surveyor of a fractured world. (LORRAINE YORK) George Bowering. A Magpie Life: Growing a Writer Key Porter Books. 224. $21.95 George Bowering=s latest publication is a compendium of anecdotes that integrate personal and literary influences. The first section, >Alphabiography ,= lists many of those influences in alphabetical order, breaking down the importance of each letter in the writer=s life. The first letter, for example, the one that initiates the others, stands for Angela, his wife. She was neither a poet nor a novelist, but she was an expert on the Canadian writer Sheila Watson, and this was the part of her that Bowering loved best. The letter E stands for Ewart, Bowering=s father, a teacher and lover of baseball who spurred his son into writing about baseball. K stands for Kerouac. What young man with dreams of becoming a writer hasn=t been influenced by Kerouac? O is for Olsonites, fans of the poet Charles Olson; R is for reading, a central activity in Bowering=s life; W is, of course, for writing: that strange compulsion of wanting to shape one=s life through words. A Magpie Life is not strictly autobiographical. According to Bowering, one of Canada=s most playful postmodern writers, biography displaces and supplants a writer=s life, whereas a >biotext,= a term Bowering uses to describe The Magpie Life, is an extension of one=s life. The tall tales, the past anecdotes retold from different perspectives because of the years between 552 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the event and the telling, the books read and the writers met along the way, are the necessary elements to the growing of a writer. The magpie is a cousin of the crow, a bird that has made many appearances in Canadian literature B think of Robert Kroetsch=s What the Crow Said and The Crow Journals. Like the crow, the magpie almost always travels in groups because it likes to chat and is often playfully contentious. Considering the many fellow writers whose company Bowering has kept over the years B Avison, Duncan, Kearns, Kroetsch, Kiyooka, Marlatt, Nichol, Tallman, Wah, to name but a few B the title of this delightful book is most appropriate. It clearly demonstrates the crucial role Bowering has played, and is still playing, in the establishment of a distinct Canadian literature. While he is not afraid of tipping his hat to American influences, neither is he afraid of asserting that we have >just north of the U.S., the best postmodern poetry in the English-speaking world.= The seriousness and affection with which he regards...