As for Sinclair Ross (review)

David Stouck has followed his acclaimed Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography with a convincing interpretation of the life of one of Canada's most elusive literary figures. As for Sinclair Ross, the first full-length account of Ross's life, incorporates meticulous archival research and material gathered during many hours of interviews with its subject and other relevant people. Stouck interweaves his biographical narrative with incisive and sometimes groundbreaking discussions of Ross's oeuvre and sheds light on some of its most ambiguous works. Critics will perhaps find this biography most immediately useful for its re-creation of Ross's early experiences which have obvious and profound resonances in As for Me and My House. Many often-discussed aspects of Ross's best novel – including the prairie setting, Mrs Bentley's music, modern aesthetics, the Philip/Steve relationship, and the Bentley marriage – can now be re-examined alongside Stouck's findings.

As for Sinclair Ross is always eminently readable. Stouck has done with Ross's life what Ross did with Mrs Bentley's: he has constructed a compelling and entertaining narrative from a life-story with many lost chapters, repetitions, and monotonies, and an almost plotless, interior focus. But, unlike Ross, who claims he did not intend or anticipate much of the unreliability and ambiguity of his story, Stouck is keenly aware of the elusive nature of his subject, and his portrait of Ross is judicious, psychologically astute, and appropriately enigmatic.

The portrait is also tragic. As a young man, Ross lived in the shadow of his quarrelsome and overbearing mother, who told elaborate stories, resented that she was reduced to working menial jobs, and berated her son for his artistic aspirations. Ross's sexual confusion played a formative role in his life, and he attributed his homosexual desire in part to the absence of his father. Ross loathed his job at the Royal Bank and longed to escape, first through a thwarted career as a musician, and then through the remunerative writing career that always eluded him; his early and masterful short stories were ahead of their time, As for Me and My House won only belated recognition, The Well and Whir of Gold were widely perceived as failures, and acclaim for Sawbones Memorial, Ross's final major work, came too late to change the direction of his career. Accordingly, Ross considered himself, almost from start to finish, a failed writer. He was needy for the infrequent and mitigated praise of others, scandalously neglected by the Canadian literary establishment, and persistently in doubt about his considerable talent. His commitment to his art was undermined by his obsessive devotion and hostility to his mother, his search for a father figure, unremitting loneliness, an inability to abandon the bank job that stifled his creativity, and chronic insecurity about his public persona, sexuality, and art. I come away from this book with a sense of regret for what might have been had Ross ever lived fully as a writer. But I also wonder if Ross's genius does not have its origins in his insecurity and prevarication.

It is difficult to find fault with As for Sinclair Ross, and I have only two minor complaints. The first is with Stouck's interpretation of Ross's sexuality. The biography politely and equivocally rejects Keath Fraser's claim, in As for Me and My Body, that Ross was a gay man, and refers to his 'less easily categorized sexuality.' Stouck writes that Ross 'felt "comfortable," as he phrased it, with bisexuality, because it gave him greater range, he believed, as an artist of human nature.' While there is no doubt that Ross's affairs were not exclusively homosexual, Stouck's story reads to me as that of a gay man who was insecure and confused about his sexuality, and found himself, despite an overriding same-sex desire, in occasional intimacies with women out of circumstance and pressure to conform. Unlike Stouck and Fraser, I never knew Ross, but it seems to me that the claim that Ross was...