George Grant: A Biography by William Christian (review)

198 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 demonstrate narrative William Christian. Grant: A Hin,armrl1111 ,...."""'I"<,,.-.iT of Toronto Press. 472. The work ~-'~.1"1.- Grant retains a 0 ..\......1\.'........ relevance: at the one strand of his at the ,......,......1"".'" !3't"\·no':lI't'C! current or even pr~~SClenct. Canadian aCclaE~mJLC term 'excellence' and to .toreSE~e term would stand in economic Cl€:ar"cultnng Nation the eerie status of a revenant. It may its of its shifts over its - which of course, are the very characteristics which have others to criticize his as pnllo,sopnv inconsistent and over-invested, as Art Davis has to Grant Feb pr(~alICn()ns will not HUMANmES 199 all need to test our answers against his essential questions.' Clearly, Grant was a public intellectual of the first order, whose idiosyncrasies drew as much attention as his edicts. But what is to be gained by a biography that is not already provided by the writings of the man himself? - who, whatever his belief in the possibility of a transcendent truth, produced works that were engaged, sometimes enraged, and often anagrammatically personal. (And, while he held this position in large part by virtue of his class and family ties - the Parkin/ Grant/Massey/Ignatieff legacy extends back to the nineteenth century and forward to our own day - his was in many respects already a public life.) It is a question William Christian faces squarely at the beginning, and in a manner which provides a model of his biographical method. In a fictional Socratic scenario staged in the Grant family kitchen, the biographer interrogates Grant's proposition that the lives of philosophers need not be written, for the best state of their thinking is already represented. Under questioning, 'Grant' admits that he omitted or encoded the full extent of his Christian belief in his philosophical writing and teaching. Therefore, if the works require a supplement (and if Grant is more a visionary than a philosopher), the biographer has a role - and that role is as an explicator, rather than assessor. George Grant: A Biography traces in meticulous detail the trajectory of Grant's life and work, paying especial attention to his family formation and his continuing relationships. (One interesting revelation is the degree to which Sheila Grant was an active collaborator, and sometimes unsigned coauthor, of some of Grant's publications.) The work is based on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, including extensive interviews with Grant's friends, family, colleagues, and former students; it keeps an even pace throughout and the mass of material is handled with aplomb. But despite the comprehensive overview of Grant's writings and his academic career, George Grant is less an intellectual than a spiritual biography. This is an observation with which William Christian might very well agree, for he refers in the preface both to St Augustine and to Simone Wei! - the' latter a key thinker for Grant - and to the Petrement biography of her. The difficulty this presents to the reader is less a matter of the genre per se than of the interpretive mode which accompanies it: this biography establishes a running allegory through which Grant's intellectual and political work is placed in constant reference to his spiritual development and to the moment of sudden insight or grace which Grant himself called his life's turning point. However, since Grant's particular brand of faith appears to have been as complex and contradictory as his political philosophy - partaking of different traditions and traversing denominations and sects - 'Christianity' functions poorly as a common denominator for the intellectual production. And (to use North,rop Frye's terms) the book's 200 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 intensely 'centripetal' motion means that it functions less successfully 'centrifugally': this is illustrated by Christian's underplayed account of Grant's interactions with the New Left and organized Canadian nationalism , and his tendency to see the adaptation and secularization of Grant's ideas as a misappropriation or deviation. Other studies than Christian's will be needed to fully assess the impact of George Grant, and the operation of Grant's work in the world. (HEATHER MURRAY) Margery Fee, editor. Silence Made Visible. Howard O'Hagan and Tay John ECW Press 1992. 160. $25.00 paper When Franklin Davey McDowell's first novel, The Champlain Road, won the Governor-General's Prize for fiction in 1939, the book had already been acclaimed in the 11 November 1939 issue of Saturday Night as 'without any doubt a Canadian classic.' Although McDowell's historical romance of the conquest of Huronia is now forgotten, another first novel of that year, Howard O'Hagan's Yay Jolm, has belatedly achieved the status predicted for McDowell's book. Margery Fee's collection of information , documents, and criticism related to O'Hagan and Tay John offers a valuable perspective on the history of the novel's production and reception, and it offers factual information which will be of substantial use to O'Hagan's biographer - a critical biography representing perhaps the next stage in his incorporation into a canon of English-Canadian literature. Silence Made Visible offers material falling into six broad categories. First, a chronology compiled by the editor and Peter James Clark confirms and amplifies upon a 1977 article by Gary Geddes that has previously been the best source of biographical information on O'Hagan. A solicited and somewhat tangential letter from Lovat Dickson follows this chronology, along with a more useful 1979 interview with O'Hagan by Keith Maillard. Three previously uncollected pieces of fictional and journalistic juvenilia come next, and with their settings and references to Australia, Argentina, Fiji, and the Falklands, they remind us that O'Hagan spent three of the eight decades of his life outside of Canada. Finally, the first half of the book chronicles O'Hagan's involvement with the Berkeley Arts Club, which he joined four years after moving to California in 1934. Minutes of club discussions of intellectual issues and productions were recorded by members as 'chronicles,' and three of O'Hagan's witty and inventive accounts survive. E.W. Strong provides_an essential memoir to contextualize these brief jeux d'espirit, and, as the editor notes, they anticipate some of the habits of mind and art emerging in O'Hagan's later work. The second half of this collection focuses more directly on Tay John through five (mostly brief) articles and an annotated bibliography of all ...