Ernest Buckler Remembered by Claude Bissell (review)

158 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 doubt had to resist some tempting leads- for example, from a classmate who once told me that Frye determined to become head of the English department before he had finished his freshman year and went into the ministry because there had never been a head at Vic who was not an ordained minister. Ayre even caught Frye in the act of elaborating the painful experience of summer ministry in Saskatchewan into a series of witty stories, during a summer in Seattle. He wanted to record the prize story from this period, about the day when Frye was asked to pray for rain after a long drought and watched the sky cloud over as the service progressed, but Frye protested that the same story was told of every ministry student and should not be included. Ayre has a good ear for phrases, especially Frye's, and peppers his prose with lines from Frye's extensive correspondence. His eye is less acute than his ear, and while he lets us glimpse the places from Frye's early days, he does little to describe the city and University of Toronto. Granted that the inner life is the real life, for Frye as for Blake, but he is a product of Toronto and readers outside Canada, at least, could understand him better if they knew more about the university setting. He does not refrain from interpretation and judgment, but because he paraphrases extensively it can be hard to know whether he thinks, for example, that Frye 'fudged' an argument in A Natural Perspective or is reporting Frye's confession or the critical consensus. He also creates ambiguities with his light punctuation- for example, when he mentions PelhamEdgar's 'first wife who made him miserable and insomniac.' But these are minor flaws in a major effort. On the last page, Ayre remarks thatFrye has always considered himself a lucky man, lucky in his job and colleagues and career. After what Ayre has revealed about Frye's restricted childhood and financial crises, his first wife's bouts of illness and his own disappointments even with the University ofToronto, all in the face of constant publishing deadlines, we may conclude that his sense of luck must be tied to a Bunyanesque sense of overcoming obstacles. Frye has faced challenges that would have driven a weaker man to drink and distraction or, worse, to dreary lectures and lengthy footnotes. The myths will continue - for example, in the campus cartoon of Frye as Jedi Master of Queen's Park, which Ayre includes in a gathering of photographs -because they show the resourcefulness we can all muster if we learn how to read imaginatively. So too will the string of good luck, which has been extended with this book: Frye is lucky in his biographer. (THOMAS WILLARD) Claude Bissell. Ernest Buckler Remembered · University of Toronto Press. 171. $24.95 In his preface to Ernest Buckler Remembered, Claude Bissell calls the book 'a HUMANITIES 159 personal memoir.' With its account of family visits to Nova Scotia, Buckler's 1964 holiday with the Bissells in Toronto, and Buckler's letters to the author, there is much to reinforce Bissell'sdescription. However, as he himself points out, he has not abandoned the biographer's tools in bringing Buckler to the page. Interviews with the novelist's friends and family, research in the Buckler papers at the University ofToronto and the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, references to Buckler's private journals, and critical discussion of Buckler's prose style all contribute to making Ernest Buckler Remembered far more than a series of personal reminiscences . Instead, the book is also an insight into the writer's development, a revelation of his cultural context, and an elaboration on his place in Canadian literature. Suffusing it all is the warmth, tact, and critical understanding that Bissell brings to his portrait of 'a man whom I knew well and for whom I had great admiration and affection.' Claude Bissell and his family first met Ernest Buckler in August 1953 when they combined a visit to the author with a holiday in Nova Scotia. Bissell had reviewed The Mountain and the Valley for...