Notes from the Rainforest by George Faludy (review)

170 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 inhuman tyrannies. People, Skvorecky shows, have an amazing way of learning to live their own lives whatever the circumstances. Yet those stubbornly lived lives are inevitably deprived in many ways, and much rage over the fact goes into the essays in Talkin' Moscow Blues, particularly when Skvorecky is discussing those amiable liberals - and especially Canadian ones - who have no experience of Communist states yet assume that left-wing dictatorships are in some way better than right-wing ones. One of the best essays, 'Two Peas in aPod,' shows how Nazism and Communism during the 1930S resembled and even influenced each other in terms of propaganda and organization. And 'Are Canadians Politically Naive?' should be widely read by people who come to easy conclusions about countries they have never visited. The other essays differ in their points of takeoff, but most of them lead to similar conclusions. When Skvorecky celebrates his enthusiasm for jazz or writes appreciatively of the novelists he admires, he is likely to bring the argument round to his own experience, and his experience -which suggests a one-track mind to those who have not shared it - is of the difficulty of sustaining any kind of creative freedom in a totalitarian world. Skvorecky's apparent intransigence in opposing totalitarian regimes (which seems to be softening into cautious interest with the coming of glasnost) has often been made the excuse to brand him a political Ireactionary.' Once, indeed, when he was talking to Geoff Hancock in an interview included in this volume, he let himself be goaded into saying: 'I am a reactionary because I believe there are certain traditional values that should not be forgotten, and if they are forgotten the results may be tragic.' But let us not forget that the first searching criticism of the Russian Communist state came not from conservatives, but from the independent Old Left, from Emma Goldman and Bertrand Russell in the 1920S, from Andre Gide and George Orwell and Ignazio Silone in the 1930S, from Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus and Dwight Macdonald in the 1940s. They judged the system by their own ideas of free socialism, and speaking from experience Skvorecky shows how right they were. To dismiss him as a mere reactionary is to shut our minds to a voice that tells us a great deal about the world we inhabit and how to live within it. Moreover, he tells it well. (GEORGE WOODCOCK) George Faludy. Notes from the Rainforest Hounslow Press. 126. $12.95 paper In the summer of 1987George Faludy, the Hungarian and Canadian poet, left the Toronto apartment where he normally resides to live for two HUMANITIES 171 months in a borrowed cottage in a Vancouver Island forest. This book is the journal he kept, with entries for almost every day of those two months. The entries are not primarily accounts of his outward activities but short meditations and pensees on a great variety of subjects. They are not so much about a single place as about the many places of his life: Hungary, Tangier, the United States, war-time New Guinea, and Toronto; about his friends, including the one identified by the initial E, who translated the journal from the Hungarian; and about his reading both of the many books he found in the cottage and of those already held in his memory. They grow out of the experiences not of two months only but of all his seventy-six years, including the experiences of political imprisonment and exile. Notes from the Rainforest has less affinity with the writings of H.D. Thoreau and Emily Carr than its title might lead one to expect, and more with those of Michel de Montaigne. Faludy sometimes sees his forest dwelling as a dacha, but the book-lined cottage also serves much of the purpose of Montaigne's book-lined tower. This work provides welcome evidence that, despite so many reports to the contrary, the great tradition of the personal essay remains alive. The personality that emerges here is attractive in ways that often remind one of Montaigne: humane, clear-sighted, eminently balanced and sane. Faludy possesses a mature wisdom and an independence...