The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott by Sandra Djwa (review)

168 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 scholarship in A Stranger toMy Time is substantial. For the metamorphosis of Grove's life in his own inventive hands (what Elsa calls 'liecraft'), and for his work as a writer in and finally of Canada, he has continued to be remembered. Curiously, because this stranger took us in (in Ronald Sutherland's fine phrase), we are in some sense lodged with him now; and thus FPG has achieved posthumously some of the fame that eluded him in life. Cogitamus ergo est. (JOHN J. O'CIDNNOR) Sandra Djwa. The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott McClelland and Stewart. 528. $39.95 Late in this biography, Sandra Djwa writes that Scott himself referred to his life as an onion, 'the layers ofwhich the biographer would have to pull back.' Peer Gynt used that same image to describe his character, only to find that, when he pulled away the layers of the onion, he found no central nub. Not so with Scott. As the title of the biography suggests, his life was a double layering of politics and poetry, the politics not at the practical level but involved with constitutional law. Djwa runs these two layers together, but although she sees Scott's life clearly and presents a portrait that gives the outlines, the shadings are 1l1uzzy. What emerges from this biography is an insistert~e on Scott's political side; and yet Djwa states that poetry was 'the central passion of his life.' The book has some notable sections about the connections between Scott's life, both public and private, and the process ofcertain poems. But it is disappointingly unfocused in dealing with the poetry, giving little discussion of poems and not a great deal about Scott's involvement with and place in the development of Canadian poetry. Djwa admits in the end that she has given short shrift to certain elements in Scott's literary life. The book also reveals that two poets were first given the opportunity to write the biography, both withdrawing from the project. Scott explained: 'Both could face the poetry side, but were fearful of my law and politics. I don't blame them.' Djwa has come down very firmly on the law and politics in Scott's life, but in the process the biography has become lopsided. The book bulges with political and legal information. Some, notably those two famous cases concerned with the Padlock act and restaurant owner Frank Roncarelli, are good accounts, though the amount of detail can become wearisome and unnecessary. Djwa gives lists of names of people who participated in discussions about the validity of the Canadian constitution. Since often those people played no significant part in Scott's life, such lists are not intrinsically revealing. The picture presented is of a man radically more uncertain of his HUMANITIES 169 abilities and capacities than one could guess from his public position. Scott continually questioned his motives and the directions and misdirections in his life, an indecisiveness not apparent to anyone who knew him personally, if not closely. The book successfully tackles his apparent ambiguities in relation to civil liberties in his late years, especially in what appeared to be his about-face in response to the Octobercrisis of 1970 and the War Measures Act. The referential apparatus of the book occupies sixty-odd pages, listing the papers and manuscripts consulted, and the interviews and correspondence ofthe author with figures associated with Scott. Yet there is no bibliography and little reference to those articles and essays devoted to Scott's literary work. Some references are vague; the notes indicate that Djwa discussed Scott with Pierre Trudeau and yet he is not listed in the catalogue of people the author interviewed. Some of the chronology is hazy, some of the notes not entirely clear. The book is an immensely detailed account and. covers all the significant events of Scott's life. I detected only one omission: there is no mention of what was probably the first conference to place Scott in the context of the life and literature of the 1930S in Canada, a conference held in Lennoxville in the late 1970s. Scottwas there...