Spreading Time: Remarks on Canadian Writers and Writing by Earle Birney (review)

454 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 MacLennan a large debt; for making the struggle clear we are indebted as well to Elspeth Cameron. (ROGER HYMAN) Earle Birney. Spreading Time: Remarks on Canadian Writers and Writing. Book I: 1904-1949 Vehicule Press. 163. $5.95 paper The first volume of Earle Birney's literary memoirs is in some ways the autobiographical equivalent of one of those cluttered and wonderful Victorian life-and-Ietters biographies. It has the same juxtaposition of an unmediated historical present (in the collected documents: letters, reviews , articles, broadcasts, etc) with a mediated past (seventeen interspersed 'As I Remember' sections); and the whole potpourri is collected or interpreted or re-created by a historian whose subject is his own literary life in the first half of this Canadian literary century. From the alternation (and occasional combination) of memorabilia and reminiscences hangs the tale, and like its Victorian ancestors that tale mixes the close-up and the long view, what seemed to be the situation at the actual time and what seems now to have happened then, in fascinating proportions and interrelations. The reader is invited to bring together the childhood which Birney now re-creates (which stands at the beginning of the volume) and the childhood which he re-created in a document of 1949 (which stands at the end). His present attitude towards a book review from the distant past is juxtaposed with the review itself in all its occasional immediacy. His tangled and frustrating relations with Canadian Poetry Magazine in the late forties emerge from documents of that time, from what he thought of those relations in 1963, and from what he thinks of them now through the filter of thirty years of memory. But the form of Spreading Time would be less fertile if the qualities of Birney's mind weren't what they are. On the one hand, his bias is to live on the very edge of the historical moment, always writing about the state of Canadian poetry now, about what this work being discussed means to us now, about what we should do (or not do) right now (he makes fun of that mistitled anthology Poems ofToday twice -an archetypal Birney joke); but, on the other hand, he is a brooder over the past, a rejoicer at lucky turning-points, a prober of rankling sores, a retailer of unforgettable twice-told anecdotes (Sir Henry Newbolt and Bliss Carman remain fIxed forever on the campus of the University of British Columbia). Most notably he is a man of magnificent generosities and magnificent resentments , quick to take offence and equally quick to forgive (a juxtaposed pair of letters to Jacob Markowitz illustrates the point perfectly). In fact, the polemical impetus - whether to praise or blame - is what drives the book forward throughits discontinuous form, and its moststriking targets HUMANITIES 455 seem to be a combination of friend and foe. I don't mean that there aren't some early friends or later proteges (from those very productive creative writing courses) who retain his unswerving loyalty or a few unadulterated villains (Hugh Eayrs, for example), but usually the people he forgives still retain the offence and his heroes (even Garnett Sedgewick) are not often unspotted; indeed, his dramatis personae display their bright and dark sides with fascinating mutability (Pierre Berton begins darkly, but brightens later, Roy Daniells does the opposite; even Sir Charles G.D. Roberts reveals an unexpected moment of kindly glory). Birney's title characterizes the work somewhat modestly - as 'remarks,' not as literary history, or as literary criticism, or as autobiography. But 'remarks' fits the sort of heterogeneous acuity of observation and confident quickness of judgment that give this book its special flavour. I look forward to Book II and hope that the final product is at least a triple-decker. (MILTON WILSON) Michael E. Darling. A.T.M. Smith: An Annotated Bibliography Vehicule Press. 228 Ken Mitchell. Sinclair Ross: A Reader's Guide Coteau Books (Thunder Creek Publishing Co-operative). 116, illus. Two contributions to Canadian literary studies worthy of brief notice. Now that The Annotated BibliographyofCanada's Major Authors has begun to appear from ECW Press, the publication of an independent...