Thomas H. Raddall by Alan R. Young (review)

HUMANITIES 455 the present. For him, as apparently not for David Lewis (who once surprised me by asserting that the NOP is merely a means to a communist end, but who writes here on 'F.R. Scott's Contribution to the eCF'), socialism has been a channel for conservative progressivism and a futuristic humanism. And poetry- found for Scott in law (see p 108) and, I suspect, in socialism as well as in poems - has been variously to him a word connoting communicated vision, spiritual cohesion, ecological awareness, shared wonder, corrective action, a beautiful and humane order - the forces which offer the hope of tempering the worst and encouraging the best of man's nature and man's world. It has become something of a cliche to call Scott a 'Renaissance man' (p 133); perhaps the cliche can be reminted by the recognition of the man. In this, and in his natural Toryism, Scott stands in a great Canadian continuity that includes Haliburton, Leacock, Creighton, and Pierre Trudeau, who played one of Scott's'advocates,' St Peter, in a pre-conference entertainment turning on the 'question' of 'whether or not Scott has been good for Canada.' The answer, obviously, was yes. Sandra Djwa is to be commended for introduCing and, with R. St J. Macdonald, editing On F.R. Scott, and for organizing the Conference on which the volume is based. The McGill-Queen's Press is also to be commended for its production of a handsome and serviceable book, complete with an index by Marilyn G. Flitton. (O.M.R. BENTLEY) Alan R. Young. Thomas H. Rnddall Twayne. '51. $19·95 The Twayne world authors series demands those virtues John Buchan once attributed to Thomas Raddall: 'swift, spare, clean-limbed narrative.' Alan Young crisply covers Raddall's achievements as historical romancer, modern novelist, short-story teller, and historian. He also argues that Raddall deserves deeper, more imaginative criticism than he has yet been accorded. Within the limits of the Twayne format, Young can hardly achieve that depth. His effective overview does, however, release a richer sense of Raddall's work: of his evocation of place, for example, and of his treatment of women characters, and of his paradoxical vision of the way values are challenged by the acquisitive urge which drives most humans, past and present. For Young, Raddall'i; central theme is this acquisitiveness. The profit motive is fictionalized as privateeringorsmugglingin historical romances, and as a commercial rapacity in the modern tales. Young points out a confusion in alternatives to acquisitiveness: return to an old, decaying home, departure from the region, escape into Acadia/Arcadia, or death. Rejection of the profit motive in the fiction is related to Raddall's 456 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 preference, as historian, for military history over a 'beaver pelt' economic approach to the past. The Nymph and the Lamp bypasses the theme of hunger for profit; and interestingly this novel seems to have been the one in which Raddall was least affected by his own calculations of market success, and least ready to tailor his work to suit his publishers' suggestions as to what would sell. In many ways, The Nymph and the Lamp emerges not only as Raddall's 'finest,' as Young suggests, but also as his most puzzling achievement. Women's names - 'Fear,' 'Fay,' 'Felicity' - surfacing from Young's plot resumes tease us into speculating about the female principle Raddall focused in Isabel Jardine: nervous alien, aggressive business woman, happy sacrifice. The recurring plot of adulterous love culminates in Skane's pursuit of Isabel, but Young shows that it begins in His Majesty's Yankees, and continues as late as The Governor's Lady. Skane's relation to Matthew Carney is also illuminated by the sequence: the hero of His Majesty's Yankees, son of a heroic father named 'Matthew,' plays Cain's part; in Pride's Fancy the hero's name is Cain; and in The Wings ofNight the hero accidentally kills his dearest friend, husband of the woman he loves. As to setting, Young's emphasis on the 'Parkman method' of researching a chosen region leads us to note the opposed method of The Nymph and the Lamp...