Hugh MacLennan by T.D. MacLulich (review)

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 - execution of scenes not researched but obsessively remembered : frost weighting the wires on Sable Island, or the deserted home exposed by shifting sands. Although Young records the process of research and composition that went into each of the Raddall works, he says little that really explains the production of The Nymph and the Lamp. At forty-seven, Raddall broke the soldierly control of his materials and themes, and released a deeply moving myth ofsearch for home, for sex, for self. We'll hope that Young is now at work on the richer study of Raddall that the present useful but brief book cries for. (ELIZABETH WATERSTON) T.D. MacLulich. Hugh MacLennan Twayne. 142. $19.95 Hugh MacLennan, like other publications in the Twayne World Authors Series, is a handy, brief summation of MacLennan scholarship to date. Following the conventions of the series, MacLulich deftly surveys works by and about MacLennan, gives a short chronology of MacLennan's life to date, and offers a selected bibliography of MacLennan materials. He concludes that MacLennan is a conservative humanist whose greatest contribution to Canadian letters is through his novels. Of MacLennan's essays, MacLulich values his 'confessional' pieces above his 'think pieces.' George Woodcock is singled out as having produced 'the most HUMANITIES 4j7 influential discussion of MacLennan's fiction' in 'A Nation's Odyssey'; Elspeth Cameron is acknowledged for having contributed a biography of MacLennan 'with commendable thoroughness: This book should prove valuable to university students as a convenient survey of MacLennan. To scholars, it will be of little interest because it is limited by the restrictions of the series format which precludes in-depth analysis or any major contribution to MacLennan criticism. (ELSPETH CAMERON) Arnold E. Davidson. Mordecai Richler Frederick Ungar Publishing. v, 20J. $16.75 A querulous, aggressive writer and one of the major presences in contemporary Canadian literature, Mordecai Richler has fostered an incomplete and surprisingly timid criticism. The best available booklength study is still George Woodcock's Mordecai Richler, but it was published before Sf. Urbain's Horseman and Joshua Then and Now and suffers too from a reluctance to consider the contexts - political as well as literary - fundamental to Richler's fiction. Arnold E. Davidson's new appraisal, in Ungar's Literature and Life series, is more comprehensive, but is just as uneven in its analytical judgments and in its selection of thematic and formal emphasis. Although Davidson's general argument about Richler's 'complexity of moral vision' (p 70) and'careful control of narrative distance' (p 82) is judicious and well organized, he exercises little ingenuity in dealing with the need for summary which is part of the introductory purpose served by the Ungar volumes. Davidson describes Richler...