A Likely Story: The Writing Life by Robert Kroetsch (review)

378 LEITERS IN CANADA 1995 The disadvantage$ of ordering by correspondent is that readers are continually being moved back and forth in time - and often in space, since the earlier letters are written in England and the later in Canada. Wainwright forgets that it is much easier to recreate an individual correspondence from a chronological listing (given an adequate index) than vice versa, which requires the ordering of over two hundred letters. Unfortunately, Wainwright was unable to include letters to Adele Wiseman, whom Laurence describes as 'my nearest and dearest friend and fellow novelist.' This is not Wainwright's fault, but it stillcreates a yawning gap within the book. In other respects, however, it is indifferently edited. The notes are mainly confined to bibliographical information about relatively well known works, and they are sometimes careless: the misdating of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar obscures rather thanclarifies Laurence's comments, and 'an annotation of a letter to Metcalf about a 'forthcoming book' misidentifies it as a volume published two years earlier. Extracts from interviews with surviving correspondents are included, but they add little, and are often inserted in inappropriate places. Although letters to AI Purdy are listed on the contents page and back cover, no suchletters appear - only an interview with Purdy - because a book-length selection or their correspondence appearedin 1993. A letter to Claire Mowat is included, but Farley is interviewed (feminist readers have a right to know why!). Unforgivably , no index is provided. An uneven book, then, but one that gives useful insights into Laurence: her persistent but W1dogmatic religious concerns, her sense of writing as a grace given, and her admirable modesty. (w.}. KEITH) Robert Kroetsch. A Likely Story: The Writing Life Red Deer College Press. 224· $16.95 In 1989 Robert Kroetsch published The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. That text gathered together the best essays Kroetsch had written since the early 1970s; it built on an earlier volume of collected essays published as a specialissue of Open Letter. A Likely Story: The Writing Life is, in part, a collection of the essays Kroetsch has written since The Lovely Treachery ofWords, including 'The Cow in the Quicksand and How I(t) Got Out: Responding to Stegner's Wolf Willow' and 'Sitting Down to Write: Margaret Laurence and the Discourse of Moming.' A Likely Story is, however, more than a collection of essays. The acknowledgments begin with this statement: 'This is (not) an autobiography. These fugitive pieces, with only minor exceptions, are concerned with the writing life, not the personal life, of the writer.' The texts inA Likely Story inhabit this apparent contradiction. All the essays are avowedly autobiographical; they have titles such as 'Why I Went Up North and What I Found When He Got HUMANITIES 379 There' and 'D-Day and After: Remembering a Scrapbook I Cannot Find.' Also included in the volume are three autobiographical poems: 'Lonesome Writer Diptych/ 'Family Retmion Cowboy Poem,' and 'Poem for My Dead Sister.' If these texts invoke the conventions of autobiography, at the same time they frustrate our desire for the personal. Fittingly, A Likely Story concludes with 'The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart,' a very 'Kroetschian' text in which the speaker announces lUs decision 'to renounce the writing of poetry and to devote [his] life during this remaining decade of an appalling century to an examination at' the notebooks and manuscripts of Rita Kleinhart, the brilliantpoet who disappeared onJune 26,1992, at the age of fifty-five.' That text opens with a passage from the fictional Kleinhart's last published poem: 'The question is always a question oftrace. What remains of what does not remain?' Fittingly, too, A Likely Story includes as one of its epigraphs a passagefrom Kleinhart's ChanceofFlurries: 'I am trying to write an autobiography in which I do not appear.' A Likely Story is a very playful collection of texts. The title derives from a passage in George Bowering's Errata which serves as another of the volume's epigraphs: 'My next novel should be titled IJA likely story.'" As Robert Kroetsch'5 writing career has unfolded, his love of, and quarrels with, the'conventions of narration and autobiography have...