The Ecstasy of Resistance: A Biography of George Ryga by James Hoffman (review)

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 become increasingly clear. In the closing pages of Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, the writer concedes that Field Nates 'is, in some perverse way, an autobiographical poem, one in which I just cannot accept any of the conventions of autobiography.' A Likely Story is yet another text in which Kroetsch both invokes and frustrates our desire for conventional autobiography. What the speaker of 'The Poetics of Rita Kleinhare states of the poet is no less true of Kroetsch himself: '[He] is nothing if not direct.1 (PAUL HJARTARSON) James Hoffman. The Ecstasy ofResistance: A Biography of George Ryga ECW Press. 336. $19.95 A full-scale critical biography of a major Canadian writer is an important project. We need more biographies because they are crucial to our understanding , not only of the artist, but of ourselves as Canadians and of our cultural heritage. Biography, however, is an exacting art; it demands a fine calibration of scholarship and narrative flair. James Hoffman's recent biography of George Ryga, while making a very important contribution to Canadian biography, falls short as biography. My response to The Ecstasy of George Ryga, therefore, is an ambivalentone: there is much to applaud here, but also much to regret. Let me briefly outline my criticisms before turning to my praise. George Ryga was a complex, turbulent man, and Hoffman's greatest chal- 380 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 lenge was to create through narration the figure - the presence - of his subject. To be sure, he tries to do this, but the result is too heavily descriptive and quantitative. He gives us dates, facts, playproduction information, SUmInaries of reviewers' responses, and the names of many people important to Ryga. What he fails to do is to re-create Ryga for us, to make him come alive, either by establishing a sustained interpretation of the man or by developing the other characters in his life-story. Even when one allows for 'schools' of biography, with preference for factual presentation (socalled 'reality') at one extreme and interpretive re-presentation at the other, I firmly believe that a biographer must make his or her subject live. I would also argue that, in the 19905, when so much fine theoretical work has appeared on the subject of biography, anyone assuming the biographer's responsibilities should be aware of his or her own narrative function. Unfortunately, Hoffman appears to be nalve about his task and the power of his own voice. Perhaps he has deliberately tried to remove himself from the story, or perhaps he was operating under constraints placed upon him by the Ryga family: the former possibility is, of course, disingenuous; the latter, if true, a real handicap. My other major criticism is pickier but nonetheless germane. The prose here is oftenfaulty...