Thirty-Two Short Views of Mazo de la Roche by Daniel L. Bratton (review)

296 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 which they were cited.) In Stories Subversive the reader is referred far too often to Firing the Heather rather than to the original source in McClung or elsewhere, a frustrating and unhelpful practice which undercuts the more substantial contribution to scholarship this volume could make. In sum, Stories Subversive is a good collection of McChmg's shorter fiction. Readers will enjoy a range of stories and have the chance to encounter McClung's warmth and wit in the format in which her contemporaries knew her so well. The limitations of the introduction aside, Davis' enterprise in bringing these pieces together in print is to be congratulated. (RAND! R. WARNE) Daniel L. Bratton. Thirty-Two Short Views ofMazo de la Roche ECW Press. 185. $14.95 At least two basic forms of biography have emerged. One relies on narrative to produce as coherent a prose portrait of the subject as possible. The other chooses a much more open form and is based on the notion that no one can reach the truth about so complex and mercurial a thing as a human life. D.H. Lawrence's life has been divided up into three eras and each one assigned to a different biographer, for example. At the beginning of his biography, Daniel Bratton acknowledges that a biographer caIIDot completely know his subject, so he has decided to make a bricolage of 'bits and pieces of whatever comes to hand.' The biography does not aspire to be more than an assembly of impressions of Mazo de la Roche, though the result is much more than that. The problem with this approach is that the reader is forced to do a good deal of the work, even though readers do not usually pick up a biography to enter the world of a 'multifaceted, postmodern narrative,' as the publisher's blurb puts it. The author can be accused of giving up before he begins. The life that emerges is shadowy and fragmented at best, but this is not to say that the study is useless or dull. Bratton points out that there are already three biographies of de la Roche, by Hambleton, Hendrick, and Givner, as well as her 1957 autobiography entitled Ringing the Changes. The biographers' biggest problem, apparently, was that Mazo de la Roche liked to fabricate such things as her name and date ofbirth, as well as exaggerate and lie about events and people. In addition, the times encouraged reticence about such things as lesbian relatio:q.ships or mental illnesses. Consequently Bratton is reluctant to go out on any limbs or to form cond usions aboutde la Roche's relationship with CarolineClement,her cousin once removed with whom she lived almost all her adult life, or about the two nervous breakdowns that she suffered. He provides hints about her dose relationship with her father, and there are intimations (nothing more) about how this made her develop a masculine version of herself in her life HUMANITIES 297 and in her art. The nervous breakdowns remain enigmas, and there are veiled references to the strained relationsltips between de la Roche and her two adopted children. Since many of the principals are still alive, Bratton must have found himself hamstrung in articulating these issues. Thebook is organized into twenty-five or twenty-six(dependingon how you COtUlt, still I couldn't find thirty-two) sections ranging in length from one to fourteen pages. There are twenty-one illustrations, an introduction, a very useful chronology, an index, some journal entries, a transcript of a conversation, an interview with Timothy Findley as well as an appendix containing one ofhis speeches, and a bibliography. The sections follow one another more or less chronologically, although there is enough jumping forward and backward to send the readernow and again to the Chronology to find out just where and when something happened. What Bratton finally settles into is a concerted effort'to find the links between de la Roche's life and the events and characters in her novels. In this effort he is always interesting and insightful. An evolving set of attitudes emerges, beginning with the author's romantic emphasis on instinctive life...