Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature by Margaret Atwood (review)

HUMANITIES 335 been conditioned by the combative language and outlook of competition and of competitions. In these pages, Aide comes across as a generous colleague, writing admiringly about such fellow Canadian artists as Greta Kraus, Jane Coop, and Anton Kuerti. He knew Glenn Gould and clearly admired, even idolized , him. Both of them studied with the same teacher, Alberto Guerrero. In his heartfelt memoir of his teacher, Aide takes spirited issue with Gould and his biographers who have been content to assign a very minor role in Gould's artistic development to Guerrero. The idea that Gould was ·self- .taught is an attractive myth: Aide shows how basic aspects of Gould's 'technique and repertoire are clearly the result of his study with Guerrero. Perhaps the most moving sections in this memoir involve the more personal relationships. There is, first of all, the accoW1t of his painful and sometimes explosive attempts to come to terms with the taciturn personality of his father, a survivor of Dieppe. His relationship to the poet Margaret Avison, who first inspiredhim to write poetry, leads to a rumination about the sometimes conflicting demands of art and religion. It is this section which makes one wish for a little more expansion. His references to organized religion are often troubled, and his feelings undergo a severe strain when, during the funeral of a student who has died of AIDS, and whom he had helped care for, there arejudgrnental and uncharitable words offered by Christian friends of the dead man's family. Yet Aide has remained a Christian throughout his life. Clearly he has more to say about the sometimes conflicting demands made by his religious beliefs and rus active intellectual life. Finally, the most powerful section in the book describes his struggles in dealing with his wife's chronic depression - a disease which has sometimes plagued the author as well. His aCCOlll1t is harrowing, painful, unsparing, and deeply moving. ' William Aide comes across as very much a child of the 19305: he is practical, impatient with the excesses and reforming zeal of the 19605. He seems almost apolitical. Yet the voice we hearis intensely engaged: with art and other artists, with problems of teaching, with questions of conscience and identity. It is sometimes querulous, occasionally prey to literary convolution, but generous and distinctive. Oberon has done an important service in making this voice available. (BRUCE VOGT) . Margaret Atwood. Strange Things: The Malevolent North ,in Canadian Literature Clarendon Press 1995. viii, 126. $27.50 cloth, $17.95 paper Margaret Atwood delivered the Clarendon Lectures in English Literature in 1991; the book contains the four lectures 'as given' with supplementary materialinfootnotes. Itis precededby a six-page introduction and followed 336 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 by a bibliography and an index. The lecture titles - 'Concerning Franklin and His Gallant Crew,' LThe Grey Owl Syndrome,' 'Eyes of Blood, Heart of Ice: The Wendigo/ and 'Linoleum Caves' - are a fairly good guide to the content as long as one knows that Grey Owl was an Englishman posing as Native (his syndrome is now usually referred to as 'white wannabeeism'). 'Linoleum Caves' comes from Alice Munro's comment that people's lives are 'dult simple, amazing and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum'; the lecture deals with how women have 'adapted the imagery and mystique of the North ... to their own complex and devious purposes.' The lectures make it clear how nearly irresistible it is for colonials visiting England to play the colonial. (Compare the tone in these lectures to that of the lectures Atwood delivered to an American audience at Harvard; see her Second Words.) Atwood herself is quite conscious of this; in her introduction she quotes a Canadian student who asked whether she should be talking about bears and cannibalism and the frozen North. After all (and these are my thoughts) surely thls simply panders to what survives in the British (and it is quite a lot, I suspect) of the sense that Canadians are a rough-hewn folk struggling to survive in a snow- and bear-covered landscape . Her defence is that an account of literary uses of Canadian urban life would be boring to her audience. Perhaps there...