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Toronto: A Literary Guide by Greg Gatenby (review)
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 71, Number 1, Winter 2001/02
- pp. 294-295
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
294 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 helpful as a way to approach A Bird in the House. Because this conference has always accepted only a limited number of participants, over the years the volumes in this series have been good ones, and some have been outstanding. If this present collection is not as strong as the best in the series, it remains valuable for the fresh insights it does offer, and it contains several essays worth having. (RUSSELL MORTON BROWN) Greg Gatenby. Toronto: A Literary Guide McArthur and Company 1999. xviii, 622. $19.95 For all its pretensions to imperial status, Toronto has always had a strained relationship with its own physical and cultural landscape. In 1873 the Reverend Henry Scadding took his readers for a series of imaginary walks along the principal streets of the city, reminiscing about a social and cultural life which he feared was being lost to the powerful forces of Victorian progress. Written with a sense of grace and fine social nuance, Toronto of Old is rich in insight and remains a thoroughly fascinating study of the cultural geography of the city. Almost a century later Eric Arthur took up the same theme. He drew his title, Toronto, No Mean City, from St Paul in order to provoke the burghers of this good town to rescue what remained of its truly exceptional architectural heritage. More recently, William Denby and Bill Kilborn have tried to reclaim the city=s cultural past through old photographs and the reminiscences of some of the more famous of its citizens and visitors. Toronto: A Literary Guide is also an exercise in cultural memory. It is an ambitious and intriguing book, even if it is somewhat narrow in its scope and execution. In essence, the book is a thick and well-illustrated compendium of the lives of hundreds of literary figures layered upon the street grid of the old City of Toronto. One watches in awe as the author leads us through some sixty neighbourhoods, pointing out who lived in which house and what they were writing at the time. The book includes the famous and those now forgotten B the home born, the new arrival, and the visitor B and reaches across time and genre (although poetry and prose fiction are favoured over history and criticism). Older literary haunts, such as the North American Hotel, are remembered as well as those upper flats where some impoverished poet decamped just long enough to stay ahead of the hounds of the creditors. For these writers, having three addresses clearly did not inspire confidence. Such a book obviously appeals to one=s curiosity and domestic ego, for I imagine most of us find a certain glory by association when we learn that someone who was passably famous lived just two streets over and one block down. But the real charm of this guide is to be found in the cultural HUMANITIES 295 capital the author brings to the text. Greg Gatenby, who has been the artistic director of the International Festival of Authors for the last twenty-five years, has made his life=s work by drawing connections between writers and place. He is a fine gossip who clearly loves the fabric of the city and a good story, so as we walk along we pick up fascinating details about the incredible traffic in literary figures that has moved through the city for over a hundred and fifty years. In his hands Toronto becomes an important place; like Scadding and Arthur, Gatenby creates a cultural landscape where few believed one had existed. For all the pleasure it gives, however, the book has some very apparent drawbacks. The guide is cumbersome to carry and its small print makes it difficult to read in the open air. Present addresses are not disclosed, so one circles upper Admiral Road without ever being alerted to the closeness of Her Presence. The book is also curiously silent on some important literary matters. There is very little here about the class and ethnic development of the neighbourhoods themselves and one needs to supplement the guide with James Lemon=s history of the city in order to parse out what living...