No Other Country by Al Purdy (review)

Reviews 177 Thoreau proceeded by study (learning that the Indians were farmers and social people and not lone forest travelers, for example) and to an extent by personal experience (observing his two guides, Joe Aitteon and Joe Polis, mainly). He had begun, Sayre says, with a rather theoretical (savagist) view, in which “ ‘the Indian’served as a point of view about nature and the past,” and was an “emblematic figure.” Gradually, Thoreau learned his subject, with typical sincerity taking thousands of pages of notes; by the time he went to Minnesota in 1861, “he was intellectually beyond savagism but not yet established in any new view,” according to Sayre, and this was essentially the end of the story— although, as reported by Ellery Channing, Thoreau’s last words were “moose” and “Indians.” Sayre also examines the assumption that Thoreau had projected an actual book on Indians — an assumption which he lays mainly to Franklin Sanborn — and finds that Thoreau’s difficulties in establishing a non­ derivative point of view (specifically, in developing a good way to use his experience with Joe Polis), gave him such pause that by 1858 he had apparently set aside any projected book. We may mourn the loss or nonexistence of Thoreau’s “Indian book,” when we ought to be noticing the Indianness of the books he did write. This seems a valid, indeed unarguable point, but to this reader Sayre may occasionally push the point a bit. Walden is probably the record of a vision quest of sorts— Sayre argues carefully here, acknowledging that Thoreau did not know of the Indian vision quest— but I am not sure that the parallels drawn add significantly to our insight into Thoreau or the book. They are highly interesting speculations and analogies, though, surrounded with enough qualifications to show that Sayre is not riding a hobby horse. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University No Other Country. By A1Purdy. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. 187 pages, $10.00.) As Canadian prognosticators continue to peer through the gloom at impending disunion, works like A1 Purdy’s No Other Country will become common fare in Canada. Indeed, as the American media swing their attention to the issue of Quebec separatism (“A House Divided,” “One Nation Divisible,” etc.), works like Purdy’s may also find a receptive audi­ ence in the United States. An “anecdotal junket” across Canada according to its dustjacket, No Other Country is a collection of Saturday-supplement and Maclean’s magazine pieces written by an established Canadian poet. Too slim and fragmentary to serve as a composite portrait of Canada today, it nevertheless adds another, gentler voice to the debate over Canada’s future, with its position staked out in the almost-pleading title. Purdy offers 178 Western American Literature glimpses into the distinctive life styles of remote communities in the North­ west Territories, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Manitoba endangered by TV and creeping homogenization, admires the pull of Canada’s two great rivers, the Mackenzie and the St. Lawrence, wanders on the waters off British Columbia in a fishing boat and over the ice-choked Arctic Sea in a mammoth patrol plane, and lights down in Vancouver to sample the ambience of West Coast life, Toronto to contemplate the meaning of hockey for Canadians, and Montreal to pass on some of the gossip about its Englishspeaking literary community. In assembling such miscellanea, Purdy is consciously the nationalist. His previously unpublished essay “Bon Jour” is a direct reflection on the issue of Quebec separatism, and exhibits the qualities of sympathy and sweet reasonableness and the spirit of compromise that he believes will alone prevent the tragedy of a divided Canada. What does No Other Country offer the student of Western American literature? First, it provides an introduction to the Canadian fact today and to the characteristic Canadian nationalist in love with the vast and varied expanse of his country and the diversity of its people, and given to a knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Second, it includes a superficial essay on British Columbia’s celebrated twentieth-century Izaak Walton, Roderick Haig-Brown, and a moving, personal memoir of Malcolm Lowry, that proto­ typical questing lost soul who made Vancouver his...