Fiction

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1958 365 conceived metrical form. A certain impatience with more self-communing types of poetry would be consistent with this: thus Alexander Leggatt in "Poetry 1958": The lyre's strings are tied in knots The fiute is stuffed with plasticine The Muse has laryngitis now Whose voice had once been crisp and clean. Three other chapbooks, Scales, by Jack Winter (n.p.), Daydreams, by Dora P. Fortner (Carillon Poetry Chapbooks, pp. 20, 1957, $1.00), and Canada for Man and Other Poems, by V. B. Rhodenizer (privately printed, Wolfville, N.S., pp. 16, $.35), call for no particular comment. I am not sure whether Poems by Martin Gray (Edinburgh: Serif Books Ltd. [Toronto: Contact Press], pp. 46, $1.00) belongs in this surveyor not. Mr. Gray is an erudite poet of considerable expertise, with a well-modulated meditative style, though the trick of ending a sentence oracularly in the middle of a line is somewhat overdone. Some of the poems are in oddly old-fashioned idioms, like the Tennysonian "Telemachus " and "Pastoral Conversation A.D. 33," which discusses the Crucifixion. In some of the poems the style is so clear and correct that the limitations of the poet's mind become visible, as in the poems on Venice and Port Royal and the Spenglerian "Speculation," where rellection has little to add to description. I like best the drifting descriptive poems, "Belle Isle," "Across the Continent," and "Caribbean," with their gentle stanzas spaced out like the whorls of a canoe-paddle. The poet also has a special affection for insects that gives unusual intensity to "Notes on Ants," and, if one may say so, a sharp bite to "Flea." [NOTE: The Collected Poems of E. 1. Pratt, second edition, edited with an introduction by the present writer (Macmillan, pp. xx, 395, $5.00), will be reviewed in a future issue by Dr. F. W. Watt.] FICTION Claude T. Bissell In The American Novel and Its Tradition, Richard Chase argues that it is the predominance of the romance that gives to the American novel its distinctive character, and differentiates it from the basic English tradition. By "romance" he does not mean a sentimentalized account of history that has inspired many best-sellers, but rather a bold and frankly unrealistic exploration of humau values through the medium of narrative 366 FICTION and character. He is thinking of Hawthorne and Melville, not of Margaret Mitchell and Kenneth Roberts. This is the tradition that has given American fiction its power and its significance. It has brought, so Richard Chase contends, a quality of intellectual energy, "a certain intrepid and penetrating dialectic of action and meaning, a radical skepticism about ultimate questions." The tradition of the romance has been strong in Canadian literature; indeed, it has been the most persistent and, quantitatively at least, the most important; but this is a very different kind of romance from the kind to which Chase refers. It is romance that has nothing in common with Melville, or Faulkner. Canadian novelists have been immune to the more extravagant and daring influences from the south. One might distinguish between the American romance emphasized by Chase and the typical Canadian romance in this way: the former is radical, dealing with unusual people and unusual situations, and written in a mood of inquiry and questioning; the typical Canadian romance, on the other hand, is conservative; it deals with familiar people in familiar situations, and moves placidly towards a mood of acceptance and reconciliation. For the latter kind of novel, marriage is the great symbolic act of reconciliation , and all of the four Canadian novels of the year that we might describe as romances conclude with a marriage or with an impending marriage. The typical method of creating a feeling of the familiar in these novels is to make use of historical events and figures and to relate them to a private world of courtship and marriage. The formula is to make history cosy and intimate by linking it to the domestic hearth and the marriage bed. In Mrs. E. M. Granger Bennett's A Straw in the Wind (Ryerson, pp. vi, 281, $3.95), the historical material dominates . This novel...