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HUMANITIES 425 something which had happened but was so incredible that a writer had got to make it credible - historians couldn't': Hughes.) Mr Thomas's introduction to the work of Hughes is so good and so well written that we can hope that when the trilogy is completed he will embark on a larger study. (NORMAN J. ENDICOTT) John Nause, editor, Inscape, Symposium Issue: the Grove Edition, 1974. Ottawa, University of Ottawa, xiii, 110, $4.80 This publication brings together most of the papers delivered at the Grove Symposium at the University of Ottawa in May 1973. Like all such gatherings, it is inevitably a mixed bag; discriminations need to be made, but it proves of interest in providing a spectrum of academic approaches to the man who complained in his autobiography, In Search of Myself, of 'the utterly hopeless ineptitude prevailing in what is commonly called literary criticism in Canada.' If these essays are representative , the situation seems to have improved - slightly. As always the schematizers are prominent. Ronald Sutherland, in 'What Was Frederick Philip Grove?' proves to his own satisfaction, by reference to a standard Handbook to Literature, that Grove was a naturalist, not a realist or a romanticist, but succeeds only in casting doubt upon the usefulness of such pigeon-holing. The critic tries to lasso Grove with terminology, but the novelist eludes him. Similarly, Lorraine McMullen, in 'Women in Grove's Novels' (who, by the way, would ever think of writing a paper on, say, 'Men in Margaret Laurence's Novels'?), finds that 'the most obvious stereotypes are the archetypal Earth Mother and femme fatale.' She proceeds to force Grove's female characters into these crassly inadequate categories and seems sublimely unaware that a successful carrying-through of the exercise would be fatal to Grove's claims as a serious novelist. Fortunately, the results are unlikely to influence anyone; this is, I fear, a classic example of what literary criticism should not be doing. Then there are the scholarly researchers. Peter Noel-Bentley, Birk Sproxton, and Anthony W. Riley all offer accounts of unpublished or unavailable materials. These prove decidedly useful to anyone concerned with the totality of Grove's work. It is curious, however, that with the partial exception of Sproxton, none of these commentators has much to say about the value of the writings they discuss. For the most part their papers are descriptive in character; we are left to draw our own conclusions (at second-hand) about the quality of the works and their ultimate relevance to Grove's literary achievement. For the rest, Wilfred Eggleston contributes a fascinating personal 426 LETTERS IN CANADA memoir of Grove and Stanley McMullin discusses the relation between evolution and revolution in Grove's thought with shrewdness and insight . But it is Louis Dudek, as his title 'The Literary Significance of Grove's Search' suggests, who penetrates to the heart of the matter and provides literary criticism in the best sense of the term. The first seven pages of his essay - until he gets sidetracked by psychology and discussion of the (wholly speculative) homosexual element in Grove - represent easily the finest literary-critical account of Grove that has yet appeared. (It is most unfortunate that Rudy Wiebe's 'A Novelist Looks at Grove,' which proved the high point of the Ottawa conference, could not be published in this volume.) An unequal gathering, then, and one that is rather carelessly edited. We have all experienced the gremlins who interfere between typescript and print, but no fewer than eight of the proper names in Grove's novels are either misspelt or inconsistently spelt here. And no editor should have passed the sentence, 'Unlike Abe, Sam's crop never matures.' One welcomes the publication of this collection, but it could and should have been better. (w.J. KEITH) Desmond Pacey, editor, The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976, xxx, 584, $25.00 There is an inherent romantic bias in our critical treatment of EnglishCanadian literature; however at odds our conclusions about works and writers, most of us tend to approach them as if the artist who created them were the only important focal point...

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