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HUMANITIES 497 view, is also the most fraught with traps for the unsuspecting scholar. This is the chapter entitled 'An Artist's View of Canadian Artists.' What raises doubts here is the failure to footnote long quotations of remarks made byJackson to Firestone - verbatim transcriptions? paraphrasesfrom memory? - as to date and place of conversation. For the general reader Firestone's apparatus is more than sufficient, consisting of a five-page bibliography, along with some 245 consecutively numbered notes, as distinguished from actual footnotes of an explanatory rather than citational nature. There is also an appendix listing 'Works by A.Y. Jackson Mentioned in the Text.' A more thorough editing job would have eliminated some grammatical and spelling mistakes, as well as unconscious repetitions of certain favourite phrases and pieces of information. Unforgivably, no index is provided. Of more enduring merit than 'memoirs' by admirers are the rare, intimate insights that collections ofan artist's letters, diaries, and sketches - 'notes: if you will, from himself to the world - offer the student of our yet unannotated pictorial heritage, works such as the books from Penumbra Press on J.E.H. and Thoreau MacDonald. (ROBERT STACEY) Barker Fairley. Barker Fairley Portraits. Edited by Gary Michael Dault Methuen. 107, 50 colour plates. $35.00 So personal a book demands a personal notice. Barker Fairley can write and speak with affection and forthrightness, without embarrassment to himself or others, and so I'll try the same and see if he has taught me that admirable knack. There is no self-portraitin this collection of fifty portraits - oranywhere else: the closest he has come to an autobiography is what he writes about his sitters on the pages faCing the 'heads.' Those who know him will recall that he can on occasion tell a good story, but he is sparing of anecdote and reminiscence. Uninterested in defining his own personality, he has always remained alert to personality in others as seen from his own definite point of view. This definite point of view is his only autobiography . Did the same man paint the portraits as wrote the books? The bibliography appended to this collection reminds the reader that Barker Fairley is a Germanist of considerable eminence. One must wonder whether his taking up painting seriously in middle life (about fifty years ago) was done by way of contrast or complement to his scholarly and critical work. Complement, I should judge. The style of both is very plain but individual, inventive, elegant. It may seem simplicity itself to quote a passage of Goethe or Heine only in German and to supply in the context so much of its meaning that the reader who knows and the reader who 498 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 doesn't know the language will be equally well served. Simple? Yes, but who else can do it? So too with the restricted palette, the flat background colour, the economy of means in the portraits: how immediately the viewer is in the picture. In his excellent introduction Gary Dault describes what it is like to sit for Barker Fairley. Most of his portraits are done in a single session, the two hours before noon. The style of painting, as of writing, is one of rapid execution, new beginnings. Sometimes he goesback to a portrait and adds something, and just occasionally he scrapes the whole thing off, but nothing is reworked and, emphatically, nothing is ever overdone. He has lived into the age of overkill, with its attendant monstrous excesses, which he opposes on moral, political, and stylistic grounds. So too with the writings - carefully written as they are, they are always rapid, concise, and full of new beginnings: he has never driven anything into the ground. I don't wish to imply by this that he is incapable of sustaining an argument: his book on Doughty and both his books on Goethe prove the contrary; but he dearly loves new beginnings - witness the essays on Faust, the chapters in the Heine and Raabe books, the three pieces on Nietzsche. Writing on Nietzsche in the Queen's Quarterly (1930), he observes that 'the briefer forms of literature are usually the more strenuous and it is notoriously...

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