Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter by Laura Salverson (review)

450 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 Laura Salverson. Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter Edited by K.P. Stich University of Toronto Press. xvii 415. $30.00, $15.00 paper This latest appearance of Salverson's autobiography brings into print again a book that has not yet attracted the respect it deserves. Although it won a Governor General's Award in 19}9, what little critical attention Salverson has received has largely concentrated on her first novel, The Viking Heart (192}). An autobiography which covers her life only to 192} might seem to have been premature. Yet, as it begins in the 18g0S and supplies a wealth of detail about the practicalities of life in that period, its limitation seems wise, the more so as it was written to explain the background, personal and historical, of The Viking Heart. The overall value of these 'confessions' lies in the explanation of the author's creed as a writer as well as the description of the everyday lives of the immigrant working class at the turn of the century. As much the autobiography of a writer as of an immigrant's daughter, Salverson's book confesses her compulsion to affirm the Significance of the Icelandic contribution to Canada and to protect their imported cultural traditions from assimilationist pressures. Her early attraction to literature is linked with the Norse sagas, which seem to have had an excessively romantic influence on her work. The expression of her antipathy towards religiOUS institutions and her passionate resentment of the indifferent divinity she styled 'the dark weaver' elaborate the philosophical concepts expressed so desperately in her novels. Her proud allegiance to Scandinavian culture explains her efforts to protect and promote it in Canadian literature. Poverty formed many of Salverson's opinions. Its consequences for her family - the deaths of her brothers, the broken health of her parents, her own limited opportunities - are bitterly presented in this autobiography, which often seems less a recollection of small successes than a sorrowful account of subsistence hard won from an unfavourable destiny. Her escapist literary fantasies and her dogged persistence to better herself were surely reactions to poverty. In part an apology for her parents' failures, the book notes the false promises of Canadian immigration agents which had lured many Icelanders to drudgery in the New World. Salverson assails social and political institutions for their hypocrisy, yet her natural self-confidence and optimism constantly compete with this cynicism. At times with grim detail, but more often with light-hearted nostalgia, she recollects the physical scenery of her life, from the muddy rounds of the swill-wagon in Winnipeg to the tragedies of her aunt's private hospital in Duluth. As a faSCinating memory-bank of the basic conditions of life at this time, informed by her awareness of social inequalities and supported by her belief in the superior civilizing HUMANITIES 451 influences of Norse culture upon a rude and motley population, this book goes far beyond being merely a prairie version of Anne of Green Gables. Despite an introduction that tells us little more than is in the text, which itselfis riddled with misprints, this new edition will surely stimulate more interest in awriter whose Canadian novels certainly repay attention. (TERRENCE L. CRAIG) David Staines, editor. The Callaghan Symposium Reappraisals: Canadian Writers University of Ottawa Press. 124· $7.50 paper For a summary of this book as a 'reappraisal' it is hard to beat the chairman's remarks bringing to an end the final panel discussion of the 1980 Callaghan Symposium at the University of Ottawa: 'Morley Callaghan has been praised for his later work, he has been pntised for his early work, he has been praised for his short stories, and he has, in effect, been damned for the whole lot.' There is not a great deal that is new in the symposium, but the attempt to approach this much praised and much condemned Canadian fiction writer from 'untried perspectives' is more rewarding. The first of these, if not entirely 'untried: aims to see Callaghan's fiction afresh against the background of his early career as a journalist, and it is attempted with great charm and vividness by another 1920S journalist...