ECW’s Biographical Guide to Canadian Novelists, and: ECW’s Biographical Guide to Canadian Poets (review)

184 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 But vision must have its victims, order its contradictions, cOlnprehensiveness its exclusions. A few pages from the end of the book we are reminded of 'the vanity of human aspirations to order'; a few from the beginning we acknowledge 'a "perennial human need, namely, the mind's desire for order" , (Harry Berger). Agreed to both. The GayJGrey Moose does not begin in search of order; it siInply happens to find a remarkable degree of order in a poetic continuity it admits to be manifold. When the glimmer of beautiful order slips into system here, I have demurred; perhaps because the book satisfies so variously a need I too find 'perenniaL' And there is no other source in Canada for a poetics as moral, and as gracious, as these essays offer. (BRIAN TREHEARNE) ECWs Biographical Guide to Canadian Novelists ECW Press. 252. $25.00 paper EeW's Biographical Guide to Canadian Poets. ECW Press. 282. $25.00 paper Biographical information on Canada's authors has too often been limited to book-jacket blurbs or short entries in anthologies or reference books. In the last few years we have seen a handful of full-length biographies Pratt , Montgomery, Layton, MacLennan, and Buckler come to mind - but there is still a dearth of material from which to develop a context of personal history (tmfashionable though that may be) for the study of our writers. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley have begun to light up the terrain, however low the wattage, with two volumes of thumbnail sketches compiled from the biographical sections of the monographs they edited in ECW's twenty-volume Canadian Writers and Their Works series published over the last ten years. The entries, covering forty-nine novelists and forty-eight poets, are arranged chronologically by date of birth (there is one replication of the Knister entry and a few reappearances of poet-novelists), and range from two to fourteen pages of text. The typical length is four pages. Since the original series concerned itself with art and artistry, rather than with the artists, the biographical introductions were often limited to such things as settings, publishing histories, chronologies, childhood education, and the like. There was no room for extended narratives, details of personal life, or an analysis of personality development. Most of the contributors to the series did their best to sum up the available information on their author, which meant the length and detail of the entries were confined to the biographical work already scattered here and there in Canadiana. The point was not to do original research, though a few contributors had to interview the authors themselves simply because information was so scarce. The word 'guide' in the title of the two HUMANITIES 185 volumes under review is probably carefully chosen for its qualifying connotations suggesting general directions and instructions rather than detailed maps. Note that the title should read 'English Canadian,' since no Quebecois writers are included, not even Gabrielle Roy, whose novels have been available in English for quite some time. These sketches, accompanied by Isaac Bickerstaff's original drawings reduced to thumbnail size, are obviously meant to fill in the gap between full-blooded biography and publisher's hype. The two volumes have obvious uses for school libraries and reference shelves in our public system. ECW Press is to be commended for taking the time and money to make these short biographies available in one place. Of course, the simple reprinting of sections of larger works automatically brings with it a variety of drawbacks. The entries, for all their wonderful variety of styles and approaches, are uneven in their coverage and goals. Take the example of the overview of Earle Birney's life. It was written in 1985 (so is now dated), and it makes scant reference to the poverty of his childhood, or to the importance of his leftist political affiliations in the 19205 and 1930s. The entry on F.R. Scott similarly makes only one passing reference to his political sympathies. The authors of these entries (and there are many like them) saved this important information for the second section of their monographs, the 'Tradition and Milieu' section...