A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet by Zailig Pollock (review)

236 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 fiction, tell stories.... We experience an event, but that event acquires meaning, becomes part of our life story, only when we tell it to someone or write it down.' This attitude towards story sounds remarkably like that of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the main narrator of Findley's Famous Last Words - and like the attitude of one Timothy Findley. Not surprisingly , then, the narrative strategy of Roberts's book - it is anecdotal, episodic, an aggregation of stories, some connected, some fragmentary resembles the narrative strategy of much of Findley's work. (As an aside here, let me add that I consider this approach inherently honest: one suspects that those biographies that present themselves as seamless, selfcontained , and all-encompassing narratives falsify their subjects more than deliberately incomplete and fragmentary ones.) Findley uses this technique most prominently in The Wars, but it also figures in most of his other work, including his latest novel, The Piano Man's Daughter. Just as the reader finds her- or himself occupying the still-warm seat of the researcher/narrator of The Wars, trying to assemble from the fragments of photographs, letters, interviews, and clippings an imaginative whole, a unified understanding of Robert Ross - the man, his action, his age - so the biographer's task is to make sense of the man and his work. Like Findley's narrator, Roberts conscripts her reader to share in the task of assembling a coherent whole from a series of seemingly disparate stories. To a large extent it works: one has the sense of a variegated tapestry, though one has to weave it for oneself. In it, dominant patterns emerge: Findley's abhorrence of fascism in all its guises; his respect for the insights granted those we call 'insane'; his reverence for the natural world, for love, for imagination. Roberts quotes Alberto Manguel, who comments that Findley'S characters are'obsessed with collecting whatever evidence about themselves is available'; she goes on to point out that '[t]he reader must then join the characters' in this piecing together of fragmentary evidence, this quest for understanding. These are not fragments shored against their ruin, however : rather, in Roberts's biography the sense is of reader, biographer, author, narrator, and character all somehow connected, all groping towards some measure of light. (DAVID INGHAM) Zailig Pollock. A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet University of Toronto Press. xii, 324. $25.95 This work marks an important milestone in Klein studies. It represents the completion of the period of research initiated by the 1974 Symposium on Klein organized by Professor Seymour Mayne at the University of Ottawa shortly after Klein's death. The Klein Research and Publication Committee which resulted undertook the task of finding all the 'tangible' HUMANmES 237 data of the poet's life and of collating, annotating, and organizing all of his published and unpublished work. Professor Pollock, who has chaired the Klein Committee since the early 1980s and whose dedication ensured its success, now brings to the task of interpreting Klein's work an impressive familiarity with the Klein material and an interesting thesis. Like earlier critics trying to explain the mystery of Klein's premature silence, Pollock is puzzled by the enigma of Klein's total withdrawal from literature and public life when he was only forty-five. What made the poet suddenly stop writing, and halt his many other 'careers' - law, journalism and editing, public relations for Seagram's, and speechwriting for Samuel Bronfman - when he was at the height of his powers? Pollock believes he has the answer. His aim is to look for the 'one' formula that will explain this enigma. He is convinced that at the core of Klein's poetry and fiction, and even in much of Klein's political and journalistic polemic, there is a recurring motif which he calls 'the story of the poet' - hence the subtitle of his book. The 'story of the poet' Klein repeats in different forms as his definition of himself changes. This motif, which he defines as 'a vision of the One in the Many,' Pollock believes underlies Klein's work. Klein wanted, above all, to find some reassurance that...