Timothy Findley: Stories from a Life by Carol Roberts (review)

HUMANITIES 235 ing of an intellectual elite, he would have seen a democratizing of the student body and professoriat; where he had wanted rigorous curricular requirements, he would have found increased elective choice (a system he deplored); and, where he had wished to encourage a methodology based on close reading within historical and biographical frameworks, he would have witnessed, at least in the United States, the ascent of New Criticism as the norm for academic criticism and instruction. Perhaps E.K. Brown can be seen after all as representative, not of a culture but of a generation of scholars, a generation caught between the North American life of privilege and apparent homogeneity at the beginning of this century and that more various one we experience at its close. (DONNA BENNETT) Carol Roberts. Timothy Findley: Stories from a Life ECW Press. 135. $14.95 Carol Roberts's Timothy Findley is a recent and worthy addition to ECW'S Canadian Biography series. Like other works in the series, it sheds light on the literary output of its central figure via an examination of the details of that figure'S life, and its relative avoidance of the considerable body of scholarly writing on Findley is consistent with its being aimed primarily at an undergraduate audience. This accessibility, however, does not preclude its usefulness to serious scholars: those who believe (as I do) that an author's life can often be relevant to the critical examination of his or her work will find the book a worthwhile complement to scholarly opinion. Nor is Roberts unaware of that scholarship: her Timothy Findley: An Annotated Bibliography, with Lynne Macdonald, remains an indispensable tool. Drawing on a wide variety of sources both critical and personal (Findley and his companion, William Whitehead, were both characteristically generous), Roberts not only produces a biography notable for its intimacy and vitality; she also recounts stories about Findley that illuminate stories by Findley. Skilfully combining details of his experience that find their way into his fiction (such as the maids with whom he spent so much time as a child, and who emerge as pivotal figures in many of the stories) with Findley's own view of his creative process, she also provides a digest of scholarly response to Findley'S work and adds her own cogent and sound readings of the larger concerns of Findley's major works. As befits a biography of a somewhat postmodern writer (Findley dislikes the term, feeling that critics' preoccupation with theory leads them to ignore or distort what his books are really about), Roberts's book begins with a passage of textual self-awareness: 'Biographers, like writers of 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...