The Antigonish Review

A Small Magazine with an International Reputation

TAR reaches readers throughout Canada and the United States, as well as in countries like Germany, Korea, France, Saudi Arabia, England, and the Netherlands. Every year the journal receives more than a thousand submissions from as far away as Afghanistan, the Bahamas, Australia/New Zealand, India, Hawaii, and Brazil.

 

What Makes TAR Special

TAR has always prided itself on offering an eclectic array of poetry and prose by emerging and established writers, as well as extensive book reviews and the occasional critical essay.

TAR was also one of the first English-language literary journals in Canada to publish translations of French-Canadian poets. This tradition has expanded to include translations by international award-winning poets such as Estonian Arved Viirlaid and Brazilian Edilberto Coutinho.

Each cover includes pieces by emerging and prominent artists. TAR won 2003 Canadian Magazine Publishers Award for Best Cover Art among Literary Magazines.

 

A Destination for Literary Excellence

TAR has a long reputation for attracting internationally recognized, award-winning writers. It has published the work of luminaries like Milton Acorn, Annie Dillard, Louis Dudek, Jane Jacobs, Marshall McLuhan, Thomas Merton, and Alden Nowlan.

Some of the many major Canadian voices that have appeared in its pages include Marshall McLuhan, John Thompson, Margaret Atwood, Alistair MacLeod, David Adams Richards, Irving Layton, Carol Shields, Sheldon Currie, Lorna Crozier, Michael Crummey, Lynn Coady, Rohinton Mistry, Jan Zwicky, Stephanie Bolster, Sheree Fitch, Johanna Skibsrud, George Elliott Clarke, Don McKay, Brian Bartlett, Kathleen Winter, Alexander MacLeod, Wayne Johnston, Leo McKay Jr. and Anne Simpson.

 

Subscription information

1 year digital subscription – $30.00, 2 years $45.00.

1 year print subscription - $75.00, 2 years $140.00.

Back Issues, print  - $20.00, digital if available, $10.00.

 

The Antigonish Review Editorial Group

Editor: Doug Smith

Associate Poetry Editors: Anne Simpson, Janette Fecteau, David Hickey

Associate Fiction Editors: Elizabeth Blanchard, Ernestine Lahey

Book Reviews Editor: Leo Furey

Administrative Assistant: Navneet Kaur 

We ask for first publication rights, after which Copyright returns to the author. 

 

Editorial Office

PO Box 5000, StFX University

Antigonish, NS

B2G 2W5
Email: TAR@stfx.ca

 

 

Poetry	$5.00 per page to a maximum of $25.00 plus two copies (one digital and one print)
Fiction	$50.00 plus two copies (one digital and one print)
Non-Fiction / Essays	$50.00 plus two copies (one digital and one print)
Translation	same as for poetry/fiction payments
Cover Art	$100.00 plus two copies (one digital and one print)

 

 

 

The quality of the writing is the chief criterion. We also consider it our mandate to encourage Atlantic Canadians and Canadian writers - although excellent writing can come from anywhere. We also welcome new and young writers.

Long pieces may displace several shorter ones, so the longer the piece the higher its quality should be as there is less chance we will read it through and less chance we will respond with a critique.

Most pieces that meet our minimum standard are read by at least 2 readers, and all works published are read and approved by at least 2 readers and a senior editor. Because of this, we may be a bit slow in responding, but we try to answer authors within 2-3 months. We sometimes suggest revisions, but if a writer sends back a revised version we feel no obligation to publish it; it has to compete with the new stories it arrives with.

We also respond to rejected submissions with suggestions when we can, particularly if we are asked to do so and particularly with new or young writers, and the closer the writer is to us geographically, Canadian, American, or other, the more trouble we take.

Please be patient with us. We read everything, sometimes four times, and we have high quality help who get no pay. So if our comments sometimes seem cryptic, enigmatic, or even on the edge of something even worse, don't get cross at us - maybe we're tired or grumpy. But just the same we love to get your stuff.

PLEASE NOTE we do not accept submissions which have been previously published in any format.

 

1. Dashes: All dashes should be "en dashes," like this – with space before and after the dash.

2. Ellipses: Use space before and after, like this ... but, generally, no ellipses are needed at the beginning and end of a direct quote (unless required to avoid misrepresentation).

3. Line indents: Consistency within each piece is always preferred.

4. Paragraph indents: Entire blocks of text may be indented for a purpose (e.g., to display a letter within a piece of fiction or a long quotation within a review). Consistency of indent size is preferred for all pieces.

5. Single or double quotation marks: The American style is for double as the first order, and then single within double. The British style is the reverse. Canadian style accommodates either preference (but tends toward the American style). For TAR, either is acceptable but within a piece "consistency" is desired (not 'mixed' quotation order).

6. Italics is preferred for book titles even if the author uses quotation marks.

7. Curly rather than straight quotation marks and apostrophes are preferred in all cases.

8. Spelling choices: Consistency with American or British within a piece, but flexibility among pieces is desired. If mixed within a piece, choose the most predominant usage (e.g., Webster, Oxford, or Canadian Oxford). If there is no obvious spelling style in a piece, use Canadian Oxford as the dictionary of reference. Canadian spelling is the preference of the TAR editorial staff.

 

Poetry

1. TAR is open to poetry on any subject written from any point of view and in any form. However, writers should expect their work to be considered within the full context of old and new poetry in English and other languages.

2. The amount of space TAR can devote to any one writer is usually limited to 5-6 pages at a maximum.

3. No more than 6-8 poems should be submitted at any one time. A preferable submission would be from 3-4 poems. Submitting more than 8 tends to conceal the merits of individual poems. The poet should also know, fairly clearly, what is or is not good work and send only that.

4. Poets should wait for response to a submission before submitting again.

PLEASE NOTE we do not accept submissions which have been previously published in any format.

 

Fiction

1. Submission should be typed, double spaced, author's last name on each page, and can range in length from 500 to 3,000 words. Any submissions longer than 3,000 words are not likely to be accepted.

2. No more than 1 story should be sent at any one time. Writers should wait for a response before submitting again.

3. The Antigonish Review prefers not to consider fiction that has been submitted elsewhere (multiple submissions).

4. Normally we do not publish sections of novels and we do not publish plays or scripts.

5. We attempt to respond within two to four months.

PLEASE NOTE we do not accept submissions which have been previously published in any format.

 

Translation

1. TAR is open to English-language translations on any subject, written from any point of view in any form. Be sure to indicate the source language in your submission (ie. French to English, German to English, Spanish to English, etc.).

2. For prose submissions, up to a maximum of 2500 words.

3. For poetry submissions, 2-3 poems (or 3-4 pages of poetry) maximum.

4. Please include a brief bio of the author as well as the translator(s) - up to 100 words, maximum, for each.

5. Please provide proof of permission from the author and/or literary estate, as well as a copy of the source text.

6. Translators should wait for a response to a submission before submitting again.

PLEASE NOTE we do not accept translation submissions that have been previously published in any format.

 

Non-Fiction / Essays

Travel sketches, personal memoirs, writing about sports, culture, history, or other essays which fall under the general rubric of creative non-fiction, are welcome. Accompanying photographs may be considered.

Serious scholarly works, interviews with Canadian literati, and the like will be considered from time to time, but those too narrow in scope or written in specialized jargon are better placed in a targeted academic, refereed, or professional journal.

Most of the essays we publish run from 1000 to 4000 words.

We do not accept submissions which have been previously published in any format.

Please submit only one essay at a time.

 

Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville- Westedited by Mitchell A. Leaska & John Phillips, Methuen, 303 pp. 1989.

 

 There is no end, but addition: the trailing
 Consequence of further days and hours,
 While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
 Years of living among the breakage
 Of what was believed in as the most reliable -
 And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

             T.S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages"

The lives of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West certainly demonstrate Eliot's observation elsewhere that our beginnings never know our endings. Vita tragically went to a painful death from which Harold Nicolson, her husband, never recovered. Nigel Nicolson, her son, wrote after his father's death in 1968, "He was never the same again. He really died with her. Not even her most famous creation, her gardens, survived.

 They cannot break the heart, as friend
 Or love may split our trust for ever.
 We never asked them to pretend:
 Death is a clean sufficient end
 For flower, friend or lover.

Vita's observation was an accurate one. In 1967, Sissinghurst passed into the ownership of the National Trust, and as Victoria Glendinning points out in her excellent biography of Vita, "its future was secure . . . though it 'can never be the same."' Violet's death came from starvation as the culmination of illness on I March 1972. Having survived Vita by ten years, her end too was tragic. Philippe jullian, her biographer in The Other Woman: A Life of Violet Trefusis, summarizes it in his closing chapter, ironically entitled after one- of Vita's novels, All Passion Spent.

 

 The last two months of her life were cruel,
 and the immense villa (I'Ombrellino in
 Florence) surrounded by statues, empty
 fountains, and dead flowers was indeed
 the perfect setting for the death agony of
 someone who had never liked doing things
 halfway.

Vita's ashes are in a "small pink marble sarcophagus that once held her two ink-wells, from Long Barn days," Glendinning tells us, secure "in the Sackville family crypt at Withyham with her ancestors." jullian records that Violet's last wishes for a resting place shout louder.

 Most of her ashes are buried close to her
 parents' tomb in the Protestant cemetery
 near Florence; the remainder have been
 sealed in the ancient ruins near the
 Monk's Refectory below the tower at
 St. Loup (in France).  A marker indicates
 the spot: 'Violet Trefusis 1894-1972,
 Anglaise de naissance, Fran@aise de coeur.'

Her chosen epitaph is a poignant and telling one: "She Withdrew.
But that was not the end of either woman. Or of their love affair. As Robert Anderson so wisely wrote in I Never Sang For My Father, death may end a life but not a relationship.
Violet Trefusis first became familiar to many of us when Nigel Nicolson published his fascinating account of his parents' marriage,Portrait of a Marriage, in 1973. Violet was the antagonist. In Nicolson's mother's (now famous) canvas bag, found locked in the corner of her tower at Sissinghurst, was an autobiography written when Vita was twenty-eight. "It was an autobiography . . . a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love which had possessed her, a love for another woman, Violet Tiefusis." Afraid that the contents of that Gladstone bag might be destroyed by his father or "it him," Nicolson waited four years after the death of his father before risking publication.

 The simplicity of it, its candour,
 the extraordinary sequence of events
 which it unfolded, her implicit plea
 for forgiveness and compassion, for
 the strength to resist further
 temptation, stirred me deeply. I had
 long known the barest outlines of the
 story (but not from her) and here was
 every detail of it, written with
 scarcely an erasure or correction at
 a moment when the wound was still
 fresh and painful. . . . Now I think
 that I should have shown it to him
 when the agony of her loss had been
 transmuted into numb acceptance of
 it.  He might well have agreed with
 me that this was a document unique in
 the vast literature of love, and among
 the most moving pieces that she ever
 wrote; that far from tarnishing the
 memory of her, it burnished it; and
 that one day, perhaps, it should be
 published.

The book was an immediate and runaway success. It was not just the shock of this extraordinary marriage and its troubled patches with Violet but the writing itself which made it such an interesting read.

 Although her narrative began uncertainly
 with a rambling account of her
 childhood, when she came to the heart
 of her problem it grew in power and
 intensity, sharpened by a novelist's
 instinctive variation of mood and speed,
 almost as if it were not her own
 experience that she was describing but
 another's.

Life does imitate, but rarely superadds, art.

 Although V. Sackville-West left no
 instructions about her autobiography,
 and as far as I know had never shown it
 to anybody, I believe that she wrote it
 with eventual publication in mind. It
 assumed an audience.  She knew that I
 would find it after her death, but did
 not destroy it.  She wrote it as a
 conscious work of art, in such a way that
 it would be intelligible to an outsider,
 and her use of pseudonyms is itself an
 indication that she expected, even hoped,
 that other eyes might one day read it....
 There are passages in the manuscript which
 suggest that the writing of it was for her
 much more than an act of catharsis. She
 refers to possible readers' of it. She
 believes that 'the psychology of people
 like myself will be a matter of interest'
 when hypocrisy gives p lace to 'a spirit
 of candour which one hopes will spread
 with the rogress of the world.'

Fifty years after the fact, Nicolson felt that the time had come.

The letters of these two fascinating women would be supplementary documentation to their story. And that is the justification for this invasion of such a private matter. The publication of Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West is meant to be both an elaboration of theme and a celebration of a unique relationship.

The editors are formidable collaborators. Mitchell A. Leaska, who already has co-edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, has this time teamed up with John Phillips. Leaska, with a solid literary background, is on the faculty of New York University. Phillips comes to this project from a more personal level. Having completed an M.A. in English Literature at Duke University, he arrived in Florence in 1960. He fell in love with "old stones," he recounts, and he eventually met Violet Trefusis, and shared a taste in antiques and houses; their friendship lasted until her death when he became her literary executor and co-authored Violet Trefusis, A Biography.

It is from Phillips's biography that we first saw collected together Vita's mound of "Violetiana" which was amongst the Sissinghurst Castle papers. Phillips included there 53 letters, most in full, written from 1910 to 1921.

 But the great mass of the letters are
 those written during the years of the
 "grand passion," from 1918-1921: more
 than five hundred, ranging from those
 scribbled in pencil on scraps,
 frequently impossible to decipher, to
 those on fine paper with splendid
 letterheads. The latter are often more
 brilliant, witty, and very beautiful;
 they are I believe in the tradition of
 the best English letterwriters. Above
 all, the reader feels keenly the
 sincerity and intensity of Violet's
 passion for Vita, an all-consuming
 passion which all but destroyed her.
 In a sense, it did destroy her: the
 youthful Violet whose idealism burned
 with a pure bright flame was transformed
 into a femme de lettres and femme du
 monde, who would embrace and conquer
 - supreme irony - the society which she
 had thought to reject, the society which
 was her heritage. She was to pass much
 of her life amid its pompous facades.
 But always, there remained in the
 shadows glimmerings of the 'other
 Violet,' an ephemeral, fanciful
 creature.

Phillips also included, in this earlier volume, a dozen letters from Violet to Vita written from 1940-1950 and three from Harold Nicolson (one in 1950 and two after Vita's death in 1962). This shorter selection is, to my mind, the wiser choice. The promise of that first tease from Phillips' cache is, unfortunately, too much like the Violet in these collected and complete letters: more attractive in the speculation than the realization.

The love story is familiar to most enthusiasts of Vita and may be reduced to an outline. The two girls met at school when Vita was 12 and Violet two years younger. Notes - hardly letters were exchanged although the first extant letter is dated 11 September 1910, four years later. Overruling her lust, Vita married Harold Nicolson at Knole on I October 1913 with Rosamund Grosvenor, an early love and jealous rival, for Violet, as maid of honour. The cast of characters for the fiasco to follow seems set with this event. Vita and Violet ran off together; and for a bit, it seemed that Violet's impending marriage to Denys Trefusis, the handsome, charming war hero, might be a decision well deferred. Shame from Harold (already pursuing his own homosexual dalliance) and shocked outrage from the mothers (Violet's mother being Mrs. George Keppel, and maitresse en titre of King Edward VII for the last decade of his life and Vita's mother being Lady Sackville-West and already setting her cap for Edwin Lutyens et al. including J.P. Morgan) eventually brought the women to their senses. But not before the lovers masqueraded around Europe, as travellers and gossip, with Vita exercising not only her new interest in lesbianism but cross-dressing. Vita called ersel "Mitya an Violet was "Alushka." They parted; they reconciled; they parted. Eventually Vita returned to domesticity and Violet married Denys when he promised in writing to a "marriage in name only." The bare bones of the affair are all too sordid (including a rape by Vita) and bathetic - even for a readership which is aware of the atrocities committee daily on afternoon (and evening) soaps. There must be more to warrant the letters in print.

After the affair ended, Violet continued to write agonising letters. Amidst talk of suicide, madness, exquisite pain and mourning, there are some sad, moving thoughts interspersed into the most insane screams of self-indulgence. On 19 March 1920, Violet wrote:

 People say they couldn't be seen with
 me in public. I give you my word of
 honour this is true.  Two people have
 said it who are by way of being my
 friends. Try to understand how deeply
 this hurts me. I come to you all
 bleeding and hurt, knowing that you
 have been spared the ghastly day I
 have just been through, knowing that
 you are surrounded with sympathy and
 affection - How can you expect me not
 to find it unjust?  It's as though
 two people had been caught stealing,
 but one is put in prison, and the
 other is not.  The one who is in
 prison can't help feeling the
 injustice.

And two months later on 7 May, there is this pitiful admission.

 ... One thing I revel in is my quite
 remarkable weak grasp on Reality - a
 little tug, and I should be free for
 ever, free from what most people
 term Reality - My realities are quite
 different, only they're so
 'insaisissable' . . . Do you know,
 Mitya, that my only really solid and
 unseverable 'lien' with this world is
 you, my love for you? I believe if there
 weren't you I should live more and more
 in my own world, until finally I
 withdrew myself inwardly
 altogether.... Because you don't see
 things as I see them, because you
 don't really understand, you think I
 am wicked and immoral and selfish -
 so I am, according to your standards,
 but not according to my own. 
 According to my own, I am singularly
 pure, uncontaminated, and high
 principled. You will laugh, but it is
 true. And you can laugh all your life,
 but it will still be true.

Surely that letter must have softened the heart of Harold who certainly suffered his own lot through the tortuous days of the affair. He referred to Violet as "that little tortuous, erotic, inescapable irremediable and unlimited tease. I don't hate her . . . no more than I should hate opium if you (Vita) took it. " And opium Violet became for Vita. But eventually, as was Vita's pattern, the effects of the drug wore off or were not strong enough. Vita went on to a long list of other lovers and Violet continued her flirtations to the end. Vita settled. Violet reconciled with Denys, but that too came to a tragic end when he died of tuberculosis in 1929. Violet never remarried. But in that year, she published the first of her novels. And that was her salvation. Fiction was finally to become the mainstay of her life. Her form of art took precedent over her misspent youth.

And so with Vita. She had written Challenge with Violet's collaboration during the height of their affair. In it, Vita appears as "Julian" and Violet as "Eve." It is not a particularly good read, apart from its sensational retelling of a "real" story. But Vita had discovered her trump card in the affair; she too was able to convert what aspects of her life she chose to art. (The ultimate irony occurs later when another of Vita's lovers, Virginia Woolf, returned the compliment by giving Vita literary immortality by writing Orlando for and about her.)

Although described by Woolf as one who wrote with "a pen of brass," Vita went on to fame as a popular novelist, poet and journalist. Violet also tried to follow in her footsteps but she never attained the fame or following of " il miglio fabbro" to quote Pound's salute from Eliot. This is largely due to Violet's stunted artistic growth. Violet was, as Glendinning points out in her TLS review ofA Solitary Woman: A Life of Violet Trefusis by Henrietta Sharpe, a fantasist.

 Harold Nicolson called her a
 mythomane - a polite way,
 says Miss Sharpe, of saying
 "pathological liar." She never
 really grew up, nor wanted to. 
 Like Vita she had a charming,
 dominant mother, and she remained
 her mother's precious little girl
 for as long as her mother lived.

Although she lived to be much older than Vita, Violet was always the child in an adult world.

But what a periphery. Her guest book is most impressive: the musicians, George Auric, Arthur Rubinstein, Francis Poulenc; personalities as various as Dior, Beaton, Duff and Diana Cooper, Randolph Churchill, the duke and duchess of Windsor, the princess of Denmark, François Mauriac and François Sagan; the writers, Virginia Woolf, Blixen, Colette, Maugham, Morrand; and her friend to the last, Frangois Mitterand. And there were many more who moved in rarified surroundings: Garden by Charles de Noailles; Frescoes by Bébé Bérard. Thierry de Beaucé, current owner of her former French residence, has noted:

 Thus Violet Trefusis ... kept herself
 constantly surrounded with famous,
 clever and beautiful people, and they
 in turn were enchanted by her eccentric
 view of the world and her perpetual
 warfare against all forms of stuffiness.

Even Nancy Mitford, who had turned her acid pen on Violet in Love in a Cold Climate, lived to become a friend and one of those who respected Violet's humanity, her culture and 'the fact she lived her life to the hilt... writes de Beaucé.

If Violet's literary skills were limited, her letter-writing abilities were not. Glendinning has observed:

 ... Her letters to Vita, even as a
 young girl, are fluent, fanciful,
 multilingual, inspired.  Vita's, in
 comparison are dull. (There is no
 more vivid account of an 
 archiprivileged Edwardian childhood
 than Violet's. She also published
 modish novels in both French and
 English; but her letter-writing
 and conversational  brilliance
 never properly transferred
 itself to her fiction.)

Violet herself was aware of her superior talent in this area. In her guarded autobiography, Don't Look Round, Violet comments on Vita's correspondence.

 I bombarded the poor girl with 
 letters which became more exacting
 as hers tended to become more and
 more of the 'yesterdaymy-pet-rabbit
 -had-six-babies' variety. 
 Clearly no letter-writer.

Vita obviously had other, and larger, more disparate, fish to fry. Violet did not. As Glendinning writes: ... Real life' could never match up the expectations of (her) beginnings."

The greatest limitation (apart from the very cheap and tawdry paperback edition compared to the splendid cloth-bound book) ofViolet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusts to Vita Sackville- West is that we are only presented with one side of the story: Violet's. This is no fault of the editors who have done a fine job in selection and commentary. Violet often writes that Vita does not write as much or as many letters in return. That was not ultimately to matter. Denys Trefusis, in a pique of rage (small wonder), destroyed all of Vita's letters. Violet subsequently reported this to Vita.

 He has done you a good turn by
 burning every single one of your
 letters - the ones that were either
 in his or my father's possession and
 the ones that were in my writing
 table drawer.  He has read them all
 so he can have no illusions left.

Fortunately, in contrast, Vita seems to have thrown nothing out. "Virtually all" of the letters which she received from Violet are reprinted here by Leaska and Phillips.

With the end of the affair, the letters became less frequent. And life had not ended in spite of Violet's anguish that it might as well have done. The relationship cooled in 1921 because Vita changed her mind and passionate commitment was never her long suit. Violet remained constant, it seems, to the end. Vacillation occurred but Violet was resigned to loneliness and social ostracism and homelessness in the capitals of Europe which for all their joys and pleasures remained empty to her. Denys, never the comfort or support that Harold was for Vita, is the mysterious player in the drama. His letters have not survived. Sharpe, in A Solitary Woman, describes him as finding comfort with Russian ballerinas and extraordinary trips to Russia. When he died, Violet was with him and she mourned him but ultimately offered too little too late as her tendency and "real instinct was to run away." Discreet liaisons with both sexes followed until she died.

Her friendships were solid and long-lasting. She inspired loyalty and support.

Violet returned to England during the war and different letters were exchanged with Vita. There were even luncheon meetings. Vita, never one to pass up on a metaphor, described her reaction to Violet's presence so near to her in England: "You are the unexploded bomb to me." (German bombs just happened to be falling round Sissinghurst at the time and invasion seemed inevitable.)

After the war, Violet moved between her parents' home in Florence and her own tower, St. Loup-de-Naud, southeast of Paris. Like Sissinghurst, it too had served as a military barracks and had all the romantic associations of Vita's tower in Kent. Given to Violet by her friend, the princess de Polignac (and that appears to be another story), a refuge was found in France. De Beauc6's description of it is apt to my recollection of first seeing it and demonstrates the attraction it must have held for Violet.

 There was nothing particularly
 enticing about it; rather the
 opposite, because everything looked
 terribly bare in the cold light of
 February.... There was the tower
 rising out of the mist, with the
 clock tower nearby ... two starkly
 vertical structures in the middle of
 a vast romantic plain stretching all
 the way to Poland.  And all this in
 an area regularly visited by many
 species of migratory birds.... The
 last thing I wanted to do was
 unsettle the shades of all those
 vanished people who had left races
 of themselves in it.

But a house is not a replacement for a person, a beloved. All the romantic fantasy of the tower was inadequate. Glendinning believes that:

 Violet never recovered from the
 disillusioning loss of Vita, who
 remained always the 'gold thread'
 - perhaps the only one - in her
 life.  She never risked total love,
 or even social disapproval, again. 
 She learnt to wear a mask.  The
 romantic vision was never re-created.

Glendinning's conclusion was drawn ten years ago. Violet To Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville- West would confirm and document it. Geography also throws light on life.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley has an interesting little rhyme in hisBiography for Beginners.

 The art of Biography
 Is different from Geography.
 Geography is about maps.
 But Biography is about chaps.

The bias of sexism aside, is there truth in th' is nonsense ver.-. What can' geography tell us about the end of biography? Both Violet and Vita were aesthetes. Both submerged themselves in lives which were false to their natures. Both searched for emotional bonds in houses and places - Vita with more success and satisfaction than Violet. Both "battled and half succeeded in ignoring the realities' of mundane existence so that their worlds of fantasy might triumph" as Phillips concludes.

 Even her unique grande passion, her
 love for Vita, was for her - as her
 letters reveal - an aspect of her
 quest for an Ideal Beauty ... I
 shall always remember the intensity
 with which on several occasions, she
 summed it up for my benefit: "Nothing
 but the Best shall content my soul."

Perhaps that is the ultimate tragedy of Violet's life, her passion, and these letters: her grasp exceeded her reach. George Woodcock has noted that "we preceive . . . according to our general preconceptions of life and . . . what we find . . . is in fact what we have gone to seek." The two women met, loved, lost and parted. Perhaps human, mortal, love was not what either was searching for at all. For the rest of their lives they each moved through great rooms, towers, countries which echoed with ruminations and ghosts of bygone passions.

Leaska and Phillips have a very disquieting ending to the story. One of Violet's favourite books, The Unquiet Grave by 'Palinarus' - her friend Cyril Connolly - is inscribed to her. Violet has marked vehemently with a red crayon the following passage:

 We love only once, for once only are
 we perfectly equipped for loving: we
 may appear to ourselves to be as much
 in love at other times - so does a day
 in early September, though it is six
 hours shorter, seem as hot as one in
 June.  And on how that first great
 love-affair shapes itself depends the
 pattern of our lives.

And when Mitterrand paid her a last visit, he left profoundly shaken and recorded this in his journal:

 ...  in the great house the memory
 persisted of singular passions of
 which I had registered the last
 cries.... There appeared occasionally
 . . . the signs of ancient storms and
 torments that half a century had not
 entirely dispelled.  I knew that an
 epoch was drawing to an end, or rather,
 were fading away the traces of a time
 elsewhere already vanished, althougl-
 until now preserved here by the firm
 hand of Violet.

So finally the life and the relationship ended. Whatever our personal or moral reaction to this story, Mitchell A. Leaska and John Phillips have, in Violet to Vita.- The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, given Violet, for the moment, the last word.

 

The Divine Ryans by Wayne Johnston, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1990

In 1986, at the age of twenty-eight, Wayne Johnston won the Books in Canada First Novel Award for The Story of Bobby O'Malley. His second book, The Time of their Li'ves, showed that he was a promising writer. His latest work, The Divine Ryans, is his best performance to ate and proof positive that Mr. Johnston is one of the country's finest story writers.

As in his previous novels, johnston's subject is the family and his narrator is a young male who reminisces in a deceptively casual manner, making us laugh (frequently aloud) again and again while at the same time focusing us to confront many of life's brutal incongruities. Like The Story of Bobby O'Malley, this is a comic novel of the most serious sort. It deals with a youth's coming-of-age. The protagonist, nine-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan, has serious problems. His father, former editor of the family newspaper, "The Daily Chronicle", a strange combination of scandal sheet cum church bulletin, has just died. The young boy and his sister and mother move in with Aunt Phil who rules the Ryan residence (and Reg Ryan's Funeral Home) with an iron fist. Also living in the house is Uncle Reginald, an eccentric who drives the family hearse. Complicating matters is the fact that Draper's growing sexual awareness results in his having weird dreams about the two important woman in his life (Momary is a hybrid of his mother, who appears to him,naked from the waist up, and his sister, Mary, who appears naked from the waist down). Too, the confused nine year old is being visited repeatedly by his father's ghost, who, for some mysterious reason, always holds a hockey puck. Concerned about these "visitations" ' Aunt Phil insists on keeping young Draper in line by putting him in tow with another Ryan uncle, Father Seymour, who runs the local orphanage and is famous about town for his 'Number', a group Of boys who sing, dance and box - "a cross between the Vienna choir boys and the Hilter Youth". Father Seymour's Number is to the parish "what the musical ride is to the Mounties."

In addition to a deadly accurate eye and ear, the author has a clear sense of form which controls what he sees and hears. Draper Doyle's refreshing voice records the world as it is. He speaks with a somber wisdom of family members (even the skeleton in the family closet), of clergy, of neighbours, of school, of hockey, of bedwetting, of everyone and everything. Once or twice, the narrator lapses into commentary that is surprisingly sardonic for a nine year old but, for the most part, the humorous voice is relentlessly honest, forcing us to laugh at characters' follies while at the same time prompting us to empathize with their pain. Time and again I was reminded of the authentic narrative voices of Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn. In the following passage, which occurs when Father Seymour attempts to fasten a necklace, his Christmas gift, around the neck of Draper's mother, we witness the keen observations of a youth alone in the phoney adult world:

 There was an awkward moment, or more
 like an awkward ten minutes when, on
 Aunt Phil's insistence Father Seymour
 tried to put the necklace around my
 mother's neck.  He was tall enough,
 but unfortunately tried to put it on
 from the front and stood for an
 embarrassing amount of time more or
 less face to face with my mother's
 bosom, more or less embracing her,
 while she tried to smile and he
 struggled to join the clasp of the
 necklace for perhaps the first time
 in his life.  No one wanted to
 acknowledge the awkwardness of what
 was happening by telling him to put
 it on behind.

The confessional account too has the authentic ring of Salinger and Twain.

 When Father Seymour had heard
 Sister Lousie, he would come out
 across the altar, his confession
 stole about his shoulders, and
 hurry down one of the side aisles,
 taking great care not to look into
 the pews, acting as if he didn't
 know that it was Wednesday,
 that among those penitents who
 were waiting for him was his
 entire family with whom he would
 have dinner afterwards ...
 As for me, I dreaded what Uncle
 Reginald called my "two minutes
 in the box" with Father Seymour.
 I hated the waiting. I remember the
 murmuring voices from inside the
 box ... But Father Seymour always
 recognized my voice - I could tell
 by the tone of his voice, in which
 there was a warning against my
 being in any way familiar with
 him.

Moments later, Draper reflects in a manner reminiscent of Huck:

 Each week, I stared at my mother,
 wondering what she had told Father
 Seymour.  Did she worry too, about
 what Aunt Phil might or might not
 have told him? ... Had she
 foolhardily confessed to some
 embarrassing sin and was now
 regretting it, or had she given so
 glowing an account of herself that
 Father Seymour had guessed that
 she was lying.
 I never felt more guilt-ridden
 than I did when leaving the
 confessional, what with all the
 lies I told while I was in
 there.

Draper Doyle can lie as effectively as Huck en route to Goshen. The encounter with the sales clerk at Woolworth's is just such a scene. But like Huck and Holden, he refuses to commit the big lie, the adult lie. In fact, Draper's world is a kind of comic hell because of his struggle with the family's attempt to hide the truth about his father's death. He cannot lie to himself even when the price is either a private nightmare resulting in chronic bed-wetting or public humiliation. Nowhere is this clearer in the book than in the concert scene when Draper Doyle has to choose between feigning reality (he is forced to lip-sync in Father Seymour's choir in order to impress his family) and making an honest attempt at communicating with an illusion, his father's ghost, which appears at the back of the hall. He chooses the latter, the consequence of which places him iii direct conflict with the archbishop around whom the adult world "acted as if the point was not to impress (him) but to refrain from doing anything which would startle him into an awareness of his surrounding." This book is packed with wonderful comic moments. Johnston is a wordsmith who effectively charges his language with witticisms, aphorisms, puns, and conceits. Typical of his humour is the Dickensian interplay between Draper and Uncle Reg at Christmastime.

  I often played Tiny Tim to Uncle
 Reginald's Scrooge, or Uncle 
 Scrooginald, as he called himself.
 "Please, Mr. Scrooge," I'd say 
 something to eat for my little
 sister."
  "I will give you," Uncle
 Scrooginald would say, "in
 exchange for your wheelchair and
 your sister's crutch, and all the
 clothes that you and your sister
 have on your backs, one cup of
 lukewarm water."
  "Oh, God bless you, Mr. Scrooge,"
 I'd say.  "God bless you, you're
 a saint."
  Other times, I played Scrooge's
 nephew, blurting out "I say, Uncle,
 make merry," whenever Uncle
 Reginald was looking glum.  Uncle
 Reginald would respond, "I say,
 nephew, if you persist in this
 nauseating cheerfulness, I shall
 make pudding of your plums."

As in his earlier works, there is a strong undercurrent of pathos in this novel. Among the many tender moments are the confrontation between Mom and Aunt Phil, and the tenderest scene of all, when Draper attempts to surprise his Dad on his father's birthday and literally gets the surprise of his life. There are dark strokes throughout the book but, on the whole, the colours are extremely bright. Mr. Johnston is first and foremost a comic writer. And this reader hopes we haven't seen the last of Draper Doyle's amusing antics and the comic capering of his mad-hatter relatives.

A final note! While reading this delightful fiction, I stopped more than once to consider what a wonderful film the Codco crew could make of The Divine Ryans. Both Mr. Johnston and Godco paint credible pictures of 'growing up Catholic' in St. john's in the fifties and sixties. What howls and belly chortles we'd be treated to were Codco given the opportunity to televise some of the hilariously funny episodes. To name but a few: Uncle Reg using the lift to get the kids ready for school; the family meals; Draper's psychooralysis sessions with his eccentric uncle; the goalie show-down between Draper and his sister; the concert; the boxing match; Draper's trips to Woolworth's to purchase underwear; and that splendid finale, the Apuckalypse. These and so many more marvelous moments in this fine book deserve to be put on the screen, if for no other reason than to bring this delightful collection of characters to those who do not read.

Black and White Tapestry by Fred Cogswell. Ottawa: Borealis Press. 1989. Unpriced.

Domestic Economy by John Donlan. Ilderton: @ Brick Books-Coldstream. 1989. $9.95.

Winter by Patrick Lane. Regina: Coteau Books, 1990. $8.00 paper; $21.95 cloth.

Fred Cogswell's forceful, passionate and convincing attachment to the strictness of such apparently archaic forms as the sestina and villanelle permits him to continue to be at over seventy years a vital and interesting poet. Black and White Tapesig contains poems about marriage and long love, about loneliness, teaching, and the heroism in any real attempt to live, but most of all about poetry and the poet's rage, even in old age. The rage is fiercely under control in his own case, but fully admitted; wild and uncontained and at last fatal in that of his friend and fellow artist Milton Acorn, who is the object of a fine elegiac sestina, as perceptive of Acorn's flaws as it is compassionate and forgiving.

In old age Cogswell senses an upwelling of forces, energies, passions that put before him the deep appeal of chaos, of letting go. In these poems, using these strict, intricate forms, he is able to look at the experience, to know it and survive it. The poetry is not always beautiful, nor often even very handsome, but there is a solidity of execution which grows on the reader and an unpretentious seriousness that commands respect. The pleasure one gets from this book is quite like that one has in finding one of the few remaining genuine hardware stores: a quiet, darkish place, with a settled sense of work and a notion of order that honours the idea of craft, knowing, as it does, that all serious craft is in the service of the beautiful and, in so far as we can make it, the true. I suppose it is a man's poetry, but one of those rare men strong enough to love and to absorb the hurt in loving. Perhaps Cogswell is responding to and challenging what is likely the best known villanelle in this century: the higher courage may be to go gentle into that good night, having so long acknowledged and mastered one's rage.

 But strength comes back as I
 remember well What a gypsy said
 at the county fair; "Don't quit on
 love, boy.  Though it hurts like
 hell, How much you live depends on
 how you care."
                       (Loneliness)

There are bigger and even better poems in this book, but "Lost and Found" gives I think the quickest picture of the man and the sources of his art.

With the unconscious importance
That money plays in an old man's life
I take the credit card from my purse
And in two seconds sign away
Sixty-nine dollars and fifty cents,
An evening's food and drink for two,
Plus ambience and a waitress' tip. 

But as I sign -I smile. In the glass
Beyond the cashier's head I see
The white flash of my own false teeth
And in my brain a memory-tape
Unrolls a cloudless weekend
In the fall of nineteen thirty-eight
When a long two days of searching brought
The greatest satisfaction I yet had known.

On hands and knees, face near to the ground, 
Foot by foot, I searched among the stubble
Of an eight-acre field of barley,
Hoping to find a porcelain tooth
That fell from my bridge during the day
When I gathered the shears into stocks.

On the second day in late afternoon
My eye picked it out from the tiny rocks
It resembled. I was ecstatic.
A new one would have cost six dollars.
At a dollar a day, the going rate
For labour, my time had been well spent.
Besides this, I had the satisfaction
Of proving all the folk wrong
Who called me a fool for looking.

The straightened youth, proud enough to look the fool, has lived to be a wise, old lover. Cogswell's sense of value is gold standard. The human rightness of this, the mix of memory and desire, is humanity at a very high, even extraordinary level. How selfdisciplined the boy, how wisely extravagant the older man. It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that law is the basis of freedom.

Patrick Lane's Winter is a weak, bad book, but it is the weak, bad book of a determined and ambitious poet. It is always a struggle to write and the struggle here is ghastly to watch, but one does watch it, ghastly as it is; which argues for some fundamental strength underlying the sloppy writing, the indulged bad habits, the absurdly portentous self-regard. Whatever else it may be about, Winter is not about the weather in Canada. Nothing in this collection is as good as Lane's "Winter Kill" (in The Measure, his best book), which, besides being a beautiful poem, is so deeply part of its place you expect to turn it over and find Property of Hudson Bay Company stamped on it. Winter is made up of forty-five sketches, each in turn titled "Winter", which seems to be a kind of universalizing term for a confused agglomeration of unhappy states, dominated by the most dreadful of them, the incapacity to feel anything at all and the perverse will to make that kind of impotence into a strength: "sitting perfectly/still/and only remotely human". Phyllis Webb's lines which Lane uses for an epigraph are an accurate epitome of the intention.

No one, not even a poet, is obliged to feel more than he or she actually does feel. Keats knew the 'feel of not to feel it', and it was a drowsy numbness that pained his sense; Coleridge's finest poem addressed his own awareness of his creative and emotional impotence. Lane is essentially a romantic, and exhaustion has always shadowed the romantic. It is not what Winter is about that is the problem; what is perplexing is the intellectual shambles consequent upon Lane's attempt to deal with it. In this book he seems to work from a notion that poetry is simply a matter of saying any damned thing you want, so long as it is sufficiently excessive and narrowly self-regarding. One would like to think that the abstract, anonymous 'he', who is the hero of these fragments - as if 'he' were less a pronoun than a mere cold, masculine syllable, a sort of degree zero morpheme - was other than autobiographical, but it isn't,likely, and the presence of a stifling egotism is hard to avoid. Like all egotisms, it is death-centered, death-obsessed. Dying, in terror of dying, but attracted, not entirely surprisingly, by a flight toward death, this kind of ego cannot bear either the happiness of courage, or even the anguish of others.

 He has already decided on the north
 He will die only when everyone else 
 is suffering the simple deprivations
 in the season where the weak have
 no place.
                          (Winter 32)


 a sharp lean hero, immaculate and alone.
 Already he is practising his cool walk, 
 hands in pockets, his cold clean eyes
 staring through all the pain there
 is at nothing.
                          (Winter 43)

Nor will it surprise to find this cold self-centredness accompanied by a truly bathetic sentimentality.

 His tears quickly freeze, forming
 delicate icicles on the pale hair 
 of his lip. If he stands perfectly
 still in the wind he can breathe
 their small impossible music.
                          (Winter 19)

Self-approval flirts dangerously with the ludicrous here; you can't contemplate the imagewithout wanting to laugh. It is doubtful that even Pater would have aspired to such exquisiteness. Or, further, given the current agony of the Roman Catholic priesthood in Canada and its victims, how could Lane permit himself these lines from Winter 10:

 he watches the people enter The Sacred Heart
 just before midnight, just before mass ...
 He likes to stare at the priest 
 standing behind them, the one who
 touches with great gentleness
 the choir boys in the sanctuary.

That's not far enough away from a thousand old jokes to stand as poetry at any time; at the moment it is either mindless or vicious. Nor will the picture of Christianity in the poem be recognized by anyone who actually practices the religion; it seems to be derived from the more expensive kind of Christmas card.

The real problem with Winter is that one cannot read it, if by reading one implies some possibility of understanding. This is not to speak of current critical notions of the impossibility of reading or the aporias of expression. One can, I suppose, move through the images, letting them register as they will. But the moment one asks what has been said, the trouble starts. Poetry has a certain responsibility to the facts, no matter what it may eventually want to do with those facts, even to the point of denying them; which is a different thing from just getting it wrong as Lane so often does. From Winter 16

 The old moon sleeps with the young moon in her arms.  
 Words like that are like reaching out
 in the darkness ...
 to find nothing at the end
 of the hand but cold.

But what the bard who made the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spense wrote was

                       the new Moon
 With the Old Moon in her arms.

The difference matters. To what degree Coleridge's great Dejection Ode, which takes those lines for its epigraph, sponsors or lies behind Winter is not clear, but it would have been worth Lane's more careful study. From "Winter 27"

 Everything is so thin,
 a leaf, a thought,
 that moment in Kings when 
  the woman lies with the leper
 and he is not made whole.

There is a leper in Kings (there are several), but no woman lies with him and he is made whole.

 delphiniums because the temple in the rock
 and the oracle singing her enigmas
 as she tricked men
                        (Winter 29)

But the etymology of "delphinium" brings you to the dolphin, not the oracle at Delphi.

 The host is sitting in his study, staring
 at a painting from the Ming Dynasty
 ... so much like
 the porcelain of the period, pale
 with only the faintest of green
 buried beneath the pure hard surface.

But Sung celadon ware is not Ming enamelled cloissonné. It goes on.

The doubtful echoes of Bataille, the gratuitous slighting of Alex Colville, surely a greater poet of essential cold than Lane, the patronizing appropriation of a laughing old "Eskimo", the whole atmosphere of intellectual self-satisfaction resting on such shaky foundations is depressing; far more so than the attempt to write a book of poems out of Alden Nowlan's hyperbolic pronouncement that "we live in a country where simply to go outside is to die." You can freeze to death in the Sahara; it isn't just snow or cold that kills. If we have lost meaning -

But what does it mean?
The old Eskimo laughing at such a strange request,

we didn't begin to lose it at Cape Dorset, N.W.T. For us the question of meaning, the questioning of meaning, was posed in Tubingen, or Paris, or New Haven. Primitive art is always meaningful, just as everything is invested with meaning in the universe of the primitive. Nothing is gained by suggesting it is otherwise. It is precisely part of Colville's power that he is able to show us the uncanny quality of an ordinary present drained of meaning, but filled with an anxious absence that is almost palpable.

Perhaps having written this ugliness out of himself, Lane can make a new start. He is a poet of many starts, too many of them in the wrong direction. His real strength is narrative; as Marilyn Bowering so perceptively said at the beginning of the career, it lies in the "looking for something to share poems", in the "details of here". One gets these in the early poems; they are most fully achieved in The Measure. If you want to know how good Lane can be, put his "Just L' ing" from that book beside Frost's "Out, Out" and watch the Frost poem reveal itself for the more or less worked-up-out-of-the-newspaper thing that it is, while Lane goes for, and gets as nearly as a man can, the whole truth: a truth that includes the crazy, almost in admissible, surreal beauty of someone's tossing a severed hand from a bridge at night, only because there seemed to be no rational alternative.

 I knew I couldn't keep it and I couldn't
 give it to his wife.  Bury it?
 What for?  The life was gone
 and he was still alive.
 It was cold and it was night and I
 had shift-work in the morning. 
 I threw it high off the bridge
 and for one moment it held the moon
 still in its fingers before it dropped
 into that darkness below.

Lane might have stopped there; many poets would have, but he goes on to bring that strange moment back under the pitiless laws of production. The man who lost his hand loses his wife and his job as well, because "there is no work for a man/with a stump. And Claude, the boss,/didn't want him there. You can see why." I can't think of anyone who has captured the voice of working class stoicism better than that. It is Lane's subject and his real vocation:

 First-Aid-Man to this village
 of slaves and broken lives.
                (Blue Valley Night)

Canada still needs a poet who can tell the truth about those lives, since it so little wants to hear of them, and when Lane forgets himself he can tell that truth with powerful conviction. But, it should be added, only when.

John Donlan's Domestic Economy is a remarkable book; one way or another, it will be an important one. No one who cares for or about poetry, especially perhaps, poetry in this country will be disappointed in it; and there is a deep temptation in reviewing it to say only that if you do care, you will buy it; pointless even to single out or name poems, since none misses the extraordinary intelligence of the whole or the sheer, triumphing pleasure of the poet's sense of having broken through to statement:

 Tunnelling out of occupied space
 each barky trunk leaves its grave of ground
 writing in its green calendar
 Congratulations on finding your voice.
                              (Missing)

Domestic Economy constitutes one of the most assured, as well as the most beautiful, depictions we have of post-modern Canada; nor is it easy to say which is the more astonishing: the easy command of everything philosophical and cultural that has gone into bringing about the post-modern or the intimacy and immediacy with which the daily facts of life in this country are brought to art.

Beyond that, as if it weren't enough, Domestic Economy forms the most penetrating and serious criticism, certainly the most creative, yet made of the major poet of our time, John Ashbury. I suspect Donlan is a young poet - all that one can learn from the biographical material accompanying the book is that he lives in London, Ontario, and has a silver tabby cat - but he is a young poet who has given himself the hardest task of all: to unlock the technical secret of a master with such absolute authority that he is free to speak as he will with it; to do in fact what the master himself seemed incapable of or unwilling to do. Like Ashbery's Shadow Train (1981), Domestic Economy is a sonnet sequence: fifty poems make up Shadow Train; Domestic Economyhas forty-nine. This sonnet form, of which there were two or three instances in Ashbery's earlier collections (though they attracted no attention as the possible solution to the problem of the sonnet, a form which English poetry seems not able to do either with or without for very long), is made up of four unrhymed quatrains, whose verse has completely abandoned a metrical base. Rhythm is controlled solely through phrasal patterns measured with exacting tact by enjambment and caesura: here is Donlan on the "Wire"

 Making choices, we flex risk like a muscle,
 launch out over the near-absolute zero
 between solitudes. Another day, another
 universe to feed like an insatiable child

 who forgets the last time he was full. 
 His attention wanders like a searchlight,
 hates shut doors more than a cat, barges in
 with wet feet, sings as it flies

 its spaceship into a de Kooning.
 The figures of grace we shape in the air
 are necessary.  That they're performance too
 makes them invitations to a brief

 freedom from what most people consider
 possible. After the show, let's have
 a drink: let's have whatever the spruces are having
 if it'll make us as wild as them.

The effect is an exhilarating release into intelligence and inclusiveness - this is a poetry whose door is always open - without surrendering any of the luminous pleasure that comes from tight formal beauty. The aesthetic gain of closure comes almost miraculously without that sense of things being forced or foreshortened: the "frantic completeness, as Ashbery described it in "Grand Galop", of Surrey who with Wyatt brought the sonnet into English.

 Let us find out, if we must be constrained,
 Sandals more interwoven and complete
 To fit the naked foot of Poesy:
 Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
 Of every chord, and see what may be gained
 by ear industrious . . . ,
         ("If by dull rhymes our English
           must be chained")

Keats proposed nearly two centuries ago, endeavouring as he said he was, "to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have." No poet in the language has had a more industrious ear than Ashbery's; there is a sense in which it might be said (he has archly said it himselo that as a poet he has done anything but listen, but of course it was the listening of genius, and the reward has been immense for the vitality of the art. There is no more going around Ashbery than there was a way to go around Wordsworth or Eliot. Ashbery is never mentioned inDomestic Economy, nor in any direct way alluded to, unless it be in an anonymous bit of verse, more or less Ashberyesque, which makes up the second quatrain of the first and title poem. Eliot said good (we would now say strong) poets steal, weaker ones borrowed. Domestic Economy is an appropriation of a form, not the imitation of a style. Far from being a piece of ventriloquism or tour de force of pastiche, Donlan's Domestic Economy grants the highest kind of confirmation to the older poet's technical discovery: it now belongs to the book of forms as solidly and as certainly as Milton's breaking the "turn" (volta) at the sestet in the Petrarchan sonnet.

Donlan's own discovery is that the form is not necessarily wedded to the notorious Ashberyian obscurity, that apparent flight from meaning, the "leaving out business", which has reduced more than one critic to complaining that often there is nothing more going on in his work than an airless, somewhat supercilious display of bravura syntax, signalling little beyond its own virtuosity. Sufficient acquaintance with all of his work would of course limit that view, but one knows where it comes from. By contrast Donland is as direct, real and as simply 'there' as the

                         bright
 Cutlasses, Challengers, Z28's! - hard as
 the Precambrian Shield we abandon, leaving
 its lakes beaming along neglected sideroads ...
                        (Cold Pastoral)

At the same time the cars are wonderfully and distantly commented on by the title's allusion to Keats and by the full phrase, "Put up your bright/Cutlasses . . . ", where Othello steps in for a cameo appearance. Donlan is a post-modern, but his security in the canon is consummate. His is a world in which a meditation, witty as Donne but gentler, on the Heideggerean notion of Venvindung (the historical 'overcoming' or healing which recognises that health is a kind of belonging and the beginning of responsibility though of course Donlan breathes no word of Heidegger) begins in history and ends in the new A&P that has replaced the old pool hall:

                  Doctoring history
 is one way we keep the present manageable,
 racking the pool balls into a tight triangle

 before the next hard break shatters their order
 as'far as the table's rubber boundaries.
 The old poolhall, where so much that is irreplaceable
 happened is gone.  But in the new A&P some faces

 still shockingly connect. You hadn't expected
 so much to survive, the important parts, the human
 memories that contradict or duplicate yours,
 those others who contain you as they live.
                                   (The Past)

The pleonastic insistence of the book's title ("economy" is literally,oikos, nemein, domestic management) is deliberate. ehind it lies indeed plenty of "homework" of the other sort; though their names, like Heidegger's, are never mentioned, the intellectual presences of Levi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Kristeva, the whole poststructuralist pantheon can be felt, but in no conceivable way as intimidating. They have to rub shoulders with ". . . Ti-jean, Stompin Tom, What's-his-ears,/play[ing] it for us again in our cheap kitchens . . . " We have come perhaps to that "condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything)" which Eliot at the end of Four Quartets sets as the prerequisite to "arrive at where we started/And know the place for the first time."

Does anything know us better, more prophetically, or with more troubled love, than "Stable", written two years ago, the day after Canada day

There must be something I forget to worry about.
That panic trying to lodge behind your breastbone
is useful energy, like the Reversing Falls,
for the right person. Who are you, anyway?

After several days on the respirator your sense of identity
can slip, leaving all that buoyed you up
unknowable. You drown in your strange body,
a terrified machine among machines.

You come out of it a step closer to the stars,
each self a story among other stories.
It's surprising how little your spirit really needs:
my letters to Santa went into the stove,

blackened to negatives, restless, flew up the chimney
on hope to the North Pole. 0 Canada
during your fireworks last night
many of us felt ash fall on our upturned faces.

If Domestic Economy is apprentice work, it is the apprentice work of an enormous talent. For the moment we can only be grateful for the compensation and consolation it offers to a country that has all but lost its soul.

Pax AmericanaBlood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies by Christopher Hitchens. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.

In a relatively short time Christopher Hitchens has achieved the status of being England's preeminent journalist, and with his recent appointment as Washington editor for Harper's Magazine many would argue that he also deserves to hold that title for America.1Blood, Class and Nostalgia (his seventh book) does much to support the case for Hitchens as our generation's Muggeridge2 or, as some would have it, Orwell. The book is a critical survey of the historical, social, political and cultural relationship that existed and exists between Britain (large and small b) and America (small and large A). What Hitchens illustrates most of all in this work is his ability to do what many of the historians warn us not to do generalize and judge. Here he is on a period of history that is of some interest to us at the moment:

The period of decolonization and receivership,
which saw the United States take over the 
former position of the Belgians in the Congo, 
the French in Indochina, the Dutch in 
Indonesia, and the British in
the Mediterranean and the Middle East ... At 
such times, there was liable to be grumbling
about American "imperialism" from the British
Establishment and sanctimony about British 
"colonialism" from the Washington side.... As
in the case of the Churchill-Roosevelt 
correspondence on Iranian and Saudi oil, both 
nations rightly suspected the other of 
self-interested designs. (United Fruit 
lobbyists in Congress had played on this 
memory artfully, pointing out that British 
oil assets were being menaced by 
nationalization in Iran, that American assets
in Iran might be I next, " and that the habit
of nationalization should not be allowed to 
spread to or from Guatemala.  If they could 
see the connection, so could others.) Iran 
was to be the alternative scenario in the 
drama of "receivership."

In a chapter entitled Greece to Their Rome Hitchens remarks that the ' literary mirror is often the most precise." And it is the sections of the book in which he discusses Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Adams, Henry James and especially Kipling and Mark Twain - that show us his extraordinary erudition and insight into British and American culture:

When Kipling aimed for the sublime, 
he always stuck at the imperial.  This 
Was a form of temptation which Twain, 
as it turned out, was well able to resist.  
When, a decade or so later, Kipling became
the semi-official laureate of the 
Roosevelt-Lodge set, with his verses 
urging white solidarity and the conquest 
of the Philippines, Twain emerged as the 
greatest and most scornful opponent of the
new imperialism.  Striking at the very 
point that Kipling had made his own - the 
emulation by Americans of the trailblazing 
British - he wrote witheringly that his 
fellow countrymen should "let go our 
obsequious hold on the rear-skirts of the
sceptred land thieves of Europe."

Hitchens the cultural and literary historian is no less perceptive than Hitchens the contemporary journalist. He describes the night in Washington when the Churchill Club had Prince Philip invest Ronald Reagan with the silver medallion and chain of the award.

The occasion draws to a surreal close 
with the singing of Rosemary Clooney, 
whose evocations of Killarney and 
Cloghamore have reduced many a St. 
Patrick's night to maudlin and lachrymose
demonstrations.  The Irish-American community 
has been the slowest to succumb to the general
insipid Anglophilia (being one of the few 
ethnic American groups polled, for instance, 
that did not instinctively side with Britain 
in the Falklands conflict).  But tonight Ms. 
Clooney eschews the green in favor of what 
looks like a jacaranda tent, and when she does 
sing of Cloghamore there is nothing in her 
rendition to discompose the Crown.  Faced by
an alliance between "the quality" from both 
sides of the Atlantic, even Fenianism succumbs
to sentimentality.

One could argue that this is comedy but Hitchens has real moments of comic brilliance. His report on the correspondence between Evelyn Waugh and William F. Buckley is a case in point.

Shortly before the showing of Brideshead,
Mr. Buckley had printed a defense of his 
own close relations with Evelyn Waugh, and
a reply to the detractors and mockers of 
those relations, in the National Review
of November 14, 1980.  His indignation had 
been aroused by a review of Evelyn Waugh's 
Letters written by John Kenneth 
Galbraith.  Galbraith had made much of the 
fact that in 1960 Waugh wrote to his old 
schoolmate and friend Tom Driberg as follows:

Can you tell me: did you in your researches
come across the name of Wm.  F. Buckley Jr.,
editor of a New York, neo-McCarthy magazine 
named National Review?  He has been 
showing me great and unsought attention 
lately and your article made me curious.  
Has he been supernaturally "guided" to bore 
me?  It would explain him.

There is much more comedy in Hitchen's work, as Gore Vidal and others have pointed out, but these are grim times. As I write, America and Britain have all but bombed Baghdad and Iraq out of history.3 At present there is more "blood" than class or nostalgia in these Anglo-American ironies.

On April 19, 1988, Hitchens flew to Yorktown and boarded the USS Iowa. The enormous Second World War battleship "named for America's most pacifist and isolationist state." The ship had been recommissioned by the Reagan-Weinberger rearmament administration and was returning from a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf:

Amid the Iowa's array of martial 
features is one incongruity.  The admiral's 
quarters boast a large, luxurious sunken bath.
This fitting, which is found on board no other
ship, was installed for the comfort of the 
disabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  In 
November 1943, he boarded the USS Iowa
and steamed at top speed across the Atlantic 
and through the Mediterranean to meet Winston
Churchill.  Their first place of rendezvous, 
ironically enough, was Tehran.  In those 
days, Persia was a semi-colony of the British,
and in 1944 it became the site of a squabble 
between Churchill and Roosevelt over competing
British and American oil concessions.  Later, 
in the 1950s, it became the site of an 
Anglo-American cooperative covert operation 
to overthrow a nationalist government and 
secure the Pahlavi [the Shah of Iran] dynasty.
It was to deal with the direct consequences of
that folly that the USS Iowa and her sister 
ships had again been seen in Middle Eastern 
waters.  The USS New Jersey had spent 
some days off the coast of Lebanon in 1984, 
tossing shells as heavy as Volkswagens from 
her sixteen-inch muzzles at the supposed 
positions of Iranian sympathizers.  I wasn't 
the only person to be reminded, by this 
classic gunboat demonstration, of Joseph 
Conrad's bizarre evocation in 
Heart of Darkness:

Once, I remember, we came across a 
man-of-war anchored off the coast.... 
In the immensity of earth, sky and water,
there she was, incomprehensible, firing 
into a continent.

Later Hitchens is given a personal demonstration of the old ship's power, a demonstration that Iraqi men and boys have been experiencing for the past few weeks:

As the huge, beautiful ship cut its way 
through the water toward its new home 
port on Staten Island, I stood on the 
bridge to watch a few demonstration 
broadsides (saying a silent valediction 
to those faraway Druze villages, as the 
gigantic shells went screaming off toward 
the horizon) and talked with Seth Cropsey,
Under Secretary of the Navy and an occasional
defense essayist for Commentaty, The Public 
Interest, and other organs of neoconservative
reflection.  "I think you'll find," he said,
"that most of our people have studied and 
admired the British example."

Hitchen's book should be standard reading for every American, British and Canadian student.
Heart of Darkness, indeed!

Notes

1. Hitchens also has a tentative connection with Canada. The Canadian businessman Conrad Black recently bought The Spectator so he could personally fire Hitchens. Hitchens had been writing nasty things about Black's friend, Ronald Reagan. Black, as it turns out, was just too late in acquiring The Spectator as Hitchens had already moved on to another paper.

2 . Like Muggeridge, Hitchens has taken on the cult of the Monarchy in England. His book, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish, has not brought him the kind of hate mail that Muggeridge had received from an earlier generation.

3. The impact of the bombing of Iraq upon the American psyche has yet to be calculated, but we might do well to remember the American poetiames Merrill who talked about the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in his poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Merrill, who expressed a belief in the transmigration of souls, felt that the souls of'those in the two bombed-outjapanese cities had been so annihilated that they were not reusable in the cycle of reincarnation.