Review of The Good Steward: The Ernest C. Manning Story, by Brian Brennan (Calgary: Fifth House, 2008) 256 pp. Cloth $24.95 black-and-white photographs. Appendix. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Indexed.
This is the first and, hopefully not the last, biography of Alberta’s longest serving Premier. Among his sources, Brennan, a journalist by trade, consulted a family memoir, written by Manning’s wife Muriel. He combines first-hand interview transcripts with newspaper accounts. This is a compact narrative, suitable for readers who do not wish to scan the entire twelve-volume history series Alberta in the 20th Century, published between 1991 and 2006.
Manning felt called by the Ministry of William Aberhart. He attended the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, from 1927-1930, when, at the age of twenty-one, he became the Institute’s first graduate. (Both men were influenced by Major Clifford Douglas and promoted Social Credit to their radio listeners.) The first meeting of the Alberta Social Credit League as a political party was held here in 1935. When Aberhart became Premier, he promised to settle Alberta’s debt by issuing provincial bonds and “Funny Money” or prosperity certificates. Much of this legislation was repealed, but the Alberta Treasury Branch (“near-banks”) was a successful venture.
At the age of twenty-six, Manning was the youngest cabinet member in the British Empire. Except for a five-month absence due to illness, he kept his public life separate from his private life, marriage and children. He was refused for military service during the Second World War. In 1943, at the age of thirty-four, he was sworn in as Alberta’s eighth Premier, to replace Aberhart who had passed away. He called his first election as leader in 1944, Social Credit winning fifty-one of the fifty-seven seats. The discovery of oil in 1947 was made at Leduc. Manning rejected public ownership of the oil industry; keeping ownership of productive enterprises in private hands. He still supported agriculture as Alberta’s number-one industry. He wanted to purge the Party of anti-Semites or Douglasites. Further, he restricted the amount of land Hutterite colonies could own under the Communal Property Act (and this was in force, until the Lougheed Conservative government won an upset victory, in 1971.)
From 1947 to 1952, the Politics of Oil and Gas largely replaced concerns about debt and spending. Commercial development of the Athabasca oil sands became the big Alberta energy story after 1962. Although there was a debate about exports, public confidence in the government remained unshaken. That is, until scandal and corruption became issues, in 1955. He replaced the second and third choices on ballots, with the one-candidate, one-vote system. Based on surveys, he cancelled the bonus scheme of Citizens’ Participation Dividends. Instead, more funds were expended on public work projects, such as Foothills Hospital and the Provincial Archives and Museum, as well as education.
Besides his duties as Premier and Party Leader, he also served as Attorney General and Minister of Mines and Minerals. Manning was kept in power, until his retirement in 1968. He received Honourary degrees from the University of Alberta and Athabasca University, but continued his evangelical mission work. In 1970, he was appointed a Senator and served, in that capacity, for thirteen years. There was no public funeral.
Only one experimental initiative of his government came “unnervingly close to actually happening”. That was an Oil Sands nuclear bomb proposal, approved by Canada’s Atomic Energy Commission, the Alberta Research Council, and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in 1959.
The controversial plan was to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Athabasca Oil Sands. Research scientists reported that heat from an underground nuclear explosion would melt the sand and release liquid hydrocarbons. The molten sand would solidify into a huge glass bubble, trapping most of the radiation inside. The oil companies would pump out the liquefied oil. The United Nations Disarmament Commission inadvertently “scuttled” the test. Talks were underway that nuclear tests, even for peaceful purposes, were ending.
Brennan, a former columnist for the Calgary Herald, is the author of Scoundrels and Scallywags: Characters from Alberta’s Past (2002); Boondoggles, Bonanzas and Other Alberta Stories (2003); and Building a Province: 60 Alberta Lives (2008).
Anne Burke
Review of The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada, by Janice Fiamengo (University of Toronto Press, 2008) 252 pp. paper $25.95 Bibliography, Indexed. black-and-white-photographs.
This study, by an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, deals with six women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their poetry, journalism, essays, and speeches display ferment, spirit, assertiveness, and moral confidence. They deal with the Issues of the New Woman, the Labour Question, maternal feminism, and matters of faith.
The germ of the project was the “ReCalling Early Canada: Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production Conference”, to which Fiamengo contributed “Baptized with tears and sighs: Sara Jeannette Duncan and the Rhetoric of Feminism”, published by the University of Alberta Press, in 2005.
Women began to be hired by Canadian newspapers in the 1880s; women were attracted to journalism because, as an occupation, it was: respectable, clean, and public. (p. 125) The election act barred convicts, lunatics, and idiots, as well as women. In 1918, Canadian women finally won their federal vote.
In a Critical “Introduction: Strong Statement, Trenchant Ideas, Promising Plans”, Fiamengo alludes to The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925, by Mariana Valverde (1991) and Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada, by Jennifer Henderson; Practising Femininity, by Misao Dean (1998); Liberation Deferred: The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, by Carol Bacchi, (1983), and other reference sources.
In Chapter One, “Agnes Maule Machar, Christian Radical”, the critic agrees with Machar (1837-1927), also known as “Fidelis”, to dispense with the notion that linked work and higher learning with “unwomanliness.” Machar wrote novels, For King and Country (1874) (about the War of 1812); Marjorie’s Canadian Winter ((1892); Roland Graeme: Knight: A Novel of Our Times (1892), and a collection of short stories, Stories of the British Empire (1913); as well as for Canadian Monthly and National Review (1872-8), Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly and National Review (1878-82), and The Week (1883-96). “Part of her rhetorical and political effectiveness involved erasing the distinction between the social and the spiritual.” (p. 37) she supported the Salvation Army and opposed the exploitation of factory workers, such that women were exposed to alcohol, dissipation and sexual immorality.
In Chapter 2, “The Uses of Wit: Sara Jeanette Duncan’s Self-Fashioning”, the critic deals with “Woman’s World” columns in the Toronto Globe during the mid-1880s by Duncan (1861-1922). She explored the Woman Question, attending meetings incognito, and published under the pseudonym “Garth Grafton”. She used parody, invective, metonymy, and comic scenes. “The verbal concision, structural elegance, and syntactical complexity— as well as the sardonic assessment of American republicanism—are characteristic.” (pp. 74-5) She also wrote for the Washington Post, the Montreal Star, The Week, and the Indian Daily News, (the last- mentioned was edited by her husband.) She represented the New Woman in Canada, worked as a literary editor and was a parliamentary correspondent. She produced interviews, book reviews, sketches, travel articles and tirades. In addition to books of non-fiction, she wrote novels, A Daughter of To-day (1894) and Set in Authority (1906). She praised poet Pauline Johnson’s poem “Brant: A Memorial Ode.”
In Chapter 3, "'This graceful olive branch of the Iroquois': Pauline Johnson’s Rhetoric of Reconciliation”, the focus is on Duncan’s interview with Johnson (1861-1913), which was published in the Globe, at a time when many Anglo-Canadians anticipated: “with relief”, the “eventual disappearance” of aboriginals. (p. 90) Johnson was born a Mohawk on the Six Nations Reserve, where she was raised. Johnson said she wished to “upset the Indian Extermination and Non-education Theory.”(p. 89) The banning of the potlatch and institutionalization of residential schools are the backdrop for a vocabulary (of “dusky”, “exotic”, and tomahawk as weapon) which is “degrading” to Johnson, as well as the sexism of uniting “Red and White in ‘one common Brotherhood’.”
The critic examines newspaper accounts of Johnson’s performances, summarizing many reviews. She analyzes Johnson’s verse, such as “The Reinternment of Red Jacket”(1884), “A Cry from an Indian Wife”(1885), “Brant, A Memorial Ode”(1886); and prose pieces “My Mother” (1909), “Catherine of the Crow’s Nest (1910), “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” (1893); “As It Was in the beginning” (1899), “A Pagan in St. Paul’s Cathedral” (1906) and “We-hro’s Sacrifice” (1907), all of them fiction.
In Chapter 4 “Gossip, Chit-Chat, and Life Lessons: Kit Coleman’s Womanly Persona, Fiamengo introduces Kathleen Blake Coleman (1856-1915), as not only belonging to the first generation of Canadian newspaper women, but also as being “probably the most famous of them in her day.” (p. 120) Coleman wrote a regular column “Woman’s Kingdom” for the Toronto Daily Mail, from 1890 to 1911, and produced a syndicated column, traveling widely. She was the first woman war correspondent, when she was sent to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War of 1898 and a founding member if the Canadian Women’s Press Club, in 1904. She married a bigamist and supported two children. She once dressed as a man and counseled a woman whose son cross-dressed. In “A Woman’s Page”, she wrote advice columns with anonymous correspondents, but distained recipes and household hints. She overcame criticism of her work as “bad” writing, due to testimonials from her “fans”. She promoted journalism as a profession and disputed the assumption that writing was a relatively easy job “accessible to anyone with a pen.” (p. 134) She opposed birth control and abortion. She wrote that “no woman worth knowing is without enemies.” (p. 129) She believed in the equality of men and women, that emancipation of women was inevitable, but worked for the Conservative Mail, which officially opposed suffrage.
In Chapter 5, “Heroines and Martyrs in the Cause: Suffrage as Holy War in the Journalism of Flora MacDonald Denison” (1867-1921), Fiamengo portrays Denison, a columnist for the Toronto Sunday World, from 1909 to 1913, as a leading activist in the Canadian suffrage movement and is revealed to be the mother of playwright Merrill Denison. She was separated from her husband and left responsible for supporting her son. After she attended the International Suffrage Alliance Conference in Copenhagen, she served as president of the Canadian Suffrage Association, from 1911 to 1914. She championed Emmeline Pankhurst, as “a woman willing to give her freedom or her life for the sake of principle...one we will all want to see and hear.” (p. 154) There is a distinction made between: “suffragette” and the more moderate “suffragist”, although Denison is associated with both public and private manifestations. She scorned the church’s concern with “race suicide” (abortion or birth control) and religious hypocrisy. Her column of storytelling, sensationalism, sentence fragments, incomplete observations, and anecdotes, was titled “The Open Road towards Democracy.” She stated: “Men need women in politics; women need men in the home.” (p. 162) She praised Elizabeth Fry for prison reform. She produced one novel and left another incomplete.
In Chapter 6, “Nellie McClung and the Rhetoric of the Fair Deal”, we learn McClung (1873-1951) published an edition of her speeches as In Times Like These (1915). She had the qualities of organization, expression, and development. She used parody, aphorisms, and witty rebuttals “to revivify” suffrage rhetoric. “The smaller the man the more disposed he is to be jealous.” (p. 203) The critic examines McClung’s published essays in terms of rhetoric, as well as her speeches, as “tactics demonstrating her ability to craft a revolutionary program of emancipation from the restrictive domestic sphere established in conservative discourse.” (p. 178) She combined humour, anecdotes, aphorisms, irony, emotional appeal, and logic. As an orator, she used gestures, modulations of voice, and a blend of humour; denunciation and pathos, according to newspaper accounts. She used language familiar to her audience, freshening it, revitalizing clichés, redefining overused words; and enlivening standard phrases with her wit, humour, and command of anecdote. She manipulated the words of her opponents. She wrote two novels Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), and The Second Chance (1910), and a collection of short stories The Black-Creek Stopping House (1912).
In the “Conclusion”, the critic compares all six writers in relation to maternal ideology, Christian discourse and social values.
The cover illustration of rapt travelers (engrossed in reading pages from a broadsheet while riding on the Canadian Pacific Railway) is apt, since it appeared in What Actual Settlers Say of the Canadian North-West (Montreal, circa 1888).
This is a valuable resource for schools of journalism, programs of Canadian Studies, Departments of English, Canadian and American Literatures, as well as Women’s Studies.
Anne Burke
Review of Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956, by Dean Irvine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008) 320 pps. Cloth, End Notes, Works Cited, Indexed.
In a critical “Introduction”, the author compares a radical avant-gardism (often codified as “masculine”) and a mass culture often depicted as “sentimental, feminine and regressive.” He describes the “little” magazine as “a type of non-commercial literary, arts, or cultural-interest periodical.” He rejects Dudek’s “restrictive” definition, with its emphasis on the “literary” and the masculine.
Irvine offers an “eccentric” focus on women’s fugitive poems, short-lived magazines, and little-known print cultures; archives, marginalia, and ephemera; manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, and other archival documents, as well as poems, letters, editorials, articles, reviews and advertisements.
Within international circles of modernism, women played a large role, among them were: Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (Poetry); Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap (the Little Review); Marianne Moore (the Dial); Katherine Mansfield (Rhythm, the Blue Review, and the Signature); H.D. and Bryher (Close-up)
Irvine seeks to recover women editors who were not themselves poets (or primarily poets). In addition, he deals with women poets who were also editors of little magazines and/or members of little magazine groups. Thus, Canadian women magazine editors and poets represent a “doubly marginalized” group in relation to international literary cultures. Women have remained peripheral to historical narratives of the little magazine in Canada.
In Chapter 1, “Invitation to Silence: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, 1932-1937”, Irvine offers histories of the Cultural Left: “Among Masses: Livesay and Leftist Magazine Culture”; New Frontier’s Popular Front”; the “Left in Crisis”. On New Frontier’s staff, women were a majority, its founder Jean Watts, and two of the four editors (Dorothy Livesay and Margaret Gould).
In Chapter 2, “Marginal Modernisms: Victoria, Vancouver, Ottawa 1935-1953”, he surveys: “Canadian Poetry Magazine, (1936-63), the CAA, and Contemporary Verse”; “Modernism Our Enemy? Marriott and ‘Magazine Verse’”; “A People’s Modernism: Livesay’s Contemporary Verse”; and “After Contemporary Verse”. The periodical Contemporary Verse was founded by Livesay, Marriott, Doris Ferne, and Floris McLaren, and edited by Alan Crawley.
In Chapter 3, “Gendered Modernisms: Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver 1941-1956”, he attempts to deal with: “Gender and Little-Magazine Cultures”; Page’s Preview (1942-5); “Waddington’s First Statement” (1942-5); “Page, Waddington, and Their Contemporary Verse” (1941-52) Female contributors to First Statement (including Page, Waddington, and Kay Smith) were subjected to gender-specific attacks.
In Chapter 4, “Editing Women: The Making of Little Magazine Cultures, 1916-1947”, he reports on the pre-Massey Commission: “Flora MacDonald Denison and the Sunset of Bon Echo” (1916-20); in the 1930s, “Feminism on the Left: Florence Custance and the Woman Worker” (1926-9); “Paper Kingdom in the Queen City: Mary Davidson and the Twentieth Century” (1932-3); Hilda and Laura Ridley of the Crucible (1932-43), “In the Making: The Ridleys and the Crucible”; “Taking Care of Business: Eleanor Godfrey and the Canadian Forum” (1935-47).
In Chapter 5, “Guardians of the Avant-garde: Modernism, Anti-Modernism, and the Massey Commission”, he considers “Commissioning the Avant-Garde”, with “Her Yellow Book: Catherine Harmon (with Paul Arthur) and here and now” (1947-9); “Making Her Impression: Myra Lazecho-Haas’s New Canadianism” (1950-1); “Art in Small Print: Yvonne Agazarian and pm magazine” (1951-2) ; “'Not a one man job': Aileen Collins and CIV/n” (1953-5); “A People’s Culture: Margaret Fairley and New Frontiers (1952-6).
In the Conclusion, we find “In Transition”; “A Putting Down of Roots’: Livesay and CV/II”; “1957 and After” Of course, the Canadian feminist literary periodicals of the 1970ss and 1980s are fundamentally different, with a radical shift after 1957. There is a sharp decline in the number of women editing little magazines, after 1957.
Of note is the fact that New Frontier (1936-7) was published in the 1930s and New Frontiers (1952-6) was published in the 1950s.
According to Irvine, who has unlocked our literary history, at least as it pertains to women little magazine publishers, “Chief among the stumbling blocks encountered by women little-magazine editors were the economic obstacles related to the cost of magazine production and distribution, which usually signaled the end of a given magazine’s existence.”
Economic difficulties persisted, when either private funds or public grants marked (and ensured?) continued funding for non-commercial magazines, after 1957.
Some important sources Irvine mentions are: Norman Levine, “We All Begin in a Little Magazine,” Thin Ice (Ottawa: Deneau and Greenberg, 1979, pp. 38-47); The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski (Toronto: Ryerson, 1967), a seminal resource which contains “The Role of Little Magazines in Canada”, (pp. 205-12); Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich’s The Little Magazine A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946); Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001)
There has been a project of exposing “masculinist” editorial practices and recovering histories of women’s editorial labour in the context of little magazines. It is a fact that women little-magazine editors have fared “poorly” in Canadian literary history. Of particular note, P.K. Page, Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott and Miriam Waddington, in their dual roles, enjoyed long careers as poets. In addition, they responded to and recovered from the “poetic crises” of their little-magazine years in different ways. Women poets who contributed to leftist and modernist little magazines have, of course, fared “much better” in literary history than those who did not. A problem is the “scarcity” of archival documents related to women little-magazine editors. Another is their uncollected poetry.
Irvine relies on Jayne E. Marek’s Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). He concludes, from David McKnight’s bibliography, of those little magazines founded between 1941 and 1956, 11 of 23 (47 percent) had at least one woman editor; for those little magazines established between 1957 and 1980), the ratio decreases to 65 of 177 (36 percent). He deals, to some extent, with the “transition” of magazines, from little magazines founded and/or edited by women in Canada, to the feminist literary magazine. Another fact is that, after 1957, as the number of little magazines in Canada increased dramatically, the percentage of women editors affiliated with these magazines actually dropped (based on both funded and unfunded magazines.)
Hence, the pre-decade remains one of the “most productive” periods for women editors of Canadian little magazines. Then, editors of feminist literary magazines took collective action “during a period of men’s ascendancy– if only in number– in Canadian little-magazine culture”, after 1957. There needs to be a history of Canadian little magazines in the 1970s and 80s. Women were writing “for women”. Livesay’s CV/II, founded in 1975, was a literary magazine edited by a woman and soliciting women’s writing (but, not yet, a feminist literary magazine). See: CV2’s transition, from Livesay’s editorship (1975-7) to its first women’s editorial collective (1984- ). Irvine compares the historical connections between the feminist literary magazine and the little magazines founded and/or edited by women in Canada.
Regarding to: the continuation of literary, arts and cultural magazines, from the pre-Council era, only Quarry was “ever edited” by a woman, though not “until Gail Fox took over the editorship in 1976”; she was succeeded by Bronwen Wallace (1978-81.)
Irvine thanks P.K. Page for answering his queries, in conversation and in a letter (9 August 2000), about her roles in the physical production of Preview. Of a predecessor to Preview, “Peggy had typed it…and [Anderson] wrote the content and ran off copies”, (in note 2, p. 287). Anderson remarks, in a 1945 letter to A.J. M. Smith, “I feel quite bitter about Preview's attitude to Peggy. She spent hours and hours mimeographing the magazine carrying paper etc. and actually called most of the meetings. She never got a word of thanks.”(note 4, p. 287.) Page was critical of Contemporary Verse in Preview, but, in a letter to Alan Crawley, she offered a “private retraction”. Her letter of resignation, to John Sutherland, from Northern Review, was published in the October-November 1947 issue. (note 26, p. 291-2) Her comment, in a September, 1949 letter to Sybil Hutchison, observes, ironically, of “The 'little magazines.’ Nothing in the world could sound more pitiful to the uninitiated than that term.” (p. viii)
In “Works Cited”, there are “Archival Sources” and “Published and Other Sources”. A shorter version of Chapter 10 “Among Masses: Dorothy Livesay and English Canadian Leftist Magazine Culture of the Early 1930s” appeared in the “Materializing Canada Issue” of Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (1999), pp. 183-212. A longer version of the second section of the conclusion appeared in the Dorothy Livesay special issue “Dorothy Livesay’s Perspectives, Retrospectives, and Prospectives: ‘A Putting Down of Roots’ in CVII,’” Contemporary Verse 2, 21.3 (1999), pp. 65-78.
This is a volume in the Studies in Book and Print Culture, Series Editor: Leslie Howsam. Irvine, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University, is also the author of The Canadian Modernists Meet (University of Ottawa Press, 2005) in their Reappraisals: Canadian Writers Series.
Another title in the Studies in Book and Print Culture is New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978, by Janet B. Friskney, (University of Toronto Press, 2007). An Appendix with “New Canadian Library Titles, 1958-1978” is provided. Appendix B covers copies of “NCL Titles Sold Annually, 1958-1979”. As well, Appendix C has “Titles Proposed but Not Included in the NCL to 1978”. A complementary text is “Publishing by Women”, by Carole Gerson, “Publishing For Distinct Readerships: Publishing And Communities”, in History of The Book In Canada, Volume Three, 1918-1980 (University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 318- 322). While women participated in the material production of print, from 1918-1980, they were proportionally fewer as identified by imprint. Those who were visible, did so in relation to woman-specific topics or though books for children. Much “rarer” has been the woman-controlled publishing house. In general terms, publishing books was more stable than periodicals. There is Table 13.1 “Labour in the Book Trade: Divisions by Sector, Occupation, and Gender in the Printing Trades in Selected Canadian Cities, 1921-1961” (pp. 364-5) to reinforce this inevitable conclusion.
Irvine does not deal with the “menial” jobs women undertook, not always acknowledged in the masthead; most of the non-editorial tasks were clerical in nature, although he admits these too have been marginalized as female-gendered labour in the masculinist little-magazine historiography.
When I taught a course in Canadian Literature while a post-graduate student at the University of Ottawa, in the 1970s, our text was Canadian Anthology, Selected and edited by Carl F. Klinck and Reginald E. Watters (Toronto, Gage Educational Publishing Limited). Klinck was the editor of the Literary History of Canada and Watters compiled A Checklist of Canadian Literature. While the majority of authors represented in the course survey were males, which nobody questioned, when I taught contemporary authors, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, I was asked why there were more women than male authors on the book-titles prospectus. My reply was that I was surprised at being asked why there were more books by females listed, because it was not a conscious choice. Rather, the predominant contemporary fiction writers just happened to be women.
The same complaint was received when I published the first issue of The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, (Fall 1983). I had selected submissions by Dorothy Speak, “Crinolines”; Ann Knight, “Roadsongs”; Genni Gunn, “The Writer” and “The Artist”; Ilona Marchaelle, “Promises, Promises” and “Happy Anniversary”; Pat Allan, “Death— Then & Now”; and Jean E. Veevers, “Prairie Born”. There were reviews of The Moment Is All: Selected Poems 1944-83, by Ralph Gustafson; Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952-83, by Milton Acorn, and Just Off Main, by Gary Hyland. However, the contributors (myself included) were female and it was cause for complaint.
I marginally attended the League annual general meeting in Saskatoon. I was “with child” and/or the child was with me, so I was constantly interrupted, by another biological imperative. When I truly came “into” the League of Canadian Poets, (or they came into me) it was attendance at the 1987 “Illegitimate Positions: Women & Language” panel, an experience that opened doors for me. It was presented May 8, 1987, at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. The Feminist Caucus, with Cathy Ford, Sue McMaster, Erin Mouré, Penn Kemp, Patience Wheatley, Neile Graham, and others welcomed me. The Living Archives Series became my life-line, when I transcribed their enlightening observations from an oral tape recording. The Caucus Committee Chairs have come and gone. I volunteered (or was volunteered) to serve as Chair. Needless to add, I have stayed. I have contributed to four chapbook panels, on Memory, on Reviews, on Belles Lettres, and another on Erotics. With the anticipated acquisition of the Feminist Caucus papers, in 2009, by the National Archives in Ottawa, at least this portion of literary history will reap rewards for future scholars.
Anne Burke
Review of Minetown, Milltown, Railtown: Life in Canadian Communities of Single Industry, by Rex A. Lucas, introduction by Lorne Tepperman (Oxford University Press, 2008) 406 pp., paper $26.95, endnotes, Indexed.
First published in 1971, this inaugural study deserves to be updated by contemporary social scientists.
Three detailed community studies were done, with the social characteristics detailed. In each study, intensive interviews were carried out, with a random sample of the population in the case of Minetown and representative samples in the cases of Railtown and Milltown. Figure 1 is a representation of the occupational order of railtown. Table 1 charts Medical services by size of community, 1968. Table 2 offers Point of contact used by urban companies in the recruitment of new young employees.
The study is dedicated to Carl Addington (1887-1964) and introduced by Lorne Tepperman, who chooses to present Lucas as: “poor and homosexual in a single-industry town”, likening the result of his research to a prize-winning novel.
Lucas admits the literature on Canadian communities of single industry is “uneven”, and this factor alone justifies the inclusion of his seminal study in the Wynford series of titles representing significant milestones in Canadian literature, thought, and scholarship.
The Introduction offers a survey of reviews, including John Porter, Canadian Historical Review, the John Porter of The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto, 1965) labeled as “perhaps Canada’s pre-eminent sociologist of the era”, but who has since come under criticism for flaws in his research technique.
Lucas defines “urban” and “urbanization”, dealing with types of small communities, based on a population of 30,000, or less. He then proceeds through: “Stage I Construction of the Community”; “II The Recruitment of Citizens”; “III Transition”; and “Stage IV Maturity”. Lucas summarizes: “The Organization of Work”; “Occupation, Stratification, and Association”; “Interpersonal Relationships”; “Recreation; Goods and Services”; “Healing Arts”; “The School”; “Churches”; “Social Conflict and Social Control”; “Marriage and Migration of Youth”; concluding with “Some Social Implications”.
Of the latter, Lucas examines: “The One-Industry Community in Canada”, “The Universality of Communities of Single Industry”, “Isolation”; “Single Industry”, “Fishing, Farming and Commercial Communities”; “The Community of Dominant Industry”, “Community Size”, “Personal Relationships”; “Community Services”, “The Community of Single Industry and Canada”.
This edition is rounded out, with a map of approximate locations of the Communities studied in this book; Notes on Data and Sources, (such as published and unpublished studies, magazine and newspaper articles, census, directory, and statistical material), as well as a Name Index, and a Subject Index.
Anne Burke
Review of Best Groundcovers & Vines for the Prairies, by Hugh Skinner & Sara Williams (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd, 2008) 234 pp. paper $24.99 Indexed.
This text, with full colour photographs and a map, is suitable for neophytes as well as experienced gardeners, who face the challenging growing conditions of gardens in the Canadian prairies and the northern Great Plains of the United States. Some of the options are: designing by habitat as well as by function. The step-by-step process involves purchasing, planting, and maintaining gardens. There are details about getting ready; purchase and planting; propagating, and maintaining. Proper preparation includes spacing. Propagation involves seed; suckers, divisions, and layers; hardwood and softwood cuttings. Maintenance calls for mulching, pruning, fertilizing, and pest and disease control.
This is an able follow-up to Best Trees and Shrubs for the Prairies by the same authors. Skinner has a B.S.A. in Horticulture from the University of Manitoba and Williams, who is a retired Horticultural Specialist at the University of Saskatchewan, has a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Horticulture from the University of Saskatchewan. She is the author of Creating the Prairie Xeriscape and of In a Cold Land: Saskatchewan’s Horticultural Pioneers and co-author of Perennials for the Plains and Prairies.
There is a Glossary of Terms, a Bibliography for further reading, and an Index.
Anne Burke
Review of Wiser Pills, by Richard Stevenson (Calgary, Alberta: Frontenac House Press, 2008) 95 pp. paper. $15.95.
Author of twenty-three books and four chapbooks, Stevenson does not disappoint us with the current collection of forty-one poems, divided into three sections.
In the first section, “Rock, Scissors, Paper”, about a children’s game, like others, such as “Playing Possum”, he defends a tomboy (“Doreen”) for being a lesbian; a fish caught with a hook on a line (“The Knife”); adolescent acting-out behaviour (“Mike’s Acid Story” and “A Room Full of Balloons.”). However, the heart of this section is a thorough examination and celebration of the “turned-on, tune-in and drop-out” psychology of the psychedelic Sixties
Like the Romantic period poets who relied on laudanum (opium) for inspiration, Stevenson writes, from inside experience, about visual and auditory hallucinations; and like their poetry, his work sanctions the “Brave New World” of Aldous Huxley, especially the function of “soma” on the human brain. In “Wiser Pills”, an Air Cadet, “a lone crow”, (among “a murder of crows”, that is, “the older boys” of his squadron) answers why he swallows the drugs, “once to belong”, “again, to be strong”, and third “to defy…their lie.” In a companion poem, “Wiser Pills (Reprise)”, the poet evokes the Fifties and popular culture, such as “Patty Duke/ and Donna Reid”, sanitized black-and-white television icons of propriety; the Sixties rock and pop music, of The Jefferson Airplane, The Dead, Jim Morrison; the so-called British band “invasion” of the Beatles, with their embedded messages about LSD in “Lucy in the Sky [with Diamonds].”
Alcohol was once the drug of choice, “Get drunk. Drink me to disappear now. / You are getting smaller. So small.” Alice Cooper and acid-rock will represent a major shift. In relation to the little pills that Alice in Wonderland was offered, Stevenson attempts to uncover what she “really found on the other side of the looking glass.” Further, he portrays a generation which believed that drug-induced transcendental consciousness was intended “to get us down every rabbit hole pore of our bodies.” The poet personifies these speaking “pills”, with “little Alice [in Wonderland]” voices, promising “to make us wiser, make us taller.” Rather, they are sanctified, to intone Christ’s Last Supper, “Take this in remembrance of me,” the act of transubstantiation in the sacrament of Holy Communion, when the Messianic figure Doctor Timothy O’Leary was once society’s leader of the “Baby Boomers”, post-war prosperity accompanied by spiked fertility rates, before the advent of Free Love made possible by the birth control pill.
Like William Blake’s “grains of sand” in the hand and the soap operatic program “Days of Our Lives”, like “grains of sand / poured through [the] hourglass”, the poet views us “all gathered”, in prime herd mentality, to fit Spandex work-out uniforms. The image of “the little engine that could” derived from a children’s book and combined with the philosophy of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am” is evident in the line, “I think I can, I think I am, I think I, I think, I—”. The human body, composed of nerve synapses, acting as conduits, “the ganglion”, is compared with steam engines, the roundhouse, and steel track, except they are fueled by “the same angst”. For this reason, we cause our own escape from both mind and body, thus “the ghost…can’t find us.”
In the section “An Exercise In Alchemy”, the poet offers a series of work poems which focus on the work place as convenience store, school, and government, when he was employed as a stock boy, a supply teacher / relief janitor, a noxious weed inspector, and on, occasion, university student and poet. He expresses empathy for the everyday, yet unforgettable, characters, “Bob” (“Making an Angel for Bob”) who suffers a nervous breakdown; “Charlie” (“The Day Charlie Got Fired”) on “two tabs of acid”; “Mrs. Nash” (“Mr. and Mrs. Nash”) who has the distinction of being “the oldest, / daffiest cashier on the floor.”; “Alberta (“Albert’s Story”) a spy “sent down from central office”; “Big Al (“Big Al’s Trick”) a school grounds’ keeper. Of “Gus”, “The truth is he was bored, and so was I” (“Grunt”). He is able to make their case convincingly because— and in spite of— his own wrongful dismissal. The acronym “FUBAR” stands for “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition”, a fitting motto for this world. He does not view them through rose-coloured glasses. For example, for his fellows, “Poetry begins and ends with dirty limericks” (“Grunt”). Further, unlike the poet, “[Howie] never has to eat words.” (“Howard’s Teeth”).
The third and final section entitled “Body Sculpture”, deals with the contemporary obsession with exercise, which has turned unwitting participants into “New Hydes” (as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). To counter this search for eternal youth, which he criticizes, is a focus on mania (“Insomniac In a Cold Snap”), death due to brain tumor (“This Is Just to Say”) and an elegy, “First Funeral, In Memoriam: P.V. Stevenson”, all the faults that flesh is to air to. Among his many gifts is Stevenson’s ear for song lyrics, authentic speech patterns, musical cadence and intonation, regular (and irregular) rhythm. These talents are evident in his tour de force “Canada Geese Nest Site, Return Engagement”, in which he imagines geese (well, one gander in particular, capable of public speaking, when introduced by a carnival barker. The poet says his inspiration was a sign at Henderson Lake Park, which claimed: “…these geese are here for your viewing pleasure.” His performance of this poem at the Jubilee Auditorium during the inaugural “Alberta Arts Day” on September 6th brought down the house.
Anne Burke
Review of Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings, by Nora Foster Stovel (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008) 406 pp. Indexed paper $29.95.
It is important to remember that what Laurence complains of, in her interview with Graeme Gibson, partner of Margaret Atwood, was absolutely true, that “some of my work, particularly The Fire-Dwellers, received some real put-downs from a number of male reviewers. They didn’t even say it was a bad novel, it was just that, if anybody like Stacey existed, they just would rather not know” (p. 350, note 21). For example, one of my professors of Education at McArthur College, Queen’s University, demanded to know if I had read some new novel “about fire.” When I admitted that I had, he asked me what “was in it”, because his otherwise contented, albeit house-bound wife, was “totally different” after reading it. Female academics like Helen Buss defended her as their topic of research, when (all-male) examiners opined that work on D.H. Lawrence was legitimate, while the sound-alike Margaret Laurence (who?) a pretender, was “nothing but a housewife”. So little-regarded too were (female) part-time graduate students, ably balancing class work with home and family, relegated to those who had no chance at “serious” tenure-track careers. Thus, the ascent of the Independent Scholar was birthed.
Foster Stovel not only serves up a credible examination of Laurence’s oeuvre, in relation to the contexts of Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman, she also manages to punctuate the text with allusions to recent female theorists of autobiography, as well as comments on characters like “Rachel and Stacey [who] do not engage in specifically feminist activity...they do exhibit a budding feminist consciousness that is easy to overlook when a 1990s reader focuses on their enmeshment in patriarchal domestic arrangements and mindsets” (p. 349-50, note 20.)
Much has been made of “Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel” held at the University of Calgary in 1982, which I attended. It is true that Laurence “topped List A”, heading the best 100 books and she book-ended List B, framing the top ten Canadian novels, with The Stone Angel as number one and The Diviners as number ten.” (p. 342, note 1). It needs to be mentioned that this may have had as much to do with their paperback publication in McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library Series (edited by Malcolm Ross) as it did with their intrinsic merit, a possibility Margaret Laurence vociferously pointed out at the time. Foster Stovel offers a fresh evaluation of Laurence’s books for children which may have been dismissed for lack of serious critical attention. She considers Laurence’s journalistic and semi-journalistic essays, in newspaper, magazine, and academic publications. There is an extensive list of “Works Cited”, from which passages are paraphrased in the body of the text, and citations of these sources appear in the substantial end notes.
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Foster Stovel states she had access to the Laurence estate containing unpublished material, including an unfinished novel “Dance on the Earth” (not to be confused with her memoir of the same title) and final journal. She examined the Laurence manuscripts at McMaster University (holograph notes and drafts for the unfinished novel were not available until 1997, when they formed an accession of material in the Margaret Laurence Fonds, of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, at McMaster University’s Mills Memorial Library); and her correspondence and papers, containing notes, typescripts of novels, and requests for revisions, at York University.
(I recall asking a York University archivist for permission to consult the newly-acquired collection some years earlier and receiving a curt response to the effect there was a twenty-five caveat.) Furthermore, this critic reviewed issues of Annals of the Black and Gold (stored in the Margaret Laurence Home in Neepawa) in which Laurence published poems and stories. Other juvenilia were contained in Vox, (for which Laurence served as assistant editor) at the University of Winnipeg and the Manitoban archived in the University of Manitoba Library. Foster Stovel cites the original introduction to Long Drums and Cannons (which was not published in the 1968 edition but is quoted by Foster Stovel in her introduction to the 2001 edition.) She cites the occasions when Laurence was inspired to compose the African stories, including one not included in standard Laurence bibliographies and which has not been discussed by critics, in spite of its significance. She refers to recollections by a former mayor of Neepawa-and-a- contemporary of Margaret Laurence and by another source who remarked that Laurence displayed talent in high-school English class. As such, Foster Stovel builds on the existing critical infrastructure of biographies by James King, Donez Xiques, and Lyall Powers, as well as editions of Laurence’s letters by John Lennox, Ruth Panofsky, Paul Socken, and J.A. Wainwright.
This critic is correct in that Laurence “predicted that The Diviners, the final of her five Manawaka novels, would be her last.” (p. 265) However, Laurence made these predictions about other junctures in her career, much to the dismay of post-graduate students whose theses and dissertations took these predictions to be fact. In this instance, she was prescient Though the novel was intended to wind up all the threads of the Manawaka cycle, who is to say it would have been “Laurence’s grand finale, her farewell to fiction[?]” (p. 269) That she intended the unfinished novel to be the finale of the Manawaka cycle is clear; what is not is why she was incapable of completing it, leaving this issue to conjecture by scholars. Foster Stovel weighs in, by advancing the theory, based on Laurence’s notes and letters, it was too painful and too personal, not removed geographically and temporally from her life, from which she was seeking refuge. Yet, Laurence retained hope that she was merely putting aside the project “temporarily” to work on her memoirs and “let it [the novel] simmer on the back burner.” (p. 281) It could be an interesting experiment if some writer can be found to finish this novel (as Jane Austen enthusiasts have done) and/or to complete a sequel, like Gone With the Wind, Mitchell’s classic novel.
What I would like to add is, that while Laurence “mastered” (not gender-neutral) the full extent of mother-daughter relationships, at least in fiction, what escaped and ultimately silenced her was her attempt at a novel which Foster Stovel says “would have highlighted that maternal-filial relationship even more centrally.” (p. 273) Instead, Laurence celebrated the matrilineal legacy in her memoir of the same name, “Dance on the Earth.” Foster Stovel muses, “Perhaps she was unable to get inside the heads of people as closed-minded as [Minister] Jake Flood (or Sam Buick).” (p. 281) Laurence had written male characters into her novels at a time when it was widely accepted that, while male authors could concoct brilliant female characters which we should accept without questioning, female authors, if they wrote anything other than “bosom-ripping” romances, were incapable of writing genuinely authentic male characters. Was this a factor in the delay, mitigated by health issues, the death of her brother from pancreatic cancer, her own depression? I have a difficult time reading about her life reduced to “addictions, alcohol and nicotine.” One of the themes which reverberated for me was her profound sense of patriarchy, by which it felt as if your father, if he could, would kill you. Here we find the male principle, incarnated as overbearing grandfather; the undependable, intermittent lover; the person of authority; whether that was a paternalistic publisher, an English Professor who finds you wanting or a husband who is indifferent to his wife’s career aspirations, to the extent it necessitated divorce (in order for her brilliance to shine) and her endurance of precarious economic challenges.
Laurence regarded all her books as “gifts of grace”. As Foster Stovel points out, Laurence explains, in her memoir, “I’ve never been able to force a novel. I have always had the sense of something being given to me. You can’t...force into being something that isn’t there.” Rather, she left behind notes about the Holy Spirit which was, in her opinion, at least partially, female. When she tried to write in the name of the Father and the Son, what she successfully produced was written in the name of the Holy Female.
Anne Burke
Review of Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery, by Elizabeth Waterston (Oxford University Press: Don Mills, Ontario, 2008) 248 pp. Indexed Cloth $24.95.
Waterston, coeditor with Mary Henley Rubio of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volumes I to V (University of Toronto Press), draws on her intimate knowledge of the Montgomery canon, as well as the novelist’s scrapbooks, diaries, photographs, correspondence, and even business ledgers.
As a result, she has produced “A Reader’s Guide” to twenty-two books of fiction by Montgomery, accompanied by twenty-four black-and white illustrations; Notes, Appendix Containing “Additions to the Manuscript of Chapter 15, Anne of Green Gables”; Works Cited: “Books Read by L.M. Montgomery”; Secondary Sources in “Interpretations and Backgrounds; and Acknowledgments. With a critical “Introduction” and “Conclusion”, Waterston fashions a portrait of an “Island” girl, who outgrew formulaic writing, married a Presbyterian minister, and resettled in Ontario. Montgomery’s “obsessive” reading, “charming” books, and strong work ethic resulted in the publication of “two books every three years, over a thirty year period until 1938, all of them still in print in the twenty-first century.” (p. 6)
Beginning with Anne of Green Gables (1908, Waterston outlines the biographical origins of the orphaned Anne Shirley, as well as the many literary antecedents of this character, based on examples of the orphan motif. The sequel Anne of Avonlea (1909) found a place in the genre of children’s literature; it contains details of teaching techniques, but its author was leading a double life. She suffered from depression despite her commercial success as an author. The next title Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910) was first published as “Una of the Garden”, a five-part serial, in a “women’s magazine” in 1908. In revising the text, the novelist incorporates her interest in psychology and experiences of her broken romances. In The Story Girl (1911), Montgomery was working through her memories of family anecdotes. In Chronicles of Avonlea (1912) she tries her hand at fiction for adult readers, by domesticating Biblical archetypes. In The Golden Road (1913) she compensates for her less than ideal marriage by employing writing as an emotional outlet she will increasingly require. In Anne of the Island (1915), Montgomery set out to write a bildungsroman, about the status of women. The model for “Redmond College” was Dalhousie University, an institution which awarded its first B.A. to a woman in 1885. In Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), the heroine reveals she is pregnant. (Montgomery, then forty-one years old, discovered that she had become pregnant again.) In Rainbow Valley (1919), there is reflected the conflicts of organized religion. Montgomery sought escape from her delusional husband. (It is thought that he suffered from a bipolar disorder or manic depression.) As for Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920), a culling of stories by her previous publisher caused a dispute over royalties and a lawsuit on behalf of the author’s intellectual property. Waterston examines the stories closely as part of Montgomery’s published fiction, but also in terms of their recurring motifs, their re-use in her later writings, and in relation to stages of Montgomery’s own life. In Rilla of Ingleside (1921), Montgomery recorded her impressions of the horrors of World War I, from the point of view of the Canadian response. In Emily of New Moon (1923), she introduced a new heroine to question patriarchy and socialization. Sequels appeared in Emily Climbs (1925) and Emily’s Quest (1927). The latter is a künsterroman. Montgomery used her dreams as material for The Blue Castle (1926), when she focused on adult rebellion against conformity. In Magic for Marigold (1929) Montgomery attempted to overcome a shift in reading taste, after she was paid a kill fee for some stories. She was interested in the new theory of child psychology offered by Jean Piaget. In A Tangled Web (1931), she was inspired by her grandmother’s old Woolner jug to write an adult story. In Pat of Silver Bush (1933) she recalled her great-aunt Mary Lawson, “Judy Plum”, the mainstay of the Silver Bush household. Book sales were down. The Great Depression had intervened. Montgomery lost investment of her royalties in the stock market crash of 1929. Family and friends did not repay her for their loans. Nevertheless, her immediate family was depending on her to pay for tuition fees, for example. In Mistress Pat (1935), she relied on her faithful older readers and this book was written while Montgomery’s husband was hospitalized. In Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), the author capitalized on the success of a 1934 moving picture of Anne of Green Gables and the public’s enthusiasm for a new sequel. The film had brought no royalties to the author, due to the fact copyright belonged to her previous publisher. When Montgomery lacked raw material, she re-used her stories published in the Family Herald. Waterston explores the epistolary form, old-fashioned but popular. In Jane of Lantern Hill (1937), Montgomery used a portrait of herself as recorded in her journals. The Canadian Home Journal published her short story called “Tomorrow Comes” a prototype of Jane. By Christmas 1936, Montgomery felt “imprisoned and smothered.” (p. 204) She managed to write the last chapter…, “my heart bleeding at every word.” (p. 205) In Anne of Ingleside (1939), Montgomery used her own home at “Journey’s End” for a fictional home called “Ingleside.” This was the last work that the author finalized and saw through the press. She was nearly suicidal due to family problems and reiterated a cry, “Oh, motherhood is awful—motherhood is awful!” (p. 208) Furthermore, she was “manoeuvred out” of a leadership role in the Canadian Authors Association. No more Montgomery novels were published after 1939. Montgomery died in 1942. The fragmented stories she left behind were posthumously published, as The Road to Yesterday, in 1974.
Waterston is fully familiar with her subject and conversant with how those autobiographical persons, both great and small, figure in Montgomery’s fiction. Of Anne of Windy Poplars,
Tension is heightened by the fact that the young suitor is “the new head of Modern Languages Department at Redmond and dreadfully clever.” Dr. Carter comes to dinner, “undeniably handsome and distinguished-looking, with crisp dark hair, brilliant dark eyes and silver-rimmed glasses.” It is a recognizable picture of Montgomery’s former professor at Dalhousie University, Dr. Archibald MacMechan. In his Headwaters of Canadian Literature (1924) MacMechan had paid small attention to the former student whose writings were very much better known than his own. Now Montgomery lets Anne dismiss him, recalling memories of her days at Redmond, where he seemed “a rather pompous young bore.” (p. 196)
Waterston ably situates Montgomery’s vision within the novelist’s growth as an author, as well as the historical background of war and economic collapse.
Of Anne of Ingleside,
The last stage of the process of producing the book was tainted by real unhappiness…Montgomery wrote,…It is surprising how one can grow used to intolerable things—and tolerate them.” She survived…Immediately she added in an ominous return from fiction to fact, “Hitler has seized Czechoslovakia and a new scare is in the offing.” (p. 214)
As such, Montgomery epitomizes a woman struggling with disappointment, at times, even despair. The descriptions are unflinching and visceral.
Spasms of depression recurred. She [Montgomery] called for help from the doctor who lived across the street. He gave her a hypodermic injection in the hip, “to tone up the nervous system” (May 3, 1938). More hypodermics, May 8 and May 16, did little to allay her trouble: “I am possessed with a desire to die,” she wrote part way through the treatments (May 5, 1938). May ended: “A terrible, terrible May.” (p. 208)
Waterston not only recreates the shifting moods of her subject, but also draws out the cyclical stages of writer’s block and “flashes” or bursts of inspiration (epiphanies), moments of clarity and insight. Of A Tangled Web,
Montgomery had reached this point in her novel around midsummer of 1930. Her work had stalled. “I cannot write and that unfinished book haunts me,” she wrote in her journal on July 5, 1930. In August she was still admitting “Am trying desperately to catch up with my new book.” Like Drowned John, she must have muttered rhythmically “By asterisk and by asterisk” and “by more asterisks and very lurid ones.” (p. 167)
Waterston is author of Kindling Spirit: Anne of Green Gables (ECW Press: Toronto, 1993). Montgomery enthusiasts will want to read Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, a new biography by Mary Henley Rubio (Doubleday) available in November of 2008. On the 100-year anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables, it is fitting that “Canada and Japan team for Green Gables film: Finding Anne inspired by famous fictional character”, by Marianne White (Calgary Herald, Monday, 4 August, 2008).