A Public and Private Voice: Essays on the Life and Work of Dorothy Livesay ed. by Lindsay Dorney, Gerald Noonan, Paul Tiessen

Abstract

life. One look at Millie and her ten miserable siblings should have scorched the myth of the Happy Swain into ashes; but so few gave that look. Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls round its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art. (Signet ed. 129) Looking over a scene, not looking at it, was the picturesque habit. It may have sustained the Victorian English novelist; the camera may permit its continued practice today, but did it, does it enervate imagination? Ross has surveyed the imprint of the picturesque well. Like any survey worthy of publication, his gives rise to as many questions and issues as it addresses. 1. s. m a g l a r e n / University of Alberta Lindsay Dorney, Gerald Noonan, and Paul Tiessen, eds., A Public and Private Voice: Essays on the Life and Work of Dorothy Livesay (Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo Press, 1986). x, 140. $17.50 Dorothy Livesay’s career as a writer has been little short of astonishing. Graduate of the University of Toronto and the Sorbonne, sometime resident of Winnipeg, Toronto, Paris, Montreal, London, Vancouver, Zimbabwe, and Galiano Island, Marxist, socialist, and feminist, teacher, editor, critic, jour­ nalist, and author of twenty books of poetry from Green Pitcher (1928) to The Self-Completing Tree (1986), she has been active in almost every crucial phase of twentieth-century literary life in Canada. Almost as astonishing, if much less creditable, is the paucity of serious commentary on her work: a scattering of articles in the journals, a special issue of Room of One’s Own (1975), and an entry in the Annotated Bibliog­ raphy of Canada’s Major Authors (1983). No other Canadian writer of such magnitude and longevity has been accorded so little criticism. The embar­ rassing fact is that this collection of papers from a conference at the Uni­ versity of Waterloo in 1983 is the first book on Livesay’s work that can be added to the extensive and impressive shelf of her own books. In these circumstances it should not be surprising that A Public and Private Voice is sketchier than most conference publications. The more ambitious and widely ranging papers have, in this case, simply too much uncharted terrain to cover. The best papers here are the more sharply focused ones. The editors have made an effort to provide a context for understanding Livesay’s poetry by arranging the papers in a series that moves from over­ views of her career through discussions of her work in other genres to close examinations of certain aspects of her poems. The lead essay, David Arna112 son’s “Dorothy Livesay and the Rise of Modernism in Canada,” is intended to furnish the necessary historical perspective. It is not altogether credible as literary history, though perhaps the conference paper is an unsuitable vehicle for that demanding discipline. Arnason’s is a position paper, con­ sciously biased and provocative, by which he seeks to correct the putative overestimate of A. J. M. Smith and F. R. Scott as pioneers of modernist poetry in Canada: “The first books of modernist poetry broadly available to a reading public in Canada, and written by a Canadian poet who was to develop a substantial reputation, were Dorothy Livesay’s first two collections, Green Pitcher in 1928 and Signpost in 1932” (13). Arnason’s assumption that the book, or even the individual writer, is the principal agent of literary change seems to me suspect, at least where twentieth-century poetry is con­ cerned. The little magazine and the clique (or more politely, “movement” ) are perhaps more basic to the dynamics of modern literary culture. Amason does survey a gaggle of poets (Arthur Stringer, F. O. Call, Louise Morey Bowman, and others) who published modernist work in the 1920s or earlier, but he dismisses them as having had a negligible impact on their contem­ poraries — which is not the same, nor so self-evident, as saying that they have had a negligible impact on posterity. Arnason also makes much of Livesay’s exclusion from the landmark mod­ ernist anthology New Provinces in 1936. In fact, she was seriously...