A.M. Klein: An Annotated Bibliography by Zailig Pollock, Usher Caplan, and Linda Razmovits

Abstract

this was a live “body” which Raspa usefully resuscitates. Raspa’s charac­ terization of this relatively coherent body and his educative footnotes do much to reduce dramatically the opaqueness of Donne’s text for the modem reader. Not just Donne scholars can share the gain. This edition contributes substantially to our further understanding of the Catholicism that darkly shadowed Donne’s life. For Professor Raspa this very public book springs from the “personal compulsions” (xlii) of a born Catholic who would shed a formal Catholicism, but not the investment of essential Christian doctrines and history. The crux of Donne’s objections to Roman Catholicism is, first, the “spirituality of visions and sometimes asso­ ciated miracles” find, second, “the Catholic tradition of clerical obedience” (xlv). Donne whips the Jesuits for excessive obedience leading to subver­ sion, while he displays publicly his changed ecclesiastical allegiance. This public work expresses a converted self “still trying to convince himself that his religious convictions are settled” (xl). Students of Donne will continue to pore over the jigsaw puzzle of his life and works. Bald’s claim about 1607-1610— the years that included the fear and trembling of the Holy Sonnets, the apparent flirtation with selfannihilation underlying Biathanatos, and the often ungainly attempts to create an identity within the patronage system— suggests a thorough-going angst that could neither be muffled nor easily satisfied. Donne’s misunder­ stood “ambition” was a symptom, not a cause, of the search for a new public identity. His emergence publicly in print, for the first time substantially in Pseudo-Martyr, confesses a desperate need to find a stabilizing public confir­ mation of the self. This is the broader personal compulsion that ultimately engaged the full resources of his person. Professor Raspa’s edition helps us understand that moment when Donne first emerged in full public view. terry g . sherwood / University o f Victoria Zailig Pollock, Usher Caplan, and Linda Razmovits, A.M. Klein: An Anno­ tated Bibliography (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993). x, 390. $65.00. When in the winter of 1946 A.M. Klein received a questionnaire from Ray­ mond Souster that included the question, “Are there any writers you would name as having been undeservedly neglected?” Klein replied, “As for the neglected — you wring fin agony out of my heart— aren’t we all?” 1 In his case at least, posthumously, the neglect is being atoned for. The University of Toronto Press has been publishing The Collected Works: Beyond Sambation : Selected Essays and Editorials 1928-1955 1982, Short Stories 1983, 476 Literary Essays and Reviews 1987, and Complete Poems (2 vols.) 1990. The Notebooks and novels should appear shortly. As The Collected Works of A.M. Klein is a scholarly edition with tex­ tual notes one might ask, why this Bibliography? Primarily because it lists chronologically all Klein’s extensive newspaper writings, mainly in the Cana­ dian Jewish Chronicle, a weekly tabloid which under his editorship func­ tioned as a cultural voice as well as a news chronicle. Items first printed here are found in all four of the scholarly volumes so fair published, but a large number of journalistic pieces have not been reprinted. The list pro­ vides a sketch of Klein’s everyday concerns. The Annotated Bibliography also devotes sections to his creative work— poetry, fiction, translations— which gives it a useful completeness. Unfortunately these listings are alphabetical and writings so listed that first appeared in the CJC are simply withdrawn from the “Contribution to Newspapers” section without cross-reference; this makes it needlessly difficult to relate the journalistic and creative writings. The two are related. If, as Klein wrote A.J.M. Smith, he wrote poetry to “reveal my civilization,” 2 he wrote journalism out of a need to defend that civilization against fascist savagery and to support his branch of it in Di­ aspora and later in its precarious new sanctuary, Israel. Klein’s writings are a defence against black nihilism. As third poetic generation Montrealer Leonard Cohen wrote in “Lines Prom My Grandfather’s Journal,” “Prayer makes speech a ceremony. To observe this ritual/in the absence of arks, altars, a listening sky: this is a rich/discipline.”3 Part Two of the...