Earle Birney by Peter Aichinger, and: Spreading Time: Remarks on Canadian Writing and Writers; Book I: 1904–1949 by Earle Birney

Abstract

clericalism” (p. 203). As noted, the changes in the text are selectively re­ corded in the footnotes. Aside from their incompleteness, this method is not easy to follow, and the interested reader has to mark up his own text: how much more useful to have included excised material in square brackets and additions in italics. (I wonder to what extent this was the decision of the Press rather than the editor.) A useful index is provided, but no bibliography — a sensible omission in view of the nature of the book, the sufficient detail provided in the footnotes, and the enormous amount of bibliographical in­ formation on Shaw available elsewhere. In summary, and in answer to the question raised at the beginning of this review, Wisenthal’s edition is useful, but it falls short of what it might have been had it provided less introduction on Ibsen’s influence on Shaw, more Shaw by way of his criticisms of Ibsen’s plays, and full details, clearly set out, of changes made between the 1891 and 1913 texts. jam es wooDFiELD / University of New Brunswick Peter Aichinger, Earle Birney, Twayne’s World Authors Series, No. 538 (Boston: Twayne Publishers/G. K. Hall & Co., 1979). 180. $14.95 Earle Birney, Spreading Time: Remarks on Canadian Writing and Writers; Book I: igo4-ig4Q (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1980). xi, 163. $16.95 doth, $5-95 PaPer Earle Birney, by Peter Aichinger, is the third and the largest “series” book written on Birney.1 It aims to trace his development as a poet and writer of fiction, declining to deal except incidentally with his career as a teacher, scholar, and editor. Twenty-five years ago Desmond Pacey could classify Birney as a chronicler of modern Canada. Aichinger concludes his first chap­ ter, “Life and Times,” by declaring him a chronicler of the modem world — “a sort of literary anthropologist searching out and dragging home experi­ ences of the great world in an increasingly despairing attempt to show men that they really are farthest neighbours.” Between the two views lie a dozen books containing new poems, and the present study deals specifically with a great many of them. There are references to more than 150 of the 220 poems in Collected Poems, and to another twenty which do not appear in CP. There are thirteen references to Birney’s verse radio play, The Damnation of Vancouver; and the two novels, Turvey and Down the Long Table, are treated in some detail. If this were the best series book yet written on Birney, it would be so because of this volume of commentary. 520 After the first, chronologically-organized chapter, the remaining six are dedicated to such themes as “Love and Death,” “The Mythological Ele­ ment,” “Nature Poetry,” and “People and Politics.” In these sections, though sporadic attempts are made to keep the development in view, the organiza­ tion is basically analytic rather than synthetic. This gives an impression of diffuseness rather than focus. Also, individual works are referred to in several places in the book according to the theme being discussed. For instance, there are nine or ten references to each of “The Gray Woods Exploding” and “Joe Harris,” in each case sprinkled through five chapters; “David” appears twenty-seven times — in all chapters but “ Satire and the Comic Spirit.” Thus the commentary on individual works is fragmented. A more serious effect of this organization seems to be a tendency to Pro­ crustean interpretation of poems according to the theme of the chapter. In the chapter on “Nature Poetry,” for instance, Aichinger argues that Birney fits the pattern suggested by Frye: “the outstanding achievement of Cana­ dian poetry is in the evocation of stark terror.” I think he stumbles. I am not convinced, by the evidence he presents, that “Birney often dwells upon the theme of a terrifying natural world.” “Leaving the Park,” Aichinger suggests, presents “a frenetic and destructive Mankind” seeking to “escape the sensations of guilt and terror.” (Guilt, maybe; terror, no.) In “Atlantic Door,” Birney “derives a memento mori philosophy from the indifference of the ocean.” (Acceptable if the term “ memento mori philosophy” is taken very broadly.) In “ Maritime Faces” (a Pratt-like...