Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life by Elspeth Cameron

Abstract

and aggressive and defensive, I would suggest, because the author expects a significant proportion of its real audience to be hostile and contemptuous. Literary theory does not have a good name among the traditional practition­ ers of literary scholarship in Canada. (In the back issues of ESC, I can find only two or three articles which question, or propose alternatives to, the current paradigm of literary studies, and one of those had to be included as an “editor’s choice” because it did not fit standard patterns of evaluation.) However exciting and important Hutcheon’s ideas are — particularly those regarding the reader’s interactions with texts — the book has all the earmarks of a text written by a member of a splinter group, for other members of that group. Like any such use of language, one of its effects will be to reinforce the isolation of that group and their sense of being a persecuted and misunderstood minority. This is particularly unfortunate because these ideas are so important, and because it is precisely the members of our profession who are least likely to claw their way through the jargon and the stylistic infelicities of this book who might profit most from a serious engagement with such ideas. r u s s e l l h u n t / St. Thomas University Elspeth Cameron, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). 421. $24.95 doth Elspeth Cameron’s fine biography of Hugh MacLennan admirably demon­ strates the value of biography to the enterprise of literary scholarship, a value called into question by the prevailing climate of scholarly opinion which would relegate biographical scholarship to a peripheral, subliterary role. Cameron draws attention to this antibiographical bias in her preface. Of course, it would not be true to say that scholarly literary biography has been unhealthy over the past few decades. The work of Richard Ellmann on Yeats and Joyce, and Montreal’s own Leon Edel on Henry James, would attest, without looking further, to the great vitality of scholarly literary biography. Indeed, I think it could fairly be argued that these two men have advanced literary biography beyond the achievements of any previous generation of scholars. Nonetheless, it is true that prevailing scholarly opinion rather unreflectively assumes that the author bears an accidental and causal relationship to his work, rather than an essential and formal one. In this view the work of art is not an utterance, but an artifact, like potsherds or burial mounds which mutely attest to the cultural collectivity of some race or group. It is true that literary biography itself has not been free of silly excesses — 245 such as arguments to the effect that Shakespeare wrote comedies when he was happy and tragedies when he was sad. But such excesses are far more commonly found in polemics against biography than in biographical studies themselves. Shakespeare is, of course, the favourite example of opponents to literary biography since we know next to nothing about his life — indeed, we are not even dead certain about his identity. The case is very different with an author like Hugh MacLennan for whose existence and identity we have hundreds and perhaps thousands of witnesses. Even if they were lacking, there remains the happy but inconvenient circumstance that MacLennan is still amongst us in the flesh. Elspeth Cameron has not only written to the subject of her biography, she has spoken to him, seen him, and perhaps even touched him. Under such circumstances it is difficult to maintain — a sceptic might argue — the proper methodological distance between investigator and investigatee. The purist might go so far as to argue that the prospective biographer might do well to wait until his or her subject, and all who knew him, were dead and forgotten. Fortunately Cameron has not been discour­ aged by such considerations. Once we concede that novels, poems, and plays are not all written by the Holy Ghost, we are faced with the problem of what methodological relation­ ship the prospective biographer ought to establish between herself and her subject, the incarnate author. Cameron does not specifically address this issue, but she does resolve it in a straightforward...