Ed Jewinski, : Express Yourself Beautifully (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994). 144. $14.95 paper. Carol Roberts, Timothy Findley: Stories from a Life (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994). 135. $14.95 paper. Ed Jewinski’s Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully and Carol Roberts’s Timothy Findley: Stories from a Life are two recent additions to ECW’s series of biographies, and like other works in the series, they aim at providing the reader with an introduction to the literary output of a major figure in Canadian literature via that figure’s life, while eschewing anything that could be considered excessively scholarly. In steering relatively clear of the substantial academic attention that both Findley and Ondaatje have attracted, these books follow that series’ tradition of general accessibility; they appear to be directed primarily toward a junior undergraduate audi ence, yet they also provide material of considerable use to those who consider the biographical context of an author’s work to be relevant to its scholarly examination. Indeed, the principal differences between these two books (aside from the typos in Jewinski’s) can probably be attributed largely to the access each writer has allowed his biographer: Ondaatje has always been guarded about his private life, deftly deflecting inquiries, while Findley has always been far more accommodating — to the point where it has seriously interfered with his work. Roberts notes that Findley and his companion, William Whitehead, “have been more than generous with their time and interest, answering my many questions, sharing stories from their lives, and allowing me to choose photographs from their collection, read manuscript copies of new work, and spend two delightful days with them at Stone Orchard” (5). Jewinski, on the other hand, gives no evidence of having any direct contact whatsoever with Ondaatje. Nonetheless, in Jewinski’s book the focus is resolutely Ondaatje himself— the man, the poet, the film-maker, the son, the brother, the novelist, the award-winner, the husband, the public figure. The works themselves are treated as activities, productions of the writer, not as isolated works of literature. Here it is the process of writing, the raw materials and Ondaatje’s shaping of them — his poetics — that Jewinski explores, stitching together from interviews, recollections, and various other texts a pastiche of the artist at work. More than anyone else, Jewinski relies on Ondaatje’s first wife, Kim, and Ondaatje’s brother, Christopher. Through the former (whose contribution appears to have been unusually generous) the book gets as close as it ever does to Ondaatje the man; the latter’s memoir, The Man-Eater of Punanai, provides much background material, and often a counterpoint for 243 Ondaatje’s own more fanciful re-creations of his past. In this vein, however, the book’s lack of awareness of its own textuality is curious: while Jewinski notes that “[a]t times both [Michael and Christopher] stretch the facts,” much of the time Jewinski presents excerpts from Christopher’s text as if they were objective renderings of reality, and ignores both their textuality and their subjectivity — all the more remarkable considering Ondaatje’s own textual self-consciousness. The narrative strategies of biographer and biographee do, however, closely approach one another in the structuring of the book. Express Yourself Beau tifully is episodic and fragmentary — deliberately so, I’m certain — reflecting the fragmentary way Ondaatje has allowed himself to be revealed, and the obviously fragmentary nature of the material his biographer has had to work with: the processes by which both the biographer and the reader come to understand Ondaatje become contiguous. Moreover, the parallel extends to Ondaatje’s own life and work: as Jewinski notes, Ondaatje’s view of his fa ther has been “based on a series of fragmented insights, often devoid of a full context or background. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that in [many of Ondaatje’s] works ... the ‘truth’ of the protagonist’s life has to be pieced together from whatever is available— a newspaper clipping, an anecdote, a bit of gossip, a hazy memory, a vaguely worded letter” (13). This self-conscious perspective, where the reader must assemble an imagi native whole from the disjointed pieces provided by the narrator, where both narrator and reader similarly...