Irving Layton: The Poet and His Critics, edited and with an introduction by Seymour Mayne (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978). viii, 291. Cloth, $12.95. Paper, $8.95 Stephen Scobie, Leonard Cohen (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1978). xii, 192. Paper, $4.95 Seymour Mayne’s collection of critical articles on Irving Layton’s poetry is a most fascinating miscellany. In it we see unfolding the doubts, loves, fears, pretensions, hostilities, and enthusiasms of several generations of critics. One has the impression that the field of Canadian criticism was tame until reviewers had to deal with Irving Layton, for Layton deliberately sought confrontation, thus obliging his critics to examine their own attitudes. This collection of reviews, dating from 1945 to 1976, has far more emotional content than one would expect: sometimes suppressed, sometimes paraded, but always in reaction to the prises de position of the exuberant Mr. Layton. In his introduction, Seymour Mayne poses the question which must arise in the mind of anyone reading this book: What is it about Layton’s writing that elicits such a fluctuating and restrained critical response ? Why, it must be asked, were his critics unable to address themselves fully to his work ? And why does a perennial distaste make itself apparent in all three decades which span his career? (P. 1) If there is an answer to this question, it is only to be arrived at by lengthy consideration of all of Layton’s work, as well as of the considerable body of criticism which has arisen in response — and since Layton has not been selective about his writings, but has apparently published everything, there is now so much of it in existence that few of his readers have really been able to keep pace with his production. Even without the central mystery of Irving Layton, that queasy something which lies at the heart of his thought, most critics would surely have a bad conscience about him. Even if they have ploughed through everything he has published, some of it has probably remained undigested. And an honest critic will ask himself if this is because some of the poems should never have been published, or if it is because he himself is ill-prepared to do his job. Reactions vary, as this collection shows. The portrait drawn of Layton is much more complete than what one person could have produced, for one sees here, as nowhere else, how the man simply decided to become a poet and then went to work on it. He campaigned like a pretty girl who has decided to get into television. He had the aptitudes, and if others had them as well (or better) no matter, for he had more energy. In the beginning he published his own books at the rate of one a year, then went to work to publicize them. 375 Layton’s energy is reflected in the tides of critical enthusiasm or indigna tion, and the collected criticism is particularly interesting because it charts the ebb and flow of opinion during his early period. One reads the reactions of established and scholarly critics beside those of the Beat generation, the former trying hard to be objective and reasonable, the latter apparently trying not to be.¡The first review in the collection was written by A. M. Klein in 1945. In it he speaks of “ neat cerebration” and “double-jointed wit.” He gives Layton his qualified approval and remarks that his “Jewishness manifests itself more in his approach to a subject than in the subject itself” (p. 25). It is an honest, cautious review. One senses in it the man who does not want to be proved wrong by posterity when he says, “ It does seem to us that the evocation of Christ, in the poem of a Jew, and of one who is described as ‘Marxist in outlook’, lacks conviction” (p. 26). Then this is followed by two brief reviews by Harry Roskolenko, admiring Layton’s “Marxism” (pp. 27-28). It must be a surprise to the Marxists of the eighties to learn that Layton was ever a Marxist. There are six reviews by Northrop Frye, spread over a decade, eminently reasonable and fair, and...