Ira Nadel, Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994). 160. Illustr. $14.95 paper. Gary Boire, Morley Callaghan: Literary Anarchist (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994). 131. Illustr. $14.95 paper. ECW’s Canadian Biography Series has set parameters for itself that fall somewhere between a chapter in a larger literary study of an author’s work and a full scale warts-and-all study of an artist’s life. Any satisfaction in reading these books depends, of course, on what the reader is after in the first place. The entries in the series can only offer more and less: more than has been gathered together in one book up to this point, and less than the fully detailed and colourful narrative of a personality that we usually expect from a biography. An added limitation is that many of the artists under scrutiny are still alive or have died so recently that there are still living relatives and friends. This raises ethical issues involving such things as invasions of privacy and betrayals of confidence. Who wants to bring into the open personal and private matters that the principals have taken pains to hide (sometimes from each other) for decades? Libraries and archives keep manuscript collections under wraps for just such reasons. The strategy that any biographer working in the series has to adopt is to confine the major portion of the study to the artist’s public life. Any information of a private and personal nature can be worked in only with permission or with the finesse of insinuation or hints. Finally, a biography should reveal something of the complexity and depth of the subject’s person ality. These are often not conspicuous if one is limited to the public record. Writing such a book is a little like sweeping up broken glass: you hope you got it all and you have to watch where you step. One can almost feel Ira Nadel and Gary Boire straining to get more room in their biographies of Cohen and Callaghan. The facts of the public lives and works take up most of the space. Characteristics of personality poke up from underneath, but there is just no way to grab hold of them. What happens is that the biographer looks for a kind of crazy-glue to create some sense of consistency and coherence in the narrative. This can be a term, a theme, or a theory of art. Boire chooses the rather problematical term “anarchist” for his theme and his theory of art, while Nadel uses the term “neoromanticism” for the same purposes. The terms are helpful as far as they need to be. However, there are those nagging passages that suggest so much more that needs to be disclosed. Cohen evidently has had difficulty in his relationships with women and an active drug life, but Nadel can only hint at possible underlying attitudes or causes. Boire needs more room to investigate the con-man in Callaghan, but he has to be satisfied with his 486 word “anarchist” as the closest one can get in a few pages to describe a relationship between personality and philosophy. Readers expecting more will find all of this frustrating, but given the limits of the scope of this series, each one will necessarily become an “appreciation” in the best sense of that word. Ira Nadel sets out to explore the union between Cohen’s life in and out side of his art. Given that Cohen has described his art as just having an effect, “it’s hard to say what it’s getting at, I’m not sure it’s getting at anything but an effect ... ,” the possibilities are intriguing. Nadel’s task seems to be something like trying to catch smoke in a net. Nevertheless he does a credible job of establishing the influences on the young Cohen and showing how experiences tempered and twisted the early idealism into new shapes without actually breaking it. He also does a good job of fusing the private poet and the public performer into a single artist more admired in Europe than in America. Clearly Cohen has crossed a number of thresholds and transformed himself more than...