Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer's Workbook

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Inside Memory is a tantalizing autobiography, not an orderly survey. It
has its own order, however, offering reflections on human nature and the
craft of writing along with snatches from the author’s life.

Over the past 15 years, novelist and playwright Timothy Findley has
become one of Canada’s most celebrated writers. Read Inside Memory and
you’ll see why. Findley is at the height of his powers here as
raconteur and wordsmith.

At a pace that is leisurely but rarely dull, the memoir takes us
through his early career as an actor in Canada and abroad. In the early
1950s Thornton Wilder became his mentor and lifelong friend. “He was
all great teachers in one,” Findley writes.

Findley writes of his sexual orientation with a light, sure touch. He
claims to have been reconciled to it from the age of three. The problem
that began in his teens was not in himself but others: “People who
once had loved me, all at once despised me.”

For nearly 30 years, Findley and his partner, William Whitehead, have
lived in an old farmhouse near Cannington, Ontario. The area nourishes
Findley’s lyric gift and figures largely in the narrative.

The subtitle hints at craft, which is demonstrated as well as analyzed.
The memoir has the perfect timing of a good piece of theatre, with
hilarious anecdotes and perceptive sketches of people encountered on the
voyage. Take the story of Beatrice Lillie, who took one look at Findley
alone in an elevator and declined to get in. “Perhaps—somehow—she
guessed I was from Toronto.” Memory, as Findley observes, “keeps
delivering the past in brown-paper parcels done up with string and
marked ‘address of sender unknown’.”

Inside Memory stands as one of the best works in an impressive career.