Giving Canada a Literary History: A Memoir

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Klinck, who died in 1990, was generally acknowledged to be Canada’s
leading literary historian. In this memoir, more an account of his
researches than of his life, he tells the story of his efforts to
establish the study of Canadian literature on a firm historical basis, a
process culminating in the publication of The Literary History of Canada
with Klinck as its general editor. It is a tale well worth recording,
though it draws attention, unwittingly, to the curiously amateurish
fashion in which serious literary research got under way in this
country. The account was put together from tape-recorded sessions made
in Klinck’s later years and bolstered by documentation from letters
and other records; it has been loyally edited by Sandra Djwa, a literary
historian of a younger generation.

Klinck was a well-loved figure (friends invariably refer to him
warmly), and one would like to salute an enthusiastic and dogged
pioneer. Unfortunately, this praise is somewhat difficult to muster. One
may admire the tenacity of people who root about in archives for elusive
and obscure facts, but their activities do not necessarily create
absorbing reading. Moreover, Klinck’s style here is disappointingly
flat. He comes across, alas, as a surprisingly naive man with a not very
interesting mind, a laborious antiquarian with a penchant for the
second-rate. Nowhere did I get the sense that he had ever responded to
literature as a living experience rather than as an inert subject for
scholarly research. One presumes that an important dimension of the man
has failed to materialize on the printed page. Nonetheless, I must
regretfully report that my opinion of Klinck was higher before I read
this book than it is now.