Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

As a subject, the brilliant, tragic, courageous, and maddeningly elusive
Gwendolyn MacEwen poses special challenges for a biographer. Early on in
this compassionate and haunting biography, Rosemary Sullivan articulates
those challenges, along with the modus operandi she adopted in response
to them. “To be faithful to the mystery that was Gwendolyn, I would
... lay bare the bones of my search for her, with little of the
biographer’s illusions of omniscience or objectivity.” The finished
product, which Sullivan likens to a piece of “metaphysical detective
work,” is, like life itself, shot through with unanswered questions.

While the core of Sullivan’s subject remains stubbornly resistant to
biographical scrutiny, the “numerous narratives” that constituted
her life make compelling reading. MacEwen’s childhood was damaged in
the extreme. An alcoholic father, a mentally ill mother, a possible
sexual trauma, and other intolerable stresses left her with little
self-esteem and a lifelong need to create alternate realities.
Imagination for MacEwen was a double-edged sword. It was the source of
her poetic gift, but at the same time it deprived her of the protective
skin an artist needs to survive in the real world; it also left her
seeking, in her romantic attachments with men, a level of intensity that
could never be sustained.

But MacEwen was brought down by more than personal demons. Also
conspiring against her was a society that fails to give poets their due.
(At the time of her death, MacEwen had a bank account balance of $2.02.)
Sullivan was driven to write this biography by a need to find reasons
for her subject’s premature death. What she, and her readers, are left
with in the end is a sense of wonder—not at the fact that MacEwen
finally succumbed but that, against such terrible odds, she endured for
so long.