Myth and Milieu: Atlantic Literature and Culture, 1918-1939

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.

This book collects the scholarly papers given in a conference on
“Atlantic” literature and culture at Acadia University in 1991.
Embracing an interdisciplinary approach, contributors centred upon
literature, notably the work of Lucy Maud Montgomery and Frank Parker
Day, but also discussed folklore, political cartoons, drama and cinema,
painting, literary history, music education, and dialectology.

This is a proud, zealously local culture, so any critique from
“central Canada” will inevitably be regarded with suspicion. So be
it. I can only report that, while the information unearthed seems
impressive and useful, the evaluation and interpretation of the material
vary from the mediocre to the inept. Two exceptions should be registered
immediately: David Pitt on E.J. Pratt (mainly because he quotes
generously and so demonstrates what accomplished poetry really sounds
like) and Andrew T. Seaman, whose account of Day’s unpublished novels
is persuasive because firm literary-critical standards are brought to
bear. The music and dialect contributions in the book are informative
and make no pretensions to be anything more. The rest is, I fear,
embarrassing.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Regional culture is vitally
important, and deserves encouragement at the local level. But
discriminations have to be made. The grandiose claims currently made for
Montgomery cannot survive lengthy quotation from her cliché-ridden
prose; to link Irving Fogwell’s poetry with T.S. Eliot’s is to
invite ridicule; Margaret Duley is a minor Newfoundland novelist, no
more.

In a concluding comment, a young professor of Canadian literature
recounts how a graduate student of hers had been reading John Metcalf
and, after spending time “in this dangerous manner,” asked “some
very difficult questions about the existence or nonexistence of a
Canadian literary tradition.” That (unwittingly, I fear) says it all.
A considered reading of “dangerous” Metcalf would have put the whole
subject into perspective, since the awkward criterion of excellence
would then be inescapable. I would give much to read Metcalf’s review
of this book; by comparison, mine would read like a eulogy. And he would
be justified.