EK Brown: A Study in Conflict

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.

E.K. Brown (1905–1951) was a man with many interests and abilities.
First and foremost, he was a literary scholar with a remarkable range
and versatility, publishing a respected book on the English critic and
thinker Matthew Arnold, another on the American novelist Willa Cather,
and a pioneering study of Canadian poetry. But he was also a university
teacher and administrator who was highly influential in the development
of English studies in North America, and an early champion of the
serious study of Canadian culture.

Laura Groening’s book about him is appropriately and wittily
subtitled A Study in Conflict, because this was the title of Brown’s
own book on Arnold, and Groening sees a similar tension between opposed
attitudes and inclinations in both writers. Brown is certainly a complex
subject; the challenge for any commentator is to write comprehensively
but also fluently about his diverse activities.

Groening’s research is thorough and admirable, but she encounters
certain problems of organization. Her biographical account is always
interesting but sometimes sketchy: we hear little about Brown’s
personal and domestic life, and what we are offered tends to be
sandwiched awkwardly between accounts of literary-critical principles or
university politics. She is informative on all these subjects, but her
book, while well written sentence by sentence, does not always flow
smoothly.

She values Brown most for his contribution to Canadian literary
studies, especially for On Canadian Poetry. Oddly enough, however, this
section of her book does not show her at her best. Her discussion is
more an impassioned defence than a sober assessment, and she is not
always absolutely fair to opposing viewpoints; it is not true, for
instance, that cosmopolitanism “denied the national roots of art,”
since its concern was not with origins but with ultimate effect. Her
bias is endearing yet ironic when applied to a commentator preoccupied
with Arnoldian disinterestedness.

Although this is not the best book that could have been written on the
subject, it is solid and valuable. And University of Toronto Press is to
be congratulated on an attractive piece of book-making and a spectacular
cover design.