Running the Rapids: A Writer's Life

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta. He is co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, author of The Salvation Army and
the Public, and editor of “Improved by Cult

Dobbs’s autobiography falls into two very different but equally
fascinating parts. The years 1923 to about 1952 comprise his infancy in
India, his youth in Ireland, being educated at Cambridge, serving in the
British navy during World War II, and working in Tanganyika (with a
spell in jail). It was, for a while, a life of privilege, with nurse and
servants (from chokidars to darzees), a teenage time in a family of
intellectuals, then a more demanding stint as a navy commando, and
finally a kind of purifying experience in the wilds of Africa.

From 1952 to the present Dobbs has lived in Canada, making a name for
himself as writer, poet, newspaper columnist, and radio personality. He
has worked for Macmillan publishers, co-founded The Tamarack Review, and
was editor of Saturday Night. It is, perhaps, this half of his life that
will appeal most to Canadian readers: his acquaintance with so many
Canadian writers—Mordecai Richler, Northrop Frye, Morley Callaghan,
Robertson Davies—and his sometimes funny stories about them are both
illuminating and enjoyable. The chief fault of these memoirs (apart from
lapses in style) is that they are mostly of the “what-I-did” and
“who-I-knew” kind. They do not often reveal the inner man, his
feelings or thoughts, nor do they evoke a personality. They are,
nevertheless, quite entertaining and sometimes enlightening about
periods and personalities.