Reality Games

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.

For a small but select number of readers, Louis Dudek, now 80, has
become a modern sage. He has always been, like Wordsworth, “a teacher
or nothing.” His poetry was notable from the beginning of his career
for its didactic content, and over the years he became known as a
courageously independent critic, especially of poetry and of his
Canadian poetic contemporaries.

Here we have his latest collection of prose pieces. They are described
as “new essays,” but the contents are in fact more varied than that.
Most of the book is made up of extremely short pieces, ranging from a
sentence or two to a couple of pages. These are punctuated by “Bitter
Pills,” a three-part series of epigrams—a form that Dudek has found
more and more congenial over the years (for example: “The foolishness
of one age is replaced by the foolishness of another”; “If a
writer’s reputation is still growing but his books no longer sell he
must be a classic”; “A living literature is one you don’t get
examined on”). There is also one poem, and the collection ends with
two essays: a highly personal and engaging comment on Joyce’s Ulysses
and an ambitious (but to this reviewer rather rambling) essay titled
“Toward a Democratic Art.”

Dudek is one of the few Canadian writers who could get away with a
potpourri of this kind. Through the years he has earned the right to
comment—boldly, and even sometimes caustically and outrageously—on
all aspects of modern art and thought. This is not a book for those who
are looking for a sustained argument or a consistent theme. But for
those who want an anthology of intellectual wisdom and stimulation, it
is a joy.