The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott

W.M. Dobell was Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, London.

Frank Scott was a lifelong Quebecker. Bilingual, and befriended most of his days by Québécois, he nonetheless worked and vacationed in those sections of Montreal and the Eastern Townships long ago settled by Anglo-Quebeckers. The publisher’s blurb refers to his three careers in law, literature, and politics. His biographer was raised in Newfoundland, and is a professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Biographer and subject thus overlap on only one of Scott’s three careers. It is literature that brought the two together, and it is literary biography that gives The Politics of the Imagination its strength.

Scott was 75 before he was interviewed by his future biographer about a projected history of English-Canadian poetry. A year later he asked her to write his biography, but two years thereafter still appeared to be viewing the collaboration as ghost-writing. There was potential for serious conflict, but Scott’s illness and infirmity left Djwa in control. According to her afterword, he claimed reluctance to have a law historian or political scientist as biographer lest the primacy he assigned to his poetry be subverted. This explanation is consistent with his periodic assertions that he was steered away from becoming a professional poet and towards a career in law by his willful older brother. There is no doubt of Djwa’s familiarity with literature, for quotations from Scott’s poetry and esoteric literary allusions are skillfully woven into the chapters, and the poetry of his friends and contemporaries receives perceptive treatment.

The work is a literary biography due to this emphasis on Scott’s poetry, his role in the cultural world of Quebec and of Canada, and the grace with which the whole is composed. Tribute is paid to his mastery of the lecture hall, his popularity with students, his few — but memorable — forays into the courtroom, and his deep involvement with the birth of the socialist movement in Canada. But there is little mention of his legal writings, descriptively or analytically. The intended implication is that they are too dated to be of value in the 1980s, a judgment that presumes the triumph of the political devolution ethic. The verdict that he was a failure in his belated role as Dean of the Faculty of Law at McGill University is more explicitly pronounced; here the evidence, even from his friends, is more substantial.

There are occasions when the biographer’s comments on law and politics are too neat. Are Supreme Court of Canada opinions on reference eases weaker in impact than Court rulings on the validity of statutes (p. 151)? Was the real purpose behind invoking the War Measures Act in 1970 to confront separatism directly (p. 402)? Djwa is more comfortable in areas of her own expertise. She also prefers Scott in that milieu: in “law and politics there was no room for the private man,” whereas “with poets and poetry there was always room for the personal” (p. 287). Especially on the literary and personal side, this is a fine biography of a quite exceptional Canadian.