Beyond the Blue Mountains: An Autobiography

Bruce Whiteman is Head of Rare Books at the McGill University Libraries
and author of The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books II to IV.

Beyond the Blue Mountains is the second in George Woodcock’s two-volume autobiography. It takes up where Letter to the Past (1982) left off, with his return to Canada in 1942. This was an important year not only for Woodcock but for Canadian culture as whole, for it was in 1949 that the Massey Commission was established. Woodcock’s literary life, as Beyond the Blue Mountains demonstrates, was to a large degree representative of the changes that the Massey Report brought about in Canadian letters in the three decades following its publication.

As this book so well documents, Woodcock’s life has been a virtual Odyssey. He has been unceasingly restless, a constant traveller in search of new material for his constant stream of books. His obsessiveness for work he explains as the result of an early trip to Mexico, which of course resulted in a book, but also in the realization that “the belief in the justification for a life in art is that it is the supreme defiance of death” (p. 51). If this seems an old-fashioned commonplace, it is nevertheless true, and writers one-tenth as prolific as Woodcock might agree. Perhaps his failure to be a novelist on an outstanding poet contributed to his obsessive productivity. If so, we can only be grateful, as most of his books are both well informed and readable. Though his interest in and success at teaching have been mixed, one can imagine the bibliographia Woodcockiana providing a useful and substantial reading list for an autodidactic baccalaureate degree.

After some initial years of grim labour and financial difficulties, during which he came within inches of leaving for the United States, Woodcock established himself in the English Department at the University of British Columbia (where eventually his only duty was the editing of Canadian Literature), as a freelancer for the CBC, as a magazine journalist, and of course as a writer of biographies, travel books, literary criticism, political commentary, art criticism, and so on. Beyond the Blue Mountains is perhaps less descriptive of Woodcock’s Canadian literary friendships than one might like. On the other hand, his excellence as a travel writer is much in evidence, as are his acute observations of peoples and cultures as diverse as the Doukhobors, the peoples of the South Pacific, and the denizens of a small Swiss village. As an autobiographer, Woodcock is stronger at description than at reflection, though his description is always solidly anchored in an intelligent and closely worked out view of the world. Straight reflective passages appear only sporadically, and are apt to be commonplace to a degree. But to be fair, Woodcock mostly manages to weld memory and imagination (which he sees as the sine quae non for successful autobiography) in this book. For anyone interested in the progress of Canadian culture, and of course for anyone interested in George Woodcock, Beyond the Blue Mountains is required reading.