Movin' East: Further Writings

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto.

As a “magazine man” — his favourite self-description — Harry Bruce has been a prolific writer of articles for The Canadian, Quest, Saturday Night, Maclean’s, Atlantic Insight and other Canadian periodicals. In 1984 he reprinted 61 of these in his anthology Each Moment As It Flies (Methuen); Movin’ East: Further Writings by Harry Bruce is the companion volume, containing 49 more.

Rather than place his earlier pieces in the first book and his recent ones in the second, he has distributed throughout both volumes articles spanning the years 1965 to 1985. Thus contemporary essays rub shoulders with older but still vital ones — and, here and there, with shopworn relics that tell us more than we ever wanted to know about Paul Hellyer or John Diefenbaker or Robert Stanfield. The playful randomness of this arrangement is, however, decidedly preferable to the alternative — a year-by-year march through two decades of prose.

Movin’ East is eclectic in subject as well as time. Besides politics, Bruce turns his attention to sports, travel, food, social issues, and profiles of writers and other artists. His best writing, though, is about the subjects he obviously prefers: his family, his animals, his sailboat, his cabin by the ocean, and his adopted province of Nova Scotia. Like his father, Charles Bruce, who in 1952 won a Governor General’s Award for poetry, Bruce loves words. Some of his journalism may be forced, given to a type and trendiness that fade quickly. But when he is free to write about the things he loves, his prose is effortless, graceful, rich, lyrical.