Irving Layton: A Portrait

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Irving Layton is one of the solid, monolithic facts of modern Canadian poetry. Love him or hate him (and it’s difficult to find any tenable middle ground), he’s impossible to ignore. This controversial biography of the poet aroused his ire upon publication; but it is a long-established Layton tradition to react savagely against anything short of adulation, so the effect of his indignant ragings is rather lessened by repetition.

His output is monumental. Indeed, friends and foes alike concur that he publishes far too much and is utterly uncritical of his own poorer pieces. When he is good, he is dazzling; sometimes, he is dreadful. His life story, as told by Elspeth Cameron, is that of a struggle up from privation through to the light and warmth of prosperity, by means of unremitting and determined effort and an outpouring of extraordinary talent; and of a continuing and repetitive exploitation of the women and children who trailed in his wake like a gaily-ribboned kite-tail. Readable, crammed with un-provable assertions (e.g., “Of the approximately one thousand poems he has published, roughly fifteen are world-class.... Another thirty-five are extremely good”), sometimes astonishing, sometimes funny, and very often outrageous.