A Climate Charged

A.T.J. Cairns was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Mr. Powe’s is one of the first post-sixties critical voices to be heard — he was born in 1955 — and, on the whole, it is a reassuring one. Widely read in the literature and criticism of the Western world, he uses his range of knowledge selectively and perceptively to evaluate current Canadian writing from the standpoint of a distinctive, personal intelligence and point of view.

This point of view is basically activist: “art for itself, criticism for itself, in these troubled tragicomic times, is a failure of nerve, a refusal to enter into debate with a confused and complacent society,” he writes in “Fear of Frying,” a criticism of Northrop Frye that is the exception to his generally amiable attitude toward writers of an older generation. Even here, though, his stance and tone are thoughtful and unemphatic. His objections to Frye’s objective, impersonal approach to literature — if debatable — serve as a perhaps necessary caution against the elder critic’s more extreme positions (even when he feels called upon to criticize an author, Mr. Powe is never harsh, vociferous, or ungenerous).

This fairness and balance is a dominant characteristic of the book. An especially affectionate picture of Marshall McLuhan — with whose views the author is clearly in sympathy — at the end of his career does not neglect the shortcomings of his critical pronouncements, while considerable reservations toward the work of Robertson Davies do not preclude a distinct fondness for his novels.

Only twice, in fact, does Mr. Powe overreact. He is rather unsparing of the repetitiveness and limitations of Margaret Atwood, while Irving Layton’s poems are both overpraised and overvalued (though, again, not without recognition of their flaws). His pieces on Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen — especially the latter — further illustrate his determination to say something pleasant and positive about even those authors with whom he is somewhat less than in sympathy.

On a broader perspective, for all his appreciation of Canadian literature — which he pays the compliment of never overpraising — Mr. Powe has little patience with CanLit cultists, and is rather uneasy about the increasingly large role the universities (and the Toronto critical “establishment”) have come to play in shaping our literary culture.

Overall, he clearly prefers writers who work in a defineable tradition — even if one to a large extent of their own invention — and, in spite of his own activist, subjective position, projects something of a “small-c” conservative stance. Writing in a clear, informal, evocative style, he can be perceptive without being ponderous, and is always at least interesting. Intelligent and thoughtful, individual, balanced, perceptive, and compassionate — his is a voice which, if at all typical, makes one look forward with considerable anticipation to our next generation of critics.