Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of A.M. Klein

Adam G. Fuerstenberg was Professor of English at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto.

Usher Caplan’s biography of AM. Klein is a portrait, and like most portraits it occasionally risks flatness and two-dimensionality. Nevertheless, it provides an entertaining picture of the surface of the poet’s life, with an occasional excursion into its shadows. This glossy volume, attractively filled with photographs of Klein, his antecedents, and his immediate family, as well as the vanished immigrant Montreal made famous by Mordecai Richler, is meant for the general reader. The author, a writer and editor for the National Museums of Canada and a co-editor of the forthcoming collected works of A.M. Klein, skillfully interweaves his text with these photographs, in addition to other memorabilia, interviews with Klein’s friends, and selections from the poet’s published and unpublished work.

The result is an absorbing chronicle of the poet’s active life. Klein’s impoverished but warmly family-centered and very religious childhood, his brilliant scholastic career at working-class Baron Byng — the Fletcher’s Field High School of Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz — and at aristocratic McGill University, and his subsequent careers as lawyer, would-be politician, Jewish communal leader, and Sam Bronfman’s speech writer and Seagram hack, as well as his productive work as journalist-editor and talented writer and poet, are all breezily covered.

Born in 1909 to strictly religious parents who had fled Ukrainian pogroms in 1910, Klein first contemplated becoming a rabbi but lost his orthodoxy while still in college, though not his love of Jewish traditions and rituals. Belief was replaced by a fervent Zionism. At McGill he attached himself to a lively, clever group of future movers and shakers in Canadian literature and politics, among them F.R. Scott and David Lewis, both brilliant lawyers and leading figures in the CCF, Irving Layton and A.J.M. Smith, poets and CanLit pioneers, and Leon Edel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Henry James. Twenty years of poetic creativity and a genteel poverty, in spite of his varied careers, culminated in a series of breakdowns and a number of attempted suicides, regression to communicating only in monosyllables, and then total silence for almost fifteen years until his death of a heart attack in 1972.

Caplan doesn’t attempt to answer the question of what drove Klein over the brink, but the evidence he presents that the poet juggled too many careers at once and that his consequent sense of failure drove him to madness, seems conclusive.

The work is a welcome addition to the Klein canon, but its poor documentation is a drawback.

A lucid Foreword by Edel and a thin index don’t quite compensate for the lack of footnotes or a bibliography, especially irritating because of the inclusion of so much hitherto unpublished Klein material.