Walking Through the Valley

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

We leave George Woodcock, at the close of this third volume of
autobiography, an 80-year-old invalid looking forward to the publication
of a new book of poems, with several books (including a novel) in
progress, and working away at his new translation of Proust’s In
Search of Time Lost. It’s an amazing picture of an amazing man.

His previous autobiography, Beyond the Blue Mountains, brought his
story up to 1977, when he was 64. One would have thought that the active
part of his life was over, but this is not so. The intrepid traveller
still has journeys to make, and we follow him and his wife to new
lands—New Zealand, Burma, Australia, China—as well as on further
visits to India, Europe, and parts of the United States. Nonetheless, as
interesting as these accounts are, valuable within the biographical
record as well as for Woodcock’s shrewdly independent insights, that
is not where the true centre of this book is to be found.

The most memorable chapters are those in which he meditates on the art
of biography itself, casts up accounts, resolutely and movingly faces up
to the fact of death. Many of the chapter titles are themselves
eloquent: “Kinds of Autobiography,” “Biographical Empathy,”
“Writing on Writing,” “Preparing for 1984,” and, of course,
“Walking Through the Valley.”

But it is not just a matter of communicating the wisdom gathered during
a long life. The glory of this book lies in its magnificently supple and
seemingly effortless prose. Woodcock has always been a clear and precise
writer, but in these autobiographies one detects a new amplitude, the
finding of appropriate sustained rhythms for recollection and informed
assessment. Above all, there is a sense of stylistic freedom, the
satisfying realization that he can say anything he wants to say, the
most delicate nuances mastered and in place. Man and style are now one.

Walking Through the Valley is important as the record of a life, but
ultimately it should be read, as Woodcock would want it read, as a model
of good writing.