Typing: A Life in 26 Keys

David E. Kemp, a former professor of drama at Queen’s University, is
the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Matt Cohen was the author of 13 novels, as well as poetry, short
stories, books for children, and works of translation from French into
English. He was also one of the founders of the Writers’ Union of
Canada and a driving force behind such initiatives as the public lending
right. Typing, which was written in five months after Cohen was
diagnosed with lung cancer and finished three weeks before he died, is
about what led him to be a writer and what shaped the books he wrote
over a three-decade career that found him at the very centre of
Canada’s cultural life.

There are wonderfully insightful portraits of such writers as Hugh
Garner, Morley Callaghan, and Margaret Laurence, but the book’s chief
delight is Cohen’s charting of his own progress as a writer, from his
early days at Rochdale (where he produced what he describes as
self-consciously hip prose) to his move to a farm near Kingston.

It was the Eastern Ontario landscape that captured Cohen’s
imagination and inspired what was probably his best work: first the
Salem novels and, much later, Elizabeth and After, which deservedly won
the 1999 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. That this
self-described outsider and Jewish intellectual could so perfectly
express the essence of a rural environment in such a funny, poignant,
and bittersweet way was no small achievement. Matt Cohen’s literary
reputation is destined to grow over time.