If I Could Turn and Meet Myself: The Life of Alden Nowlan by Patrick Toner

REVIEWS It is perhaps interesting, it now occurs to me, to notice that cairn’s “blind shape” staring out to sea, and wonder whether P ratt’s “grey shape with the palaeolithic face” (“still the master of the longitudes”) is not floating somewhere in the neighbour­ hood of that Purdy line. Still alive after all, old mole, just when some nobody had declared you sunk without a trace? Several last things before my time is up. One, I several times felt that Solecki was bringing a finely honed critical apparatus to bear upon philosophical “positions” within the poems that the latter did not merit, e.g., frequent mentions of Heidegger in connection with some pretty slack Purdy passages. Not the worst fault of a critic but a touch misleading. Two, as with the Emerson quotation, there are phrases here that will stick in the mind even when Purdy-thoughts are taking a lengthy break. Helen Vender’s reference to a “compelling aesthetic sig­ nature” — find a more valuable three words in this context than those! Or Dennis Lee’s “the local nature of cadence” — I have known Lee’s essay for a couple of decades now, and its useful­ ness here is exact. I should like also to tell you that, reviewing Purdy’s The Woman on the Shore, I once wrote that all of his poems were elegies. It was far from a criticism, but, protesting mildly, more questioning than anything, A1 wrote to me, and we corresponded a few more times on the subject. I still think the case can be made. Very likeable man, very gifted poet, erratic in both regards, I think, but Solecki has surely got it right. For what Solecki has got right, check the quotations in paragraphs one and four, above. DON COLES / Toronto Patrick Toner. If I Could Turn and Meet Myself: The Life of Alden Nowlan. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2000. 350. $24.95 paper. To the list of full-length critical material on Atlantic-Canadian writers, we can now add Patrick Toner’s biography If I Could Turn and Meet Myself: The Life of Alden Nowlan. Along with Charles G.D. Roberts, Hugh MacLennan, Thomas Raddall, 563 ESC 28, 2002 Ernest Buckler, Milton Acorn, and others, Nowlan, who died in 1983, now finds his place in this region’s biographical pantheon. Toner’s book examines the life of a pre-eminent Canadian poet whose work is hardly terra incognita for literary scholars. Yet, Toner makes whole the world of a poet, novelist, journalist, and playwright that was formerly presented to us only as loose pastiche and delves into facets of Nowlan’s life previously unex­ plored. What might be questionable for some here is how Toner does this. His methodology includes sorting through the minutiae of source material to try, in his own words, “to construct this biog­ raphy as narrative.” As Toner explains, “I wanted to step back from time to time and allow characters to speak in their own voices without my intervention. I did not create the unmediated dialogue out of my imagination. In some cases, I blended two or more accounts of the same incident into one scene. In other cases dialogue represents verbatim renderings of interviews or letters.” Although this approach might seem heretical to some, Toner’s narrative is underpinned by fastidious references to his primary sources, and scenes are regularly convincing. The opening section of the book illustrates this. Toner be­ gins with an account of Nowlan’s funeral that reads like a dra­ matic episode from a novel. At the cemetery in Fredericton, Jim Stewart, who visited Nowlan’s house as a student, played a lament on his tin whistle, which he then broke in half and threw into the grave. John Nowlan, the poet’s son, passed around what Toner refers to as a large vessel of Irish whiskey, while two bag pipers played in the background. Then, David Adams Richards, after consuming his share of the liquor, poured the rest into the grave. From there, Toner attempts to illuminate the details of Nowlan’s life that made him the respected writer he was. From the outset, it appears that Toner...

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