ESC: English Studies in Canada

with issues of national destiny; she believes that in different circumstances he would have plumped for “regionalism” not nationalism and that he would have “identified with the feminine and passive, rather than the macho and aggressive” (34). (Camille La Bossiere, in fact, finds in MacLennan’s char­ acters not aggression but indolence, the “acedia of the ‘careless gentleman’ recalled from ‘the eighteenth century’ ” [73].) Cameron’s essay is a reminder that we must endlessly search, in reading any writer who reached a large audience, for what the work can teach us about the audiences to whom it was so acceptable and how this contributed to making us the way we are now. Further reappraisals along such lines are needed for MacLennan, and a good many other widely read Canadian writers, needed far more, I would claim, than examinations of influence, aesthetics, and biography except in so far as this last category enlarges historical understanding. julie b e d d o e s / University of Saskatchewan John Orange, Orpheus in Winter: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993). 115. $14.95 paper. George Woodcock, Moral Predicament: Morley Callaghan’s More Joy in Heaven (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993). 71. $14.95 paper. These two short books on Morley Callaghan are aimed principally at an un­ dergraduate audience. Both provide a brief chronology, biographical note, critical context, and detailed reading of the novel under consideration. Both are written in an easily accessible style, and provide a helpful bibliography and index. But both, in their critical analysis of the text, unfortunately re­ discover such tired old issues in Callaghan criticism as his use of the parable form, the theme of Christian personalism, the importance of individual­ ism, not to mention Callaghan’s fondness for creating ambiguous characters. Neither book, in other words, constitutes a foundational breakthrough in Callaghan criticism; in fact, Moral Predicament and Orpheus in Winter are built upon methodologies perfected and exhausted almost thirty years ago. George Woodcock’s Moral Predicament, especially, is notably unrivetting. The book is essentially a creaky re-working of earlier articles such as his “The Callaghan Case” (1962), “Lost Eurydice: The Novels of Callaghan” (1964), and “Callaghan’s Toronto” (1972) — three articles that revolutionized how we read Callaghan when they first appeared, and which established Wood­ cock then as one of Callaghan’s shrewdest and most insightful critics. But 247 the discoveries of yesteryear are today’s truisms and, as such, Moral Predica­ ment merely restates the entrenched obvious about More Joy in Heaven: that the novel is a parable for the modern world; that it is very popular be­ cause it romanticizes the gangster figure; that Callaghan wrote throughout the 1930s under the influence (as it were) of a birthright Catholicism; that he was fascinated by the workings of the law, interested in the similarities between saints and sinners. And so on and on and on. Perhaps the chief irony of Woodcock’s essay is the fact that he ultimately spends little time providing a detailed analysis of the very novel he complains has received too few detailed analyses. Instead the book is crammed with tangential remarks about other novels (particularly Strange Fugitive), as well as belletristic observations that would befuddle most average undergraduate readers (at least at my university). For example: Pilgrim’s Progress and Gulliver’s Travels axe neither novels nor realistic, and even the typical works of the later moralists, like André Gide’s Strait is the Gate and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, deliberately abandon plausibility to achieve the highly formed and artificial pattern of the moral parable. Callaghan belongs in this company. (51) This kind of elitist liberal twaddle deflates most of Woodcock’s book. In the end, the essay is a rambling unfocussed repetition of both his own original theses and the oft-recycled clichés that infect Callaghan criticism. Moral Predicament offers little that is new and much that is repeated. Such is not the case with John Orange’s interesting book, Orpheus in Winter, which has been honed carefully with its university audience firmly in mind. Here The Loved and the Lost receives the same kind of meticulous attention that marks Orange...