The Ottawa Journal from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Page 46

Page 46 Ottawa Journal Saturday, March 24. 1979 Book page Seals and sealers: caught in one political net SEASON OF THE SEAL. By Calvin Coish. 263 pages. Breakwater Books.

$4.95. Not surprisingly, this detailed historical account of the annual Canadian seal slaughter reveals Seos: natural cousins of men, natural enemies of codfish The author argues that Newfoundlanders in the annual hunt employ the most humane techniques. Ersatz SPRING TONIC. By Peter Gzowskl. 208 pages.

Hurtig. 12.95. I'eter (Jowski's celebration of spring just isn't Hie elixir it's cracked up to be. Instead, it's reminiscent ol March sunny" at times, but full of false hopes and shortlived promises of what is ahead. Gzowski thrust this oversized paperback on the country at the most vulnerable lime of the year possible.

Winter-weary. a whole nation is willing to grasp at spring straws. When they are offered under the guise of the writing of Canadian literature's greats and near-greats, expectations run high. The table of contents is an impressive document. When was the last time you picked up a "book which contained the works of W.O.

Mitchell. Silver Donald Cameron. Stephen I.eacock, Greg Clark and Susanna Moodie. together with cartoons by Ais-lin and a painting by Greg Curnoe? It is hard to imagine such a variety of Canadian talent has ever been collected in one anthology before. Hut hen you gel down to the reading of it.

there Characters THE BACK ROOM. By Ann Copeland. 119 pages. Oberon Press. $15.00.

Paper, $6.95. Ann Copeland is a relatively new voice in the Canadian Mari-times and an impressive ope. I recently reviewed in these pages her first collection of stories, also from Oberon. It was not difficult to guess, from the contents of At Peace, that Copeland is an ex-nun, strongly affected by the changes in the church since Vatican II, The new collection represents a further step into the world. None of the stories are set in convents; and only one, Miscarriage has a priest as a central character.

The sterile asceticism and formality of the Right Reverend Vincent Greg- ory lfo Campbell Is nicely bal anced against the warmth and- compassion of a young priest who is leaving the church, a middle-aged parishioner, and a girl who miscarries and dies. The symbolic miscarriage of the much more about homo sapiens i.i,. than the Pagophilus groenlandi-ca. We do learn it is the highly gregarious nature of the harp seal which makes it prefer to travel in large herds along the thin, smooth ice near the water's elixir for reviewed by Aileen McCabe seems to be a little tob'much tedium interspersed with the sunshine to let you feel good, about paying $12.95 for a little false-hope of spring. Allen Abel's piece on spring baseball training is a delight, but whose idea of fun is it to have to plough through Ken Lcfolii's treatise on the sexual habits of the birds, bees and the palolo worm, before you come to it? And that reproduction of Greg Curnoe's famous painting of a bicycle is worth a thousand words, but Curnoe shouldn't have been allowed to write one of them.

It should have been left entirely to the versatile pen of Eric Nicol: a man who knows a bicycle story when he tells one. Don Ilarron's remini-sences about the first production of the annual revue. Spring Thaw, are interesting loo. but another Toronto broadcaster, Allan McFee, somehow manages to write about winter and still get included in this anthology. One thing that is done re who reveal reviewed by Patricia Moriey title is the personality and profession of the older priest.

The eight stories of The Back Room are carefully pdsitioned so that the collection's structure has a circular feeling, from Beginning to Return. Beginning features a 33-year-old divorcee, who must now support herself and her children and who Is beginning to retrain as a teacher. The instructor of her seminar In learning disabilities has an unfortunate resemblance to her former husband. There Is the same pseudo-solicitude, the same authoritarianism masked as democratic procedure. Copeland evokes the fear, the strarw geness with which many middle-aged women are now attempting to come to terms as they move back Into a world from which they had withdrawn.

The most obvious point of analogy be it-'Xf 'J I'dgu. Ironically, this uncumpiu- mising sociability is the harp seal's nemesis: it brings the animals back south annually, in large herds, to breeding grounds accessible to the sealers and their lethal clubs. spring markably well in Spring Tonic is the illustrations. Gzowski asked four large advertising firms to work up an ad for spring and the results are really quite inspired. Take for example, a bright yellow tulip blooming in an old gum boot which is standing in the slush apd a caption that reads: "Cheer up It's Wow! So seldom you get to see top-notch advertising, that this offering from Base Hamilton Partners Limited is a real treat.

The centre piece of the book is a great photograph of an auction' illustrating a few words of country-sense on the subject of the courtesy of the staff of Harrowsmith magazine. Spring lives in this article. There's no doubt Perth auctioneer Clayton Hand knows what it is about too. He's decided he'll probably have to start holding all his auctions inside; the weather is just too unpredictable in this country in the spring. Well, Mr.

Hand, so is the literature. Spring Tonic is fun in some spots, but a little tedious in others. It was a great idea, there's no doubt about it, but unfortunately it just isn't very memorable. ourselves tween an ex-nun and an ex-wife is that both are attempting to enter the job market for the first time in middle age, but there are many other parallels. Copeland explores this psychic terrain with sensitivity.

Other stories deal with apparently ordinary, unheroic characters such as the clerk in the back room of a clothing store, a shoe salesman, a grandmother visiting her first grandchild. Copeland shows the heroic quality that is possible in "common" lives. The gem of the second collection Is A Woman's an Ironic tale of three women who have devoted much of their lives to looking after their widowed mother. As one of Copeland's narrators'' -Mia. fs not everyone who Lgela.

a peek into the "Back Room," where people reveal more than one may wish to see. Copeland's stories disrobe characters whom we recognize as part of ourselves. Thu Irony surrounding Me human but not necessarily humane side of the centuries- old hunt is much more complex and transient. In March 1914, 178 underpaid, overworked, poorly-fed sealers perished on the shifting Ice, miles from the relative safety of their ship, the Newfoundland. They had been dispatched on a far-ranging search for seals at the impetuous command of Captain Westbury Kean, a young man anxious to make a name for himself like that of his famous sealing father, Abram.

After the disaster, a St. John's newspaper explained in a eulogy the incredible subservience of those downtrodded, lost sealers. "It was Duty's Call you obeyed. Were a monument to.be erected to your memory, the epitaph could be inscribed: 'Sacred to those brave and hardy soldiers the Industrial Army who struggled, suffered and died on the Frozen Battlefled for their Captains of Industry, and their loved ones at home. In 1964, long after the sealers had struggled to form unions for protection from the "Captains of Industry" and sincere conservationists had persevered in their lobby for quotas to control the hunt, the annual seal slaughter Frontier THE ROAD TO ST.

OLA AND OTHER STORIES. By David Trumbleand Glen Ellis. 143 pages. J. W.

Dent and Sons (Canada). $8.95. "One time about a hundred years ago A richness of living memory springs from the heart and mind of David Trumble in this, his second book of oral reminiscences committed to paper by Geln Ellis. He uses language as easy to follow and as uncluttered as the dirt road he travelled long ago the road to St. Ola.

Trumble, now in his tilth year, and Ellis, more than 80 years younger, have found communion of thought and understanding by which the past is brought into the present in this collection of 74 short stories in free verse. Each story is a step along the bush road of Ontario history, a moment or a day or a year in a lifetime in which this land took Major re-assessment THE NATURE OF MASS POVERTY. By John Kenneth Galbraith. 150 pages. Har vard University Press.

$8.95. One of the world's most influential economists gives here his views on why so many people in so many lands remain so poor. He presents a harsh critique of much of post-war international aid, but he also suggests some new ways of tackling the problem. Poverty, Galbraith argues, "Is man's most powerful and massive affliction." With all the great skill at his command, he shows persuasively how the only sensible, rational response for large numbers of the human race is to "accommodate" themselves to their afflicted state. And "once an individual has made his peace with poverty he Is unlikely again to resist." How can this be changed? Galbraith makes no bones about his opinion that such change is required, that it is a moral issue.

He offers a rigorous re -examination of the policies of the rich countries, having found the present "numerous and exceptionally confident answers" to "have one feature in common: they are universally unsatisfac- He energetically dismisses various Important ideas, taking both care and pleasure in separating cause from consequence. The traditional Gal-, bralth style Is here at tjmes reviewed by Bob Reade was exposed to International scrutiny. A Montreal film crew released footage showing a hunter skinning a seal while it supposedly was still conscious. The scene ended with a skinned carcass racing wildly about the Icq, screaming deliriously. A zoologist later testified that two persons in the film, one of whom was trying to slice open a live seal pup, were members of the film crew.

A third man later made a written statement certifying he had been paid to skin a live seal. And the Canadian government sent scientests to investigate charges of cruelty to the seals. The official party brought back no reports of cruelty. But what Calvin Coish, a native Newfoundland writer and teacher, characterizes as the media event of the century had been launched. And journalists around the world joined the competition to produce the most gruesome report of bloody carnage on the ice floes.

Coish makes no attempt to hide his scorn for many of the groups and individuals leading the anti-seal-hunt crusades. But history in free verse reviewed by Wain King shape. Inded, the land had to be shaped the hard way. First the timber was cut "Then we went in there when the timber was all cut off and logged it up and cleaned It up and took the roots off and stone and everything and burned It oft. Started putting In a crop." The land was a gift, free to those who had the courage apd strength to work it.

A hundred years ago, in the eyes of a boy and in the memory of a very old man, those- who worked the land were bigSnen. "Bigger than what they Is here today. They'd stand to a log as big as that table pick it right up. Very big men. reviewed by Alexander Craig conspicuously magisterial, as the chapter titles alone indicate, the first being "How Poverty is Now Explained." The author's background among the Scotch in southern Ontario is brought skilfully to bear, and the chapter "On Migration" is a masterful summary of that basic human process.

This is very much a liberal manifesto, in both small and large ways the former in the author's sharp and sly digs at conservative spokesmen such as Moynihan and Buckley, without of course, mentioning them by name. The larger ways are-rather more significant. There Is no mention here of race or imperialism. In this broad survey of post-war relations between rich and poor countries, Vietnam is hardly mentioned and southern Africa not at all. Many economists will be understandably dissatisfied by the extent to which Galbraith oversimplifies, as he clearly does on terms of trade, for instance.

In such a grand historical sweep this la difficult to avoid, of course, and Galbraith does get back very ably at the narrow, self-serving myths of many of fellow practloners: reputations in economics, "as elsewhere In the social sciences, can be ad- he does try to present their basic arguments. After conceding that some sealers have been guilty of brutality or carelessness In their slaughtering techniques, he adds that "even today, many of the seal carcasses are left on the ice pans and that, one must admit, is a waste." He also credits some of the most strident anti-hunt forces, such as Greenpeace, with "doing much to focus world attention on our fragile environment." But he disdains the "rabble rousers" and "headline hunters" who malign the annual slaughter which he insists Is crucial to the Newfoundland omy employs the most humane techniques possible and would have to be continued even If the market for pelts disappeared. He notes that the British government bops off an annual quota of seals to protect its fisheries from their voracious appetites, and nobody complains about this. It's an argument that's been taken up by the Codpeace Foundation, a new counter-movement which brings a refreshing touch of satire to the seal hunt dispute. Codpeace bases its campaign on tongue-in-cheek pleas for the rights of baby codfish who are menaced by the ravenous seals.

Weighed three and four and five hundred pounds. A lot of the big men was Flan-nigans." Bigger than life they seem today. But not too big to die. Die they did in the First World War where "Some of Jim Spracket's boys went. Got killed McMurray's children went to the army, never got back." I cannot pass judgment on the technical qualities of Ellis's verse.

It docs not seem important as long as the language and its form ring true. Ves, they do. St. Ola is near as dammit half way between Madoc and Bancroft. There's not much there now.

Piles of fieldstonc and some still-standing log barns and homes in the area were there in Trumble's lusty youth. But they can't speak. David Trumble can. of poverty vanced by patient refinement of detail within the larger framework of assumptions. The last can remain more or less indefinitely unquestioned." Every reader will have some reservations.

That particular set of stimuli aside, this trenchant book is a major re-assessment of many of the basic ideas shaping international relations in the last three decades. For those who want to know whieh significant policy changes should and indeed may even be made, Galbraith's latest work will make entertaining and instructive reading. iiiill John Galbraith 1 Often amsplafousry magisterial Ai.