The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 94

1-2 The GAZETTE. Montreal, Saturday, March 12, 1983 G3CSS Woodcock: Canada's man of letters He is indeed a poet, but a better critic and theorist and that's why he is worth reading Research pain can indicates be eased an 7 VJ LETTER TO THE PAST: An Autobiography By George Woodcock Fiuhenry Whiteside 329 pp. $21.95 By JAMES STEWART of The Gazette George Woodcock is a man of letters. He lives in Canada. Therefore, he is Canada's man of letters, a title he is frequently given and certainly deserves.

Woodcock is indeed a literary fellow, living by his own words and by words about others' words. Without blushing he can describe "the emergence of my literary persona" and tell us about his "finest blossoming of creativity" in his later years. These small pretensions merely give away Woodcock's desire to be considered an artist, rather than the workmanlike social and literary critic he really is. This first volume of his autobiography, weak in creative rumination and imaginative analysis but strong in descriptive observation, confirms his limitations. He is indeed a poet, but he is a better critic and theorist and that is why he is worth reading now and for years to come.

Thousands of words have come from Woodcock's restless and lucid pen on poetry, history, literature, anarchists and rebels, art. travel, biography and now, autobiography. At 70, he is still pouring it out, writing copiously about himself, the first 37 years of his life in England, and what made him a writer. Woodcock, though he has written extensively and trenchantly on Canadian themes and literature, has an international reputation for his works on the lives of George Orwell and Thomas Merton, and for his critical and biographical studies of anarchism and the great anarchists such as Godwin, Kropotkin and Proudhon. He has written at such length on so many subjects that it is difficult to detect in every work the underlying voice of the libertarian socialist, the theme of individual freedom and terial here on the anti-miliiarist left in wartime Britain.

Acute observation and reportage is presented in the clear and incisive style that marks good writing in general and Woodcock's writing in particular. But recalling these events years later, in what is supposed to be an autobiography, Woodcock is disconcertingly impersonal and unana-lytical. There is little soul-searching or self-questioning. Woodcock at 70 doesn't express doubts or regrets, has few reflections on meaning and motives. In 1940, he believed that "the Imperialist squabbles of England and Germany were not our quarrels," and he still holds fast to his callow simplicities.

"In the demonology of the modern age I have, since August 1945, placed Truman and Churchill beside the Nazis and Stalin," he writes. There seems something amiss in that rather self-satisfied determination to make no distinctions. Making distinctions is much of the business of life. Refusing to do so may be good anarchism, but it seems a far too easy way around the natural complexity of things. Perhaps what's missing is wisdom and feeling.

There is, in fact, something faintly prissy and bloodless about the Woodcock that emerges in this book about himself. One wonders how any man, having lived 70 years, could approve of himself as unques-tioningly as Woodcock seems to do. Self-confidence and the conviction of omniscience, of course, are the marks of the critic (note with what assurance I here dissect the Wood-cockian corpus). Without those traits, Woodcock might not have been as good and sure a writer as he is. This book ends as he arrives in Canada in 1949, headed for a life of rural semi-isolation on Vancouver Island.

There he will produce his most important critical and biograpical writings and later teach at the University of British Columbia. But that is for the next volume in the life of this enormously-talented, provocative and uncompromising man of letters. Author of almost 50 books, Woodcock writes his own story. His mother's death brought him an inheritance which permitted him to give up his job, devote himself to writing and to editing Now, a literary magazine with an anarchist bent. He was also an editor of the pacifist Freedom Press during the Second Acute observation is presented in the clear and incisive style that makes good writing World War, though he was not among the editors who were arrested for sedition.

Woodcock was a conscientious objector "as a poet and pacifist." In lieu of military duty he was assigned to agricultural service and he actually did some gardening before deserting and going underground in London. There is good and interesting ma New fiction for new human experiences Ouchl: "Pain is complicated and influenced by many physiological and psychological factors," says Prof. Ronald Melzack, a psychologist at McGill University. His book, The. Challenge of Pain, written with Patrick Wall, is being published in English and French (Ld d6fi de la douleur) in Canada this month by Penguin Books and Cheneliere et Stanke, and in the U.

S. by Basic Books. In 1965, Melzack and Wall published an article in the U.S. journal, Science, which changed conventional thinking about pain and stimulated research on the subject. The authors challenged the previous notion that pain signals travelled along a single path directly to a pain centre in the brain, making pain an unmodifi-able experience.

hi i '4 RONALD MELZACK Needless suffering "Pain is much more complicated," says Melzack. "Culture, type of injury, relationships, all have a bearing on the way we feel pain. There is too much unnecessary pain and suffering." Their article and description of what they called the "gate-control theory of pain," also prompted a new treatment "transcutaneous nerve stimulation" in which the skin is electrically stimulated to diminish pain. According to Melzack, the gate-control theory also explains how hypnosis, biofeedback, suggestion, and drugs modify pain. Melzack's name is well known in book-selling circles.

His older -brother, Louis, founded the Classic Bookshop chain, and his nephew, Brian, now heads it. Appropriately, the launching party for the English and French editions was held at Classic's St. Catherine St. store in Montreal. First Novels: Four of the six titles on the short list for Books in Canada's first novel award were published by small, literary houses.

Coming For To Carry by Montreal's Lorris Elliott was published by the new shoestring, one-woman firm of Williams-Wallace. Coach House Press in Toronto published The Bee Book by Ann Rosenberg and Blue by Geral-dine Rahmani. Quadrant in Montreal published Dead Ends by Keith Harrison. Preparing for Sabbath by Toronto-born Nessa Rapoport was first issued in hardcover in the U.S. and then published in Canada in massmarket by Seal and Shoeless Joe by W.P.

Kintella, published in Canada by Thomas Alien, had wide acclaim here and in the U.S. The list is the personal choice of Doug Hill, a former columnist for Books in Canada. His selections have been turned over to Anne Collins, Jack Hodgins, Gwendolyn MacEwan, and John Richardson to determine who will receive the $1,000 prize. ee Pirating Books: Piracy is considered to be one of the biggest Sephardim Nt. Jin, Jt ar ANDRE ELBAZ Admirable dedication the activities of wonder-working rabbis such as Meir Bal Hanes.

The stories also reverberate with the mischievous deeds of the jinn, underworld spirits which upset the divine order. Book World BEVERLEY SLOPEN growth areas and the most depressing. British publishers export books worth 315 million pounds sterling a year and calculate that 150 million pounds sterling is lost through copyright material theft. Modern photo offset methods allow pirates to produce books almost indistinguishable from the original. And pirates, based mainly in Southeast Asia, not content to operate in their own areas, are running a thriving export business of their own.

Containers of pirated books printed in Taiwan were seized in Nigeria. This, in turn, has prompted Nigerians to produce pirated editions at home. Many of the illegal or "sidewalk" editions are education texts. Vendors are providing students, apparently unconcerned they are buying stolen property, with cheap textbooks needed for their studies. see Halfback Success: Last November, the Ontario government renewed its Halfback program, allowing losing provincial Win-tario lottery tickets to be applied to the purchase of books by Canadian authors.

Each ticket is worth 50 cents and can be accumulated to cover half the price of a book up to $15. According to Halfback official Barbara Mcintosh, 750,000 tickets were redeemed in November and December for $375,000. The program will continue through next Christmas or as long as the budget holds out. Halfback applies to all books by Canadian writers, including remainders or clearouts on which authors receive no royalty. It doesn't seem fair that government subsidy should be applied to books when the author doesn't benefit, but Mcintosh says that people tend to use their tickets to defray the cost of expensive or new publications.

She said there was limited application towards paperbacks. The promotional program is highly attractive to authors, publishers and retailers and there are hopes of convincing the western provinces to launch a similar scheme. The plan could also be transferred to Quebec using funds generated from the provincial lottery. see Singer for Children: Isaac Ba-shevis Singer wrote his first book for children, Zlateh the Coat Boy, in 1966 when he was more than 60 years old. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak, it won the prestigious Newberry Honor.

Did his immediate success surprise him? asked the Publishers Weekly interviewer. Singer replies in wonderful Singer fashion: "I read the story myself and I liked it, and my editor liked it, so if I got a prize, I thought so maybe the committee also liked it. And this was the end of my surprise." Singer says the Bible was his "children's" book. When he was 8 or 9, he discovered Sherlock Holmes, whom he read in Yiddish. Singer likes writing for children.

"Children read books not reviews. If you tell a child that Freud or Moses praised this story, he will be unimpressed." to survive As Elbaz explains in his introduction, folktales were popular entertainment among the Sephardim who were often the object of persecution. Sublimating fear through tales of resuscitation, miraculous salvation and vindication was a wonderful way to calm a minority community's anxieties. The Canadian Sephardim maintained in their folktales a warm sense of humor and a delicate sense of irony. On their arrival at Dorval from Morocco, a French-speaking Jew sees two signs: "Bienvenue au Canada" and "Welcome." "Bienvenue, that's nice," says the new immigrant.

"But on the left, they warn us that things could be better here. Wilkum! Woe to you! You'll soon find out what's in store for you." A footnote explains fiat Wilkun is Arabic for "woe to Wherever they are. the Sephardim continue to create folktales. brotherhood in the blessed absence of constituted authority. It is not difficult to detect that theme in his autobiography.

Woodcock searches his past selectively for the influences that made him a philosophic anarchist, which is how he still sees himself and wishes to be seen by others. Woodcock was born in Winnipeg in 1912 but left the same year when his parents returned to England after failing to make a go of it in Canada. In his autobiography, Woodcock evokes, at times beautifully and at times tediously, his childhood days in rural Shropshire and the Thames valley. There is much description of wild flowers, hills and dales, village markets and, of course, of his growing awareness that he was a poet. After grammar school he got a dreary job in a railway office in London, where he was able to consort with other poets, pacifists, anarchists and war resisters.

ing to follow the nuances. Sections on the physical sciences come off best, with deft explanations of relativity, energy sources, time travel (improbable but fun) and the riddles of quantum mechanics. Biology is well treated; sociology's uncertainties echo here with a preponderance of "this, but on the other hand, that" discussion. Weaving through the chapters on aliens, intelligent machines, catastrophes, powers of the mind and the like is an unstated assumption: In s-f, science is not merely another element in people's lives, but rather serves as the canvas upon which all human dramas are painted. Disaster stories the most common s-f motif in films give us a vision of mankind's comfortable little pocket, the biosphere less than 100 miles thick, and what happens when it is disturbed by gigantic forces.

This ability of s-f to symbolize our science-shaped world is its secret power, taking it beyond the easy territory of fantasy. New kinds of human experience demand new kinds of fiction, and the rise of s-f parallels the impact of science on our lives. It is difficult to write s-f well, yet it has a tenacity ordinary fiction does not; many of the stories and books discussed here are (Macmillan) (5) (18 21... tl THE SCIENCE IN SCIENCE FICTION Edited by Peter Nicholls. David Langford, Brian Stableford Knopf 208 pp, $33 By GREGORY BENFORD Special to The Gazette People do not read science fiction to learn science any more than others read historical novels to study history.

There are easier ways of going about it. One of the great strengths of science fiction, though, is its ability to incorporate the landscape of modern science, with all its grandeur and philosophical import, in a way conventional fiction cannot. A few decades ago a book explaining the science behind science fiction (s-f) would have appeared in crabbed, small type from a specialty press. Today Knopf distributes this volume, with lavish color illustrations and well-thoughtrout diagrams. Such are the fruits of Star Wars.

The movie audience for science fiction, however, may find this book tough going. It spans all the sciences, delving into outre areas with aplomb, setting a brisk pace. Many will need the bibliography of background read A common s-f cliche: The alien lusts after an Earthwoman still in print after three or four decades. Accuracy is essential who can be awed by new perspectives when he knows it is all done with bogus science? Although s-f authors try, they often fall behind the tide of scientific advance: Long after the atom was known by physicists to be made up of a complex, uncertainly shifting pattern of protons, neutrons and electrons, science-fiction writers were still producing stories about incredible shrinking men who discover that atoms are solid little worlds with tiny people including princesses living on their surface. A delightful chapter on "wrong science" treats hollow-earth novels (one of the earliest written by Casanova), impossible giant insects and aliens, force fields as likely as find Best sellers Numbers in brackets indicate standing last week and number of weeks on the list.

NON-FICTION 1. The F-Plan Diet, Audrey Eyton (Bantam) (1 (5) 2. In Search Of Excellence, Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman (Fitzhenry Whiteside) (3) (4) 3. Jane Fonda's Workout Book, Ja'ne Fonda (Musson) (2) (53) 4. Megatrends, John Naisbitt (Random House) (6) (7) Tales of humor helped ing a new color in the invisibility the retinas were invisible, light would pass through them without effect and the invisible man would be and bad predictions (a space pirate boarding a spacecraft with a gun and "a slide rule, a calculating instrument now as dead as the dodo, gripped between his Science fiction will always be a minority taste, leaning heavily on imagination.

Even so, it offers one of the few avenues for understanding what the scientific world view feels like, and might imply for our future. Shows like Star Trek, the quarter-pounder of science fiction, will always dominate the public's perception of the field. This book is a healthy antidote to the sloppy science often used in television, movies and, alas, even in novels. Los Angeles Times Montreal, Toronto and Quebec City. Several years ago Prof.

Andre Elbaz of Carleton University decided to collect the folktales of these people. His knowledge of the main languages used by Moroccan Jewish expatriates (Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Span-ish, Hebrew and French) was a useful mechanism in helping him record the stories. The English versions of these tales, only occasionally marred by inelegancies, is a powerful testimony to Elbaz's reportorial skills and the richness of Moroccan Jewish culture, which the author believes is disintegrating in Canada. Elbaz has done yeoman's work in rescuing one of the cultural monuments of North African Jewry. The stories he has collected and annotated show the piety and warmth of those Morrocan Jews who enjoyed a condominium with Berber-Arab society for more than a 1 .000 years.

The folktales (80 of the more than 300 collected are presented) reflect 5. 6. Grits, Christina McCall-Newman Living, Loving and Learning, Leo Buscagiia (Holt, Rinehart Winston) (-) (32) The Establishment Man, Peter Newman (McClelland Stewart) (4) (22) Why We Act Like Canadians, Pierre Berton (McClelland Stewart) 8. 9. None Is Too Many, Irving Abella and Harold Troper (Lester Orpen Dennys)(10)(12) 10.

Towers Of Gold, Feet Of Clay, Walter Stewart (Collins) (7) (26) FOLKTALES OF THE CANADIAN SEPHARDIM By Andre E. Elbaz Fiuhenry Whiteside 192 pp. $14.95 By ARNOLD AGES Special to The Gazette The term Sephardim is used by ethnographers to describe the group of Jews, or their descendants, who settled in medieval Spain and Portugal. In the broader sense, Sephardim refers to those Jews who inhabited the Mediterranean basin or who dwelt in Arab lands. The Sephardim of Morocco were once a large and culturally-rich community whose roots were deeply entwined in the history of North Africa.

In the wake of the creation of the state of Israel, masses of Moroccan Jewry emigrated there. A small gioup. about 15.000. came to Canada and settled in Ottawa. I FICTION The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carre (General) (5) (2) Space, James Michener (Random use) (1) l23) 2010, Odyssey Two, Arthur C.

Clarke (Random House) (2) (23) Master Of The Game, Sidney Sheldon (Macmillan) (4) (27) Floating Dragon, Peter Straub (Coihns) (10) (4) Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov (Doubieday) (3) (15) The Moons Of Jupiter, Alice Munro (Macmillan) (6) (20) The Prodigal Daughter, Jeffrey Archer (General) (9) (37) Mistral's Daughter, Judith Krantz (General) (8) (15) Different Seasons, Stephen King (Penguin) (7) (28) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. t. 9. 10..