The Best of Tom Thomson by Joan Murray
1987; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1987.0141
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
Resumo230 Western American Literature keep her from writing and eventually drive her insane. Her poignant life story emerges from the thirteen overlapping and interconnected stories included in Black Swan. Gerda and her family suffer a fate like that which befalls the characters in a Greek tragedy; and like some of the ancient Greeks, Story writes with a style that John Ditsky has aptly described as “a clear and decep tively simple one.” As vain and overbearing as the Jason of Greek myth, Gerda’sfather insists on keeping a great white stallion, even though the Beckmanns are poor. Her father so harshly berates Gerda’s sister Elsa that the girl enters the stallion’s stall and is killed by the flying hooves. Then the father’s willfulness helps lead to his young son’s accidental death. Gerda feels guilty about both deaths, and she comes to hate the father she also loves. Black Swan is also like Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio in its powerful depiction of the agony of poor women and children. But in Yonnondio and much other prairie fiction, the most destructive forces are the economy and the environ ment, whereas the Beckmanns’own inner demons seem most destructive. Here the comparison is to Vardis Fisher’s tetralogy, titled from lines by George Meredith: “In tragic life, God wot, / No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: / We are betrayed by what is false within.” Because she fears and hates her father, the adult Gerda will not share her extraordinary poetry. Bottled up, it helps drive her mad. And when after many years a man offers love, she refuses it. Hers is a sad song indeed—but beautifully, movingly told. JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University The Best of Tom Thomson. By Joan Murray. (Edmonton, Canada: Hurtig Publishers Ltd., 1986. 90 pages, $22.95.) As neighbors, the United States and Canada shared a continental land mass, a westward march of civilization, and a common mix of geographical and social elements. Yet even while both countries had their West, Canada had—has—something more: its North. From earliest times, Canada’s North Country has gripped the national consciousness. In this alluring little book, Joan Murray portrays Canadian painter Tom Thomson’s substantive role in visualizing that spiritual force through his magical brush. One quality that fixes Thomson in the Canadian imagination, she points out, “is his link to the cold pure North, to the great dreaming that underlies the Canadian psyche. He was the first painter to give [Canadians] a memorable image of [their] spiritual heartland.” Reviews 231 Born in Claremont, Ontario, in 1877, Thomson died in 1917 under some what mysterious circumstances, drowning in Canoe Lake in the Northern Ontario wilderness. Only thirty-nine, he had established his reputation as one of Canada’s leading artists in the remarkably short span of five years. He was highly respected by his fellow artists and was an inspirational force behind the founding, three years after his death, of Canada’sseminal Group of Seven. Director of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, Joan Murray is well along on a catalogue raisonne of Thomson’s work. For this present celebration, she has selected fifty-five subjects, and offers them in color plate to show his chronological development over his unfortunately abbrevi ated career as a painter. With one exception, they are landscapes; Thompson rarely included human figures in his scenes. “He was primarily a painter of linear distance,” wrote Northrop Frye in 1941 in an essay reprinted in this book. Murray finds “religious overtones [as] a natural concomitant to the gentleness and peace of the images he created.” This reviewer concurs whole heartedly in her assessment that Thompson’s gouache study for a painting titled “Northern River,” reproduced in this book, “is a lyric poem.” In the range of subject and the play of style there is something for everyone in this “Best of Tom Thomson.” WILLIAM GARDNER BELL Arlington, Virginia The Life and Times of James Willard Schultz (Apikuni). By Warren Hanna. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. 382 pages, $24.95.) This is a charming book simply because of the lucky combination of biographer and subject. The obvious pleasure of...
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