Caricature of Patrick Watson by Anthony JenkinsAnthony Jenkins
WHO Patrick Watson, television producer, writer, host and interviewer and a Globe and Mail contributing reviewer. Creative director of the Historica Foundation (The Heritage Minutes); former chairman of the CBC, author of This Hour Has Seven Decades, Wittgenstein and the Goshawk, Finn's Thin Book of Irish Ironies: A History of Ireland in Verse, and a dozen other books; currently writing a collection of limericks.
WHAT Art and Politics: A History of the National Arts Centre, by Sarah Jennings; The History of Modern Ireland, by R.F. Foster; Autobiographies: Reveries Over Childhood and Youth and The Trembling of the Veil, by W.B. Yeats; The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats ; Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats, by Brenda Maddox; Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, by Adam Gopnik; Short Haul Engine, by Karen Solie; Sailing Alone Around The Room, by Billy Collins; Hamlet, by William Shakespeare; The Bible
WHY All of these - with the exception of Jennings's absorbing narrative of the fight to create the NAC and Adam Gopnik's provocative study of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln - are rereads. Tackling a solid piece of non-fiction, like Foster's comprehensive and lucid history of Ireland, is a much richer experience the second time: You know the story, so to speak; now you can soak up the texture, the detail, the persons, the arguments. Same feeling about Maddox's book on Yeats.
I am a Yeats freak. I always have his collected poems in my bedside table drawer, have had for decades. I can remember discussing his Lake Isle of Innisfree in class when I was in Grade 10. We always visit his grave near Sligo, when we are in the west of Ireland (which is fairly often). He is a very big figure in my imaginative life. And I guess that when I first read the autobiographical stuff I must have raced through it, because now that I am - well "savouring" it is not quite right, but certainly exploring it and musing on it - I am struck with what a strange man he really was, how awkward and studied his prose writing is, how much I would have disliked him.
I still resent the fact that my parents did not take me to hear him read when he was in Toronto, even though I was only 3. And I continue to read and to relish his poems. But it is an experience now oddly coloured by thoughts that flash by, such as, "What a jerk!" or, "He doesn't really mean this. Why is he saying it?" And the plays are awful.
Jennings' NAC story is a remarkable achievement of narrative about plotting, skulduggery and characters that could easily have just been a conventional institutional history.
The two modern poets, Billy Collins of New York and Karen Solie from Moose Jaw, have been favourites ever since I first picked them up. I have had the wonderful experience of taking their books to dinner parties, being told by other guests, "Uh ... sorry. ... Uh, not into poetry," etc. And then having them clamour for more after I've read a few.
The Gopnik book is a must: powerfully written, a strongly personal and passionate study of two individuals about whom the author has become profoundly intrigued, and whose life stories have much to say to the modern reader.
For several years now, a complete Shakespeare and a Bible have been constantly at hand; I turn to them for language and instruction. My ongoing readings of the Bible are making me increasingly cynical about organized religion. My reading and rereading of the great Shakespeares (including the sonnets) keep turning up lines that I seem not to have noticed before, and moments of profound poetic, dramatic and emotional satisfaction.