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BOOKS IN REVIEWLAZAROV1TCHTO LAYTONELSPETH CAMERON, Irving Layton, a Portrait.Stoddart, n.p.IT IS ALL SUMMED up on pages 452-457.We learn that like "many Jewish immigrantsto North America, [Layton] hadmade an important contribution to thearts and to culture." He won prizes. Etc.His poems are a "truly remarkableachievement": "roughly fifteen areworld-class poems. . . ." "Another thirtyfive are extremely good." Etc. "In hisbest work, he does not employ coarse language.""As a lover, Layton was exciting,bold, all-consuming, tender. . . ." "Itis as a father that he has been most vulnerable."Etc. "He proved himself theperpetual child."Thus, and with a little more of thesame, Elspeth Cameron sums up IrvingLayton. But why, after 450 pages, isthere this need for a condensed Layton?Not, I think, just to close off the book.Not just to retain (or re-establish) thetidy voice. It is, rather, a compensationfor the fact that she had lost track of hersubject some 100 pages earlier — perhapsas early as the chapter "The Day AvivaCame to Paris" (pages 305-307; the yearwas 1959). Granted, her subject was onthe move. But somewhere along the wayCameron lost the authorial voice whichshe had established in the earlier part ofthe book. Her predicament raises somequestion for us about biographical writing,especially on prominent authors, onsubjects like Layton whose life is alreadyinscribed in writing.Irving Layton, a Portrait provides, forabout 300 pages, if not a model at leastan organized representation of a life thatwas already authorized as culturally significant."Irving Layton" had alreadybeen invented : the life, the life-style, thename (something more than just the invented"Layton" from "Lazarovitch" ).The biographer of an already culturallyestablished figure has, at the very least,a doubled task: the invented must bere-invented. A given life must be reproducedin a "closed" text, in this case theframed portrait, and given again. Bakhtin'sterm "heteroglossia" takes us to theproblem: "all utterances are heteroglotin that they are functions of a matrix offorces practically impossible to recoup,and therefore impossible to resolve." Thepossibilities for achieving objectivity areslim indeed.In Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form,Ira Nadel has argued persuasively thatbiographical writing is, in special ways,fiction. Within the fictional mode of biographicalwriting, we expect somethingresembling objectivity, an authority establishednot by facts but by perspectiveand discourse. Cameron provides muchfactual material, and for awhile herwriting provides the perspective necessaryto create such authority. But for anumber of reasons — her own position,her subject, the cultural congruities andincongruities residing in herself and inher subject — she fails to maintain herdistance, to maintain her perspective, herown authority. Perhaps Cameron herselfknows that it would have been better topublish a different book, Irving Layton:the Early Years. Her archaeological projectwould not then have left so muchdebris.Biographical writing has its specificconventional modes: the exemplary life,the growth of the writer's mind, the lifeand work (or times) of X, the "casestudy" of Y. (Nadel provides a valuablediscussion of the problem.) Cameronchose one of the most demanding conventions,the "life and work," almost"life and times," model. Authority in thismode is established by, among other powers,patience, "sheer plod," combined160