The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955–1980 by Joel Deshaye (review)

Joel Deshaye. The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 264 pp. $35.00. There has been a recent rise in academic interest in the study of celebrity and its consequences for writers in Canada. This interest has led, in turn, to a number of important works on this topic by critics like Lorraine York, Gillian Roberts, and others. These works have problematized the practice of literary reading by demonstrating the interconnections between the text and the material conditions that surround it. They have forced readers to reckon with the ways in which the supposedly exterior conditions of textual production inevitably impact the structures of texts themselves, our readings of these texts, and the very possibility of the text’s existence as such. Joel Deshaye’s monograph The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980 is a welcome addition to this growing body of scholarship. It is a sensible, well-reasoned book that I have found usefully provocative. Whereas most of the recent studies of celebrity have tended toward a focus on present-day conditions, Deshaye’s contribution chooses to isolate the period of 1955 to 1980 to provide a specific reading of poetic practices during that period. Deshaye focuses on four writers in order to conduct his study: Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. Each writer is the focus of two chapters, and the project is nicely contained by introductory chapters that set up the critical focus and a conclusion that contemplates the idea of Canadian poetic celebrity in light of contemporary media. The book establishes its terrain from the outset: the metaphor of celebrity, as Deshaye articulates it, is that when one becomes a celebrity even one’s privacy becomes a part of one’s public performance of the self. In other words, as Deshaye puts it, “privacy is publicity” for the celebrity (4). He makes an important distinction between celebrity and fame in order to substantiate this seemingly paradoxical argument: while fame derives from lasting achievements, and may be obtained over a long period of time, celebrity is, rather, the possibly fleeting attention that may be granted to a particular figure through the media and other means. Celebrity, in this account, is fickle in ways that fame is not. This distinction is crucial, because it allows Deshaye to develop the temporally limited framework for the book, 1955 to 1980. This period is marked, at the outset, by the rise to public prominence of Irving Layton, particularly with A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959), and, at its end, by books like Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (1978) and the shift of poets like Ondaatje into novel-writing (leading to the examination of this subject–the poet’s novel–by the critic Ian Rae, among others). Deshaye uses examinations of cbc archives and the Canadian Periodicals Index in order to quantitatively demonstrate that the poets of his study became prominent during this period, that they sustained public interest for their poetry, and that the mood in the Canadian literary world as the 1980s began shifted away from granting celebrity status to poets. These examinations, in turn, lead him to note the gendered imbalance in the poets upon whom he focuses, which he views as a product of the historical period.