George Woodcock Biography

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to British parents, he was raised and educated in England. In the late 1930s, while mixing in the London literary world that included Dylan Thomas, Roy Campbell, Herbert Read, and George Orwell, Woodcock emerged as a poet and radical pamphleteer, part of a socially committed literary underground whose pacifism only intensified as a world war approached. During the war he performed non-military duties as a conscientious objector, edited the anarchist publication War Commentary (later Freedom), and founded the radical literary magazine Now, which he edited until 1947. In retrospect the pamphlets he wrote in this period fathered his later more lasting works, such as Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements (1962) and Gandhi (1971), though the young Woodcock gave little indication of the important and prolific literary figure he would later become. His early work ran from collections of verse, such as The white island (1940) and The centre cannot hold (1943), to The incomparable Aphra: a life of Mrs. Aphra Behn and The writer and politics: essays (both 1948). They all reflect the fluent writing style and the precise mixture of literary and political curiosity that seemed peculiar to him alone. The nature of the recipe is tied to Woodcock's belief in literary anarchism, the anti-doctrine whose most popular historian he became.

Within the general view that society is best served by individuals who are not organized under the yoke of government, Woodcock found room for himself as an independent journalist, historian, and literary commentator equally unconstrained by the academy or by slavish devotion to only one or two disciplines. As an anarchist, his antecedents were the notable libertarian thinkers of the nineteenth century whose biographer he became in such books as William Godwin: a biographical study (1946) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: a biography (1956). In the same vein is The anarchist prince: a biographical study of Peter Kropotkin (1950), written in collaboration with Ivan Avakumovic, as was The Doukhobors (1968). Woodcock's literary ancestors, however, would stretch from Defoe and William Cobbett to any of the late-Victorian generalists to whom nothing humanly interesting could be totally foreign.

In 1949 Woodcock returned to Canada, settling in British Columbia, eventually in Vancouver, and carrying on his profession as a writer with even greater vigour. All his Canadian writings, even the most personal, tended to be informed by his interest in the role of the arts in a free society and the way many past eras and more primitive cultures point up weaknesses in our own. While one should be wary of seeing his career as compartmentalized, it is possible to break down his work into several convenient, if maddeningly overlapping, categories.

As a prolific travel writer Woodcock produced personal narratives rather than guide-books, though such stylized works as To the city of the dead: an account of travels in Mexico (1957) and Incas and other men: travels in the Andes (1959) are full of observations on the history, geography, economy, and culture of the regions being examined. Other travel books are Faces of India: a travel narrative (1964), Asia, gods and cities: Aden to Tokyo (1966), Kerala: a portrait of the Malabar coast (1967), and South Sea journey (1976). It is no coincidence that all the above deal with areas once part of either the Spanish or the British empires, for in Woodcock colonialism is often seen as government writ large, and the lowly native as a metaphor for the individual within the dreaded state. These ideas are still more apparent in related works of history, such as The Greeks in India (1966), The British in the Far East (1969), Into Tibet: the early British explorers (1971), and Who killed the British Empire? (1974).

Woodcock's travel books, all of them examples of a type more common in Britain than in North America—informal and objective in approach, wide-ranging in subject-matter—were thus the fountainhead for other of his works, including his many publications on Canada. After Ravens and prophets: an account of journeys in British Columbia, Alberta and southern Alaska (1952), in which he saw the region as deliciously untamed yet foreign, Woodcock gradually became a Canadian nationalist whose nationalism was rooted in the cause of regionalism and decentralization. Such is the viewpoint conveyed to foreign audiences in Canada and the Canadians (1970; rev. 1973) and The Canadians (1979), and expressed more stridently for domestic consumption in Confederation betrayed! (1981), whose format harks back to his numerous early pamphlets. The underlying concern with local cultural history surfaced fully in such biographical studies as Amor De Cosmos, journalist and reformer and Gabriel Dumont: the Métis chief and his lost world (both 1975). The subtitle of the latter is significant for, as in Peoples of the coast: the Indians of the Pacific Northwest (1977), Woodcock often laments or tries to evoke a lost world—one in which anarchism was the natural state of man. Also in this vein are The walls of India (1985) and Caves in the desert: travels in China (1988).

In his literary criticism, too, one can see Woodcock constantly refining certain tenets that came early to him. In its search for the perfect marriage of imaginative and political activity (somewhat akin to Tolstoy's idealized balance of the intellectual and the physical), The paradox of Oscar Wilde (1950) is virtually a blueprint for later bio-critical studies, such as The crystal spirit: a study of George Orwell (1966)—for which he won a Governor General's Award; Dawn and the darkest hour: a study of Aldous Huxley (1972); and Herbert Read: the stream and the source (1972). These books also showed his preference for the radical and his inclination towards sociological over textual criticism (which he nevertheless did not disregard), as did Odysseus ever returning: essays on Canadian writers and writing (ncl, 1970), The world of Canadian writing: critiques and recollections (1980), and Northern spring: the flowering of Canadian literature (1987). All are important collections, showing to best advantage the style and disposition that are also obvious in two monographs, Hugh MacLennan (1969) and Mordecai Richler (1971), which present Woodcock as a questioner and leveller rather than as an explainer and champion, which he tended to be when discussing younger regionalist authors.

As regards influences, Woodcock was both a transmitter and a receiver—the latter particularly in his verse. In poetry collections from Imagine the South (1947) to Selected poems (1967), he was essentially a British poet from between the wars in outlook and style. In his newer verse—collected in Notes on visitations: poems, 1936-1975 (1975) and The kestrel and other poems (1978)—Auden had been supplanted as an influence by Margaret Atwood, and the writer had been virtually redefined and rejuvenated. His most finely crafted collection of poetry was likewise his last: The cherry tree on Cherry Street (1994).

Among Woodcock's many other books—each expressing strains in his previous writings—are Civil disobedience (1966), Henry Walter Bates: naturalist of the Amazon (1969), Thomas Merton, monk and poet: a critical study (1978), and Two plays (1978). He also edited several anthologies drawn from Canadian Literature, which he founded in Vancouver in 1959 and edited until 1977. The rejection of politics and other essays on Canada, Canadians, anarchism and the world (1972) suggests the enormous volume of his journalism, while A George Woodcock reader (1980), edited by Douglas Fetherling, gives a broader hint of its scope. Taking it to the letter (1982) is a selection of his correspondence with other Canadian writers. Letter to the past (1983) is the first volume of his autobiography, covering the years before his return to Canada. He completed the story of his life in Beyond the blue mountains (1987) and Walking through the valley (1994).

In his last few years, Woodcock turned to history with renewed vigour, and with as much concern for historiographical ideas as for mere historical information. Three such works were A social history of Canada (1988); the unjustly overlooked distillation of his ideas, The marvellous century: archaic man and the awakening of reason (1988); and The century that made us: Canada 1814-1914 (1989).

Woodcock was a vital force in Canadian writing, and a constant link between the Canadian tradition and those of other English-language cultures.

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See also Criticism in English: 5(f).

Douglas Fetherling