Among today’s Irving Layton coverage is an unsentimental piece on the CBC Arts website by Raymond and Hannah author Stephen Marche. Marche clearly admires Layton’s talent for living large and mythologizing himself: “In a country of self-deprecation, he represented its opposite,” he writes. But Marche also remains ambivalent about Layton’s literary legacy. “Layton was immeasurably greater at convincing himself, and a few others, of his abilities than he was at writing poetry, but let’s not disparage the gift of his conviction. In the 1950s, we desperately needed somebody to say that a Canadian could be a great writer, even if he could only do so by claiming that he himself was that great writer.”

Related links:
Click here for Stephen Marche’s CBC Arts piece