It seems fitting that Douglas Fetherling has become a Boswell of one of Canada’s great polymaths, the late, learned George Woodcock. He is something of a self-taught renaissance man himself, bidding to be as prolific and Catholic in his interests as Woodcock. The underappreciated Fetherling has written and edited more than 40 books as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, social historian, and cultural commentator. Not to mention his busy career as a freelance writer, editor, and collector of books.

It’s these latter roles that he recalls so vividly and wittily in his second memoir, Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast. This is a compelling account of Canadian literary and journalistic life by a well-placed participant, a refugee from America, during a decade he describes as “a time when counterculture was cross-fading into millennial conservatism and reaction.”

The astonishing last line of Fetherling’s memoir of the Sixties, Travels by Night (1994), reminds his readers that his multifarious adventures with a grandly dysfunctional family, gangster mentors, and literary lights-to-be ended in his 21st year. Although he had left us in London, Way Down Deep’s opening chapter about his visit there does nothing to propel the plot of his life.

The pace picks up on his return to Toronto, with his debut as a Macmillan poet, then underground newspaper publisher, book editor for The Toronto Star and Books in Canada, stalwart at Saturday Night, and failed lover. We get fully fleshed portraits of foreign correspondent and “awe-inspiring drinker” Charles Taylor, “straight arrow” Robert Fulford, and a latter-day Hugh Garner who “wore his reputation right down to the gums.” I was on the scene as a slightly older magazine writer, knew some of the same characters, and Fetherling nails them. And there are bonuses along the way, about the out-of-print book trade, the world of weekend magazine supplements, and a Toronto in decline.

Fetherling is unnervingly honest about his own stuttering, self-loathing, and reinventing of self; about being fired by, among others, Canadian Business’s Sandy Ross; and about the downside of the freelance life (“For a dozen years I never knew the luxury of an unexpressed thought”).

I eagerly await his memoir of the Eighties (tentatively titled Going to See the Elephant), when he and Woodcock come face to face.