DON KERR
George Ryga's life reads like a play. Act one is From Athabaska Farmboy to the Opening Night of The Ecstacy of Rita Joe; act two is Fighting Back. Ryga's life went both higher and lower and was more full than most lives, and ended far too soon: Ryga dead of stomach cancer in 1987, aged 55. He'd be 65 this year and surely still fighting. To paraphrase gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, he lived the life he sang about in his plays.
The outline of the story is well known: the Ukrainian and farm background on a Canadian frontier, the importance of teachers and mentors in discovering and fostering his talent, his move outward in the world, from Athabaska, to Edmonton, to Banff, to an extraordinary trip to Europe in 1956, when Ryga was 24. Mentors were just as important later; at the beginning of his writing career, there were Daryl Duke and George McCowan on television and George Bloomfield as the partial begetter of Rita Joe.
There were many combats and defeats. They began almost as early as the success. Ryga lost his IODE Banff scholarship because he spoke out against the Korean War, lost a job on Edmonton radio because of a speech for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, had Captives of the Faceless Drummer cancelled by the Vancouver Playhouse board, a notorious case of volunteers usurping artists. Always he spoke his mind, talked back, entered public conflicts all his life, as James Hoffman suggests by his title, The Ecstacy of Resistance.
Hoffman's biography is a lineal account of Ryga's life, broken by paragraphs of historical context, by brief summaries of unpublished work, and by analyses of Ryga's more important work. Hoffman's prose is clear and serviceable and he has much new information: from the Calgary archives but more especially from interviews he held with Ryga in 1984, as well as with his wife Norma, with George Bloomfield, Joy Coghill, David Gardner, Thomas Peacocke, John Juliani and others.
The biography has its shortcomings. The preface is poorly written and while analyses are clear they are not rich enough to help anyone teach Ryga. The bibliography fails to give production dates for plays, or to list Ryga's unpublished work. Nor are there sources for Hoffman's historical material. Is it all from encyclopedias? How useful is one paragraph on the United Farmers of Alberta, or one paragraph on Bill Irvine (has Hoffman read the Antony Mardiros biography of Irvine)? How useful is a summary of 1968 theatre as noisy and Dionysian as if all plays in all places could so easily be labelled? There is no theoretical framework in the book, either about the enterprise of writing biography or coming to terms with Ryga as a committed political writer and man. The intensity and various forms his commitment took are everywhere in the book, but without a framework or at least a summary this central part of Ryga's life remains out of focus.
The chapter on Rita Joe is a test case of the book's quality. There is valuable new information from interviews; we learn what was happening in Ryga's life that year, the difficulty with an older daughter who ran away, all the other work completed--including five teleplays on CBC that year. However Hoffman's reading of Rita Joe is ordinary and his account of the history of the manuscript isn't as good as that by Christopher Innes' in Canadian Drama, (Vol. 10, no. 2), whose article is not mentioned by Hoffman.
Still there are lots of bits I enjoyed. I was intrigued to learn that Ryga as a young man read the famous five cent Little Blue Books from Girard Kansas, that the first play Ryga saw was Oedipus Rex, that when poor he typed on great rolls of paper suspended on a coat hanger and unrolled into his typewriter and torn off when they hit the floor, that The Zoo Story on Quest inspired him to write for television, that he recycled his material ("Betrothed" was a short story which was broadcast on CBC radio, appeared in a short story anthology, then as part of the novel Ballad of a Stonepicker, and finally as an unproduced teleplay), that his beloved Underwood had a fatal accident, that faced with a George Ryga teleplay full of lines, Tony Franciosa said, "Christ! I'm a star, not an actor" (p. 202), that Ryga received less over two years from the Vancouver Playhouse than one year's salary of a receptionist (p. 220), that Ryga was the first subscriber to Canadian Theatre Review (p. 252), and that he refused to be in Geraldine Anthony's Twelve Canadian Playwrights Talk about Their Work because he wouldn't give up copyright.
I wonder if Ryga could fashion a career as a writer were he to start in 1996. His mainstay was clearly radio and television on the CBC, an institution now so despised by conservative and liberal governments it wouldn't have a place for Ryga more than once a year. We certainly need his anger today, with Canadian culture under attack by politicians and others, who wish to replace captivating stories with their own tedious disaster epics in the mean '90s. His fury would be a sensible response to our times.