SOURCE: Smith, Patricia Keeney. Review of Irving Layton: A Portrait, by Elspeth Cameron, and Waiting for the Messiah, by Irving Layton. University of Toronto Quarterly 56, no. 3 (spring 1987): 467-70.

In the following review, Smith contrasts Elspeth Cameron's biography of Layton with Waiting for the Messiah, Layton's memoir, highlighting the different accounts of the interplay between the man and his poetry.

Having had one of the first words on Elspeth Cameron's biography of Irving Layton in the Canadian Forum of November 1985, I may here also claim the dubious distinction of having one of the last words on the question of that poet's suitability as a subject for biography or autobiography. It is now public knowledge that Layton's response to the Cameron biography [Irving Layton: A Portrait] is unrelentingly negative, damning it for factual error and rampant anti-Semitism. Having written what I believe to have been a rational and balanced review...