Adozen years ago, Eli Mandel`s deathwould have been news, with tributes, public letters, and a standing-room-onlymemorial service. But by the time he succumbed to pneumonia last fall, a seriesof strokes had long since robbed him of the ability to write, and he was prettymuch out of the loop. The FamilyRomance, agathering of essays published in 1986, was his last book. That was a mere sevenyears ago, but long enough for his name to slip into limbo. The only acknowledgementof his death I saw was an obituary in the Globe and Mail that drew most of its information from a decade-old reviewof his selected poems, DreamingBackwards. TheGlobe writer also spoke withAnn Mandel, his widow. In the circumstances, she said, the death "wasreally a blessing. He was just wasting away" in a nursing home. Poor Eliwas 69. TheCanadian-studies community had not forgotten him the way ordinary literaryreaders had, but recalled him as the kind of poet and critic - a kind I thinkof as typical of his time - who struggled mightily both to keep alive humanistscholarship and to stay alert to popular culture. Dennis Cooley, who had beenteaching a class on him at the University of Manitoba, was instrumental in thespecial Mandel issue of Essays onCanadian Writing, which appeared about 10 days before Eli died. Ann Mandelreports that she and Mandel`s son Charles read him some of the sections, whichelicited signs of pleasure. A piece by Margaret Atwood made him laugh, shesays: "The ego is the last thing to go." Iknew him only very casually and then mostly in the late 1960s, only a year ortwo after he had moved to York University and won the Governor General`s Awardfor Poetry for his collection An Idiot Joy. I last saw him atone of those fund-raising dinners for the Writers` Development Trust, after thefirst and, I assume, least severe of the strokes; he seemed quite well exceptfor minor bouts of aphasia, which would come to steal the words he was lookingfor. WheneverI think of him, I think of a wonderfully funny 1965 film called Bye Bye Braverman, which expertly satirizesthe type of academic I believe Eli was: the type that`s forever trying to readsignificance into show business in order to prove that it`s possible for seriouspeople to he in tune with the masses. His later collections of poetry - hepublished five Of them, all quite substantial, during the 1970s, his busiestdecade - were full of elegies on Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. They were also,of course, full of his personal past. In particular, Estevan, Saskatchewan,which was both a geographical reality and the capital of his patrie interieure, a place he seemed tohave loved and loathed retroactively. For me, and I`m sure most of his readers,his poems of growing up there in an immigrant Jewish family during theDepression are the ones we remember best, because they were so deeply felt andcommunicated all the more powerfully for that lack of linguistic adornment heworked so hard to perfect. Mandel wrote about high culture and low culturealike, critically as well as creatively, but he wrote mostly in formal,depersonalized language that avoided excesses of emotion. I once commented thathe came of age as a writer in the 1950s, when there were psychoanalysts onevery street comer, like phrenologists a century before; in the arts everyonewas intensely concerned with undoing the deification of reality; those notafraid of Howdy Doody and Communism were afraid of those who were. Many ofMandel`s concerns seem to spring from the agenda at that time. Inlater years, of course, the agenda changed, and Eli grew uneasy with what hecalled "post-structural deconstructionist scepticism," though he wasinterested in its workings as the latest fad in orthodoxy. Youcan`t help but wonder whether he didn`t come to believe that existence, likepop cult, is at the mercy of changes in fashion -always a big demand for nextyear`s kind of life, while prices on last year`s reputation are marked waydown. I don`t know. I only know that there should have been more magazine andnewspaper pieces published to mark his passage. Here`s mine.