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REMEMBERING PURDY
Terry Barker interviews James Deahl about the
career of Canada's 'Voice of the Land' poet, Al Purdy, who died in April
2000 after a poetry career that spanned nearly six decades.
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TERRY BARKER: The recent death of Canada’s
‘Voice of the Land’ (as the League of Canadian Poets called him), Al
Purdy, prompted journalist Valerie Gregory to write that ‘among such
contemporaries as Earle Birney, Milton Acorn and Irving Layton, [Purdy]
stood out easily.’ (The National Post, April 25, 2000) In light
of your association with the People’s Poetry tradition in Canada, I
wonder if you agree with that statement?
JAMES DEAHL: Well, the generation that started
with Birney, who, by the way, was born in the west in 1904, and ended
with Acorn, who was born in the east in 1923, produced several
first-rate People’s Poets, or poets who wrote out of the populist
tradition. To Birney, Acorn, Layton, and Purdy must be added A.M. Klein,
Dorothy Livesay, Miriam Waddington, and Raymond Souster, among others.
This was the second truly important generation of Canadian Poets; the
first being our Confederation Poets of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
Dennis Lee has called Al Purdy Canada’s greatest
poet and Patrick Lane has him as our greatest poet of the twentieth
century. High praise, indeed! But in what way is Purdy great? In what
way is he Canadian? And, of course, how does he stand out from other
members of his generation?
To take them in order: The finest of Al’s poems -
such as ‘The Country North of Belleville’ and ‘Wilderness Gothic’
- are as great as any ever written in this country. In terms of poetics,
Al is right up there with Milt and Earle. Number two: Al, like the
others I’ve mentioned, wrote for the people as a whole, not for
the academic/cultural elite. And he wrote first for the Canadian people,
and later for his international readership. Al’s poetry is to Ontario
what Milt’s work is to the Maritimes. It defines a place and a
culture.
This brings us to his ‘standing out’ from the
others. The way I see it, poets like Al are at one end of the spectrum
while Milt and Dorothy, for example, can be found at the other. That is,
Milt was a poet with a vision, and that vision grew out of his Marxism
and his Christianity. Al had no vision. Milt often wrote about the
Canadian people as they ought to be or as they might become. Al was much
more the realist; he presented people as he found them, flaws, failures,
and all. In this respect Al’s poems are like the short stories and
novels of James T. Farrell - naturalistic. You see, Milt and Dorothy
were always trying to reform their readers; but Al wrote out of no such
idealistic agenda. In short, Al was more like a regular Canadian
person. And, for writers and artists, that is extremely rare.
TERRY BARKER: You say that Al Purdy was ‘like
a regular Canadian person’ who, in contrast to Acorn and Livesay, had
no vision for Canadians or of Canada. What does this say for the state
of the Canadian nation and why, in your view, did so many Canadian
commentators evidently accord Purdy the status of a ‘national icon’
(in the language of The Globe and Mail’s extensive obituary) if
he was without some sort of ‘national dream’?
JAMES DEAHL: In view of the fact that at the
time Al’s obituary was published, The Globe and Mail was
complaining that Québécois nationalism was retarding the economic and
cultural integration of Canada into the greater U.S. of A., I can’t
imagine how that newspaper could recognize a national icon, be that icon
Al Purdy or anyone else. This is not to say the Globe is out of
step with those regular Canadians we’re talking about. I’d say most
Canadians today see Canada as merely a more pleasant version of America;
that is, Canada is the U.S. with less racism, sexism, poverty, and
violence. They do not see Canada as being fundamentally different. If
Canada is to play the role of the nice American sister, as opposed to
the naughty sister (but sisters nonetheless), you don’t want the
nationalism of an Acorn or the Québécois.
So, was Al really a continentalist? Not in my book.
Sure, he liked William Carlos Williams, Charles Bukowski and several of
the Beat Generation poets, but he also was attracted to the work of the
Georgian poets and John Donne. Like most
Canadians, he found much to admire in U.S. culture. But at the time of
his death, Al wanted to work with younger poets towards a revival of
People’s Poetry in this country. If Al wanted Canadian culture
integrated with American culture, why revive People’s Poetry? But he
was no man of vision. Al felt Canadian, and he wanted to retain
that feeling. Many of the people I know want to share in all things
American while still feeling, in some vague way, Canadian. Of course,
you can’t really do that, but that’s what they think they can
achieve.
Now I may be completely wrong; still,
here’s how I see it. Near the end of his life, Al sought to return to
something he thought had been left behind during the late 1970s. This
was the poetic spirit he possessed (or that possessed him) when he wrote
the poems in The Cariboo Horses, North of Summer, and In
Search of Owen Roblin. He wanted to again embrace things that had,
he discovered, remained close to his heart throughout the years - but he
ran out of time.
TERRY BARKER: The 1958 Penguin Book of
Canadian Verse, edited and introduced by Ralph Gustafson, includes
work by all of the poets you have named as ‘first-rate People’s
Poets, or poets who wrote out of the populist tradition’ except Milton
Acorn and Al Purdy. Acorn was the youngest member of the group you
describe, and did not publish his first chapbook collection until 1956.
However, Purdy was somewhat older than Acorn, and published his first
book of poetry in 1944, In view of these facts, why do you think
Gustafson ignored Purdy in his anthology, especially as just over a
decade later (in 1970) prominent Canadian poet and academic George
Bowering was hailing Purdy as ‘the world’s most Canadian poet’?
JAMES DEAHL: No real mystery here, Terry. The
work in Al’s first few collections was derivative and, to be frank,
not particularly good. His poetry did not become anything at all special
until The Crafte So Longe To Lerne in 1959, a book that shows the
influence of Acorn. The Acorn/Purdy friendship is one of the most
important in the history of CanLit. Al helped Milt write better poems -
very, very little of his pre-Purdy work is worth reading - and Milt
helped Al in just the same way. I mean, how many of Al’s poems that
are in the canon date from before he and Milt got together? So if
Gustafson looked at Al’s poetry at all, it would have been his
pre-Acorn work that was considered and rejected.
The texture, tone, and content of Canadian poetry
written throughout the 1960s and 1970s would have been quite different
had Al Purdy and Milton Acorn not met, and become friends, in Montreal
during the 1950s. Their friendship was so profound that one cannot speak
of Al’s poetry without talking about Acorn, and vice versa. Even more
important, one cannot speak of modern Canadian poetry without reference
to both Al and Milt. And this friendship also involved such great poets
as Ray Souster and Louis Dudek. These men all influenced one another, as
well as Canadian poetry as a whole. Then, when you mix in Dorothy
Livesay and Anne Marriott, both of whom inspired Acorn, you get a pretty
pure taste of People’s Poetry. In a sense, this is when Canadian
poetry became Canadian poetry. Oh, to have been in Montreal in the ’50s
when all this came together!
This should be the subject of a book-length study.
The number of very major Canadian literary figures - not only poets -
who hung out around McGill University at that time was astounding. And
they influenced each other as young writers, before their mature voices
were fully developed. Yet, I know of no book that deals with these
friendships. Do you?
TERRY BARKER: No, I’m not aware of a general
study of the putative intellectual and literary influences among members
and associates of the McGill Group/Montreal Movement and their
associates during and after the 1950s.
JAMES DEAHL: Odd, don’t you think? I mean,
there are histories of the Bloomsbury Group as well as of Dorothy Parker’s
circle at the Algonquin Hotel. The McGill scene was our Algonquin, was
our Bloomsbury. And yet no study!
TERRY BARKER: Yes, it is odd. I do think it is
clear (according to Bowering’s 1970 book-length study of Purdy that I
referred to) that it was, among other things, Purdy¹s philosophical
shift, from the 1940s to the 1950s, from a vague Protestantism to an
agnostic existentialism, that contributed to his being considered ‘the
world’s most Canadian poet’ by the late 1960s. Does that mean that
by the latter decade the dominant spirit of Canadian poetry and poetics
(and perhaps, by inference, of Canada itself) had become that best
expressed by existentialism?
JAMES DEAHL: Certainly. I’m old enough to
have started my life as a poet in the mid-‘60s, some thirty-five years
ago, so I remember the era well. Existentialism was in the air. During
the ‘60s I used to visit New York frequently; everyone was reading
Sartre and Heidegger. Same as when I worked at The Book Stall in
Pittsburgh. We sold a lot of existentialism to members of the writing
community. And this was no doubt going on in Canada, too.
Early Modernism had religious roots. Look at Eliot.
Look at A.J.M. Smith. Whether the poets were real believers, like Eliot,
or attended church as unbelievers, as Robert Lowell has it, they
nonetheless came from Christian backgrounds. But late Modernism was very
different. Immediately after World War II, existentialism came to the
fore, first among writers, and later among the general population.
Existentialism developed into a religion for poets who found they could
no longer believe in God. That as well as the New Left. Indeed, many
writers were attracted to Sartre and the New Left. I also looked both
ways before I crossed the street.
All culture is based on some being, or on some idea,
beyond the individual writers and artists. The shift from a religions to
a philosophical basis, first seen in Europe, and then here in North
America, began at mid century. Al was a man of his time.
TERRY BARKER: The late Canadian philosopher,
George Grant, much admired by many New Left and Left Nationalist
intellectuals in Canada in the 1960s and ‘70s, pointed out that ‘liberals
in the modern world nearly all become existentialists’ because they do
not believe there is any centre of value or meaning in the universe
external to their own wills. One of Grant’s mentors, German-American
political philosopher Eric Voegelin, described existentialism as a ‘side
road’ off the actual philosophical ‘ascent toward essence’, which,
in fact, since the eighteenth century has served as a convenient ‘escape
for the bewildered’. In view of Purdy’s early attraction to the
poetry of two liberals who were not existentialists, G.K. Chesterton and
D.H. Lawrence, why do you think he became so influenced by the
Existentialist Movement during the period of his best-remembered work,
the 1960s and 1970s? He was, for example, evidently reading William
Barrett’s classical study of existentialism, Irrational Man,
during the time he was writing the poems included in North of Summer,
published in 1967, Canada’s Centennial Year.
JAMES DEAHL: One of the things that Professor
Ezio Cappadocia pointed out to me is that liberalism is not a real
philosophy. Cappadocia believes, and I do too, that a ‘real’ system
of ideas must trace its roots way back to one of the classic
philosophies - the Greeks in Europe or Taoism in China, for example - or
to one of the world’s major religions. In either case, the roots will
go deep into something that is prior to, and greater than, mankind. That
is, to an external source of meaning.
But liberalism, despite the repeated claims of
various liberals, really does not come from the Greeks. It comes out of
the Industrial Revolution. Industrial production is the result of the
development of certain technologies, technologies that changed forever
both agriculture and manufacturing. Things became very large, they were
no longer human sized; the cobbler shop was replaced by the shoe
factory, the family farm by multinational agribusiness. Over time, this
gave rise to an urban, bourgeois culture, and to a middle-class life
style. Political and philosophical liberalism, including the much touted
American pragmatism, is an outgrowth of this economic process.
The key point is that, unlike most other systems of
thought prior to the nineteenth century, liberalism is not rooted in
what we might call the philosophical tradition; it’s rooted in
human-invented technology and the resultant society.
It is soft, not hard, and intellectuals become
tired of that, they want something more rigorous. I knew both poets, and
I know Acorn did not like this softness, nor did Purdy. This is why some
modern writers became Marxists and others existentialists. George Grant
should have said that modern liberals become existentialists or
must surrender their liberalism. That is, of course, not easy. When I
went away to college in the autumn of 1964, I was required to read Mark
Van Doren’s Liberal Education to prepare me for the education I
was about to receive. Liberalism was the American way. Hard to
escape that. Hell, I still have the book in my library.
For a person like Al it was easy to take up
existentialism but hard to remain a mere liberal. Harder still to reject
liberalism, which he should have done, and which Acorn eventually did.
At any rate, I’m sure you’ll agree, Terry, that existentialism is a
bit more rigorous than the sort of liberalism that was on offer during
the ‘60s. It was, after all, a decayed liberalism, much like we see
today.
TERRY BARKER: Purdy’s early mentors,
Chesterton and Lawrence, were both part of the Georgian Movement in
British poetry of the early decades of the twentieth century, and both
wrote from clear spiritual perspectives (Christianity and Vitalism,
respectively). In Purdy’s mature work, these (or other) intimations of
the life of the spirit seem to me to be absent, to be replaced by a
strong sense of existentialist angst and disorientation. As Purdy
seems to have been canonized by the Canadian literary establishment as
the chief exemplar of the poetry of the Canadian people in the twentieth
century, does this mean that that poetry, and thus, perhaps, Canada
itself, is devoid of spiritual substance?
JAMES DEAHL: Yes. The process of liberalism is
always one of despiritualization. When I came to Canada thirty years
ago, there were three principal communities of thought. The dominant one
was American-style liberalism; but the other two, although marginalized,
were still vital during the 1970s. They were socialism of the old
Prairie, or conservative, school, and Sir John A.-conservatism, often of
the red, or pink-Tory variety. These were quite important at the
provincial level of government, and also to some degree at the federal
level, in spite of Trudeau.
The reason these three existed is that whole segments
of society were liberal, socialist, or conservative; the political
parties reflected the social reality. But that has all changed; neither
the socialist nor the conservative community has really survived the
Americanization of our culture. Canadians are now American liberals. And
unlike socialist or conservative philosophy, liberalism has no roots in
anything real, that is to say, in anything beyond itself. Liberalism has
no spiritual basis. So today one sees a materialist society that
emulates the Great Empire to the South. Purdy, of course, picked up on
this.
TERRY BARKER: In his Milton Acorn Memorial
Lecture last year, Dr. Bruce Meyer suggested that a more or less direct
link can be traced between Canada’s Confederation Poets (specifically
Bliss Carman and his Songs of Vagabondia) via Carman’s
colleague, the U.S. poet Richard Hovey, and Robert Frost, to the British
Georgian Poets, and from them back to modern Canadian People’s Poetry.
If, as you say, Purdy was aware that the contemporary American
liberalism that Canadians had adopted had no spiritual basis, why was he
apparently not attracted to the Anglican Romanticism and Tory Socialism
that Carman espoused, and that was also being practised by Purdy's
friend and mentor Milton Acorn in his latter, and more reflective,
years?
JAMES DEAHL: Well, it is harder to believe in
something than to believe in nothing. Many people these days lack the
courage to believe.
TERRY BARKER: In his recently-published
literary and intellectual biography of Al Purdy, The Last Canadian
Poet, Sam Solecki suggests that the argument he presents points to
the conclusion that Purdy ‘may be both the first and last of our
(Canadian) poets.’ What is your view of this radical assessment?
JAMES DEAHL: It’s total nonsense. If
anything, it displays Solecki’s stunning misunderstanding of our
literature and its tradition. I have long said - and I’ll say it again
- the greatest block to the development of a truly great culture in
Canada has been our almost complete lack of intelligent and insightful
criticism. Men like Solecki, I think, more than prove my point. That a
professor at what claims to be our finest university can make such
remarks is astounding. The first important Canadian poet was Isabella
Valancy Crawford. And, although it is true that both Canada and the
Canadian people are vanishing, there still are a few Canadian poets
around. And some of them, such as John B. Lee, are better writers than
Purdy.
TERRY BARKER: Your picture of Canadian poetry,
and of People’s Poetry in particular, certainly extends Solecki’s
somewhat. However, if ‘Canada and the Canadian people are vanishing’,
as you say, are you not only really making the same point, albeit in a
less hyperbolic way, that Solecki does in his book (i.e., that just at
the time Canadian poetry matured, its material and spiritual bases
disappeared)?
JAMES DEAHL: That’s one way to look at it;
but, while most citizens of Canada are rapidly becoming Americans,
Canada - the geography, that is - still exists. What does this mean?
Simply this, there are two aspects to any real place: the geography and
the culture of the people who live there. Take the Iberian Peninsula,
for example. The Spanish and the Portuguese have shared that
southwestern piece of Europe for centuries. Other people have come and
gone: Arabs, Jews, and so on; yet Spain is still Spain, Portugal still
Portugal. Or in the U.S.; the New England states still have a New
England culture, same as Texas has its own culture.
The writer in Boston and the writer in Dallas are
both Americans, but they remain different. Both cultures are
sub-divisions of the overarching American culture. Now the writer in
Toronto or Winnipeg will also operate within a sub-division of American
culture. That does not mean Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, and
Patrick Lane will write like John Updike, W.S. Merwin, and Adrienne
Rich.
Is this good or bad? I’d say it is not good. I came
here because Canada was a sort of anti-republican version of North
America. That is no longer the case. Now it is a quasi-republican
version, becoming more republican each decade. The Canadian conservative
tradition, that I came to respect, is dead everywhere except the
Maritimes, where it is surely dying. But we must not forget that many
individual Canadians are still anti-republican. How these people will
operate within the new North American entity cannot be predicted. It’s
really a bit, I suspect, like Wales and England. Some Welsh are
pro-English, some couldn’t care less, and others are anti-English; yet
all are part of Great Britain.
What is clear is that Canadian cultural and economic
nationalism, so popular as recently as the late 1970s, is finished. And
Canada, as a truly independent nation-state, is also finished. It’s
clear that the future Canada will be a rather junior partner in this new
North America. What remains unclear is how this process will play
out.
TERRY BARKER: Well, it sounds as if you agree
with the famous statement of George Grant (in his Lament for a Nation)
that ‘the impossibility of conservatism in our era is the
impossibility of Canada.’ It’s interesting, though, that Grant ends
his meditation with a line from a People’s Poet more august than any
that we’ve mentioned so far: ‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris
amore.’ (‘They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward
the further shore.’ - Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI)
Terry Barker teaches Canadian
Studies at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. His collection of essays,
After Acorn: Meditations on
the Message of Canada's People's Poet was published by UnMon
America, Pittsburgh, 2000.
James Deahl was a personal friend
of such People's Poets as Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, Dorothy Livesay, and
Ted Plantos. Deahl is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks,
most recently Blackbirds: war poems; Under The Watchful Eye; and Tasting
The Winter Grapes, which won Hamilton's Award of Excellence.
http://www.meklerdeahl.com |