Remembering a Decade (Almost) of Poetic Life in Montreal
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| Bruce Whiteman ©Howard Romero |
When I moved to Montreal from Hamilton, Ontario in 1988, it felt like going home. I didn’t know the city well, but my parents were raised there in the teens and twenties, married there in 1942, and lived in the Côte des neiges neighbourhood until 1950, when they moved to a suburb of Toronto, two years before I was born. I had first visited Montreal in 1966 and went again the following year for Expo 67, staying on both occasions with my grandmother and my beloved Uncle Sydney, my father’s elder brother, in what English-speaking Montrealers called the Town of Mount Royal. Uncle Syd had a deep influence on my musical interests, and took me for the first time to a real music store where I bought the scores of pieces by Mozart and Liszt. The International Music Store on Ste-Catherine Street was owned by “old Mr. Ramsperger,” as my uncle called him. For me, this was the time before poetry.
But in 1988, when I was thirty-six, I was already reading deeply in the poetry and literary history of Montreal as part of a project to bring together and publish the letters of John Sutherland, the writer and editor whose magazines First Statement and Northern Review had done so much to further the Modernist aesthetic in Canadian poetry in the years during and after World War II. I had a little time after my interview at McGill for the library job I eventually was offered and took, the position that brought me to Montreal, and I spent it looking for the address where Sutherland lived in the First Statement days. I couldn’t even find the street, much less the exact number, until an elderly pedestrian helpfully told me that Craig Street now had a new, French name. When I did find the address on what today is rue St-Antoine, whatever had been the old building was gone and an ugly pizza restaurant stood there. I felt like Wordsworth returning to the market square of his childhood where he’d played on a “rude mass of native rock,” only to find it gone and “a smart Assembly-room” built in its place. But I had learned two lessons, first a crucial political one regarding language in Montreal, and secondly a more dispiriting one about literary fame and historical value. “Fame and virtue rot,” as Yeats said in one of his poems about Sir Roger Casement.
The Sutherland book was well advanced when I took up my McGill job in April of 1988, and it was published by ECW Press in 1992. During those four years I became friendly with two of the players in the First Statement movement, Louis Dudek and Audrey Sutherland, John’s widow. I have written elsewhere about my relationship with Louis, and don’t need to rehearse it again here.[1] John Sutherland died at age thirty-seven, when he and Audrey had been married for only thirteen years. She was a very private person and did not talk at all about their relationship, but my feeling each time after visiting her was always that her life after John’s death in 1956 had been mere temporizing and filling in. She was a devout Catholic (as John had been too after his conversion a year or two before his death), and I believe she became a nun for a while. She was generous and helpful with my project in every way, but when I showed up unannounced at her apartment door on St-Matthew Street with an inscribed copy of the book in 1992, her reaction was one of distraction and disinterest. It was odd, to say the least, but I decided that illness must explain her seeming change of heart. It’s a strange thing to say about a scholarly work, but I thought of the Sutherland letters book as an act of homage to Louis Dudek, to Audrey Sutherland, and to Ray Souster, and although none of them responded with the warmth that I was hoping for, the book quietly made its way. It helped to establish my bona fides as a Montreal writer, I think.
But my greatest friendships among the poets came about differently. I’d met Ralph and Betty Gustafson in Hamilton, when I had invited Ralph to be a very short-term poet-in-residence at McMaster University, and we discovered that we had many passions in common, poetry and music among them. Now Ralph was only two hours away by car instead of eight, and we saw a lot of each other. Ralph was one of those rare poets who get better in old age – Yeats was another, as Layton was not – and despite the disinclination of postmodernist critics like Frank Davey to find anything of interest in his poetry, its musicality attracted me from the start. Ralph did not need or want acolytes – I don’t think he ever had any, really – but he welcomed friends who loved writing and classical music, and we spent many afternoons listening to piano CDs and discussing Canadian literature in the living-room of the house in North Hatley where he and Betty had lived since he came back to Canada from New York in the late 1950s. It always felt prospective to drive south off the island of Montreal over the Champlain Bridge towards the Eastern Townships, which seemed almost to exist in another country. Ralph was full of great stories, and although he forbade me ever to recount it, one of my favorites, which I mention now only because it happened so long ago, was his experience of being hit on by Archdeacon Scott, F.R. Scott’s father and a poet of sorts who, according to Ralph, would recite his work “at” you on the least provocation. I’m sure that Ralph neither exaggerated nor misunderstood. After all he knew Somerset Maugham well, among other gay writers; and doubtless, with his Hollywood great good looks as a young poet, he attracted similar expressions of erotic interest from other parties at a certain time in his life.
Ralph and Louis were elder statesmen. Ken Norris, the Montreal poet who was not then living in Montreal (nor has he since) was a coeval, and the poet with whom I became the closest friends. With Ken teaching in Maine, we did not see each other that often, but our deflections from poetry were similar (he’d worked as a Ph.D. student on Canadian little magazines, a keen interest of mine), our attractions to the older poets were parallel (he primarily to Louis, I to Souster), and our need to divide our time among poetry, scholarship, and the poetry business was largely identical. We were both engaged in writing a long poem, Ken for substantially longer than I; and although our approaches to the long poem were different, our sensibilities had much in common. What’s more, Ken was the first poet in my acquaintance who really cared about what his friends were up to, to the extent of constantly offering his view of ones progress. I believe he thought about the track my work was on more than I did, and that was of great importance to me emotionally. We helped each other – one book of his long poem was published by my department at McGill – and we fomented iridescent happenings we wanted to exist in the world, like the Dudek award we contrived for Louis or the bilingual Montreal poetry section I put together with Ken’s help for a Toronto-based magazine called Canadian Notes & Queries, which my friend Doug Fetherling was then editing.[2] I was rather in awe of Ken for his dedication then, as I still am. He writes more poems in a year than I will write in a lifetime. My eight and a half years in Montreal were vital for me as a poet in large part because of him.
There were others. Through the antiquarian bookseller John Mappin, the husband of Judy Mappin who cofounded the Double Hook bookstore, I met Marian Scott, Frank Scott’s widow and a well-known painter. She still lived in the wonderful old house at 451 Clarke Avenue in Westmount where she and Frank had resided for many years before his death in 1985, and several times I went for tea there with John. Marian struck me as a blueblood, if such a word is valid for such a woman, and she was extraordinarily kind and generous. She gave my young son a wooden toy which he still has, and signed a copy of one of Frank’s books for me, Events and Signals. (One of her drawings is on the rear panel of the dust-jacket.) I also met their son, the poet Peter Dale Scott, who taught then at Berkeley and was suddenly in the news as a poet with a book called Coming to Jakarta. After Marian’s death Peter offered to rent the Clarke Avenue house to me when I once drove him from Toronto to Montreal, but the idea went nowhere, unfortunately. Irving Layton I knew only a little, largely through Wynne Francis, who brought us together more than once at dinner. He was in his eighties then, but he still relished the role of provocateur-poet, and rather like F.G. Scott would read or recite his poems at the slightest sign of encouragement. I also got to know another artist with writerly connections, Colin Haworth, who had illustrated Ron Everson’s Contact Press book, A Lattice for Momos, in 1958. Colin was a very sweet man, and he generously gave me the painting which appears in that book opposite the title-page, a piece called “October Prospect.”
My French was not bad when I moved to Montreal, but it took a long while before I began to make contacts in the Francophone poetry world. Someone, I forget who, eventually put me in touch with Francis Farley-Chevrier, a young poet who was bilingual (he admitted to learning a lot of his English from Sesame Street and other TV programs) and who seemed to know everyone. We met a few times at a bar on The Main called La Bibliothèque (appropriately enough for me, the McGill librarian), and immediately became fast friends. Other French-speaking writers would pass by our table and Francis knew them all and they all greeted him warmly. I recall André Roy in particular. Francis was something of a prodigy and had published his first book at fifteen or sixteen. His second book was issued by Les Herbes Rouges, as close to the aristocratic in Québécois publishing as it is possible to get. We undertook two projects together. Francis edited the French section of the new Montreal poets anthology we did for CN&Q, which I mentioned above. More substantially, Francis got François Charron, another close friend, to agree to let us translate some of his poems for a book that we called After 10,000 Years, Desire. It represented the first time Charron’s work had appeared in English, and although almost no one seemed to buy or read or review the book (ECW Press published it in 1995), I remain very fond of it and continue to think that we did a very good job englishing poems that are sometimes quite dauntingly difficult. We would meet once or twice a week in the basement stacks of the McGill Rare Book Department to work through the poems, Francis mainly creating drafts which I would then try to make into poems that worked in English. I felt rather fraternal towards Charron, although I did not get to know him well. We were born in the same year, and the prose poems at the end of our translated selection, from Pour les amants, struck me as being close in spirit to my own work in the prose poem.
When I moved to Montreal I was already deeply into my lifelong work, a poem in prose called The Invisible World Is in Decline. Coach House Press had published Book I in 1984 and Books II-IV in 1989. Book IV was written in the south of France during a kind of sabbatical I had contrived from my library job at McMaster University, just before I left Hamilton. Much of Book V, which did not come out until 2000, long after I had moved to Los Angeles, was composed in Montreal. I have always been a slow writer, often going for months without drafting any poems, but Book V was especially slow in the writing. I have forgotten why that was so, but a short essay I published in Matrix in 1993 on the subject of how middle-class poets have to try (and often fail) to balance the conflicting demands of family and work with literary devotion may explain it in part.[3]
I do not need any special dispensation from the poetry gods for laziness, because in truth my life outside the poem at that time included other writing (essays, reviews and books, as well as editorial work) and a determination to be part of the “scene,” including readings, launches, exhibitions etc. My long poem went slowly, but 1995 – the year before I left Canada for California – was a kind of banner year, as I published a selected poems (another instance of prestidigitation by Ken Norris), a book on the Group of Seven painter J.E.H. MacDonald, and a short history of English-language printing and publishing in Quebec. The latter was commissioned by the Association des Ēditeurs Anglophones du Québec (the AEAQ), and although I am pretty certain that I did not produce the book they had in mind – late in the day I was told that they had wanted me to concentrate on the current publishing scene and only to mention the older history as context, when in the event I did something like the reverse – Lasting Impressions, as the book was called when it was published by Simon Dardick at Vehicule Press, is a handsome short introduction to the subject. George (now, then Doug) Fetherling commissioned the MacDonald book on behalf of Quarry Press, as one of eight art books that were to cover the Group and Tom Thomson. Quarry was an infuriating press to work with, as getting money owed to one out of Bob Hilderley was like trying to find logic in a John Ashbery poem. But the book that was eventually published – the only one of the eight to see the light of day under Quarry’s imprint – was lovely. If only Bob had sent copies to reviewers and sold it to bookstores. It was remaindered within a year – a book that should have had a very long shelf life in the gallery and museum shops if nowhere else. I bought fifty copies for myself at $1 each. How depressing that was.
I began The Invisible World Is in Decline in 1981 as a way to get out of the self-constructed autobiographical box that I thought the lyric poem had become. I wanted my poetry to have greater range and to reflect my life rather less than it had before, even as I wanted the form to embody less carpentry and more openness to the music of language and ideas. The standard poetic line seemed to me to reflect too much egotistical decision-making, whereas the prose line, while still being as musical as the language allowed or desired, was less closed in and less manipulable. I loved the French prose poem tradition, from Gaspard de la nuit to Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Lautréamont, and envied its musical flexibility and its philosophical capaciousness. I wanted something of those qualities in my own poem. I wanted my poetry to allow the world to speak, rather than simply to be an address where feelings were registered. This larger aspiration has a less obvious rootedness in the local, so it is not necessarily easy to find “Montreal” in my long poem, although the local did creep back into the work later. I find a poem in Book V that mentions “two feet of Montreal mid-January snow,” but that cliché can probably be found in every poet who has ever spent a winter month on the island of Montreal, as can something akin to “the slow rhythm of spring’s demarche,” a line from another poem. The French models for my long poem certainly make linguistic sense in a Montreal context, but in truth I was reading those poets as a teenager, long before I had a Montreal address. It was good to find a Montreal poet like François Charron writing prose poems that clearly came out of an equally developed passion for the nineteenth-century masters, but his work was corroborative rather than influential where my own was concerned. And like my own, the space where his prose poems existed was primarily erotic, not geographical.
Montreal seemed to enter my poetry almost by absence rather than presence, for when I left Quebec for Los Angeles I was obviously leaving not only a specific city but also a country, and I was unprepared for the sense of exile that overcame me. To some extent I felt sheepish, even guilty at having those feelings. Ovid was exiled. Dante was exiled. Victor Hugo and Ēmile Zola were in exile for a period of time. I merely left Montreal and Canada for a job in L.A., and I wasn’t sure that I really deserved to feel like an exile. Those feelings were at the root of a series of poems called “Tristia” (after Ovid) that became part of Book VI of my long poem. They are landscape poems filled with the weird botanical presence of California, but they also operate at the level of etymology (the language in each poem is based in part on an etymological investigation) while trying to convey the exile’s sense of being out of place and disoriented. Borderline-seeming life-forms like lithops, a succulent that looks like a riven rock, were invoked as metaphorically allied to the émigré poet. (The name of that plant is from the Greek and means “stone-face.” The split nature of the plant led me impishly to suggest that Linnaeus, the great eighteenth-century expert in botanical nomenclature, had jokingly called lithops “cunty stone-face” in a private moment, a statement I simply invented.) California seemed the inverse of Montreal. It was full of “fruits and foliage not my own,” to quote the Coleridge line that I used as one among four epigraphs (appropriately enough from “Dejection: An Ode”). I tried to invoke the strangeness of being there by citing or alluding to writers like Ovid, Mandelstam, W.G. Sebald (another voluntary exile like me – he’s the poet who dies “in a moving metal box in a foreign country” in the first of the “Tristia” poems), Hobbes (who went to France to save his skin), and Ezra Pound as a translator of Li Po’s “The Exile’s Letter” (translation itself being a kind of borderline life-form). The vocabulary of the poems includes a number of plant names, sometimes in their Latin form, as another analogical evocation of the exile’s sense of strangeness.
The sequence finishes in the high desert, where the poet scrapes by among infidels and naked archers – figures straight out of Ovid’s Black Sea poems. In retrospect that setting was predictive, for it was eventually the desert which worked its magic on me and made me feel at home again, perhaps because it is so patently unallied with any normal reality. I would start going there at the hottest time of the year to write poems, and my life was given back to me there by a woman who came into my world completely unexpectedly. Book VI of The Invisible World Is in Decline ends with a three-part poem about the desert and her vivid presence there. Its title, “As It Is in Heaven,” is of course a borrowing from The Lord’s Prayer, but more importantly I hear it as “finishing” the title of Robert Creeley’s last book, On Earth, as the various Creeley epigraphs propose. She arrests the decline of the invisible world; for as the poem says, heaven is here, and “merely to wake up is bliss.”
[1] BW, “Amicitia,” in Eternal Conversations: Remembering Louis Dudek, ed. Michael Gnarowski and Sonja Skarstedt (Montreal: DC Books, 2003), pp. 145-50.
[2] “Montreal Poetry: A Sampler.” Canadian Notes & Queries 46 (Spring 1992), pp. 19-24.
[3] BW, “Notes of a Bourgeois Poet.” Matrix 39 (Spring 1993), pp. 61-62.
Bruce Whiteman is a poet and writer currently living in Grinnell, Iowa whose books include The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books I-VI (ECW Press, 2006). His most recent book is a translation of Tiberianus’s poem Pervigilium Veneris (Russell Maret, 2009). He lived in Montreal from April 1988 until June 1996.
