The Shifting Sand of a Son's Radical Faith in Peter Dale Scott's Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 TRACY WARE The Shifting Sand of a Son=s Radical Faith in Peter Dale Scott=s Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror In this search [Arthur Koestler] comes at once face to face with the philosophic problem of the individual radical who has learned the Freudian basis of his radicalism and has then to find a new morality to replace the shifting sand of his former faith. F.R. Scott, review of Yogi [Gary] Boire=s target, F.R. Scott, is now a national father figure at whom wild shots may legitimately be taken. Peter Dale Scott, >Difference= Peter Dale Scott came to the attention of most Canadian critics after the publication of Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror in 1988. The first part of a trilogy given the title >Seculum= with the publication of the third part, Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000,1 Coming to Jakarta is dedicated to Scott=s father, F.R. Scott, the prominent poet, lawyer, and activist. Peter Dale Scott provided further enticements for those who would read his work against his father=s in two articles that appeared in Essays on Canadian Writing in 1991 and 1995. I will respond to those enticements in this paper, but first I would note that Scott should be of interest even if his father were not. He is the author of many articles on literary and political subjects, the translator (with Czeslaw Milosz) of Zbigniew Herbert, and the author or coauthor of books on the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination, and the politics of cocaine, among other subjects. It is tempting to call him a follower of Noam Chomsky=s political writing, until one notes that he is the first authority cited in Chomsky=s influential 1967 essay, >The Responsibility of Intellectuals= (359). So Scott is less a follower than a colleague of Chomsky=s, and Coming to Jakarta is in a way the long poem that Chomsky never wrote. 828 tracy ware Earlier versions of this paper were read at a session of the Northeast MLA on >Other Spaces/ Other Places in Canadian Literature= organized by Marilyn Rose, Baltimore, MD, 17 April 1998; and at >A Visionary Tradition: Canadian Literature and Culture at the Turn of the Millennium,= the University of Guelph, 14 November 1999. I am grateful for helpful comments from Sandra Djwa, Ajay Heble, Barbara Leckie, J.R. (Tim) Struthers, and the students in English 889, Queen=s University, 1998B2000. 1 The second part, Listening to the Candle, appeared in 1992. We now know that Scott=s relations with his father were strained, and that is no doubt why Sandra Djwa=s biography says so little of F.R. Scott=s only child.1 Contrary to our expectations, it is the father who is the less critical of American influence. F.R. Scott mocked the previous generation of poets, which included his father F.G. Scott, for following British instead of American influences, admired the liberalism of FDR, and saw the 1940 US election in these terms: >A belief in the creative power of government, a desire to continue domestic reform, and a will to use the might of America to help build a better world B these appear as the deeper issues of the election= (>Roosevelt,= 268). His son=s response is to study the destructive influence of >the might of America,= and to distinguish himself from >all the efforts of utopian reformers like [his father] to make the world conform to our fantasies= (>Alone,= 289). In so doing, he raises the question of how social idealism can survive when the word >utopian= is used pejoratively. As the last two parts of the >Seculum= trilogy reveal, he ultimately finds his answers in Buddhism, but he never abandons the political concerns that make Coming to Jakarta so striking. I want to begin with a look at F.R. Scott=s poetry of the period immediately after the Second World War, but first I turn to III.xi of Coming to Jakarta, in which a visit from Djwa causes Peter Dale Scott to dream about his family and >some...