Brazilian Journal by P.K. Page (review)

Prefacing P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal is a photograph of the author in Rio de Janeiro in 1957, in the stern and elegant vestments of her role as the wife of the Canadian ambassador to Brazil, William Arthur Irwin. She wears a black ensemble, a pearl necklace, a stately coif, and an enigmatic expression. She is forty-one and is, among other literary-cultural accomplishments, the author of two acclaimed books of poetry. In a very different – and this time verbal – self-portrait in the Journal’s last pages, Page meditates on the new dimensions of herself that have been the Journal’s steady revelation. Now a successful emerging visual artist who paints under the name P.K. Irwin, she types with her golden lion-monkey “affectionately de-fleaing” her and anticipates the soon-to-be-vacated hallways of the Brazilian embassy ringing with the sound of her macaw calling out to the absent Arthur in her own voice. Brazilian Journal recounts the many personal metamorphoses that marked Page’s Brazilian years, metamorphoses that are never reducible to a predictable narrative of cultural acclimatization.

Writing on Brazil, Page is a keen amateur naturalist and a social satirist whose eye falls with equal interest on the creatures that venture into her garden and the diplomats who sit at her table. She has a Dickensian ability to populate her writing with an abundant cast of characters and with a warm attunement to human idiosyncrasy. Like her poetic memoir Hand Luggage, Page’s Brazilian Journal is riddled with literary and artistic citations documenting her encounters with artistic friends and mentors. Her primary tutor, though, is the Brazilian landscape itself, and she reflects continually on her awakening to form and especially to colour, an awakening to which the book’s design pays tribute with neon pink flyleaves.

Though Brazilian Journal was first published by Lester & Orpen Dennys in 1987, Suzanne Bailey and Christopher Doody’s version is not simply a new edition; it is a new book. The work joins Page’s oeuvre this time in light of a completed life and career: it has a more comprehensive posterity than its predecessor, is overlaid by Page’s memoir and Sandra Djwa’s 2012 biography, and has an increased number of points of contact with Page’s other works. (It is meant, in fact, to interact with the online hypermedia edition of her Collected Works.) Its editors have expanded the visual component of Brazilian Journal to include many black-and-white and superbly saturated colour plates of Page’s (i.e., P.K. Irwin’s) original visual artwork. The images, in their new profusion, also serve the rhetorical purpose of underlining the essential ongoing creativity of a period in which Page castigated herself painfully for her inability to write poetry.

Page’s self-portrait has always been a matter of some calculation in Brazilian Journal. Extending the Journal’s own interest in the manifold self, Bailey and Doody valuably discuss ways in which Page revised and curated her unpublished journals. The editors underscore that we are reading a document in which Page’s later memory has intervened, sometimes tempering her more ambivalent primary assessments of Brazilian culture, sometimes even mitigating the original journals’ more intimate descriptions. The editors have restored a particularly personal element by confirming that a 1957 medical operation Page underwent in Brazil (about which the Journal itself is very discreet) was a hysterectomy that rendered irrevocable Page and Irwin’s decision not to have children together. Here, too, Page’s disclosures to her biographer have continued to rewrite Brazilian Journal in a sense, for Djwa’s Journey with No Maps poignantly emphasizes the irony of Page having to confront her infertility against the fecund Brazilian backdrop and suggests ways in which the operation has influenced Page’s shaping of her narration of these years.

Brazilian Journal is a complex work performing ever more elaborately as autobiography, as gallery, as field guide, as travel document, and as social satire. It...