We Go Far Back in Time

But you had to live your life to write your poems, as I had to live mine for the same purpose.

—Al Purdy to Earle Birney, 30 September 1977

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This sizable and well-edited volume of the letters exchanged by two of the shapers of Canadian poetry is the fifth book featuring the letters of Al Purdy.¹ As Nicholas Bradley observes in the introduction, the more engaging letters in this collection are those written by the younger poet:

Birney as a correspondent was laconic and often guarded, Purdy was digressive and anecdotal. Birney’s letters are summaries of his days; Purdy’s are rambling accounts of his thoughts. Purdy’s self-deflating manner is as evident in the letters as in the poems. Serious or sentimental passages about poetry, depression, frustrations, even friendship and happiness are accompanied by jokes (usually crude), teasing, and mere complaining.

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Birney and Purdy are among the last of the pre-email correspondents we will have – and a book like this reminds us of what a loss that is. Birney was himself, as Jonathan Kertzer has observed, “an epic writer of letters” (155) but Purdy, who once estimated he had written to some 1,200 separate correspondents, probably surpassed him. Now that so many of Purdy’s letters have been published – most of them with Purdy’s approval and even assistance – it becomes clear that his epistolary role was not ancillary to, but a meaningful part of, his literary career, the way Virginia Woolf’s diaries were of hers. And since he did not keep a journal, it is to his letters we must look to get a deeper sense of Purdy as a creator.

Not only a prodigious correspondent, Purdy was notable for preserving (and eventually archiving) most of the letters he wrote and received. As Bradley notes, the volume of collected letters edited by Sam Solecki after Purdy’s death “runs to nearly six hundred pages, yet gathers but a fraction of the extant correspondence” (29). Purdy’s careful preservation of his letters has sometimes been attributed (particularly by Purdy) to his canny sense of their worth: once he discovered that his literary stature meant he would be paid for his papers, he liked to joke that he was keeping every piece of tissue he had ever used and selling by the pound. But, as Kertzer points out, Purdy’s retentive habits did not need prompting: “from an early age [he] kept everything he wrote, received, recorded and thought” (155). Behind that urge to preserve was Purdy’s reverence for the past. The often noted elegiac note he sounded in his poetry also runs through the letters – as when he writes, of a lost friendship, “I mourn the past” (90).

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All five volumes that collect Purdy’s correspondence offer rewards, but the letters he exchanged with Birney are particularly good to have for their insight into Purdy’s poetic growth and aesthetics – as well as for their openness. Some twenty years after first contacting Birney, Purdy attested to the intimacy of their epistolary friendship: “The only people I write to at all, I mean really write as apart from necessary notes, are yourself and Margaret” (21 March 1969; 192). Margaret Laurence had indeed become a significant friend, but – as she admitted in June of that year – “I know sweet nothing about the techniques of poetry, so a lot of the structure and the finer points escape me” (Laurence and Purdy, 144). It was therefore to Birney that Purdy turned for discussions of and gossip about the Canadian poetry scene, as well as for letters of support to granting agencies and for commentary and feedback on drafts of poems before they were published and on his books after they were in print.

The voice we hear in Purdy’s letters to Birney suggests the nature of their relationship. Writing to Charles Bukowski, Purdy sounds like a tough-talking, hard-drinking roughneck; in his letters to George...