The Canadian Modernists Meet

A.J.M. Smith's Eclectic Surrealism

AJ.M. Smith's Eclectic Surrealism BRIAN TREHEARNE A.J.M. SMITH EXPLICITLY rejected any identification of his poetry with Surrealism. When a conservative reviewer of The Book of Canadian Poetry, William Arthur Deacon, casually identified him as a poet of the Canadian "surrealist school," Smith vituperated on Deacon's obtuseness in a letter to A.M. Klein1 and was still resentful thirty-five yearslater when he penned his "Confessions of a Compulsive Anthologist" (7-8). These protests notwithstanding , several of Smith's poems of the 1930s and early 1940s,especially those published from 1934 to 1936 during the Surrealist craze in London, showhis distinct attraction to Surrealistideas and effects, includingimagery and its associative accumulation; automatic writing; surreal treatments of setting and landscape; the notion of "black humour"; and a cryptic but clearly emancipatory politics refusing alignment, like Andre Breton's, with the right, left or soft left demanded by the times. Smith more or less deliberately obscured his Surrealist experimentation by reprinting these poems haphazardly at best (only half survive in The Classic Shade of 1978), and his diffidence has helped to impoverish our narratives of his development , narratives that dwell almost exclusively on his relation to AngloAmerican modernism and the Metaphysicals and that sport a vocabulary of "austerity," "classicism," and "difficulty"with which I for one am simply bored—and to judge by his steadily dwindling place in the canon,2 I'm not alone. Smith's intermittent Surrealist practice would appear to offer a 120 A.J.M. Smith's Eclectic Surrealism refreshing critical alternative to that overworked consensus, one that might make us interested once again in this alert, conflicted, self-deprecating modernist. In an article published near the end of Smith's life Leon Edel remarked that his friend had early on "frolicked with the surreal and knew how [Andre] Breton wastrying to trap the wit and humour of the unconscious" (202). No one found the hint suggestive; of the poems I will cite only "Noctambule" has been linked to Surrealism,in brief asidesby Leo Kennedy (17), Sandra Djwa (20),and John Ferns (56)."Noctambule" was composed by 1932;3 it first appeared in a Wisconsin campus publication in the spring of 1935 and was reprinted in London's New Verse in August-September 1936 and in every Smith volume. In the previous issue of New Verse W.H. Auden had published "Honest Doubt,"a request for clarification of essential Surrealist doctrine;4 earlier New Verse items surveyed the Surrealist imitators in England,5 reviewed Surrealist publications from France,6 and translated the poems of Paul Eluard and Jean Arp.7 Surrealism was clearly that summer's rage, with the International Surrealist Exhibition taking place at the New Burlington Galleries in London in June.8 Although these New Verse items were not free of skepticism, the appearance of "Noctambule" among them would have made the poem's Surrealism readily legible to a contemporary reader. The poem's superficial features certainly justify such a reading. The "a of b" formula I first identified in the poetry of P.K.Page (Montreal Forties 74-75) and later recognized as a Surrealist mannerism9 is prominent in "Noctambule," with its "flag of this pneumatic moon," "hulk of witless night," "pockethandkerchief / Of 6 a.m.," and "warcry of treacherous daytime." Smith's images, sharply juxtapositive, and with a latent violence typical of the mannerism, accumulate in a restless parataxis that begins to hint by the closing lines at the unconscious coherences of automatic writing, the free-associative compositional method that Breton identified early on as the essence of Surrealist artistic activity:10 So mewed the lion, Until mouse roared once and after lashed His tail: Shellshock came on again, his skin Twitched in the rancid margarine, his eye Like a lake isle in a florist's window: Brian Trehearne 121 Reality at two removes, and mouse and moon Successful.11 The broad result is a cryptic urban nightscape, with a "pneumatic moon" like a "wetwash snotrag," a looming figurative "Othello" overhead, a whiff of "horsemeat," and mice twitching in the margarine. If we surrender to an impulse to read "Noctambule" as a verbal painting, the Surrealist composition of Smith's canvas seems apparent. That temptation can be misleading, though, because a brilliant ekphrasis of a Surrealist painting would not itself be a work of Surrealist art at all, since the poet would have had to accept a fixed...