The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

Unremembered and Learning Much: LAC Alfred W. Purdy

Unremembered and LearningMuch LAC Alfred W. Purdy D.M.R. BENTLEY WAS IN THE AIR FORCE then, and it was 1944," wrote Al Purdy in 1968; "Hitler was hugging Eva Braun and Montgomery was drinking champagne in Egypt.1 I had just published a terribly important book, at least it was to me, in Vancouver, called The Enchanted Echo' and it was crap. Of course, I didn't know that, I thought it was a combination of Shakespeare and Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe" ("Purdy at 25" 9). Later in the same autobiographical sketch, Purdy elaborates, noting that five hundred copies of The Enchanted Echo were printed at a cost to him of $200, that only "[ajbout 150copies" of the book were "sold or given away," and that, when he eventually summoned up enough courage to pay a visit to the publisher, Clarke and Stuart, several years later, the remainder of the books had been I am grateful to the University of Western Ontario and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Ccouncil of Canada for their support of my research and teaching and to Geoffrey Martin, David Bindle, Solomon Asfada, Patricia Bozeman, and Wendy Bousfield, withoutwhosehelp this essay wouldnot havebeen possible, i. Hitler may well have been hugging Eva Braun in 1944, but by that time Field Marshal Montgomery was commanding the Allied armies in the openingphases of the invasion of France. 31 "I 32 D.M.R. BENTLEY destroyed, adding: "Sad—the culturalheritage of our nation is continually eroded like this. Sad—but the poems were crap" (10; emphasis added). Thanks in large part to George Bowering's witty reiteration and reinforcement of these remarks in Al Purdy (see 4-5), Purdy's defecatory and purgative dismissal of The Enchanted Echo has stuck to the walls of the Canadian literary academy and probably helped to prevent all but a few scholars from attending to Bowering's subsequent and necessarily brief treatment of the volume as a "dim" but discernible revelation of "the concerns of the later poet..., the sources and materials [that] he later learns to put to authentic use"(29). Bowering's attribution of inauthenticity to The Enchanted Echo rests on an unhelpful amalgam of Sarterean and Tishy aesthetics, but he is surely right in seeing the volume as proleptic of Purdy's later and frequently better poetry, for, like his other writings of the same period, it reflects the forces at work during an important but insufficiently understood stage of his development. That stage began in 1936 when Purdy "rode the freight trains ... to Vancouver," and it ended in 1950 when, as he explains in some detail in Reachingfor theBeaufort Sea, he "found new prosodic mentors" in Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence (65, 287). Prior to 1936, his principal "prosodic mentors" had been an anthology of English, American, and Canadian poets of the Romantic and post-Romantic tradition: Byron, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Housman, Kipling, Chesterton, WalterJames Turner,2 and —in his own words—"Carman, Carman, Carman" (and, it needs to be added, Carman's fellow poet of vagabondia Richard Hovey) (see RBS 38, 135, 140, 285-286). Many of the debts to these and other poets that encumber the pieces within and surrounding The Enchanted Echo have been noticed by Bowering and Sam Solecki and some will be mentioned in the course of the present discussion. At this point, it is sufficient to observe that although Purdy 2. An Australian-born Georgian poet and man of letters, Turner is primarily remembered for his poem "Romance/7 which puts the romanticism of place names to good effect in such lines as "When I was but thirteen or so / I went into a golden land, / Chimborazo, Cotopaxi / Took meby thehand Chimborazo,Cotopaxi / They had stolen my soul away" (qtd. in McKenna 165). It may not be entirely fortuitous that in Reachingfor theBeaufort Sea, Purdy recallsthat "writing poems began for ... [him] at agethirteen when ... [he] read Bliss Carman: 'Arnoldus Villanova / Six hundred years ago / Said peonies have magic / And I believe it so' [TeonyT'^S). As witness the chant-like opening and closing lines of "The Country North of Belleville" ("Bush land scrub land / Cashel Township and Wollaston / Elzevir McClure and Dungannon ..."), the romanticism ofplace names remained a component of Purdy's aesthetic (CP61). Uurenit'tiibered and Leaning Much ^3 had enough knowledge of Anglo-American Modernism between 1936 and 1950 to twit a...