Out of this World: The Natural History of Milton Acorn by Chris Gudgeon (review)

326 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Chris Gudgeon. Out ofthis World: The Natural History ofMilton Acorn Arsenal Pulp Press. 240 . $27.95 In 1970, the most prominent Canadian poets were so incensed that Milton Acorn had.not been awarded the Governor-General's Award that they named him 'The People's Poet' and gave him a fete which became part of Canadian legend. His clothes, his cigars, his stories about pirates, were related wherever Carw.t was celebrated. The quirky perfection of some of his poems made h}m an anthologist's delight. But Chris Gudgeon suggests that the neglect in the ten years since his death makes him ready for a literary resurrection and a biography. 'Natural History....' Is Gudgeon saying thatAcornwas'a natural,' in the sense that sports uses it, a star who seems'to be born with the ability, who needs no training? Or is he 'a natural' in the old sense of the naif, the strange cousin from down the road? Or is Gudgeon claiming that Acorn was simply indigenous fauna of Prince Edward Island? Gudgeon doesn't say. I suspect it is just part of the facetious offhandedness which is the worst part of this book: 'Acorn's chestnuts' is bad enough but 'Thoroughly Modem Miltie'? And yet that free-wheeling attitude also makes the book personable and vital, conveying a feeling of Acorn's amazing balance of absurdity and brilliance. It would not be far wrong to see Acorn as a 'natural' in that second sense: a man who could write a line of poetry as polished and insightful as a Robert Lowell and yet could literally get lost walking around the block. I knew him very slightly but he remains the most unusual person I have ever met. And without even having seen Acorn, Gudgeon captures this, as in the obvious contradictions in Acorn's Marxism: 'while other young politicos struggled to understand the near-religious mysteries of the dialectic, Milton found it to be a key to understanding his own, ongoing emotional turmoil. His heart was full of love; his head was full of anger.' Still, every success in Gudgeon's portrait seems met by a flaw. His neat summation of Acorn's very personal Marxism is joined with the claim that Acorn was a Stalinist,'a word which, like fascist, has a rhetorical flourish but little meaning. Acorn's nationalism was idiosyncratic, as Gudgeon states, but extravagant nationalism was the Canadian zeitgeist. Hasn't Gudgeon read the early Dennis Lee or Margaret Atwood? The treatises of George Grant or Robin Math~ws? The political studies of Me! Watkins or Abe Rotstein? Gudgeon's assessment of Acorn is hampered by an amateurish sense of literary history. He uses terms such as 'modern' and 'postmodem' as though they just mean not like the old. He labels Acorn 'perhaps the first true professionalpoet the countryhad ever seen,' but what of BlissCarman, Pauline Johnson, or Charles G.D. Roberts? He calls the Canadian Forum 'the most thoughtful and influential magazine in the country' and then a few HUMANITIES 327 paltnt]ng married the inventiveness of Pierre l.:JOOQ]~la,~e Roberts and the pUlowmea on the occasion of Ewen's retrospel:ti\re at the Art of .....,.l.LlL.••,u.J.'U. ...