Reaching for the Beaufort Sea: An Autobiography ed. by Al Purdy (review)

HUMANITIES 221 Al Purdy. Reaching for tile Beaufort Sea: An Autobiography Edited by Alex Widen Harbour Publishing. 296. $26.95 The shape of Al Purdy's life - or at least such shape as Purdy has given it - grows increasingly clear. Since 1983, we have seen the appearance of three volumes of the correspondence he has exchanged with other writers (Charles Bukowski, George Woodcock, and Margaret Laurence); now we have an autobiographical memoir, Reaching for the Beaufort Sea. Readers of the poetry may be forgiven, however, if they feel such documents are mostly superfluous because, in contrast to poets such as Earle Birney or Margaret Atwood, Purdy's life has always been clearly visible. 'Much of my life gets into poems,' he acknowledged in a 1972 letter to Woodcock, 'reworked sometimes but also close to the original I guess.' Woodcock may have remembered that statement when - aware that Purdy was attempting to write a prose autobiography and finding it difficult - he commented in 1983: 1've just finished reading your new poems ... which seemed to me not only good poems but also damned good autobiography . In a way, for those who want to see it, it's all in your poems, or as much as you and your real readers need.' In staying 'close to the original,' Purdy may seem more to belong in the American confessional tradition than to resemble the Canadian poets of his generation. IAnecdotal' would, however, be a better term for Purdy's poetry than Jconfessional,' since we rarely have the sense - as we do in reading Lowell and Sexton and Plath - that Purdy is revealing something hidden, or dark, or embarrassing. Still, Purdy does ground his poems in the personal. An identifiable character in some of them, he is the recognizable speaker in all: his rambling, colloquial voice unifies the corpus, making the poems an ongoing record of the opinions and moments of insight in one individual life. Having given us this kind of poetryl to provide us now with a prose version of the life is therefore to risk sounding like one of those selfabsorbed speakers who keeps telling the same story over and over again. Most events important enough to warrant inclusion in Reaching for tlte Beaufort Sea have already had poems made out of them - and some may be included here only because Purdy knows that he has made good poems about them. Still, as his published letters show, Purdy has, since at least 1971, wanted to provide a prose account of his life. He told Laurence in that year that he was writing J a personal autobiography of 1950 to '60 ... verging into criticism by discussing Lowry, Layton and Acorn as I was involved with or knew them.' Later, in 1981, he wrote Woodcock that he was 'Working on a prose autobio thing instead [of poetry], first ten or twelve years of life.' But he found such projects difficult: he is, he adds in the letter to Woodcock, 'afflicted with all sorts of doubts.' Nevertheless, 222 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 that later work-in-progress (in its published form it carries him to about age eight) did appear. It was published as Morning and It's Summer - a lovely chapbook, twenty folio pages of lyric prose and accompanying photos, supplemented by a section of the poems Purdy had made from these childhood memories. Chapter 1 of Reaching for the Beauford Sea reprints that book. Though it has been revised slightly, Purdy inadvertently reveals that his first chapter was written in 1978 when he writes of having been born 'sixty years ago.' Other sections of this autobiography have also been previously published , some quite recently, some even earlier. 'The Iron Road' - an extended account of Purdy's experiences crossing the country by hopping freights in the 1930s - originally had its inception as a short piece for Maclean's in 1963. In its expanded form it now follows 'Morning and It's Summer,' where it feels at odds with the poetic and lyrical quality of that piece. The final section of the book, called 'Anecdotage,' seelns a collection of leftover literary gossip (some culled from the letters) that Purdy didn't bother to integrate...