The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

'Living in a Land of Giants': Locating and Sustaining Boyhood

"Living in a Land of Giants" Locating and Sustaining Boyhood MARGARET STEFFLER But when did I find yellow in buttercup and dandelion in the meadowlands and hill country discover them in my mind ("Pre-School," MS40) L PURDY'S 1983 TEXT Morning and It's Summer consists of twenty pages of prose memoir followed by thirteen poems introducing "Some of the People/7 The prose memoir falls within the genre of the "Childhood/' defined by Richard N. Coe as an extended piece of writing, a conscious, deliberately executedliterary artifact, usually in prose . . . in which the most substantial portion of the material is directly autobiographical, and whose structure reflects step by step the development of the writer's self; beginning often, but not invariably , with the first light of consciousness, and concluding, quite specifically , with the attainment of a precise degree of maturity (Coe8-9) Coe, who maintains that "the majority of significant Childhoods have been written by poets'7 (2),makes a distinction between the "mode of 143 A 144 | MARGARET STEFFLER assertion" found in "true autobiography" and the "mode ofinterrogation " intrinsic to the autobiography of childhood, in which questions such as "How did I come to be like that? Why was I impelled to do this?" (41) repeatedly surface. Clearly demonstrating this mode of interrogation, Purdy's memoir draws attention to ontological questions and musings; the adult writer claims that "some part of me still remains a child: sitting on a pile of lumber behind Reddick's Sash & Door Factory in 1924,trying to explain to myself how I got here and what Fm going to do about it" (MS 11). The difficulty of providing answers or responses to such questions confirms Coe's observation that "behind the assertion of the uniqueness of self there tends to lurk the nagging doubt whether that past, that alien self had any substance, or value, or even ascertainable reality whatsoever" (Coe 41). Despite this uncertainty of substance, Morning and It's Summer goes ahead and locates the poet in the boyhood that formed him. Purdy writes with an awareness of the epic tradition of Wordsworth's Prelude, and incorporates elements of familiar Childhoods such as the humour in Dylan Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and the pastoral elements of "Fern Hill," which Purdy ventures is "perhaps the best poem about childhood ever written" (SA 215). Although the memoir itself has not received critical attention, Purdy's interest in childhood has obviously been noted by critics and reviewers. In his review of Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, for example, John Bemrose argues that Purdy "writes extremely well of his childhood" (66);Dennis Lee claims that Purdy has "been extending his vistas of the setting in which this one life has been lived. That has meant pushing further back into childhood" (CP386); while Sam Solecki argues that Purdy has "remained very much a poet of beginnings and origins" (144). Morning and It's Summer poses important and profound questions, evoking the time and place of "beginnings and origins" in a sensuously stimulating and intellectually rigorous manner. The memoir portion of the book, which consists of eloquent prose accompanied by thirteen deliberately cut, framed, and positioned photographs, merits serious attention as a highly effective account of childhood/boyhood, and as a thoughtfully constructed and designed material text. Wordsworth's "gentle breeze" is the Romanticarchetype of the natural force that inspires poet and child. Purdy's memoir opens with his own version of the energy encompassed by Wordsworth's Cumberland breeze. Electricity arrives in Purdy's town in "1921 or '22," when Purdy is "three or four years old," providing the occasion for him to write of what he is "too young to remember": "And there was a feeling of foaming lakes and rivers coming from far away, while "Living in a Land of Giants'' \ 145 the overhead wires hummed urgently/' People left the lights on all night "just for the novelty/' while the "hoarse and exasperated" birds "kept on singing" (MS 9). Across the road from Purdy's home is McLean's pumpworks where McLean creates small wooden men "by an act of magic" (MS 9). Purdy remembers that "the men McLean brought to life spent their days lifting water up into sunlight. It was cold and sweet. It tasted of deep springs and wells and rivers under the earth" (MS9).Moving along wires and lifted up by little...