Fiddlehead Poetry Book No. 244, Review

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

The Loneliness of the Poet/Housewife
by Mary Humphrey Baldridge
Fiddlehead Poetry book No.244, 1978

Mary Humphrey Baldridge, born 1937, is a Calgarian, playwright and poet. This is her first collection of poetry. Titled The Loneliness of the Poet/Housewife, it is just that. A chronicle of a lonely poet/housewife. This collection is no celebration of life. It tends, instead, darkly, to illumine endings - the endings of all things. There is sad memory here, and there is the uncaring present and there is the dim future - and overall, is the spectre of finality. Finality expressed in the poet's vision of the hunter, the hunted.

Trees, cats and victims occur time and again in this collection, as symbols. The trees, one would assume metaphorically, as life or perhaps, the cycle of renewal; life and death. Trees seen in summer-thriving and trees dressed in winter shrouds. And the cats; predators, slinking through the back-alleys of this poet's perception, forever hunting their helpless victims; hunting, devouring.

This is a very internal view of life, almost completely without joy, without happy discovery, devoid of anticipation of the future.

There is not any comfort in marriage here, as in 'Space', where: "now we are two great marble boulders/ striking against each other continuously/ until permanently s h a t t e r e d". Well, sad, is it not? Impervious to one another's needs, two psyches lie together in the conjugal bed and hold themselves apart: "at night I lie quiet aware of my round hardness/ terrified of rolling toward the center/ of the bed".

In her life as a 'poet/housewife', Ms. Baldridge seems always to be looking out-of-doors, through windows, at the trees, the birds, the cats continually on the prowl; a relentless recurrence, this vision of oneself inside, looking out on the pressing scene. The passing scene, however, is an ever-static one; life pursued by death. But was she different before marriage, before becoming the 'poet/housewife'? It would seem not, for, as she notes in "The Solitary Tree": "I was in college then/ Drinking black coffee as I sat by that/ cold window/ And I thought: what greater pleasure/ Than to sit, talking, thinking, drinking coffee/ Gazing out at snow in turmoil and the solitary sparkling tree?".

Why has what was once a pleasure become a personal kind of torture? The answer evades the reader. But the scenes which once gave pleasure now threaten, as in the poem, "As They Await Their Hour": "The trees/ have all/ advanced a pace/ black hands trembling/ their feet in knotted trails/ above the earth/ their eyes yet hidden/ they ache - to shudder forward...">

When Ms. Baldridge does look about her, at the lonely place where she is trapped, a housewife, she sees:

"The kitchen's locked in light
and I alone revolve
Gigantic diamond
Cutting sharp squares
Through porcelain, chrome, black metal
bone
Releasing erupted ice-cubes
in cold pyramids
The whole room a revolution
of white light and ice
Imprisoned in the centre am I
When I move
My facets are in danger of cracking
Like the shattered Window
Through which glass and snow and broken leaves
spray slowly."

And then, in 'Vision', Ms. Baldridge goes on to shatter crockery until nothing is left of her 'antique wine glasses' and 'all the good china cups' - and she resolves, tomorrow, to buy plastic.

The china and the antique wine glasses, it appears, have not helped her adjust to her life. If she imagines even in a poem that plastic will, someone should tell her she appears to be living a plastic life. There is infinitely more to life than staring as though in catatonia, through the window of life and seeing there only death.

No one can go on forever as noted in 'The Woodstock Poem': "someone is beating on the door/ that faces the stand of birches/ and nothing else/ the door opens onto a white woods/ and space."

Visually, this is a fine Fiddlehead production. And despite the gloominess of this collection Ms. Baldridge speaks with an expressive poetic voice. It is to be hoped that Ms. Baldridge may some day manage to open the doors that trap her, see more optimistically through the windows that corrupt her vision and become herself a winged bird, not a hapless victim. When and if she does, she may write poems that will sing as well as sigh. Life should be a celebration, not an ongoing dirge.

c. 1982 Rita Rosenfeld

Coming Together ... Book Review

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

Coming Together
by Elaine Marcus Starkman
Graphics by Ruth Starkman
West Coast Print Center, Sheer Press

Elaine Starkman, holder of an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, is wife, mother, housewife and obviously frustrated with that triad. To offset that frustration she teaches night classes at St.Mary's College and Acalanes Adult Center in California. This is her first collection, self-published.

The collection, for the most part, is a very personal one. In the mode of confessionals, once so au currant, now out of favour. But then, that is not the only anachronism in this collection. Elaine Starkman seems almost to have been lost back there in the heady apex of Women's Liberation. It is as though through that 'liberation' of the newly-educated middle-class woman of the 60s and 70s, Elaine Starkman found a celebrated personal liberation and she shouts hallelujah! off the roof of her head. Which is fine, but rather stale. Because Ms. Starkman wallows in this new-found 'freedom' (which always appears to confer on the male half the role of warden and is happily now passe), her poems come off as rather egocentric in their self-sacrificial plaints. Tiresome. Fine in small doses, but stifling when the reader goes on to read one, another, and yet another. As in the "Preface" poem, when Ms. Starkman offers:

"We have little in life/ besides children/ husbands, houses/ classes, cars, clothes/ when we are stripped/ what remains of value is on the inside/ in my case only my poems/ I offer them up".

Well, yes, indeed. But that should be a warning to the unwary; that 'we have little but children, husbands, houses, classes' (weary litany) etc. - what in God's name else is there beside the valuable essence of the mind? Her point quite escapes me.

Yet, and for all that, there is an elegance about these poems. True,Ms. Starkman appears to be as much in love with the poems as idea, as she is in love with liberation as escape - but these poems, taken singly, do sing. In 'Israel Remembered' there is a poignancy in "you were the past I did not know/ the psalm I dared not sing/ the wall I could not touch/ the manna I had no time to taste". And in the poem, 'Prayer', we see Ms. Starkman at her best:

lord, let my soul
soar above my room
let her dance on walls
to songs of violins
leap rooftops
to pages of poetry
praise
.... an orange, a horse
.... a mountain, a breeze
let her transcend all limits
of my small life

There is promise in this poet's work. Her poems are finely crafted, her language precise and the rhythm does carry the reader into her moods. Still, one comes away with a sense of having been stifled in the self-made dissatisfactions of one who has too much and hardly knows what to do with it. It is possible to be a human being without wallowing in the angst of Woman's Place.

If and when Ms. Starkman ever resolves her personal dilemma and begins to reach outside her own small concerns; if she is ever able to transcend her awe of Writing Poetry, she may well become a fine poet.

c. 1982 Rita Rosenfeld

Canadian Jewish Outlook, April 1985

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

The Blue Pools of Paradise
by Mick Burrs, Coteau Books, c.1983
Thunder Creek Publishing co-Operative Limited

The author, a transplanted American draft-evader now living in Regina, is a poet and a teacher of creative writing. Mr. Burrs, beside being the founder of a reading series, is also a vocal advocate of books written by Saskatchewan writers.

In this collection Mr. Burrs has turned to exploration as a way of mining his inner feelings, as a way to attempt to understand his beginnings and perhaps by so doing, understand also the endings of all things. For the human experience is a universal one; understand what brought us to the shore of sentience and the universe is unravelled before us. This search is a long and weary one, the road a well-traversed one, well-worn by many who have gone before - and the exploration is doubtless destined to be repeated by those many who will surely come after. The answers are elusive, the way is shrouded in mystery, a mystery as arcane and little-fathomed as the human mind and the emotions which experience evoke. The search for sources, the search to unravel mysteries beckons many, and some who search discover truth. But truth is a troublesome word and what is truth or 'answer' to some is merely baffling and veiled mystique to others.

Perhaps real truth lies in the satisfaction of having attempted the journey; to finally understand is not given to many, and many realize that behind one truth or one answer is simply another question beckoning, another exploration to be undertaken and its mystery unravelled.

Mick Burrs begins his exploration through his family's unrecorded history, back to the tracery of Czarist Russia, pogroms, the differences of Yiddishkeit, the ostracism of the 'different folk'. Aptly enough, the photograph fore and aft of this collection does speak a thousand words, silently and eloquently, as it is a photograph of Russian military officers sitting around a table hosting a Samovar and the lead poem, titled 'Samovar', sets the exclusionary stage at which the story told through the collected poems, unfolds.

Mr. Burrs dangles exploratory fingers into the pudding of his birth, to his early development, when in a poem with that title he "...would laugh and swing/ eight years old/ a pilot taking wing/ in our garden/ shout BOMBS OVER TOKYO!' on a swinging crescent/ a boy/ too young to know/ bombs/ are appalling things/ tokyo a human place/ i only now remember/ our japanese gardener/ hoeing, turn away his face/".

The poet lingers over 'names and numbers', tracing his connection to father, grandfather and name change from "B ... is for Burrs, from Berzinsky/ (son of one who lives near Birches),/ his family name/ ...the family name changed/ by the father, in the New World,/ to fit in with the Smiths,/ to be more acceptable to the Browns/" ... with the poet's avowal of the value of the Berzinsky, yet his devotion to the Burr, now long-familiar and self-owned.

From the purges and the pogroms, from the Czarist officers and their samovars - escape - to the Goldene Medina. Transition to the golden world of Encino, California, where the neighbourhood has changed, and the samovar transformed to swimming pools; the fabled blue pools of paradise. Surrounded by movie stars, palatial homes and the obligatory pool, the neighbours are felt, but never seen; forever diving into their pools, celebrating, bringing in New Years' fetes. The separatedness, the apartness of the Burrs family is as complete in this new world as it was in the old.

Finally, an act of separation, the decision of the misunderstood, unappreciated and sensitive son to leave the country of his family's succour, that country which has oppressed another, alien people. His refusal to fight, his flight to another, war-uninvolved country which brings him to the following poem, after an evening in a Vancouver hotel room with his father and mother, where their two disparate sensibilities and worlds still fail to touch one another; neither father nor son saying the things that matter, to bridge the gap of misunderstanding, and soon afterward, on his return to Encino, the father dies:

"And none of us realized that last night
in the motel room in Vancouver
how one year later
these two Als
my father the sign painter and real estate broker
Jolson the movie star and popular singer
would share
the same consecrated hillside
of the City of Angels
each with his place under the grass
(though they had never met
on the palm tree boulevards of Encino)
or how their gray hair
would slowly intertwine
with the holy roots in the dark
soil of Hollywood
(Near the oil derricks and bright roar
of the city's snarling freeways)
or how the audience of their bones
would only hear the stillness
of talk / the silence of song
from a million flickering stars
light years removed from all those fabled blue pools
of paradise."

Mr. Burrs returns, briefly, to Russia/California to bid farewell to his dying grandfather... "I had not seen you for fourteen years./ Now at the gray border separating our lives/ the bus driver turned the motor off -/ and I watched an officer step aboard." He is taken off the bus, interrogated, and is relieved to be permitted his journey. He tries to explain ...

"You could not understand why your grandson
had fled the country that was your refuge,
had left the land of freedom; to be free,
not to struggle in someone else's war,
not to kill or be killed, but to find

the gift of poetry
along paths in northern woods,
songs waiting to drop like red berries
from the arms of snow-clad trees."

Finally, he recalls himself as a nature-struck child, collecting fireflies, wondering at the effervescent, evanescent firefly in a jar ... and it is this wonderment that we shall all, perhaps, return to finally... "Discovered among songless shadows/ plucking my notes of fire/ on invisible strings/ I became/ your small captured moon/ composed of throbbing light/ the one bright song/ in your dark universe/ now I resonate with echoing faintly against glass."

In the final analysis, we are all but transient flashes, fireflies burning brightly, then extinguished. But while we burn, beating our wings against adversity, striving to live out our ephemeral spans with dignity and honour we search for direction and meaning. Sometimes we discover these in our personal histories.

This collection does justice to the never-ending search.

c. 1985 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Canadian Jewish Outlook, Vol.23, No.4

Canadian Jewish Outlook, July-August 1984

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

The Burning Bush: Poems and Other Writings (1940-1980)
by Aaron Kramer, Cornwall Books, 1982

This collection by the American academic, translator and poet, Aaron Kramer, The burning Bush, represents, as his long-time friend and publisher Thomas Yoseloff tells us in his introduction, a "highly subjective" group of poems, "to represent the essence of his forty years of literary output". And, as was the intent in this careful selection, the reader does "come away with a thorough understanding of the essence of the poet's oeuvre".

An understanding, moreover, which leads one to marvel at the sensitivity of Dr. Kramer's perceptions, his intense and burning interest in all which surrounds him, his ability to evoke, through a careful selection of impressions - Everyman. And yet, although he too is Everyman through his detailing of a life - his life - he is yet unique, not only in the way that we all are as distinct personalities shaped by genetic endowment and environment - but this is a scintillating soul which compels us, after reading one group of poems, to go on reading, discovering, and admiring the essence of this person whose legacy to the world is this special creative talent.

The Burning Bush is both reality and metaphor. Dr. Kramer's cultural/historical roots shape his sensitivities and his ability to discern, to cull the precious element from what might appear to be the pedestrian; dross of anyone's existence in a way that celebrates life, in a manner that, in the true creative mind, sings of the glory of life. He is aware of the dark side of life, of human nature, of history. Never forgetting that he still is able to gently move aside the curtain of despair, the cushion of apathy, and find that precious spark in every situation, in any person; surely we all have the potential to perceive, to appreciate as he does?

Many of these poems were published in his previous nine collections. these are poems of joy, of longing, of bitter regret, of fond memory and of despair too in the knowledge that time is such an inexorable and ineffable element; and too little of it is apportioned to each one of us. But there is also present in this collection humour and whimsy and a deep and abiding love. The love of a son for his father, his mother and later, as a motherless young boy, for the sister who would try to mother him.

In the segment titled Family: 1 - the poet speaks of a story his mother would tell him to encourage him to eat, as a child. In A Lunch Remembered, the mother croons a story: "Once, in a forest a mother bird/sang while her babies sat sleeping/Hushabye fledglings! At dawn you fly/over the deep wide waters./Alone I'll die,/but hushabye;/you'll live, sweet sons and daughters..." And the child then asks: "Did they live? The story's finished/Did she die? Eat up the spinach!/What's the matter. Ma? You're crying!"

So it's little wonder that the child grown to a man could write such poems as The Song of the Burning Bush. "It blazes wild, this bush of woe-/not water speaks to its need, nor wine;/only weeping and blood - there grow/such furious berries, that all who dine/go screaming and dreaming over the seas,/seeking an altar for their knees." And this man did, as he promised in that poem, "tear the testaments out of my soul". The poems are his testament. His avowal of a life realized, well lived.

In the group of poems included in The Holocaust selection he writes in The rising in the Warsaw Ghetto: "If a word from Warsaw came,/unsurprised we took the news;/April's sun had set aflame/fifty thousand ashlike Jews". Briefly holding aloft the flame of life, those ashlike Jews affirmed their right and although might briefly triumphed leaving them in a funeral pyre of immense proportions, their actions, their affirmation still lives through the burning lines of a poet.

In the poem Tour, he tells us:
In four languages, the guide
explains as she has twice a day for years,
that we are entering
one of the quaintest sections of the city,
formerly the Jewish quarter.
Inside the synagogue she points out oddities.
'Notice the walls!'
Perfectly arrayed, as if being marched
are names -
seventy thousand Czechoslovak Jews,
their dates of birth and deportation.

"A touch on the shoulder/'Must you always be the last one/back on the bus?" he is asked, when he feels immersed in the memory of his immense black experience which he feels in his very marrow, as though it had happened to him; a brother Jew, knowing it had happened to him, and will continue to be a part of a Jew's experience, his life.

This man, this poet, this son, father, lover, husband, considers himself a fortunate man. Fortunate in the love lavished upon him by a father and mother who cherished their children; fortunate in his memories of them, in his memories of his own children growing up, thriving, in his companionship with his wife. He calls himself, in poems, Mr. Lucky, Mr. Glucklich. In the poem Mr. Glucklich Takes a Shower, we are given an instant history of the fondness of the human memory, as, under the shower which becomes "a world that has only water":

He is thirty-four, circling Lake Garde,
guzzling in his thirst its Giorno blue;
he is twenty-four, wheeling his baby
up to the fountain in Washington Square;
he is fourteen, repaying spray with madrigals
the length of Gravesend Bay;
he is four, above the shadowy Hudson,
on a mountainside across from Newburgh,
joining his mouth to the nipple of a spring;
he is the first breather ever cradled by the sea;
he is the sea god.

Dr. Kramer writes a universal experience, in an exquisite language of understanding. Hindsight is something we are all gifted with, but more, so many of us have experiences which, although we perceive them as being unique to ourselves are but repetitions of limitless human experience; they repeat themselves generation after generation. In Hindsight we are thusly informed:

You kept us safe, you kept us soft,
you trembled when we sneezed or coughed;
you gave your life for our life's sake -
no doubt it was a grave mistake:
but it was a mistake of love
which we are also guilty of.
Our children also figure out
what we are whispering about.
To keep them soft, we too grow hard;
to keep them safe, we too are scarred.
And through our love for them, we see
your love's true shape and quality.

To have been able to read this collection represents an experience of recognition. There is a sublime beauty in the strength of so many of these poems. No man could wish a finer epitaph to leave as a reminder of his own life and experience, and the richness of both. To evoke in the reader the sense of kinship, of empathetic recollection is no mean feat.

Some poems, such as those comprising the first half of Minotaur, although certainly not lacking in conviction, do not, however, quite manage to persuade this reader; there's almost a lack of intensity of experience itself ... a perception which is lifted in the second half of Minotaur when one no longer feels a distanced onlooker, but is once more taken by the poet into the inner circle of experience.

This is a diversified group of poems, to which the reader can only respond with a sense approaching love for a stranger, the writer of these poems, who happens in the end to be no stranger at all.

c. 1984 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Canadian Jewish Outlook, Vol.22, No.7-8

Fischbach Etc., Review

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

Fischbach Etc.
Basil Mogridge
Editions du Centre cultural de Differdange (Luxembourg)
Available through Prospero Book Stores

Basil Mogridge teaches at the German Department of Carleton University. This is his first collection. Mr. Mogridge is the editor of an impressive new poetry magazine distributed throughout Canada and Europe. Reenbou is a plurilingual magazine publishing the work of international poets. Mr. Mogridge carries his passion for poetry and for languages over into his own work.

Some of the poems in his collection, Fischbach Etc., are written in French, German and Portuguese. A frustrating exercise for the interested, unilingual reader and one that Mr. Mogridge need not really subject his audience to, for the foreign-language poems in this collection could also have been translated into English as they are not that numerous and place could have been found for them on the scattered blank pages that intersperse the English-language work.

There is a quote on the frontispiece of this collection by Jack Spicer which says in part, "Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances." Nice, very well put. Basil Mogridge seems to have an ear for resonance and an eye for the beauty in nature and the nature of man's monuments. At times, however, his observations are so subtle as to become almost trite. While many poems on this collection are imbued with an elegant simplicity, some appear to be mere observation and as such, banal.

These poems, however, are also exotic, as in "pennine landscape/picture postcard/Dillenburg/The red blood of the copihue flower/Unfolding/remembrance/pippel/Rwanda". And again, instances where the faraway is intermingled with the familiar as in: "La belle province/Caroni at dusk/Cayenne/February, west of Lisbon/February north of Lisbon/Vilnius/Tartu/North Owl"; that kind of wistfulness of the traveller-born.

Yet and again there are too many poems in this collection which are more observation than poetic rendition. They stand as mute reminders that poets are rarely able to view their own work often born of fond memory, with anything approaching the cold objectivity of the critic.

Happily, Mogridge redeems himself with such sharply etched pictures as "Snow, opaque, enveloping/thwarting, threatening/wisps cavorting/in a harsh wind/squeaky protests under boots and tires/the downtown skyline/sharp/a bulbous moon". And he presents us also with an urgent sense of place, an affection that is infectious, of the splendid grandeur of baroque Europe: From "Vilnius":

Crowning the wooded hill, the ancient Gediminas Tower;
below this town "born of the howl of a wolf".
St.Anna's soaring facade,
brick Gothic in miniature splendour
(Napoleon's greedy eye was clear).
St. Peter and Paul, jubilant baroque;
high, within, its ship of light.
The Old Town's pastel colours, courtyards,
studious tranquility.
In Gediminas Square a building gravely monumental:
beyond its classic portals paintings, rustic crosses,
solemn music: white and gold,
cathedral organ and attendant angels,
playing to a land of amber
and of green.

With poems such as these, he gifts us with the vicarious pleasure of his travels. An auspicious collection, in all.

c. 1980 Rita Rosenfeld

Canadian Jewish Outlook, March 1985

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

A Time To Thunder and other Poems
by Edith Segal, Watercolours by Samuel Kamen
Introduction by Pete Seeger
Philmark Press, New York City
c.1984

Edith Segal, a product of New York's Lower East Side, is perhaps best known for her connection to the theatre arts. The same talented person, however, is also the author of a number of volumes of children's verse and others of adult poetry. Now in her eighties, Edith Segal has produced another collection of poetry.

On the jacket back of this collection a group of the poet's peers, among them other poets and theatre people, are quoted in approving if not outright admiring endorsation of her talents. The introduction by Pete Seeger informs us that "these poems, with their humour and insights, cover a wide range of everyday life, but all point in one direction; a world in which people of varying backgrounds can share, a world without poverty, a world with room for all..."

The first poem in this collection, appropriately titled Foreword, entreats the gentle reader:

"Listen, please listen,
I ask to be heard
I've labored long
selecting each word
with piercing precision
to truly mirror
my deeply disturbing
restless furor ..."

We are thus brought into Edith Segal's world of concerns; concern of a nuclear holocaust, of the inequities which life hands to the vast working class, of lack of understanding between people, of discrimination. And we're also given glimpses of the Edith Segal of dance and song, and of the elderly and concerned artist/philosopher's view of self; of self reflected in the mirror of diminishing years.

A reading of the campaigner-against-nuclear-proliferation Edith Segal tells us in Rainbows: "We challenge the madmen, the rainbow killers/ We refuse to burn, agonizingly die!/ Our rainbow of people will guard this planet/ and reach for the rainbows that arch the sky!"

The personal Edith Segal tells us in the poem Years: "the challenge is to grow and learn/ in spite of growing old,/ to spread one's wings each living day/ as the precious years unfold". Clearly, from this collection and the thoughts arranged therein, this is precisely what the poet has always striven to achieve.

Some of these poems have a resonance and strength, like The Rebirth of Dance Black and White, commemorating a dance production which Edith Segal choreographed, with the poem reading in its final stanza:

"The many labor, as the few exploit...
A long and painful truth,
the crushing of humanity's hope,
the demeaning of its youth."

The poems titled On Reading Barrie Stavis' Lamp at Midnight, and Spanish Morning Song are outstanding in this collection, and the poem of the Spanish Civil War reads thus:

"Awake, my children, danger's near
'Tis not the humming birds we hear
'Tis fascist blackbirds come to kill
Death is not still.

Awake, my children, soon they come,
their shadows hide the morning sun.
Awake before it is too late.
Death does not wait.

Awake, my children, hear their cry.
Your playmates fear that you may die.
They call for you to wake and live.
Death does not give.

Awake, my children, see the sun,
it shines again, for we have won!
The blackbirds came a-tumbling down.
Death wears a frown!"

The watercolours that grace this publication are elegant and lovely, a wonderful counterpart in spirit to the elegiac poetry. And it is perhaps fitting that this is a husband and wife effort; the artist is Edith Segal's husband.

While there are definitely some very bright moments in the poems representing this collection, their quality and poetic tone is, unfortunately, not sustained throughout. Many of the poems included here are banal and uninspired; they lack lilt, express and verve.

However, the collection is an attractive one, the poems quoted at length here lifting the quality overall to a production well worth reading.

c. 1985 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Canadian Jewish Outlook, Vol.23, No.3

Outlook, May 1986 review: Waiting for the Messiah - a Memoir, Irving Layton with David O'Rourke

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

Waiting for the Messiah - a Memoir, Irving Layton with David O'Rourke
McClelland and Stewart, 25 Hollinger Road, Toronto
c. 1985. Hardback, 264 pages.

To this reader, it is hard to reconcile the initial chapter of this book with the succeeding ones. Indeed, the further one delves in this memoir the more it appears as though the reader has been made privy to the maturing of a writer. The beginning chapters have a naivete, an arrogance and even a kind of silliness (deliberately playful, let us dare hope) which is off-putting and unworthy of the literary stature of this man, despite his flamboyance and provocative style.

But, for those of you who may decide to embark upon this reading adventure, a word of advice - persevere. It's worth it, for the work steadily improves and becomes less tendentiously tedious (the initial style and content going far to give credence that some people will do anything for attention and that advanced age is no guarantor of social or emotional maturity) and progressively interesting.

Less, alas, as a result of Layton's own life experience, more as a fallout of his place in the times he writes of, and his relationships, close, tenuous, distanced or what-have-you, with other, more interesting, and sometimes more talented people than he.

Which is not to deny the man's estimable talent. I have tried to in the past, mind, when his misanthropic and seemingly misogynist attitudes have infuriated me to the point of denying the man his due - and my adversary-in-opinion has been none other than my husband, an ardent admirer of this latter-day bard - an unhappy experience.

Layton begins his memoir, logically enough, at the beginning. We are informed that the incipient poet was 'born with the smell of baked Challa in his nostrils', a startling revelation but infinitely less so than his other well-known claim, that he was born with the messianic sign - already circumcised. This affectation does not grow dim with the passage of time, but since it offers a kind of comfort to the man there is no point denying him that cushion.

During his growing, and omnivorously-reading years, he imbibed stories of the lives of other saviours and heroes, including Moses, Buddha, Alexander the Great - whose own births were accompanied by bizarre circumstances, as his was. Thus was born a legend of self.

Once departing from that thesis, we are introduced to life in the Lazarovitch family, with father Moishe, a soft-spoken, pious and scholarly man who brought the shtetl with him to Montreal; mother Klara who shrieks curses down upon young Irving's hapless head; siblings Avrum, Dora, Esther, Gertie, Harry, Hyman and Larry. And, of course, the extended family members, most particularly the men whom sisters had wed, and whose foibles and coarseness are discoursed upon at length. Layton's childhood was not a happy one.

In a background of grinding poverty, in a family whose orientation was mercenary (how else survive in the hostile environment for immigrant Jews in turn-of-the-century Montreal?), the emerging intellectualism of the young boy with a mischievous temperament was a puzzle and a nuisance to his family. While Layton was increasingly drawn by education, with an emphasis on literature and the beauty of language, his increasingly alienated family demanded that he assume the life of an itinerant peddler, an occupation at which, fleetingly, given his gregarious character, he was able to succeed very well at.

But Layton had a self-vision of a glory greater than earning dollars with which to support himself, and eventually evolve into budding mercantilism. His love of, and admiration for poetry, was first inspired by the beautifully rendered readings of Tennyson's Ballad of the Revenge by one of the few teachers for whom Layton had some modicum of respect at Baron Byng High School.

In total, Layton's experiences with teachers in general throughout the public school system, and on into college were dismal, demoralizing affairs for the budding scholar/poet. Insensitive clods they were, demineralized, myopic, harsh, coldly demanding and censorious of the high-spiritedness of a rebellious adolescent with a penchant for learning, but only in the environment of nurturance, which was, alas, a scarce commodity.

He had a budding romance, both with a young woman (and by extension, her mother) and with the dialectic of communism. With the former because he was a normal, lustily yearning young male, the latter because it was socially verboten. After that flirtation, Layton dabbled, with friends who drew him into their circle, with socialist ideals. He met, and became a personal friend of David Lewis whose analytical and brilliant mind he appreciated, but whose oratory he felt was far from brilliant. Through Lewis he met Abraham Klein, then a young articling lawyer, and language-precise, fiery poet with whose help he was able to master Latin, and make his senior grades.

A chance encounter led him to attend college, at a time when Layton was drifting along, with nothing much else to do but earn the odd dollar to keep a roof over his head and go to meetings at the Young Peoples' Socialist League communist meetings, and Horn's Cafeteria, the hangout for social radicals of the time where social responsibility, proletarians' rights, Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto, the evils of the capitalist class, unions and labour were discussed with resounding vigour, and the pilpul of opinion had its day.

In that forum Layton was exposed to the explosive mixture of socialist and communist thought, Trotskyism, anarchism. It was a heady, pleasing ongoing experience for the young man, which he balanced with his private readings of Shelley and Keats, trying to hone his own, by then, not inconsiderable skills, both as an orator, and a poet. Very little of the social cant, of the traditional exposition to which he was exposed was taken at face value; he observed and trod daintily among the ideals and ideas, although his admiration for some of the exponents knew no bounds.

This was the Quebec of the Catholic Church with its stranglehold on the thoughts and minds of Quebecois; it was the Quebec of Arcand, and of police brutality. And this was a Layton whose mind and heart were torn between social activism and literary endeavour. In the end, his literary ambitions emerged victorious, although there is an inescapable thread of social activism in the warp and woof of his literary work.

The college of Layton's choice turned out to be Macdonald College, chosen for the logical reason that it was the only institute of higher learning which he could manage to afford. Associated with McGill University, the only degree this college conferred was that of Agriculture and this explains neatly why Layton's degree is in this area.

Because of the cautious, conservative, intellectually stilted atmosphere of the college, Layton decided that he would form a speakers' club which he called the Social Research Club. To its regular meetings he invited the then-president of the Royal Bank of Canada, followed in fairly rapid succession by the pacifist Lavell Smith, the fabled Dr. Normal Bethune, and the founder of the CCF, J.S. Woodsworth. His plans to also invite Tim buck were thwarted by the organized efforts of other members of the student body who feared the college would be irremediably tainted red, thus scuttling their future plans for a civil service career.

Layton experienced a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that exposure to these fiery speakers of the time, some of them exceedingly controversial, opened up the minds of their student listeners. Even so, the reputation that Layton acquired while at the college was not that of a social facilitator, but that of a rabble rouser, and both the unlikely appellations of 'Hitler' and 'Trotsky' often crowned his reputation there.

Layton mourned the sad fact that while at college the literary-poetic idols held to review and admiration were those of the era of Edwardian England, and as delightful and earth-shaking at their time as they were, they did not reflect the social and cultural tradition of the country and the times which he inhabited. He professes to some bitterness at not having been exposed to the works of T.S. Eliot, Hart crane, and Walt Whitman, let alone Canadian poets like Lampman, Bliss Carman or E.J. Pratt.

This lack left him with the impression for too long, he felt, that he could do no better than to emulate their style. It was when he became exposed through his own search and pique to the work of these ground-breakers that it dawned upon him what progressive poetry, free verse reflecting the temper of the times could really accomplish.

The man, obsessed with the earthiness of life, of passions unleashed, scorning convention and the limpid and sexually repressed poetic style of his peers, evolved a poetic address uniquely his own. One that shocked both the reading public and the then-literary establishment. It was not 'polite'.

He writes of his marriages, of his attachment to women, to his ideas and his poetry. He writes of the joy and ecstasy of creative achievement, of self-affirmation in the final realization that one is yes indeed, a poet of incalculable creative ability. Which there is no denying Irving Layton is.

This is a good book, a rewarding book, and in its own way, a revelation, Messiah complex aside. For in his very own, inimitable way, Layton really has been a messiah; he has helped to unleash unbridled sensualism in poetic expression, given it a fire of his own devising, and brought poetry where it belongs, in the gut as well as the mind of the reader.

Abrasive and even abusive he can be at times, but where is there a poet whose totality is perfection? It is unfortunate that Layton's very well-publicized divergence of opinion with Elspeth Cameron and his dismissal of her 'unauthorized' biography of him did not result in an increased public interest in his own book. One has the impression that the increased notoriety he might have traded upon as a result of the acrimonious exchanges in the media would translate itself in brisk sales, but alas, volume one of his memoirs has not sold well.

Still, he's preparing to write the second volume of Waiting for the Messiah and this reviewer, however inclined to be critical as I am, intends to wait for that messiah. Stay tuned.

c. 1986 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Outlook, Vol.24, No.5