THE CARTOGRAPHY OF MYSELF

IN EARLY SUMMER, 1965, I WAS COASTING ALONG in a Nordair DC8, bound for Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island. It was about 4 a.m. and most of the other passengers were asleep, but I was peering from the window watching the small reflection of our aeroplane skimming over the blue water and floating ice of Frobisher Bay, several thousand feet down. Low hills on either side of us were patched with snow, like Jersey cows. The water was so blue that the colour looked phony; the sun had been up for about an hour.

Far beneath the noisy DC8, ice floes reeled away south. Black-and-white Arctic hills surrounded us. This was the first time I had been to the Arctic, and I was so excited that I could hardly sit still. In Cuba, England, France, and other countries I'd felt like a stranger; but here, I'd never left home. And I thought what an odd feeling it was in a region that most people think is desolate and alien. But I felt that the Arctic was just a northern extension of southern Canada. Baffin Island:

A club-shaped word
a land most unlike Cathay or Paradise
but a place the birds return to
a name I've remembered since childhood
in the first books I read -
('The Turning Point")

I have this same feeling of enjoyment, of being at home, all over Canada. Maybe part of the reason comes from an earlier feeling of being trapped forever in the town of Trenton, Ontario, when I was a child; then the tremendous sense of release when I escaped, riding the freight trains west during the Depression. Also, I take a double view of history, for then and now merge somewhat in my mind. Winnipeg is also Fort Garry and Seven Oaks. Adolphustown, not far from where I live in Prince Edward County, is the spot where the United Empire Loyalists landed nearly 200 years ago. The restored fortress of Louisbourg in Cape Breton makes me feel like a living ghost, especially when looking at the tombstone of Captain Israel Newton who died there, a member of the colonial army from New England. And driving along Toronto's Don Valley Parkway, I think of the old Indian trails that take the same route under black asphalt. In cities everywhere, grass tries to push aside the concrete barriers of sidewalks.

I think especially of people in connection with places. Working on a highway near Penticton, British Columbia, with a fellow wanderer named Jim, shovelling gravel atop boiling tar: a speeding car ignored warning signs and nearly killed us; the big road foreman blistered that driver's hide until his face turned dull red.

And walking through the Okanagan Valley with my friend, picking cherries from orchards for food, sleeping wherever we could: sometimes in vacant sheds, and once buried in the pungent shavings of a sawmill. Then going to work for two weeks on a mountain farm, for a man whose naine sounded like "Skimmerhorn." I got five dollars for those two weeks, cutting down trees with Jim and splitting them with wedges. At night, we listened to John McCormack sing 'The Far Away Bells Are Ringing" on a wind-up phonograph. Jim stayed behind to work for a stake, but I gave up and rode the freights west to Vancouver. I never saw him again.

One of my favourite Canadian places is the area around Hazelton and Woodcock on the big bend of the Skeena River in British Columbia. I was stationed at Woodcock in 1943, helping to build a landing field as part of the defences for an expected japanese invasion. Snow-covered mountains surrounded the barracks sheds, with the Skeena River racing down the green valley on its way to Prince Rupert. Sometimes there were eagles, circling overhead nearly as high as the sun. And on weekend passes, airmen from the base would hop freight trains to Hazelton or Smithers to drink beer and terrorize pleasurably the local female population.

In 1960 I went back to the big bend of the Skeena to do some writing about the Tsimshian Indians around Hazelton and Kispiox. I was driving a '48 Pontiac that coughed its way up and down. the mountain roads, threatening to expire at any minute. But I managed to reach Kispiox on the Indian reservation, with its carved house fronts and rotting totem poles. The place seemed entirely deserted, so I drove past the village and down to the Kispiox River. Standing in the shallows, wearing hip waders and baseball caps, were some twenty American fishermen with station wagons parked nearby.

There are other places stored on my mind's memory tapes. Places where I feel comfortable, at home: the battlefield at Batoche, in Saskatchewan, where I camped in a trailer; the highline tracks of the CPR near Field, BC, where I'd walked after a cop kicked me off a freight at Golden, then became a CPR labourer on a landslide blocking passage east for forty-eight hours, then rode in legal luxury to Calgary on a work train. And once there was a mile-long Arctic island, my home for three weeks of summer: I lay with my ear flat against the monstrous stone silence of the island, listening to the deep core of the world - silence unending and elemental, leaked from a billion-year period before and after the season of man.

I think back to all the places I've been, the people I've met and the things I've done. Having written and edited some twenty books, I hope to write a dozen more - to follow all the unknown roads I have not explored, until they branch off and become other roads in my mind . . .

There is a map in my head that I've carried there ever since I left school, and I connect it, oddly, with Leo Tolstoy. He wrote a short story called "How Much Land Does a Man Need," in which a man was given title, free and clear, to as much land as he could encircle on foot between sunup and sundown. The man was too greedy for land, tried to walk around too much of it, and died of exhaustion just before the sun went down.

But I have as much land as I need right now. There is a tireless runner in my blood that encircles the borderlands of Canada through the night hours, and sleeps when day arrives. Then my mind awakes and the race continues. West
with the long and lamentably undefended American border; north along the jagged British Columbia coast to the whale-coloured Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Islands; south in past Baffin and Newfoundland to the Maritimes and sea
lands of the Grand Banks. This is the map of myself, what I was and what I became. It is a cartography of feeling and sensibility: and I think the man who is not affected at all by this map of himself that is his country of origin, that man is emotionally crippled.

My own country seems to me not aggressive, nor in search of war or conquest of any kind. It is exploring the broken calm of its domestic affairs. Slowly it investigates its own somewhat backward technology, and sets up committees on how not to do what for whom. My country is trying to resolve the internal contradictions of the Indian and French-Canadian nations it contains. In rather bewildered and stupid fashion it stares myopically at the United States, unable to, assess the danger to the south - a danger that continually changes in economic character, and finally confronts us from within our own borders.

This is the map of my country, the cartography of myself.
(1977)

IRVING LAYTON:
Balls for a One-Armed Juggler
QUESTION: IS IT POSSIBLE TO SITUATE IRVING LAYTON anywhere in the general "tradition" of Canadian poetry?

ANSWER: I don't think so, in spite of the fact that he's here. There has never been anyone quite like Layton - for good or bad - in Canadian poetry. He's the sport and anomaly of tradition

Q: Layton bas been called an innovator and a meticulous craftsman. Is this true?

A: He is not an innovator - unless you consider that his subject matter and language are innovation. Which in a sense I do. But given the tradition of preaching Christ-like sensualists and moralists such as Nietzsche, Lawrence and Shaw - then Layton is a fine craftsman. And this is relevant in an odd way. It allows Layton to swing expertly and acrobatically around the fixed trapeze of his own and other men's certainties.

Q.: To what poets or group of present day writers has he most affinity?

A: Leaving out the dead men for whom Layton professes admiration, one has to point to the Americans whom Layton affects to despise, such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, etc. - the Beats. But Layton has a singing magnificence in his earlier work which I find absent from theirs.

Q: There is preoccupation with physical violence and cruelty in many Layton poems. What does this indicate?

A: That he is a moralist. The reader may generally draw a conclusion or point a moral with Layton's poems of animal death and human violence.

Q: How good is he?

A: The best in the country.

There is much to be said for the idea that Layton is his own mythology. He stalks through most of the poems in Balls for a One-Armed Juggler much larger than life-size, far more angry than it's possible to sustain in the living flesh and bone of the human mind. So that his poems are frozen anger, solidified passion--set rigidly into forms which do not allow this anger to dissipate away into sleep or lessen into human anti-climax.

Of course there are modulations and degrees of printed emotion. There are also rare flashes of the characteristic early lyricism, which now seems to be fading away in the poet's impassioned middle age. Label this excerpt pity:
for I loved you from the first
who know what they do not know,
seeing in your death a tragic portent
for all of us who crawl and die
under the wheeling disappearing stars;
("Elegy for Marilyn Monroe")

Humour in Layton is liable to be savage as an executioner laughing at his victims. The philosophic moments are hardly ever calm, but generally vital:
Yet vitality proves nothing except that
something is alive
So is a pole-cat; so is a water-rat
("On Rereading the Beats")

I don't think I've ever met a human being with such impressive qualities of being right all the time as Irving Layton. And in this regard man and poems are inseparable. In a sense that's admirable. I admire the passion and bluster and candour it gives to the poems. In another sense I don't like anybody to be so right all the time. For it is not a very human quality; it withdraws its possessor from participation in the storms and passions of the actual world, makes him a mere angry supreme court spectator. It turns a man into a megalomaniac god. I think some readers share this dislike of the absolute, and certainly the tendency of a few is to rebel against it.

However, that is ungrateful. God pities the dead little fox in "Predator." God explains "Why I Can't Sleep Nights" in the poem of that title. God condemns and castigates the sinful individual in "Epigram for Roy Daniells." And God has written parables for his worshippers - "Butterfly on Rock" and "A Tall Man Executes a Jig," (of which Irving said to me once, "AI, in ten years you'Il be able to understand this poem. In twenty you might be able to write one as good." I was moved to a great humbleness by this statement.)

But I'm not one of Layton's detractors. Balls is an excellent book of poems. It deserves to be read by all - especially those to whom Layton addresses the poems specifically. And I notice that even those who dislike Layton always read him - if only to rush indignantly to their typewriters. For perhaps I'm wrong about this god-idea, and the anger of some of Layton's critics is the only indication they are alive.
(1963)

The Collected Poems of Irving Layton
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF IRVING LAYTON is a large blockbuster of a book. It takes in most of Layton's published work for the last twenty years, replaces the earlier Red Carpet for the Sun from the standpoint of quantity, and allows the reader to indulge in some wide generalizations.

For instance, some people believe that Layton has been slipping badly as a poet, perhaps ever since about 1960 when he was receiving greatest recognition. In fact I shared this belief myself and mentioned it to Milton Wilson. But Wilson said he saw no change one way or the other in Layton's work (this is only an approximate quote), and that very likely it was the poetry reader who had changed - not Layton.

Looking at the present Collected Poems I now think Milton Wilson was right. Since reading Layton for the first time I've changed, at least my own attitudes have; and other readers too have retreated somewhat from an earlier enthusiasm.

I find that curious. One might suppose that a work of art endures unchanged in one's own mind forever, or the personal equivalent of forever. Not so. And it does chill me a little to think that perhaps one day I may tire of Peter Breughel, W.B. Yeats, the French Impressionists etc.

The question is: why has my own attitude (as well as that of some other people) changed regarding Layton's poems? For he is in many obvious ways, the great trail-blazer in Canadian poetry. He antedated and outdid the blessedly unborn American Beats as long ago as 1950. He broke the sound barrier of taboo and prudery thru his use of words relating to the sexual act, at a time when many young poets now using his methods and perhaps believing themselves excessively daring were yet unborn. (In Vancouver during the early fifties the poems of this then unknown poet of Montreal affected me like a personal revelation, thru which I thought life had been stripped down to its basics of delight and honesty.)

The trouble is that Layton is still doing the same things today. He has not changed. And on closer inspection what looked daring then seems commonplace now. The sexual words turn out to be those found in textbooks, phallus, penis, and the like. And I have been inoculated to some degree against Layton by repeated and massive doses of Layton. Whereas the younger generation has not been so inoculated. He is fresh and new to them: which is erha it h Id be, for he is a poet of youth and the flesh, the quick and easy judgment, immediate praise or condemnation whatever the grounds for either.

Layton's critics select specific objectives at which to aim their criticism. For instance, Robin Skelton says he rants, brags and boasts tiresomely. This is true, and can be substantiated by quoting particu lar poems. Louis Dudek says, among other things, that Layton's awkward juxtapositions of words in order to make them conform to a metric scheme result in Layton being a species of literary troglodyte. Again, this is true, and could be demonstrated by means of quoting Layton's poems. But the verdict that follows such logic is not necessarily true, for it is as one-sided and unjust as the immediate magisterial verdicts Layton himself hands down in his poems.

For these knowledgeable critics have selected Layton's worst and most awkward poems in order to make their point effectively. Skelton and Dudek have been largely correct with their specific complaints. However, there is a great deal more to be said of Layton than these comparatively minor points, true as the particular criticism may be.

As I look at 350 odd pages of Collected Poems, beginning with verse published in Layton's first book (Here and Now, 1945), I find a most curious homogenized texture from first to last. The early themes - sex, Jewishness, love of life, bitter complaints about philistinism, and many others - are there now and still in the saine abundance. Of course the poet became a bit more technically expert in handling his themes, but the themes themselves are the saine. And for that matter, I don't see why they shouldn't be.

And during Layton's mid-period, say around the early 1950s, lie produced his finest poems, things like "The Birth of Tragedy," which he affects to dislike as academic thesis fodder, but which I am sure delight him in reality.

In attempting to explain this "homogeneity" previously mentioned I'm forced to settle for the word "tone." And I don't mean idiom. The best way I can explain what I mean by "tone" is to give a precariously related example. Suppose a man yells aloud every day for 20 years, and each time a scientific device registers his volume as, say, 467 decibels. The exact number doesn't matter, and besides I don't know how many decibels amount to a whisper. Anyhow, transfer this metaphor to Layton's poems, and say he's been giving vent to a stentorian yowl of exactly 467 decibels every day for the last 20 years.

I'd like to be as metaphorically exact as I can. Therefore - the 467 decibels (of course) comprise other things beside volume. Included also are cocksureness, conceit, delicacy, a modicum ofwisdom, and occasional magnificence. (This last being very rare in any poet.) And all thru those 20 years, the "tone," the decibels, yowl of stance and attitude have been largely the saine.

Take the following two lines: "Here private lust is public gain and shame;" 'When evil has become our normal climate." The first is from a poem in Here and Now, Layton's first book; the second is from "On the Assassination of President Kennedy." The "tone," the "decibels," the voltage, call it what you like, seem to me the saine.

Of course I'm doing here exactly the saine thing I say Skelton and Dudek are doing - selecting appropriate passages to prove my particular point. But I don't maintain there are not slight variations in the overall tone. "A Tall Man Executes a Jig" is certainly one of those variations. Here Layton lowers his tone and intensity about 200 decibels with corresponding benefit to the poem. But these poems are exceptions. And while it might seem that a poet ought to have an "unmistakable voice," as Layton does, the actual possession of one makes for monotony over 20 years.

Another thing that has always troubled me about Layton's poems, after the early euphoric sensation wore thin, is that I am seldom able to share his personal feeling and emotion, when attempting to relate my own feelings to the circumstance of the poem. (Of course I wasn't there.) Just once in a while, when Layton is joyously "lord of all the marquees" and "the traffic cop moving his lips/Like a poet composing/Whistles a discovery of sparrows." Such moments are the "happy time," that I think all members of the human race must share, at least once in a whiie. And for tribute to the man who puts it into words all I can say is: Wow!

But generally speaking, I admire the rhetoric from outside, as if watching a very good actor perform, tho not quite good enough. What Layton says is much too frequently a little off to one side of the way I think things actually are, not quite my truth, tho I suppose Layton's' truth.

As an example of this feeling of mine, take the last line in "The Bull Calf" - a much admired Layton poem: "I turned away and wept." Now I'm as sentimental a person as the next, but can't conceive myself in these circumstances of death. Tho some can. I can only conclude there may have been other things, other feelings in Layton, himself, which he has failed to communicate to me. Or perhaps I'm just insensitive. And the reference to the late President Kennedy as 'our noble prince" strikes me as maudlin and a little embarrassing.

Nor do I subscribe to the trivia of "In Memory of Stephen Ward" or the "Earth Goddess" poem for Marilyn Monroe (tho I wrote one myself and regret it). But they and others are by-products of Layton's poetic renderings. Against trivia you can balance and overbalance occasional genuine magnificence.

Another commonly held theory about Layton is that he is a marvellous craftsman (this is true in some degree) and a technical innovator. The last is sheer nonsense. Layton picked up and developed his form and tone from fairly obvious sources, perhaps Horace Gregory's translations of Catullus being most easily apparent. The enjambments and juxtapositions of much modern poetry are, in Layton, conspicuous by their absence. To me lie is a traditionalist, with a good ear for the modern idiom.

As in most of the poets, iambs throng in his work like veteran marching armies who have conquered before and certainly will again. Nor is this reprehensible in any way. A poet would have to be insane to discard entirely the arts and technical craft that have taken a thousand years to develop, but yet continue to change and move forward.

With Layton a soliloquy generally amounts to a harangue. On page 308 begins a short sequence of poems concerning, presumably,' marital infidelity. And I'm amused to note that in these poems Layton condemns the woman as vociferously as he does modern culture in general. The woman is "evil"; the man, it is taken for granted, is virtuous and blameless. Apart from ye olde double standard, such judgments are predictable, and after a while very monotonous.

It makes you wonder if there is no possibility of the man being wrong. Is everything one-sided, simple and transparent to this angry all-wise sage? Yes it is.

But it's unfair to carp and cavil all thru Layton's Collected Poems. I hope I haven't seemed entirely too one-sided in my criticism, as Layton sometimes is in his poems. Despite obvious faults, these poems are the most substantial body of good work published in the, country. You have to accept the bad with the good, and be thankful: for both, for they're interrelated and mutually dependent.
But decide for yourself which is which. Don't let Layton overpower you, either with rhetoric or personality, or the dogmatism that makes him a prize example of his own pet theory about the despised', academics.

Layton is a fine poet, and if I disbelieve his genius-assessment of himself, there's enough justice and/or truth in what he says to make me think about the possibility seriously before I make up my own mind. Which is my 10 (minor) decibels worth.

T: What was your family upbringing like?
PURDY: We were lower middle class, I guess you'd call it. My father was a farmer who died of cancer when I was two. My mother moved to town and devoted her life to going to church and bringing me up. I suppose I reacted against religion. But I remember when I rode the freight trains west for the first time, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I got lost in the woods and couldn't get out. So I prayed. I wasn't going to take any chances, no chances at all.
T: If a person reacts that way when he's very young, they say he'll react that way again when he's old.
PURDY: Christ, I'll never make id I haven't prayed since that time. I doubt if I ever will again. I'm not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense.
T: Do you think riding the freights appealed to you because it put you in touch with your survival juices?
PURDY: Well, let me give you the story about the first trip I took. I was hitchhiking north of Sault Ste. Marie when suddenly the Trans-Canada Highway didn't go any further. So I had to catch a train. I waited till after midnight. I got onto a flatcar that had had coal on it. It was raining and so I huddled there, all selfequipped with two tubes of shaving cream and an extra pair of shoes and a waterproof jacket.
We went all night into a town called Hawk Junction. I was desperate from the rain. I got out my big hunting knife and tried to get into one of the boxcars. I ripped the seal off one of the cars and tried to open the door but I couldn't do it. So I went back and huddled miserably on the flatcar. I didn't know I was at a divisional point.
A cop came along and said, "You can get two years for this." He locked me up in a caboose with bars on the windows. There was a padlock on the outside of the door, which opened inward. Then he came along a couple of hours later and took me home to have lunch with his family. They gave me a Ladies' Homejournal to read.
I began to get alarmed. What will my mother think? Two years in jail. The window of the caboose was broken where other people had tried to get out and couldn't do it. But I noticed, as I said, that the door opened inward. There was a padlock and a hasp on the outside. I put my feet up on the upper part of the sill and got my fingers in the hasp. I pulled the screws out of the padlock on the outside.
I started to walk back to Sault Ste. Marie, which was a hundred and sixty-five miles. Then I got panicky. They'll follow me. I'm a desperate criminal. I broke a seal. So I thought I'd walk a little way in the woods so they won't see me. But I got in too far. I couldn't get out. I was there for two bloody days. It rained. That was the last time I prayed, as I said.
T: What were your ambitions as a kid?
PURDY: To stay alive. To get along with other kids. Growing up in a small town, the only son of a very religious woman, I was always alone. Until I got into the Air Force at the age of twenty or so, I didn't get along with anybody.
I became a great reader. I read all the crappy things that kids read. I remember there was a series of paperback books back then called the Frank Merriwell series. When I was about thirteen, a neighbour moved away and gave me two hundred copies of Frank Merriwell. This guy Frank Merriwell went to Yale University and he won at everything he did naturally he was an American - and anyway, he went through many vicissitudes. I pretended I was ill and went to bed. My mother fed me ice cream and I read all two hundred books. I stayed in bed for two months. Then I went back to school and passed into the next form.
T: Were you good in school?
PURDY: Not really. I even failed one year so I could play football. One year I got ninety percent or something and the next year I got forty. Don't ask me why. I started writing when I was about thirteen. I thought it was great when in fact it was crap. But you need that ego to write. Always.
T: You sound like you were probably pretty harem-scarem in those days.
PURDY: No, I wasn't harem-scarem at all. I was pretty conventional. Also I was always very discontented. A miserable little kid. I started, out of sheer desperation, to ride the freight trains. There's a quality of desperation about riding the freights. In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid. At a certain age you're always uncertain how other people will take you. I was desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the world. Finally I didn't give a damn.
T: Was the RCAF the next step in your life, after the freight trains?
PURDY: I was doing odd jobs around Trenton. What you did was you picked apples or you worked for Bata shoes. You quit one and then the other. I got into the Air Force for a job. I was there six years. I took a course and became a corporal, then an acting sergeant. Then I was demoted from acting sergeant to corporal and all the way down.
T: You got demoted "to the point where I finally saluted civilians." Why?
PURDY: By this time I was ... going out with girls. I'd been too scared to go out with them up to the age I got into the Air Force. Once, when I was corporal of the guard, I drove the patrol car over to Belleville to see this girl after midnight. I got caught at it. I was acting sergeant at Picton where I had a big crew of Americans waiting to get into training. What I did was appoint a whole bunch of acting noncoms so that I would have plenty of freedom. I went out on the town again.
Actually I was enjoying myself for the first time in my life. I hated the town of Trenton and I was finally out of it.
T: You've described your first book of poetry, The Enchanted Echo, as crap. Did you pay for its publication?
PURDY: Sure. Clarke and Stuart in Vancouver printed it for me. I cost me two hundred dollars to do about five hundred copies. About one hundred and fifty of them got out so I guess about half of those have been destroyed. I went back there ten years ago and they'd thrown them all out. Or they'd burned them I'd been afraid to go back because I didn't think I could pay storage charges.
T: Around this time you got married. Your wife plays a pretty integral part in your poetry, yet we never get a clear picture of what kind of person she is ...
PURDY: Oh, she's good material. She fixes small television sets and bends iron bars. I picked her up in the streets of Belleville, way back when. Her name's Eurithe because I think her parents were scared by the Odyssey or Iliad or something. It's a Greek name. I don't know why they picked such an oddball name because they're pretty straight people.
T: Have you ever tried writing a novel?
PURDY: Yes, I got sixteen thousand words once but it was terrible. I used to write plays, too. Ryerson Press accepted a book and the first play I wrote was produced, so my wife and I moved to Montreal so I could reap the rewards for my genius. She went to work to support me, as any well-behaved wife should. It turned out I had to write a dozen plays before I could get one accepted by the hardboiled CBC producers. She decided if I could get away with not working, she could too. She quit her job, though I advised her against it.
That's when we built the house, which would be in ah... oh hell, '57 or something like that.
T: Were those the good ol' days or the bad ol' days?
PURDY: Oh, the bad old days. We were so broke! We spent all our money buying a pile of used lumber and putting a down payment on this lot. It was very bad for a while. You know how insecure your ego is when you have no money and you're jobless. There's nothing more terrible than walking the streets looking for a job. I'd been so sick of working for somebody else. Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.
I was picking up unemployment insurance for quite a while. When I built the house, I was still getting it in Montreal. I didn't dare move the unemployment insurance to Belleville because they'd give me a job. I used to drive to Montreal every two weeks to pick up the unemployment insurance. I'd drive like hell. Finally I had to get a job. So I decided to hitch-hike to Montreal. It was twenty below zero. I always pick a day like that. I got seventy miles and I couldn't make it any further. I had no gloves and I was freezing to death. Finally I got so disgusted I hitch-hiked back again. Things like that always happen. Born loser.
T: Isn't it possible to perpetuate that "born loser" image yourself?
PURDY: Oh, sure. It's your own attitude. Now I don't figure I'm going to lose hardly anything. But I used to always have that in the back of my mind, that I was going to lose or be defeated.
T: Is a talent for writing something you're born with?
PURDY: I had no talent whatsoever. If you look back at that first book, it's crap. It's a craft and I changed myself. Mind you, there are qualities of the mind which you have to have. I don't know what they are.
Still you look at some precocious little bastard like W. H. Auden -who was one of the closest to genius in this century - and you wonder. My God, there's some beautiful lines, beautiful
poems.
T: How did you come to meet Irving Layton and Milton Acorn?
PURDY: I'd been corresponding with Layton because I'd found a couple of his books and liked them. After I got out of working at a mattress factory, I decided to go to Europe. I went to Layton's place in Montreal and slept on his floor before we caught our boat. I met Dudek through him. I can remember being at this drunken party in Montreal and lying on the floor with Layton, arm-wrestling. Dudek was hovering above us, supercilious and long-nosed, saying, "And these are sensitive poets!'
Milton Acorn had come from Prince Edward Island to sell his carpenter tools. He'd visited Layton. I was writing plays and Layton told Acorn to come around and see me and I'd tell him something about writing plays. I couldn't tell him anything. I couldn't even write them myself.
T: What made you head off to the Cariboo when you got your first Canada Council Fellowship in 1960?
PURDY: I was looking for an excuse to do anything. I only got a thousand bucks so I decided to write a verse play. I'd been stationed at Woodcock during the war, which is about a 150 miles from Prince Rupert. Totem poles, Indians and the whole works. We were building an airstrip.
T: So did you intuitively think the Cariboo would stimulate you? Likewise for your trip to Baffin Island?
PURDY: I thought I was so damn lucky to be able to go up there to Baffin Island. I'm the only writer on the whole damned island! The feeling that nobody'd ever written about it before!
T: Now you've published twenty-five books, fourteen in the seventies alone. Do you consider yourself prolific?
PURDY: I'm not prolific like Layton. I'll publish a small book and there'll maybe be three or four poems which I think are worth including in Being Alive. It's a frightening thing to look backward and see that the earlier books have more poems in the collection than the later ones. T: How closely did you work with Dennis Lee in editing Being Alive?
PURDY: He's a friend of mine. There are about fifteen poems which have been changed a bit because he'd look at a poem and say, "I don't quite understand this" or "I think this could be a little bit better." Picking the poems was a mutual thing. The idea was to be able to read through the sections and be able to go on to a new section easily. The divisions are not so clear cut as in Selected Poems.
It's by far the best book I've ever brought out. It amounts to a 11 collected" but it feels like a gravestone at the end of a road. There's a feeling of where the hell do I go from here? I certainly write less as I grow older. I'm writing very good poems at infrequent intervals. Like "Lament" and "A Handful of Earth."
T: Do you ever force yourself to write?
PURDY: Occasionally. I think a prose writer forces it out like toothpaste, but I prefer not to. Sometimes you've got a thought and you want to explore it. I dunno. The title poem of The Cariboo Horses was written in about half an hour. Another poem, "Postscript," took seven years.
T: Ten years ago you said people who develop a special way of writing, like b.p. Nichol or the Tish-Black Mountain people, were going down a dead end. Yet they're still travelling after a decade.
PURDY: It's still a dead end. They don't have any variety. The Black Mountain people talk in a certain manner in which they make underemphasis a virtue. It's dull writing. It's far duller than conversation. I can't understand how people can write it except kids can write it and think, I too can be a poet. They can ignore a thousand years of writing poems, not read what's come before. There's so much to read, so much to enjoy. That's the reason to read poetry, to enjoy it.
T: Do you have any thoughts on the general characteristics of Canadian literature?
PURDY: The most prominent characteristic of Canadian literature is that it's the only literature about which the interviewer would ask what the characteristics are.
T: I think your best poems are those that cover the eerie meeting place between past and present, such as "Method for Calling Up Ghosts," "Remains of an Indian Village," "Roblin's Mills 1 and 2," "Lament for the Dorsets." Do you believe you have a soul?
PURDY: Well, Voltaire had some thoughts on that. He tried weighing himself before and after death. I don't think he came up with anything. I don't think I do have a soul. But there are areas in bur nature that we don't know about. It's possible that we may find something that we haven't found before and we may use that word that's already invented and call it a soul. We use that word because it's the only word we have. You can feel this, of course, this so-called transmigration of souls. I thought it was a fascinating concept to imagine everybody living to leave lines behind on the street where they've been in "Method for Calling Up Ghosts." What it means is you're walking across the paths of the dead at all times. Every time you cross the St. Lawrence River you're crossing ,Champlain's path.
T: You think a lot about death? PURDY: Quite a bit. T: You were born in 1918. Has feminism affected your life at all?
PURDY: Every time I read my poem "Homemade Beer" it affects me. The audience thinks, "male chauvinist." It's a bawdy, exaggerated poem. Then I can read "The Horseman of Agawa" and it's exactly the opposite. People think you want to be one thing. You're not one thing. You're everything. Of course women have been second-class citizens for years. To gain a position of near equality, which they certainly haven't done yet, they've got to exaggerate. I exaggerate, too. Those remarks about my wife were facetious, of course, but I'm trying to imply with exaggerations that she's a tremendously capable woman.
T: In "The Sculptors'' you enjoy the imperfections of the broken Eskimo carvings and in "Depression in Namu, BC" you write, "beauty bores me without the slight ache of ugliness." There seems to be a streak in your that feels affinity with imperfection, that wants things to be blemished.
PURDY: Don't you ever want to splash muddy water into a sunset? A sunset is so marvellous, how are you going to paint it? How are you going to talk about it? So there is a quality of wishing to muddy up perfection, I agree.
T: You end many of your poems with a dash, as if the poem is not really completed.
PURDY: Yes, a lot of poems are in process, as if things happen after you stop looking at it. A poem is a continual revision, even if you've written it down without changing a single word. I like the thought of revision. When I copy a poem, I often change it. When I've written a poem in longhand, as I always do, I'll type, then I'll scribble it all up with changes. T: What is there in you that needs to commemorate your existence thorough poetry?
PURDY: You have to back to when you started to write. I think most young poets begin to write through sheer ego. Look at me, no hands, Mom. There's always going to be the element of ego, because we can't escape our egos. We don't necessarily want to. But there has to be a time when we can sit down and write and try to say a thing and the ego isn't so important. When you are just trying to tell the truth, you're not trying to write immortal lines that will go reverberating down the centuries. You're saying what you feel and think and what is important to you.
T: Are you at all optimistic about our future?
PURDY: I'm pessimistic about everything the older I get. We're going to wade through garbage. We're going to split up. The Americans are going to take everything, even though they don't need to, of course, because they have it already. The world is going to explode and we'll all be dead. Life is awful.

INTERVIEW WITH ALICE MUNRO
T: Your writing is like the perfect literary equivalent of a documentary movie.
MUNRO: That is the way I see it. That's the way I want it to be.
T: So it's especially alarming when Lives of Girls and Women gets removed from a reading list in an Ontario high school. Essentially all they're objecting to is the truth.
MUNRO: This has been happening in Huron County, where I live. They wanted The Diviners, Of Mice and Men and Catcher in the Rye taken off, too. They succeeded in getting The Diviners taken off. It doesn't particularly bother me about my book because my book is going to be around in the bookstores. But the impulse behind what they are doing bothers me a great deal. There is such a total lack of appreciation of what literature is about! They feel literature is there to teach some great moral lesson. They always see literature as an influence, not as an opener of live. The lessons they want taught are those of fundamentalist Christianity and if literature doesn't do this, it's a harmful influence.
They talk about protecting their children from these books. The whole concept of protecting eighteen-year-old children from sexuality is pretty scary and pretty sad. Nobody's being forced to read these books anyway. The news stories never mention that these books are only options. So they're not just protecting their own children. What they're doing is removing the books from other people's children.
T: Removing your books seems especially absurd because there's so little preaching for any particular morality or politics.
MUNRO: None at all. I couldn't write that way if I tried. I back off my party line, even those with which I have a great deal of sympathy, once it gets hardened and insisted upon. I say to myself that's not true all the time. That's why I couldn't write a straight women's lib book to expose injustices. Everything's so much more complicated than that.
T: Which brings us to why you write. Atwood's theory on Del Jordan in Girls and Women is that she writes as an act of redemption. How much do you think your own writing is a compensation for loss of the past?
MUNRO: Redemption is a pretty strong word. My writing has become a way of dealing with life, hanging onto it by recreation. That's important. But it's also a way of getting on top of experience. We all have life rushing in on us. A writer pretends, by writing about it, to have control Of course a writer actually has no more control than anybody else.
T: Do you think you've chosen the short story form because that requires the most discipline and you come from a very restrictive background?
MUNRO: That's interesting. Nobody has suggested that before. I've never known why I've chosen the short story form. I guess in a short story you impose discipline rather soon. Things don't get away from you. Perhaps I'm afraid of other forms where things just flow out. I have a friend who writes novels. She never touches what she's written on the day she's written it. She could consider it fake to go aback and rework the material. It has to be how the work flows out of her. Something about that makes me very uneasy. I could never do it.
T: You're suspicious of spontaneity?
MUNRO: I suppose so. I'm not afraid spontaneity would betray me because I've done some fairly selfexposing things. But I'm afraid it would be repetitious and boring if I wrote that way. It's as if I must take great care over everything. Instead of splashing the colours of and trusting they will all come together, I have to know the design.
T: Do ideas ever evolve into something too big for a short story?
MUNRO: Yes T: I thought the title story of Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You was a good example of that. It didn't work because you were dealing with the lifetimes of four different characters.
MUNRO: You know I really wanted to write a novel of that story. Then it just sort of boiled down like maple syrup. All I had left was that story. For me it would have been daring to stretch that material out into a full novel. I wouldn't be sure of it. I wouldn't be sure it had the strength. So I don't take that chance.
T: Do you write your stories primarily for magazines now, or for eventual inclusion in a book?
MUNRO: Writing for magazines is a very sideline thing. It's what enables me to survive financially, but it isn't important to me artistically. Right now I'm working on some stories and I might not be able to sell any of them. This has happened to very established writers. Markets are always changing. They say to beginning writers -study the market. That's no use at all. The only thing you can do is write what you want.
T: You once said that the emotional realism of your work is solidly autobiographical. Is that how your stories get started? When something triggers you back to an emotional experience?
MUNRO: Yes. Some incident that might have happened to me or to somebody else. It doesn't matter which. As long as it's getting at some kind of emotional core that I want to investigate. T: Do ever worry that goldmine of your past will dry up?
MUNRO: I never know. I never know. I thought I had used it all up before I started this book. Now I'm writing out of a different period. I'm very interested in my young adulthood.
T: Has there been a lot of correlation between your writing and raising your daughters?
MUNRO: Tremendously. When I was writing Lives of Girls and Women, some of the things in there came from things my daughters did when they were ten or eleven. It's a really crazy age. they used to go to the park and hang down from their knees and scare people, pretending to be monkeys. I saw this wild, ferocious thing in them which gets dampened for most girls with puberty. Now my two older girls are twenty-five and twenty-one and they're making me remember new things. Though they live lives so different from any fife possible to me, there's still similarities.
T: Do you feel a great weight has been lifted now your kids are older?
MUNRO: Yes. I'm definitely freer. But not to be looking after somebody is a strange feeling. All my life I've been doing it. Now I feel enormous guilt that I'm not responsible for anybody.
T: Maybe guilt is the great Canadian theme. Marian Engel wrote Canada is 11 a country that cannot be modern without guilt." And Margaret Laurence said she came from "people who feel guilty at the drop of a hat, for whom virtue only arises from work." Since intellectual work is not regarded by many people as real work, did you face any guilt about wanting to write?
MUNRO: Oh, yes. But it wasn't guilt so much as embarrassment. I was doing something I couldn't explain or justify. Then after a while I got used to being in that position. That's maybe the reason I don't want to go on living in Huron County. I notice when I move out and go to Toronto, I feel like an ordinary person.
T: Do you know where you got your ambition to write?
MUNRO: It was the only thing I ever wanted to do. I just kept on trying. I guess what happens when you're young has a great deal to do with it. Isolation, feelings of power that don't get out in a normal way, and maybe coping with unusual situations ... most writers seem to have backgrounds like that.
T: When the kids play I Spy in your stories, they have a hard time finding colours. Was your upbringing really that bleak?
MUNRO: Fairly. I was a small child in the Depression. What happens at the school in the book you're referring to is true. Nothing is invented.
T: So you really did take a temperance pledge in the seventh grade?
MUNRO: Yes, I did.
T: Sounds pretty bleak to me!
MUNRO: I thought my life was interesting! There was always a great sense of adventure, mainly because there were so many fights. Life was fairly dangerous. I lived in an area like West Hanratty in Who Do You Think You Are?. We lived outside the whole social structure because we didn't live in the town and we didn't live in the country. We lived in this kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived. Those were the people I knew. It was a community of outcasts. I had that feeling about myself.
When I was about twelve, my mother got Parkinson's disease. It's an incurable, slowly deteriorating illness which probably gave me a great sense of fatality. Of things not going well. But I wouldn't say I was unhappy. I didn't belong to any nice middle class so I got to know more types of kids. It didn't seem bleak to me at the time. It seemed full of interest.
T: As Del Jordan says, "For what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every small, pothole, pain-cracked illusion.
MUNRO: That's the getting-everything-down compulsion.
T: Yet your work never reads like it's therapy writing.
MUNRO: No, I don't write just out of problems. I wrote even before I had problerns!
T: I understand you've married again. And that it's quite successful.
MUNRO: It's a very happy relationship. I haven't really dealt much with happy relationships. Writers don't. They tell you about their tragedies. Happiness is a very hard thing to write about. You deal with it more often as a bubble that's about to burst.
T: You have a quote about Rose in Who Do You Think You Are?, "She thought how love removes the world. With your writing you're trying to get in touch with the world as much as possible, so does this mean that love and writing are adversaries?
MUNRO: Wordsworth said, "Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity." You can follow from this that a constant state of emotion would be hostile to the writing state.
T: If you're a writer, that could have some pretty heavy implications.
MUNRO: Very heavy. If you're a writer, probably there's something in you that makes you value your self, your own objectivity, so much that you can't stand to be under the sway of another person. But then some people might say that writing is an escape, too. I think we all make choices about whether we want to spend our lives in emotional states.
T: That's interesting My wife's comment on Who Do You Think You Are? was that your character Rose is never allowed to get anything. She's always unfulfilled. Maybe she's just wary of emotion.
MUNRO: She gets something. She gets herself. She doesn't get the obvious things, the things she thinks she wants. Like in "Mischief," which is about middle-aged infidelity, Rose really doesn't want that love affair. What she does get is a way out of her marriage. She gets a knowledge of herself.
T: But only after a male decides the outcome of the relationship.
MUNRO: I see that as true in relations between men and women. Men seem to have more initiative to decide whether things happen or don't happen. In this specific area women have had a lack of power, although it's slowly changing.
T: When you write, "outrageous writers may bounce from one blessing to another nowadays, bewildered, as permissively raised children are said to be, by excess of approval," I get the feeling you could just as easily substitute the word male for outrageous.
MUNRO: I think it's still possible for men in public to be outrageous in ways that it's not possible for women to be. It still seems to be true that no matter what a man does, there are women who will be in love with him. It's not true the other way round. I think achievement and ability are positively attractive qualities in men that will overcome all kinds of behaviour and looks, but I don't think the same is true for women.
A falling-down-drunk poet may have great power because he has talent. But I don't think men are attracted to women for these reasons. If they are attracted to talent, it has to be combined with the traditionally attractive female qualities. If a woman comes on shouting and drinking and carrying on, she won't be forgiven.
T: Whenever I ask writers about growing older, they not only answer the question, they respond to the question. I suspect you're enjoying getting older, too.
MMUNRO: Yes. Yes. I think it's great. You just stop worrying about a lot of things you used to worry about. You get things in perspective.