For we are great statements in our days And on the basis of that we can expect small audiences.
GWENDOLYN MACEWEN was born in Toronto in September 1941, during the darkest days of the Second World War. She died, unexpectedly and far too young, in 1987, at the age of forty-five.
Due to family disruptions — her mother was frequently hospitalized for mental illness, her father became an alcoholic — her childhood was stressful; but the conviction that she would be a poet came to her as a saving grace in early adolescence. She began publishing poetry in the well-respected journal The Canadian Forum when she was sixteen, and at the age of eighteen — although warned against such a rash step by more practical heads — she left high school to pursue her vocation.
The late 1950s was not the best time for such a move, especially if you were a woman. In the world of conventional North American popular culture, Doris Day and Betty Crocker ruled supreme and Mom-and-Dad domesticity was the norm; rebellion against the bourgeoisie was embodied by Marlon Brando and his all-boy Wild Ones motorbike gang. The music was rock ‘n’ roll or jazz, heavily male both. “Artist” meant male painter; any woman rash enough to take brush in hand was regarded as a dabbler. The Beat Generation writers had a place for women, true, but only as complaisant helpmeets; they were expected to keep on cookin’ and smilin’ and payin’ the rent, and to keep out of the hair of their genius men. Women artists of any kind, in that still heavily Freudian era, were assumed to have adjustment problems. Man Does, Woman Is, as Robert Graves so dauntingly put it; and if women insisted on doing rather than being, they were likely to end up with their heads in the oven.
For Gwendolyn MacEwen, all of this was compounded you would think by location. Toronto was not exactly a centre of cosmopolitan artistic energy at the time. Montreal was considered to be the cultural heartland, for both English-speaking and French-speaking artists alike, whereas Toronto was thought of as a puritanical provincial backwater, a boring, constipated place where you couldn’t get wine with dinner. Persons of taste sneered at it, even and especially those who lived there. Colonialism lingered on, and it was assumed that first-rate cultural products were imported from abroad — from Europe if you were old-fashioned, from New York if you thought of yourself as the cutting edge.
But for young writers, even young female writers, there were compensations. Cultural trends are never as oppressively homogeneous in the outbacks as they are in the centres, and in Canada there was a generation of woman poets just before MacEwen’s who hadn’t heard yet that they were supposed to just be: Phyllis Webb, Anne Wilkinson, Jay Macpherson, P. K. Page, Margaret Avison. And the writing community was so small, beleaguered, and desirous of reinforcements that it was welcoming to any newcomer with talent, especially such an outstanding talent as MacEwen’s. Oddly enough, this period — so forbidding and desertlike to the casual view — was, for writing, an age of youthful successes. In addition to Leonard Cohen it produced Daryl Hine, who published his first major collection when he was under twenty; James Reaney, the boy wonder from Stratford; Marie-Claire Blais, the girl wonder from Quebec; Jay Macpherson, who won the country’s foremost literary award when she was twenty-seven; Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol, Joe Rosenblatt, bill bissett — all early publishers; and many others. So although Gwendolyn MacEwen started publishing very early, she wasn’t alone.
Nor was it unusual for her to begin with poetry. Like many of her contemporaries, she eventually produced several novels and collections of short stories, and during the course of her career she also produced radio plays, translations for the theatre, and travel writing; but the poetry appeared first. Indeed, for most of the 1960s poetry was the predominant literary form in Canada: the few existing publishers were reluctant to take chances with new novelists, as novels were expensive to produce and were thought to have a severely limited audience inside Canada and none whatsoever outside it. But poems could be published as broadsheets, or in one of the five or six “little” magazines then extant, or by very small, frequently self-operated presses; or they could be broadcast on the radio — notably on the CBC’s pivotal program Anthology. Or they could be read aloud.
I first met Gwendolyn MacEwen in the fall of 1960, at The Bohemian Embassy, a coffee house — it was, by then, the age of coffee houses — that featured jazz and folksinging, and, on Thursday nights, poetry readings. The Embassy had the décor of its period — the checked tablecloths, the candles in the Chianti bottles; it was also a smoke-filled firetrap. But it was mecca to the poetry community, and MacEwen, who must have been nineteen then, was already a regular reader there. She was a slight-figured, doe-eyed person with long dark hair, who read in an accomplished, sultry, caressing voice that owed, perhaps, a little to Lauren Bacall. The combination of the childlike appearance, the rich voice, and the poetic authority were compelling — you came away from a MacEwen reading feeling you’d been let in on a unique and delicious secret.
MacEwen’s primary interest as a poet was in language and in its corollary, mythmaking. In this she was not alone: the late 1950s and the early 1960s comprised a sort of minor Age of Myth, though there were, of course, other influences around. Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism held critical centre stage, with Marshall McLuhan and his structural analysis of popular culture moving up strongly. Leonard Cohen’s first volume was called Let Us Compare Mythologies; James Reaney’s magazine Alphabet was entirely devoted to the “mythopoeic” approach, or to correspondences between “real life” and “story”; and Canadian poets were endlessly telling each other that what they really needed to do was to create an “indigenous mythology.” In this context, MacEwen’s interest in what we might call a mythic structuring of reality — or the structuring of a mythic reality, in opposition to the disappointing world of mundane experience she often refers to as “Kanada” — seems less bizarre. True, no one else settled on Ancient Egypt and the Middle East with quite the same intensity as she does, but her imaginative otherworld is not limited to one time or place. In general — and especially in her earlier poetry — she opposes the works of children, magicians, adventurers, escape artists, the hierarchical and splendid past, the divinely mad, the “barbaric,” and poetry, to that of grown-ups, materialists, bureaucrats, the modern daily grind, stolid sanity, the “tame,” and newspaper prose.
One of the paradoxes of MacEwen’s work is that the protagonists she chooses — in Yeatsian terms, the personae — are almost invariably male. She speaks in a female voice when addressing, as the lyric “I,” a male “You,” but when she uses a more dramatic form, or writes a poem about a heroic figure, the central character is usually a man, such as the escape artist Manzini, or Sir John Franklin, or — in a later, major work — Lawrence of Arabia. When female figures from history or story do appear as speakers, they are likely to be exceptions to their sex; Egyptian princesses, not ordinary Egyptian women; H. Rider Haggard’s She, with her supernatural powers.
But this is not really surprising. The roles available to women at the time lacked energy; and if what interested you was magic, risk, and exploration, rather than, say, quiet contemplation in the garden between meals, the choice of a male voice was almost inevitable. MacEwen wanted to be out on the sharp edge with the boys, not back in the kitchen with the girls; she was entranced with cosmic predicaments, and the time for female astronauts had not yet come. She might have analyzed the female condition and then tapped the resulting anger, like Sylvia Plath; but then she would have been a very different kind of poet. Power — including the dark side of power — was much more interesting to her than powerlessness. Even in the love poems, in which she repeatedly invokes and extols what appears to be a transcendent male figure — a kind of male muse — it’s evident who is doing the invoking; and invoking is after all a kind of conjuring, with success dependent on the expertise and verbal skill of the conjuror. What engaged her was not complaint but exuberance, not descent but ascent: not the fire, but the rising fire.
The first volume of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s selected poems covers the first fifteen years of her poetic career, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It traces the bright trajectory of her early verse, followed by the astonishingly rapid development and exfoliation of her talent. In these poems her range and craft, her poetic strength and intelligence, speak for themselves. Over these years she created, in a remarkably short time, a complete and diverse poetic universe and a powerful and unique voice, by turns playful, extravagant, melancholy, daring, and profound. To read her remains what it has always been: an exacting but delightful pleasure, though not one without its challenges and shadows.
Deal, infidel, the night is indeed difficult.