(1959)
The Cruising Auk, like its namesake, is a member of a rare and all-but-extinct species: the book of humorous verse which somehow manages to be also a book of poetry. George Johnston achieves this hybrid result by refusing to take himself, or any of his other subjects, seriously—but by taking the demands of his form and language seriously enough to do them admirable justice.
Mr Johnston’s subjects are delightfully trivial—and almost always small. His universe is a backyard pond —somewhat puddly and muddy, but teeming with lively bits and pieces of life and half-life. The blithe spirits which Mr Johnston calls from this vasty deep include neighbourhood notables like Boom, the pompous sufferer, who knows
what is and what
In spiritual things is not,
and Goom, who sips at Life, but doesn’t know
Whether it’s really good or bad
Its sweetest moments sour so;
Mr Murple, his “underslung long dog,” and his gindrinking mother; a sprinkling of timorous virgins (virginal with a truly Canadian practicality), and several other youngish ladies whose very abandon has a sort of grim determination. There are also poor nervous Edward:
In the short sharp winter twilight
When the beans are in to cook
Edward under the trilight
Reads a detective book;
various other cowed males, and a formidable caste of wormy aunts and assorted old ladies. All, like the “sweetish aunt, Beleek,” are slightly rotten —and their progeny all empathize with Eliot’s Mrs Porter, either in thought or in deed. The bird’s-eye of Mr Johnston’s Auk focuses on more than the worms, however. His children are exuberantly innocent (for instance, Andrew in “Kind Offices”) or painfully tender:
The wind blows, and with a little broom
She sweeps across the cold clumsy sky.
His sketches of the city are lightly done, but with affection and a train-whistle kind of nostalgia:
One hears a sink
And low voices, rustling feet;
Clocks in the town put by the night,
Hour by hour, ticked and right.
He reveals the small well-meaning suburbanite, living life with a quieter than usual desperation:
I’ve got time in my clocks
And beer in my cellar and spiders in my windows;
I can’t spend time nor drink all the beer
And I feel in the spread web the spider’s small eye.
The really remarkable thing about The Cruising Auk is not, however, the subjects themselves, but the author’s treatment of them. The poems are surprisingly simple in form and image. Their ironic and often hilarious effect comes from the aptness of the choice of words and, above all, from the timing. A simple comic-verse rhythm and a punchline sequence tend to become tedious after the first five minutes (as anyone who has read too much Robert W. Service or Rudyard Kipling at a time will know); but Johnston, because he uses his rather exacting forms with a great deal of variety, never bores. Several poems fail in total effect—surely “A Little Light” and “Yeats’ Ghost” are below the usual standard —but they are interesting failures, at least.
Throughout the book, Mr Johnston preserves an objectivity that allows his verses to be humour rather than invective. Even when jabbing a favourite dusty aunt he is amused and amusing rather than spiteful. Like the splendid Auk, he remains detached:
Surely his eye belittles our despair
Our unheroic mornings, afternoons
Disconsolate in the echo-laden air…
The product of his peripatetic musings is a collection poetic enough to delight even the most literate of the literati, and hilarious enough to soothe the most book-shy quarterback to a charming diffidence.