(1973)
Watching poets’ critical reputations is a lot like watching the stock market. Some poets make slow but steady gains and end up safe but dull, like blue chips. Others are more like shady gold mines: they’re overvalued initially, then plunge to oblivion. More often it’s a combination of the two, with each high period being followed by a low of sneers and dismissals and an ultimate recovery engineered by a later squad of critics who rescue the poet’s reputation, from a safe distance.
This is especially likely to be true of a poet who, like James Reaney, has been associated with a trend, group or movement which has either angered people or gone out of fashion. Judging from a sampling of recent critical commentary on his collected Poems, Reaney’s reputation is in its slump phase; which is a shame. Any poet who has created an original body of work, especially one of such uniqueness, power, peculiarity and, sometimes, unprecedented weirdness as Reaney’s deserves better treatment. A critic might begin by attempting to actually read the poems, as opposed to reading into them various philosophies and literary theories which the poet is assumed to have. If you start this way, with the actual poems, one of your first reactions will almost certainly be that there is nothing else like them.
I’d never before read most of the uncollected single poems —my reading of Reaney had been limited to The Red Heart, A Suit of Nettles, Twelve Letters To a Small Town, and The Dance of Death in London, Ontario (as well as the plays and the short story “The Bully”) so I was most intrigued by sections I, III and V of this volume. I was especially struck by the early appearance of a number of Reaney images which crop up again and again, variously disguised, in his later work. The fascination with maps and diagrams (“Maps,” 1945), the collections of objects (“The Antiquary,” 1946), the sinister females, both mechanical (“Night Train,” 1946) and biological (“Madame Moth,” 1947), and that nightmare, the Orphanage, already present in “Playbox,” 1945 —all foreshadow later and more fully realized appearances.
But what became clear to me during a chronological reading of this book is that most commentators —including Reaney himself, and his editor and critics —are somewhat off-target about the much-discussed influence of Frye on his work. I have long entertained a private vision of Frye reading through Reaney while muttering “What have I wrought?” or “This is not what I meant, at all,” and this collection confirms it. Reaney is to Frye as a Salem, Mass. 17th century tombstone is to an Italian Renaissance angel: Reaney and the tombstone may have been “influenced,” but they are primitives (though later in time) and their models are sophisticates. The influence of Frye, however, was probably a catalyst for Reaney, rather than a new ingredient; let me do a little deductive speculation.
The world presented to us in the early poems, up to and including The Red Heart (1949), does not “work” for the poet on any level. The people in them are bored and trivial, like “Mrs Wentworth,” or they are actual or potential orphans, loveless, lost or disinherited, like the speaker in “Playbox” or the one in “Whither do you wander?”:
… I never find
What I should like to find;
For instance, a father and mother
Who loved me dearly…
Instead I must forever run
Down lanes of leafless trees
Beneath a Chinese-faced sun;
Must forsaken and forlorn go
Unwanted and stepmotherishly haunted
Beneath the moon as white as snow.
The reverse side of the melancholy state of being an orphan—hate for and disgust at the rest of the world and the desire for revenge —is explored in two other orphan poems, “The English Orphan’s Monologue” and “The Orphanage,” but in these the orphans are not touching and wistful children; they are repulsive, “With plain white/And cretinous faces,” or filled with elemental destructiveness. Within a larger social context, the speakers are stifled by their society, like the speaker in “The Canadian,” who longs to escape from a parlour haunted by his “grim Grandfather” and the Fathers of Confederation to “hot lands” and “heathen folks” (a theme treated more succinctly later in “The Upper Canadian”). In these “social” poems, Reaney does not analyze, he dramatizes; and, like a dramatist, he counterpoints. Thus to the smothered longing of the provincial in the “Canadian” poems he opposes the sneering of a cosmopolite who has escaped the Fathers of Confederation, is reading Tristram Shandy and Anais Nin, and who says to the “proletariat”:
Your pinched white and grey faces
Peer in
Like small white tracts held off at a distance.
Well… is it not all very beautiful?
As you stand hungry in the rain
Just look to what heights you too may attain.
(“The Ivory Steeple”)
If this poem had been written by anyone else but Reaney, everyone would have called it savage socialist satire; in fact it’s a good deal more savage and socialist than much that passes by that name.
In these early poems the objects —and the poems bulge with objects —create the effect of a kind of rummage sale, partly because the objects are lacking in all but personal significance:
… my spotted ring
And the wool blanket hemmed in red…
Also the corduroy suit
And the scarf with the purple bars…
(“Playbox”)
The Cup had the outlines of a cup
In a lantern-slide
And it was filled with Congou tea
What did it mean this cup of tea?
(“Faces and the Drama in a Cup of Tea”)
The speaker can rarely make “sense” of them by relating them to anything else; all he can do is record them, and the effect is a still-life, captured and rendered immobile, like the pictures Miss ffrench takes in “Kodak:”
They have their camera.
No one sits in its gloomy parlour
Of pleated walls.
No wind stirs or ghost stalks…
And all my garden stands suddenly imprisoned
Within her pleated den.
In the early poems on “love” —and there are quite a few of them —the love is either unconsummated, as in “Platonic Love,” or it turns into sex, which is as inextricably linked with death as it is in the poetry of Al Purdy. This is sex observed through a child’s eyes, foreign and monstrous. At times Reaney manages a kind of queasy humour, as in “Grand Bend,” which begins:
It is the rutting season
At Grand Bend
And the young men and the women
Explode in each others’ arms
While no chaperones attend.
More often it is simple horror, mixed with revulsion, as in “The Orphanage:”
They that lie pasted together
In ditches by the railroad tracks
And seethe in round-shouldered cars
With the lusty belches of a Canadian spring.
Young men with permanent waves
Crawl over ghastly women
Whose cheeks are fat as buttocks…
“So love does often lead a filthy way to death” one poem ends, and another concludes, “It has always been that lust / Has always rhymed with dust.”
Reaney’s early world, then, is an unredeemed one, populated with orphans and spiritual exiles, littered with couples engaged in joyless, revolting and dangerous copulation, and crammed with objects devoid of significance. In it, babies are doomed as soon as conceived (as in “Dark Lagoon”), the “real world” is the one described at the end of “The School Globe,” filled with “blood, pus, horror, stepmothers and lies,” and the only escape is the temporary and unsatisfactory one of nostalgic daydreaming. If you believed you lived in such a world, you’d surely find the negative overwhelming. Anyone familiar with the techniques of brainwashing knows that all you have to do to convert almost anyone to almost anything is to subject him to a nearly intolerable pressure, then offer him a way out. The intolerable pressures rendered with such verbal richness in the earlier poems are those of the traditional Christian version of this earth, but with Christ (and escape to Heaven) removed; sin with no possibility of redemption, a fallen world with no divine counterpart.
Frye’s literary theories—this is a guess—would surely have offered Reaney his discredited childhood religion in a different, more sophisticated, acceptable form: the Bible might not be literally true, but under the aegis of Frye it could be seen as metaphorically, psychically true. Frye’s “influence,” then, is not a matter of the critic’s hardedged mind cutting out the poet’s soul in its own shapes, like cookie dough: “influence,” then, for good poets, is surely in any case just a matter of taking what you need or, in reality, what you already have.
Frye made a difference (and again I’m guessing) not so much to Reaney’s choice of materials, or even his choice of forms, but to the kinds of resolutions made available to him. Horror remains and evil is still a presence, but a way past the world, the flesh and the devil is now possible. The redemptive agents are all invisible, internal: they are the imagination, the memory, verbal magic (Reaney has several poems about language, and many references to the magic tongue) and —I’m thinking here of the short story “The Bully” —dream. These elements are so important in Reaney’s work because the hideousness of existence can be redeemed by them alone: it is the individual’s inner vision, not the external social order, that must change if anything is to be salvaged.
It is this arrangement of priorities that surely accounts not only for some of Reaney’s themes, but also for some of his characteristic structures, in the plays as well as the poems. The pattern I’m thinking of is that of the sudden conversion —a Protestant rather than a Catholic pattern. If you think of the Divine Comedy with the Purgatorio left out you’ll see what I mean: we get the hellishness of the “earthly” situation and the quick turnabout followed by a transcendent vision, but we are never told how you get to the vision—what process you undergo, what brings it about. No indulgences sold here; it’s Faith, not Works and you just somehow have to “see.” There are several Reaney plays (The Sun and the Moon, The Kildeer) in which the evil witch figure is defeated simply by being perceived as a fraud; but in the lyric poetry, this structure can best be illustrated by that unsettling poem, “The Sparrow.” It’s a poem about grubby lechery in the most unappealing places —the underpass, the episcopal church—symbolized by obscene chalk drawings, and the fourth verse starts like this:
Dirty, diseased, impish, unsettling, rapist
Illegitimate, urban, southless, itching,
Satyromaniac, of butcher string the harpist,
The sparrows and their gods are everything.
Then comes the turn:
I like to hear their lack of tune
On a very cold winter snowy afternoon.
They must be listened to and worshipped each —
The shocking deities: ding dung is sacred
So is filthiness, obscenity…
And the last stanza makes the point: everything, not just beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder:
Christ and Gautama and Emily Brontë were
Born in the midst of angelic whir
In a dripping concrete den under,
Under the alimentary trains: it is we
Who see the angels as brown lechery
And the sacred pair—Venus and Adonis
As automatons coupled as a train is.
And so step down my chalky reader,
Why keep our festival here
In this crotch?
Ding dung chirp chirp:
A sparrow sings if you but have an ear.
In Reaney’s work, the Songs of Innocence come after the Songs of Experience; in fact, you can take a number of figures or images from the earlier poems and follow them through the corpus, watching how the Lost Child gets found (most notably in Night-Blooming Cereus), how the sinister Orphan gets changed into the harmless comic-strip Little Orphan Annie, how the baby doomed from before birth is allowed more latitude (though he can be the Christ Child as parody dwarf, he can also be the real Christ Child or magic baby; see “A Sequence in Four Keys”) and how the collection of random objects is permitted (or perhaps forced) to have universal significance (see, for instance, the pebble, the dewdrop, the piece of string and the straw, in “Gifts”).
The problems I have with Reaney’s work are both theoretical (I can’t see certain pieces of evil, for instance Hitler and the Vietnam war, as angelic visitations or even unreal, no matter how hard I try; and I don’t think that’s a flaw in my vision) and practical—that is, some of the poems work admirably for me and others don’t get off the ground at all. Reaney’s best poems come from a fusion of “personal” and “mythic” or “universal;” when they lean too far towards either side, you get obscurity or straight nostalgia at one end or bloodless abstraction at the other. And at times, reading his work, I feel the stirrings of that old Romantic distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, though I try hard to suppress it; I even hear a voice murmuring “Whimsy,” and it murmurs loudest when I come across a concrete image linked arbitrarily and with violence to a “universal” meaning. If you can see a world in a grain of sand, well, good; but you shouldn’t stick one on just because you think it ought to be there.
But this is a Collected rather than a Selected; it isn’t supposed to be Reaney’s best poems, it’s all of his poems, and I can’t think of any poet who produces uniformly splendid work. It’s by his best, however, that a writer should ultimately be judged; and Reaney’s best has an unmistakable quality, both stylistic and thematic, and a strength that is present only when a poet is touching on something fundamental. Certain of Reaney’s poems do admirably what a number of his others attempt less successfully; they articulate the primitive forms of the human imagination, they flesh out the soul, they dramatize—like Blake’s “Mental Traveller”—the stances of the self in relation to the universe. That sounds fairly heavy; what I mean is that Reaney gets down to the basics—love, hate, terror, joy—and gives them a shape that evokes them for the reader. This is conjuring, it’s magic and spells rather than meditation, description or ruminating; Coleridge rather than Wordsworth, MacEwen rather than Souster. The trouble with being a magic poet is that when you fail, you fail more obviously than the meditative or descriptive poet: the rabbit simply refuses to emerge from the hat. But you take greater risks, and Reaney takes every risk in the bag, including a number of technical ones that few others would even consider attempting.
The physical appearance and presentation of a book such as this is really the least important part of it, but it never hurts a book to look good. Typeface and design —spare and antique, but somehow lush and eccentric—are in harmony with Reaney’s world. The Introduction by Germaine Warkentin, informative about both poet and poems, represents only a small part of her editorial task; the major piece of work must have been the sifting, comparison and selection of the poems, some of which exist in a dismayingly large number of versions.
The most unattractive thing about this collection is its price. The ways of publishers are unfathomable, but I hope someone can convince New Press to bring Reaney’s poems out in paperback soon so that more than a few people will have the chance to read what Reaney actually wrote rather than what he is popularly supposed to have written. The difference, it seems to me, is considerable.