For the Love of Words

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I HAD MET Earle Birney during my first year at M&S. He was a tall, spindly, white-bearded figure with a strong resemblance to Don Quixote. I love the Harold Town drawing of Earle for the Purdy book that never happened. Earle was best known for his long narrative poem “David,” a fact that he resented and liked in about equal measure. Poetry was only one of his passions. He had the astonishing ability to speak Old and Middle English. I had battled at university with Sir Gawain and Beowulf, but for Earle they were poetry, as was the unfiltered Chaucer. He was a traveller, a novelist, a teacher, a professor of literature, a mountain climber, a collector of memories and of remarkable women. I had met only three of them—all unusually attractive and accomplished. I knew only two well: Wailan Low, the great love of Earle’s late years, and briefly my mother. Earle had courted my mother in 1969 and 1970, when she was visiting Canada from New Zealand. He even wrote her some fine, rather suggestive poems.

I found a couple of them in a drawer of her memorabilia, where she keeps photographs of her parents and her grandchildren (my children); letters from her father, Vili; miserable letters I wrote her when I was in the Sacred Heart Convent; and a few of my Hungarian poems. There is a particularly fine poem Earle wrote on Galiano Island where he appears to be missing her. There is another one he called “The Moon of Pooh Chi,” celebrating the “melting of ice” and birds that invented special songs for my mother’s benefit. Her nickname, the one that stuck from her early childhood, was Puci, pronounced a bit like Pooh Chi.

She was (thank God) not interested in a serious relationship with Earle. It would have been disastrous.

Earle and Wailan could not have been less similar physically. He was nearing seventy, painfully thin; she was short, cheerful, dark-haired, and more than forty years his junior. They moved into an apartment together on Balliol Avenue, Toronto, in 1973 when Wailan started her legal studies.

Earle’s most tender love poems, such as this, are to or about Wailan.

. . . when warm winds come

she will move

all her body

in a tremble of light . . .

I hired John Newlove at M&S without so much as an interview because he had been recommended by both Earle and Al Purdy. I had read some of John’s poetry, which was great, but had no idea whether he would be a good editor. He turned out to be a fine editor of both poetry and non-fiction, but he descended into rages when he drank too much. He often seemed on the verge of quitting or just erupting in anger and despair at the world. I was never quite sure whether his anger was aimed at the manuscripts sprawled across his desk, his experiences as a labourer or social worker in Western Canada (he fulminated about both), or me for bothering him in his office.

Among his most loathed editorial tasks was dealing with Earle Birney. Earle, if he felt slighted by Jack or M&S’s lack of attention to his manuscripts, and by the scant presence of his books in bookstores he visited, was given to temper tantrums—in writing.

Earle’s most frequent grudge during the years I worked there was “macstew,” as he called us collectively, and, in particular, Jack. They had started sparring as long ago as 1949 when Jack had to convince Earle that army language, absolutely right for the men he too had fought beside, was not going to be possible in print. The censor would not allow him to publish Turvey. In the end, Earle had reluctantly changed words like cocksucker, shit, and fuck.

They used to exchange violent, mutually abusive letters that did not have to pass through the censor. This is one from the M&S Archives: “Dear Jack: Jesus fucking Christ, what in fucking hell are you up to? I haven’t heard a goddamn word from you for six long bloody weeks and I want an explanation . . .”

Jack replied, pretending to be his own secretary, that he was “utterly revolted” by the language.

Earle responded thus: “Dear Jack: I am furious! If I can’t write to my own fucking publisher in any form I wish, then I’ll find a new goddamn publisher. Stuff the whole fucking thing up your ass . . .”

Earle fumed about the terms of his contracts or the delay in receiving them, about the lack of sufficient books at his readings, and about typos in his printed books. All these failings he blamed on Jack’s preoccupation with saving the company—or selling it.

One prevailing rule of the book business, Jack taught me, is that an author will very rarely find his/her book in a store he/she visits and there will never be enough copies at a reading, unless nobody shows up—and that too will be your fault. Another is that no book is published without typos.

Sometime in the seventies Earle got into a legal spat with fellow poet Dorothy Livesay, who had written that his “David” poem had recorded the real death, or possible murder, of a friend. Julian agreed to represent him, but Jack refused to engage in the suit.

On several occasions, after listening to his tirades about my boss, I left Earle and Wailan’s apartment in a fury. Somewhere in the M&S archives at McMaster there is a copy of one of his letters of apology. We had become reasonably good friends by then, and I remained a fan of his writing and of his conversation.

Earle had a lifetime of memories and old resentments to share. His best stories include his travels by freighter in the 1930s; his meetings with Leon Trotsky in Mexico; his partying with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; his disillusion with the Fourth International; his visits with fellow poet and novelist Malcolm Lowry in a British Columbia cabin Lowry shared with his second wife, writer Margerie Bonner; his time as personnel officer in the Canadian Army; and his battles with fellow academics at the University of British Columbia. He had lived an extraordinary life and remembered all of it right up until he was hospitalized in 1994. After Key Porter published Sam Solecki’s Imagining Canadian Literature: The Letters of Jack McClelland in 1998, Sam and I discussed publishing a similar volume of the letters of Earle Birney. I am still sorry I decided not to go ahead with the book. It would be a valuable addition to our literature, but I was worried about the shaky state of the book market.