Al Purdy

Thank you very much for the Woodcock piece.

Yes, a friend has described Purdy's voice as "rumpled suit", and I'm not sure that "At the Quinte Hotel", the only one I've heard him narrate, would put him in a suit!

It is the degree to which he travelled the Canadian north country - and the farm country North of Belleville, the territory of my youth - that are most appealing to me.

Hope he's available in softcover.

I want to explore how a Purdy can stay under the radar of a Canuck for so long - besides the complex explanation from life itself, which the poet mocks by saying (in Quinte) things like:..."and you can see that I am a sensitive man...And I notice that the bartender is a sensitive man too ...so I tell him about his beer.."

The CBC program which brought him to life for me a week ago featured Purdy because of his statue appearing on the lawn at Queen's Park.

Whereas other countries statues to their poets are a dime a dozen, Purdy's is apparently a Canadian first.

It doesn't help to grow up in a culture where poetry and pubs could not be forced any more than he found, "...in the tavern that poems will not really buy beer or flowers...or a goddam thing...and I was sad...for I am a sensitive man"

Hope "Steve" is not successful in his ideological project of burying CBC among the ad-dependent stations of North America.

Would like to compare notes down the road a bit when I have sipped some more of Purdy's work.

Thanks again for George Woodcock. The old B.C.anarchist disappeared quite sometime before Purdy, didn't he?

I'm limited by a dialup service, but hope the horse comes through soon to change that. [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]

More revelations!
THE nationalist historian of Quebec was also a poet.
Wonder if I can find a bit of his poetry (preferably in translation)? A bit would probably go a long way.

I worked in Quebec-Labrador as survey-instrument guy on QNS&L railway , 1959-61, when Duplessis bit the dust up in Schefferville (before Mulroney shut the town down) and change began. The young Montrealers were ecstatic about possibilities for cultural change, and the young south shore guys couldn't wait to bring math and science to their kids' schools. The taxpayer could no longer depend on inflated tax receipts from their priest.

Engineering work was conducted in English then. Should imagine that has changed. [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]

The 1970s take up 140 pages of Beyond Remembering's 600 pages.
Margaret Atwood wasn't so intimidated by him then, she tells us in a foreword. And Purdy was writing things like

The Time of Your Life :
Childhood - when toads and frogs rain down the sky,
and night is velvety as under the skirts
of a goddess, where it's always summer -
In winter water pours from gardenhose,
and turns to ice in town backyards;

There's the barest hint, there, of where Margaret might have had her doubts in that earlier decade?

As for math as an international language...if only that first summer of directing axemen, chainmen and rodmen could have been limited to a universal language.
They were invariably patient with this young guy from that other province, where, after all, the women were
so ...so...English.
They could be condescendingly (and jokingly) superior on this point, while asking very seriously,in the next breath, how much money went to the monarch from the sale of those stamps with the queen's head on them.

God, the tolerance of French Canada in those days.

By the way, just in case my own discussion raises some doubts, I proudly claim feminist tendencies...my wife is honourably mentioned in The Taking of Twenty-Eight.
And you'll pardon me if all this qualification is unnecessary, or even discomfiting. Still finding my way around here, and I pre-date some postmodernist (there's that word again) niceties, like the reign of relativism, and can only aspire to approximate Al's "sensitive" man.

But there is Lampman, Sask., named after the late Archibald, who seems to have moved country folk, at least, to some kind of commemorative effort a hundred years back.

Certainly, Toronto the Good could not have been moved to erect anything so offensive as a tribute to a dead poet in its earlier, church-going phase. Even a gentle one writing in Wordsworthian vein. His aversion to industrial growth would have offended the board of trade.

Archibald's "tourist plaque" looks quite unvisited in the churchyard near his Lake Erie birthplace.

And how do we display veneration of today's poets? Is Al to be the anomaly? Or will Atwood, for instance, stand for something? Or will anyone else?

And is "veneration" a bit rich for the vocabulary today? Another "postmodern" levelling trait on display where nothing may be taken from history for comparison?

[img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]

[ 29 May 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

Just suffered another "Flash" attack , so went offline for a bit to elude the venemous vendors.

Don't know if it would be useful to submit someday...I only have a dialup service so assume it would not be.

Anyway, just wanted to say that the above are samples of Al Purdy's work that attract me to him. I'm afraid it's that old "unsullied wilderness" thing again, identifying with the earth and its smaller, uninhibited inhabitants.

Al, of course, can get pretty uninhibited himself, eh?

Purdy was born two months after the munitions plant explosion just north of Trenton, Ont. in October , 1918. His parents lived nearby, and Purdy begins his autobiography: "The unborn child of Mrs. Eleanor Louisa Purdy rested comfortably inside his mother, in timeless calm and measureless peace - then all hell broke loose."..."The explosions no doubt accounting for any oddity and eccentricity in my character.

Just began reading his memoirs, Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, the other day. Had to wait for interlibrary to bring it in from Oxford County.

It seems some of the best works survive the occasional purgings of library shelves only out there in the "boonies".

Had to wait until they found Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station squirreled away in Orillia. Have since bought a copy.

It's my theory that the small book purchasing budgets of the little rural systems account for preservation. But that's only a theory, leaving aside other reasons, like ideologically inspired suppression. Can't imagine a much-vaunted history of collectivist thought being objected to by your average librarian however, eh? [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]

More about the novel, please.

[ 13 June 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

Everyone says that Purdy's poems weren't up to much in the early days - and there did seem to be a lot of reference to Greek myths then - but he came to speak of Canadian places and events (and often, Margaret Atwood, who seems to have taken him under her wing)and in a totally honest way.
Hemingway fought, but he would not have admitted to poetic impulses and sensitivity to flowers. He did not even admit - anywhere - to being thumped by Morley Callaghan in a private sparring match.

Purdy was a working stiff before the 1960s, and came to us as self-made, which makes his later stuff the real McCoy when he stops trying to tart up his images with Grecian urns.

Leaving his job of five years with Vancouver Bedding :"So there I was, pretending to be a writer, on my way to Europe in 1955. I wasn't at all sure what a writer was, or if I might be one."

He visited Cuba in 1964, and found himself in a touring group with Pierre Trudeau, who said "Don't be naive, Al", when he asked a Cuban official if decision-making was carried out by majority vote.

That's the honesty that makes his stuff notable, and I guess, worthy of a statue.

I have not read his novel, but from your description, expect it would look a lot like Cabbagetown, or the Tin Flute, or others coming out of the 1930s experience. Will have to give it a boo.

I don't read much of Atwood or Laurence either, preferring, say, Rudy Weibe, and Syd Marty (whose Switchbacks is a must). Adventure stuff.

But then, the librarians will tell you, as a huge generalization, women read fiction and the guys read non-fiction. Does our sex further pre-determine our taste?

I read any of it with an eye to trying, first, to understand what makes it distinctively a Canadian truth, and only then what universal truths it holds. And any Canadian artform still seems to depend heavily on experience in nature.

What Canadian work do you think rises above Can Lit, and why?

I hope Al's novel, Splinter in the Heart, was more entertaining,DBG, than his memoirs, for which I can't give a heartfelt recommendation.

His "beloved grandfather" wasn't, really, and seemed more of an intimidating, somewhat frightening figure whose size and probable pugilistic prowess in the lumber camps a century back was emulated on a small scale by Al. If "Splinter" shows up as a bargain on some used books shelf I would peruse it, perhaps, before purchasing.

Had to satisfy curiosity and nationalist's conscience. Your musings on his place in literature (and those of people who experienced him in a school setting) fit just fine.
(30)

[ 25 June 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

Lots of explosions in munitions plants in 1918?

Apparently working with nitrates in those places turned white skin to a shade of yellow. Don't know how long it persisted after leaving that employment.

An aunt of mine worked in a munitions plant in Ajax during the Second World War.

And you have probably seen that Al's widow has put up their old country house in Prince Edward County for sale. Some people want to preserve it for posterity.

Wonder what Al would think of that, as
a "sensitive" man? He certainly described the antics of a lot of wild bird life from his windows there. And there was, no doubt, a lot of wild life inside, from time to time. And it was a retreat for some of his better known friends, apparently.

We all need a temporary retreat, without actually retreating.

[ 16 July 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]