The exact curve of the thing
Post #11: Alden Nowlan, Paul Gilbert, John Thompson
Alden Nowlan. Poet: Encircled by our tidy 1960s Fredericton suburb lay a fallow remnant of the hilltop farmstead upon whose spread our parents’ homes were built. That Loyalist-era acreage, by then reduced to a single scrubby field, would soon be bulldozed. The pertly pretty twin sisters residing in its weather-beaten shingled farmhouse were shunned at school, their older brother a victim of outright harassment.
Why? Simple white ‘settlers’ they were, yet as different as could be insofar as local kids were concerned.
Enduring ‘narcissism of minor difference’, in this case mere architectural variation placed them on the hither side of a gaping social divide. Rather than occupying a ‘modern’ cloned suburban home, this family—as understood within the sovereign jurisdiction of children’s law—subsisted in backward ‘pioneer’ circumstances. Whispers of bedpans at night, unsanitary conditions, contagious germs. None of it true, but that didn’t stem the opprobrium.
Ever smiling, those twins rose above calumny even as their older brother slunk away on his own. Other than friendliness I took no action. Certainly, I had no critical distance on the ersatz modernism of this expanding suburban frontier; how it constituted its ‘other’ by ascribing ‘anti-modernism’ to the family occupying their rickety house. Not just impoverished but overdue to be superseded, their ‘hillbilly’ presence an abomination.
There’s no glint of redemption in this. Duly that dwelling was ploughed under, development proceeded. Those kids moved away.
Moreover, here memory lies at odds with contemporary certainties about ‘lessening’ (to adopt Daniel Heller-Roazen’s supple term). For I recall no similar prejudice towards the African-Canadian family living on the street behind us, nor towards Jewish families in the neighbourhood—at least, not among the children. No racist reflex towards Wolastoqew counterparts living twenty minutes away; no hostility like that inflicted on the youths of that offending farmhouse.
The surrounding adult world, the poets assure us, did harbour more catholic antipathies. Fred Cogswell’s Ode to Fredericton records: “O snow-washed city of cold, white Christians/So white you will not cut a black man's hair.” Alden Nowlan, close observer of Maritime ostracisms and residual colonial airs, inked our city’s river with “the colour of a bayonet.” Decades later, Kwame Dawes found it home to “stolid icicles.”
I tagged along with friend Neil, a few years older, would-be poet, to the modest post-war ‘victory home’ that Nowlan rented from the University as part of his extended writer’s residency. Opening the front door, the weighty bearded one in overalls seemed outsized for that modest house (itself exactly the transition from ‘pioneer’ to ‘modern’ in our makeshift architectural lexicon). Grunting, snuffling, he grasped the envelope with Neil’s poems, peering through thick-rimmed glasses. Likely we sat in his living room; I’ve not noted it.
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He’d accumulated valid pioneer knowledge; Alden could locate the three spring-water sources on the Nashwaak Road. In ‘Trip up the Nashwaak’, a draft poem distributed for free at the 1979 Toronto Book Fair, he wrote: In time each of us/become mother or father/to the child we once were.
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Nowlan confounded his patron Desmond Pacey, head of the English faculty, with demotic verse oblivious to New Criticism, closely attuned to local idioms. In the mid-seventies I’d see Alden in the Playhouse Green Room with artistic director Walter Learning mooting murder-mystery playscripts. It was Desmond’s son Peter who gathered Alice Hamilton and me to draw from Alden’s poems to create the revue “Duffy’s Hotel.”
In Nowlan’s The Bull Moose, rural New Brunswickers witness the final hours of a majestic dying moose. Performing Duffy’s Hotel on the Miramichi, craggy-faced Peter lowered his voice and imparted gravely: The oldest man in the parish remembered seeing/
a gelded moose yoked with an ox for ploughing
An elderly man—perhaps the oldest of this parish—nodded, whispering, “Yep, that’s what she was like back then.” Others on the benches the Woodsman’s Museum in Boiestown shed tears when the scaffolded king rose to bellow one last time/young men leaned on their car horns. (2005, Ottawa.)
Paul Gilbert. Marketing Guru. We set off towards the former home and gravesite of poet John Thompson. A grey day, unlike yesterday’s splendid beach weather in Shediac. Exploring Fort Beausejour we exulted in its panorama of undulating grasses. Epicentre of Acadia’s colonial struggle against English domination, the star-shaped military citadel has a ceremonial feel, as if the elevated site could be of earlier indigenous significance.
Onwards to New Brunswick’s frontier with Nova Scotia, to tiny Jolicure where scarcely a few farmhouses flank the marshes along a low ridge. It has further withered since our last visit fifteen years ago—the exception being photographer Thaddeus Holownia’s substantial white metal house/studio. We’d found the graveyard last time but couldn’t identify Thompson’s plot.
On this visit, brush-clearing along one side of the burial ground had exposed an additional marker, a rough granite flagstone with Thompson’s name and dates (1938-76) etched on its face, surrounded by natural fractures like knife cuts.
A patch of pink wild flowers had sprouted at the foot of a striking dead tree with upstretched branches; I pressed one blossom in my sketchbook.
What offering to leave? We settled on a tide-smoothed sandstone taken from the shore at Bourgeois the day before. (Like a storm of Antiquity, a northerly blowing in out of nowhere had raised steep foaming waves on the eerily glassy ocean where I’d just swam.) This stone, like a blunted knife, grasped easily in the palm. Appropriately Thompson-esque.
With this, we completed a quest begun in winter 2002 while living in Fredericton. During a stay in Sackville Léa dreamt of a long-haired man lifting a stone, emerging from the earth with light projecting upwards on his face. The next night, after the Arts Board meeting, snowed in by a blizzard, Paul Gilbert kindly hosted us.
A high-octane advertising executive, Paul’s rambling comfortable house in Sackville was abuzz with children and friends. Hearing Léa’s dream, he said in his matter-of-fact way: “Oh, that was John Thompson.”
He told us of a stone recently placed on his grave a couple of miles away on the Tantramar near Jolicure. But that summer we failed to find it. (Ottawa, 19 September 2017.)
John Thompson. Poet. The fate of John Thompson, so tied to High Marsh Road in Jolicure, New Brunswick, so tied to 1973, according to biographer Peter Sanger, and to the number 37.
Sanger’s edited volume, Working in the Dark (2014), assembled seven living poets to palimpsest additional words over Thompson’s feral rhubarb patch, along with Tantramar landscapes photographed by Thaddeus Holownia.
While laudably greening Thompson’s memory, these verses and images also give a sense of ‘over-writing’ the English-born poet’s rural Canadian topos; a light re-burial with a few fresh insights strewn through Sanger’s introduction. For one thing, I learn that Jolicure’s poet never met its photographer. His neighbour, Holownia, who initiated this friends’ book of poems, arrived on High Marsh Road only after the poet’s demise.
“They share,” Sanger explains, “an intensive and extensive engagement with its landscape, its plants, trees, animals, birds, building, skyscapes, with its light and darkness.”
Acquiring the late-eighteenth-century farmhouse on that gravel road in Fall 1973, “Thompson was delighted and imaginatively moved to find a leather shoe when he tore out a wall, realizing he had stumbled across an archaic (and sacrificial) building custom.” It was here that he wrote most of Stilt Jack. Its second ghazal ventured cautiously that in this place we might be happy.
Might he better have left that shoe in the wall?
In sending the typescript to colleague Douglas Lochhead in 1975, Thompson wrote: “I hope to have 37 (my age) or 38 (my age in Spring) for the book.” Sanger detects in the poet’s attitude the idea that “life and art...shared an identical numerological pattern.” As such, he finds a poet concerned with “preservation” not “chaos,” and certainly “not the random anarchy...ascribed by...his admirers and detractors.” He defends Thompson’s spare edgy verse as “redemptive, not self-destructive.”
That said, he chronicles the poet’s destruction. The drive ‘down the road’ in Fall 1974 to Toronto’s House of Anansi with his lover, publisher Shirley Gibson, more or less coincided with a local fire-starter’s annihilation of the Jolicure house, incinerating Thompson’s writings and library.
Ghazal XXXVII, second-last in the sequence, written a year before that blaze, glows uncannily: Now you have burned your books, you’ll go with nothing. Sanger shudders at this: “Thompson would be 37 in five months...had written his thirty-seventh ghazal a year before [with] strange prescience...of his own disaster by fire.” Returned to Sackville, living in an apartment and lecturing, the poet would perish alone in 1976 in ruined health one month after turning thirty-eight.
So much is packed into those final two ghazals—his last published words. A premonition of fire, yes, but also of his spectral presence in Jolicure.
I wonder if that what it all was for, in the end?
I’ll learn by going..., Thompson wrote. Ghazal thirty-seven’s final couplet stands out on a page where every word is a sinker on a line. Could it be that his grand joke, as he says, his mot juste, is that by going he finally meant to stay?
Out of the folly of tongues, too many stories, high talk.... Narrowing on poetry’s core vocation, he insists on the exact curve of the thing.... the very last words following, in thirty-eight: I’m still here like the sky/and the stove.
. . .
Is it his restless absent presence on High Marsh Road that occasioned an ongoing need for its over-writing?
Even in 1975 the cover design for Stilt Jack glossed the knife-edge poetry with emphasis on its ghazal form. In one sense Anansi’s medieval jacket image worked: the nude bearded man cradled in the lower jaw of a giant fish or whale reaches towards an angelic figure proffering a garment. Cleverly, Thompson’s traits and motifs are keyed to classical Persian poetry. Yet, it seems altogether wrong. To foreground the ghazal, only partially hewed to by Thompson, obscures High Marsh Road in Jolicure, so vitally the place of this bristling marshland verse that dilated into a folk tragedy.
Holownia’s eventual acquisition of the burnt homestead, brambled and weed-ridden, completed the overwriting of the land.
Here the theme of literary and artistic successors inhabiting predecessors’ domains achieved an apotheosis. Think of Mackenzie King living and séancing in Laurier’s house, of Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky writing in the master’s study at Tilton, or Benedetto Croce purchasing Vico’s villa. There must be many such examples.
Holownia’s cool white modern studio built on the site of Thompson’s burnt writings has overlaid the remaining traces of the fire with the confident footprint of an artist who ‘has it together’.
All I can think of—given startling summoning apparition in Léa’s 2002 dream in Sackville, so purposefully guiding us (eventually) to Thompson’s gravestone—all I can think of is that Holownia’s decisive build must have been crucial to staying on that austere ridge overlooking the Tantramar. (August 2019, Ottawa.)