Thoughts on F.R. Scott

For the last six months I've been reading my way through the Montreal Group of poets who helped bring modernism in poetry to Canada back in the 1920s; the group includes four poets: F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, John Glassco, Leo Kennedy, and A.M. Klein.

            It's a different experience to read someone's individual books than it is to read their collected poems. For instance, F.R. Scott's Events and Signals (1954) softens and humanizes him; perhaps this side of Scott isn't as evident as in his Collected Poems (1981). In fact, the Frank Scott in this earlier book is quite fascinating. "Departure" seems to refer to his separation from his lover P.K. Page in the late 1940s. For Peter Dale Scott his father's poems "A L'Ange Avant Gardien" and "Will to Win" refer to the artist and dancer Francoise Sullivan. We also know that Scott had a romantic relationship with the artist Pegi Nichol, one of his wife's best friends, which perhaps gives us a different perspective on his poem "For Pegi Nichol". Did the affairs have the silent approval of his wife? "Invert" and "Caring" give an insight into these affairs: it is that Scott was always looking for love but also afraid to leave his marriage with someone he also loved.  As we say, "It's complicated."

            I also reread F.R. Scott's The Dance is One (1973). Scott is not a great poet, he's more of a "minor major poet" whose importance lies in what he did (he helped bring modernism in poetry to Canada), who he knew (Leon Edel, A.J.M. Smith, John Glassco), and what he believed (an inclusive federalist vision of Canada). I met Scott once or twice and he was a lovely person. Louis Dudek told me that Scott controlled every aspect of Sandra Djwa's biography, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (1987); I don't think Dudek's comment was a compliment for Scott but part of Dudek's aversion to falsehood in literature. Consider that Scott did not allow certain details about his private life to appear in Djwa's biography. Indeed, Dudek seems to have had a double standard when it came to Scott; Dudek rejected John Glassco's spurious memoir but he never objected to Scott's censorship of Djwa's biography which included his repeated betrayal of his wife in a series of affairs, but perhaps these affairs should remain private.  Should they? Is anything private anymore? What about the children? Where is justice at the individual level?  

            I was also very impressed with Scott's book of translations, St-Denys Garneau & Anne Hebert: Translations/Traductions (1962), and there are more translations in The Dance is One. Both Hebert and Garneau deserve a lot more attention in English Canada. Scott's work as a translator of French Canadian poetry deserves greater acknowledgement and is a part of his literary career.

            The title of The Dance is One is from Scott's poem "Dancing" and is also the inscription on his and his wife's headstone in Mount Royal Cemetery. Another of Scott's poems that deserves greater attention is "Letters From the MacKenzie River, 1956", published in The Dance is One (1973. In this poem Frank Scott refers to, among other things about the North, the residential schools; he is prescient in exposing how bad these institutions actually were, he writes,

                                   

                                    Upstairs on the second story
                                    Seventy little cots
                                    Touching end to end
                                    In a room 30 by 40
                                    Housed the resident boys
                                    In this firetrap mental gaol.

            There are other poems of Frank Scott that deserve to be mentioned, for instance "The Laurentian Shield" which is anthologized and among the best of Scott's writing. Otherwise, I am not a fan of satirical writing so those poems of Scott's hold little interest for me.