On Leo Kennedy

On the right is the Kennedy family home on Rushbrooke Avenue in Verdun where they lived in the 1920s.
They had a private tennis court adjacent to their property. 

On Leo Kennedy

Ken Norris told me that in the 1970s he and a Montreal publisher invited Leo Kennedy to publish a book of poems, it would have been Kennedy's first book since The Shrouding (1933). Kennedy arrived at the meeting with a garbage bag full of poems (not an auspicious beginning!) and the meeting failed to produce a book; it would have been only his second book in forty years. One wonders about this meeting. Did Kennedy sabotage an opportunity to publish a second book so late in life? Was it a way to get out of publishing what may have been inferior work? Did he dislike my friend or the publisher and not want to work with them, then why go to the meeting? Or was there some psychological complex that had held him back from writing new poems or publishing them? Still, despite the dearth of new poems by Kennedy he always insisted that he was a poet, he was not shy about his place in Canadian literature, nor should he have been.

When I heard this story about Kennedy I thought that he was a fool to have passed up on a publishing opportunity; however, I've known other poets like him who had lots of talent but who never fulfilled themselves as poets, they stopped publishing for several decades or never published again after some early success. Am I the only one to think of this as a failing on Kennedy's part? Perhaps I am. During the years after The Shrouding Kennedy didn't publish much original poetry but he did publish book reviews and even some poems in Poetry (Chicago). Patricia Morley in As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy's Story (1994), her biography of Kennedy, mentions that these reviews were perceptive and incisive. As well, Kennedy was also interested in socialist ideas that were at odds with his work in an ad agency as a copywriter for consumer goods. Kennedy was one of the early "Mad Men" as depicted in the television show by that name. It seems that his creative energy went into copy writing.

Perhaps the circumstances of Kennedy's personal life need to be considered. After 1935 Kennedy had to make a living to support his family; he had a second marriage and years later he took care of an invalid wife. Indeed, he had a successful career in copy writing and the family moved several times because of his work. He had three sons—one with his first wife and two with his second wife—and he helped raise two grandchildren which is what brought him back to Montreal in the 1970s. Kennedy was no puer aeternus, the Jungian term that describes a man who does not take on full adult responsibilities like gainful employment, maintaining long term and meaningful relationships, supporting his family, and being a fully functioning adult in society. He lived a responsible life of stability and middle class respectability and was well-liked and respected by his colleagues; however, perhaps (solely as conjecture) this middle class life conspired to end his career as a poet even though others have lived middle class lives such as his and they continued being poets. So what gives?

What gives is that after hearing of the "poems in the garbage bag" episode I saw Kennedy in a new light, as a kind of archetypal trickster, a coyote figure in mythology, someone who punctures the appearance of respectability in others. The anecdotes that Morley recounts of Kennedy shooting squirrels and storing them in his freezer, and other stories, suggests to me that Kennedy had a bit of the joker in him; perhaps even his copy writing career is a job suited to the jester, to someone aiming to sell stuff to people who don't want or don't need the stuff up for sale. This is just to suggest an explanation for some of Kennedy's behaviour and perhaps his work as a poet.

Kennedy is someone who had lots of talent as a poet, he is a formalist in his work, in some poems he is counting syllables, he has an incredible vocabulary in his work, and his images, metaphors and similes can be stunning. There is also something "old fashioned" in his work, I am not sure that he is a truly modern poet except that he was active as a poet in the Modern period; he's some kind of an aberration, a solitary voice that is self-invented. Kennedy has a depth of perception that is sometimes greater than the other Montreal Group of poets from McGill University. But I don't think he felt included among the Westmount poets who dominated English language poetry back in the 1930s. F.R. Scott made some cracks about Kennedy coming from working-class Verdun even though Kennedy had as much talent as FRS as a poet; Kennedy was not truly a working class person, his father owned a successful business located in Old Montreal and their home in Verdun was substantial. It is ironic that Scott is the defender of the working class, one of the founders of the CCF, a precursor of the NDP, and yet he is snobbish with Kennedy. Could Kennedy not have been offended by this, or contemptuous of Scott because of this? A response to Scott and his patrician lifestyle and social class might be to become even more eccentric. This, of course, speaks to the considerable class divisions that English-speaking Montreal experienced in the past; the wealthy lived in Westmount and had little or nothing to do with the English in Verdun, NDG, Griffintown, or elsewhere in the city of Montreal.

It's also curious that in 1926 AJM Smith published a poem entitled "The Shrouding", seven years before Kennedy published his book with this same title. Was there some conflict between them because of this? Small things divide poets! A friend published a poem with the same title as one of my poems and I always wondered what that was all about. BTW, his poem was inferior to mine... But I also published a poem entitled "Heirloom" after reading AM Klein's poem "Heirloom"; with its allusion to Klein my poem was to honour the older poet and it was published years (in the mid-1970s) after Klein's death. Was Kennedy making some kind of a comment, positive or negative, about Smith or the poems that Smith was writing by using Smith's poem title for his book?

I also question some aspects of Patricia Morley's biography of Kennedy; she treats Kennedy in a benign way, but you also get the feeling that she thought of him as her personal pet project, she was writing his biography and she was proud to have him captive. She insinuates herself into his life story and becomes a part of Kennedy's biography. She comments that there is no biography of AJM Smith; Anne Compton's A.J.M. Smith, Canadian Metaphysical  (1994) is not a biography but a discussion of his work. Kennedy has a biography and the biography was a big deal for Leo Kennedy as it would be for any poet. It must have made him more impressive with his family and with other poets, it also returned him to public attention. I doubt we would pay him as much attention as we are (for instance this essay) if the biography hadn't been published, it raised interest in Leo Kennedy, poet. Kennedy was serious about the biography but he must have realised how little he had achieved in poetry; indeed, later he has difficulty collecting any archival material when requested to do so. There are no extensive Leo Kennedy Fonds; he came up with very little archival material.

Now, I'm just thinking about Leo Kennedy and trying to figure him out and maybe he's not a trickster at all. One of the things critic do, one of the things some readers do, is try to figure out some explanation of the writer or the writer's work that he or she is currently reading. Another thing is to build on what we read, to develop some of the ideas we read and make them a part of out own insights into life. We find something curious, or something that appeals to us, or something that deepens our feelings and understanding about life, or we find something that speaks to us as human beings and we need to explore that writer or his or her work for ourselves, to apply it to our own understanding of life. That's what I've tried to do here.

Note: Kennedy may have published a second book in 1972 or 1992, Sunset in the States published by Diane Press; this seems to be a summary of some kind of legislation in Michigan, it is not mentioned in Morley's book on Kennedy. Perhaps it is not Kennedy's work but wrongly attributed to him.

18 January 2018