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.
