A Tremendous Canada of Light

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

Though he was born in Lachine, Quebec, Bellow moved to the U.S. at the age of nine and I think, for the purposes of this website, he can be considered an American author. The Adventures of Augie March, however, does contain quite a number of references to Canada — enough that one might almost wonder whether, at some subconscious level, Bellow is trying to work out some issue(s) related to the country of his birth.

In any case, we’ll take a look at them.

Smuggling Immigrants Out of Canada

This idea comes up several times in the novel, and while I assume that Bellow’s family entered the United States legally, there is nevertheless an echo of his own history in this portrayal of immigration. The first reference occurs when Five Properties consults with Grandma Lausch about getting married:

Five Properties was keen on getting married. He took the question up with everybody and naturally had been to see Grandma Lausch about it, and she masked herself up as usual and looked considerate and polite while in secret she checked off and collected what she wanted for her file. But also she saw a piece of change in it for her, a matchmaker’s fee. She watched for business opportunities. Once she had masterminded the smuggling of some immigrants from Canada.  (25)

It recurs when Augie meets Joe Gorman, a character he was previously involved with in an aborted robbery attempt. This time Gorman has a new scheme:

“What’s up with you?” I said, for I didn’t want to ask explicitly; it was bad manners. “Do you ever see Sailor Bulba?”
“Not that dumbhead, he’s no good to me. He’s in an organization now, slugger for a union, and it’s all he’s good for. Besides, what I’m in now, I have no use for anybody like that. But I could do something for you if you wanted to earn a fast buck.”
“Is it risky?”
“Nothing like what worried you last time. I don’t go in for that any more myself. It’s not legitimate, what I’m doing, but it’s a lot easier and safer. And what do you think makes the buck so fast?”
“Well, what is it?”
“Running immigrants over the border from Canada, from around Rouse’s Point over to Massena Springs, New York.”
“No,” I said, not having forgotten my conversation with Einhorn. “I can’t do that.”  (174)

In the end, however, Augie does get involved, agreeing to help Gorman with the driving but not the actual immigrant-smuggling:

All this was how I decided, in my outer mind, to go; with the other, the inner, I wanted a change of pressure, and to get out of the city. As for the immigrants, my thought about them was, Hell, why shouldn’t they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There’s enough to go around of everything including hard luck.  (174-75)

The subject appears one more time, briefly, in a conversation between Augie and his wife Stella:

“Oh, Augie! Please, honey, remember that you made mistakes too. You went to smuggle immigrants from Canada. You stole. A lot of people led you astray also.”  (574)

What’s interesting about this particular thread of the novel is that we have often seen Canada portrayed as a place that people want to escape to: a fresh start in Dickens and Basil Bunting, draft dodgers in Lorrie Moore, the Underground Railroad in Chris Kraus, an escape from an American fascist regime in both the Philips, Roth and K. Dick; but it is much more unusual to see Canada portrayed as a place people want to escape from. Here, however, at least according to what Augie says, these immigrants want to get out of Canada and into the U.S., apparently in search of better opportunities that Canada can’t offer them. So this represents an interesting reversal of a common theme.

Canadian Hunting Trips

I don’t want to regurgitate the plot of this novel, which is long and complicated, but just so that the following quotes make sense, I’ll note that the long central section involves Augie and a woman named Thea going to Mexico with an eagle named Caligula, which they are trying to train to catch iguanas (or some other lizard) for some purpose that, to be honest, I no longer recall. This passage is part of the explanation of how Thea and Augie end up together:

Now, when I had called in from South Chicago, Thea had told me she didn’t have much time, she would have to leave soon. And the first few days, as I’ve said, she didn’t speak of it, but eventually the open suitcases brought up the subject and she told me that she had been, and legally still was, married, and she was on her way from Long Island to Mexico to get a divorce. Afraid to hurt my feelings, all she’d say at the outset was that her husband was considerably older than either of us and was very rich. But gradually more came out. He flew a Stinson plane, he had tons of ice dumped in his private lake when it became lukewarm in July, he went on Canadian hunting trips, he wore cufflinks worth fifteen hundred dollars, he sent to Oregon for apples and they cost him forty cents apiece, he cried because he was growing bald so quickly, etcetera.  (340-41)

Here the Canadian hunting trips are clearly meant to be seen as one more element in the life of the leisured rich; beneath that, they carry the suggestion that Canada is a less civilized nation, more of an unspoiled wilderness where rich Americans can go to hunt. This, of course, connects naturally with the idea of the Canadian cottage in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “That Thing Around Your Neck,” and also with the idea of fishing in Canada that has come up in the work of several of Bellow’s rough contemporaries, such as John Cheever and Frederick Exley.

Canada As Metaphor

Canada also appears several times in the book in what I think of as a metaphorical sense; that is to say, the reference isn’t really about Canada, but rather uses Canada to stand in for some other idea.

For example, when Caligula, the eagle they are trying to train, escapes from Thea and Augie, it is described this way:

Thea shrieked at him, “You stinking coward! You crow!” She picked up a stone and flung it at him. Her aim was wide; Caligula only raised his head when it struck above him.
“Stop that, Thea! For the love of God, stop! He’ll tear out your eyes!”
“Let him try to come at me, I’ll kill him with my hands. Let him just come near!” She left her mind with fury, and there was no sense in her eyes. I felt my arms weak, seeing her like this. I tried to keep her from throwing another stone, and when I couldn’t I ran to unstrap the shotgun for use, and also to keep it from her. Again she missed, but this time came close, and Caligula took off. As he rose I thought, Good-by bird! There he goes to Canada or Brazil.  (386)

Here Canada is paired with Brazil, representing the farthest northern point Augie imagines the eagle might fly to, while Brazil represents the southern end of his imagined flight. There is no real idea of Canada here, though, beyond the fact that it is a place far to the north of Mexico.

There are several similar uses of Canada (or places in Canada) to convey other points. This one is part of a description of the typical conversation between Einhorn and his cronies:

Be this as it might, the topic inside the railed space of benches or at the pinochle game in the side-office annex was mostly business — receiverships, amortizations, wills, and practically nothing else. As rigor is the theme of Labrador, breathing of the summits of the Andes, space to the Cornish miner who lies in a seam under the sea.  (77)

The idea here seems to be that certain topics are inevitably associated with certain places. The fact that “rigor is the theme of Labrador” ties into larger ideas about Canada, and Labrador in particular, being a place with a harsh climate, where survival is difficult.

A similar idea comes up in this passage about Augie’s brother Simon:

Such a consideration would never trouble Simon. Whatever the place was, he would make it pay off, the only relation with it that concerned him; it had dollars, as the rock water, as the waste-looking mountain is made to spit its oil or iron, where otherwise human beings would have no wish to go, the barrens, the Newfoundlands, the scaly earths and the Antarctic snow blackened with the smoke of fuel tapped in Texas or Persia.  (248)

Here again, Canada — this time Newfoundland — is portrayed as a harsh place that no one would want to live, except for the fact that it contains natural resources that, through hard work and industry, can be turned into profit for those with the nerve to extract them.

And finally, after Augie’s attempt to help Gorman with the immigrant-smuggling falls apart, Augie hops freight trains to try to make his way back to Chicago:

As the sun went south it was back of us and not on the left hand; we were going north. There was no getting off either. I sat down, legs hanging at the open door, back-broken and dry, hungry furthermore, and my eyes followed the spin of the fields newly laid out for sowing, the oak woods with hard bronze survivor leaves, and a world of great size beyond, of fair clouds and then of abstraction, a tremendous Canada of light.  (183)

The movement at the end of that sentence, from cloud formations to abstraction to light — it could almost be a description of a Turner painting — gives the feeling of Augie watching a vast, shining land of possibility recede out of reach, and seems to give the lie to the aspirations of the immigrants who want to be smuggled out of that world and into the U.S. Is Bellow, whose own family made the journey from Canada to the U.S. when he was a child, looking back, through the eyes of his character, at Canada with regret and seeing in it a brilliant world of unlimited potential? It seems unlikely, given the ostentatious, almost aggressive American-ness of the novel’s famous opening paragraph. But perhaps that is overcompensation, and perhaps here, in this quietly reflective moment, we see his true vision of our country, a vision of opportunities forever closed off and lost.

Surely, along with Paul Muldoon’s “gateless gates of Canada,” one of the more beautiful images of our country that we have come across, if a slightly melancholy one.

 

The Vanishing Business Men of Canada

Marianne Moore, Observations (1925/2016)

This is a re-issue of the 1925 edition of Observations, published after Moore had made minor revisions to the original 1924 edition, but before the drastic revisions she made later (such as cutting “Poetry” (“I too dislike it”) from a couple of pages to three lines). I’m biting my tongue a bit here, on the principle that one doesn’t argue with genius — I’ll just say that I’m happy this book is now easily available in essentially the form that established Moore as one of the foremost voices of modern poetry. (And, while I’m generally pro-epigram, I just don’t like the three-line version of “Poetry” that much. There, I said it.)

Of course the best thing about this book (as you may have guessed by now) is that it mentions Canada. The reference comes in the poem “An Octopus,” which John Ashbery (for whatever you think his opinion’s worth) calls “one of the truly great poems of the twentieth century” on the back cover. The poem is much too long for me to re-type in its entirety, but here are the relevant lines:

No “deliberate wide-eyed wistfulness” is here
among the boulders sunk in ripples and white water
where “when you hear the best wild music of the mountains
it is sure to be a marmot,”
the victim on some slight observatory,
of “a struggle between curiosity and caution,”
inquiring what has scared it:
a stone from the moraine descending in leaps,
another marmot, or the spotted ponies with “glass eyes,”
brought up on frosty grass and flowers
and rapid draughts of ice water.
Instructed none knows how, to climb the mountain,
by “business men who as totemic scenery of Canada,
require for recreation,
three hundred and sixty-five holidays in the year,
these conspicuously spotted little horses are peculiar;
hard to discern among the birch trees, ferns, and lily pads,
avalanche lilies, Indian paintbrushes,
bears’ ears and kittentails,
and miniature cavalcades of chlorophylless fungi
magnified in profile on the mossbeds like moonstones in the water;
the cavalcade of calico competing
with the original American “menagerie of styles”
among the white flowers of the rhododendron surmounting rigid leaves
upon which moisture works its alchemy,
transmuting verdure into onyx.  (88-89)

The quoted passages are annotated in the back of the book; here is the note for the reference to Canada:

“business men”: W.D. Wilcox. “A crowd of the business men of Banff, who usually take about 365 holidays every year, stands around to offer advice.”  (108)

This is a quote from The Rockies of Canada, by W.D. Wilcox, published in 1903, and appears on page 116.

What to make of all this? In her introduction to this edition, Linda Leavell says, “‘An Octopus’ similarly celebrates the biodiversity of Mount Rainier National Park as a model for democracy,” which may offer some hints on interpreting the whole poem, but doesn’t help us much with Canada.

So what can we say? The reference to Canadian business men is obviously drawn from Wilcox, and demonstrates Moore’s technique of weaving fragments from other written works into the fabric of her poems. It’s interesting that she has changed “Banff” to “Canada”; Banff is, of course, in Canada, but maybe she thought readers were less likely to recognize the name of a specific place, and so she changed it to the whole country — which we could argue is symptomatic of a typically American lack of interest in specificity when referring to our country. (In a nutshell, “If it’s not Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver, then it’s just Canada.”)

But how are these business men “totemic scenery of Canada”? And how is that status connected to the fact that they “require” 365 holidays a year? I would think a Mountie might be considered totemic scenery of Canada — Niagara Falls could maybe be called totemic scenery of Canada — perhaps even totem poles could be called totemic scenery of Canada — but business men? And yet Moore seems to feel that these Canadian business men are somehow the quintessential representatives of our country. And what does the joke about being on holiday 365 days a year mean? Are Canadian business men considered lazy? Is the idea that Canada is such an undeveloped country that while we do have business men, they have no actual business to transact, and so are on holiday all year?

Wilcox seems to mean that the Banff business men have nothing better to do than stand around and offer advice, while having no intention of actually doing anything themselves — they are, in short, the most irritating type of onlookers. But in Moore’s poem, the syntax of the whole sentence suggests that the “little horses” are “instructed … to climb the mountain by” these business men, though “none knows how.” This is a much more active role than they seem to play in Wilcox, though it’s not clear (to me) why they would be instructing horses to climb a mountain.

Wait, What Happened?

Fair warning: things only get worse from here.

While I will admit I’m a little baffled by the question of what to make of these Canadian business men, I was, nevertheless, glad to find them in “An Octopus.” Imagine my horror, then, when I consulted Moore’s Complete Poems (Penguin, 1994) and found these lines:

Instructed none knows how, to climb the mountain,
by business men who require for recreation
three hundred and sixty-five holidays in the year….

(Un)Fortunately, my reaction was captured on video:

How could you, Marianne? How could you?

The reference to Canada has gone — and, what’s worse, this version of the poem is Moore’s final revised version, representing her ultimate thoughts on how the poem should appear to posterity. In the end, she decided the whole thing would be just fine — and, dare I say it, perhaps better? — without the reference to Canada. This seems, somehow, typical of the American attitude to Canada — we’re so insignificant that it doesn’t really matter whether we get mentioned or not. I doubt Moore agonized over the removal of the lines — she probably didn’t even stop to consider that she was cutting out the only reference to Canada in all of Observations. Why would she?

I hate to argue against my own interests (who doesn’t?), but it does seem, in this case at least, as though Moore’s later instincts may be correct. As my struggles (above) to untangle the plain prose sense of the lines show, things get a little oblique (not to say opaque) at the point in the poem where the reference to Canada appears; and does it matter that the business men are Canadian? Do we miss the description of them as “totemic scenery”? Is the poem somehow less (for purposes other than those of this website) for lacking the reference to Canada? It’s hard to say that it is; in fact, the lines feel a little cleaner and less cluttered as they are in the Complete Poems.

I’m still not sure how the business men instruct the horses to climb, but then the poem says no one knows, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

Nothing about our proud tradition of lumberjack poetry?

Jared Bland, “Griffin Prize Judge Alice Oswald on Canadian poetry’s humour, modesty,” The Globe and Mail, May 31, 2016

I prefer to focus on books, but this brief article/interview contains a stunning concentration of ideas about Canada held by people from other countries, and also illustrates a key aspect of how we Canadians feel about ourselves — I just couldn’t resist it.

You can read the full article here; the essentials are that British poet Alice Oswald is one of the judges of this year’s Griffin Prize, and Jared Bland (the Globe’s Arts editor) is interviewing her, mainly about her impressions of Canadian poetry. What’s striking about the article is how closely her ideas about Canadian poetry track more general ideas about Canada and Canadians that we have noticed repeatedly here at Wow — Canada!

Before we even begin to consider the content, the fact that this article exists at all speaks to the Canadian character. I hate to get into the ugly habit of quoting myself, but in the interests of economy I will reproduce the first paragraph of the “About” section of this website:

We Canadians judge our country by the opinions of outsiders. Every time a celebrity of any wattage touches down in Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal, some breathless local journalist can be counted on to ask them, “What do you think of Canada?” They say something politely anodyne and we all sigh with relief and go back to admiring their glorious foreignness.

This article perfectly expresses that impulse; confronted with a British poet, come (literally) to judge us, we can’t help but ask that almost pleading question, “What do you think of us?” (It is phrased as “What do you think of Canadian poetry,” but the larger implication is clear.) In fact, Bland’s first three questions are basically three different re-wordings of this same question.

And what does she think of us?

Oswald first mentions Anne Carson and Robert Bringhurst, but seems to set them apart from her idea of Canadian poetry, which is based more on Moosewood Sandhills — a book I haven’t read, but the title strikes me as a two-word compendium of ideas non-Canadians associate with Canada. Based on this book, Oswald describes Canadian poetry as “a quiet discipline — watchful and outdoor”. We’ve noticed the word “quiet” before, and it carries the standard suggestion that we are a humble, unassuming people quite happy not to attract any notice.

“Watchful and outdoor” is interesting, and Oswald restates it when she talks about “a bashful attentiveness to the natural world” in her answer to Bland’s third question. Both “outdoor” and “natural world” express the common view of Canada as a wilderness nation, but Oswald extends this idea, implying that when you live in a country like Canada, where the natural world is so dominant, the work of poetry will naturally (sorry!) focus on observing the elements of nature that surround the poet. (Just by the way, here is my favourite example of this idea of Canada as an untamed wilderness: a gorgeous Sylvia Plath poem that enacts this process of poet observing nature, and then questions how nature might affect the poet in return.)

Oswald also says, with apparent surprise, “Poetry is hard at work out there!” — “out there” meaning, of course, here in Canada. This politely patronizing phrase is typical of a British person speaking of a (former) colonial possession, and suggests Canada is a distant, rugged outpost — the sort of place our colonizers have heard of but never actually been, and certainly not the sort of place where poetry is written (she was “astonished at the quantity and variety” — she doesn’t mention the quality). She goes on to say that it was “particularly good” for her “to come across so much urban Canadian poetry.” Why particularly good? Oswald doesn’t say, but it’s hard not to feel that urban Canadian poetry was unexpected for her because she thinks of Canada as a wilderness rather than an urban nation, and she was happy to have that preconception shattered. (There may be a little self-interest involved here too: if her tasks as a Griffin Prize judge require her actually to come to Canada, I’m sure she’s relieved that we have hotels, and she won’t have to stay in a tent à la Plath and Hughes.)

Finally, we come to the word “modesty,” which echoes “bashful” and seems to be the keynote word in Oswald’s impression of our poetry: it is picked up in the headline, and Oswald herself repeats it several times. Like “quiet,” “modesty” seems a close cousin to “politeness” and repeats a generally accepted idea about the diffidence of Canadians. Regarding the books she read for the Griffin Prize, Oswald noticed “a certain modesty to the Canadian submissions” — “Modesty is a good quality,” she hastens to add, “although….”

Yes, there it is, the “although,” and as soon as we reach that word, the questions begin. Is “modesty” code for “not very ambitious”? Is “not very ambitious” code for “not very good”? And suddenly, looking back over the whole article, we become aware of an undercurrent of ambiguity in all Oswald’s comments on Canadian poetry, as though she is trying to say enough to make us feel like she thinks it’s good, without actually coming right out and saying it’s good.

Am I over-reading? Am I such a typically insecure Canadian that I’m searching for hidden criticism where perhaps there is none? Oswald also identifies “anxiety” as a Canadian characteristic, and the whole article is expressive of that Canadian anxiety about what others think of us — and this entire post is, by extension, a form of meta-anxiety, as it were, an enactment of anxiety about Canadian anxiety.

But I’m tying myself in knots. I think I need to get outdoors and pay some bashful, modest attention to the natural world, all leavened with a soupçon of self-deprecating humour. That will soothe me.

 

The Romance of Canada 2: Ansel Adams Pays Us a Compliment

Ansel Adams, In The Canadian Rockies (2013)

This is from a letter Adams wrote to Virginia Adams while he was photographing the Canadian Rockies in 1928, which is quoted at the very beginning of this book:

These mountains are breathtaking — utterly different than anything we have seen. The peaks and forests and “tone” fulfill almost every ideal I have had of what “my” mountains could be. The cold ice crashes down tremendous cliffs to the very edge of deep, somber forests. No dust is here — all is snow, ice, clean black rock and mossy earth covered with thick green vegetation — all cool and calm and very strong in the primal aspect. These are the great mountains we dream about.

There speaks the true Romantic voice! Just the choice of words shows how Adams had absorbed the Romantic idea of the natural sublime: the forests are deep and somber, the ice crashes down, the cliffs are tremendous, the rocks clean and black, the vegetation thick and green. Here, in essence, is the idea of Canada as an unspoiled wilderness of breathtaking natural beauty, so different from the mountains Adams has seen before, presumably in the U.S., and presumably rendered less impressive by the fact that they had become more travelled than the remote regions of Canada he visited. The word “primal,” at the culmination of that sentence, suggests that in travelling to Canada, Adams feels almost as if he has travelled back into an earlier period of time when nature was still untamed.

And note the use of the word “ideal”. I don’t like to harp on Plato too much — well, actually I kind of do — but this letter seems to lend itself particularly well to a Platonic interpretation. When Adams speaks of the “ideal” he has had of “what [his] mountains could be,” we enter the territory of the Platonic idea of forms: the “ideal” mountain is essentially the “form” of a mountain, the perfect, idealized concept of “mountain” of which all earthly, actual mountains are an imperfect reflection or imitation. And yet in Canada, Adams has found the ideal; it’s as if he has entered the world of Platonic forms and seen in reality the perfect mountains that until now he has only been able to visualize in his imagination.

Canada here is almost a mythic realm, a place so unspoiled and rich in natural beauty that its mountains cease to be earthly objects and become the perfect forms that fill the artist’s dreams.

Further Ambiguity

Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986)

As with Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, one of the poems in Wendy Cope’s collection confronts us with an ambiguously Canadian reference.

The Poem

The Lavatory Attendant

I counted two and seventy stenches
All well defined and several stinks!
–Coleridge

Slumped on a chair, his body is an S
That wants to be a minus sign.

His face is overripe Wensleydale
Going blue at the edges.

In overalls of sacerdotal white
He guards a row of fonts

With lids like eye-patches. Snapped shut
They are castanets. All day he hears

Short-lived Niagaras, the clank
And gurgle of canescent cisterns.

When evening comes he sluices a thin tide
Across sand-coloured lino,

Turns Medusa on her head
And wipes the floor with her.   (49)

The Commentary

The flushing toilets make “short-lived Niagaras,” which to a Canadian will immediately raise thoughts of Niagara Falls (Canadian side). But of course there are also falls on the American side, and it is impossible to say whether Cope is thinking of Canada or the U.S. (a problem that has arisen before). Most likely she is just thinking of the humour inherent in comparing a toilet flush to one of the largest waterfalls in the world, and isn’t thinking about Canadian versus American sides at all — such things concern us, not her.

Since the Canadian falls are the larger and more impressive, however, the comparison is inherently funnier if the Canadian falls are meant, because the contrast is greater. And since Cope herself is a British poet, I feel we can draw on our history as a British colony and claim the reference as a Canadian one.

And while it’s an honour for Canada to be home to (the most impressive part of) a waterfall that is so famous poets from other countries draw on it for comparisons, we might note that Canada is, yet again, known for a natural feature that happens to be within our borders rather than for anything that could really be considered a Canadian accomplishment.

The Commentary on The Commentary

The thought process in the second paragraph above reveals a peculiarly Canadian form of insecurity: we’re convinced that the world in general takes no notice of us, and so when we come across a reference that might be about us, but might not, we’re very keen to convince ourselves that it is about us, because it makes us feel important to be referred to by non-Canadians. Being noticed forms a sort of bulwark against our own feelings of national insignificance.

As for the third paragraph, how typical: go to great lengths to claim a reference is Canadian, and then complain that it’s not complimentary enough.

The Fur-Rich Forests of Canada

William Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (2001)

I sometimes feel that a reference to Canada in a book like this doesn’t really “count,” in the sense that it’s not surprising that a book about the history and circumstances of the French Revolution would mention Canada. In this case, however, there is a certain, possibly suggestive, oddity to the way Doyle’s book treats Canada, and so I’m going to quote it.

This paragraph is about France’s struggle to maintain its prestige in the generations following the death of Louis XIV in 1715:

Rivalry with the British was fought out on the oceans of the world. At stake was dominance of the sources and supply of the tropical and oriental luxuries for which Europe was developing an insatiable appetite. Footholds in India, staging posts to China, fur-rich Canadian forests, tropical islands where sugar and coffee could be produced, access to supplies of slaves to work them: these were the prizes for which the British and French fought almost uninterruptedly throughout the 1740s and 1750s.  (19-20)

We have come across a passing reference to the fur trade before, and the fact that fur was a luxury item that Canada supplied to Europe isn’t really news. And the word “forests” is attached, seemingly automatically, to Canada, reminding us that at the time under discussion Canada was mainly wilderness.

There is an oddity about the passage as well, however, that comes out if you linger over it a bit. What Doyle is really talking about, it seems – or at least his own words when he generalizes the subject matter before listing the specifics – is “tropical and oriental luxuries.” Coffee and sugar are grown in the tropics; the “staging posts” to India and China presumably supply the “oriental” luxuries. But how does Canada fit into this? The “fur-rich Canadian forests” are, obviously, neither “oriental” nor “tropical,” and yet Doyle drops them into the middle of his list without appearing to notice the incongruity.

Now, granted, the book is subtitled “A Very Short Introduction,” and so it’s a bit mean-spirited to criticize the author for not explaining details more fully – particularly in regard to Canada, which, it must be admitted, is extremely tangential to the topic in hand. Still, it’s hard not to feel a bit slighted, as if Doyle’s very carelessness in referring to Canada suggests that he doesn’t think our country is important enough to warrant a category of its own, and so he has simply lumped it into a list of colonial possessions and products even though it doesn’t really fit. (This is in contrast to the French administrations he is writing about, incidentally, which clearly did think their colonial possessions in Canada (among other places) were important and valuable, and struggled to keep them.)

Doyle’s attitude here is consistent with that of other non-Canadian authors, who simply don’t seem to think Canada is worth much conscious attention.

Happy Canada Day.

Gateless Gates and Canadian Intertextuality (Paul Muldoon Part III)

Paul Muldoon, Madoc: A Mystery (1990)

Please note the page numbers refer to the edition of Poems 1968-1998 pictured above.

An Attempt to Provide Some Context

Would anyone be so bold as to claim that they understand Madoc: A Mystery? I certainly won’t. The title is, in this case, perfectly apt: it is a mystery. However, I feel like I ought to attempt to provide at least a rough sketch of the book’s “plot” (for lack of a better term), in order to present the reference to Canada in some sort of context. So here goes.

Madoc: A Mystery contains a few independent short poems at the beginning, but is mostly the long, title poem. It is divided into short sections, each titled with the name of a philosopher in square brackets. I’m not a profound student of philosophy, but it seemed to me that the section titles went in roughly chronological order, i.e. the earliest sections of the poem have the names of the Pre-Socratics as their titles (Pythagoras, Heraclitus), and by the end we’re at least brushing up against the contemporary (Habermas, Kristeva). The title refers to Madoc, a mythical Welsh prince who supposedly journeyed to America in the 1100s and founded some sort of Welsh tribe there. Robert Southey wrote a poem about him called, somewhat predictably, Madoc.

Muldoon’s poem takes, as its jumping-off point, a plan by Coleridge and Southey to leave England for America and form a “pantisocratic” society in Pennsylvania. They never actually made the trip to North America, of course, but Muldoon begins by imagining that they had, and placing them, along with some other characters (including a talking, syphlitic horse named Bucephalus) in America in the late 1700s and early 1800s. As the poem proceeds, it also draws in historical figures who actually were in America at the time, including Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and the explorers Lewis and Clark.

I should make clear that the book is really more concerned with American history than Canadian; to the extent that you can tell where it takes place, it takes place in the U.S., and the other “characters” who appear are mainly American. Canada does, however, make one notable appearance.

The Reference to Canada

I’m going to quote four consecutive sections from the poem, as I feel like they are all part of the reference to Canada.

[MAIMONIDES]

‘And the devil was pleased for it gave him a hint
for improving the prisons of…’

_____

Coleridge stops in his tracks. A Seneca
wearing only a breech-

clout
and a skunk

bonnet and cradling an arquebus
has just stepped out

from behind a beech.
Coleridge is genuinely perplexed.

He unclasps and dabbles
in the portmanteau

for which Southey and he drew lots.
He brandishes John Eliot’s

Algonquin Bible
and quaveringly intones the name of ‘Manitou’.

The Mohawk, as he turns out to be, goads
and bullies

him through the gateless gates
of Canada

and into
the formal gardens and unfathomable fountains

of this, the summer palace
of the Old Man of the Mountains.

[FIBONACCI]

Up a spiral staircase with precisely two hundred and thirty-three
steps, each conjured from the living rock.

[BACON]

Through the hoopless hoop of a black rainbow.

[AQUINAS]

To the room where Thayendanegea, Joseph Brant,
appears to him as in a dream,

his head shaved but for a scalp-lock
adorned with a white

feather, his bearskin
robe, his shirt a calico

print
set off by a solid brass

gorget, his sword-stick with its brass ferrule.
He offers Coleridge tea and scones,

pres-
erves and clotted cream.

He folds his arms: ‘Would
you say you came here of your own free will?’  (225-7)

That gives a sense, anyway, of what the book is like. It will take a wiser head than mine to determine the relationship between the philosophers in the titles and the content of the sections, but I will note three things: Coleridge is described as “perplexed” and the most famous book by Maimonides is the Guide for the Perplexed; the number of steps (233) is a number from the Fibonacci Sequence; and the question of free will is one that was extensively considered by Aquinas (though also by numerous other philosophers). Could it all be that straightforward?

But let’s get to the good stuff – one of the most exquisitely suggestive descriptions of Canada I’ve come across, and all conveyed in so few words:

…the gateless gates
of Canada

I’m torn here; I’ve reached that point one sometimes reaches with poetry where trying to explain why something is beautiful simply drains the beauty from it. This image of Canada as a country separate from the U.S. and yet not clearly marked off as such seems to me to speak quite compellingly about the wilderness our country once was, and the mystery and strangeness it once possessed for Europeans. Of course this idea is immediately undermined by the description of “formal gardens” that follows, and ultimately leads to tea and scones with Joseph Brant.

And what of Brant? Born in what is now Ohio, he is technically an American; however, he fought on the Loyalist side (i.e. for the British) during the American Revolution (a subject that came up recently), and lived the later part of his life and died in Canada, and so has come to be associated with our country as well. I think the tea and scones here must be a nod to (or a mockery of?) the fact that Brant’s lifetyle in Canada was apparently very much that of an English country gentleman – he certainly appears somewhat dandified in this passage. And his question, which ends this sequence, has undeniable resonance for a country of immigrants like Canada, a country that people choose to come to – even if they feel to some extent that they have been pushed to it by circumstances in their homelands, just as Coleridge here is “goaded and bullied” across the border. (One could almost read the sequence as a fable of immigration.)

Wow – Canadian Intertextuality

There’s one more reference to consider, which isn’t directly to Canada, but related to our work here at Wow – Canada!:

[MANDEVILLE]

It moulders now in the double-dusk
of the valise,
along with a copy of Voltaire’s
L’Ingenu;   (230)

The Ingenu involves a Frenchman who was raised in Canada by the Huron and, as we have already noted, contains numerous references to Canada. Muldoon probably mentions it here simply because its subject matter relates to that of Madoc: A Mystery, but for us, this passage represents the exciting first instance of what we might call “Wow – Canada intertextuality”: a book that refers to Canada and also refers to another book that refers to Canada. So a big moment.

In Conclusion

I want to enjoy those two lines one more time:

…the gateless gates
of Canada

 

The Canadian Sun Sets on the Western

Eddie Heywood & Norman Gimbel, “Canadian Sunset” (1956)

It was reading the Sylvia Plath poem “Two Campers in Cloud-Country” that reminded me of the song “Canadian Sunset,” about a couple who escape for a “week-end in Canada, a change of scene.” I first heard (and saw) it on the Lawrence Welk Show when some channel was showing re-runs years ago; I’m pretty sure this is the version I saw:

I’m not in love with the novelty-song aspect of the singer impersonating a trombone, but it’s Lawrence Welk – you have to expect that kind of thing. At least there aren’t any bubbles blowing across the stage.

Unfortunately, she drops out an important verse. We’ll have to go to the Andy Williams version (with a bizarre conclusion) to pick up a key reference:

Here are the relevant lyrics, just for the record:

Cold, cold was the wind
Warm, warm were your lips
Out there on that ski trail
Where your kiss filled me with thrills.

A weekend in Canada,
A change of scene
Was the most I bargained for.
Then I discovered you
And in your eyes
I found a love that I couldn’t ignore.

So essentially, an American couple finds love on the ski trails of Canada, that convenient getaway just a short distance to the north. Of course, it would be on a ski trail – what does Canada have to offer the vacationing American besides access to winter sports?

Not a lot – except a sunset:

Down, down came the sun.
Fast, fast beat my heart.
I knew, when the sun set,
From that day we’d never part.

No doubt the Canadian sunset was much more glorious than anything they could have seen in their urban American homeland. And naturally the Canadian sunset will be forever special to them, because it sealed their love. Sigh.

I think this is the original, “hit” version (it went to #2 on the Billboard chart in 1956!):

It’s difficult to see exactly why this song would have had such a strong appeal to Americans in 1956. It’s an instrumental version, so the lyrics, suggestive of a bucolic escape, can’t have anything to do with it. Was the evocative song title, redolent of slightly foreign romanticism, enough to push it almost all the way to the top? Or was it just a catchy melody? Difficult to tell at this remove.

For those with more sophisticated musical tastes, here’s a version by Wes Montgomery:

Or maybe Gene Ammons is more your style? He’s done it too:

And finally,here’s an interview with Aretha Franklin, where she plays it on the piano but (alas) doesn’t sing it:

It’s interesting that the song was used in a lot of Westerns; it does have a sort of loping rhythm that suggests cowboys cantering over the sagebrush plains, but how odd that a song about falling in love while skiing in Canada should provide the soundtrack to a genre as quintessentially hot, dry and American as the Western.