The Home Place: Essays on Robert Kroetsch's Poetry [1 ed.] 9781772121483, 9781772121193

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The Home Place

dennis cooley

The Home Place  Essays on Robert Kroetsch’s Poetry

1

The University of Alberta Press

Published by The University of Alberta Press Ring House 2 Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1 www.uap.ualberta.ca Copyright © 2016 dennis cooley

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cooley, Dennis, 1944–, author The home place : essays on Robert Kroetsch’s poetry / Dennis Cooley. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-77212-119-3 (paperback).— ISBN 978-1-77212-148-3 (pdf) 1. Kroetsch, Robert, 1927-2011--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Canadian poetry (English)--20th century--History and criticism. I. Title. PS8521.R7Z54 2016 C811’.54

C2016-900137-7 C2016-900138-5

First edition, first printing, 2016. First electronic edition, 2016. Copyediting and proofreading by Joanne Muzak. Indexing by Stephen Ullstrom. Book design by Marvin Harder. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written consent. Contact the University of Alberta Press for further details. The University of Alberta Press supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with the copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing University of Alberta Press to continue to publish books for every reader. The University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.



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the home place: N.E. 17-42-16-W4th Meridian. the home place: one and a half miles west of Heisler, Alberta, on the correction line road and three miles south No trees around the house. Only the wind. Only the January snow. Only the summer sun. The home place: a terrible symmetry. —Robert Kroetsch, “Seed Catalogue,” Completed Field Notes 30–31

home again home again riggety jig

in memory of Robert Kroetsch

Contents

Acknowledgements  xi one Getting There  1 The Long Road Home two Or So It Has Been Alleged  49 The Ledger three

Hearing Voices  87 Seed Catalogue

four

What It Was  151 Seed Catalogue



five It’s a Lover’s Question  199 Staging Romance in The Sad Phoenician

six Noted & Quoted  253 Kroetsch in Conversation and at the Podium

Notes  303 Bibliography  335 Permissions  349 Index  351

Acknowledgements

With thanks to: Peter Midgley for first conceiving of this collection, championing it, and seeing it through its major stages at the University of Alberta Press; the score of librarians, above all Apollonia Steele, compiler and keeper of the Robert Kroetsch fonds, who helped me through the rich Robert Kroetsch archives at the University of Calgary library; the legions of Kroetsch readers; the two reviewers who heroically read for the Press what was a larger and less finished manuscript; Duncan Turner who saw to the complexities of permissions; Marvin Harder for the inspired design; Joanne Muzak who painstakingly saved me from many errors; Mary Lou Roy for her always reliable help; Monika Igali and Cathie Crooks for cheery support; Linda Cameron for her focus and foresight; and, always, Diane Cooley for her constant help. No doubt, despite their best efforts, I have managed to make a few mistakes that eluded even them.

xi

one

Getting There The Long Road Home

“Where are you from?” the woman asked in the bar in a town north of Ottawa, watching the guy with the grey hair try to jitterbug. “Alberta,” I said. What do I mean by that answer? Why do I give that answer, having lived in a dozen places since growing up in Alberta, since leaving there when I was twenty, since leaving again when I was twenty-seven? In a province where so many people are from somewhere else, I am, when somewhere asks, always from Alberta. —Robert Kroetsch, “Dancing with the Time Machine” 297

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We are forever looking for home. I go back I get there and it has been altered in just a little way The wheel is no longer on the mill and I am there but still I am not quite there— —Robert Kroetsch in Carl Bessai, The Impossible Home: Robert Kroetsch and His German Roots

I

The story I tell picks up with Robert Kroetsch in his last years at the State University of New York in Binghamton from the early to mid-1970s. He has been there (what in his first years was called Harpur College) since the fall of 1961 when, at thirty-four years of age, he arrived as a newly minted professor from the University of Iowa. He had just finished his PhD, his dissertation a novel called Coulee Hill. From the beginning of his writing career in the States, there are words of being cast adrift, as a working title for a novel in 1961, When Sick for Home, and as the title to his first novel, But We Are Exiles, would attest. He had thought he would spend a couple of years at Binghamton before moving on. Kroetsch did a lot of moving on. He spent a lifetime feeling restless,1 being what his mother had called a fidgeter.2 For the most part, he felt stimulated by his work and environment, so that it was “in that unbecoming city” that he “finally became the writer that” he “had desired to become.” It was there also that he “seriously” became a poet, a condition that he playfully attributes to his perpetual unrest: “I became a poet in my mid-thirties, at a time when the lyric impulse is supposed to be spent and prose fiction setting in—like some version of arthritis” (MsC. 775/04.25 30.7). After a few years in Binghamton he had begun to chafe with his situation in the English Department and to an extent with the work he was doing as an editor at boundary 2.3 He felt increasingly put out by administrative chores, professional slights, and bureaucratic impediments.4 He was also being drawn back to Canada and to his original home on the prairies, in the parklands around Heisler, Alberta. “Towards an Essay” records his increasing longing for “home” (Lovely Treachery 133–50). 2

the home place

The sense of a lost or usurped home surfaces for Kroetsch at least as early as the days when he was serving as information and education officer at the United States air base in Goose Bay, Labrador. On “18 dec 52,” well into his stint in the North (1948–54), prompted by a desire to reattach himself to his homeland, he seeks membership in the “RCAF Officers’ Mess”: “mostly I would like to join because, to me, a visit to the RCAF Officers’ Mess is a visit to Canada and a visit with Canadians. And to those of us who are seemingly exiles within our own country, this is very important” (MsC. 775/04.25 7.9). He was “leaning toward” home, Eli Mandel might have said, he for whom the writer is a compass needle deflecting toward the first home. Mandel’s luminous essay, “Writing West: On the Road to Wood Mountain,” had in 1977 spoken to that condition: it is not place but attitude, state of mind, that defines the western writer—and that state of mind, I want to suggest has a good deal to do with a tension between place and culture…that makes the writer a man not so much in place, as out of place and so endlessly trying to get back, to find his way home, to return, to write himself into existence, writing west. (69) Mandel’s musings came at a time when Kroetsch, friend and colleague, was himself in midst of a final return to the prairies. Kroetsch’s departure from Binghamton comes in several stages. Well into the 1970s he is a frequent visitor to Canada, especially Alberta, where he does the research for his Alberta (1968), which was part of “The Traveller’s Canada” series with Macmillan. Writing west, he finds, is not an easy thing for him. He admits the difficulties to Dorothy Livesay on May 27, 1969. He is surprised when reading proofs of The Studhorse Man: “I’m shocked by the pain in that story.…Home hurts us. Hurts us home” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.60). In all that time he returns to family and friends, and to an increasing number of writers, reviewers, publishers, and academics. He writes to Dick Harrison on January 23, 1974, to report that he is looking forward to spending “two glorious weeks teaching at the Saskatchewan Summer School near Regina. Want to immerse myself in the language of the prairies, want to work with students who come off those prairies, want to feel that goddamned sky over me again, the wind on my neck. That promise keeps me sane.” The first public sign of return comes in the fall of 1975 when Kroetsch leaves for the University of Calgary to be writer-in-residence, before moving on to the

Getting There

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same position at the University of Lethbridge in the new year. In 1976–77 he becomes writer-in-residence at University of Manitoba. During these years, the summers of 1974, 1975, 1976, and 1977, he is dynamically involved in the Fort San writing retreats held in the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan, where he feels enormously alive and at home. He returns to Binghamton for 1977–78, before moving back as professor of English at the University of Manitoba. That appointment marks his full return to Canada. He basically remains at Manitoba for almost three decades. Later in retrospection Kroetsch reveals how tentatively he felt his way into that return: Well, the process of my coming back to Canada was a very slow one. First I came back as a writer-in-residence for one year; then I stayed another year; then I went back to the States for a year; then I moved to Canada. It’s hard to say when I really understood that I had done it. My movement had been outward a lot before that. (Miki, “Self on Self” 141) Kroetsch took back with him to the prairies the effects of his profoundly stimulating life in the northeast. The place teemed with a long tradition of intellectual commotion in universities and bookstores and theatres and art galleries and pubs. Kroetsch’s association with the brilliant and iconoclastic William Spanos, collaborator and co-editor of the postmodern journal boundary 2, was undoubtedly the most important single influence on him. That relationship brought Kroetsch face-first to new theory as it was exploding into North America. Kroetsch had always been an avid and curious reader, but Spanos shouldered him into current theory, especially Spanos’s version of Heidegger.5 And it was Kroetsch who, in Spanos’s estimation, nudged Spanos out of the “high seriousness of the Arnoldian tradition,” with its deep suspicion of humour and misadventure. Years later, Spanos recalled his initial wariness over what Kroetsch seemed to represent: I was intensely intellectual, abstract, theoretical, existentially engaged in the social and political issues of that tumultuous time, whereas Robert seemed to me to be body-oriented, metaphorical, elusive. I guess the word I would use to characterize his whole frame of reference is play, the kind of open-ended sense of play that seemed indifferent to the gravity of that tumultuous time. At first, that playfulness put me off because I didn’t 4

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really understand what it was, and so I kind of kept my distance from him...Eventually, I came to realize that his maddeningly elusive presence, outside my sphere, was haunting my frame of reference and influencing my sense of my own identity as a thinker. (McCance and Kroetsch 6) The times seemed wide open to a high-octane scorching of the academy and the collision ignited both of them. They were years also when Kroetsch read as revelations scores of European and South American writers—Márquez supremely.

F Meanwhile, back in Canada, things had started to happen and Kroetsch, sensing that animation, began to go back more often and more hopefully to his homeland. In the 1960s, he had been doubtful about actually moving, however. When Russell Brown, who at Binghamton had been assigned in 1966 as graduate assistant to Kroetsch, interviewed him at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in New York, Brown ended the session with this question: “Do you want to return to Canada eventually?” (18). Kroetsch’s reply shows no great urgency. “I return often,” he says, but “In a certain way Canada’s a place in my head, so I don’t have to worry because I can take it with me everywhere...Western Canada is in me, so I don’t have to live there to write about it” (“An Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 18). In a letter to his friend Jim Bacque on September 9, 1968, he had supposed that he exists most intimately and most powerfully by imagining Heisler: “Living in England made me realize how deeply I am anchored in Canada: from the distance offered by a Sussex village, my American experience seemed very thin” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.23). Though even then he was a bit uncertain. He had allowed on “July 13, 68” that an actual return might make sense: Perhaps I’d be better off in Canada at the moment; England is beautiful, but I’m not a part of this society. Canadian society is less sophisticated, less rich, less varied—but it is the stuff out of which I feel compelled to make books. London is absolutely an incredible place—the very skyline speaks to me. But the studhorse man drives through another landscape. (MsC. 334/84.1 3.80) Late into the decade, Kroetsch remains sustained by his origins and productively immersed in intellectual life in the States.

Getting There

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And then he returns to Alberta for a few days. It is May 1, 1971, and he is giving a talk to Alberta school librarians. He begins with a brief series of anecdotes about meeting Albertans, in whom he finds his characters and his impetus as a writer. He confesses that “For a long time I’ve been trying to write a long poem about Alberta, and things began to come in place” (“Writing from Prairie Roots” 7). He goes on to talk about his work in progress, prairie pubs, and the oral tradition. Distinct signs of his love for the prairies emerge: “To persuade an outsider that prairie is beautiful is a very difficult task. But I go on trying, because I think it is beautiful. I think ecologists now are discovering that we are indubitably bound up with our landscape: we have to respect the way we relate to that which surrounds us” (9). For any response to be at all adequate “you have to love the names of flowers, you have to love the names of birds, you have to love the mountains, rocks and stones, dust: you have to relate to this world physically” (11). The persistence in the clause—“you have to,” “you have to love”—shows more than a flourish. The talk ends much as it began: “I would like, finally, to write the poem I’ve been struggling with for a long time, trying to find a way to get into the material” (13–14). What he is after seems clear enough. He wants to write a poem about the world he most intimately knows and most deeply cares for. On “Dec 9, 1971,” one year after the Brown interview, the homeward tug has strengthened, and Kroetsch writes in another frame of mind: “One reason why I’m going to return to Canada within the next few years is just that: the need to confront ‘the genius of place.’ Those goddamned high plains in my bones” (MsC. 27.28.2). Though Kroetsch couches his dreams in a vocabulary of encounter, he names them, too, as something that is, if not congenital, at least essential to the body—wind on the neck, a summons in the bones. He felt particularly pulled toward the family house, an inclination that might surprise those who knew Kroetsch only as a literary and sometimes loud figure, or by legend as a rambunctiously peripatetic man. In what is by far the best interview on Kroetsch’s personal life, Roy Miki remarks that “you have a very continuous and long period of your childhood in one particular place,” to which Kroetsch replies with uncharacteristic vulnerability. RK: Oh, one particular house. I think I’ve told the story before [Lovely Treachery 4], but I was quite astonished and hurt when I found out that people buy and sell houses. 6

the home place

RM: No kidding. RK: “House” was like a part of your body almost. This was you. I still have trouble in a city where people say, I can sell this house and make a certain profit and move into another area. My sense of “rootedness” was terribly upset—and I have become a kind of vagabond in my life. (“Self on Self” 111) A sense of becoming unhoused and cast adrift emerges in Kroetsch’s poetry at least as early as “The Stone Hammer Poem” in which he interrogates a series of possessions and dispossessions of the land where the Kroetsch farm was located. The pattern culminates in what looks like feelings of guilt or betrayal for selling the family farm (The Stone Hammer Poems 57–58). The forsaking appears in another poem about a “forgiving” but possibly dead father who is not there to welcome home “an errant son” (39). In like mind Kroetsch recalls the shock of realizing that people fleeing from the Dirty Thirties had been disastrously divested of their homes. He remembers an acute sense of transgression in witnessing their dislodging, the profanity so great that it registered on his body: “Only then did I grasp it: I had met homeless people. I had met refugees. And I remember walking out our lane, almost secretly, to stare; I remember the literal weight of the sun’s heat, the silence of the road” (Lovely Treachery 17). It would be hard to imagine a stronger sense of the damage felt in losing a home.

F We can speculate on a cause for that acute sense of the lost home. The death of Kroetsch’s mother on October 3 in 1941, when he was fourteen, came as a terrible blow. In a letter dated “oct 4” to “joseph,” he admits to the force of that time: “Yesterday it was 24 years after the death of my mother, and I still remember the day, the details, with terrible accuracy” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.59). (The letter must have been sent in 1975, given where it is placed in the archives, and what references follow in the letter about wife and friends and daughters, and a sharp awareness of imminent departure, in which case the mother’s death would have been thirty-four years earlier and the entry simply a typing error.) Kroetsch records in greater detail the weight of memory in his “Crow” Journals on “Sunday, March 9, 1974” when he is at home in Binghamton: “I remembered the men who came to my father and tried to tell him of the sorrow they felt: and even at the age

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of 13 [14 actually] I saw the failure of language, the faltering connection between those spoken words and what it was I knew my father felt, what I felt” (The “Crow” Journals 16).6 The time and place of remembering is curious—“in bed, alone, after.” The long-orphaned son lies in the space of dream and birth, and of sexual (and possibly maternal) intimacy. He is “alone” and beyond others, able to remember, though unable to summon adequate words of solace or sorrow. Although the memory of his mother haunted Kroetsch all his life, she appeared spottily in his writing, other than in brief mentions in Seed Catalogue, until 1985 when she powerfully surfaced in “Sounding the Name” and “The Poet’s Mother.” Her death was Kroetsch’s first and probably most devastating un-homing and he bore the damage for the rest of his life, all the way into Too Bad, his last major book. In that book, studying a key he cannot identify nor bear to part with, he speculates about his comings and goings. One poem, “Keyed In,” is so simple and unprotecting, its diction so repetitive, its sentences so short, unelaborate and uninterrupted, its lines laid out in grammatical units, and the voice so wondering, that the poem sounds almost childlike: Maybe it fit the door of that old Chev I drove away in when I left home. Why didn’t I keep a key to the house? But maybe it is a key to the house. Too bad the house is gone. It’s still the place where I live. (Too Bad 11) The close circling is almost uncanny. The sought place, the remembered place, persists: home, house, house, house, place where I live. The signs of departure and return are prominent: “that old Chev / I drove away in,” “a key to the house.” So is the language of access: “it,” “the door,” “a key,” “a key.” The voice is genuflecting: “Maybe it fit,” “maybe it is.” The poem is speculative, self-interrogating, and it flirts with contradiction: “Why didn’t I keep a key to the house? / But maybe it is a key to the house.” It is also quietly regretful: “Too bad the house is gone.” Paradoxically: the house is gone, but I still live there. It is tempting to wonder whether the impact of his mother’s death had anything to do with Kroetsch’s perpetual oscillations between travel and affiliation. All his life he was torn between immersion and closing off; he wobbled between 8

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extravagant gusto and elaborate secrecy. Throwing himself into public roles; rejoicing in those times when he talked and joked with friends; speaking with humour and eloquence in innumerable talks and interviews; sitting in silence among friends and strangers; disappearing, sometimes for weeks on end—he remained an elusive and enigmatic and vital figure. He led his life in equal measures of drama and reclusion: “My need to be the outsider. Rushed back here [to Lethbridge] from two Ontario readings, in order to recover my secrecy” (The “Crow” Journals 44). His was a prodigal and spendthrift spirit, a thrifty and skimping self. His days vibrated from outburst to austerity, shifted swiftly between risk and safety. In 1970, when he was on the verge of critical recognition, he told Rudy Wiebe that “Meeting the Canadian literary ‘establishment’ was a reassuring experience. And two days of celebration made it clear to me how important it is for a writer to have privacy, even loneliness” (MsC. 334/84.1 6.32). Forty years later, long since lionized, he still felt the same way. “I’m not very good at being alone,” he told Aritha van Herk shortly before he died. “To put it another way, I can’t stand to be alone and I can’t stand to be with people” (Van Herk, “Our Odysseus” 31).

F When it came to travel, Kroetsch could hold his own with anyone. He surmised that much poetry derived from travel, and several of his long poems came out of his journeying: “Letters to Salonika,” “Postcards from China,” “Delphi: Commentary,” “The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof,” “Spending the Morning on the Beach,” “The Snow Bird Poems.”7 Travel, he did. A journal entry dated “April 17, 1976,” from the time when Kroetsch was writer-in-residence in Lethbridge, notes, “This year, so far: 46 airplane flights” (The “Crow” Journals 51). That’s 46 flights in about 110 days! Other numbers are just as dumbfounding. In 1986, ten years later, an astonished Roy Miki remarks on Kroetsch’s “incredible restlessness” (“Self on Self” 140): “you’re on the move more than any single Canadian writer I’ve ever talked to.” Kroetsch, who has just identified himself as “a kind of vagabond in my life,” responds, “Oh, there was a time [that same year, 1976, possibly] when I was on, I think, 75 flights in one year” (“Self on Self” 111). He was in perpetual flight—everywhere, all of the time. A Daedalusian complex. Flight or seclusion. Kroetsch has said as much: “I live a fairly isolated life in Winnipeg. I really do withdraw from the social world” (“Self on Self” 140).

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An acute sense of privacy and secrecy governed his writing life too. He would emerge intermittently, aberrant groundhog from weeks of invisibility, to greet friends and colleagues. “How’re you doing, Kroetsch? How’s the writing going?” Kroetsch would take a long pull on his draft. “Dammit,” he would say, wiping the foam from his mouth, “I’m not getting a fucking word written.” Two months later another book would come out. He carried on like that for decades. When a friendly and admiring interviewer once tried to coax a progress report out of an evasive Kroetsch, the results—writer wooed, reader spurned—turned almost comical: EC: Tell me more about your new novel. RK: Oh no, I can’t talk about that… EC: Oh sure you can—come on, what’s it about? RK: No—I don’t dare…I’m still in the process of writing it a little bit. EC: All right. (Ms 591/96.6 68.2, ellipses in original) Kroetsch’s sidesteps and slippings away seemed never to end. Forget all those professional trips, he was peripatetic the rest of the time too. He was always on the go. Few may know but none will be surprised to hear of his enthusiasm for heading into the country, across the mountains, into the hills, across the prairies to Banff, down the coast through Oregon and all the way down to California; dozens and dozens of short drives and long drives in search of adventure or surcease. Or motion. There were god knows how many outings—many of them unknown to friends and family—that took a few hours, took days and weeks, thousands and thousands of miles, and more than a few trips out of town for sheltered anonymity in some small town. “I was tired of work,” he writes, “Monday, April 26, 1976,” “and drove out to a small town, Picture Butte, and sat in the chinaman’s, watching the wind blow, watching the smalltown people come in to drink coffee, listening to their humor, their yarns” (The “Crow” Journals 54). A few days later, May 6, 1976, he conveys his excitement about the outings: “I sort of like the free-swinging prairie style of maybe drinking too much beer, or, you know driving, to me driving across the prairies is a beautiful experience—just blasting out across there—I love that” (MsC. 27.28 3.3). “You don’t ask where you are going,” he wrote in 1993, “going is what you are there to do” (Alberta, 2nd ed., 30.) He was always lighting out, always on the road to whatever it was he 10

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restlessly sought, or avoided, or waited for, or found, or passed by, or crossed through. He fled to the edges of people where he listened and witnessed but seldom spoke. Consider the endless parade of questing figures that populate his novels. Frank Davey has incisively described the skeleton of those narratives. The male characters, Davey explains, are conflicted “between individual ambition and the attractions of home, family, and society.” The adventure plays out as both crippling and enabling: “eccentric individual quests are most often self-indulgent and narrowly anti-social, but they are also often creative, flamboyant, and life-affirming” (“Polis is Difficult Here” 241). The house, Davey explains, doubles “as both prison and site of community and decency” (247). Against a “context of armed conflict, conquest, and transcendent personal ambition,” Badlands “offers only small local habitations,” all of them “associated with women” and “the momentary sentimentalizing or utopianizing of community that occurs so frequently in Kroetsch novels” (246). The fascination with quest works its way into the poems too. Think of all those slippery and enigmatic characters who couldn’t stay still—Tom Thomson, Frederick Philip Grove, the Mad Trapper Albert Johnson—whom Kroetsch addresses in early poems,8 all of them searching for something or trying to escape. Consider Peter Thomas’s words on the first Field Notes. The book’s epigraph, he finds, “defines its onrushing, unstill quality.” Kroetsch is a man on the way: “What we are never allowed to know—the questions being unanswerable— is the where to or where from.” (“Talking on the Run” 37). Kroetsch consciously refused to be compromised by the responsibilities that farm boys assumed as a matter of course, and that his father took on. Kroetsch attests that, as a boy, he “had an incredible sense of freedom which I think governs my response to the world to this day” so that “any kind of infringement on that kind of freedom to think, to dream” was a little more than he could bear (Miki, “Self on Self” 111). When young he was constantly drawn into “a little cosmos of my own” (112). Because he had “solitary jobs” (113), he “was left doing some of the isolated jobs” and “living” with his imagination (112). There seems here something personal too—some misgiving about the kitchen table, a skittering by what might prove too close or too intimate. An entry from “Towards an Essay” dated “Wednesday, November 22, 1972” shows Kroetsch in a domestic setting (with his wife, “Over coffee”) at his most exposed and self-appraising:

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Over coffee with Jane this morning: she telling me of my own background, of my growing up in a closed society in Heisler, my struggle to escape that society. The struggle of individuation so intense, so prolonged, that I cannot bring myself to trust interrelations. A kind of painful truth there. My novels of escape, of loners. The intense life all in my head. My distance, my slipping away when people get close. And yet my longing back to that closeness, my fascination with that lost place. (Lovely Treachery 144) The Jungian analysis sounds credible, though it locates the cause as social, when it may well be more familial than anything. There is not much evidence that Kroetsch was deeply estranged from neighbours and family or that he tried urgently to get away. On the contrary. Despite his accounts of having pulled back into his imagination, Kroetsch spent a lifetime celebrating his storied childhood neighbours and relatives, and a good part of his life honouring them in his work. It seems unlikely he was simply trying to shake them off. Whatever the explanation, Kroetsch knew what it was to hope for fulfillment when disappointment awaits. He keenly understood what it is to long for something and to miss out on what it is he wants. “For Doug Jones: The Explanation,” a facetious retelling of the Columbus story, raises the prospects of a gratification to exceed one’s dreams, only to end with letdown: having come to this ragged island where bodies run naked down to the beach to embrace our arrival,

we swear we have found what we sought. What might we say otherwise? (Completed Field Notes 111)

“Desire,” Kroetsch has cogently written, “is that which stands outside the boundaries of satisfaction” (Completed Field Notes 215).

F What happened in Kroetsch’s life in the early 1970s was undoubtedly complicated, but we can trace its trajectory in “Towards an Essay: My Upstate New 12

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York Journals,” which begins with an entry on “Sunday, January 11, 1970,” and ends on “Sunday, June 9, 1974.” In those three and a half years, we read signs of a deep stirring toward a first home. “Canada looked awfully good last weekend. I went to Ottawa to receive a GG,” Kroetsch writes on “Monday, May 18, 1970” (137). He is beginning to fidget in a big way. “I have fidgeted my way through much of North America,” he will write, later, looking back on his time in the States. “I’m drawn to place, always. And yet any arrival makes me fidget” (“Becoming a Writer” 9). So did his stay in the United States. It made him constantly restless. A letter to Jim Bacque, dated November 2, 1970, speaks with great enthusiasm about his recent trip to York University: “What I learned most about was the genuine hunger for a Canadian literature” and “the need for fiction and poetry came blazing through as the students responded, asked questions...Yes, we are into it now, not Canadian lit as something given, inherited, but as something we are making. It’s good and terrifying at once” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.23). He could scarcely be more excited about what was happening. The homeward pull is felt in a personal way too, as something ingrained in memory. On “Friday, July 2, 1971” Kroetsch writes these touching words: “Up with Laura who has been sick, and I heard the first birds of morning. And hearing those first birds, anywhere, I never stop hearing the prairies. The dawn sound of home” (Lovely Treachery 140). Home wells up as instances of beginnings—“the first birds,” “those first birds,” that sound in the earliest morning, the “dawn sound” that is here and there, but above all there. The newness in the air is as old to him as his childhood. He does not hear sounds that remind him of home, he hears “the prairies” and “The dawn sound of home.” The passage is remarkable in naming “then” and “there” as viscerally and memorably “here” and “now.” The father, attending on his beloved and defenceless daughter, there in his wakening adult home, thinks of his “home” elsewhere in Alberta. The entry—the sheer force of those simple, unadorned reminders—is inexplicably moving. The significance of that dawn experience can be discerned a few years earlier in Kroetsch’s Alberta when, after a year of research, the book came out in 1968. His way into the book becomes a report on the sounds of prairie birds: “Drive off the four-lane highway, off the asphalt and onto a gravel road,” he wrote, “and stop at the edge of a slough to listen.” This will deliver you into the listening. You will hear “the gulls crying over a stubble field,” “the music

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of a western meadowlark as he sings his territory from a telephone pole” and maybe “a sung reply.” You can hear “the harsh impatience of crows” and the “trilled hoarse oka-lee-a of the red-winged blackbirds,” also the “chuck of paired pintails and teals and mallards.” You can listen for “the song of an oriole, the killdeer’s call, the hell-diver’s sudden racket, the bugled surprise of whistling swans” (2nd ed., 2). Years later he will recall as a boy listening, with his mother, to the ducks “inside the darkness, / all night talking” (Completed Field Notes 205). Repeatedly and increasingly Kroetsch longs for the world he has left: “I’ve spent two long evenings with Padma Perera, from India, talking the traces of home” (Lovely Treachery 140–41); “I’m hankering today for the Mackenzie” (143). By “Sunday, October 31, 1971” he is overcome with thoughts of familial and tribal beginnings: “My deep longing of recent days for the west of my blood and bones. My ancestral west, the prairie west, the parklands” (141). The three brief phrases, quietly added in small increments, zero in on the definition of home. The tilting toward never abates. He writes Barry McKinnon on “June 14, 1972” praising him for having “hit the prairie experience dead on” and telling him that he is headed west in July to “Knock the east out of my breathing and get back to those precious, original impulses” (MsC. 4.10). A few months later, on November 22, 1972, though acknowledging a need to escape the place of his upbringing, Kroetsch writes of “my longing back to that closeness, my fascination with that lost place” (144). A few years later nothing has changed. He still feels the tug, he still lives in Binghamton. He continues to experience a near sickness in exile. On “Wednesday, April 24, 1974,” he records a “curious sense of being cut off from my sources. In America and alone. A far connection missing these days” (149). He experiences acute loneliness, feeling distant and disjoined.9

F We pick up the story of Kroetsch’s final departure in The “Crow” Journals, which begins with an entry from late 1973, “Sunday, November 25, 1973.” It will be one more year before the full break comes. Momentously, on New Year’s Day, 1974, having for “the first time in many years” not held a New Year’s party, Kroetsch records that he and his wife, Jane, have agreed to a separation (13). The entry concludes with a remarkable poem that speaks of enigma and risk: 14

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I have been to the water’s edge, and heard the water’s story. Each day, a borrowing against the night. And love’s only portal, too. (13) By the middle of the year Kroetsch has made up his mind about leaving Binghamton for good. A letter to a friend, “Joe,” on October 14, 1974, ominously speaks of the “profound feeling that this trip I’m going for broke” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.59). That thought had nagged at him for years, at least since 1966 when he tuned down the offer of an academic appointment: “My God, did the academic womb look tempting. And then, far far back in my head a little voice spoke up and said, dammit, Kroetsch, give it a whirl. So beginning in March 67, I’m a writer or nothing. It begins to become exciting” (MsC. 334/85.1 6.8). And now he sets off. Wednesday, June 5, 1974 Binghamton, New York And so we come to exile, finally. As if I sought it out and only last night found it. After years without quite having a country. Now, separating from wife and children, I have the sense of being totally without place. (The “Crow” Journals 20) A month later, at Fort San for the Saskatchewan School of the Arts in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Kroetsch meets a young woman who has just been “dropped off ” by her lover “as the final act of their relationship.” Their parallels are striking and their circumstances ironic. The young woman and the middle-aged man, stricken into silence, sit looking out across Echo Lake “at the far shore,” just as Kroetsch himself had so recently sat at “the water’s edge” and heard “the water’s story.” The entry adds two clipped and verbless sentences: Escapes and separations and abandonment. People without names.

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Unattached by name to anyone, he ends the entry in a numbed confounding: What is this? (21) In the imminence of leaving his wife and family, he begins to conceive of the “adventurer” who is “in flight from women” (20). In a few years, the influential essay on the fear of women in prairie literature will follow. Before the essay is published Kroetsch will write to Byrna Barclay on September 20, 1977, to say “the first chapter [of What the Crow Said] is shortly to appear in EXILE under the title “The Honey Sack” and after that I have to write about fear of women in prairie fiction for the banff meeting of prairie folk” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.18). The proximity of the texts—“The Honey Sack” and “The Fear of Women”—may say something about the nature of Kroetsch’s thinking, as earlier it was evident in his talk of “the erotic and social hegemony of women” (The “Crow” Journals 20).10 The full essay decides that “Travel, for all its seeking, acts out an evasion” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 54). The next year, back in Binghamton, Kroetsch writes a friend, “Joe [Lisowski].” The letter is sent, it would appear, in August of 1975: “And I leave for Calgary this coming Friday. Apartment rented. Novel ready to be written. I’m scared shitless,” “but wanting that: draining, the stripping away. That loss of the East” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.59). The actual driving away is terribly wrenching. It is late summer when he goes, repeating to himself the name of the town, almost as though he were trying to hold on to it, and feeling stricken with its recession. His words trail into ellipsis and snap off in dashes: Friday, August 22, 1975 Niagara Falls, Ontario Left Binghamton today. To drive to Calgary, where I’m to be writerin-residence at the University of Calgary from September through Christmas, then on to the University of Lethbridge...Like trying to leave the earth’s gravitational field— Left Binghamton shortly after 12 noon. Stopped in a roadside rest area west of Owego. I couldn’t go on. And I couldn’t go back...(The “Crow” Journals 36, ellipses in original) 16

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We get some idea of how excruciating that departure must have been when we see what Kroetsch says about his two daughters, Meg and Laura, right up to the time of his final departure in 1978. He deeply loves them and takes enormous joy in them, as they figure in every part of his thoughts from the years when he and his wife, Jane, are first living in Binghamton. He records his happiness in his first daughter on March 29, 1965: “Little Laura…grows and changes at a monstrous rate. Here [her?] seventh (month) birthday approaches. Her fourth tooth breaks through, a great huge Kroetsch tooth. She is a great huge happy girl” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.40). A letter dated “March 30, 1966” speaks of “the promise of another child” (MsC. 334/84.1 6.8) and on “29 April 66” Kroetsch eagerly anticipates moving into a new house where he and his wife can raise their children. He writes to tell a friend about a “big old house on Grand Blvd. A fenced yard. Lots of bedrooms. A fireplace. 60 Grand Blvd.” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.29). On July 20, 1966, he tells a friend, “By the way—just one month ago we had another daughter. Margaret Ann. An absolute delight. That makes two. Having children beats almost anything I’ve ever done” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.53). On June 23, 1969, three years later, Kroetsch announces that after eight years in Binghamton he is fully immersed in fatherhood: “My two little daughters are such a delight I’m buying an old house on the West Side of Binghamton; which indicates, I hope, I’ve become partially reconciled to the town” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.31). In “Towards an Essay,” a few years later, he again speaks caringly of the two girls: Thursday, September 7, 1972 Little Meg went into grade one yesterday. Her first day of school. Her excitement is beautiful...My sense of the overwhelming importance of that first experience compels me to listen in silence. (Lovely Treachery 144) Monday, June 3, 1974 Laura fell off her bike Saturday evening, fractured her skull...The beauty of Laura. In the hospital and yet so alive to the new experience. (149, ellipsis in original)11 Kroetsch, knowing he will be headed next year to Calgary, confided to a friend on “oct 4 [1974]” that he “Can’t yet bear the thought of leaving my daughters” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.59). The “Crow” Journals give us similar glimpses of the girls later in the 1970s. One entry recalls when Laura was a little girl at a

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merry-go-round listening to the horses singing (14). Kroetsch will remember the phrase two years later—“Friday, July 9, 1976,” in the Qu’Appelle Valley (58) and again in “Postcards from China,” written out of a visit to China in the early 1980s and dedicated “To my daughters, Margaret and Laura”: “My ecstasy at seeing the Tang horses. I experienced ecstasy, Meggie. Whatever that is...The horses are singing. What you used to say, Laura, when we rode the carousel, there in the park in Binghamton, New York. Those perfect horses gave me transport” (Completed Field Notes 166). He will write also of the day when in 1978 it is “Meg’s birthday today. Suddenly, 12. And so beautiful. Tall and skinny, she is, at ease with the sun” (The “Crow” Journals 82). It is June 14, 1978. By the end of July he will be gone.

II

Kroetsch gets to Calgary on August 31 after stopping in Ontario at Stratford, Bamberg, Penetang, and Iron Bridge; then staying one night with the Scrivers in Grenfell, Saskatchewan. At Calgary he arrives into, “A delightful, large, quiet” apartment. “I’m exhausted,” he adds. A few weeks later (on September 16, 1975) he writes a friend to say, “Calgary for the moment is hectic. But, after 20 years of sharing an apartment or house, I find being alone a joy. When the depression hits it tends to be short” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.38). The record of his time in Calgary as it appears in The “Crow” Journals includes only twelve entries, and of them only two refer to his life at the university. There are brief mentions of faculty, none about students. The rest of the pages mention brief drives, a visit to the Calgary zoo, and a few more substantial bits on family. Mostly they specify visits with artists or scholars: John and Kay Snow, Lorna Uher [Crozier], Rudy Wiebe, Brian Moore, academics at the University of Manitoba, John Whyte. As the term is ending, he writes to Gary Geddes. It is December 9, 1975, and he ends the letter almost uneventfully: “I’m off to the University of Lethbridge come January 1” (MsC. 334/84.1 2/15). The last short entry in the journal, dated December 25, is written from California where he has joined his sister, Sheila, and her family. The fall at Calgary seems quiet, even tedious, despite his letter on September 16. His daughters are back in Binghamton. It is a fallow time, a necessary lull, perhaps, though at some point that fall he evidently stirs up the old seed catalogue that impels him into his next major poem. 18

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F Painful though the separation is, by the new year he takes shelter in Lethbridge. His time there proves to be productive and even gratifying (it is here that he does much of the work on Seed Catalogue), perhaps in part because he finds ease in the houses he rents: “Lethbridge is a fine place for learning. I’m alone in a big old house, the town is small enough to be knowable on short order, the university is small enough to be both familiar and quiet. I damned near hate to go back to Binghamton at this point” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.11). He writes in similar mood to his good friend, Spanos, who is back in Binghamton. It is “January 8, 1975” and he is pleased with the bright snowy silence and an old house whose artifacts settle the rooms: “Lethbridge is quiet, prairie beautiful, all snow and sub-zero. I’ve rented an old house that is full of antiques, drafts, morning sunlight, and places to work. I’m working” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.38). Lodged within a place that he finds “small enough,” “familiar,” and “quiet,” and rinsed with light, he seems reassured that the rest of the world in its noise and magnitude is falling away. A month later he is still serene: “Lethbridge is the perfect place for me at the moment. I’m mostly hidden and mostly in solitude. The school is small, the city is pleasantly small, the people are pleasant, considerate, interested” (MsC. 27.2.1.45). The recuperation takes the form of a new domesticity. In “Crow,” he writes that he has found himself “Liking the old house I live in, a four-bedroom house, crammed with antiques and plants. A house with lovely wooden floors. And floors somehow make a house” (44). A homely touch. In the second house especially, he divests himself of the turmoil he has left behind. On May 20, 1976 he writes of that satisfaction: “Houses. I’m into the house-appreciating side of myself...This new, bare place, after the Read/antique house. After the luxury of accumulation, the luxury of simplicity” (56). He finds comfort, or claims to find comfort, in a stripped-down state and the clean lines of demarcation: “I like the clarity. I like, here, the arrangement of rooms, the order of corners, the page-like veracity of walls…” (The “Crow” Journals 56, all ellipses in original).12 Clarity, arrangement, simplicity—these would seem to preserve him. The house is quiet, his sanctuary still. Neatly laid out in flat surfaces and rectangles, the geometries provide space he can count on and boundaries that will protect him. It is a site he can write on, too, a page free of the clutter and detritus of living. Braced against motion, it would seem to be free of subterfuge and uncertainty, welcoming as was the local landscape when

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Kroetsch arrived in January to find “the beautiful, stark valley of the Oldman River” (The” Crow” Journals 44). An asceticism has long been characteristic of Kroetsch’s life but now, in his transition from Binghamton, it takes on special allure and potency. “We silence words,” he writes in Seed Catalogue, poem from his days in Lethbridge, “by writing them down” (Completed Field Notes 42). Kroetsch had written a few years earlier, almost prophetically, that “we are reluctant to venture out of the silence and into the noise; out of the snow; into the technocracy,” which is huge, powerful, and jammed with noise, especially “To the south of us.” Wary of the clamour, Kroetsch decides to lie low, “For in our very invisibility lies our chance for survival” (Lovely Treachery 57). The desire for self-protection extends even more resolutely into resisting the possibilities of administrative chores, as Kroetsch confides to Spanos: “Frankly, I can’t imagine the sum of money that would make me take on a chairmanship. The chores of administration depress me in a frightening way... This year has been good for me—the old clarity of vision, returning. The old mad dream, renewed” (MsC. 334/84.1). Kroetsch connives to put behind him the soul-destroying life of university bureaucracy. Kroetsch’s retreat into minimalist spaces will guide him, a few months later, to his office at the University of Manitoba when in the fall of 1976 he arrives, having shed the furnishings of his life. For days he will live in a dreary motel on Pembina highway, unhoused and feeling “a fate so barren and so complicated I can hardly endure” (The “Crow” Journals 60). Finally moved into “my rented house by the river,” he laments his continuing sense of transience: “All these rented houses. Until I’m tempted to return” (66). The office he occupies will be bare, even barren, every paper clip in place, both of them, half a dozen books precisely aligned on the shelf, the desk clear. When Kroetsch returns to Manitoba in the fall of 1978, he will replicate that space, and it will be as empty and as austere as the first, and seemingly as impermanent, as spartan as the apartments he rented. In its vacancy the Manitoba room will resemble the Binghamton cell into which one Sunday morning on August 21, 1972, Kroetsch had contentedly withdrawn: “To my office a little after nine: beautifully, monkishly quiet, the fog not yet burned off outside my window” (Lovely Treachery 144). The weather would seem to envelope him and shroud the world itself. This may be the office (does it matter?) into which he had retreated in September 5, 1968: “I am enwombed safely in my SUNY office...I find it best not to turn on the lights in my office: I go with ease to the correct bookshelf, I find the keys of 20

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the typewriter with little difficulty. I have muted my telephone so that it only consoles me with the promise of distant voices.” The haptic regression comes on the heels of an eighteen-month leave, which included “my glorious ten months in the west” (MsC. 2.22) working on his forthcoming book of home, Alberta. Kroetsch willfully makes himself deaf and blind, or as nearly as he can. In the dimmed light and muffled sound, his apprehensions of the outer world fade, though they are never entirely eliminated (there is a faint “promise” of voices). He knows the space in an intimate and almost animal way by touch and kinaesthesia, and he moves by the body’s proximities through the quiet dark. The ascetic order of his Winnipeg office will also mirror what appears to be yet another office at Binghamton. Kroetsch records his experience for “Sunday, September 15, 1974,” time of a nearly empty campus: “To work at eight, in my new, secret office in Hinman College. Trying to keep books out of this office. The walls a stark white. A desk. One set of shelves. A filing cabinet. Four bright blue chairs.” Kroetsch entertains thoughts about adding a few small items but the notion seems half-hearted (The “Crow” Journals 26). This site, sought first thing in the morning, no time to lose, is a “secret” space, vacant and unadorned. Best of all, it is inaccessible to others. It is an English professor’s space, yet it is almost unfathomably bookless—protected against books, actually. It is hardly more elaborate than a monk’s cell—no folders, no stashes of notes, no clutter of manuscripts, no sign of students’ papers, no boots or coats, not a mention of reports or memos, no teaching files, not a single bureaucratic form, nary a stash of letters (none that we are made aware of at least). What furnishings Kroetsch chooses are few, singular, and angular: “a” desk, “one” set of shelves, “a” filing cabinet. The wonderful “Four bright blue chairs” are the only plurality he allows. They provide the only colour too—their blue set against the eye-pinching white. How Mediterranean it seems. And four chairs…Why four? Why blue? Why bright? Why that particular flair? And why chairs, anyway? A coffee cup, say, or a table, a plant or two, a carpet, a print or photograph, would hint of hominess and hospitality. Is he faintly hoping for visitors? Expecting them? Those options seem unlikely. More than anything, the four chairs seem emblems of absence—the four of them sitting there so self-sufficiently and so conspicuously unoccupied—sharp reminders that no one is there. Whom might he be expecting in this room whose privacy he has sought and whose whereabouts he guards? Is their sole

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function an austere beauty? Mute reminder of his melancholy ways? He arrives into these hushed spaces early in the morning, disciplined in timing and purpose, seeking a site of sensory deprivation and social elision. Ever the recluse, he is still there in “February 3, 1975” (a Monday, it turns out, first thing in the week) when in a letter to Applegarth Follies he confesses: “About phoning: I’m usually a failure talking on the phone. But I’ll try. Until 10 in the morning I’m in a secret office.” He spends rather a lot of time there as a matter of fact: “I’m in the secret office Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings as well.” He adds, almost guiltily, “Yes, I want to talk. I’m such a silent bastard, I hide away here in Binghamton” (MsC. 27.2.1 23). “I liked that sense of disappearing,” he confides over twenty years later (Kroetsch and Lent 100). Secret, hushed, private, sparse—the pattern will come close to mocking Kroetsch’s professed love for chaos and jeopardize his reputation as clamorous postmodernist who throws himself into disorder. The habitations seem a vast undoing of the world, a radical shedding of it somehow. Inside those shut-off rooms he seems buffered from the loud complications of living. And yet, though he flees the house, he also searches endlessly for it. The extreme ambivalence about house and horse, which he enunciates in “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction” (Lovely Treachery 73–83), his well-known remarks about the housed female and the horsed male—the male anxiously circling a “female” house which he cannot bring himself either to enter or to repudiate), will never leave him, quite. He will spend much of his life seduced to thrift, tempted to drift. He wants to sit and visit at the kitchen table, and he can hardly wait to get on the road again.

F In the summer of 1976, having left Lethbridge and on his way toward Winnipeg, he enjoyed an idyllic interlude at the Qu’Appelle writing retreat. It is “Saturday, July 10, 1976”: The nighttime drive to the Dysart Hotel. Stars and darkness, and the road like a dream; out of the dark then, into the sudden light of the beer parlor. That Canadian name for getting warm on a chilly day, for flirting, for making out, for hiding, for meeting, for sitting down, for telling a story. (The “Crow” Journals 59) 22

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How compelling is the story of sluicing through the night, when the prairie would have been letting out its breath, its perfume after a long hot day. The clutch of writers slide through long stretches of darkness, the night streaming past, “the road like a dream.” And then—the sudden sound and light they splash in. Those who next summer returned to the heydays of those retreats and those who came newly to Qu’Appelle Valley were, Kroetsch attests, “Rooted. We are, in this crossing of our myriad lines, rooted. / So slowly, / we learn to be / lovers.” They move into “the poem of our naming each other” (The “Crow” Journals 71), much as in the end of Alibi the narrator names friends into their shared lives. The archives include several personal letters from those Qu’Appelle writers, and a single-spaced, single-page statement, “LETTER FROM BOB,” in which Kroetsch, sky-high and naming the others into comical and affectionate narratives, laments his departure. Hidings and meetings. The letter ends in eulogy: “love to all of you, to the songs we made of each glorious day” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.57). Ann Munton speaks appreciatively of those occasions: “his descriptions of the camaraderie shared by the writers there…exemplifies his own warmth and generosity within the growing Prairie writing community” (“Robert Kroetsch” 77). No accident that the connections occur in a pub, that home. The pub, Kroetsch has long thought, provides a sanctuary where people can speak to their deepest needs and to what lies closest to their lives. He may on occasion joke about that mythologizing but he always honours the pub as a privileged space: “I walked across the beer parlor floor as I had walked toward the holy water font in the Wanda church, years earlier” (“I Wanted to Write” 55). The pub serves as a place where we might outlast and, for a brief while, talk down the world’s incursions: “Our endless talk is the ultimate poem of the prairies. In a culture besieged by foreign television and paperbacks and movies, the oral tradition is the means of survival” (Lovely Treachery 17–18). A lot of the listening occurs in a “rare abnegation of self” of the sort that Glen Sorestad—friend, poet, imbiber—embodies. Sorestad announces that a beer parlour is a sacred place.13 The True Drinker [no “serious drinker,” no mere “regular,” but a capital “T” and capital “D” “True Drinker”] knows that to enter in through those doors, off the street of a small town, is to enter a place where time is suspended. In the secret place of the beer parlour, we are allowed to change identities—in our laughter, in our silence, in the stories we tell, in what we remember from the past. In a beer parlour we are as equal as our politics insist we

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are—or as equal as the price of draught can make men be. We are God’s blessed creatures, seeking a prairie version of ecstasy, sharing the poet’s divine madness. (Lovely Treachery 18)14 The entrance itself is construed in Kroetsch’s marvellous fable as no mere dropping in for a few cold ones. The drinkers abandon main street, find their way through a special portal, slip past the frame, across the threshold, into another world. The high time of rapture that they enter, the suspension and transformation, is captured in Kroetsch’s ceremonial style: the graceful parenthesis, the gently periodic sentences, the neat and repeated syntax—“in the secret place,” “in our laughter,” “in our silence,” “in the stories we tell.”15

F By the time Kroetsch arrives in Winnipeg in the fall of 1976 the festive times are receding into the long prairie night. He arrives in a funk: Tuesday, September 7, 1976 Winnipeg, Manitoba Just got here one hour ago. I hate arrivals as much as I hate departures What do I do next? (The “Crow” Journals 60) The travelling man is worn upon arrival from his journeys and detachments. His desolation is compounded by the fact that he has left behind those heady days at Qu’Appelle. After the exhilaration of that summer, Kroetsch feels distraught and depleted: “To be a Canadian: a fate so barren and so complicated I can hardly endure” (The “Crow” Journals 60). He has moved swiftly from intoxication to abjection, painfully missing those earlier connections. Asked about all the maimed male characters in his fiction, Kroetsch replies in what at the time (1976) was unusual forthrightness about the contradictions in his own life:

24

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Yes, I can understand that. Trying to rejoin the world. Stitching the parts together...It’s human loneliness. Travelling the world back together. It’s a double thing. There’s an immense satisfaction in loneliness, a kind of sinful pride in it; and along with that an appalling sense of how inadequate—how, at whatever the cost, you have to seek a way to be free of that same loneliness. (Hancock 49, ellipsis in original) Kroetsch’s radical ambivalence lurches across The “Crow” Journals—all the ducking and escaping, the endless reaching and yearning, seeking and shying, the careening between ups and downs. The condition never leaves him. “It may be,” he says to Barbara Kraus, “that I am simply a person who is uneasy in the world; I think, that’s the case, in many ways. For decades of my life I was more ‘at home’ in geography than in the social community” (MsC. 591/96.6 7.3). Convivial recluse, he entertains his friends with verve and charm, and he seals his life in privacy. He soon gets caught up in the literary life of the city. By December he is entertaining an offer to join the English Department at Manitoba. He finds the young faculty bright and energetic, and he longs for some stability in his life. But the distraction remains and the ambiguities persist. Where is he to return? Where does he feel rooted? Maybe Winnipeg: “After all my hesitating, the prairies begin, again, to feel like the inevitable home,” he writes, sensing an arrival or wishing for one. What is it to say he is “at home” but homeless? Where in his words is he located? (The “Crow” Journals 66). In mid-February he is still mulling over the job offer. He is tempted: feb 14 77 Dear Jill Mostly—at least for the past two weeks—I’ve been thinking about a job offer from the University of Manitoba. I think I’m going to take it, though I have another week of stewing to do. Abandon eastern U.S. for western Canada. A shot at teaching Canadian. Working with small press books and their impact...Yes, I have ideas: ma theses on the visions and courage of those who dare...including the courage not to write ma theses...But I see also for myself a return to my material.



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Though he is excited about having the time to do his own work, he remains up in the air: “Shit, my head wants a rest from guessing. So I work away at my novel. So I decide to decide” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.18). Two weeks later he has decided. On March 1 he again writes to “Jill,” outlining the complications: “My wife and two daughters will not come with me to Manitoba, because our attempt at a separation is what you might, with gross irony, call a success. The implications of that remark are so immense that for the moment I keep my head in the proverbial sand” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.18). “Dear Bill,” he writes to his best friend and confidant, William Spanos, on “March 18 77.” He has become deeply disenchanted with what is and is not happening at Binghamton: You and I will always get fucked over in that place. They don’t like what we stand for, they don’t like what we think a professor is...At least we can leave with the feeling that we kept our integrity…There’s a sense in which SUNY-Bing was good for me, I’m aware of that. I think it was good for you. But we both have energies that are now being frustrated. (second ellipsis in original) He also says, ominously, “And when I’m not working I want to spend time with my daughters, because what’s happening is going to be one awful blow to them—in spite of Jane’s absolute genius at caring for them” (MsC. 334/84.1). The crisis is one he is prepared to face. Following a devastating self-appraisal in The “Crow” Journals for May 17, 1973, naming himself as torn between domesticity and a drastic breaking from it, Kroetsch added these dark words: “I do know something about Yeats and his opposing selves, and I do know that the risk of creation involves the risk of destruction” (19). He once more turns up at the Saskatchewan School of the Arts. It is “Friday, July 15, 1977” as he writes in his journal: “Homeagain homeagain.” The words seem oddly freighted. They are playful, certainly, small chant we sing to children, or when we are children. Do they hint of a (sought? felt?) restoration to personal origins? Are they a sign of comfort? childlike release? re-energized spirits? wishful hope? self-mockery? giddy permission? At this home-away-fromhome Kroetsch finds his good friend, Eli Mandel, bent in his own comical and tragic caring. Kroetsch, divided between coming and going, admires Mandel’s “daring to depart. His daring to return” (The “Crow” Journals 70).16 Kroetsch, 26

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mirroring Mandel’s journeys, will be returning for one year to Binghamton, and in the fall of 1978 he will be back to Manitoba.

F Though the journey in the 1970s is distressing, it also is heady. Almost in concert with the move, and quite aside from his other publications, Kroetsch brings out several poetry titles in rapid-fire succession. Between 1975 and 1979 he publishes four remarkable long poems: The Stone Hammer Poems, The Ledger, Seed Catalogue, and The Sad Phoenician. There was that returning, then. There was a recovering of landscape too. The journals that record a wish to return invoke landscapes exactly seen. Little wonder that Kroetsch responds with exasperation to the yawns of those who plunge through the prairies in indifference or derision.17 He notices what is there, it speaks to him. On the West Coast, Vancouver Island, he says, the “leaves never move on the trees,” but “On the prairies the leaves move, even when there seems to be no wind at all, the trees and bushes and grass are alive. The fields of grain shift. The ditches stir” (The “Crow” Journals 74). Kroetsch’s prairie (moving, stirring, shifting) is alive in a W.O. Mitchell way. But Binghamton is a different story. Kroetsch sees “trees that I’ve never quite learned to identify.” He cannot name them, not “for all my years” in the northeastern United States (79).18 Back on the prairies, however, the landscape and its creatures provide a powerful experience of place that impels him into new life. It provokes a mythology of writing, the muse available, inexplicably, in the dry prairie sun, everything in the landscape shifting and answering to the light: Hot sun. Grasshoppers, making the sound of that prairie light. Caraganas, letting down their green shadows against the heat. Light and shadows and that woman enjoying so much the sun, her long hair loose and dark, her right arm, pale, moving. I didn’t yet know her name. But I had a glimpse, in that one hour, of the opening of my novel, the novel’s shape. (22) In small gestures of caring, in details that bring a leap of recognition, Kroetsch is rekindled and begins to reclaim his home.19 He is struck, too, by how much his new friends’ lives seem to accord with the Heidegger he has met through Spanos: “Being-in-the-world. There-being...The experience was a profound one,



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the communal life, and the landscape itself, the people at-home in the landscape. Dasein...But always in the world” (23). And yet, oddly, there are few descriptions of landscape in Kroetsch’s poetry, not a lot of it in his novels, either.

F In September of 1977 Kroetsch rallies himself at the imminence of leaving Binghamton for good, and he writes exuberantly to tell Byrna Barclay, whom he had met at the Saskatchewan School of the Arts: i have to move the hell out of here and back to the PRAIRIES (more hurrays) i have had my Eastern Experience and need to go home home home and christ there’s so much to write about our prairies as you are discovering. (MsC. 334/84.1 1.18) The letter surges with elation, its energy released in irreverent expressives, intensifiers, and repetitions. It shows a precise use of case. The pretensions of an esteemed state are lightly mocked in title case as “Eastern Experience,” and the vitality of local realities celebrated, smilingly, with the burgeoning of full upper case as “PRAIRIES.” The joyful announcement disperses a graphic and kinetic energy across the page, in a dramatic sign of his excitement. Not incidentally, the greeting includes a good-natured address to a prairie friend and fellow author, who connects with the place. The text at once renounces the past (and the somnolent present) and embraces the yet-to-be. Still, the separation is hard. During his final days in Binghamton, Kroetsch feels unnervingly on hold, virtually a stranger. He is there and not there. He feels a sudden tearing when he sends off a manuscript: “That awful sense of separation” (The “Crow” Journals 82). The awareness of final departure registers in the quietest of words, which characteristically enter his most emotional passages. Glimpses of his disquiet appear in his correspondence. A letter dated April 27, 1978, simply says: “Two weeks of teaching left to go here. I still haven’t quite grasped the notion that I’ll be somewhere else come fall” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.14). It is May 18, 1978, and he writes, “In a few weeks I leave here, move to the University of Manitoba” (The “Crow” Journals 81). “I’m finishing up my last year 28

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at Binghamton,” he tells Pat Krause on May 22: “The thought of moving myself— I’ll be happy to get settled in Winnipeg. My novel should be out in the fall” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.57). As the time nears, he speaks in near silence to Daphne Marlatt on “July 18, 1978.” He mentions his travel arrangements and ends in a trailing, almost wistful voice: “All this letting go…” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). The “Crow” Journals completes the story of separation and return with remarkable restraint: Friday, July 21, 1978 Today I moved out of my SUNY-Binghamton office, took out my typewriter and a last box of notes and turned in the keys. Arrived here almost 17 years ago. Seventeen years next month, as I recollect: driving into town from Iowa City with all my possessions, except for some boxes of books that I mailed, in the car. And all my own books published during my stay here. Beginning with But We Are Exiles. And what is exile? … Binghamton. My daughters, Meg and Laura, born here. Staying here with their mother. Home. Perhaps my father, born in Ontario, growing up in Ontario, felt he was an exile in Alberta. … I bought two chairs; the other one is in the basement of the house on Lathrop Avenue, where I lived. (The “Crow” Journals 85) It all is so shut. The smallest detail—the key he turns in, quite likely to an uncaring stranger for whom his departure is of no consequence—scratches the surfaces of his life. The room locked behind him is now closed to him. We are left with a bald no-moreness of words in the force of the understatement. When Kroetsch names the Binghamton years in past tense and singular pronoun, the grammar sets the place aside. Without elaboration or qualification it amputates him from place and person. Not: “where I lived for…” Nor: “while we were living at…” But, simply: “where I lived.” What’s missing is a “we” and a “now.” The words register a terrible sense of finality. The office in which for many years he has sheltered and created is now abandoned and his past irrecoverable. He sheds what for decades he has gathered and Binghamton slams shut behind him. The one single chair on Lathrop Avenue is sole remnant of those years. And that’s it.

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“I drove into Winnipeg from Upstate New York in an aging green four-door Dodge Dart in 1978,” he was to write, matter-of-factly, a few years later (A Likely Story 65). “To want to be a writer is to seek home by risking a kind of homelessness” (“Becoming a Writer” 2).20

F Kroetsch’s days in Winnipeg bring him little peace. Marian Madden writes on “April 19, 1979,” concerned about his low spirits: “You seem sad, almost reticent…I don’t know what was wrong” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.67). Kroetsch replies one week later. He has been melancholy, as you observed in your letter. Complexities of spirit. A touch of melancholy is natural to me.21 But this is more. Something in me had to lie fallow for a while. Now I feel myself stirring alive again. Novels coming into my head. I’m a westerner in some profound way, and in some profound way Manitoba isn’t far enough west. (MsC. 334/84.1 3.67)22 On “May 11, 1979” in a different letter, he informs a friend, “It now seems strongly possible that I’ll be a member of the faculty of the University of Calgary next fall. That is, not only will I be an Alberta writer, but I’ll be writing in Alberta” (MsC. 334/84.1 13.6). The possibility is soon a certainty. He writes Douglas Marshall at Books in Canada on May 26, 1979, to say incisively, “I’m heading west. I’m leaving Winnipeg, going to the Department of English, University of Calgary, effective August of this year” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.35).

F In fall of 1979 he is ready to move on again. As soon as he gets to Calgary he regrets the move, and on “sept 4 79” writes to me asking about returning to Manitoba. A few weeks later (on October 1, 1979), he says the move to Calgary “has confused my life incredibly” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.20). He confesses, “It has been a very traumatic experience for me coming back and trying to combine art and life” (Brahms 117). “Calgary is not all the press has it cracked up to be,” he tells Geoff Hancock (MsC. 334/84.1). 30

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By 1980 he is back at the University of Manitoba where he teaches until he retires. He continues to travel widely. He is a dervish of wisdom and energy. He writes dozens of books and essays, scintillating titles that are widely feted and cited.

F He writes his way home in his poetry. If Kroetsch’s claims that writing brings us into existence ever were true, if ever they could be true, it would have to be said of himself that in his highly personal, even autobiographical poems, he returned—rambunctious, indignant, elated, madly inventive. He was also conflicted, worn, yearning. He was excruciatingly alone on the way, not to the “real”23 home that he left, and not as the “he” who left in the first place. That goes without saying. When Kroetsch returned to Canada, he found that after two decades of exile, he had come to undertake the task of translating myself back—in order to reconstitute a text that was becoming too faint to read. In a certain way, the Canada I thought I was returning to was not here when I returned. Setting out to learn the strangeness of the world, we discover we have “made strange” our most familiar places. The traveler, going away, is a kind [of] Odysseus. He is also a kind of Rip Van Winkle, sleeping while the world changes. (“Becoming a Writer” 19) “We have to try to understand that home is something that is not fixed but rather something that is continually in motion,” he adds in an unpaged statement attached to the “Becoming” text. Change washes over the grounds and muddies them, it squeezes all of us through the wringer. The glimpses we have, or think we have, of what “was,” are only glimpses. The past melts in the plasticity that is memory, fades in old ink, reforms in the viscosity we know as history. Yet, even as Kroetsch faced the challenges of contemporary thinking, and embraced that knowledge, he never forgot the world that he knew and loved, and that he felt had been snubbed by the rest of the world. Deborah Keahey catches the force of Kroetsch’s reach when she calls her book on prairie writing Making It Home. In Kroetsch’s case “the lost (sold) home place and the absent mother figure appear in ghost form through his continual

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dislocation in and among space, language and relationships” (Making It Home 126). What I have to say in The Home Place concurs. Kroetsch was getting there, arriving home, despite delay and impediment. In Keahey’s words, “the persona does undertake a journey of nostalgia, constructing a home not in but through language, which may be the only means to access or recover a ‘lost place’” (128). Though another world told the locals they didn’t matter, perhaps didn’t even exist, in a way Kroetsch did come back, believing, he said, in a “continuing and literal relationship between person & place. For the regionalist writer, the acts of living in a place and writing become inseparable.” He makes it clear, however, that he means to avoid a naive or sentimental view of place: “Regional writing must understand not how life in the region was (for that leads to mere nostalgia), but how life in the region continues.” The verb acknowledges a movement between residual and emergent states that is always fluid. It permits a play between change and retention, for regionalism also offers a “chronicle of where you’re coming from” (MsC. 334/84.1 13.6).24 The argument distils Kroetsch’s lifelong efforts to preserve and to renovate—to celebrate something of his home, and to seek new literary forms. Making it home, for Kroetsch, never meant a return to a world preserved in reassuring familiarity. Nor did it mean returning as the self who, in order to finish high school, first left Heisler; or any of the other earlier selves, exactly, who may or may not have existed on the family farm near Heisler. Seeking home meant wanting to see the place as somewhere a person could feel a shiver of recognition, get the chance for a minute to shrug on an old coat that no longer quite fits. Kroetsch’s profound attachments meant he would commemorate his place and his people—even as time wears on the mind and the world shifts in its makings. But it is home. Keahey has made this point rather well when she finds that in poems such as The Ledger and Seed Catalogue the world “out there” never gets forgotten: “Despite the high postmodernism of Completed Field Notes, the referential function of language, while questioned, is never entirely eliminated, still maintaining its ‘pointing’ function...In addition, the performative function of language may bring into being a kind of reality outside, or other than, the language itself ” (128). Aritha van Herk has located another category of homecoming in Kroetsch. Where Keahey looks to familial and psychological causes, Van Herk looks to social and geographical explanations. For her, as for Kroetsch, the homeward draw is to be found in place—in Kroetsch’s memory of the landscape and a 32

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people’s experience of it. It is “Alberta, the parkland, the Battle River” that Kroetsch “returns to again and again, in life and in writing” out of “a longing for home and a longing for language the same” (“Biocritical Essay” xvi). That is why we find “the sickness that is evident throughout Kroetsch’s fiction: the prose writer’s lust for home.” “Alberta is, he confesses, his magical kingdom, the centre of his imagination, a world he never left” and so “His stubborn love for this place is unapologetic” (xviii). In a 2008 interview Kroetsch says as much: “Home for me was a very geographical place—it was a farm in Alberta. It was really a little community. That was my home. And it still is in a way; I’ve been homeless ever since I left, in a curious way” (Fakiolas). He was saying the same thing when he left Winnipeg for the last time. There was a move to name a Manitoba poetry award after him, but he demurred. No, no, he said. I’m not a Manitoba poet, I’m an Alberta writer. His reaction had a lot to do with his immense modesty and his embarrassment in being singled out, but it surely also demonstrates how deep were the ties to his home province.

III

Either way, Kroetsch’s loyalty to his home place brought him into a constant give-and-take with contemporary theory: Living outside of Alberta (and outside of Canada) while writing most of my fiction and poetry…I was constantly aware that we both, and at once, record and invent these new places called Alberta and Saskatchewan. That pattern of contraries, all the possibilities implied in record and invent, for me finds its focus in the model suggested by the phrase: a local pride. (Lovely Treachery 5–6) The extent and complexity of Kroetsch’s purposes is caught in that double claim—to “both, and at once, record and invent.” Shifts in emphasis at different stages in Kroetsch’s writing unsettle our readings of him: Is he inventing, or is he recording here? One way or another he wanted to take things in and to make things up. He was a fierce regionalist but he also was immersed in formal innovation, increasingly in a postmodern way. As a regionalist he understood

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that language gestures to the world, that it can tie us to the world, and that it is profoundly social. As a postmodernist he realized that those connections are profoundly unstable because language operates as a system generated by its own waywardness and self-regard, which means that in intricate ways we are always making our worlds. Kroetsch stresses that for him this is much more than a formal issue. It has everything to do with a sense of one’s own world and one’s place in it: The feeling must come from an awareness of the authenticity of our own lives. People who feel invisible try to borrow visibility from those who are visible. To understand others is surely difficult. But to understand ourselves becomes impossible if we do not see images of ourselves in the mirror—be that mirror theatre or literature or historical writing. A local pride does not exclude the rest of the world, or other experiences; rather, it makes them possible. It creates an organizing centre…“by lifting an environment to expression.” (Lovely Treachery 6) An emphasis on actuality and recording were particularly important for Kroetsch in the 1970s. One has only to read Kroetsch’s essays from the period to hear the appeal. “Unhiding the Hidden,” first published in 1974, provides a forthright statement. Within a few pages these words appear: “authentically his own,” “demands of authenticity,” and “the false names” (Lovely Treachery 58–59). That vocabulary proliferates: “The process of rooting that borrowed word, that totally exact homonym [from English or French], in authentic experience, is then, must be, a radical one” (59); “Robert Harlow’s Scann is a reckless demolition of inauthenticity”; we need to “decreate the literary tradition that binds us into not speaking the truth” (62); we must lament “the sheer failure of that language to confront reality” (63). The terms, which persist in other essays from the time, could hardly have been any clearer, or any more emphatic. The argument never goes away, not for long at least. In 1988, when Kroetsch was writer-in-residence at Trent University, an interviewer asked him whether writing, however much it was “game-like,” still must be to some degree mimetic. Kroetsch unequivocatingly replied: “Yes, I really do. It’s that tension between the two that’s fun, really. It’s mimetic and it isn’t. There are schools that try to make it one or the other. I’m not really interested in that” (MsC. 591/96.6 68.2). 34

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Late in the 1970s Kroetsch’s work moved briefly into a highly reflexive mode before he shifted, for the rest of his career, to a writing that fluctuated between self-reference (the “Rita K” poems and the rewritten “Mile Zero”) and regard for the larger world (the mother poems, for example). Partly because of Kroetsch’s regard for the local, he remained the leading figure in prairie regionalist writing, even as in other circles he was heralded as someone who saw that writing shaped and redirected things. It is testimony to the range and depth of his work that for some readers he emerged as champion of prairie writing; and that for others he served as leader of a postmodernism that rejected the legitimacy of regional expression.25 He would be best named as a postmodern regionalist. It becomes more than possible to view Kroetsch as a figure for whom, as David M. Jordan wisely proposes, “regional identity is neither a transcendent symbol, nor a fixed entity, nor an abstract structure defined by subjective patterns of coherence; it is ‘in the midst’ of this temporal difference” (105). That is why “to the postmodern regionalist, a region is neither an external fact nor an internal intentional object; instead, it occupies the void between intent and reality, between book and world” (107). Kroetsch wanted to write the long poem, and he meant it to be postmodern. He also wanted to write “prairie.” The play between these views, both of them demonstrable in what Kroetsch has said and done, brought him to some of his most memorable expressions, most infamously perhaps, to what he said to Margaret Laurence in a conversation published in 1970: “the fiction makes us real” (Creation 63). The expression has been quoted so often, and so enthusiastically, it has become almost a shibboleth that pretty much wraps things up. As it stands, by itself, it is misleading.26 One reception favoured by deconstructionists (not to be confused with postmodernists) names writing as an act that itself creates something that is not there, in the world, or at least cannot be shown to be there, and that therefore is not beholden to what may be “out there.” Reality is what it is named then. Kroetsch’s clipped expression can be read in a different way. Given the whole of the Laurence / Kroetsch conversation, and given Kroetsch’s penchant for interventionist statements and for colourful hyperbole, the assertion probably should be read in a different way. Arguably it does not support a purely reflexive view of language, or not only that. It also celebrates a representational writing within which an author receives a world and brings it into regard. In this apprehension the fiction that “makes us real” provides recognition and a

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sense of legitimacy—a situation in which we might be able to see something of ourselves. The writer would then be delivering the world into attention and respect. It seems best to hear the gnomic claim as a paradox that recognizes a double view of language. That option sounds reasonable when we revisit the ground from which the celebrated nugget has been extracted. Here more fully is what Kroetsch says: “In a sense, we haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real” (“A Conversation with Margaret Laurence” 63). The longer and more nuanced statement is less quotable, but because it is less categorical it is intellectually more satisfying: not that such-and-such is the case, but that in a sense it is the case. Unfortunately the qualification, and the larger frame for the discussion, often get lost. Much closer to Kroetsch’s apprehensions is his case for a dual role in writing. When “we both, and at once, record and invent” (Lovely Treachery 5), we write “the imagined real place” (8). The terms allow for both representing a world, and constructing a world, for using words both constatively and performatively, to invoke the somewhat unwieldy terms familiar to scholars. The larger allowance would coincide with William H. Gass’s memorably phrased understanding: It is the same, to a degree, with all words. That is, I remember their meanings; I remember my encounters with their referents; and I remember the company of other words that the ones in question have commonly kept...These memories have been compacted and their effects summed...My mind remembers the way trained muscles do, so when I speak and read as well as I walk and bike, then we can say that I have incorporated my language; it has become another nature, an organlike facility; and that language, at least, will have been invested with meaning, not merely assigned it. (174) More than a few students of Canadian literature have raised their own objections to doctrinaire deconstructionism. Linda Hutcheon regrets that “there is still a tendency to see postmodern theory and practice either as simply replacing representation with the idea of textuality or as denying our intricate involvement with representation” (Politics of Postmodernism 29–30). Shirley Neuman raises her own reservations about attempts to make Kroetsch into a thorough-going deconstructionist. Kroetsch, she proposes, 36

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shares in neither the linguistic nihilism nor the undiscriminating pluralism with which the deconstructionist critics who have influenced Kroetsch are charged by their detractors. To resist Meaning in pursuit of the play of “meanings,” as Kroetsch does, is to demand an ongoing response, to insist on speech with an other as against the solipsism of the self. (“Figuring” 193) Frank Davey’s “Contesting ‘Post(-)modernism’” articulates one of the strongest protests when he argues that Kroetsch’s postmodernism is demonstrably political. It is “postcolonial, specifically ‘Canadian,’ but [it] can also serve to legitimate the Canadian west” (255). Some would be inclined to turn around those priorities and to see Kroetsch loyalties to “West” as mattering more to him, at least in the 1970s, but Davey’s observation is persuasive: “there can be no easy transportability of theory from one cultural moment to another” (290) and “such cultural appropriations become modified in the process of being put into local use—the exigencies of particular politics de-form, trans-form, or in-form the construction borrowed to serve it” (291).27

F It seems fair to say that Kroetsch’s engagements and disengagements are multiply occasioned. For him, though he never sought any final or total truth, he sought something more than an easy read or deracinated narratives or purely diverting texts. He spent a lot of his energies decrying intellectual inertia, whether it took the form of laziness or fear or sentimentality. The dismay he confided to Rudy Wiebe in 1970 at “how few really serious novelists we have in Canada” (MsC. 334/84.1 6.32) continues in letters to Audrey Thomas (MsC. 334/84.1 5.28) and Robert Harlow (MsC. 334/84.1 3.11). “Too many Canadian writers,” he has said with Kroetschean flair, treat language “like a heap of fresh bear shit” (Hancock 38). Kroetsch had little patience with those who thought of writing as a flare of genius or an eruption happily unsullied by thought or knowledge: “And I think so many poets—I really get irked by Canadian poets—are using dead forms. And they cannot say anything” (Butling and Rudy 12). Though inspiration is important,28 it is never enough: “about once every two months a drunk poet corners me and says, ‘You sonofabitch, you’ve been reading books again!’ That kind of thing disturbs me. And I’m getting older; it’s harder to fight

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these guys off after a while” (Schellenberg 18). Knowledge of theory is enabling then; necessary, really. It protects a writer from getting locked into a version of writing that can dry up or become unproductive: Yes, I would say that the model of the artist which still functions to a large extent in our culture is one I’m violently opposed to. In certain ways, it’s a post-Romantic notion of the artist, claiming that through an upswelling of knowledge from within, one knows how to proceed. In fact, theory doesn’t silence the writer at all; it enlarges the boundaries. I meet a lot of writers in Canada who have blocked, and the problem is often, it seems to me, rooted in an insufficiency of theory. They have come to the end of what they’ve picked up unconsciously, and they don’t know how to break through to a new plateau. And I swear it’s theory that would help them out. (Schellenberg 24)29 Kroetsch has also warned against a slavishness to theory that can bring poetry into neglect and suppression. He raised the concern in 1980 at a time when theorists, newly emboldened, had come out slugging. In “The Writer Looks at Academia,” which he had wanted to call “A Writer Looks at Professors,” Kroetsch expresses serious reservations about the disappearing poem: Unfortunately, the professor, basking in new-found success and prosperity, has taken the poet literally at his word. The poet is a failure. The professor is the true champion of true art; poetry itself becomes the mere stuff of the art of criticism. We are persuaded, by some wonderfully precocious argument, that criticism precedes poetry. The poets, meanwhile, mutter of Derridian deconstruction and Heideggerian de-struction. (MsC. 334/84.1 1.20) A little craft and diligence in writing wouldn’t hurt either, if Kroetsch is to be believed. He explains (this is in 1976) that when working on a novel he will “spend a long time mapping it out before I start to write.” At that stage he will write down a lot of notes: “You have a chapter in a folder and you say these are some of the things that have to happen there. It sounds very calculated, but it isn’t when you sit down and actually write. It is calculating innocence, it never works out that way…But those are useful things to begin from, you see.” 38

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Typically he writes steadily but slowly on a novel, as he facetiously confesses: “No, I whack off 2 or 3 pages. I think about 3 pages a day as a rule. Those 3 pages might be rewritten 3 or 4 times in the course of a morning.” In rewriting, he says, you begin to “discover the implications of what you’ve done” (Enright and Cooley 33). However, intelligence alone is insufficient. It is good to act in a “mixture of knowledge and self-deception and innocence” (“I Wanted to Write a Manifesto” 64). That condition allows an author to ride a rush of energy or near irrationalism. What’s needed, Kroetsch insists, are the right conditions. In “teaching” writing “primarily you’re creating an environment for people to write in. You know, I think we shouldn’t be too romantic about this notion that if a man wants to write, he will. I think that’s nonsense. You create an atmosphere that will allow people to write” (Brown, “An Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 12). What’s needed is knowledge of the tradition and familiarity with current writing. The trick is to learn without being buried alive. And so it is worth realizing, Kroetsch says with his knack for making knotted arguments clear and memorable, There are these two sides to language: langue and parole. Langue is the great-given, the sum total of words and grammar and literature and concluded speech. Parole is what one of us says, the uniqueness of the speaking (writing) person. If you are unlucky, the great-given swamps you, and even when you speak, you are silent. If you are incredibly lucky, and if you work your ass off, the great-given sounds, not over, but in your unique speaking. If that happens, then you have found a Voice. (Lovely Treachery 19) The statement may sound a bit shaky for a poet such as Kroetsch who is so willing to swallow other voices in a Bakhtinian babel. It may be better to think of some larger and capacious “voice” in Kroetsch that accommodates all those other voices; to hear Kroetsch’s “voice” as what host who houses all the words. Elsewhere, wary of his own claim about finding “a Voice,” he warns against notions that one’s very own personal and unique voice speaks in a text. He endorses polyvocality and recommends a mix of discourses, not to mention awareness that in writing one is always in a position of derivation and refraction. Even so, the point remains broadly true for him: when a writer tries to wedge a book onto the shelf, the chances of success are slim. They are really grim if

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a person doesn’t know what’s already there and is not prepared to enter an age-old, taxing, and unending conversation with those books. When it comes to writing ignorance is seldom a virtue. Not knowing is rarely a good thing, though Kroetsch also believed that at times it can be helpful. For him it was important to half-forget what you know so you can write what deep down you really know. In those moments he sometimes wanted to pretend he was a rustic prairie boy with little couth or learning. But he never sought to renounce prior texts, he simply wanted to resist their priority. The deepest respect for writing persists in everything he did, as we can see when Kroetsch and Dorothy Livesay exchanged several telling letters in the late 1960s. Livesay is teaching at the University of Alberta with a dynamic faculty (Stephen Scobie, Dick Harrison, Eli Mandel, Sheila Watson, Rudy Wiebe, Ted Blodgett, Diane Bessai, Douglas Barbour, Morton Ross, and Margaret Atwood among them—though not all of them were there at the same time) and she writes to Kroetsch in Binghamton, admonishing him for his involvement with “tricks.” Kroetsch’s friend, Robert Harlow, suffers equally “of course” from “that fling through Iowa.” Livesay offers Kroetsch her best advice: “So—forget all the ‘tricks’ and the ‘archetypes’ in your next book; and just tell a story. And vary the pace, vary the pace more than you have done, heretofore. As I said, somewhere at a party, did I not? give the reader a break!” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.60, underlining in original). Livesay’s letter is dated December 6, 1968. Kroetsch replies several months later, on April 8, 1969, allowing validity to some of Livesay’s points, but objecting to her larger claims that formal daring is no more than infantile flirtation or trivial transgression: You are right, I guess, about my need to vary pace—and I think I’ve done it in this new book. But I must quarrel with you (and I have the advantage in that you don’t remember the letter you wrote me!) about your trust in nature over art. The novelist, Dorothy, has got to suffer his way through to some new possibilities for the novel. This conscious and deliberate risk-taking means he has to know what was done before—he has to trust the instinct that tells him the old way won’t work. A place like Iowa doesn’t teach “tricks”; rather, it teaches what has been done. And that is killing young writers at the moment for one thing, there are huge rewards (ironically) for doing again what has been done. (MsC. 334/84.1 3.60, emphasis in original) 40

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F Kroetsch was driven by serious ambition. Wanting never to repeat himself, he pressed to invent new forms and to find unused structures. He wanted to do what no one else had done. He was modernist in that regard possibly; possibly through American influence during his heady days in the States among those who were disposed to see the writer as a person set apart, to believe in exceptionalism, and to see writing as a high calling.30 Kroetsch most openly avowed those views from the late 1960s to mid-1970s when he writes with evident satisfaction that Márquez presents a breakthrough because he “has cracked the problem of how to tell a story in third person again” (The “Crow” Journals 29). A spirited Kroetsch admires Charles Olson for having “found resources that go beyond the discoveries of Pound and Williams” (Lovely Treachery 136). He wonders about whether three heralded poets, personally known to him, are “at a point of crisis, fearful they cannot progress beyond the plateau on which they find themselves” (Lovely Treachery 139). The vocabulary of threshold—breakthrough, stalling, surpassing—reveals a writer who is exceedingly serious and who sees writing at its best as a series of gains. While it is true that Kroetsch shuns Charles Olson’s “great man view of himself: the prairie radical democrat in me resisting,”31 he yet respects him for his lofty ambitions: “I admire the daring to go for greatness” (Lovely Treachery 148). Olson can be forgiven his vanities, given his achievements. Hence the solemn tribute, elegiac really, that Kroetsch writes after hearing of Olson’s death: “He was the living master poet of this time, and now he too is only his books” (136). In similar gravity Kroetsch pays homage to Pound: “Ezra Pound dead now. The old order done” (144). Kroetsch speaks highly too of Hart Crane’s “sheer, outrageous daring” to fail (149). The tributes are almost ceremonial and they enter a lexicon of the exalted—a realm of enterprise and belief. The writer—the real writer, the master writer, the writer who risks everything, as ideally a writer should—participates in a story of improvement whose goal is surpassing greatness, whose focus is daring and whose gradations are measured in sudden lurches through levels and conundrums. One thing is certain, however. Any writers worth their salt had better be wrestling with big issues of form. Bob Harlow was one of the few in Canada at the time who devoted himself to “a total and lifetime work.” He was in Kroetsch’s estimation a “genius” with his “goddamned talent” and a real

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“sense of what it means to gamble” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.11). Kroetsch continued to think of writing as cracking codes and solving problems, as his comments on Daphne Marlatt imply: “I don’t think she’s every really got past the greatness of Steveston. She has never found a way around that—and that kind of ‘moment’ when she’s hit all the problems” (Miki, “Self on Self” 133). The writer seeks to break through impasses. S/he is one who risks everything. The vocabulary is hardly the stuff of postmodernism. The talk of great risk and grand achievement may well be inflected by the turbulent times in America during the war in Vietnam. Those were Dionysian days, when a radical romanticism found powerful expression in thinkers such as Susan Sontag, Herbert Marcuse, N.O. Brown, and William Blake as prophets of the times. Kroetsch’s take on writing perhaps is coloured by Harold Bloom, whose arguments for vaulting ambition, titanic struggle, and epic succession caught Kroetsch’s fancy in the early 1970s (Lovely Treachery 145). “My concern,” wrote Bloom in 1973 in open disdain for the scribbling hordes, “is only with strong poets, major figures.” What characterizes these exceptional poets is a heroic “persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death” (5). A war among colossals then, locked in mortal combat. The Canadian Northrop Frye at the time offers an alternative and gentler view when he adduces that literature never improves or surpasses itself (possibly never regresses, either), it only changes. Frye’s narrative pays no homage to myths of monumental struggle and triumph, though it values the enterprise no less than does Bloom.32

F Whatever Kroetsch said about writing as an exacting pursuit, he professes an abiding love for the comic (which in him can be ludicrous and macabre) that reveals Canadians, including Canadian artists, in their sense of man’s littleness. Certainly that’s so often overwhelming in Canadian writing. It seems to me that you don’t get that feeling of supreme confidence that you find in some American writers, because there’s always that ironic awareness of man’s littleness. And there are political and historical reasons. Americans are “masters of the world;” Canadians have never had that experience. (Brown, “An Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 8) 42

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Others have discerned in Canadians a rueful humour, bordering on wisdom and often taking the form of ironic self-mockery. Frye in The Bush Garden (he is here speaking of early Canadian poetry) notes “a humour of a quiet, reflective, observant type…and clearly coming from a country which observes but does not act a major role in the world” (167). We can find the comic archetype of Kroetsch’s “little” Canadian, who has featured prominently in the work of, say, Duncan Macpherson of cartoon fame. We find that character, too, in Stephen Leacock’s “My Financial Career,” excruciatingly funny to those who see something of themselves in the bank customer’s anxious negotiations with an intimidating institution. In that world, large powers loom and squeeze their lives. Leacock’s brand of kindly humour offers the story of figures making their baffled way through life. Elizabeth Waterston may very well have had such examples in mind when she identified to her satisfaction “the peculiar brand of Canadian humour” as “wry, sly, rueful” (Survey 96). Our national sense of irony, Beverly Rasporich attests, means that Canadians, “living as a small power, only too well know the incongruity between the ideal and the real, between what is hoped for and what is possible” (110). Rasporich, invoking the well-known comedy team, Wayne and Shuster, as quintessentially Canadian in their humour, presents “their preference for parody and burlesque” as “expressive of a colonial mindedness that continues to haunt the Canadian psyche”: They are dependent for their laughs not on comic invention but incongruous imitation. Shifting between parodies of Shakespearean plays and American classics [their baseball skit is a favourite], Wayne and Shuster have implicitly demonstrated over the years the status of the country they represent, the middle position of a colonial power sandwiched between Uncle Sam and John Bull. (B. Rasporich 109) The point is shrewd. How do you write yourself into existence if you have so little sense of cultural worth? How do you dare to have a run at it? Canada (outside its own borders; internally is a different matter) has hardly been a colonizing or aggressive nation, but it has only recently left the ambit of one imperial power only to be situated near another enormous power that can be hard of hearing and swollen with self-regard. Canada itself is populated by people who know they exercise no military or political or economic clout in the world, and very little cultural influence either. It is perhaps to be expected that Canadians

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would themselves display few signs of assertion, much less any sense of being in charge. A person can speak, of course, but is anybody listening? The supremely confident Spanos in 1976 berated Kroetsch for his reticence: “You’re too fucking modest—or is it uncertain of yourself. [There is no question mark here.] It’s always hard to tell about you. I’ve not had that problem since I was about 27 years old when I decided that I was good” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.38). The Canadian sense of humour may well reflect a felt insignificance and help to explain that the reputed, and perhaps fanciful, Canadian modesty is as much enforced as elected. Margaret Atwood’s trenchant ruminations would indicate that that pretty much is the case, though in her analysis Canadians turn out to be considerably less affable and a lot more crippled than what other scholars have assumed: If laughter and audience in English humour are saying, “I am not like them, I am a gentleman,” and if their American counterparts are saying, “I am not like them, I am not a dupe,” Canadian laughers and audiences…seem to be saying, “I am not like them, I am not provincial, I am cosmopolitan.” Atwood proposes that the concealed self-deprecation, even self-hatred, involved in such disavowal, the eagerness to embrace the values of classes and cultures held superior, the wish to conciliate the members of those other groups by deriding one’s own33—these are usually attitudes displayed by people from oppressed classes or ethnic groups who have managed to make their way out of the group, alienating themselves in the process. (“What’s So Funny?” 188) When it comes to the “little” Canadian, Kroetsch remains conflicted. Those humble Canadians, Kroetsch muses, are maybe too proper, too timid to take their work as artists seriously enough: “From American writers I learned the high seriousness of the calling of the writer. The Canadian writer is tempted to let himself out of the agony of commitment by pretending he isn’t serious” (Lovely Treachery 54–55). When Kroetsch meets John Snow in the fall of 1975 he will write, almost disappointed, that Snow feels urged to make 44

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art commensurate with the place but is reluctant to risk the move.34 Kroetsch found the paradox defining of Canadians: “That pressure in the Canadian to do it, and to see at the same time some sort of futility at the doing. Never somehow achieving the conviction that achievement is worth it. The ha at one’s own working” (The “Crow” Journals 39). The hesitation was something that Kroetsch also felt. He tells Russell Brown that he himself “can never enter into that American self-confidence” (“An Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 16). He was too Canadian and too democratic, finally, and he never fully or finally bought into the narratives of monumental endeavour, however well he regarded them or sought to realize them in his own unassuming way.

IV

Through all the aspirations, there was always Kroetsch’s desire to find new forms for his own world on the Canadian prairies. A note for the League of Canadian Poets, “On Being Influenced,” which was published in a 1996 issue of Museletters, articulates something of Kroetsch’s attempts to write a poetry that might permit a homecoming: First off, I suppose, I found in the writing of poetry a direct engagement with language...Secondly, I was unable to be “autobiographical” in my novels and I wanted to address something then that we now call origins. I wrote poems of origin such as Stone Hammer Poem and The Ledger and Seed Catalogue...They were about our sources as we located them in language and reading and family and place and desire. (16–17)35 He was clearly after a structure that would answer his desire to speak innovatively within the conventions of literature, but that would also allow him to write some type of “chronicle of where you’re coming from” (MsC. 334/84.1 13.6). Kroetsch was supremely interested in the long prairie poem, something that might enable him to speak about home in ways that could excite him. When, in December of 1970, Russell Brown asked if he had thought of some day trying to write a poem that would compare in extent to Paterson, Kroetsch was not

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prepared to say yes or no: “Perhaps. Right now I’m interested in the critical and technical problems posed by the long poem—what makes it work.” He himself then asks, “once you take out narrative what do you use instead in order to structure a long poem?” (“Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 3). The next spring, on May 1, 1971, when Kroetsch gave an address to the Alberta School Library Council Conference in Calgary, he professed to being rededicated to his efforts: “For a long time I’ve been trying to write a long poem about Alberta, and things began to come in[to?] place” (“Writing from Prairie Roots” 7). “I would like, finally, to write the poem I’ve been struggling with for a long time, trying to find a way to get into the material,” he adds (13–14). The intention of writing a long poem has been percolating for a few years. A journal entry dated “Monday, September 3, 1973” suggests he is close to doing the writing: “I’m toying with the basis for a long poem of my own— ‘Winter Count’” (Lovely Treachery 47). The sentence is followed three days later by notes on a talk he is preparing for the MLA in Chicago: “it is the first task of the Canadian writer to uninvent the world...To uninvent the world. To unconceal. To make visible again. That invisible country. Canada. Our invisible selves” (Lovely Treachery 147). His work on the ongoing long poem seems to have begun in a real way. On April 24, 1974, he is under way: “Two days ago, got started on a long poem. After months, years, of waiting for the poem to begin itself” (149). Into that condition the poem appears as sought conjunction. “Kroetsch’s physical return to the West coincides with his beginning to write poetry seriously,” Ann Munton observes (“Robert Kroetsch” 73). It would be hard to disagree with her. The incitement for The Home Place derives from those remarkable years between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s when Kroetsch published The Stone Hammer Poems, The Ledger, Seed Catalogue, The Sad Phoenician, and most of the titles that were gathered in Advice to My Friends. In those pieces—disjointed, rambunctious, erudite, bawdy—his work explodes. In them and in related texts, he writes from a profound homecoming. He speaks to a “you” and of an “our,” and, later, he speculates that “postmodern came out of a sense of not-at-homeness...And for that period that we call postmodern, that not-at-homeness was very central to our experience” (Fakiolas). And so the effort persists: “As always—the impossible task of figuring out what home is, what home might be. How strange, then, after so much wandering in search of home, to begin to suspect that I never left” (“Becoming a Writer” n.p.).

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F The first words of The Ledger are “the ledger survived” (Completed Field Notes 11). Among the first of the lines in Seed Catalogue are these: “Into the dark of January / the seed catalogue bloomed” (Completed Field Notes 30). Survived / arrived / bloomed. The words proclaim (re)appearance and renewal. They inaugurate the poet into inspired gatherings of memories, documents, jokes, anecdotes, letters—texts from “home.” The sources are familial, regional, familiar, and they show little literary pretense. Out of such inauspicious beginnings, two texts of eminently practical and even mercantile purposes—ledger and catalogue— Kroetsch begins to find and shape his long poems of family and place. In them he writes his way home: Obviously in the prairies the small town and the farm are no longer real places, they are dreamed places...Ultimately, some remembered. Remembered certainly. Once it is memory, it changes entirely what it is. See, when that was the actuality of our lives we had realistic fiction, and we didn’t have any poetry at all. But now that it’s a dreamed condition, a remembered condition, an explanation of where we come from, a myth, now suddenly we get poems about that. You know, Wood Mountain is a scrubby little place. But as a remembered place, as a dreamed place, it has great resonance. (Enright and Cooley 36) The fourth poem in the series, The Sad Phoenician, calls on an orality from the place and time of Kroetsch’s upbringing. Its colloquialisms are immersed in the give-and-take of a pragmatic language that speaks among others and to them; hence their own kind of homecoming. The poems that The Home Place addresses—polyphonic, linguistically alive, formally venturesome, idiomatic, and highly oral—revolve around conspicuously “un-poetic” sources from Kroetsch’s prairie. They are folksy, endearing, entertaining, profane, charged— the language of his home in a way. In acts of culture making, he blows open possibilities for prairie writing with language that bursts into Kroetsch’s criticism too. His texts, of whatever genre, are in energy and play remarkably aural. That impetus spills into his criticism, as the final essay, “Noted & Quoted,” seeks to show.



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Kroetsch’s poetics and his cultural affiliations are of a piece. His abiding love for the local and his respect for contemporary theory prompt him into a body of writing that bears his unmistakable signature and his peculiar brand of prairie postmodernism.

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two

Or So It Has Been Alleged The Ledger

Aunt Mary O’Connor in Edmonton gave me that actual ledger of the family’s watermill in Ontario, kept in the 19th century, and I did recognize that I had a kind of “William Carlos Williams gift” there—that sense of the “discovered document.” And I spent a long time writing that poem The Ledger…I suppose, in ways, I was learning a technique there. —Robert Kroetsch in Miki, “Self on Self” 125 Manina Jones’s “Kroetsch’s Balancing Act” names Kroetsch’s happening upon a ledger as pre-text for his citational mode in The Ledger. Various signs of that intention are to be found in Kroetsch’s inclusion of other documents, but the old ledger is central to it. Kroetsch speaks in “Rocky Mountain Interlude: Our Lives Refracted” of Aunt Mary’s active role in providing that family document:

49

“This is for you,” she said. She drew a large, flour-stained book out of the bag. I thought the stains might be from her kitchen. But the book was the ledger kept in the family gristmill and sawmill back in Carrick Township, Bruce Country, Ontario, in the latter part of the 19th century. “You are the only one,” she said, “still interested in our family history.” She gave me the ledger. (MsC. 775/04.25 4.4) Page 31 of that journal contains a signature: Mrs. Mary O’Connor, Heisler, Alberta. The anointing seems replicated in words written on one page of that ledger: My grandson the poet: finding (in this ledger) a poem (MsC. 27.19.6) Kroetsch’s aunt, who plays a custodial role in the family’s narratives, bestows responsibility for them upon her nephew. On the upper-right corner of page 181, in the actual ledger that Kroetsch used in writing The Ledger, Kroetsch acknowledges the gift: Robert Kroetsch from Aunt Mary O’Connor in Edmonton, Alberta, 1969 The archives at the University of Calgary provide more signs of the quiet collusion. In pursuit of the story, on “April 12, 1971,” Kroetsch reconnects with Aunt Mary from his home in Binghamton: “I’m writing a long poem about Ontario... I wonder if you could find time to write down a little information for me?” Specifically, he is “writing a poem that centers on the old mill—and the Ledger 50

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you gave me” (MsC. 27.2.1). On “June 18, 1971” he writes again: “Your information about Theresa Tschirhart is absolutely wonderful. I’m going to use it in my long poem” (MsC. 27.2.1). Aunt Mary persists in his thoughts. On a sheet torn off a larger page Kroetsch has written a series of names, Aunt Mary’s among them. Pages 1 to 30 are missing, fairly neatly removed, and pages 141 to 180 have been roughly cut out of the family ledger, leaving ragged edges along the gutter. In The Ledger itself we read one account of the removals, which, Kroetsch told me, his Aunt Mary was responsible for: some pages torn out ( by accident) some pages remaining ( by accident) (11) The words perplex. How does such a tearing happen by accident, particularly when some pages apparently have been so carefully taken out? As for what pages are left “by accident,” what are we to make of that observation? Is this a symptom of neglect? forgetfulness? lost opportunity? bad judgement? haste? Whatever the state of maiming, what is left fascinates Kroetsch. “I studied that ledger—I cherished it—even as I read the chronicle of the destruction of a forest,” he later wrote in “Becoming a Writer Is Unbecoming” (18).

F The first words of the poem are abrupt: “the ledger survived.” Out of that chancy event Kroetsch derives or, rather, begins his poem. The Ledger is the first of Kroetsch’s long poems to draw on found texts, and it does so more heavily than do any of the others. He makes conspicuous use of the record from sawmilling days in Ontario, but he also visited the family site at “Mildmay, Ontario” on “Monday, August 25, 1975”: “The first settling place of the Kroetsch family in the New World. Circa 1830. Exactly 66 1/3 acres, including the farm and the watermill. A widow and her sons, six or seven, migrating from Bavaria” (The “Crow” Journals 37). Kroetsch also visits his paternal family’s place of origin in Germany. The archives contain nine colour photographs of what is identified as the “Kroetsch family watermill, south of Formosa, Ontario” and dated

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“1976” (MsC. 775/04.25 26.6). There are also photographs of Kotzendorf (MsC. 775/04.25 26.8), the small town in northern Bavaria, where the Kroetsch’s great great grandparents ran a watermill they abandoned in 1841 (MsC. 775/04.25 13.5). Those ancestors, transplanted into the New World, carried on the work they had been doing in Germany.1 And so the actual family ledger plays a major part in activating the poem. So do an array of other texts. The Ledger deploys lines from a popular song, bits of German (including a poem about death),2 a letter from Aunt Mary, sections from The Canadian Gazette and The Queen’s Bush (a history of Peel County), and several extracts from the Oxford English Dictionary that spell out meanings for the word “ledger.” Archival evidence indicates that Kroetsch also drew on, and possibly quoted from, The Canadian Settler’s Guide (MsC. 27.19.6). In citing so many “a-poetic” texts, the majority of them drawn from local narratives and regional records, and spread disjunctively across the pages, The Ledger strongly echoes one of Kroetsch’s favourite texts, William Carlos Williams’s long poem Paterson.

F A preponderance of found prose and an assembling of names, items, and numbers in imitation of the original ledger may have been cause for the pique with which Dermot McCarthy greeted the book in 1976. McCarthy evidently was looking for quite another kind of writing. He declares in derisive tones that The Ledger is no poem at all and that Kroetsch certainly is no poet. McCarthy finds that the text shows a lack of craft, is “rough,” “premature,” and “underachieved.” Kroetsch, he sniffily decides, is no match for “serious practitioners of the long poem,” proves to be no more than a “dabbler” who has “doodled” the manuscript. Among Kroetsch’s transgressions is a catering to a “fashionable” interest in ancestors. In sweeping dismissal McCarthy declares that Kroetsch’s effort is part and parcel with “the poetry of immigrant paraphernalia and ancestor-questing which is so honourable in the Atwood era” and amounts to no more than a clumsy agglomeration of modish tricks. McCarthy asks in clinching certainty, “what does it offer the reader interested primarily in poetry?” (MsC. 27.19.11). This then won’t do. The Ledger is the infantile work of an inept and opportunistic amateur who demonstrates neither the skill, nor the application, nor the maturity to pull off the job. He suffers also, it would seem, from an unhealthy provincial interest in family 52

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legacies, which amounted to no more than “paraphernalia,” the sort of thing a man of the world evidently would have no part of. McCarthy shows little sympathy for the cultural aspirations behind those searches, whose impulses Kroetsch has often explained: “Our genealogies are the narratives of a discontent with a history that lied to us, violated us, erased us even” (Lovely Treachery 63). Kroetsch wouldn’t have been surprised by the reaction. The notes and drafts he kept while working on The Ledger include words, written in ink, that sound almost as if they were written in reply to McCarthy, or someone very much like him: I am a Canadian poet I AM A CANADIAN POET. Yes, you heard me, you ____ing [word unclear] at the windmill book reviewers, you dogs in the manager professors of literary rumour, you [word unclear], you

critics. (MsC. 27.19.5)

Whatever Kroetsch’s outrage, in a letter of “April 19, 1972” to Robert Weaver at Tamarack Review he writes almost diffidently about his submission of the poem: “I realize you think I should stick to prose, and, further, this poem is quite long. But I feel at the moment that I’ve written a good piece—about an Ontario past as it relates to the present, in a form that for me is new and liberating—and I want Tamarack to have first chance to reject it” (MsC. 27.2.1.2). McCarthy couldn’t have been further in his sympathies from the idealistic publishers who received the manuscript at Applegarth Follies. On “26.3.73” Hilary Bates sends Kroetsch an enthusiastic reply: We received and read with great interest and delight your Ledger poem. It is exactly the type of submission which in wildly optimistic moments we hoped would come our way. The content is perfectly suited to Applegarth’s idea of publishing articles on regional & Canadian iconography. (MsC. 27.2.1. 5) This was the very thing they were looking for and it answered the creative potential of the press, which possessed a handset type and a letterpress:

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This long documentary poem about ancestors in nineteenth century Bruce Country may represent the most important new direction in Canadian poetry. By the author of Gone Indian, The Studhorse Man, and other major novels, this new work has been designed and set on Baccalieu letter Press (a different typeface for each voice in the narrative), then printed offset. (MsC. 27.6.12) What for McCarthy counts as deficiency turns out to be an enormous virtue for the small Ontario press. It is true that The Ledger is a long way from demonstrating those qualities that in earlier decades readers of poetry had learned to expect and to revere. McCarthy is probably right that the weight of a novelist’s practice can be felt within The Ledger, though in the view of the publishers The Ledger was a poem, if a poem of unusual sort. It was still a bit aberrant in mid-1970s Canadian poetry. Judged by lyrical standards, The Ledger doesn’t amount to much, and a reader who prefers such writing will be disappointed in it still. The poem nearly abandons inwardness, and it pretty much eschews metaphor, at least of a kind that might startle or bring a catch in the breath. The Ledger doesn’t opt for the sharp image either, nor does it present a sensitive figure who speaks in erudite allusion, steadfast sincerity, or mellifluous rhythms. Clearly we do not find a romantic poet speaking with unforced ease. Kroetsch’s poem in a sense is rough. Even early admirers of his poetry, such as David Carpenter, who has called The Ledger “one of Robert Kroetsch’s most important experiments in postmodern literature,” confesses to uncertainty about its success and hesitates to call it a poem (12). Carpenter also said of the earlier The Stone Hammer Poems, as if in awkward concession, that Kroetsch “seems destined to be considered by literary historians as primarily a prosefiction writer” (MsC. 22.2.2.37a). Len Gasparini’s review of The Stone Hammer Poems similarly discerned a wordiness induced by habits Kroetsch had acquired from working in prose fiction (18). Charles Tidler decided that Kroetsch suffers from “misunderstanding and mishandling the forms and content of poetry.” The Stone Hammer Poems, though it does include some “competent verse,” is “belaboured,” “lightweight,” and sadly prone to “fooling with various versions of ‘O. Canada’” (MsC. 27.2.2.38). Readers seemed taken aback with writing produced by a novelist who had sadly strayed from his true calling, and a few of them bemoaned Kroetsch’s interest in Canadian experience. Kroetsch himself, 54

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perhaps less than confident about what he was doing at the time, or in what readers might make of his writing, had himself downplayed his efforts in The Stone Hammer Poems. “I’ve never pretended to be anything but a quasi-poet, a novelist who writes crypto-narrative poems,” he writes to friend and fellow writer Bob Harlow on January 20, 1976. Yet, he objects to a term of dismissal that Harlow had passed on to him: “I’m a little bit surprised to hear a contemporary poet saying that poetry is song. I thought we’d settled it that poetry is poetry” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.11).3 Whatever it was that Kroetsch was writing, both Douglas Barbour in the Toronto Star for January 17, 1976 (MsC. 37.2.2.39) and David Carpenter in CV II (MsC. 22.2.2.37a) spoke well of the first books of poetry. Barbour’s review is brief but perceptive, Carpenter’s long and more detailed. Carpenter does an excellent job of showing what Kroetsch is up to and what he has accomplished. There were other admirers. On January 5, 1976, Spanos had written to rave about the collection: “Both Peggy and I say that The Stone Hammer Poems are your best work. They’re absolutely stunning. The voice is the authentic K. voice—and it rages with cosmic tragic laughter” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.38). Uneasiness will haunt the reception of Kroetsch’s publications over the years as, one by one, he adds poems to the ongoing collection that for convenience’s sake he came to call “Field Notes.” In speaking of the intergeneric texts that follow The Ledger, Kroetsch will invariably call them “long poems,” stretching the term to include sections that were not obviously “poetry,” perhaps not even to readers whose sense of form was unusually accommodating. Kroetsch evidently had in mind the cumulative effect of placing “prosaic” material within a larger structure where it can acquire greater reach and resonance. The long poem for him became a supple form that stretches the resources of poetry by wringing possibilities out of a large patchwork of material—some of which would probably not have made it so fully or so honorifically into related long poems by, say, Eliot or Pound. Out of that poetics Kroetsch wrote to Andrew Suknaski on May 10, 1974, to say that the long poem can house material that might not stand on its own: “I’m not quite persuaded that the enclosed poems should be published separate from the mother text. Where does a long poem get its energy? I’m into the long poem in a big way, teach a course in it, and want to see the book. Sections lose sources, lose connections” (MsC. 334/84.1 5.17). He urges another poet to dare “a total, world-making poem.” He urges expansion: “I mean, there’s so much of you that you’re excluding from the poems...I mean, goddamn yes, world-making. That’s

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what I mean. Intend. Write fifty poems, then. Let them stick to each other” (MsC. 27.5.2.270). Inclusiveness and adjacency are what’s called for. Aware that readers might balk at what in Kroetsch’s poem they are reading, Brick Books, successor to Applegarth Follies, forthrightly addressed the issue. This statement is posted on the press’s website as of December 2015: The Ledger is a foundational book-length poem in the Field Notes series that Canada’s top literary bullshitter has now declared Completed. Be that as it may, The Ledger has been in continuous demand since its first publication in 1972. This documentary long poem about pioneering in Bruce County, Ontario makes the debit-credit form of accounting into a force-field that holds the pros and cons of settling a new country. If you begin these pages wondering what makes them poetry, feel free to shuck the term. Robert Kroetsch’s poetry generously offers a reader enough space to become a writer. Go ahead and read yourself in. The publishers might have taken heart from “New Directions and Old,” an early response from John Cook. Cook focuses on the quest as it spirals into the foreground: “the poet watching himself search, watching himself write, and finding some pleasure in the irony of his self-regarding posture.” The text, Cook proposes, “speaks of the urge to register, to list, to find a balance in the commerce of life.” As “clerk of the imagination” Kroetsch “takes delight in noting” and with “grace” pays special regard to the shadowed world (38). What in The Ledger Kroetsch fashions—much of it anecdotes, lists, quotations, happened-upon material—takes him on a trip with no logical sequence and no apparent end. Kroetsch comes close to the ideal rhetorician that Gerald L. Bruns has with dazzling eloquence depicted. This rhetor makes do with what’s before him: Rhetorical improvisation is related to embellishment and ornamentation or adornment; it is an art of doing something to what has already been done…By working between the lines or in the margin, or by using the text as a point of departure or pretext or as a program of intervals…It begins instead with what is received, which it then proceeds to color, amplify, alter, or fulfill, never to abolish or forget…Romantic improvisation begins with a blank sheet of paper; rhetorical improvisation begins with a sheet of paper on which a poem or score is written but which contains to the 56

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knowing or the artful eye large and indeterminate areas of something left unsaid, unsung, or tacitly unfinished. (Inventions 147) Or mis-said, Kroetsch would almost certainly have added. Almost certainly mis-said.

F More particularly, what can be said for The Ledger? A ledger. A setting down, a filling in of the record, a settling of accounts. Also a setting off. For Kroetsch, the family record, and his own response, are both settling and unsettling. In seeking out the old family history, Kroetsch finds ways of taking stock and sorting debts. Where is he at, he wonders? Where does he stand? What’s the reckoning? What has been left him? From the very start Kroetsch considered his work as something more than a recovery of forgotten or misplaced material. The poem, he tells an editor, is for him “a fascinating venture into problems of form and material” (MsC. 27.25.14). We find a fuller, almost vehement, version of Kroetsch’s thinking in a letter addressed to David Antin on October 5, 1974, when Kroetsch was co-editing boundary 2: Your talkpoem becomes poem as pure content. It is not a solution to but an avoidance of the problem of form. In art I look for the tension of opposing forces: the form itself, and with it the force, the energy within the form, that threatens to bust the form apart, kick it to pieces.…4 Your stance is a naive one. Naive in its avoidance of selection in its concern with the pleasure of hearing one’s own voice rather than one’s language... Naive, finally, again, in assuming that to talk about writing a poem is to write one.5 Kroetsch then adds, suddenly, words of rejoicing: “I like your reckless recovery of narrative into poetry” (MsC. 27.1.9.77). Whatever reservations early readers might have had about The Ledger, it is clear that Kroetsch thought he was onto a serious venture. The Ledger elects a poetry whose characteristics for the next thirty-five years or so will leave their traces in successive stages of an ever-expanding poem.

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What Marjorie Perloff has said about John Cage could be usefully transposed to our understanding of The Ledger. Cage’s work goes “unrecognized as poetry” because of a “general inability to dissociate ‘poetry’ from the twin norms of self-expression and figuration” and from an unwillingness to accord significance to the “temporal and spatial arrangement” of material on the page (Poetry On & Off 301). In the poetry that Perloff prefers we would not find the sensitive poet pouring out her soul, nor a concentration of image and metaphor. We would take pleasure in a flaunting of the material and graphic resources with which the poet makes meaning. But working as Cage does “does not mean that anything goes, that anyone can be an artist, that any random conjunction of words or sounds or visual images becomes art.” “What it does mean,” Perloff explains, is that “the ordinary” world “can provide all that the artist needs to make ‘something else’” (305). That something else—a poetry of the commonplace and the seemingly trivial, perhaps—permeates The Ledger. Kroetsch opts in The Ledger, and in many later poems, for mixed entries brought by contiguity and by an interrogating voice into persistent and intensifying ironies. A gathering of parts to be overseen by a presiding figure will be central to his poetry, though it is less disjointed, less multiply-voiced, and more supervised than is, say, Williams’s Paterson. The first edition of The Ledger, designed and handset by Michael Niederman and Hilary Bates, and printed in offset by Michael Niederman, makes brilliant use of print technology to heighten its effects—Perloff’s temporal and spatial configurations. The publishers painstakingly use topography, typography, and other graphic means, to the point of producing the German-language parts in Gothic script and a variety of other fonts to delineate the sections. Kroetsch speaks enthusiastically of the “eloquence of typeface” in thanking his publishers on April 26, 1975: “It works, it works. A poetic complement to the poem. The language of language” (MsC. 27.2.1.27). The Applegarth edition also makes creative use of large pages to dramatically spread entries across their surfaces. The result is both visually pleasing and expressive of the mixed voices as they talk and listen to one another.6 Kroetsch cleverly celebrated that splendour in an undated letter: Hilary, a librarian, a word-hoarder who has made captive great trays of the alphabet itself, Michael aware of the pictures that words make on a page, aware of the perfumed temptation called ink, as if he has escaped past (through, beyond) mere meaning to other dimensions of what 58

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print is: and Jill (you) herself the figure out of the North insisting in the (against the affront) face of all that print that HANDwriting is the only truth. (MsC. 27.2.1.28) The Ledger in all of its incarnations assembles its documents and activates them within a questing structure that leads the narrator to familial relations and to New-World concerns. The issues were of no small consequence to Canadian writers at the time, however impatiently McCarthy and others may have viewed them. Douglas Barbour favourably draws out the cultural significance of the moment: “The Ledger provides a fascinating glimpse into both Kroetsch’s personal past and his response to it, as well as to our collective Canadian inheritance as it can be seen in the lives of this family that immigrated to Ontario and eventually moved on to settle in the West” (MsC. 37.2.2.39). The poem represents a movement toward recovery then. It also reactivates texts that have lain dormant. The citing and positioning of the found material—the prosaic material some would say—sparks it into “saying” more than in its original moment it surely would have “said” or meant, or been taken to mean. In The Ledger Kroetsch writes from a belief that a reality is “there,” despite our doubts about the wobbling uncertainties of our language. For him there is a world we can seek and that we need to respect. His statement about what is left or what can be found of the past, whatever reservations we might share about accessing it, leads to an important part of his family’s history and the country’s past. To set aside the attempts as naive or to rule them untenable may be to surrender to whatever cultures wash ashore, and to accede to whatever powers prevail. Knowing nothing for sure, we need not spurn what interventions Kroetsch has made in his poem. The Ledger asks us to see through the triumphal rhetoric of imperialism, and to hear beneath its loud proclamations important and unheeded stories. Small stories. Local stories, we might say.

F The columns in The Ledger bring material into collision and remove from the original texts whatever harmlessness they might have once seemed to possess. Kroetsch sets sections side by side, vertically and (more radically) horizontally, to make or let things happen. He would soon have noticed patterns as he

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positioned the findings and added his glosses. This is set against that, that made answerable to this, the alternations taking place in non-stop reciprocity. Back and forth he goes. Back and forth the reckonings shuttle. They don’t quite add up. They don’t gibe. They don’t, not though the historical record has become so quantified that, as Kroetsch has put it, it seems “as if the world might be counted and measured and weighted” (Marshall 44). The Ledger allows us to ask why the world should be so unreflectingly assessed. It asks with what consequences our days are counted out and our work is brought to calculation. The doubts and resistances take the form of radical asymmetries. Using a structure that normally would register balance, Kroetsch tips the scales and shakes the anomalies loose. No neutral compiler of raw data, Kroetsch cooks the books. It is his chosen role as inspired auditor to decipher the old accountings and to fill in some of what is missing from the record or unread within it. With gathering interest he makes his own deposits: his own memories, personal associations, the speech of wife and daughters, material from his research, uncovered texts, anecdotes, jokes and puns and oxymorons. He may sound unguarded when he gazes in discombobulating astonishment: he can’t believe his eyes, he can’t believe his eyes. But he cannot take things at face value. His appraisal deposits figures into a new exchange, though they still bear, inevitably, an older stamp. When he seizes the books and sends the figures into circulation, he defaces the old currency and at times reveals it as counterfeit. In a way, he invites us to see where spending has gone amiss, what credits and debits remain, what lines of credit are overdrawn or unaccounted for. His irony acts implicitly to discredit and to “correct” the record as unforeseen tallies emerge. Kroetsch is perfectly prepared to redeploy and to doctor what he has come upon, setting it beside other passages that cause us to reread all of them. What “quotations” survive in the long poem are not tightly constrained by fidelity to source, though they do follow parts of the old ledger closely. For the most part, in handling the documents Kroetsch shortens and compresses (e.g., the entries for 1880 are reduced from ten to four); clarifies; modernizes (by using lower case); simplifies (by removing one column); selects (by deleting a lot of material); and transposes, invents, rewrites, and repurposes. He could be working from incomplete or inaccurate notes, cursorily kept with the intention of later producing a semblance of the records. It is also possible that Kroetsch had trouble deciphering the actual entries; they are not 60

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always easy to read. Alternatively, he may have been working from memory, or crabbed notes, and been liable to produce his own gaps or “errors.” These explanations sound a bit improbable considering Kroetsch’s apparent access to the actual document. There is a more likely reason: he consciously altered the entries in order to simulate their flavour without being bound to them. Whatever the explanation, the “quotations” are not constrained by literal fidelity to source, though they are meant to catch its spirit. Kroetsch achieves the effect through several devices. Most basic perhaps are the prominence of dates; the precise citation of dates; the frequent use of numbers; the use of the ditto mark; the keeping of tabs, including a tabulating of money owed and paid; the addings and summings; the laconic entries supervised by dates and names; and the notes ascribed to named people in the nineteenth century. The moves illustrate Kroetsch’s awareness that he is writing a site of contest and creation. Refitting the material undermines the documents as sources for irrefutable reality. Mostly, Kroetsch would have been asking, what “works” in the poem I am trying to construct? The aesthetics behind what he chooses, and what he decides to do with it, would have been paramount. The design ensures that the facticity will be undermined. In the narrative of his quest, foresight and serendipity also work their effects.

F Much of the time the speaker acts as respondent. He does not especially serve as the originator who we once would have considered the very essence of the poet. Kroetsch eschews the role of poet-god, opting for acts of inspired research to ferret out material and release it into the energy field of The Ledger. But his purposes are always literary, alert to the potential in what he happens upon. Chance and accident lead him at almost every turn. Sometimes he is puzzled, or delighted; on more than one occasion he is appalled at what he comes across. Other times he is pensive. Always he is actively rummaging and arranging. The effect has not been lost on readers. “Thanks for letting me see The Ledger,” Dennis Lee writes to Kroetsch a few years later. “It’s a kind of writing I have never tried myself, and I feel a kind of naive, small-boy-at-magic-show astonishment at the number of turns, riffs, changes, and other suchlike you are able to produce” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.50).

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F Despite The Ledger’s appreciation for the family’s life in an earlier century, it is far from a rural idyll. The ancestors have made deposits, and the poet lives off the interest, true. Part of his purpose has been to hold up the past to our appreciation, and to demonstrate what the actual ledger has banked against the future. Kroetsch’s poem credits the past of his family and his family’s community. With ambivalence and sometimes humour, Kroetsch inscribes those bits of ancestral history into his poem. He portrays the most colourful ancestor, the old battle-axe Theresia Tschirhart, with comical affection. So too he depicts Henry the gentle carpenter, and his worn neighbours hoping for the comforts of a chair and the pleasures of a beer. Yet they enjoy no immunity from doubts and second-guessings that Kroetsch sets in motion. Though Ann Munton appears to read the settlers’ invasion as simply necessary and even beneficial to a narrative of renewal (“Robert Kroetsch” 109–10), what is needed, The Ledger reveals, is a gentler response. In raising the issue The Ledger is probably the most openly political of Kroetsch’s long poems, and it is far more invested in that world than is, say, a later title such as Excerpts from the Real World. One of the eminently un-poetic texts which The Ledger takes in claims that it will make “no effort or pretension to literary merit” (Completed Field Notes 26). Coming upon this passage from an early history of Ontario, a reader of Kroetsch would find something suspect in its rhetoric. At the same time it is hard to read the words without wondering how they might apply to the Kroetsch family ledger that looms across his poem. The quotation seemingly points also to the book which Kroetsch himself is writing, his The Ledger, the book that houses the old family ledger, and many other texts. The disclaimer, “no effort or pretension to literary merit,” turns us to the literary status of Kroetsch’s own work. Once the demurral is heard as metalingual it provides an amusing gloss on The Ledger itself. No effort is needed? None whatsoever? None, possibly, none evidently if some of Kroetsch’s first reviewers are to be believed. Yet, The Ledger clearly is written out of a strong sense of literary ambition, and even a little bravado. The connection is strengthened when the words reappear a few pages later. Neither entry can then be heard as simply providing information. Kroetsch intensifies the effect by setting the second instance in unusual ways. The short lines, double-spaced, vertically widened, placed to the right of the page, and wrapped in parentheses, guarantee that they stand out and offer something that, though 62

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it is the “same,” clearly is “different.” The iteration and the material use of the page discourage us from sliding past the words: (with no effort or pretension to literary merit) (26) Insisting, yet again, and in altered shape, that there are no such ambitions, none whatsoever, the poem guarantees that the claim will be brought into greater scrutiny. Kroetsch applies the method again when he quotes a passage of blind boosterism which proclaims that “private business” and “property” are the pioneers’ finest accomplishments. Kroetsch relines and realigns another claim about the continued contributions of “a specimen of the self-made men who have made Canada what it is.” He arranges the passage down the left-hand column: (specimens of the self-made men who have made Canada what it is) (15) The near repetition is enough to arouse mistrust. The words are brought within a resistant discourse provided by the speaker, who intervenes in the texts he compiles. Resituating the words provokes them into greater significance. The small suspensions at the line endings would seem to register a solemnity, and perhaps a self-importance, of a kind we observe when pausing over weighty utterances. The ambiguities created by the juncture allow us to read the lines as if they contained a comma. When a line speaks not of “the self-made men” but of “the self-made,” the for-the-moment shift of the hyphenated adjective to noun conveys a largeness of claim, a rhetorical puffery that bespeaks of aggrandizement, if not colossal egotism. We are speaking of the “self-made” here, not simply the “self-made man.” What could be more impressive, or more god-like? These pioneers well could be samples of the self-made man who worships his maker, iterations perhaps of God Himself. The progenitors of nationhood have not simply “made Canada what it is,” which is to say shaped its culture and fired its aspirations. In monumental acts of creation they actually have “made

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Canada” itself. That at least is what the lines allow in their momentary completions. An overweening sense of self is conveyed by the layout. The moves are not metaphoric, they are syntactic and graphic. But they thicken the text and release its potential. The repetition and realigning induce us to (re)consider what might constitute literary merit. In as much as we respond to Kroetsch’s structure and hear the words doubly, we would be sharing with him a facetious comment on skill and savvy in his own work. The excerpt must have come as a happy find for him, for it allows him to anticipate the very complaints that his text provoked. We are then prepared to read with like care the quoted words that follow the disclaimer. They avow an intention “rather to present a plain statement of facts of general interest” (26). The unstable double-voicing provides a wonderful opening. The author(s)—the quoted author (and the quoting author?)—would seem resolved to speak clearly and truthfully. The plain and simple facts, we read, will “bear upon the past growth and development of this wonderfully prosperous section of the Province, in such manner as to render future comparison more easy, and offer to the rising generation an incentive to emulation in the examples of the pioneers” (27). Avowing a desire to serve the public good, the original and secondary speakers unwittingly incriminate themselves, and the passage becomes more and more ironic as it invites us “to render future comparisons [as in Kroetsch’s poem?] more easy” (26). There can be no plain statement of facts here. The examples we are invited to admire and to emulate begin to sound more and more questionable. Reframed within Kroetsch’s poem, the annexed language migrates a long way from whatever assumptions may once have lain behind its original purpose. Once Kroetsch gets hold of the words we can, as we say, see right through them—the words and the pioneers, alike. The ancestors after whom we are asked to model ourselves were, we read, “self-reliant” folks of “indomitable spirit and true manliness” (26). These may have been virtues of a real and necessary sort at the time. Kroetsch himself seems deeply indebted to the exemplars, at least for the book of the ledger that he engulfs within his own Ledger. But what of their consequences, what does he get in exchange? What are we left with? What becomes of the inheritance we are asked to embrace? What do I owe you? the narrator repeatedly asks, as if confounded. Or indebted. How about the single-minded dedication to “material wealth”? What of the “progressive enterprise” that “conquered the primeval forests”? 64

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What of the pioneers’ status as members of “a noble race”? What in their “lives and deeds” is it that “will shine in the distant future” (26)? The inflation of language to speak of nobility and manliness culminates in what amounts to a battle cry: “To the Saugeen” (15). The resounding speech legitimates a drive for wealth and possession. It promotes as champions those who would seem to bring light into a thick darkness, endorses the confident and heady rhetoric of progress, affirms the self-satisfied terms of race and gender. However, given Kroetsch’s extensive ironies, we are not taken in. The section, which in matter-of-fact brevity reports that the son of one of the patriarch’s was hung for murder (18), provides a fine example of guilt by proximity. It lies directly across the page from reports of the settlers’ giddy and easily realized accomplishments, so idyllic were their circumstances. In the crossing and fusing of lines, Haag’s murder and execution itself seem bizarrely to have happened with neither effort nor pretension. The syntactic ambiguity prompts other readings. The murder, or the hanging, in turn appears to have been either cause or consequence of the hanging. The strange collisions and creative dislocations bring the self-congratulation into shaky standing. The tactic is aided by the speaker’s skeptical and wondering stance. Accident and inadvertence play their part in reassessing the record. Committed to narrative, “Kroetsch” goes looking. He is constantly amazed by what he comes upon. “I’ll be damned,” he says (14); “I can’t believe my eyes” (17, 18, 23). The declamations emphasize a pattern of discovery and, not long after the fact, reacting in past-tense retrospection and present-tense surprise. They also increase our readiness to find the historical reports less innocuous than they once may have appeared to be. By interspersing among the proclamations his own curious and shaken responses, Kroetsch brings them further within a resisting irony. That he chooses to contend social and cultural constructions by such means does not discredit his practice, or the level of his accomplishment. Nor does it lessen the postmodernism of a mongrel vigour that would be unthinkable for greater purists than he.

F From time to time the narrator comments on the relationship between the columns. In two separate entries he writes: “(it doesn’t balance)” (11); and then: “(IT DOESN’T BALANCE)” (12). The second clause, in upper case, evidently

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conveys a heightened realization, the magnified letters bespeaking escalation: Yes, I saw that it doesn’t balance but now, my god, now that I think about it, it really DOESN’T balance, does it? Or: it doesn’t BALANCE! Though the lines contain identical clauses, they are unequal in weight and they vary in meaning. The changes advance the clause from informational to expressive purposes and take us from a suggestion of mild surprise to the profession of outright astonishment. Kroetsch continues to pile up the material, and we continue to monitor his updates. Some of the citations, or apparent citations, may seem to offer little reward. Mere numbers, we might decide. Nothing but names, names everywhere. There are personal and family names, lots and lots of them as Kroetsch fills in the lines of ancestry—a small community of names he recites into the poem. Who are these figures, anyway? And why should they matter to us? There are toponyms too, in a proliferation that in pioneering days had begun to swarm the maps of Ontario and write displaced Europeans into the New World. There are also names of tangible things. It is hard to say quite what makes the following passage so effective, so lovely really, as it rolls down the left margin: to sawing Butternut " " Pine " " Basswood " " Birch " " Soft Elm " " Rock Elm " " Cedar " " Tamarack " " Maple " " Beech " " Black Ash " " Hemlock " " Cherry (20) In appropriating the bookkeeper’s convention, Kroetsch directs our attention across the page to the names of the trees, which are in turn further foregrounded in title case. The ditto mark allows the nouns, if only for an illusory 66

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moment, to stand as if unattended and unbeholden to a sentence. Virtually ungoverned by suppressed invisible transitive verb which would render the named trees as object to the pioneers, they appear to enjoy a status of their own. Only marginally modified in this list, the tree names appear to be almost freed from the impingings of axe and saw. The implements are almost hidden by the lovely icons that tick down the page. Pried free of grammar, the names of the trees in the hardwood forests of Ontario appear as if unsmothered by other words, as if outside their ambience. The names are foregrounded so distinctly they become almost new, asking of us a response that is not dulled by habit, which is to say a not-seeing that comes from taking things for granted. Visually they are self-sufficient—these nouns, these trees—unembellished with adjective, inured to adverb, unheeding of verb, unbesmirched by article. Lifted into attention, they approach what Barbara Godard in Heideggerian flourish has called “the world’s fullness” that comes from “the insistence that being-in-the-world is first and foremost a creative intentionality, a turning to things-that-are in order to express and articulate them” (11). Kroetsch’s inspired adapting of bookkeepers’ conventions then would provoke an appreciation for the marvellous (list of ) diversity and plenitude to be found in the “primeval forest.” More alarmingly, the ditto would imply that the work of sawing goes on and on—repeatedly, relentlessly, systematically—not to be stopped, no need to mention. The clipping of the phrase, “to sawing,” would admit an ideology of efficiency—no word to spare and no time to waste. The ditto, devoid of actual words, would point to an action impelled by an inertia of its own, one that virtually eclipses human intervention or perception or qualm—epic and heroic in one understanding, destructive and a bit mad in another. One thing is sure: the words do not “speak for themselves.” Words never do, they can’t. Lists need narratives, require circumstance, depend on contexts, to take on full meaning. And these particular words, chosen and arranged by a wily author, and duly authorized by him, clearly do not in themselves possess those powers. They don’t, not even though Kroetsch himself on occasion has spoken as if truth can be sprung from beneath a cover of guile and self-deception: Wiebe “lets government records and legal debate and newspapers and memories and journals speak for themselves” (Lovely Treachery 63). This obviously won’t do as unqualified claim since it sets aside the role that Wiebe plays as intercessor and arranger. It would be a mistake,

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however, simply to deny the spirit of Kroetsch’s argument, for he, like Wiebe, seeks to pay homage to a world that is “there” but unsatisfactorily read or damagingly unread. But the trees. That wonderful list of trees, so strikingly set off—the basic poetry in thus naming the things of this world. In an “‘artistic’ removal of the object from its usual surroundings,” proposes Marjorie Perloff, an author is able to “recharge its potency, the object itself being ‘unimportant” (Wittgenstein’s Ladder 11). The actual object is crucial in The Ledger, however; we don’t have any old names. Is it the sheer number of names, the varieties, that appeal to us—a cherished and fulsome naming, a felt plenitude in their recitation, laddering down the page like that? In the neat and self-contained column we perhaps intuit an intactness, a hint of what is untouched, not yet hewn. In ceremonies of naming we would understand a measuring of the things of this world that have not been reduced to the logs and timbers and planks and boards and shingles and tables and beds and chairs and gallows and mills and scantling whose names scatter across the poem as the pioneers are “Shaping the trees” and turning them “into,” “into,” “into,” “into,” “into.” The pioneers have wrought the transformations by using special powers, evidently, for theirs is an art of making change and of making themselves at home. They were “raising” barns and they were refashioning the world for their domestic comforts. The efforts, we see, could be laudable and the results reassuring. One pioneer, John O. Miller, is offered a seat, a beer, to ease his aching bones (14–15). Henry, on quiet days at the mill, on wintry days, made furniture for sale to the thriving inhabitants who intended to stay. (18) The settlers haul off stuff from the primal forest so that they might find ease. The acts came to trouble writers in 1970s literary Canada. When Kroetsch wrote The Ledger a fascination with ancestors did not preclude authors— Margaret Atwood in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, among them—from closely inspecting what they did and what they represented. In Kroetsch’s treatment his ancestors and their compatriots are in their own way heroic and sympathetic; they also are disconcertingly destructive. 68

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F It is plain The Ledger is elegiac. In midst of Kroetsch’s growing agitations, the poem commemorates what has been removed.7 In brief and rare passages about those losses, The Ledger breaks into what it seems possible to call the lyric. What lies on the edges of spreading rapacity and mindless destruction the narrator-quester calls “the chaos.” We read of its synonyms in a sequence of phrases that linger on a shared preposition: in the dark night in the beautiful forest (26) “You MUST / marry the terror,” Kroetsch writes (24) and in felt urgency writes again in a centred and concluding line: “You Must Marry the Terror” (28). It is not clear to whom we might attach that slippery “you”: His distant and dead ancestors? We the readers? Kroetsch himself in self-address? Canadians? People in general? Kroetsch’s words perhaps talk more of what is recommended than what is sought, and what is more symbolic than practical. The advice circulates in macabre humour around a rip-roaring predecessor, a holy terror if ever there was one. Kroetsch calls her a “ringtailed snorter” (24) and a “ring-tailed / snorter” (25), she who married and buried three men, she who would settle for no less than what she asked. “Owing that woman money / was a mistake” (25), Kroetsch notes in one of his witticisms. A person can almost feel him wince. He goes on in sardonic mood to explain that she “Went to church more often / than was necessary” (23), as if one could hedge on piety. The mention of “terror” speaks within a comedy of domestic intimidation, but it serves a second function. It speaks of a need to face the chaos before it is razed to the ground and its creatures hunted to extinction by those proud to have “conquered the primeval forests” (26): you must see the confusion again the chaos again the original forest (20)



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The “terror” remains within us, and around us—in the unacknowledged and denied recesses of our psyches. It is that which we must “marry.” When Kroetsch talks about “chaos,” it would seem unlikely he is thinking about a terrifying and utterly incomprehensible condition. Arguably he has in mind what the word meant in a pre-Socratic way—as denoting “Nature.” It would then refer to something prime, or “original”—the undomesticated, perhaps, the unsettled world somewhere outside or along side of an ordered and familiar world. The word “chaos” would designate experiences that are not governed by reassuring structures and settled understandings. It would represent disturbance or uncertainty (“confusion,” we read); whatever is not openly regulated, but not, however, what is irrevocably monstrous. It seems fair to say that in The Ledger (and in many subsequent poems) Kroetsch does not restrict himself to the self-regarding writing that some critics have been pleased to find in him. In a 1991 review of Completed Field Notes, Terry Whalen argues against those who have decided to see in Kroetsch no more than a “free play of signifiers.” Whalen makes a case for another reading of what Kroetsch actually has done. He proposes that “Kroetsch has always been more of a tentative postmodernist than have been some of the zealous obstructionist-postmodernist-poststructuralist-deconstructionists who think that true wisdom in all matters literary starts with throwing out” the outer and tangible world (74).8 I am similarly proposing that in The Ledger Kroetsch writes out of a sense that a reality is “there” in a sense, one that, despite our sophisticated doubts about the precarious state of language, we can appreciate. Access to “it” remains uncertain and contentious, of course; it is coloured, always, by responses than can only be mediations, versions of “it” if you will. That’s true, critically true. Still, inconstancy in reference need not make meaning impossible. It would be unwise simply to deny that by consensus we do use, need to use, words to point and designate, however provisionally or inadequately. Even in poetry. Manina Jones has discerned in the complex and conflicted meanings that Kroetsch makes available to us a writing that is subversive in both serious and playful ways. It is also representational and anti-representational. Extrapolating skillfully on Dominick LaCapra, Jones proposes that every text is both “documentary” and “worklike,” by which both LaCapra and Jones mean that any text is positioned in its “literal dimensions involving reference to empirical reality,” and in its “critical and transformative” actions. Jones 70

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reads Kroetsch’s text as eminently amenable to those distinctions. Its mix of referential or empirical language, and creative or generative language, produces a larger text that operates by “relativizing without completely discrediting the ‘documentary’ dimension.” As bookkeeper, Kroetsch “preserves and revalues the monologic, functional, referential unity of the historical account,” and as respondent he serves as “playful interpreter of the multivoiced ‘worklike’ linguist potential of the document” (Jones, “Kroetsch’s Balancing Act” 61). It would be hard to find a clearer or more satisfactory explanation of what Kroetsch’s text is doing.

F And so we read the poet’s unhappiness in the despoiling of the world. An amusing account of a spelling bee, which would have been part and parcel of the pioneers’ time and place, allows Kroetsch to move deftly from orthography to semantics. A word, “threnody,” which, the narrator reports, “would do the trick” in mowing down a few contestants, comes to register disappointment for what has been lost and destroyed: Threnody: a song of lamentation. (27) The double booking that characterizes the journal enables Kroetsch to lament a discrepancy between debits and credits. At one point he names the binary within terms of arrival and departure. By adding the missing items (missing from the original ledger, and missing in the New World drastically altered by the pioneers, that is) Kroetsch names the costs:



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arrivals: the sailing ship arrivals: the axe arrivals: the almighty dollar9 departures: the trout stream departures: the passenger pigeon departures: the forests arrivals: the stump fence arrivals: the snake fence arrivals: the stone fence (16) The move enquires into the terms of what the settlers are seeking. The proximity of the clear and immediately repeated binaries (departures / arrivals) enjoins us to think of the relationships as both temporal and causal. It clearly asks us to see that in the long run the aggressive stance proves wrong-headed. Import European technologies, impart imperialist ideologies that prize property and wealth, read nature as commodity to be exploited, think of Aboriginals as those who can be nudged or forced aside—The Canada Gazette promised “actual settlers” that “Actual occupation [was] to be Immediate and continuous” (13), no Natives to create a fuss, no “actual” Natives—and what happens? Trout—gone. Forests—gone. Passenger pigeons once so plenteous that flocks extended for eighty miles—gone for good. Once we think of the world as a place to be carved into bounded property and hewn into profit, this may be what we get. An entry from “Towards an Essay” dated “Sunday, October 31, 1971” spells out Kroetsch’s dismay: “The old/new struggle in the capitalistic West: land as earth and land as commodity. The connection lost, we find it” (141). When it comes to such art, there’s no accounting for waste. The provision of brought and lost realities registers those consequences across The Ledger. The short lines, the staggered indents, the capitalizing and italicizing too, reveal something heightened and perhaps refined, markedly different from what it is we have just been reading. Their placement below the recitation of murders and off to the other side of the page, playing their part in strophe and antistrophe, suggest a precarious standing, as if the forests themselves were profoundly susceptible to the pioneers’ incursions. In the careful display of print, they appear to be marginalized, if not jeopardized. 72

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Kroetsch mounts a similar opposition in paradox. In order to “raise” a new order, the settlers need to “cut down,” to “burn,” and to “kill.” In further paradox “That they might sit down [on a chair made from local wood] / a forest had fallen” (14). Their ascendency is bought through violent reducing of the world around them. The mill-owning family diminishes and destroys what is there when they arrive:

To raise a barn; cut down a forest. To raise oats and hay; burn the soil. To raise cattle and hogs; kill the bear kill the mink kill the marten kill the lynx kill the fisher kill the beaver kill the moose (13) The recursive grammar, and the conspicuous parceling of noun phrases over to the right, set against verb phrases on the left, emphatically illustrate the contrasts. To the right sits the language of increase and domesticity; to the left stands the language of wilderness and depredation. The effect is strengthened by the distribution and duration of words. The left column rolls down the page with an inertia that seems unstoppable, a whole column in persistent refrain and holding tenaciously to the margin, not to be budged from the unnerving verb: kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. The verb gathers momentum as it opens each line, and each clause with almost manic persistence. It creates a chant threatening to hurl us beyond halt or reflection. In Kroetsch’s simulation of a ledger—this charged against that / this paid for that; this merit / that demerit; this benefit / that loss—we parse the settlers’ overwhelming iterations of credit and discredit. They inherit the earth and practice dominion over it in an unswervingly transitive grammar. Their clauses speak of doing things to the world and visiting human will upon it. The settlers play out

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their drama fully within the Subject-Verb-Object of the imperial sentence; at least in Kroetsch’s careful structuring they do. Skepticism can be turned on other features of the passage. “To raise” and “To raise” and “To raise” are all set to the right, and “cut down” and “burn” and “kill” are all aligned to the left, so that the topography accentuates the chasm that separates the pioneers from the world they confront. The verbs of interference present acts of unhesitating violence, their prominence delineating the annihilation of the forest. What Kroetsch once said in interview might help to explain how important it is that the configurations occupy the surface of the paper as they do: “I like composing a page in the sense of ‘weight’ on a page, the way you put the weight—like a small statement and a big statement, and the small statement daring to be as heavy as the big one. I like that sense of positioning ‘clumps’ of word-thoughts on the page” (Miki, “Self on Self” 135). His poems, Miki says, are so deliberate that they exist a long way from the processual practices that mark some versions of postmodernism, those that name it as organic and virtually unpremeditated. Kroetsch, agreeing with Miki’s promptings, says what he has written is “anything but process” (135). The term “semiotic” arguably would provide a better way of defining Kroetsch’s postmodernism in the first long poems, which are given to a fair share of forethought and revision. Immediately after the passage on animal slaughter, Kroetsch inserts to the right a two-line stanza (if stanza it is). Scored in italics, in ragged margins, and in exact replication, it can be heard as an answering voice: A Pristine Forest A Pristine Forest (13) A lamentation then? The lines seem also to register shock. Given the context, the second line would stress the narrator’s agitation (much as it is registered in the refrain “I can’t believe my eyes”)—a pristine forest! That pure. A quality then. The acts of lumbering figure as contamination, a besmirching or soiling. But then, also: “A Pristine Forest”! A quantity (and something more) then. My god, they wiped out an entire forest and many of its creatures, devastated a forest that up until then had been intact and untouched. The whole damn thing—gone! Gone bankrupt in reckless expenditure, the world in improvidence depleted, its riches squandered. This too is part of the narrator’s inheritance. 74

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How will the narrator spend it? The Ledger asks what is bequeathed within the taxonomies of gift and indebtedness.

F Kroetsch’s audit reveals a chilling inequity in the accounting. An early response is fairly subdued: “(it doesn’t balance)” (Completed Field Notes 11). He almost casually repeats the expression a few pages later (20). On two occasions he is mildly taken aback: “I’ll be damned. / It balances.” (15); “(I’ll be damned. It balances)” (14). The reactions at first appear to address simple matters of counting: the figures add up all right, who would have thought? Their math is not bad, nothing wrong there. But the whole structure of the ledger, in weighting one side against the other and seeking to tally all of the losses and benefits, serves the larger impetus behind Kroetsch’s text. It soon prompts disquiet about what kind of accounting this is, or what it amounts to. Over and over, The Ledger asks at what costs things are done. What balance is there to be had? What is it that is in dispute? We assess the old ledger’s numerical and mercantile figures, and in Kroetsch’s new ledger his rhetorical and literary figures. What is it, we wonder, to value the world in columns of numbers, dates, and names, to record endless calculations of debits and credits? What are the damages? we say, when we get hit with the bill. And what is it to have gone for broke and squandered our credit? Whatever Kroetsch’s attachments to his ancestors, he is writing from inside the ferment of dissent in the United States at a time when he is passionately engaged with Spanos, that “fierce intellectual” given to “voracious reading” (“Becoming a Writer,” n.p.), and thinking of postmodernism as a radical resistance to repressive powers. In that spirit Kroetsch asks what the figures can tell us of the world and our place in it.10 The pioneers appear strangely oblivious to the consequences of what they have done. To the right of the column that itemizes the murder of animals, Kroetsch quotes what could easily be a trivial and anomalous testimony. According to Father Holzer things couldn’t be better. So fine are they, he “declares,” that during his first nine months in the district (a time of gestation, the world reborn?), “they had only one funeral, and / that was of a man 84 years old” (13). The trees are wiped out and the animals exterminated, but the pioneers live on in satisfied and near immortality. In Manina Jones’s exemplary words, “The superficially ordered system of the ledger is shown to suppress

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imbalances of a fundamental sort, but the poem’s dis-ordered quotation of it suggests the differences of value that the rational balancing of the columns is erected to conceal” (“Kroetsch’s Balancing Act” 66). There’s no accounting for progress, not when it comes to who matters or what counts. We can make out the immense unknowing in still other disparities. One of the histories that Kroetsch quotes without explanation permits a disquieting awareness of what it is reporting. Its anonymous author is comfortable in his assumptions and expects that his reading of the world will square with his readers’: “Though very few families in this county ever suffered any inconvenience or annoyances from the aborigines, the Clements were rather roughly used by a wandering band on one occasion, who forcibly took possession of the whole roof of their shanty (which was composed chiefly of disjunctive) for the purpose of canoe-making” (Completed Field Notes 16). The story sounds innocuous enough, even kindly, and it is in its own way comical. However, Kroetsch’s placing of it in the midst of a long mixed-genre poem about invader-settler experience gets our attention and asks us to take a longer look. What is it, we then ask, for “aborigines” to be named as people who have not caused “any inconvenience or annoyances”? We might think that the “aborigines” would feel more than a little annoyance, at least some disappointment, at what is happening, and perhaps view the latest arrivals as the source of real “inconvenience” to them. To construct their dislocation as a matter of small annoyances to the settlers strikes one as oddly out of whack. Then there is the Natives’ confiscation of the birch-bark roof. The story is wonderfully funny and in its own way perhaps an expression of sympathy. But then we read these words: departures: the birch-bark canoe (ledger : a resident. Obsolete.) (17) The entry sharply refocuses the situation and we suddenly consider whose birch-bark it is, was, in the first place. Whose technologies and whose understanding stood behind the roof? The shift from roof to canoe hinges on that one word “birch-bark.” Speaking of “birch-bark,” the disjunctive structure would seem to “say,” come to think of it, how about this “birch-bark”? We step between 76

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the two worlds—the birch-bark affixed to the canoe, the birch-bark affixed to the shanty, and we surmise that the birch-bark canoe, which is so much at home in this place, in residence really, hovers on the verge of destruction. So, metonymically, do the longtime and earlier residents, who for millennia have made and used the canoe. The bark that has been taken into the farmer’s shed we then could imagine as thieved from those whose way of life depends on the material. The story is a bit sobering once we ask what the charges are. What’s the damage? There is certainly nothing funny about the census, presumably found, that Kroetsch inserts. In a very short passage he lays it out in chilling disclosure. It becomes clear for the indigenes that their days are numbered. This is what forms the small huge drama: Census, 1861: Township of Carrick: “Indians if any”

none (17) The passage opens in brisk confidence. The snappy identification (“Census”), the numerical exactitude of the date (“1861”), the invoking of an imported institution (“Township”) and the force of proper and European noun (“Carrick”) establish the signs of duly constituted authority needing no further explanation or justification. The laconic entry that follows—“Indians if any”—demonstrates a ready presumption about the legitimacy of the census. It asks for what it is its prerogative to expect. Almost in the same moment it allows that “Indians” may well have been removed from the district. The category (“Indians”) is opened only to be immediately brought into uncertainty. The brief phrase, “if any,” chillingly raises doubts about the answer. The instances or names or numbers (of “Indians”) becomes designated by a word of half-hearted possibility—“if.” The vague and subsuming pronoun, “any,” supplants what could have been, once would have been an enormous series of nouns and numbers, a lot of actual and individual people. The entire category apparently has now been voided.

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The blank space that follows speaks powerfully to that condition. Why such a gulf? we might wonder. The gap adds no information, why not remove it and nudge the words up? For one thing, it reinforces a sense of difference in the voicings. The spacing may originally have derived from juxtaposing lines taken from different sources, the first within, and the second without, quotation marks. The first line seems to be guaranteed by an act or figure of authority, one whose words enjoy the endorsement of quotation marks. These are the words, the very words—simple, brief, directing—of someone granted the right to issue them. An anonymous agent, entitled to seek and to expect a response, activates the language of the bureaucratic form. In turn, the official fully expects that a respondent, unknown to him, some time later and at some distance from him, will provide the particular kinds of entries that are required. Kroetsch has brilliantly handled the entry by carefully selecting the passages and wedging them apart. The visual configuration is deliberate and highly functional, it does more than words alone could do. The reply that finally comes is devastatingly simple: “none.” What more is there to say? What do we hear, what can we hear, across that wide white space, but a choking off? It is a site of no words. The duration of unspeaking can be understood variously as a time of calculation (How many indeed? I need a minute to cipher.); or as a dumbfounding (Is there any need to ask? Don’t we all know the answer?). It could equally be heard as a sense of shock (I can’t believe my eyes: my god, there are none!); or felt as shame (I find it painful to report, hard to speak the words, but there is not a single one of them.) The dramatic suspension that follows the initial provocation leads the reporter, the speaker, and the reader across that expanse to discover with something like a blow that there is nothing to enter. They seem to have disappeared, the Natives, gone or unaccounted for. What understandings we form are induced by the arrangement on the page, which is to say by something other than and more than semantics. The handling of space powerfully conveys what has become of the first local people, in recognition if not in body.11 Most of the time, the citations in The Ledger are allowed to stand without introduction, or transition, or explication, though Kroetsch continually frames them within irony and suspicion. They are laid one after the other by a scavenger who has an eye out for things, an eye on things. He goes sniffing for scents, a whiff of ancestors. What he finds he adds to his bone pile. What he turns up in his research and in his personal histories he dumps into the stash and scratches dirt 78

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over it. Keeps it for later. For the poem. The results of all that snuffing and digging and hauling and chewing is what in The Ledger generates interest and meaning. Archaeology. Kroetsch liked to call it—all those bone hoards he rummages in.

F The dictionary. The book of words, trove of troves. Encyclopedic, amassing. Book of books. It is the dictionary, really, that organizes the text and presides over its parts,12 as David Carpenter saw in his review: “The work has six movements, each keyed by one of six definitions of the word ‘ledger.’…With this six-part structure, Kroetsch is able to use his original ledger as a scaffolding for a wide-ranging meditation on the birth of vigorous civilizations, the rape of a bounteous wilderness, the vital severe lives and tragic deaths of its early settlers” (MsC. 27.19.11). What definitions Kroetsch springs from that document echo throughout The Ledger as the happened-upon thickens in interaction with historical texts, letters, extractions from the family ledger, personal anecdotes, jokes, family letters, wry asides, expressive responses. These are the definitions of “ledger” in order of their appearance in Kroetsch’s poem:

a. “In bookkeeping, the book of final entry, in which a record of debits, credits, and all money transactions is kept.” (11) b. “a horizontal piece of timber secured to the uprights supporting the putlogs in a scaffolding, or the like.” (13) c. “one who is permanently or constantly in a place: a resident. Obs.” (15) d. “the nether millstone.” (19) e. “a large flat stone, esp. one laid over a tomb.” (22) f. “a book that lies permanently in some place.” (26)

And these are what we find in the OED where we get additional definitions and more detailed examples, a different sequence of definitions, and slightly different wordings:

1. A book that lies permanently in some place. gen. Obs. 2. A horizontal timber in a scaffolding, lying parallel to the face of the building and supporting the putlogs.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

A flat stone slab covering a grave. The nether millstone. Angling. Short for ledger-bait. An ordinary or resident ambassador: also, a papal nuncio. a. A (permanent) representative; a commissioner; an agent; also, an ambassador of the Gospel. b. One who is permanently or constantly in a place: a resident. Obs. c. A jocular name for the cuckoo. 8. [a hodge-podge of examples without any new definitions.] It is surprising that Kroetsch made no moves on some of these definitions, angling and baiting for example, or these wonderful definitions, ripe with potential: a “papal nuncio,” “an agent,” “an ambassador of the Gospel.” How could he have overlooked the “cuckoo”? We readily hear how ironically and how richly the definitions circulate in Kroetsch’s work. In a book of death and loss—is not our author, by the testimony of wife and daughters, caught in a perpetual looking for the dead? (13)— each and every one of these meanings resonates with importance. The ledger as scaffold soon leads us to the (staged) hanging of Gottlieb Haag’s only son. The nether millstone takes us to the millstone that wound Joe Hauck up the water wheel to the smashing of his arm. The tombstone ledger connects with narratives about the deaths of three men married to Theresia Tschirhart, aka “Theresia Kroetsch Messner Hauck” (23)—and are not the partial erasures of her names emblematic of what might be lost and what retained?—and of her own burial on the lone prairie (25). Is not the book belonging to Kroetsch’s Ontarian family, stored now in university archives, and named also inside Kroetsch’s own Ledger, brought through facetious anticipation into a canonical state of permanence, a ledger of another sort? More chillingly, the ledger that once was a permanent resident (a lodger?) is now, alas, no more. Impermanence has come to the settler who, in the language of the poem, intended to stay. He who would stay has gone. That kind of belonging, being closely connected to the New World, has been lost it would seem, even for, above all for, those who had lived for millennia in the place, lost now or never known. And finally, the ledger, as book of final reckoning, alerts us to the stark reality of personal and familial death, of death in trees and creatures, and in

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a culture’s extinction. It also provides a sobering notice to each and all of us about our own inescapable ends. In a further wrinkle on the definition we are delivered in punning phrase—“a book that lies permanently in some place”— into a state of perpetual dishonesty. Or so it would seem: A man that lies permanently in some place. A woman that lies permanently in some place. A resident. Obsolete. The book of final entry. (26) Once we become obsolete, we fall out of residency and dwindle into insignificance, in effect reduced to an italicized and anonymous afterthought. All of us (settlers, pioneers, seizers of property, consumers, and abusers of the places we occupy, writers, readers) hasten death for the world. All this from opening a dictionary and letting the words fall onto the page.

F Kroetsch, we remember, wrote David Antin during the period of The Ledger to praise his “reckless recovery of narrative into poetry” (MsC. 27.1.9.77). Kroetsch is no less enthused about narrative in his own poetry. What probably is the most entertaining and freshest part of The Ledger occurs in the story about draining a lake. The text bursts free from its more deliberate itemizings and somewhat wooden citations. The change of pace provides a colourful story, a bit of legerdemain surely, that might satisfy readers who remain otherwise reserved about The Ledger’s merits. Kroetsch distributes the new narrative in bits and pieces across several pages (one part on 19, two parts on 21),13 wisely I think, so that we can come in and out of it with a sense of renewed discovery. The sections provide an additional reward, plunging us yet again into a pell-mell whirl of muddy waters, for stretches diverting the poem from its more documentary line. The story is vintage Kroetsch. There is plenty of energy, visible speed and urgency in the syntax, varied and effective rhythms, satisfaction in narrative, comical elation, joyful invention. Even a little myth-making. Vibrations of astonishment and hesitation, imbalance and determination, supervise the writing:



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Henry could hardly believe his eyes. But he sent the boy for a sack. And couldn’t believe. But sent the boy for a tub, for a barrel. (19) The duration and pacing beautifully convey the adjustments Henry makes. He is initially waylaid by what he sees; he then makes a move (something has to be done); halts / briefly, confounded (“And couldn’t believe”); then releases into action, the words arriving in greater permission (“for a tub” but then, caught in the excitement, the promise, why not?—“a barrel [Make that a barrel]” (19). From ambush to delight, Henry provides the trajectory for the speaker’s own exposures. From the moment of Henry’s delight the words let go in one long rush. Characters, released straight out of folklore it would appear, come “from up” and they come “from down.” They come “with” and they come “with,” their world thick with withness. They come to abundance. The recursions churn through the story, and the poem explodes from the pressure of their entry and their passage. They all come, all of those people: “Charlie Reinhart, Ignatz Kiefer, James Darling, Peter Brick.” Kroetsch’s “catalogue of the dead,” as he calls it, thinking of The Ledger, is an attempt to counter the silence and the absence that, in Kroetsch’s words, surrounds “these desperate little lists we make in our lives” (Marshall 44). All of them—all, all at once, come hurtling in, their names adding up, there’s no stopping them. They spring into action. Their verbs, transitive and forceful, convey the crazy release, a letting go in play and adventure: “they clubbed at the eels that skated on the bright mud. They lunged at the leaping trout. They pounced like bullfrogs after bullfrogs. And they swam” (21). The residents step through their personal names into a world that, like them, is jumping with high-voltage energy, the whole animal world alive in squirt and slither. The passage clearly is “poetic.” It even shows off a few images and metaphors. The eels are skating on “the bright mud” and, as for the neighbours, this is what they do: “they swam in the quick, receding flood” (21). The world is magically transformed in sweep and shine, the images strongly visual and visceral (such a sensory sense of quickening, of movement), the rhythms so perfectly shaped we could mark off the last sentence in traditional scansion. And that clause, about the swimming, the swift, withdrawing water: there’s a shiver of pleasure, reading that, isn’t there—hearing the easy speed of the 82

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first two anapests, and then an even-toned lingering in the two iambs of withdrawal? There’s plenty here—striking images, lots of images, and strong catching rhythms. There are also tropes, plenty of tropes to go around. Tropes abounding. Leaps of imagination bring the narrator to fanciful terms. The eels, metaphorically transmogrified, go skating and, no less fantastic, the children “screamed” in delight and oxymoronically (you’ve got to be kidding) “bathed in the / clean, the original mud.” They “stayed in the water” where they “usurped the fish” until, finally, “They rose, blue-eyed and / shouting, out of the tripping, slippery mud.” Usurped? Who’d have thought of usurping fish, in the water, yet? How would you usurp fish? The kids’ transformation is wondrous, a breach in nature surely, the mud itself so tactile it is “slippery” and so extraordinary it is animated to a trickster “tripping,” the kids’ own piscine metamorphosis captured memorably in their “blue-eyed” appearance. They cannot simply be pale-complexioned, can they? They cannot be merely cold, surely. If cold, would that make them stranger still, creatures from a muddy and watery underworld, brought to, or from, primal source, some mythic uroboros perhaps? The fish themselves, with their newly “quick gills,” are no less altered and so, in brash Kroetschean reversal, they “drowned for lack of water” (21). If you want lyric, if you want myth and symbol, you might find it here. Genesis, metamorphoses, innocence, dreams of inexhaustible life, an outpouring of dazzling image and metaphor, a flair for stress and pacing—it’s all there. Readers knowing of Kroetsch’s esteem for William Carlos Williams and how much he drew from Williams, particularly when Kroetsch was writing The Ledger, might at this point feel a twinge of recognition. Haven’t we heard this before? Well, yes we have. There it is: Paterson, Book One (46–47). In Williams’s long and, in moments, awkward poem people crowd “on the drained lake bottom” and watch before them “big eels, weighing from three to four pounds each.” Such plentitude in catching, there too: “everybody got all they wanted in a few moments,” “There seemed no end to the stock.” The “hoodlums and men” “Leaped into the mud and water”: The crowd increased. There were millions of fish. Wagons were sent for to carry away the heaps that lined both sides of the roadway…There were heaps of catfish all along the walk, bunches of sucker and pike, and there were three black bass on one stick…a wagon body was filled with fish and eels…four wagon loads had been carried away (final ellipsis in original).

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Williams’s world burgeons in heaps and leaps, increases in bunches and loads. It supplies the people with “all they wanted.” There “seemed no end” to the plenitude, when in “millions” the fish are piled “all along the walk.” The world reels in fish. And still there were eels, quick and beautiful, that “glided along the top of the mud in shoal water” and, chasing them, “the men and boys [having become creatures of water] splashed about in the mud” (47).14 What could be more obvious to the readers of The Ledger? Surely the scene in The Ledger owes its life to Paterson, as does so much in Kroetsch’s poem.15 One day, back from working in the Kroetsch archives at the University of Calgary, I asked Kroetsch about the story. I had been looking at his notes and early versions of the poem. He was surprised. “No,” he said. We were sitting in the faculty lounge at St. John’s College. It was February 16, 2007. And I had asked him, “Did you have Williams in mind there?” He was a little taken aback and didn’t respond right away. “When you were writing the pond-draining story?” He was amazed to hear of the resemblances. “Oh, no no,” he said. A gentle denial. No, this story, and some of the others, too, had come from his father. His father, legendary storyteller, liked to tell that one. And yet the connections are startling. Could Kroetsch have forgotten the borrowing? Forgotten his reading of Paterson? Or never been quite conscious of it in the first place? Did he blend the stories—Williams’s and his father’s—in recreating? Whatever the source for the pond-draining scene, the versions it went through indicate what readers likely would have guessed. Kroetsch himself is behind the stylistic flare. The first, or what appears to be the first, draft consists of one handwritten page that, like almost everything written in Kroetsch’s hand, cannot be easily deciphered. But it is legible enough to reveal a skeletal story. It mentions tubs, barrels, the arrival of neighbours, and the taking of fish, which are so “thick” in the mud (?) you “could have walked / on their — [unreadable word] bodies.” Later and more developed versions are typed. One of them appears on a single page, left-justified and indented a third of the way across the page. Its information is continuous and appears in one uninterrupted block, the words close to those that end up in The Ledger. Some lines referring to uncle, mother, and grandmother disappear from another draft; by that point the words get broken into two columns, one section to the left of the page and then the next indented half way across the page. On those pages Kroetsch jots a few handwritten notes (“develop”) and adds new lines about “the clear, original mud,” the children’s eviction of the fish and their total and irrevocable takeover 84

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of the water. Kroetsch’s wondrous words, “they usurped the fish,” now arrive (MsC. 27.19.5). By the time the pond-draining story takes its final form, it has been dispersed across a few pages. Along the way to that embellished version Kroetsch himself, it seems clear, has added the most flashy and most inventive bits. In producing the marvellous story of comical metamorphoses he also has worked over the father’s narrative for rhythmic effect and drama.

F In the end it is Kroetsch’s kind of bookkeeping that brings us The Ledger. The word is brought to a new accounting. A new numismatics. In Kroetsch’s wily ledger domain.16 His legerdemain. And there’s more. Lots more. There always is. Lots more where that came from. Go ahead and laugh. But there is. Lots that could be said. At all costs. So it has been alleged. Or so they said. so we have heard—



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three

Hearing Voices Seed Catalogue

So I was in Calgary in 1975, just poking around in the archives at the Glenbow Museum—and I guess I do have an archival instinct—and I found this old seed catalogue. That was like a stroke of lightning. I just knew, looking at that thing, that I had the other half of my poem. There it was, all I had to do was work it out. From there on, it began to elaborate itself. —Robert Kroetsch in Roy Miki, “Self on Self” 126 The margin speaks its one small change against the design of the center, and on that speaking everything turns. —Robert Kroetsch, “The Cow in the Quicksand and How I(t) Got Out” 83

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F It would be easy to respond skeptically to the recalcitrant writing in Kroetsch’s garden poem. What possibly can be made of this jumble, the compendium of forms and babble of voicings: anecdotes, kids’ rhymes, definitions, local jokes, reporting letters, homilies, confessions, chants, directions, summaries, pronouncements, demotic conversations, songs, legends, instructions, aphorisms, lyrics, first-person narrations, allusions, appropriated documents, prose, found poems, family stories, promotional hyperbole, harangues, advice, catechisms, elegies, reminiscences, point forms, epitaphs, testimonials, exhortations, sayings, art criticism, meditations, expletives, parodies, citations, proscriptions, riddles, letters of appreciation, helpful letters, yarns and tall tales, journal entries, metered lines, personal stories, advertisements, itemizings, and more? Not normally the stuff of poetry. What are we to do with the (often literary) references to friends, among them Lorna Crozier, Al Purdy, Sheila Watson, and Rudy Wiebe, as they are brought into play, without particular guide or annotation?1 What are we to make of the inclusions of family members? Who are they and why do they matter? What do notes on Hiroshige have to do with anything? Are they no more than detritus, loose baggage, “all that raw material” that Williams and Pound learned to incorporate (Miki, “Self on Self ” 124) to protect the poem from easy cohesion? Where is the unity in the poem? Not an idle question, really, nor even a particularly reactionary one. One answer is that however unusual the text is, it’s not wildly radical, not at least when it is set against the “language” poetry that has been appearing in North America for half a century or so. It’s not even very drastic alongside, say, Paterson, urtext for Kroetsch, with its long stretches of narrative prose, big hunks of even less obviously “literary” material, and even more eccentric use of the page as a graphic canvas, still greater jumpiness, and drastically missing deictics. Kroetsch’s poem is organized by an adult narrator who clusters memories and texts around issues of cultural expression; Paterson is far more drastically dispersed and cast loose from its narrator. Seed Catalogue is, however, unusual in prairie poetry even as it partly extends the work of others—precedents that would include what Andrew Suknaski and Anne Marriot and Barry MacKinnon, for example.

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F Kroetsch himself has told us a lot about the sources and purposes of such writing: “The Canadian writer’s particular predicament is that he works with a language, within a literature, that appears to be authentically his own, and not a borrowing. But just as there was in the Latin world a concealed Greek experience, so there is in the Canadian word a concealed other experience, sometimes British, sometimes American” (Lovely Treachery 58). It is hard to reconcile those assertions with what we hear from Daniel Creelman, who, troubled that orality might not accord with a poststructuralist reading of the world, supposes that Kroetsch fully agrees there is nothing to choose between the spoken and the written text. There is no difference, perhaps, if we think of words only as they operate solely within a linguistic system of texts. Big difference if, like Kroetsch, we think of anecdote and orality as embodiment of a region or expression of a situated people. If we aren’t to ignore his sense of words as operating within, and perhaps even taking their energies and their commitments from, a particular place or time, where does that leave us? There is a problem too if we think of texts as deriving solely from particular authors and only from printed contexts. For Kroetsch, orality serves to represent a world that has been occluded and that would continue to be set aside by arguments that disparage representational values, or logocentrism, or the expressions of a culture-in-waiting. What’s to choose between the Parthenon and the Heisler hotel? Nothing, supposedly—not linguistically at least. Nothing that matters, really—we have only a play of signifiers. Kroetsch has often claimed that regionalism depends upon a close connection between person and place. If we are to be successful we must be self-aware and self-conscious in using language (MsC. 334/84.2 13.6) and in finding a language that fits. What’s especially needed, he often surmised, is some narrative for those who feel invisible and who urgently need to read or to write themselves into existence. That line of thinking began to develop clearly in the early 1970s when Kroetsch was preparing a talk for an MLA conference. Take this statement, whose tautness and whose rhythm catches the force of his thoughts, as they accumulate and as he amends them in clarification or emphasis: “To uninvent the world. To unconceal. To make visible again. That invisible country, Canada. Our invisible selves” (Lovely Treachery 147). The passage slows into its recognitions. It moves, only to stop, and yet again stop. The punctuation measures out the gnomic power



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of the words. Kroetsch articulates the condition most radically when he claims that “Canadians do not ask who they are. They ask, rather, if they are” (Lovely Treachery 55). Crucial to regional literature, he argues, is “the spoken language itself, the many varieties of speech—tall tale, lie, curse, family chronicle, dirty story, song, sermon, prayer, whatever—the oral tradition which we somehow translate into a literary and written text” (MsC. 334/84.1 13.6).

F We begin with a well-known statement from “On Being an Alberta Writer”: “The great sub-text of prairie literature is our oral tradition. In the face of books, magazines, films and TV programs that are so often someone else’s, we talk to each other by, literally, talking” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 75). And these words from “Playing Dead”: “We are marginalized by the unspeakably full page of our knowing. History. Literature. America. Britain. Europe. The page announces itself as jam-packed, unalterably full; that is one of the strategies of the full page.” Trouble is: “we who are twice marginalized cannot forget, dare not forget, the unspeakably empty page. The page that is our weather, our rivers, our rocks” (“Playing Dead” 95). “On Being an Alberta Writer” presents anxieties about those antecedents: “Even at that young age I was secure in the illusion that the land my parents and grandparents homesteaded had had no prior occupants, animal or human. Ours was the ultimate tabula rasa.” “We were the truly innocent,” Kroetsch adds (70), aware that the clear and “unwritten” page does not exist. It has been already inscribed, and whatever settlers and recent immigrants scribbled there was itself an overwriting of a much older script. However unseen the earlier imprintings had become, the later scratchings were themselves faint, because only recently or not yet written. And so Kroetsch adds a note on the precarious nature of writing in Canada: “We write poems, in Canada, not of the world, but to gain entrance to the world” (Lovely Treachery 107). The problem finds memorable and humorous shape in a longer passage from “On Being an Alberta Writer”: There was an older boy a mile from our farm who, as we kids liked to put it, knew everything. He was so smart a lot of people thought he’d become a priest. I remember that he could recite the names and dates of kings and prime ministers from whomever was thought to be first to the latest. 90

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I asked him about buffalo wallows. He’d never even heard of buffalo wallows. But more: he made considerable show of not caring that he hadn’t heard. He was educated. My sense of the gap between me and history was growing. History as I knew it did not account for the world I lived in. Present here in this landscape, I was taking my first lesson in the idea of absence. (70) Kroetsch adds in almost angry dismay, “The authorized history, the given definition of history, was betraying us on those prairies” (71). The narrator’s embroidering brilliantly makes fun of the wrong-headedness even as he reports it. The folksy style deftly mocks the small manifestations of cultural imperialism. “I was very anti-European, against the whole European tradition,” Kroetsch confessed in interview (Miki, “Self on Self” 121). Kroetsch laughingly speaks about his early years as a professor, fresh out of graduate school in Iowa where his landlord, a professor of French, had come “very close to being offended by my sense of at-homeness in a world of pig farms and corn fields, and of football fans who did not aspire to walk the streets of Paris” (“Becoming a Writer” 14). Kroetsch, inspired by what he found in American writing, elaborates those feelings of antipathy: “I hadn’t even gone to Europe at that point in my life, I was resisting it. I was very sympathetic to that American notion of a new world— which is slightly different from the Canadian, I suspect, but I loved that sense the Americans had that it was a new kick at the cat” (Miki, “Self on Self” 121). Hence Kroetsch’s repudiation of what in 1976 would still have been admired: “Friday, July 9, 1976 Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan” O Word of Eliot we cannot believe you O Principle of Causality we cannot believe you O Verisimilitude we cannot believe you O Depth & Profundity we cannot believe you O Epiphany of Joyce we cannot believe you (The “Crow” Journals 58)

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Although the imperial pressure of England had diminished by the time Kroetsch wrote Seed Catalogue, it had not disappeared and Kroetsch counters an achieved culture that arrived full bore into his world. He mounts a spirited comeback to expose the kid in his sniffy complaisance. He so deplores the consequences of received truth (“education” and “history”) that his words make light of the institutions. What counts as “everything”—what it is that counts as encyclopedic, universal, all-inclusive, from “first” to “last,” alpha to omega—proves to miss a few things, important things if your own place is to mean anything. The boy who “was so smart” he might become a priest, it turns out, is not so knowing as he seemed to be, or supposed he was. He smugly parades his education (certainly not wisdom) and “made considerable show of not caring that he hadn’t heard” about local phenomena. The preening is excessively theatrical, Kroetsch lets us know, for the boy made not simply a show but a “considerable show” of pride in not knowing about the world at hand. Real learning concerns what has happened elsewhere, somewhere that is not Heisler, and it involves important people. Intelligence, learning, and power reside with an establishment figure, the priest.2 One way or another, the self-satisfied kid is endorsed in his assumptions. As if in retaliation, Kroetsch omits the actual names of kings and prime ministers. Whether British or Canadian, each and every one of them presumably exists in a place far from Kroetsch’s world and rather above it. He reduces them to mere and brief anonymity: “whomever was thought to be first to the latest.” The long consecration of proper nouns collapses into inconsequence. It gives way to one single solitary pronoun and its two reductive adjectives, “first” and “latest.” The devastatingly derisive “whomever” implies that the names that loom so largely for the smart young neighbour are eminently forgettable, hardly worth mentioning. Kroetsch’s own gesture comically undermines received knowledge by locating it in unidentified and therefore suspect authority. In his rephrasing, the smug kid does not announce who actually “was,” only who was “supposed” to have been, important. The passive voice works doubly, to present the kid as acquiescing in what he is told, and to serve Kroetsch’s opposition in mocking the acceptance. Though the young boy bears the brunt of our amusement, Kroetsch is after something more. The entire passage derides the exalted figures and those who unthinkingly participate in suspect legitimacy.

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The List

The page packed full, unalterably full. Utterly closed. Kroetsch there in the margins, mere gloss on the text. The Great Tradition. Consider a long section from Seed Catalogue: How do you grow a past/ to live in the absence of silkworms the absence of clay and wattles (whatever the hell they are) the absence of Lord Nelson the absence of kings and queens the absence of a bottle opener, and me with a vicious attack of the 26-ounce flu the absence of both Sartre and Heidegger the absence of pyramids the absence of lions the absence of lutes, violas and xylophones the absence of a condom dispenser in the Lethbridge Hotel,3 and me about to screw an old Blood whore. I was in love. the absence of the absence of the Parthenon, not to mention the Cathédrale de Chartres the absence of psychiatrists the absence of sailing ships the absence of books, journals, daily newspapers and everything else but the Free Press Prairie Farmer and The Western Producer the absence of gallows (with apologies to Louis Riel) the absence of goldsmiths



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the absence of the girl who said that if the Edmonton Eskimos won the Grey Cup she’d let me kiss her nipples in the foyer of the Palliser Hotel. I don’t know where she got to. the absence of Heraclitus the absence of the Seine, the Rhine, the Danube, the Tiber and the Thames. Shit, the Battle River ran dry one fall. The Strauss boy could piss across it. He could piss higher on a barn wall than any of us. He could piss right clean over the principal’s new car. the absence of ballet and opera the absence of Aeneas (Completed Field Notes 35–36) These words appear early in the poem, which appeared in 1977 (the reservations of some reviewers excepted) to immediate acclaim and growing influence. The poem was written out of an abiding distress: how to write a prairie poem under serious difficulties. How to write a literature in a world that provides few models and still fewer encouragements? How to speak in a world that is hard of hearing? Always: “how?” Not: “why?” That question is not even asked. The real question is: “how” do you do it? Procedural issues dominate the poem. How as: in what manner? There are troubles of another sort, too. How as: how is it possible? “How do you grow?” the text asks again and again, conveys the poet’s urgency in the re-petitions. The absences section introduces an unusual discourse, the list, which in unnerving length enumerates one kind of obstacle facing the would-be poet. This list, despite enormities of inertia, unlists itself. The pattern holds in a smaller way for another list in Seed Catalogue, a brassy collection of folk remedies (Completed Field Notes 38). The passage alternates between condition and cure. The terms in the corrective regime—oil, plasters, molasses, and cereal— are set (respectfully?) on their own, devoid of specifying adjectives or directing verbs. Yet the list threatens to disintegrate in discomfiting reminders of corporeal and rhetorical anomalies. Masturbation and constipation and similar acts of offence (“self-abuse” apparently being the most grievous) get named in the same breath as Mary and God the Father, and apparently require fulsome rituals of penance. 94

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In the absences section Kroetsch compiles a series of (mostly) proper nouns that identify a slew of items—exotic, impersonal, conceptualized—that are well thought of in leisured and established cultures, those faraway places with strange-sounding names. All of them are prior to Kroetsch’s time or beyond his place, and endowed with cultural priority. “I specially like the part of the seed catalogue where you listed the absences,” Miriam Waddington wrote to Kroetsch a few days after the book came out. “How true it is—a wonder any of us ever put pen to paper—it always surprises (amazes!) me” (MsC. 6.20). The items would have been daunting to the young prairie kid, no doubt, and later imperious to the more wary worldly writer. They sound immutable when we apply Gerald L. Bruns’s words to them: “The authority of any system is technical and intrinsic: once in place (or in motion), a system will appear to be self-constructing and self-operating, such that one can neither imagine that the thing never existed, nor that one could have ever been outside of it” (Inventions 92). The authority would simply be there, already proven and beyond challenge, for all time, for old langue’s sake, natural and inevitable as breathing—part of les grandes récits. We could think of the collision as the dynamic relation between “langue” as the given system that governs language, the “rules” of a language and literature, and “parole” as what resists the system and energizes it, what gives it flavour and colour (Lovely Treachery 19). The refrain, “in the absence of,” lands again and again on its completing nouns that it hammers into place. They gain weight as they complete line after line. They pack the page from margin to margin with what would have seemed to an aspiring prairie poet unattainable, perhaps even irrevocable. Their eminence attests that, apparently unaided by human intervention, they have been brought into regard solely by something called “time.” They “have stood the test of time,” we say, time whose mechanisms work as invisibly and as majestically as the mysterious hand that hovers over the market place. Kroetsch’s dismay with the received world is hardly peculiar among prairie writers. Wallace Stegner’s luminous and haunting book Wolf Willow speaks to the predicament: In the world’s old places, even the New World’s old places, not only books reinforce and illuminate a child’s perceptions. The past becomes a thing made palpable in monuments, buildings, historical sites, museums, attics, old trunks, relics of a hundred kinds; and in the legends of grandfathers

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and great-grandfathers; and in the incised marble and granite and weathered wood of graveyards; and in the murmurings of ghosts. (29) The page that Kroetsch opens is already written in, it is fully inscribed. Everywhere the would-be writer runs up against Roland Barthes’s déjà lu, or the great-given, as Kroetsch would call it. Graffiti is sprayed everywhere, the world is scribbled over, and everywhere it reveals an imperial hand. No small matter these letters: the prominence and presumed permanence in the larger world, the peaks rising in Olympian majesty above a sweating and fleeting existence. Alongside those eternal items what the poet has to offer exists in mere history and lamentable proximity. Its realities are exposed as gauche, mired in time, and cripplingly provincial. Lacking in almost every regard. Little wonder that Wallace Stegner’s list of “without”s so startlingly parallel Kroetsch’s: “I had grown up in this dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting, without sculpture, without architecture, almost without music or theater, without conversation or language or travel or stimulating instruction, without libraries or museums or bookstores, almost without books” (Stegner, Wolf Willow 24). A sense of what’s missing nags on the adult Kroetsch years later when in Seed Catalogue he assembles the names of the known and the grand. A sign of how much he chafed can be had in a letter dated “April 8, 1969.” Speaking to Earle Birney he raises the spectre of cultural inundation, and speculates on possible resistances: “I have long liked your ‘Prairie Counterpoint,’ though you seem to have stricken it from later records. In it you found a way of talking about that western experience, a way of finding depth and perspective…—it bridged the gap between our gut reactions to that fucking sun-crazed land and our literary conditioning” (MsC. 334/84.1). In Stegner, too, we hear the regret: Contradictory voices tell you who you are. You grow up speaking one dialect and reading and writing another. During twenty-odd years of education and another thirty of literary practice you may learn to be nimble in the King’s English; yet in moments of relaxation, crisis, or surprise you fall back into the corrupted lingo that is your native tongue. Nevertheless all forces of culture and snobbery are against your writing by ear and making contact with your natural audience. You grow out of touch with 96

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your dialect because learning and literature lead you another way unless you consciously resist. (Wolf Willow 25–26) Kroetsch’s answer is bold. He draws heavily on actual catalogues. The absences list, which generates its own form of catalogue, is conspicuous in magnitude and position, and would seem to be fully furnished. It shows every sign of confidence, of being known, stable, finished. Items could be added but what already is there, in place, is more than enough to do its work. What particular items are included contribute to the effect. Analecta of the sublime and the beautiful, the list bears all the inertia of the received and the sufficient. Its parts need no apology or explanation. Yet it is severely limited. The past, cast in the form of this list, cannot escape itself. All it can offer is more of the same, more of itself. Its very mode represents a state of narrative paralysis. Calcified in form and cultural bias, it can only addend, compile, pile on, amplify, stretch out a string of synonyms. That is the nature of a list: it can find no completion and it cannot outrun itself. It fills in a lexical field, but it cannot do much more than that. It provides inventory, but no real invention. Though there is no reason, no intrinsically formal reason, it should ever come to an end, and in that sense remain unbounded, graphically it seems fixed. Grammatically it certainly is. In a list of nouns what can there be but another noun? Among these nouns of near transcendence how can there be anything but another eminent noun? The form can never find its way to something else. The compendium as form is mostly positive when Kroetsch’s lists, and there are plenty of them, gather the things of his world, and hold them up to regard. This list, however, the one that recites items of enduring worth, is neither generative nor commemorative. Fortified by its likes, it resists departures and interruptions. What breaches the list are narratives that point in radically different directions. The pattern holds above all for those items that enter in cultural subversion of the cohesion. They call forth what within the realm of high-falutin’ European (and other exotic) culture would be marked as badly out of place, if not in bad taste. The insertion of the personal and bodily sullies the integrity of the passage. Why should it not? Literature, writes Geoffrey Hartman, involves “always a palimpsest or a contaminated form of some kind: a stratum of legitimate, sacred, or exalted words purifying a stratum of guilty, forbidden or debased words” (143). In Seed Catalogue abstracted world gives way to personal and corporal realities.

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Rude stories—mock confessions, outbursts of bravado, sounds of wonder and comedy—sweep across the poem. The home place defiles the products of an old and often print culture until it starts to budge and bulge out of shape. Each of the entries introduces a colourful and bawdy story, however abbreviated it may be. The bottle opener, whose absence the poet grieves (parodically in imitation of other, more “important” lamentations surely), occasions an anecdote about a hangover. The condom dispenser, whose unavailability produces a moment of hilarity (embarrassment, too), gives way to a slightly more sustained narrative about a young man’s protests of love and lust. The girl who, together with her nipples, has disappeared, gives rise to an even more developed story. The brief stories recount experiences as they are near at hand and participatory rather than distant and objective. Situation challenges system. Jean-Jacques Lecercle has something to say about such a situation when, in The Violence of Language, he identifies the “remainder” in language as all that is unusual, untidy, and disrupting. He diagnoses a paralysis at the heart of a list, which in Lecercle’s reading “becomes a little boring.” It is “too static” and “lacks action.” In response, any author fed up with the list can “load” the text with “personal memories.” When he does his “subjectivity tears the cosmos apart; it disturbs its regularity and causes unwelcome excitement…Suddenly…the narrator has an illumination: the key lies not in subjective control, but in letting language, or the remainder, speak” (117).

F Behind the noun, violence, is the verb, to violate. We want to penetrate the word, penetrate the image, and uncover story. (Lovely Treachery 108) How could those anecdotes possibly make up for what’s not to be had—resources upon which a poet in the past might have been able to draw? Clearly the verbs that wedge into the list in no way are equal in quantity or cachet to what is enumerated there. Yet it is these verbs that prove enabling. Eric Havelock has proposed that oral syntax is dynamic as opposed to the fixed nature of “achieved literacy” (41). In Kroetsch’s poem the talk of pissing, screwing, kissing, and drinking announces an energized occupation of the world, and threatens to dislodge the great-givens from the past. The grid unlocks when 98

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(conceptualized and proper) nouns give way to (disreputable and local) verbings: “a vicious attack,” “to screw,” “said,” “won,” “she’d let me kiss,” “I don’t know,” “she got to.” The disembodied world, forbidding though it may be, is exposed as enfeebled in its high-mindedness and tired in its purity. Into a set of generalized precedents Seed Catalogue injects a bawdy tumult of anomalies that make way for a “new introduction” (Completed Field Notes 29). The verb in Seed Catalogue plays a role that is drastically different from what it does in The Ledger, where it signals destructive and willful incursions into the New World. Verbs in The Ledger often register the decreative and depleting efforts of immigrant culture; verbs in Seed Catalogue denote the creative eruption of homegrown life. The differences have everything to do with the circumstances and purposes of the two narratives. John D. O’Banion helpfully for our purposes called the interaction of the oral and the written “The dialectic of List and Story.” By “list” he means to include “all forms of literal thought” and by “story” he means “to represent oral thought” (xiv). He amplifies the terms in shaded nuances across almost three hundred pages, but a distillation will provide some sense of his argument. In his analysis the list exists in space; it is discontinuous; and migrates toward the non-human; it is abstractly ordered; it is isolating and analytical; it divides and collects; it opts for abstraction and generalities; and it diminishes the role of its “speaker.” It operates in a timeless state (much like the list of absences, we note). Story is continuous, it exists in time, which is to say in history, and it is ordered by scene. It is integrative, more concrete; it is motivated by human concerns, and it foregrounds the narrator (14). The list works with small grammatical units, the story builds with the sentence. The list offers “fact,” the story provides value and understanding. Further, narratives are “tied to specific times and places” (29) and “their meanings are grounded in action and in the body” (45). Whereas the list migrates toward systems and “fact,” story moves toward personal and contextual explanations (55). Narrative operates as “the case enacted, embodied, the parts brought to life” (95). It attaches to the ongoing and shared word of human bodies and aspirations (147). In narrative we create ourselves, move listeners, and affirm our lives (185). In the disorders that we know as poetry, we embrace the very faults that system seeks to extinguish, we discover and retrieve the language of a lived life. Little wonder, then, that in Kroetsch’s letter to Antin he welcomed narrative into the poem.

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Anecdotes / Dirty Words

The exempla are forbidding in their cachet and inalterable in their “universality.” Into that world, somewhere beyond the reach of mere mortals, Kroetsch interpolates some startling particulars: the absence of a bottle opener, and me with a vicious attack of the 26-ounce flu … the absence of a condom dispenser in the Lethbridge Hotel, and me about to screw an old Blood whore. I was in love. … the absence of the girl who said that if the Edmonton Eskimos won the Grey Cup she’d let me kiss her nipples in the foyer of the Palliser Hotel. I don’t know where she got to. (35) There’s something a Kroetschean hero could miss. Against and within the compendia of what’s not to be had, a very different discourse emerges and the formidable array of unavailables begins to destruct. The eccentric texts to be found in Seed Catalogue, inauspicious though they might seem, are electric with life. A rackety and swirling world breaks in upon the still life. Kroetsch’s prairie, it turns out, is not the barren place so often depicted in earlier prairie literature or in readings made from elsewhere. In David Arnason’s sense of Seed Catalogue, “The absence that characterizes earlier writers is an absence of vegetation and life. In Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue…the absences turn out not to be defects in the landscape at all, but social and cultural absences” (“The Prairies” n.p.). Kroetsch finds beauty and plenitude and vitality in a world that others find scant. Though in the grand scheme of themes Kroetsch’s realities may seem small and marginalized, they are enormously alive—vulgar, raw, profuse, obscene—and they put a charge into the poem. Dirty words in the sacred books. In story, Kroetsch has argued time and time again, we become ourselves and we do so disruptively: “Every existing story, from gossip to the yarn to the novel to the sacred text, is full of desire and exuberance, violence and terror, facts and possible facts and contradictions” (“What 100

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the Kroetsch Said” 17). The stored nouns of magnitude and consequence, exempt from history and perhaps even geography, get pushed aside and the small narratives explode the structures of then and there. Gerald L. Bruns has expressed great concern about what happens when we set system before version, and see writing as “a system superior to every utterance” (Inventions 106). We need to realize “how contingent is the idea of a fixed, univocal, objective, plain, and infinitely portable meaning, that is, a meaning that is systematic rather than versional—a meaning that is never comprised by the situation on which it occurs, or by what lies next to it, or by what is hidden between its lines” (89). Troubled by generalized responses to the world, and its enmeshed hierarchies, Bruns calls for a behaviour that is more provisional and dynamic. Structurally, the small stories in Kroetsch’s absences list answer that call. They elbow their way in, disrupt the mounting litany, swarm it with personal experiences mired in time. Inside the accumulation of declarative phrases, the poet’s expressive and slightly vulgar language shakes the dominant style and revokes its grammar. The first-person and—this is paramount in Kroetsch—the second-person break in to displace the language of an almost invisible narrator. Kroetsch’s poetics of earthly life ensure that situational discourse threatens system. The structure of supposed dismay, followed by tongue-in-cheek disavowal, continues within the long and daunting list of fabulous European rivers—alas, none available to the aspiring poet. Not one. And yet, the list succumbs to egregious transgression. The affront is compounded by blunt repetition (“could piss,” “could piss,” “could piss”). There will be no hat-in-hand bemoaning here: the absence of the Seine, the Rhine, the Danube, the Tiber and the Thames. Shit, the Battle River ran dry one fall. The Strauss boy could piss across it. He could piss higher on a barn wall than any of us. He could piss right clean over the principal’s new car. (36) How sorry that local river would seem alongside the rivers of Europe, here enunciated in a full chorus of their names.4 None of these great and honoured rivers flows through rural Alberta, true. There is no Seine, no Rhine, no Tiber—none of those legendary and monumental rivers, none of their

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Olympian magnificence. Nothing but the piddling little Battle River, little more than a puddle easily and rudely spanned, and of no consequence it would seem alongside those grand waterways, which are elevated in stature, eternal in story, timeless in song. In time immemorial they flow, those celebrated waterways, their calm unperturbed by the negligible days of ordinary folk or the nibblings of history. No Thames either, sorry to say. No lines upon Westminster Bridge. No sublime grandeur, no courses stretching majestically from bank to bank, or sea to shining sea. None of that flowing magisterially on their way—lordly, unruffled, commandingly, testament to their nations’ enduring greatness, hardly imaginable in their magnitude and duration.5 They all make the list, their banks lined with resplendent cities. But so does the muddy little Battle River, the river no one’s heard of, small and unkempt and undomesticated, and utterly insignificant. So does the Strauss boy with his own unpretentious stream. This is the stuff out of which Kroetsch makes his moves. The unpretentious stories, the rude events of rural Alberta butt in, and in their own way answer the Old World exemplars. Well, the Strauss boy for one (he of the Strauss family, of “Blue Danube” fame?). What is important is that the Strauss boy (no sissy he) can piss right clean across—the words teasingly oxymoronic—the principal’s new car; could, possibly, as one with Rabelais’s character, “piss, full-bladdered, at the sun” (Gass 179). Who could not feel the rightness—to “piss right clean” and to speak bawdy irreverence in the face of sublime authority? The boy’s gesture on the banks of the Battle River, and by the fender of the principal’s car, and on the farmer’s barn, is, I suppose, no more than a pokey move in a negligible landscape when set against the grandeur of a mythological Europe. The Battle River is a mere trickle, almost no river at all. And yet the boy—heroic in his own way—is more than a match for it, more than adequate measure of it. What is called for is a thumbing of the nose, or other parts, at propriety. Of such unseemly acts are the beginnings of poetry on the prairies made. Kroetsch affronts the nearly ethereal world by brandishing bodily functions (sex, drinking, excreting). The poem forces our attention to the bare-nippled woman, she who is (or would be) exposed publically in a hotel of some repute. “Perhaps it is the body, first, that feels the place, the country,” Kroetsch muses in “Canada is a Poem,” written out of a decade of cultural aspiration. And so he can announce arrival in his own place: “Now, we break our silence. At last, we are here” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 35). The interpolations jam the list with colourful invention, jostle it with local idiom. The interruptions fit perfectly for, 102

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as Kroetsch proposes in another piece from the same period, “When the [old] language fails—then we hear the [authentic, local] language” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 34). Perhaps, Kroetsch speculates, “in the absence of traditional culture and its elaborated implications we fall back on our own experience” (“The Cow” 75). The energies appropriately take their release in rough diction (“screw” and “whore,” pronounced, in Kroetsch’s time and place as “whoo-er”). The folksy expression, “shit / we’re up against it,” wells from the very stuff Kroetsch would have heard everywhere in his boyhood community—an epithet that very nearly swallows hardship with a shrug. His own sources are as unpretentious, unassuming, and unrecognized as the prairie (would-be?) muses themselves; as is, for that matter, the very catalogue from which he quotes. In Manina Jones’s words, Seed Catalogue “encompasses much material that leads another life as discursive prose” (“Kroetsch’s Balancing Act” 114), which the poem provokes into new significance. Through Kroetsch’s “excerpting and contextually rerouting” (115) the material finds new life. The voices in Seed Catalogue propel a poem that at points is as much found as made. Eli Mandel clearly approved. Seed Catalogue, he has noted, “develops a stunning contrast between the absent models of the past—those eternal forms of desire—and the present scatology of prairie life: art as opposed to excrement; the gross experience from which the prairie town, uninvented place, has to be written into art” (“‘Life Sentence’: Contemporary Canadian Criticism” 17). Bakhtin would have cheered the swashbuckling jump and expenditure every bit as much. For him carnival laughter overthrows what is “always one-piece, serious, unconditional, and indisputable,” and destroys “all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value” (Rabelais 49). What is “finished, stable, completed, clear, and firm” (109) is besmirched with urine and faeces6 (147) (as it is most notably for Kroetsch in What the Crow Said). In polite and hierarchical societies, “Abuses, curses, profanities, and improprieties…refuse to conform to conventions, to etiquette, civility, respectability” (187). Kroetsch’s long poem seeks ways to disrupt what stands in the way of the New-World writing he wants to do. The choices are ideological as well as aesthetic. Even as elsewhere in Seed Catalogue Kroetsch laments, or seems to lament, an array of missing benefits; even as, elsewhere in Seed Catalogue, realizing there is no classical muse available to him, he declaims in mock, or not-so-mock, horror, “shit / we’re up against it” (37)—even then he quickly gets over any impasse he might have felt, or supposed he ought to have felt. The question is: what to do in such felt insufficiency?—no muses; no material

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of recognized merit; no models upon which to draw; few mentoring adults; no precursors to draw out one’s literary proclivities; no one to encourage a young poet. The adults mainly disallow or thwart his impulses. Their obstruction seldom if ever is malicious, however. Often it is comical or endearing and it brings them to a shaky befuddling. It remains uncomprehending or inappreciative all the same. There are no readers either: I wanted to become a postman, to deliver real words to real people There was no one to receive my application (Completed Field Notes 36) Though experiencing a lack of support and resources that poets in other times and other places might have taken for granted, Kroetsch briskly gets on with things. In contrast to the elegiac mood that accompanies the lists of losses in The Ledger, Seed Catalogue spurns with near rejoicing a past jam-crammed with things. The repudiation takes inspiration from William Carlos Williams: “Look at his beginning of Paterson with the three words ‘a local pride.’ A local pride is where you’ve got to begin, and we didn’t have a local pride. Because all the models were telling us we didn’t even exist. And that’s what I take from Williams—the lesson of a beginning of a local pride” (Enright and Cooley 36). Williams, whom Kroetsch, newly appointed professor in 1961, first taught in a graduate class on American poetry, showed a “sense of trying to capture our speech” and a “willingness to look at the ordinariness of life instead of ‘high subjects.’” He offered a “movement away from purity of form” and because he was “violently anti-Freudian,” he also, says Kroetsch in Olsonian mood, “showed how to avoid the ‘investigation of the interior’” (Miki, “Self on Self” 123). The outward, the vernacular, the low and local, the irregular and the impure, the errant and the aberrant, the radical disjunction of material, much of what seemed eminently “un-poetic”—it was through their lead in Williams that Kroetsch would find his way into The Ledger and then into Seed Catalogue, his major poem of the prairies. Kroetsch often posed the question, how do you write in a new land? It’s not an issue of whether he should; that goes without saying. It’s a matter not of motives but methods. But first there must be a clearing of the way. Kroetsch’s diagnosis 104

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will sound familiar to those who are versed in American literary history—a repudiation, or seeming spurning, of the effete and the overweening, which comes from somewhere in “the East,” usually England, and preferring of local and more rudimentary language. In Kroetsch’s version, the locals form part of a culture’s beginnings, what Eli Mandel has called “a dream of origins,” not real places but remembered places, “a dreamed condition, a remembered condition, an explanation of where we come from, a myth” (“Border League” 118). Mandel, thinking of what growing up in the Canadian west has meant, identifies “a mythology of west, and the writing self, the deep dream of a people we are dreamed by in the intercourse of pen and paper, word and world” (109). The argument, close to Kroetsch’s heart, advocates a fluid exchange between experiential and imagined worlds. “We are a people who have not dreamed,” he wrote in shock at a time when he was working on Seed Catalogue. “Imagine that” (The “Crow” Journals 45). Kroetsch’s poem embodies the explosive venturings of poetry in Canada of the 1960s and 1970s as they are enumerated in Eli Mandel’s enthusiastic account: For the aesthetics of post-modernism accompanies a poetry that to those trained in, educated as humanists, remains challenging to the extreme: a poetry of illusion, deception, deceit, duplicity; anti poetry, breaking apart forms and structures and attitudes about forms and structures; perceptual trickery, found poems, sound poems, concrete poems, yowls and grunts, chanting and howling, mystifying, mixing genres, indulging in forgery and lies, role playing. (“‘Life Sentence’” 16–17) In all its wild expenditures and formal perversities, the new poetry seldom if ever turns its back on the “real” world, however. Not to Mandel’s eyes it doesn’t, for it is “yet the most beautifully grounded in place and time, in the particularities of our felt life, we have yet encountered in Canadian writing” (“‘Life Sentence’” 16–17). There but for the yowls and grunts goes Kroetsch.

Violent Refusals

Seed Catalogue tells of a favourite cousin who dies bombing the German motherland during the Second World War. Kroetsch codes the horrific raid as necessary

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and as symbolic. The treatment is shocking, but it is in keeping with a vehement repudiation of colonizing forces that place Kroetsch’s world on the periphery and into the margins. Fuck the past, Kroetsch at his most iconoclastic has said, more than ready for “effing the ineffable” (“voice/in prose” 35).7 The snappy expression renounces both faith in inward power and original genius and imperial renderings of the past. He has written with pained dismay of how little his world counted in a book on history of the Second World War. “We were eager to read the completed shape of that story, and I bought and read one of those books,” he said. Yet That history of nearly six years of a world war had in it one paragraph on Canada.… For six years our Canadian lives had been dominated, shaped, determined by the war, and there in that text all our efforts made no mark whatsoever. That book, instead of giving me a sense of my story, a sense of my identity, made me feel invisible. (“D-Day and After” 142–43) Kroetsch depicts the cousin’s violent death as beneficial since it enables a creative renunciation of the Old World. Refusing the “already said” releases the poem into the renewal implied by the botanical metaphor that overruns Seed Catalogue and extends into Kroetsch’s unorthodox depiction of the bombing:8 A strange muse: forgetfulness. Feeding her far children to ancestral guns, blasting them out of the sky, smack/ into the earth. Oh, she was the mothering sort. Blood/ on her green thumb. (Completed Field Notes 44) Kroetsch’s is a double amnesia. He has “forgotten” his own past, lamentably; and he chooses to “forget” his Old-World past, liberatingly. Noticing so much of what is not there in the prairies of Kroetsch’s childhood, Laurie Ricou finds that Kroetsch’s “muse is forgetfulness; he lacks a story, lacks a past, lacks the epic poet’s confidence” (Rev. of Seed Catalogue 114). What’s needed is both a repudiation of the Old World and an enunciation of the prairies. The poem brings us to a second destruction—the razing of the local hotel in Heisler, the poet’s hometown. The hotel has harboured the fripperies of an 106

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Eastern upbringing and its presumed extensions—“satin sheets” and “embroidered pillow cases” and “tea towels and English china” and “silver serving spoons”—that an aunt has brought west in a hope chest from Ontario. What is one to make of the loss—these Eastern and bourgeois and fussy artifacts? What does the attempted import and its destruction tell us? Female aspirations blunted in a male world? Perhaps so. It serves possibly also as symbol of a future that is an extension of the past. Think of the scale of the dispossession: “Everything / in between: lost. Everything: an absence”? (34). A pattern of disaster and recovery sways through Seed Catalogue. Death by fire. Death by water too: “Adam and Eve got drownded—” (46). There we have them, the age-old catastrophes almost obscured within jokes and anecdotes. The narrator’s cousin bombs Germany, she with “Blood/ / on her green thumb,” “she [who] was the mothering sort” (44). The Heislerians happen upon ways of putting an end to the Old World, that fabled land, and they come close to calling it quits on social class. Still, once all that happens, what then? “Who was left?” (48). What do you do? If you are the Kroetsch of Seed Catalogue you get on with renewal. Bullshit is one answer—a brand new or scarcely recognized poetry. Gone are the troubadours; the jokesters have come to take over. What also remains: a fallen humanity (in a mythic reading, reminding us of Genesis and Milton); a trusting and naive humanity (the dupe of the childhood joke); farmers in rural Alberta of Kroetsch’s childhood and youth (the local and social); readers left to bring the poem into meanings for themselves. And more. The enigmatic ending leaves us with the open question. Kroetsch welcomes such catastrophes in the country’s literature: “Again and again Canadians write of destruction by fire, death by drowning. The physical literally goes back to elemental water and air” and “We return to the condition preceding creation” (Lovely Treachery 56). Felix Paul Greve has passed through that trajectory to be transmogrified by arrival upon Canada into Frederick Philip Grove, his heroes caught between the “silenced” old version of the garden (European in this case) and the not-yet-speaking new one. And, it seems to me, behind the not-yet-spoken garden, there is another myth trying to speak itself... I suspect the concealed story is that of the necessary death—the death, that is, out of one culture, with the hope that it will lead to rebirth in another. (Lovely Treachery 90)

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Hyperbole

Kroetsch’s answers in devil-may-care bravado. He celebrates a robust and anonymous poetry that he has lifted from the shared lives of prairie people: “Rebuild the hotel when it burns down. Bigger. Fill it / full of a lot of A-1 Hard Northern Bullshitters” (36). A regional vocabulary abounds. The word “hotel” stands as synonym to “beer parlour” and, more inventively, “A-1 Hard Northern” stands in its agricultural life as the actual name for the highest quality of wheat. The quirky naming provides fitting measure for the finest local poets, Kroetsch’s surpassing “bullshitters,” none of whom would have been caught dead making any such claims about themselves.9

F No Dictionary entry for “bullshitter” (alternatives) blusterer, blustery, blistery, blustered, blustering, blistered, bestirred, blusters, balusters, blusterous, blistering, blusterers Proximity/Merriam-Webster U.S. English Thesaurus No Thesaurus entry for “bullshitter” (alternatives) by-sitter Proximity/Franklin U.S. English Thesaurus No Thesaurus entry for “bullshitter” 12-11-07 (alternatives) belles-lettres

F A prairie town needs to knock the old furniture out of the way and clear the ground for the bullshitters. Too bad about the fire, the poet in his larger-thanlife way would seem to say. There has been way too much trouble in a world crammed with European apogees.10

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That at least is what the poem implies. The mad hyperbole is part of its charm: “I’m interested in the way people communicate legend to each other; often it’s what leads to the tall-tale tradition: the story has vitality; why not stretch it a little bit, make it a little better.” “It’s up to the artist, I suppose” who can “treat it in a comic fashion” (“Writing from Prairie Roots” 10). But that’s not the whole story. The renunciation is far from complete. Despite Kroetsch’s bluster, the Old World lives on, for good or bad, as Kroetsch knows it would, and as finally he needs and wants it to continue, under duress, in the tell-tale revisionary texts that he writes, his very poem, Seed Catalogue, among them.

F What’s needed is an innovative language, some colourful prevarication, a bit of flair and vitality. Against Havelock’s “achieved literacy,” the poem draws on what he calls “the spontaneity, mobility, improvisation, the quick responsiveness of spoken speech” (70) which is based in the body and sounded in its somatic rhythms.11 The bullshitters speak the language, the poet listens. Always listens. We have only to read Kroetsch’s homage to a prairie pub to hear the language venture through its stages: from information to overture, to evocation, on to analysis, and into celebration and commemoration: The trick is just this: to hear a pub. To listen is to recover our story, is to dwell at the centre again. Drink one day, from early afternoon to closing time: rejoice in the flow of sound, the building from quiet, from silence even, to the closing crescendo. Or go on a pub crawl: rejoice in the modulation from performance to performance, the nuance of soliloquy and diatribe. But always listen…Sorestad hears the laments, the tall-tales, the ironies, the indignation, the resignation, the sentimentality—but he hears it all together, finally. He hears, in the beer-talk of our daily lives, the shape of our living. (Lovely Treachery 17) Kroetsch’s testament invites us into a necessary immersion: to hear, to listen, to dwell, to drink, to rejoice, to go, always to listen. It is these processes, submissions really, that enable us to experience the sounds that Kroetsch stretches out in pause and motion. The readiness to listen allows us to



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appreciate the “modulation from performance to performance” and in “the nuance of soliloquy and diatribe.” No clumsy rowdies, these; they play their music in skillful measures. Through their words they are delivered to the heart of things. Kroetsch’s pub serves as both theatre and church, a place where the bullshit offers relief, but never final refuge, from imperious culture. Sometimes the language in that pub is inflated, sometimes it is maudlin, sometimes it turns bitter or aggressive. At times it becomes mumbling and incoherent, now and then menacing or mesmerizing. Much of the time it is comically inventive; and sometimes it is, to adapt a Kroetschean conceit, part of a sublime concert with fellow knights of the round table.12 It is important to realize that Kroetsch does not hear the language of ordinary people as inherently failed or as lacking in some essential way. For him it serves as generative source. It brings people through the ritual of community into contact and meaning: “Drinking a bit, the men. And swapping stories in a way that once again makes me realize where the method of What the Crow Said really comes from. I listen” (The “Crow” Journals 83). For Kroetsch there is no great difference between the linguistic resources at work in, say, ordinary storytelling and in what we call “literary” work. There may be differences in degree and concentration, perhaps, and there certainly would be in intention and distribution, some differences in sustained skill and creation too. But the language we use outside of literary texts freely uses literary devices and formal strategies. That is why Kroetsch’s flirting with deconstructionist arguments, his saying, for example, that he wants to avoid “meaning,” cannot be particularly useful in speaking about what he has done and what fundamentally he believes in, when it comes to the first long poems he wrote. Those who have worked in speech act theory, or in a Bakhtinian tradition, would be much closer to understanding what Kroetsch was after in those texts. For him, overwhelmingly, language is something whose significance gets realized in a diachronic, social, and interactive world—among speakers and listeners, as it swings among them, and as it reverberates within a social give-andtake, amplifying the dreams of those who join the conversation. In Kroetsch the second person presses, invites; it provokes and energizes; it renews, directs and redirects. It is there in The Ledger, Seed Catalogue, and The Sad Phoenician. It is there in his interviews and it is there in his criticism. Kroetsch listens to quiet voices too, and hears unassuming speeches: “As with rural people, the complexities and patterns beneath the formulaic speech. Almost the opposite of urban, where the surface is sometimes more complicated 110

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than what lies beneath it. But the text beneath the text…is at the root of our Canadian writing” (The “Crow” Journals 53). Sometimes the text is so negligible it is barely a text, but it speaks if we listen. Winter, Kroetsch writes in section 10 of Seed Catalogue “West is a winter place. / The palimpsest of prairie // under the quick erasure / of snow, invites a flight” (45). The prairies are not simply unlettered, they are, in Kroetsch’s world, written as a small quiet trace, though the vocabulary here stands in stark contrast to the explosive vernacular that drives the poem. Though “the poet himself” may leave “no record / of his having traversed / the land/in either direction,” and leave “no trace” of his coming and going, no more trace that is than “a scarred / page, a spoor of wording” written by a “pile of rabbit / turds,” the poet nevertheless “tells us” “where the track was” (39). What writing can be discerned is anything but monumental; it is barely legible and only faintly realized, but it offers the promise of fuller articulation. Before Kroetsch wrote Seed Catalogue, D.G. Jones had discerned in Canadian literature some such yearning for the unsaid and unread. Many poems, he found, acted as “prayers to effect a communion with all the inarticulate experience that remains unheard and invisible beneath the slogans and conventional formulas of the day” (177). Jones’s words cut to the power of the trope: “the whole inarticulate creation cries out for expression” (11). In the same year that Jones published Butterfly on Rock, Margaret Atwood brought out The Journals of Susanna Moodie, whose narrator frets in tight nervous lines that she is no more than a word in a foreign language because she cannot see her face in the moving water. Before both Jones and Atwood, F.R. Scott had in “Laurentian Shield” adroitly amplified the metaphor: “Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. / Inarticulate, arctic, / Not written on by history, empty as paper” (38). A.M. Klein similarly saw “the world but scarcely uttered, naming, praising, / the flowering fiats in the meadow, the / syllabled fur, stars aspirate” (334–35). It may not be surprising that the unsaid would be rendered metalingually, but it is striking. Yet the listening goes only so far. Kroetsch does not listen to tiresome voices, arrogant and overbearing speakers who egotistically insist on monopolizing social spaces (The “Crow” Journals 61).

F More gently, Kroetsch elsewhere in Seed Catalogue raises the well-known gestures of poetry.

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The Invocation

Start: with an invocation invoke— What is an invocation but the act whose words bring into being what they name? But it comes up short, unavailable to the New-World poet. Its lost efficacy becomes evident when the speaker tries to act on the intention. An invocation is what’s needed; the poet will call on the muses, he will invoke. The verb lies somewhere between self-exhortation and half-hearted prayer. The sought source takes the poet nowhere, the wherewithal once available to poets having moved somewhere beyond reach or use.

The Muse

His muse is his muse/if memory is The attempt to find the muse falls into abrupt, broken lines that stand out against the rest of the poem where often they are more reassuringly bounded by grammatical completion and terminal punctuation. In the muse section, they sound another music and the poet is left to bemoan his state: and you have no memory then no meditation no song (shit we’re up against it) (37) No invocation, no muse—nothing of what was readily available to poets in other times and other places—the aspiring author has to work with felt insufficiency. The fumbling points to an answer of sorts. It arrives precisely where the lines falter and cut off. The stumblings may be read as signs of crisis, as if the proposition rests uncomfortably on the poet’s tongue. The aposiopesis conveys 112

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how shakily words come to him and how inconclusive they are: “a winter proposition, if [yes—what then? what if?] / spring should come then” (30). Then what? What then? The staggered rhythm registers as meaningful speech. These are not the sounds of someone who can speak with full confidence in what he might say and how he might be received. The choked-off speech works as fitting form, in its own way accomplished, muse or no muse. The admission of lack is laid out in sudden terms. The words lurch from the indicative to the declamatory and the poet breaks out in rough vehemence: “shit / we’re up against it.” Still, the poet, child of next-year country, ever hopeful, rallies to his options: “how about that girl / you felt up in the / school barn or that / girl you necked with / out by Hastings’ slough” (37). The words are so lively and so filled with possibility they exceed entreaty. The manner in which Kroetsch speaks of that promise—“how about,” “how about”—is fully given to hope. The stanza gropes optimistically, comically too, for something more than what is readily available or already recognized. In subjunctive mood, the poet projects a possible and desired future. His lines whirl in a current of what-ifs and just-supposings. The language, ignited and undeterred, extends beyond questions of method (how do you?) and pushes on into heartening prospects. The figure who presides over Seed Catalogue is one of many in Kroetsch who move achingly hopeful through a world that is unrealized. Johnny Backstrom is supremely another of them: “I’m a dreamer myself...I was dreaming by the time I was big enough to know things aren’t what they might be, which out here means before your pockets are very high off the ground. Christ, you have to dream out here. You’ve got to be half goofy—just to stay sane” (The Words of My Roaring 46). Figures of a different bent might opt for stoicism and understatement, or elect pathos, but not Kroetsch’s. Not Kroetsch himself who would rise into morning with a cup of coffee and a crazy sense that on that very day the world had reopened astonishingly to something new or more, a new chance, another maybe. His characters let fly in witty and anguished yearnings for “if” by “maybe” They know things probably won’t work out, but they bob on currents of laughter, the future of their dreams unsnuffed. Wishes so unquenchable might seem reason for scorn. They might, except all those why-nots and if-onlys speak to our capacities to stir from the inertia that sees things only “as they really are.” George Steiner could have been thinking of Kroetsch’s world when he wrote of a commotion that rustles at the heart

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of our lives. What he calls “forward-dreaming” enables us “to construe ‘that which is now’ as being ‘that which is not yet.’” We seek “conditionalities of the unknown” which “force us to proceed afresh in the morning, to leave failed history behind. Otherwise our posture would be static and we would choke on disappointed dreams” (217). We live, if we live at all, by the subjunctive. You have to live by dreams out here, Kroetsch supposes, the what-ifs and just-supposings we know as life.

The Tradition

However radically Kroetsch is committed to his roots, he shows the kinds of literary savvy we might expect from a credible poet. In Eli Mandel’s words, “he defines himself in small-town terms from the midst of a center of cosmopolitan and international connections” (“The Border League” 117). This is entirely possible if Iain Chambers is right: “to choose to move in the traffic between such worlds…where there is neither the stability of the ‘authentic’ nor the ‘false,’ does not mean that there are not real differences of experience, of culture, of history, of power” (82). An appeal to unsullied origins is clearly indefensible but, Chambers supposes, that knowledge does not stop us from making a claim on local experience. He argues that “somebody else’s inscription…is interrupted and stutters in local inflections and dispersal” (83). His phrasing applies perfectly to Kroetsch’s poem: “This is to propose a more localised and limited sense of ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition,’ one that is not metaphysically guaranteed by…essentialism, but is realized under the sign of performative exigencies” (90). It is the performative, Jean-François Lyotard argues in The Postmodern Condition, that brings us into reality, which is a world forever making and unmaking itself; and not the world of saleability and efficiency (51). Dennis Lee, writing “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space” in the Canadian issue of boundary 2, which Kroetsch assembled in 1974, has laid out a Canadian version of that argument, one that applies almost uncannily to Seed Catalogue: “Then to name one’s own condition is to re-create the halt and stammer, the wry self-deprecation, the rush of celebratory elan and the vastness of the still unspoken surround, in which a colonial writer finally comes to know his house, his father, his city, his terrain—encounters them in their own unuttered terms and finds words being born to say them” (166). 114

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Kroetsch’s own words, two decades after the publication of Seed Catalogue, speak in a metaliterary way to that condition. Discussing the novelist Margaret Laurence he asks, “How does one write with and against that [full or empty] page?” Laurence shows the way: “It is the fullness of that page, its overflow, not its emptiness, that enables Morag Gunn to write, even as she is threatened with a silencing” (“Sitting Down to Write” 152). The full page discourages, but it enables too. It supplies the wherewithal against which and with which the preoccupied author must contend. Though Kroetsch rejoices in language that is oral and idiomatic, even unlearned, he does not restrict himself to verbatim transcripts or even to close replications of actual speech. A too-close fidelity can be terribly limiting: In the Prairies right now [in 1976] there’s a great deal of concern about hearing that voice. I’m uneasy about surrendering to it. The manifestation of the voice is oral because that’s the only language we recognize at the moment as ours. But if you look at the books of Andrew Suknaski’s poems, there’s almost a surrender to the voice, even in verse form finally. (Enright and Cooley 34) Kroetsch goes for an “improved” and hopped-up speech stripped of the dull and directionless stuff. He knocks out the straying and mumbling, the errors in agreement and diction, the stumblings into incoherence, all dun and trite expressions, so that we end up with enhanced speech. The A-1 Hard Northern Bullshitters Greatest Hits. It goes without saying that the orality which brightens Kroetsch’s text is made available and activated through high literacy. He writes in reply. It’s impossible to imagine how, without a very high level of literacy, he could even conceive of Seed Catalogue, or include within it patches of orality. What’s needed, Kroetsch knows, is something more than “raw material” (Enright and Cooley 29): “Many readers want it to be life that changed people. That’s not true, it’s the goddamn three-line stanza that changed them. In something as simple as letting go of your left-hand margin the implications for what is ultimately vision are just staggering, they really are” (27). The muse passage shows as much, though Kroetsch opts for a colloquial style, he makes ready use of Mnemosyne, she who figured as chief muse for a highly oral poetry based, as her name indicates, in memory. Kroetsch makes a similar move when he writes in recall of childhood song and speech.

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Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me went down to the river to swim— Adam and Eve got drownded. (34) The childlike construction aligns the poem with a long lineage of garden poems. It provides another twist in its second and final iteration: “Adam and Eve got drownded—” (46). The lines toss the poem into jocularity, an effect heightened by the wait-a-minute suspension at the dash. What Kroetsch writes in the next and final line—“Who was left?” (46)—provides no completion to the riddle. In the actual telling (“actual” that is during Kroetsch’s childhood) the teller would stall. “Pinch-Me,” the unwitting kid would say. Quite what readers might make of the omission would be hard to say, but it does leave the poem in multiple incompletions. At times the speaker heads on in enough speed or jest that we could almost miss what he has said. Take the missing “Aeneas.” The name has got to be right up there with Sartre and Heidegger when it comes to cultural clout. Kroetsch sets the well-known names alongside, or against, those whom Kroetsch posits as collective and anonymous “A-1 Hard Northern Bullshitters” (36), whose identities derive from unpretentious lives as farmers and storytellers. They stand up pretty well. The naming enlists them within the botanical myth that informs the entire poem, and celebrates them fabulously as the finest of the fine (the highest grade of wheat). As for Aeneas, the last of the missing greats, what do we say about that name and its position, he who announced he would be the first to bring the Muse into his new country? Who would dare to be the new Aeneas?13 How do you write in a new land? The erudition is evident elsewhere in the list, including a moment of wry dissimulation: “the absence of clay and wattles (whatever the hell they are).” The very mention of the words might well have made a young farm boy wilt in inadequacy. Yet the off-hand allusion is followed immediately by impatient interruption. The poet may well be speaking here in baffled helplessness: what to do with these words, this information? But it is more than possible to discern an irreverent dismissal, the speaker coyly pretending to an unknowing or uncaring—“whatever the hell they are”—much as Kroetsch had slighted a list of powerful political figures in his account of growing up in Alberta: “whomever was thought.” The response speaks, disingenuously, slightly dismissingly, as if those strange-sounding articles are pretty much unknown to the 116

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speaker and scarcely worth noticing. It does not show admission or concession or regret, as in: we don’t have “it,” it’s true. It replies in repudiation and near-ridicule: who needs it? It’s hardly worth mentioning. The casual response may of course speak also of comical bafflement (as the required explanations that accompany the word “wattles” in North American anthologies would tend to suggest). Most likely this is a matter not of dishonouring the tradition or refusing it, but of an unwillingness to accept it without qualm or question.14 The gloss admits even as it disavows the Yeatsian echo. And so, in Kroetsch’s poem, we have, and don’t have, the clay and wattles and what they represent, however much he might pretend the phrase has confounded him. The ambivalence illustrates rather well what Linda Hutcheon has called “postmodernism’s renegotiation of the different possible relations (of complicity and critique) between high and popular forms of culture” (Politics of Postmodernism 27). By the simple act of naming, Kroetsch makes the resources available, of rhetorical use, in his poem. He takes in the very resources supposedly beyond his reach and beyond his approval. That magnified past becomes less daunting when we learn that “the gopher was the model.” Kroetsch implicitly offers the very ordinary creature as substitute for the missing lion mentioned in the extended list. The claim about the gopher may sound close to simple jest, yet another illustration of Kroetsch’s hyperbole. So might the badger who “stood up” in the potato patch. The mentions are almost flippant, but their verticality is not. As emblem of new settlement it informed a seminal book on prairie literature. A few years before Seed Catalogue was published, Laurie Ricou, a good friend of Kroetsch’s when he was writer-in-residence and working on Seed Catalogue at the University of Lethbridge, published Vertical Man / Horizontal World.

Multiple Others

In distrust of high culture, Kroetsch opts for other voicings. The uses of vernacular for poetic purposes “make their claim upon literary or trained attention,” argues Gerald Bruns: they are divergences from the better sort of speech, lapses from Latin or Literature into vulgarity—failed utterance…a mode of violence and

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therefore of refreshment: that is, originality. Originality is, among other things, a failure to preserve what everyone had thought valuable. To speak in Latin is to speak the language of preservation—the language of writing and museums, of poetry and tradition, of philosophy and truth—but to speak a vernacular is to strike out on one’s own. (Inventions 158) Such lapses lie at the heart of Kroetsch’s early poetry. Kroetsch’s grab-bag poem bulges with voicings, many of them adamantly sub-literary. They emerge, Eli Mandel offers, “out of terror, out of the losses, out of the shards and fragments of lives, their letters, documents, memories, speech, stories, big stories and little stories, invocations and epilogues, first and last words, loves and deaths, emptiness, all that the prairie wasn’t, could not be, its absences, emptiness and fulfillment, the plenitude of being” (“The Border League” 119).

Letters of Testimony

“I wish to say we had lovely success this summer with the seed purchased of you. We had the finest Sweet Corn in the country, and Cabbage were dandy.” —W.W. Lyon, South Junction, Man. (29) Wanda Campbell, in “Strange Plantings,” one of the best essays on Seed Catalogue, draws attention to the “demotic” words and the “inherited vocabulary and cheerful hyperbole,” which exist within the “literary formality of the letter” (20). We can note also that the style is charming in its combination of diction slid slightly off course (“lovely success”), oral elision (not “the Cabbage” but “Cabbage”), and unassuming idiom (“were dandy”). Endearing in its own way is the slight reach for elevation (“purchased of you”). Kroetsch’s poem implicitly declares the passage to be interesting and worthy, valuable in its own right and valuable in his own work.

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Children’s Songs

Kroetsch foregrounds a proper name, “Virtue,” as he has taken it from a piece of advertising. It next unsettles into a common noun as “virtue,” or in mocking escalation as proper noun, “Virtue.” What could be more proper than Virtue? Finally, the word turns into a verb in the unexpected meaning it acquires through a small revision to a familiar kid’s song: No. 25—McKenzie’s improved Golden Wax Bean: ‘“THE MOST PRIZED OF ALL BEANS. Virtue is its own reward. We have had many expressions from keen discriminating gardeners extolling our seed and this variety.” Beans, beans, the musical fruit; the more you eat, the more you virtue. (30)

Metrics

The poem even has a go at metered verse. One line, regulated by iambics and inverted syntax, is set alongside a second verse in more conventional syntax, a more prosaic syntax some might say: How do you a garden grow? How do you grow a garden? (45) Now that’s poetry, that first line. You can hear that rhythm: HOW do YOU a GARden GROW. And then that second line, so flat and ordinary. The couplet begs the question. What are they doing here, side by side? What are they doing here at all? It would be easy to read them simply as iterative and serving an expressive function—the emphatic repetitions conveying the poet’s frustration. That strategy would work. Seed Catalogue does not offer any commentary on the variants, but the poem’s general concerns, which again and again ask how one might grow a prairie



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poem, and which note the lacks and obstacles faced by the young aspirant (among them the provenance of foreign and outdated models), encourage us to consider the weight and value of that option. We are prompted to wonder what it would be to choose between the lines—the traditionally metered line, reminiscent of “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” an old children’s verse, and the other line, so unpromisingly quotidian. Consider The Hornbooks of Rita K, that knotty and bewildering poem written long after Seed Catalogue. In it, Raymond, erstwhile editor, frets over meter: We went head to head as poet, she and I, there’s no denying it. She was into that willful stuff. The old forms were good enough for me, and on occasion I now take one of her poems and give it the look it should have by highlighting in her disorder an iamb or two. (43) The lines provoke another thought: What happens when we read semantic duplication within small shifts in word order? An issue of form then. What does it matter that the same words are altered only in sequence and at that only slightly? None whatsoever, or very little, we might say if we are devoted to “meaning” as it is lexically realized. But the entirely different affects allow us to consider what role rhythm and sequence play and how they might mark out patterns of expectation and appreciation. We can discern in the two almost incidental lines a miniature of the whole poem. They implicitly ask us to think about what occupies a default mode, at least for casual readers, and what might serve the young poet-in-waiting.

The Confession

We happen upon a confession that in its impiety amounts to a travesty of the form. No sooner has the penitent opened the discourse (“Bless me father”) than he blithely resists it. What follows shows comical, almost total, disregard: —This is my first confession. Bless me father I played dirty so long, just the other day, up in the granary there by the car shed—up there on the Brantford Binder Twine gunny sacks and the sheets of paper—Germaine with her dress up and her bloomers down—(Completed Field Notes 34)15 120

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The kid immediately reveals he is heedless of any personal wrongdoing and unfazed by the priest’s presence. He halfheartedly gestures toward the situation when he names his lapsing but he clearly is unprepared to admit guilt or to fill the role of chastened sinner. Though his headlong and casual speech readily admits, however rotely, to having “played dirty,” it shoves aside what seems required. A little caution perhaps would have been in order, some hint of probity and contrition. Propriety would call for simple principles of relevancy and economy. A little decorum wouldn’t hurt. We get anything but. The kid’s contribution is spendthrift and fanciful. What on earth do Brantford Binder gunny sacks have to do with priestly absolving? Why the brand name? Does it mark the offence as particularly heinous or ludicrous? Why mention the car shed? Why bring up the girl’s name at all? Strange and wonderful propinquities, these. The kid, swept on capacious speech and deictics, rushes into inapplicable details. The eruption shows more fancy than contrition, a lot more: up in…there by…up there on…with...The breathlessness invests the speech with far more quantity and buoyancy than might ordinarily be sought or allowed, a lot more enthusiasm too. We hear none of the halting tightlipped brevity and none of the constraint we might expect from a shamed or stricken sinner. The details the “son” supplies exceed the occasion and indicate a sanguine fixation on the when and where and what of his supposed transgressions: Germaine “with her dress up” and “her bloomers down.” The words are immersed precipitously in the sublunary world: the other day, the granary, the car shed, gunny sacks, sheets of paper. It is not in sorrow but joy that the kid delivers his testimony. Repentance is swept away and drowned in giddy ebullience.16 Humorous disparities, derived from the boy’s sublime unawareness—what, after all, is he to be absolved of?—undermine the form. The kid has other things in mind, no euphemistic language for him. Flagrantly sexual, unapologetically pleased with himself, he cheerily, almost boastfully, recounts the details. He unabashedly converts the solemn form into a new and colourful poetry. Bakhtin has eloquently described the nature of such collisions. Official language, he says, is “magisterial.” It demands allegiance and offers itself as “complete,” permits no “play with its borders” and “no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it” (“From Discourse in the Novel” 533). The “authoritative word (religious, political, moral; [is] the word of a father, of adults and of teachers, etc.).” Further,

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The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it finds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distant zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers…It is a prior discourse…It is given (it sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact. Its language is a special (as it were, hieratic) language. It can be profaned but it cannot be altered. (Bakhtin, “From Discourse in the Novel” 532) For Bakhtin that means that “an intense interaction and struggle between one’s own and another’s word is being waged, a process in which they oppose or dialogically interanimate each other” (539). Comically, in the struggle that takes place in the church, the powerless young boy seems to be getting the better of things. The confession revisits the scene in “On Being an Alberta Writer,” the one about the haughty young neighbour destined to be a priest. In both cases, presumed authority rests with the church, and Kroetsch, or his surrogate, responds with laughter. The boy’s alternative to formal and prescribed discourse is every inch given to play and invention. Where modesty and penitence would be expected, he shows pride in his accomplishments and satisfaction in his speaking. No mortification for him. Asked for repentance, he desecrates the ceremony and decorates his own part until it overflows the moral and religious discourse. Against the prescriptive word of god, and the priest—which is to say the already written and the fully authorized, that juris-diction—the boy finds his own story in self-pleasing discourse, a vital contra-diction. Uncowed, he replies in “parole” to the institution’s “langue.” When the farm boy directs the profane and earthly language into an entertainment that he can cherish, he endorses himself as poet-in-waiting. Scene succumbs to story and the confession gives way to the entertaining narrative of the kid’s happy making.

Pardon / Edict

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manner to that of the genial and distracted Father Basil in What the Crow Said. The allowance amounts to a parody of high admonition: “Son. For penance, keep your peter in your pants / for the next thirteen years” (34). The small struggle between the father and the son, for the moment resolved, recapitulates the arc that according to Northrop Frye is central to comedy (Anatomy of Criticism 164). Other priest’s rulings are more drastic and less permissive: when the priest said playing dirty we knew—well— he had named it he had named our world out of existence (33–34) The edicts are graphic, frightening enough that they are not cancelled by the narrator’s mocking aside: playing dirty is a mortal sin the priest told us, you’ll go to hell and burn forever (with illustrations) (33) It is the priest’s prerogative to speak a language of authority that the kid is unable directly to refuse.17

Tall Tales

Local jokes and tall tales, known to at least some members of the community, contribute to the telling. The genre is signalled by appeals to the second person, a lead-in which signals “joke” or diverting anecdote (“the one about”), the dropping of the auxiliary (“did”), and a slightly fractious vocabulary: —You ever hear the one about the woman who buried her husband with his ass sticking out of the ground so that every time she happened to walk by she could give it a swift kick? —Yeh, I heard it. (36)

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Havelock would have been thinking about this sort of passage when he said that the “genius” of “conversational language lies in its expressiveness.” It is aimed, he claims, at reiterating and memorializing cultural wisdom. In Kroetsch’s burial joke, the anonymous speaker invites an unidentified auditor into the event that enjoys some currency. He then delivers it in unpolished syntax. The unidentified auditor completes the discourse and affirms it. Their contributions show their comfort in a familiar narrative, which they appreciatively recycle. Because these are things they know and repeat, they affirm their lives in the reciprocities of speech. The joke belongs to them, and they speak from and of and to what they know and who they are. The speakers take satisfaction in the tall tales and memorable incidents that are known to the community and that express it. Their anonymity demonstrates that speech circulates, almost ritually, in acts of shared pleasure. This sort of speech is, in Havelock’s words, “astonishingly flexible and mobile.” The words in their situations are “varied, flexible, expressive, and momentary” (64). Kroetsch seeks in his prairie poetics to bring that oral quality into highly sophisticated and literate texts, not to replace a high literacy, but to supplement it and energize it.

Oaths, Curses

Kroetsch shows no qualms in speaking impolitely or indecorously, though the expletives we find in Seed Catalogue are fairly innocuous (“whatever the hell”). Uncle Freddie’s words speak in tender exasperation: Jesus Christ, he said. He was a gentle man, really. Don’t you understand anything? (43) This is a poetry of passion, prone to outburst: “In the west we are possessed of a curious rhetoric. A rhetoric that goes back to religion and politics, to the outcry, to the curse, to the blessing, to the plea, to the song. Not to the educated man imagining himself to be reasonable” (Lovely Treachery 146), not to modulated and judiciously shaped speech, but a language that is raw and vital. Then there is the narrator’s curse. In a growing sense of handicap and realization that he and his people have no muse, no literary memory, he blurts out: “shit / we’re up 124

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against it” (37). There is also Kroetsch’s slightly comical protest: “This is the God’s own truth” (33). Is this not the substance of the sub-versive? It is rough and ready, immune it would seem to nuance and density. And yet it is creative, flamboyant, highly functional. The chutzpah rouses suspicion toward a story whose veracity it coyly avows and which, the reader immediately realizes, the poet is about to supply. It turns out “the God’s own truth” amounts to a prohibition on sexuality, and an insistence on confession. Surprisingly, the epithet never is attached to the tumble of profane behaviour that abounds in the text. Apparently “the God’s own truth” serves as an institutional sanction. We might recall Kroetsch’s words when he speaks of Wallace Stegner. Stegner, prophet of prairie experience, named its people as mystical and prone to poetry. Yes, Kroetsch agrees, this has “something to do with whatever it is that can’t be fully articulated.” That something is what Kroetsch calls “unspeakable,” something that could be perhaps as much offensive as indefinable. The unspeakable, for Kroetsch, derives from “our very unwillingness as well as our inability to speak the name of all that we are” so that “when we claim to tell the God’s own truth,” we are resorting to “strategies of evasion” (“The Cow” 72), as surely is the speaker of the oath, “the God’s own truth.” The vigorous reassurance guarantees that Kroetsch himself will be one of the A-1 Hard Northern Bullshitters. He almost never writes the music of the unsaid and the understated that have occupied so much of prairie life and poetry. Laurie Ricou hears in those brief voices something powerful, which is “hesitating, groping, almost deprecatory and apologetic; in their silences, something almost eloquent” (Twelve Prairie Poets 17). The wrenching scene in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel when mother and son in near speechlessness bid goodbye to one another conveys the power of that language. So do the deeply moving scenes of silent suffering in Sinclair Ross’s short stories. Mostly it is the oath we hear in Seed Catalogue. A hired man’s expressive and accusing speech, hardly the stuff of lyric, but fresh and compelling poetry of a new land, his tones superbly emulated in the lineation: “how / in hell did you manage to / fall off a horse that was / standing still?” (29) Consider Frye on oaths: “As we sometimes use the phrase gospel truth to mean the quintessence of demotic language, or veridical fact, it is interesting that of all figures of speech, the hyperbole, or intentional exaggeration, is the one that departs most explicitly from the representation of fact” (The Great Code 54).

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Second Thoughts, Second Takes

The poem includes parenthetical comments and doubled expressions—traits that reveal ongoing adjustments, on-the-spot explanations and concessions. The scene in which a young Kroetsch asks his Uncle Freddie about drinking hot water reveals in memorable detail the speaker’s felt need to speak of his closeness to his uncle. Uncle Freddie, who “refuses to say Uncle,” “learns not only to make, but to make do” (Campbell 30): Why, I asked him one morning— I wasn’t all that old—why do you do that? I asked him. (43) Now and then Kroetsch speaks in self-cancelling rhetoric: “Then it was spring. Or, no: / then winter was ending” (29). Metanoia. Given to misdirection and prone to redirection, the narrator hovers on the virgule. It is precisely there that he articulates the parts—this and not this. He asserts a condition, only to halt in reappraisal, and then attach a preferred rephrasing. Lacking assurances or a determination, he acts in self-correction. The report is crossed through, but it is not simply eliminated. It is included and excluded, discarded and kept. The style refuses a seamless text that hides its earlier incarnations. The redirecting voice does not cling to assured eloquence and so will admit to “error” and adjustment. It is willing to leave in place signs of a mind that is active and on its way to somewhere, even if that somewhere is less than clear.

Inscriptions

Epitaphs from gravestones, offered with little mediation: Tombstone engravings. Partial (and here: invented or imagined?) Engravings to commemorate the dead: Anna Weller: Geboren Köln, 1849. Kenneth MacDonald: Died Cologne, 1943. (44)18

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The bald listings allow us to feel the weight and symmetry of the words. Do we read the gap between “Köln” and “Cologne” as indication of what lies between Old World and New World, an old way of memorializing and a new means of lettering? The juxtaposition acknowledges Kroetsch’s distant and weakened access to the German language and his German ancestors.19 Whatever we make of the entry, it strays rather badly from the conventions of traditional English verse. It certainly makes odd poetry. Strange, Victor Shklovsky would say. In “Art as Technique” he famously names art as something that succeeds by making strange: And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are [“already”] known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Shklovsky provocatively adds that art is “a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (720, his emphasis). There are other means, Shklovsky reminds us: “parallelism, comparison, repetition, balanced structure, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical figures, and all those methods which emphasize the emotional effect of an expression (including words or even articulated sounds)” (718). Kroetsch would have had no problem with the claim that poetry slows our processing and prevents us from speeding past every phoneme. His graphic presentation of the inscriptions, set apart as they are, and alongside one another, foregrounds them and bring us, if only briefly, into a rethinking. Kroetsch would not have agreed, however, that “poetic” language is essentially different from “practical” language, not inherently different, that is. For Kroetsch poetry is less a matter of essential properties than writing and reading strategies. He steps into “This new introduction,” which, in the language Kroetsch has appropriated from commerce, heralds cabbage and annunciates his own spanking-new prairie poem.



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F Pithy Sayings, Riddles

Adam and Eve got drownded— / Who was left? (46) Dreams, like all acts of the “remainder,” writes Jean-Jacques Lecercle in his marvellous book, The Violence of Language, “draw on the ‘treasury of language’—not only idiomatic phrases, but proverbs, nursery rhymes, slang, and the poems that everyone has learnt at school” (129). Beans, beans, the musical fruit. Kroetsch’s penchant for paradox and inconclusiveness is evident everywhere. He also is liable to quips, aphorisms, brief statements that sound memorable and beyond contesting: “We silence words / by writing them down” (42);20 “The danger of merely living” (43). “The fiction makes us real” (“A Conversation with Margaret Laurence” 63).

Familial Stories

In one of the most memorable stretches in Seed Catalogue, a father works and reworks an increasingly fanciful story (31–32). The family are all in on the fun, all of them. This is their story, maybe the neighbours’ too, told and retold in confirming them. The father, who openly relishes his performance, bears uncanny resemblance to Kroetsch’s own dad, who, in Kroetsch’s words, was “a famous storyteller” (MacKinnon, “The Writer” 4). The father, who, with a little help from his grown-up authorial son, stars in Seed Catalogue, constructs himself as comical hero, all the while fooling no one, least of all himself. He begins in huff and threat and indignation: the badger, endowed with willfulness from the outset (he is “threatening”), has got to go. The father is mad, ready to shoot the badger dead, which, he realizes all too well, and is prepared to make known, could spell injury or worse to creatures—what the high-flying father describes in stylized humour as “man and beast.” It becomes apparent in Kroetsch’s affectionate version of the story that the father is drawn to the “beast”: “Every time the badger stood up, it looked like a little man, come out of the ground. Why, my father asked himself—Why would so fine a fellow live under the ground?” (31). No longer beast, the badger 128

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grows on the father’s sympathies. Though the father had waited in ambush, determined to do away with the nuisance, he succumbs to a touching identification with the badger, which by now has transmogrified amiably into “a little man” and “so fine a fellow.” The badger seems to have emerged from stories of dwarves and hobbits, from narratives of elves and diminutive miners, “come out of the ground,” risen from the very core of fable. Once the father gets embarked on his story of fellow creatureliness and marvellous origins, he abandons his original purpose and settles into rumination. Reprisal gives way to whimsy. Poet now, he fails to remember he had arrived as resolute hunter into a besieged garden. The badger, no longer scourge, has turned into a needing creature in search of shelter and nurture. Human and creature are brought to a wobbly truce, amicably share the garden. When this section of the poem was still in a draft stage someone (the poet? the father?) offered a series of answers to the larger question, “Why would so fine a fellow…?”: He loves the cool of roots, the solace of dark tunnels, the blood of gophers. (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1) In an adroit move, Kroetsch chooses to present the father not as someone almost matter-of-factly supplying answers or unflappingly receiving them. He becomes someone who is brought to charming speculation: “Just for the cool of roots? The solace of dark tunnels? The blood of gophers?” Why this talk of underground? Though the father’s musings do not prevent the damage the badger causes, or might deliver, they construe the animal as fanciful resident in a cool and dark realm, some kind of dream world. Wondrous creature, he lives in and moves through lightless passageways that, in the father’s activated imagination, might offer some kind of “solace.” From what hurts or disappointments, we ask ourselves, might the badger seek “solace”? (And how like the author himself, this badger is, the Kroetsch who habitually withdrew from jeopardy into room and office and journey.) Evidently, the badger’s distress is, in the father’s fabulous musings, occasioned by exposure to heat and light. Their harm would be something that could be withstood only by dwelling in funnels of darkness. And so the father there in the potato patch undergoes a conversion. He becomes so taken with the badger that he openly

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jettisons his murderous plans, returns to his own home, misgivings forgotten, stature ruffled, for the time being. The two of them, man and badger, in excavation and anger, carry on something awful. Their two-step, the words allow us to imagine, embodies a comically tender relationship. A scandal, one would think, the two of them running around like that all summer. And so the father supplies his own entertaining fable in spite of himself, he normally a practical man who would, or should, abide no harm to his agricultural world, nor indulge his son’s own inclinations to poetry. In the wondrous interlude of story, commerce succumbs to poetry. As things turn out, the father is brought to an undignified ineptitude, which he trustingly reports (he can’t shoot straight, couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn). In admitting to the gaffes, he perhaps tries to camouflage a soft-heartedness he has come to feel for the scouring badger, whom the father farmer has now rendered as an intimate. His explanation is highly adept. The reduced sentences, opening with a stress on each offending subject (Magpie, They, They’re) mime the father’s deadpan insistence on the hard realities—nothing but the bare unadorned facts—with which he has had to contend and the remarkable skills he has had to summon: A week later my father told the story again. In that version he intended to hit the magpie. Magpies, he explained, are a nuisance. They eat robins’ eggs. They’re harder to kill than snakes, jumping around the way they do, nothing but feathers. (32) The properties that adhere to the magpie’s name reveal how taken the father is by the bird he has mistakenly almost shot, and how badly caught out he is in his half-hearted potshot at the badger. The father’s story reveals an abiding penchant for hyperbole (“nothing but feathers,” “jumping around,” more elusive than snakes) that is transparently self-exonerating. The changes mark the momentum of a developing narrative as well as the adult son’s amused disbelief: he “told the story again,” “in that version,” “he explained.” On the heels of the poet’s ironic interjections, the father’s final exoneration—“Just call me sure-shot” (32)—culminates his story of comic audacity. In the end, the superbly skilled father recovers from personal chagrin, enters a lyrical interlude, and deals with personal humiliation to establish his redoubtable skill as one of those A-1 Hard Northern Bullshitters who 130

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resourcefully make us real. The remarkable orality leads the father into adjustments that answer to his strong sense of audience and his dynamic reaction to them. His is no prepared speech, not exactly, though evidently it has been practised, and undoubtedly improved, over the years. It certainly is not completed or closed, however, for it is subject to amending and taking new directions, as the occasion makes possible, or necessary: “Magpies, he explained.” Of course he would explain. Didn’t he have some explaining to do? Some answers to provide? The faces before him, incredulous you’d think, would have called for some accounting, prodded the father into justifying speech. The exoneration comes in affirming the family in deft and pleasing orchestration. You want to know how come I hit the magpie? Let me tell you why I shot the magpie, how hard it was to shoot. There was this and there was that, all kinds of reasons, all kinds of challenges. Made it damn near impossible to pot. The father’s revisionist story, artfully told and retold, would seem to fall somewhere between primary orality and conversational orality. In as much as the father’s narrative is given to emphatic retelling for the shared pleasure and memory of his family—“the storage of cultural information for re-use,” Havelock calls it (71)—it would be primary. But it is also answerable to the immediate occasion (mostly the father’s embarrassment) and so an instance of conversational orality, perhaps of a kind that is better known to contemporary readers and writers. Yet, even as the father’s narration, later mediated and ironized by the adult son—“threatening man and beast with broken limbs (I quote)” (31)21—features amiable speech and endearing comedy, it becomes almost ceremonial, and it emerges as a story that whimsically constructs familial identities. They are all in on it, all into the story. The family would appear to consent to the telling and to enjoy their own tacit parts in it. The unabashed iterations and colourful embroiderings establish and confirm the ties: this is our story, the story that dad tells; he brings us into the story, adjusts it, magnifies it for us, improves it. There has got to be reassurance in that—the invention of shared stories and the family’s ongoing participation in them.22 Accomplished as the father’s story is, entertaining as it is, its purpose is more than aesthetic. It approaches the phatic in affirming a local and selfaddressing world, brushes the family with affection and delight, even though the unrestrained and public pleasure that the father takes in his own inventions contrasts to the spirit of denial he elsewhere displays when it comes to his son’s almost secretive interests in poetry (38), tendencies that the father finds

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bewildering and improper. The father’s local narrative also counters imperial values that guarantee the exotic namings in the absences section. It is possible to hear the father’s resistance as belonging to the apprehensions of an ancient oral culture. Havelock has explained the relative prestige of the oral and the written in early Greek culture: “The alphabet was an interloper, lacking social standing and achieved use. The elite of the society were all reciters and performers” (87). The distinction might help to illuminate the father’s resistance to the kid’s aspirations, which are partly tied to textuality and inwardness. Alongside the father’s own skills as a storyteller as one who, for the benefit of his auditors and his own pleasure, adjusts his story and improves it in one version after another, the bookish son would seem peculiar. The father enjoys status as one who recites and performs, who tells stories, conspicuously in public. The kid occupies a strange place as someone who, in privacy, away from the clatter of social life, writes things down and locks them away in mind or on paper. In a way, he is shut by the father. “Yes, my father was quite a famous story-teller. I could never compete in his presence—maybe that’s why I went upstairs and wrote,” Kroetsch confides to Geoff Hancock (36). Kroetsch’s speechlessness when, as an adult, he is asked to tell a story perhaps conveys the long-felt diffidence (The “Crow” Journals 35). “I certainly was both fleeing and being influenced by the father figure literally in my life as well as in my writing,” Kroetsch told Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson a few years later (22). Kroetsch himself put the poem through one version after the other. The smart-alecky and droll language as a rule appears well into the rewriting, including what happens in the father / badger section. The addition adds to the jocularity. “My father got mad again” and “They carried on like that all summer” (31) get tacked on. The word “gun” becomes (ominously) a “double–barrel shotgun”; and “a little man” becomes “a little man come out of the earth” (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1). With a little help the badger becomes endearing (“so fine a fellow”) through acquiring human traits, intimate connections, and magical powers, and through the father’s supposed speculations, whose phrasing arrives toward the end of the writing. The almost-cartoonish dance of a normally practical father and a persistent badger (shades of Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny) is actually understated compared to what happened in an earlier draft where the distance across which the father ineptly shoots gets reduced from an early estimate of fifty yards (and even, in one draft, two hundred yards!) to a mere fifty feet. The diminishing serves more to name the father as foolishly unskilled or deliberately 132

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inept. The smaller number is a bit more credible, though still wildly exaggerated. Who could remotely credit a miss of fifty yards? Fifty yards is going too far. But fifty feet—that’s a different matter, that’s possible within the limits of hyperbole. It’s still stretching things, but it’s in the ballpark. There is more. Kroetsch had at one point apparently completed the father’s protest about shooting the magpie. That entry consisted of mock objections to the magpie’s predatory ways. Kroetsch then adds in holograph a further exoneration for the father, this one speaking of his jaw-dropping skill: “They’re harder to kill than snakes, jumping around the way they do, nothing but feathers” (32). How could he possibly miss the magpie? Rhetoricians would probably call this a procatalepsis—anticipating and heading off objections. In much the same spirit, the poet inserts “I quote” within parenthesis. (An earlier version of the danger was less whimsical: “threatening us all with broken ankles and sprained hips” [MsC. 334/84.1 11.1].)23 The poem becomes increasingly witty and colourful as Kroetsch continues to revisit it. At one point it mentions the promise of a young girl to expose her nipples and it leaves things there. A bit later Kroetsch adds by hand these words: “I don’t know where she got to.” In like fancy, Kroetsch parenthetically adds “with illustrations” to the priest’s warnings that the sexually precocious children will “burn forever.” By raising doubt about what has been said (in effect saying “I merely report what he has said, I can hardly believe it myself”), the glosses bring the earlier words into disrepute and into sardonic hearings. The improvements keep coming. What once read rather pedestrianly as “the absence of a bottle opener in Fort San, Saskatchewan, and me with a dozen cold Bohs24 in the trunk of my Dodge Dart”25 is crossed out, to be replaced by nearly indecipherable words that allow us to see that Kroetsch is searching for another option, though on another page in a more legible hand he has written what appears to be these words: “and me with a —? attack of the 26-ounce flu.” In the book, the following expression supplants the earlier attempts: “and me with a vicious attack of the 26-ounce flu.” Kroetsch develops along lighter and more playful lines the reference to the missing bottle opener and his own hangover as a bad case of “the 26-ounce flu.” The inventive naming, deriving almost certainly from the genius of all those A-1 Hard Northern Bullshitters, displaces the 26-ounce bottle of alcohol from cause to consequence. More: the narrator’s condition, we learn, is a “vicious attack of” the “flu,” his condition in no way being his own responsibility because evidently it is the consequence of a

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monstrous enmity in the universe itself. The hangover, possessed with a life and a malevolence that knows no let up, has with terrible consequences gone after him. This flu is one that besieges him and puts him into serious and undeserved suffering. With similar effect Kroetsch addends words to the children’s declared resolve to end their sexual adventures, making their decision not one occasioned by stricken guilt, but inflected by feigned regret, their hearts not in their resolution: “we decided we could do it / just one last time.” The move toward comedy often accompanies revisions to risky material and saves those occasions from a naming that might have made for discomfiting or at least solemn moments. The priest who counsels the sexually precocious child to abstain from his dalliances, for instance, speaks indulgently and almost amusedly in the final text: “Son. For penance, keep your peter in your pants / for the next thirteen years.” When Kroetsch was drafting Seed Catalogue, the priest was less possessed of impishness. That priest opened his address with fairly lame and hackneyed instructions (“Son, we must not offend God.”), in words that Kroetsch subsequently drops. Kroetsch went on to write in the earlier draft that the priest admonishes the kid to control not his “peter” but his “palm,” the earlier version being far less folksy and less indulgent, not to mention far less resonant, in failing to name the offending member as possessing a life of its own, irrepressibly, or as homophonically connected to Pete Knight, the heroic rider. Similarly, the young Strauss boy, character of large and wondrous transgression in what we all read, is able to “piss across” the Battle River, not to mention “higher on a barn wall than any of us” or, more impressively still, “right clean over26 the principal’s new car”; whereas at an earlier point in the writing, there is no Strauss boy at all when we reach the reference to the Battle River, and its diminished size is at that stage measured not by a boy’s capacity to “piss” across it, but by the ease with which “You could jump across it.”

Familial Intimacies

One of the few tender voices in Seed Catalogue occurs when we encounter the mother’s brief and intimate whisper: “Bring me the radish seeds, / my mother whispered” (30). As Wanda Campbell has observed, “the gentle simplicity of the mother’s voice” is juxtaposed against “the elaborate mythologizing of the 134

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story-telling father” in the next section (22–23). It may be this passage that Stan Dragland had in mind when he wrote, “I feel feminine strength as quietly equal to everything male in Seed Catalogue” (“Potatoes” 104–05).

Chants

The exact iterations of kids’ masturbation song surrender to onanistic thump and outcry. The ejaculatory energy erupts from beneath civil discourse. Phoneme after phoneme propels the poem into a demotic choral: I don’t give a damn if I do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do (36)27 By themselves the sounds would take the speaker only so far in his attempts to elaborate a full culture, but they memorably serve the occasion. Its poetry rises from what shortly before the publication of Seed Catalogue D.G. Jones had approvingly called “a common distrust of conventional forms, rhythms, diction and imagery, and a common desire to explore and articulate those aspects of… experience that are ignored or denied or simply distorted by the traditional matrix of language” (168). How uncivilized—how primal, how childlike, we might say. “Children,” writes Gilles Deleuze, “are well skilled in the exercise of repeating a word, the sense of which is only vaguely felt, in order to make it vibrate around itself” or “to make it take flight on a line of non-sense” (157). In the “do die” section, the speaking tongue moves in sticks and pops. We are not rewarded with the lexical variety or subtlety in rhythm we might have hoped for. What we get instead is a rescuing of the body’s throbs and spasms, a somatic gratification made possible by the repeal of a civil and knowing semantics. The boys who are engaged in the ritual enact the connections between music and body that pulsate at the heart of oral culture (Havelock 41). The chant releases energies, relishes excess, flirts with nonsense, celebrates desire and the body’s percussions. It plays a new-old music in a new world. Why, we might ask, did Kroetsch not score the passage more? He might have stressed the shifts in tempo and duration?28

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Prohibitions

The iterative form in the masturbation passage parallels what happens elsewhere in the poem, most noticeably the father’s litany of advice. His incisive sentences, within intact and end-stopped lines, brook no interpolations and allow no equivocations. They rotate on the armature of a gesturing pronoun—“this”—which dramatizes the nearness and force of the father’s realities. His catechism follows quickly on an initial noun of address. The single word (impatient word?) operates in a pattern of definition and finality: “this is ___.” The father converts a structure of instruction (this is how we build fences on a farm) into a form of reprimand (you should forget poetry). The ordinarily good-natured father here enjoins his son, a bit playfully, to give up his dreams and to take up farming in a dutiful way: Son, this is a crowbar. This is a willow fencepost. This is a sledge. This is a roll of barbed wire. This is a bag of staples. This is a claw hammer. (38) The catechism culminates in dire, yet teasing, warnings: “And the next time you want to / write a poem / we’ll start the haying” (38).29 There is not a lot of room for the kid’s behaviour in a culture of work.30 The father’s forbiddings find their like in the prohibitions of other patriarchs. The priest’s actual words during the confession are rather good-humoured and indulgent, and show him to be in remarkable ways flexible and accommodating, yet they too prohibit. The one-word sentence which opens the priest’s injunctions registers a rhythm of hesitation, quite possibly a weight of exasperation or affection. The instructions of writer and friend, Rudy Wiebe, sound stern and dismissive by contrast: “‘You must lay great black steel lines of / fiction, break up that space with huge design and, like / the fiction of the Russian steppes, build a giant / artifact. No song can do that…’” (39). Wiebe’s proclamation, it appears, arrives as a call to epic magnitude that will brook no derailing. The clinching sentence sounds particularly decisive, and it is hard not to hear its view of poetry as utterly dismissive. The exact same words occur in Wiebe’s “Passage by Land” 136

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(26–27), which appeared several years before Seed Catalogue came out. The published statement includes a semicolon after “No song can do that,” then adds these words: “it must be giant fiction.” The statement quoted in Seed Catalogue sounds rather sweeping and categorical. The paragraph in which the dismissive words originally appear, however, is more nuanced and much less abrupt than in Kroetsch’s truncation it seems: In that wandering to find it is rooted, I believe, the feeling I articulated much later; the feeling that to touch this land with words requires an architectural structure; to break into the space of the reader’s mind with the space of this western landscape and the people in it you must build a structure of fiction like an engineer builds a bridge or a skyscraper over and into space. A poem, a lyric, will not do. You must lay great black steel lines of fiction, break up that space with huge design and, like the fiction of the Russian steppes, build giant artifact. No song can do that; it must be giant fiction. (26–27) It may have been these words, or something close to them, that Wiebe spoke when, in February of 1975, he gave a talk in Lethbridge. Kroetsch records that, on that occasion, he had written down what Wiebe said with the intention of including it in Seed Catalogue. “Dear George [Melnyk],” he writes on “February 16, 1976”: “Rudy Wiebe was here this past week-end to read (a success, with a big crowd listening), and while I listened I incorporated part of what he was saying into a long ‘documentary’ poem that I’m writing...The poem is called ‘Seed Catalogue’ and it’s about how you grow various things in a new place—things from a garden to a poet to a culture, etc.” (MsC. 27.23.9). As we have seen, Kroetsch had, at about the same time, written his friend Bob Harlow to say, “I’m a little bit surprised to hear a contemporary poet saying that poetry is song. I thought we’d settled it that poetry is poetry” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.11). Even so, the word “song” is not confined to Wiebe in Seed Catalogue. It appears favourably just before the words of Wiebe’s dismissal: and you have no memory then no meditation no song (shit we’re up against it) (37)

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In Wiebe’s view the mode itself is insufficient. Imperatives—“must lay,” must “break up,” must “build”—abound in his speech. What does a pitiful little “song” amount to alongside the colossal magnitude in “great” lines and “huge” design that Wiebe enjoins others to construct? It would be tough negotiating with such confident injunctions. A commanding language persists elsewhere in the poem, though for the most part it remains unassertive. The Wiebe character, too, shows himself elsewhere in the poem to be generous and supportive (40). One father figure actually shows no inclination whatsoever to correct the kid. Uncle Freddie refuses to say “Uncle” (refuses to name himself into a patriarchy perhaps?) and he never presumes to admonish the young kid, not even when he feels irked with his nephew’s incomprehension. Other blockages to the narrator’s passions occur at inadvertent moments. An anonymous skeptic interrupts a speaker to object, “That’s a story” (38). No poem at all, really. Other sections, brief and seemingly less relevant, identify impedances to the dissemination of words and seeds, and so bring the verbal and botanical worlds into near identity. The gophers eat the seeds the kid plants; no one is available to receive his application for a job that would involve the delivering of words; the kids’ seeds spill in acts of masturbation (36); the boy is unable to couple with a girl at the skating rink (37); the priest forbids “playing dirty” among the seeds in the granary, a transgression whose nature is made especially manifest in the name of the girl—“Germaine” (33–34). Acts of creativity and procreativity are everywhere thwarted.

Permissions

The patriarchal oppositions, aimed at what is unmanly, wasteful, and sinful, are hardly malicious, but they are often uncomprehending. The mother speaks in shelter and invitation (30).

Naming the Home Place

The poem provides three different ways of naming “the home place.” They enact Kroetsch’s attempts, in Seed Catalogue and elsewhere, to uncover what has 138

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been obscured in his world. The definitions begin with the deracinated emblems of science and technology: “N.E. 17-42-16-W4th Meridian” (30).31 The explanatory terms derive from a mathematical system that is abstract and, in the root sense of the word, idealized. The measures of longitude and latitude anchor in sites that are located elsewhere and decided elsewhere: Greenwich Village, suburb of the imperial city of London, and, closer to home, Ottawa, the capital of the Dominion. Based on instruments that have read the stars, and gauged the prairies in lengths of chain, those readings are themselves extensions of the huge zenith telescopes, compasses, chronometers, and catalogues of stars that the international boundary surveyors lugged with them—the “measuring worm” Stegner called it (Wolf Willow 91). Central to the surveyors’ work was the recording of data and storing of it elsewhere—in the imperial centre of England—as means of specifying place within a conceptual and quantified reading. The bristly array of abbreviations, coded Arabic numerals, hyphens, scientific nouns, and inflated uppercase designate the name as precisely decided, important, and perhaps incontestable. The spiky signs would almost certainly sound disquieting, virtually incomprehensible, to someone not versed surveyors’ conventions. The gnomic and symbol-laden definition, suggestive perhaps of esoteric knowledge, could hardly be less homey. The particles sit in stark contrast to the more modest and familiar lowercase words, “the home place,” that introduce and accompany them. The naming shifts to include the language of recognizable local markers, which is to say, signs of occupation, however recent they may be. The second attempt retains traces of the surveyors’ work— the home place: one and a half miles west of Heisler, Alberta on the correction line road and three miles south. (30) —but it is more domesticated. The Arabic numbers give way to English words (“one” and “three”). The deictics—“west of” and “on the” and “south” of— attach themselves to landmarks (Heisler and the correction line road), which, though still attached to the survey system, would be well known to everyone in the region. The new terms express the relationship between a compass and a tangible point of reference. We can discern in the heft of human habitation a passage through a mapped and named space. The cardinal directions and

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the numbers, their mathematical force reduced in a new wordliness, mingle with familiar human dimensions. We hear comforting place names, and a more amenable amplification, a more reassuring naming of “the home place.” The blending of the two systems of knowing is caught in the phrase “the correction line road.” The phrasing, familiar to anyone who grew up in the rural prairies, derives from anomalies in the surveying system, but it mainly serves here to describe the place in a way that would be known to those who have recently lived there.32 The section then adds a third and still more resonant definition, a more “poetic” version if you will. This one locates home in a way that suggests intimate awareness of a place and a strong responsiveness to it: No trees around the house. Only the wind. Only the January snow. Only the summer sun. (31) The sequence of namings becomes increasingly embodied, and concrete; it becomes more personal and emotional in registering memories of a family house. Gone are the quantified and mechanized vettings which are taken from Ottawa, from Descartes, from the very stars. The simple common terms are not answerable to regimes of precision invented elsewhere. They offer visible signs of a place that is occupied in daily and familiar life, felt in the body and taken into the mind.33 The account arrives at a place measured by social relationships (“home place” gives way to “house”), worn in memory of the human body, felt in the pressure of bare-bone elements—house, wind, snow, sun: “only” these, in the circle of seasons. The terms of home move closer and closer to personal lyric. Yet the poem provides little detail. The words are so simple, so brief, so spare, the world they envision looks stark and unencumbered. They create an oneiric landscape and they move toward their own mystery: “only” the wind, “only” the snow, “only” the sun. The “only” place which is the home place, Kroetsch’s only home in a profound way, occasions the poet’s enigmatic reflections on “a terrible symmetry”34 (31), the retrospective and ruminative voice constituting the home place now as perplexing and possibly even painful. Home 140

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is a familiar strange place that frequents the poet’s dreams. How do you measure home? How do you get there?

Point Form / Pointed Form

In yet another passage, one that is perhaps the most flagrantly anti-poetic in all of Seed Catalogue, the poem organizes itself within the conventions of point form. An index. The structure shocks in its suddenness and its foreignness. It implies something quite other than lyrical felicity or oral invention: He intended merely to release a cargo of bombs on a target and depart. The exploding shell was: a) an intrusion on a design that was not his, or b) an occurrence which he had in fact, unintentionally, himself designed, or c) it is essential that we understand this matter because: (44) The voice, in imitation of discursive argument, works in latinisms, syllogisms, and discrete analysis. It stands far from the expressive mode we have come to expect in poetry and a long way too from the participatory language we find so prominently in Kroetsch’s poetry. The alphabet, the very rudiments of literacy, prominently featured here, provides an external and anticipatory system for ordering the material. The lettered sections graphically signal a system of premeditation and the segmenting of an argument into succinct parts. The expedience considers possibilities one by one (serially)—a matter of this or this or this—and it speaks the language of logic, causation, and deliberated alternatives: “it is essential that…because.” Much the same effect derives from the series of colons, which includes even a colon within a colon. The alphabetizing itself opens expectations based on high literacy. The bombing passages consists of assertion followed by example or explanation in a carefully marked sequence of options, each excluding the other in manner that follows the structure of logic. The construction resembles the rhetorician’s “exordium” or statement of the case. The abstract and Latinate terms, which generalize and disembody, imply the workings of a print-based intelligence, one that arranges (and stores) its information far more schematically than does an oral culture or, for that matter,

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far more compartmentally than do several centuries of English-language poetry. The journalistic dating that appears in a few entries in Seed Catalogue—“Sunday, January 12, 1975” in section 7. (b) (41), and “February 14, 1976” in section 6 (40)—in a quieter way increase the penetration of literate thought. Henri Gobard distinguishes among four functions of language, which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have conveniently summarized: 1) a vernacular language—of maternal, or rural language; 2) a vehicular language—of urban, even international life, involved in business, commerce, and bureaucracy; 3) a referential language—of sense and of culture; 4) a mythic language—of spiritual or religious matters. Deleuze and Guattari have nicely distilled the distinctions: “vernacular language is here; vehicular language is everywhere; referential language is over there; mythic language is beyond” (Kafka 23). The categories apply well to Kroetsch’s long poems of the 1970s—particularly their collisions between vernacular language and other languages. With those terms we could draw out extensive connections between formal design and the larger implications in Kroetsch’s poetry.

Orality

The dominant voice in Seed Catalogue is eminently in and of the world. In overt addressings, in anticipations, and in implied responses, the narrator seeks contact with others and frequently registers it. Only rarely in Kroetsch do we find the modulated lyrical voice which turns to no one (no one present to the speaker at least), and which shows few signs of response to an auditor. Though the talking voice in Seed Catalogue, The Ledger, and The Sad Phoenician, may be loud and at times even clamorous, it never disregards or shouts down other speakers. Time and again, the narrator gets caught up in give-and-take. He may be, as we say, quite the talker; he also is a keen listener. He speaks and is spoken to. At first glance, the poem would seem to have been created without any great sense of cultural import. The narrator’s own voice, at times surpassingly “uneducated,” is given to phonetic elision and fusing of words. It loves 142

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hyperbole, intensifiers, and addresses to the second person: “This is the God’s own truth” (33). The manner in which the narrator opens the topic of his preoccupation perfectly illustrates the style. —Hey, Lady. You at the end of the bar. I wanna tell you something. —Yuh? —Peter Knight—of Crossfield, Alberta. Bronc-Busting Champion of the World. You ever hear of Pete Knight, the King of All Cowboys, Bronc-Busting Champion of the world? —Huh-uh. (42) The narrator straightforwardly speaks to his sought audience and in a fashion identifies her: “Hey, Lady. / You at the end of the bar.” Second person all the way. Having caught her attention, he announces that he has something he is itching to tell, and (shades of the Ancient Mariner), he has singled out her, a total stranger he has never before set eyes on. In face of the woman’s evident mistrust, registered in her spunky “Yuh?,” he lets fly a flurry of names and attributes, all of them capitalized: “Peter Knight” and “Crossfield” and “Alberta” can be no surprise; but we also see (and in an attuned reading, hear) “BroncBusting Champion” and the “World” and “Pete Knight” again who is “King,” not simply of “Cowboys,” but, more insistently, of “All Cowboys”—he who, not to make a mistake, continues to be “Bronc-Busting Champion” of the entire “World.” The conventions of print underscore an oral insistence on Knight as no mere “king” but The King. The capitals bulge and shoulder in emphasis, score for us an aural reading, holler to enlist the unwitting woman (a “Lady”) within a story of those who exceed the limits of ordinary mortals. Peter Knight, once named, returns in the iterations of his hometown. The locating terms follow a pause marked by the dash (“Pete Knight—of Crossfield, /

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Alberta”), as if the speaker had suddenly realized that his ambushed listener doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) about this Pete Knight, whoever he was. It inspires the speaker that he is not any old Pete Knight, he is the Knight from Crossfield. The speaker briefly interrupts his embroiderings to appeal once more to his auditor (“You ever hear of”) before launching on a second spurt of identifications. A new designation (“the King of All / Cowboys”) supplements an earlier naming (“Bronc-Busting Champion”). The structure of explanation is overwhelmingly expressive. The tempo is more committed to conveying the speaker’s attitude than to providing information. I want to tell you something, the narrator compulsively says. But he immediately provides the hero’s name rather than supplying a helpful context. The loud admirer elects repeated and amplified mentions of Knight’s name, and his language thickens with consternation at the woman’s lack of appreciation. These hardly are the signs of an explanation organized for the page, or for oral comprehension for that matter. The site of enunciation, and the awkward goodwill of the narrator, are enough to provoke suspicion about his condition, and it was probably wise of Kroetsch to remove two words—“sound drunk”—he had included in an earlier draft of the poem (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4). In that same copy, he clipped explanatory words to simulate the breezy vernacular. “You ever hear of Pete King, / He was the king of all cowboys?” becomes “You ever hear of Pete King, / the king of all cowboys?”

Found Texts

There is at least one other voicing—if voicing it is—and it probably is the most conspicuous in the poem. From start to finish, Seed Catalogue is jammed with “un-poetic” material, primarily extracts from an actual seed catalogue—“a kind of magic talisman or a generator of mythic energy,” according to Jay Johnson (90). Kroetsch has dug up some bright and promising finds. He hauls them back to shine his nest, pleased with their colour and sheen. Poet as thief, kleptomaniac. Shoplifter, shapeshifter. “Magpies, he explained, are a nuisance” (32). Kroetsch handles the scroungings with special flair and success. The catalogue material would seem at first blush to be eminently unpromising, certainly unliterary. The following passage would be typical (the noisy and persistent jostling of fonts occurs in Kroetsch’s text and in the original catalogues themselves): 144

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No. 339 — McKenzie’s Pedigreed Early Snowcap Cauliflower: “Of the many varieties of vegetables in existence, Cauliflower is unquestionably one of the greatest inheritances of the present generation, particularly Western Canadians. There is no place in the world where better cauliflowers can be grown than right here in the West. The finest specimens we have ever seen, larger and of better quality, are annually grown here on our prairies. Being particularly a high altitude plant it thrives to a point of perfection here, seldom seen in warmer climes.” (37) Kroetsch’s seizure foregrounds the extract as newly authorized and unexpectedly pleasing. Other entries offer similar prospects. Brome Grass, we discover, “Flourishes under absolute neglect” (40), though any comparable hope for the boy looks a tad less likely. This from a document that is shamelessly given to acts of commercial persuasion? “Climes?” A bit gauche perhaps. Heard now within a literary circuit, however, the archaic and “poetic” word can live on with happy effect—a humorous elevating of the cauliflower to noble purpose and romance. The superlatives leap to attention: “one of the greatest inheritances” and “no place in the world,” “The finest specimens,” and “thrives to a point of perfection here.” Outlandish claims, no doubt. Bare-assed lies, we might, in the spirit of Kroetsch’s poem, be inclined to say. And yet, now that the words have been rescued from their original purpose, they take on new worth and offer their own reward. Ordinarily discarded or disregarded, they now provide a comical dream of richness and plenty, a charming version of the fabled garden. Theirs is a poetry in the commonplace then, a parody of the old myth of the West as a garden rich in profusion. It seems right to wonder: to what extent does the embellishment derive from the propaganda literature that once lured settlers to the West? In it the prairies were invented as a veritable outburst of seed and blossom. The myth captivated with its promised lushness and plenitude. Superlatives and wonderfully creative language abounded. The winter was bracing, the air curative. The posters, giddy with prospects, promised the world, or at least paradise. This was a region that “‘could not be excelled for agricultural purposes’” (Owram 160), one that was “‘naturally clothed with nutritious grasses such as those named buffalo-grass and bunch-grass’” (161). The region veritably burst with “‘the largest flower garden on the continent’” and the climate was so temperate it was found to be “‘very much the same as it was in England 30 years ago’” (165).

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In one particularly rhapsodic report, we learn, “‘the lakes and rivers teem with fish, and every marsh and pool swarms with water fowl.’” Cattle are to be raised “‘without an hour’s labour’” and “‘a prolific soil’” will work its miracles. Most wondrous of all, “‘all that is needed is a mere scratching of the soil or the placing of a net in the water to supply a household with food’” (166). Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country, in particular the chapter “Eden, Surveyed and Fenced: The Romance of Pioneering,” spells out the baleful effects of the myth for prairie dwellers and prairie artists alike. Might we suppose, further, that the original author or authors had themselves written the advertising copy with a knowing smile and that they took their own kind of satisfaction in the hyperbole? “Popular advertising,” writes Bakhtin, “is always ironic, always makes fun of itself to a certain extent” (Rabelais 160). Few could resist a metapoetic reading of the passage. “How can you grow?” Kroetsch’s poem asks again and again, driven by some kind of anxiety. How can you grow: a prairie town? a prairie poem? a prairie garden? a prairie poet? How can you grow any of it? Within the botanical metaphor that spreads through Seed Catalogue, the passages about “finest specimens” and a plant that “thrives to a point of perfection,” one that “is unquestionably one of the greatest inheritances of the present generation,” demonstrate the writer’s unenviable position. A fine irony emerges as Kroetsch claims for his own purposes the sub-literary source, as of course he would: “I’m always looking for quotidian texts that tell us how to be literary” (Hancock 40). The found bits allow other understandings. When we happen upon the description of a squash,35 we are confronted with a sensuality that may or may not have escaped the notice of its anonymous authors. Whatever their awareness, the words linger on the gourd’s colour, shape, tactility. The adjectives relish its richness: “The / vines are of strong running growth; the fruits are large, / olive shaped, of a deep rich green color the rind is / smooth…” (32). The description savours the properties—inviting, palpable, downright sexy. The account trails off in ellipsis, in loss of words, as if wanting to say more (there is more to be said), but unable to find the words. Who could overlook such a squash, so close at hand, so inviting—in shape and feel so palpable, so irresistible? Homely old “Hubbard Squash,” it turns out, is imbued also with wondrous force and movement (“strong running growth”), and endowed with exotic allure (“olive shaped”) that would stir the ardour of a poet. The three strong monosyllables—“deep rich green”—are compelling.36 No doubt it helps that we can 146

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scan the lines within traditional prosody, that we can remember our chlorophyll myths, and respond to the charmed terms of fable and plenitude.

The Lyric

It would be misleading, then, to imply that Kroetsch never makes use of traditional means. Fairly conventional passages appear in Seed Catalogue when it is speaking in a somewhat studied voice about poetry, when in contemplative mood it is considering the significance of bombing Germany, and when it is describing a Japanese print—when, that is, the poem is raising aesthetic and symbolic issues. As we also have seen, Kroetsch now and then turns toward image and metaphor, rhyming of vowel and consonant, and modulated phrasing. Most of all, he makes much use of narrative, far more than we might expect to find in a postmodern poet. The lyric that makes its way into Seed Catalogue may get past readers who have been prepared to miss it because of what Kroetsch and others have said about the mode, and because they have been fascinated by the sheer dazzle of Kroetsch’s volatile writing. A few readers seem to have been distracted enough not to hear the lyricism at all, or at least not to acknowledge it. The interludes are few and brief in Seed Catalogue (and they were reduced as the poem developed toward a sparer expression), but they are there. Seed Catalogue turns to the lyrical tradition when the narrator thinks of his young love, Germaine, and when he remembers his dead mother. The treatment enlists the two female figures within a pastoral tradition, as embodiments of nurturing and fertility. The vacancy of the family yard reminds us of that lost mother, and haunts the adult author to the end of the poem. The poet is quickened by memories of the sweet peas, which the mother evidently has endowed with special powers: Your sweet peas climbing the staked chicken wire, climbing the stretched binder twine by the front porch

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taught me the smell of morning, the grace of your tired hands, the strength of a noon sun, the colour of prairie grass (45) In the parallel structures, the sweet peas—staked, stretched, climbing, teaching—take on life and purpose. They stand in for the mother, very nearly serve as her agent. They take on her grace and serve as emblems for her aspirations in a world of spare and unadorned conditions. The growing flower, metonym to mother, initiates the devoted young gardener into a touching and vivid sense of her. A field of metaphor, though it is not exactly lyrical, spreads across the text—botanized boy / pedigreed spuds / humanized creatures—until the human, animal, and plant kingdoms cross over and the boundaries begin to break down.

Minor Literature

The idiomatic language that Kroetsch sets against, or more precisely within, received language would be part of what Gilles Deleuze has called a “minor” literature. That literature rewrites a “major” language or an established literature in a dynamic way because it is not totally beholden to it. For Deleuze, minor literature is inherently political, collective, and deterritorializing. It does not make use of an institutionalized diction, nor does it observe a settled arrangement of words. The writer within a minor literature never speaks as a master, and would in fact “hate all languages of masters” (Deleuze 167). “The sound or the word that traverses this new deterritorialization no longer belongs to a language of sense, even though it derives from it, nor is it an organized music or song, even though it might appear to be” (157). The Deleuzean distinctions illuminate Kroetsch though, as David Arnason has pointed out, a jubilant Kroetsch observes none of the scarcity or paucity that Deleuze discerns in their exemplar, Kafka. (“The Prairies” n.p.). Charles Bernstein has, in a related move, championed a poetry that counters the tired pieties of an “Island English Verse tradition” (A Poetics 117). In resistance to its 148

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“staid and staged irony,” “linguistically anemic” plainness (118), and “imperial” standards (117), Bernstein endorses nervous shapes and energies. He has had enough of “agendas of clarity, plainness, accessibility” (119) when “eccentricity” might “rekindle writing and thinking” (118). What’s needed for Kroetsch, too, is a rawer, more embodied language.

What Is To Be Done

Kroetsch focuses his many voices in an exuberant outpouring. In a flurry of hope and protest he speculates, irrepressibly, brilliantly, on what might be done, rejoices in the force of what is near, or happening, and what is yet to come. How do you…? he asks again and again. How about…? How about…? he marvels, and he tries the options, one after the other. The refrain is emphatic, the grammar anticipatory. Precisely what it is we hear in the spasms of questions is not certain, though whatever it might be has to be mixed. Is it frustration: How on earth can this be done? Fascination? Is it persistence? A confoundedness? In at least one instance it surprises. Faced with a priest’s admonition to “keep your peter in your pants / for the next thirteen years,” the poet responds in chagrin. He replies not in full refrain (“But how do you grow”) but in amputated clause (“But how—”) (Complete Field Notes 34). The choked-off clause does not so much seek knowledge or information; it expresses something like exasperation, perhaps, at the impossibility of the terms: How could he ever manage a thing like that? Whatever we hear in the protraction, the tones of ongoing challenge register: how do you…? A matter of means then. No doubt something has to be done. Resisting a repressive past and an unheeding present, Kroetsch lets rip with the possibilities. He begins to hear voices and to spring them loose. Into his poem rise the sounds of the unsaid and the unheard. His goal is to make a present of the present; not what is pre-sent, the great-given as he sometimes calls it, but what is at hand. His poetry recalls what “was,” but it insists on what might be done with newly accessed texts. It asks what now and in the future they might come to be. Where some have found scarcity Kroetsch discovers profusion. There is no end to the tones and accents: shouts and whispers, pleas and pleasurings, threats and rejoicings, boastings and reportings, lamentations and meditations, objections and overtures. He opens prospects, raises a spate of what-ifs and just-supposings. He releases onto

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the page a wild compendium of voices, his own demotic music, his democratic summoning toward the new poem in a new world.

F Not bad. Not bad for starters. There among the catalogues and kings, the squash and the cabbage, the horses and the bullshitters. Around talk of Pete Knight, of family and friends, poets and pretenders. The gardens and the pubs. All that. All that unfinished writing.

F How about that? we might say. How about /that?

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four

What It Was Seed Catalogue

And in bed, alone, after, I remembered the death of my mother. I remembered the wake, the crowds of people arriving over muddy roads, the body in the coffin in my parents’ bedroom. And I remembered the men who came to my father and tried to tell him of the sorrow they felt: and even at the age of 13 [14 actually] I saw the failure of language, the faltering connection between those spoken words and what it was I knew my father felt, what I felt. —Robert Kroetsch, The “Crow” Journals 16 The story is concealed from us. Only by a careful acknowledgement of that concealment do we allow for a revelation of the story. —Robert Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words 182

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And yet, is not the mother figure the figure at once most present in and most absent from this poet’s work? The concern with nostos is related to a long family history of losses, [including]…the early death of the poet’s mother in Alberta, a century after that first un-homing. —Robert Kroetsch, Completed Field Notes 124 The “Crow” Journals mentions the difficulties Kroetsch is having in coming into a story. “The son remembering the story-telling father...One of the reasons why I’m a novelist, I suppose” (19). In that same journal, Kroetsch mentions what happened the next summer when he returned from upperstate New York to one of the legendary Qu’Appelle writers’ retreats in Saskatchewan. It is July 25, 1975, and he listens without a word as, one by one, the gathered writers speak into the night: “Then it was my turn. But I couldn’t tell a story. The novelist unable to tell a story. The ghost of my father, there in the shadows—the story-teller. I sang a song, ‘Cigareets and Whiskey and Wild Wild Women’” (35). When Eli Mandel writes to Kroetsch on June 5, 1981, he mentions that scene. Mandel had known Kroetsch for several years and he had been at a few of the famed Qu’Appelle retreats, but it is to that July night that he refers. Mandel is protesting what he takes to be a lack of insight in a critic who misses the near defencelessness beneath Kroetsch’s ribald humour: “Too many jokes, I think. I see you—singing at Fort San (Whisky and Wild Wild Women) and remember something desperate in the declaration.” Mandel astutely names that “something” as “such longing” (MsC. S91/96.6 8.39). Laurie Ricou has discerned a similar undercurrent in Kroetsch’s work: “Kroetsch’s exuberant style is richly humorous, yet beneath the humour is one of the most forceful expressions of human solitude to be found in the Canadian prairie novel” (Vertical Man 135). Again and again the profound sadness of the clown haunts Kroetsch and lurks in his characters. Nevertheless, more than a few readers inexplicably have not noted behind, or within, or alongside, or beyond the laughter in Kroetsch, a suffering and longing that at times is acute. “I wonder why you never allow your characters to weep,” Byrna Barclay says to Kroetsch on October 21, 1983. “You write from both your heads, at each end, it’s time you went straight to the middle, to your own heart” (MsC. 591/96.6 2.1). “I would like to rage my way into a long poem,” Kroetsch writes on “Aug 9, 1975,” “and instead I’m left with silences” (MsC. 27.2.2.29). In March 1976, when he was writer-in-residence at the University of Lethbridge, he records his strugglings into a new text: “I thought again of a 152

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poem, ‘The Bullshit/Artist’” (The “Crow” Journals 44). The title may not refer to Seed Catalogue, though the words circulate in both the published version of Seed Catalogue and in the drafts that led up to it. Kroetsch had actually mentioned the text a little earlier, when it was in its infancy. On February 9, 1976, Kroetsch wrote to his Aunt Mary from his writer-in-residency at the University of Lethbridge: “I’m starting another poem, a kind of companion piece to The Ledger. This one is to be about the West, our experiences in the West, and at the moment it’s called Seed Catalogue” (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–4). On April 26, Kroetsch confesses, as if in happy transgression, “I’ve been working on a poem, Seed Catalogue, instead of on the novel” (The “Crow” Journals 54). By September 22, the anticipation has turned to excitement: “Seed Catalogue will become a book” with a new press in Winnipeg (60).1 On October 8, 1976, Kroetsch writes ebulliently of the poem’s first public performance: “First reading of ‘Seed Catalogue.’ It works as a poem. All that bloody gambling. It WORKS! We drank for ten hours, in the campus pub, after the reading—four of us at the hard core, but many others floating in and out. A rare and beautiful drunk” (62). Cigarettes and whiskey. A few months later, on December 22, he is talking about the impending release of Seed Catalogue (Enright and Cooley). To his chagrin, the book is a while coming out, and he writes to a friend on “feb 14 77”: Dear Jill, I wish the rumor about SEED CATALOGUE would find its realization: but no, the book ain’t out. I’m a believer in the local, and last fall I agreed to have Turnstone Press do a limited edition of the poem. Nothing has happened, but the manuscript is finished, complete. Perhaps it’s waiting for spring, as a seed catalogue should. (MsC. 334/84.1 1.118) Kroetsch has spoken of the false or wrong-headed histories he had faced as an aspiring author. He responded to the impediments by making use of “the particulars of place: newspaper files, place names, shoe boxes full of old photographs, tall tales, diaries, journals, tipi rings, weather reports, business ledgers, voting records” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 76). Within that world of the flagrantly local and the eminently unliterary, Kroetsch finds an item of particular interest—an old seed catalogue. It was in the spirit of Kroetsch’s poetics that Turnstone, in designing Seed Catalogue, used a copy of the actual

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McKenzie Seeds 1917 catalogue Kroetsch had quoted. McKenzie Seeds in Brandon, Manitoba, loaned a copy from which Turnstone created a palimpsest “beneath” (in the actual printing, upon) the text of the poem. The screen was printed lightly in gold on a light blue textured paper so that the graphics would not distract from the reading of Kroetsch’s text, which was printed in dark green, but would be visible to those interested in the play between text and field. Laurie Ricou describes the selection of the screens, their creative juxtaposing, and the visual effect of the design (Rev. of Seed Catalogue 115). The ink used for the reproductions in the first edition, originally legible, has now (in 2015) faded almost beyond recognition. Kroetsch’s account of the poem’s beginnings might lead us to believe that the discovery of the actual seed catalogue had preceded and even precipitated the poem and that the poem was inaugurated in one sudden discovery: “That was like a stroke of lightning. I just knew, looking at that thing, that I had the other half of my poem.” (The “other half” refers to Seed Catalogue as supplement to The Ledger or completion of it.) He adds in satisfaction, “There it was, all I had to do was work it out. From there on, it began to elaborate itself” (Miki, “Self on Self” 126). He goes on to say, I didn’t take the notes for the poem with me; I left them all in Winnipeg [when he returned to Binghamton for a year]. I got there and realized I couldn’t leave the poem alone: I had to work without the notes—I had an enormous pile of notes by this time. And by being free of the notes— it’s again a very interesting lesson—suddenly I could write the poem because I didn’t have all that material sitting on my desk. I went back with a manuscript, then used the notes I had. That’s when Turnstone asked to publish it. (128)2 So: an electrifying uncovering, followed by the immediate resolution of a problem, and then a fast (re)writing of the text—the whole thing realized in three sudden stages. The structure of the published poem tends to reinforce at least part of what Kroetsch has said. The major sections characteristically open with passages from an actual McKenzie Seeds catalogue, so that what follows seems to have been triggered by the quotations and to have arisen in response to them. The sequence in reading Seed Catalogue encourages us to suppose that

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Kroetsch’s ruminations, too, were provoked in chronological and causal ways by what he had come upon. A clear begetting then.3 The evidence in the archives suggests a slightly different narrative—different at least in the chronology of choosing and positioning the appropriated passages. It looks as though the citations that Kroetsch ends up using arrive late in the development of the manuscript, so that the clause “then used the notes I had” might explain what happened. One archival page, for example, includes jottings on meteorological reports, wills, and The Camrose Canadian. Kroetsch advises himself about what he should be investigating, including “old seed catalogues.” Specifically he writes, “see: Bowdon Seed Company” and “see Glenbow: old seed catalogues, old ads for homesteaders.” The memos need not have been anticipatory; they could have functioned as prompts or reminders as Kroetsch went about visiting and revisiting his material. Still, there is reason to believe that the McKenzie Seeds catalogue was not quite so unsought, nor its consequences quite so abrupt, as in Kroetsch’s memory it was. Many of the excerpts from the McKenzie catalogue that we find in the published version do not even appear in the material that has found its way into the University of Calgary archives, and so might well have been added only at the very end, just before publication. Further, several catalogue excerpts that Kroetsch had been thinking of using, and which did appear during what look to be late stages, do not make it into the final version, though several of them, cleanly typed, were well developed and would have leant themselves to inclusion. It is entirely possible that the late additions were the result of material having gone astray and only far into the process recovered. Despite Kroetsch’s reports that he had misplaced or put aside much of the material in hurried moves back and forth between Binghamton and the Canadian prairies, and that he had rewritten the entire poem from scratch while he was back in Binghamton, the evidence points to the addition of the McKenzie material once he was back in Winnipeg. Whatever the process, the find was a gift. “The seed catalogue,” Kroetsch explains, “is a shared book in our society. We have few literary texts approaching that condition” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 82). In a sense Seed Catalogue is a text of culture making, then—one that would speak from Kroetsch’s people and to them in a shared understanding. Seed Catalogue tests his belief that from such inauspicious sources could come the makings of poetry. .



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F The road to Seed Catalogue—possibly twenty-eight months in writing4—would seem to have been both troubled and heady. Behind it, upon it, lies the liberating and inhibiting presence of the storytelling father, one of the bullshitters who looms so flamboyantly in the poem. It is this figure, a lover of horses,5 who witnesses what must be one of the most puzzling events in Seed Catalogue. In a memorable early passage, the young protagonist falls off a horse, much to the scorn of the hired man and equally to the bewilderment of the father. The narrator reports the scene in clipped sentences: This is what happened: we were harrowing the garden. You’ve got to understand this: I was sitting on the horse. The horse was standing still. I fell off. The hired man laughed: how in hell did you manage to fall off a horse that was standing still? (Completed Field Notes 29) Another figure appears at this moment, apparently interceding in parental protection: Bring me the radish6 seeds, my mother whispered. A few lines further on the mother narrative is amplified: My mother was marking the first row with a piece of binder twine, stretched between two pegs.7

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The hired man laughed: just about planted the little bugger. Cover him up and see what grows. My father didn’t laugh. He was puzzled by any garden that was smaller than a quarter-section8 of wheat and summerfallow. (30) The sheer “unmanliness” of the falling Kroetsch has made no effort to hide—within the poem or outside of it. The kid provides a variation on a Kroetschean character shown to be a crashing failure as a rural male, a point that David Arnason has elaborated in “Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue.” Whatever reticence the family’s hired men might have been expected to show out of deference to their employer, they were more than ready to pass judgement on the son’s inadequacies. Kroetsch did face some such ridicule, according to his later reports at least, and it was sometimes rude and aggressive: “The hired men…made no bones about telling me I was a disaster, sixteen years old and still reading books, often to be seen in the garden doing women’s work when I should be out pitching bundles or working the summerfallow. I couldn’t be trusted with a team of horses...Useless as the tits on a boar, the hired men said” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 73). The young farm boy’s woeful failures—his proclivities for book and garden, his infantilism, his close ties to his mother—he is willing later to admit in comical self-exposing stories. Another hired man, in the ferociously male domain of the rural pub, unhesitatingly diagnoses the source of the boy’s failures. He said that, “I was spoiled rotten by a mother who led me to believe I had a destiny to accept rather than a life to endure” (A Likely Story 56).9 The young Kroetsch was, in the eyes of those men, a momma’s boy. How unmanly he would have appeared in his childhood, and how laid open to scorn he must have felt when he was excused from the demands made on other farm boys. That his mother meant to save her son from an abridged life would only have heightened the sense of exposure. In Kroetsch’s words, “I guess my mother didn’t want me to be a farmer. She was quite happy to have me reading books and daydreaming” (Miki, “Self on Self” 112). Kroetsch never lacked for encouragement at home or in school. The mother’s support for her son probably had a lot to do with his readiness to become a writer. The fullest statement about that encouragement occurs in an interview from 1996: “My parents,

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especially my mother, encouraged me to think: You can do what you want to do in the submissive self that the Catholic church was teaching. In a nice way, my parents were part of my liberation; they encouraged me to dream, if you will, to discover, and to create” (Müller iii). His mother hired a young teacher to help around the house but also to teach her son who, as a result, could already read when he got to school. Kroetsch loved school from the outset, he told me, and he obviously did well. He has written “A Thank You Prologue,” a warm tribute to the teachers of rural Saskatchewan and Alberta during the 1930s and a fairly full account of his own experiences as a school kid. Teachers were encouraging. A report card dated “Jan. 4, 1943” records superb grades for everything except “Physical Training.” A teacher attaches this note: “First and highest average in school.” Kroesch’s teacher and principal at Heisler public school then added a few glowing words of praise and encouragement: “Robert is going to make something in life if he continues his good work. A parent should be is proud of such a boy. Be sure the boy gets an opportunity for further study. You’ll be proud of him” (MsC. 775/04.25 87.9). Kroetsch would have been fifteen and a half years old at that point. His mother has only recently died and his father signs his report card as parent. The next year, three years after his mother’s death on October 3, 1941, and shortly after his seventeenth birthday on June 26, Kroetsch is off to Red Deer to take his grade twelve (1944–45). He was there instructed by an exceptional teacher, whose influence Kroetsch has made a point of mentioning on more than one occasion. It was she who identified his promise as a writer and encouraged him to pursue his instincts: “Mrs. Aylesworth. The fierce-eyed, redheaded teacher at Red Deer High School who told me I should become a writer. Again, today, I thought of her. My debt to a teacher” (The “Crow” Journals 67). Although Jane Tompkins was writing about the American Western, and she was not thinking of Kroetsch when she wrote West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, her words can be applied to the situation in which Kroetsch found himself as a bookish kid and a doubtful horseman. Tompkins outlines a code of stoicism that, in the Western genre, is set against a female hope for something more intimate and more creative. She surmises that Western heroes seek exemption from a suffocating gentility and moralizing religion set within the purview of women. She proposes that male asceticism stands for “inner confusion. A welter of thoughts and feelings, a condition of mental turmoil that is just as hateful as the more obvious external constraints of economics, politics, and 158

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class distinctions. Women, like language, remind men of their own interiority; women’s talk evokes a whole network of familial and social relationships and their corollaries in the emotional circuitry” (66). The scene of the boy’s fall, followed soon by his reaction to the mother’s death, is oddly handled. The experience would undoubtedly have been hard on the boy, who is very close to the speaker himself. The Kroetsch character (“actual” and surrogate), who figures in decades of texts as a crushing failure, here in Seed Catalogue appears as a disappointment to the able and confident father, who loved to work with horses. Exposed as clumsy before his dad, before his mother too, the boy must have felt sharp anguish. Little wonder that Stan Dragland has identified this scene, or one very like it, as source of unusual poignancy for the author: “What draws me is the plain human emotion his writing contains and generates. One of its main sources is the primal knot of gender confusion caused by the pull between father and mother, between biological maleness (and heterosexuality) and yens that don’t fit the male social script” (“Potatoes” 107). However painful the experience, the moment of deficiency is treated comically, and the mother’s interventions, so brief and so discreet, are rendered almost negligible. Sheer and laughable ineptitude might be our own assessment of the boy’s bungling: How in hell could anyone fall off a horse that was standing still? Anyone, much less a boy on a farm where horses were a familiar part of daily life, would surely experience what happens as profoundly humiliating. Skill in horsemanship was so expected in that rural and very male world that failure would prove particularly damaging,10 so unpalatable that the hired man in the poem can show no circumspection whatsoever. He is emboldened, even in front of the parents, to restate and to amplify his contempt. The hired man is so imbued with conventional wisdom and so confident in his measurings that he assumes his view would accord with the father’s (and perhaps the mother’s, if that mattered). Without concern for the boy’s feelings, the unnamed man blurts out his derision—“just / about planted the little bugger” (30)—in words that diminish the protagonist into anonymity and ridicule. The slighting name (“little bugger”), the dismissive reference to him in the third person, and the further removal of the boy through the definite article, name him almost as though he were not there, as if he were unworthy of patience or respect, or even acknowledgement. Had the hired man named him “the little guy,” say, or “the little fella,” he would have softened his response to something affectionate.11

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Instead of speculating on what it might be to “Cover him up and see what grows,” and so extending his ridicule,12 the hired man could have shown a sensitivity that respected the parents, too, in their attendance and concern, and allowed the kid to emerge in a little more dignified way. Kroetsch’s decisions to remove from the scene its potential pathos, and to enlist it in a comic narrative of planting and growing, displace what sympathy we might otherwise have developed for the farm kid. In the drafts the boy’s fall is caused by distraction. A sensitive kid, given to daydreaming and to role-playing, he lets his mind wander so far that he loses track of where he is and what he is doing: “One day, riding back from the potato patch to the yard, not watching what I was doing, not watching the rhythm, I fell off. The horse was walking, pulling the cultivator. I was sitting on the horse, my legs crossed, I fell off.” In another account the author is more speculative, less clear about how the failure has happened: “Perhaps the horse was walking. / Perhaps I was sitting cross-legged.” At other points the boy is thinking of winter, he is dreaming of the circus, or he is practising to ride cross-legged. In earlier versions he is “not watching what I / was doing.” In one way or another, the boy is bemused and his fall occurs not out of clumsiness but preoccupation. These accounts, relinquished in the end, would have presented him more sympathetically as a daydreamer given to fancy and we could have been able to read him as sensitive artist-in-hiding. His falling off the horse would hardly have been cause for levity, at least not of the kind or degree we find in the published text. Kroetsch actually adds to the sense of the kid’s failure. The horse once was actually moving (“walking”) in virtually all of the earlier versions but in the published poem he halts the horse’s motion. He also assigns a near willfulness to the kid’s falling. At one point the hired man had said nothing, simply “laughed when / I fell off the horse.” In a later version he asks how the kid “could” fall off what at first is a slowly moving horse, and then becomes a stationary horse. Kroetsch escalates the culpability when the kid “manages” (at least in the hired hand’s estimation) to fall off, as if in deliberate ineptitude or perversity he himself made it happen. By the time the poem is published, the boy would seem to be so complicit in his own mortification that a reader might share the hired man’s consternation. There is another big difference. The kid’s misery over the fall and then the wake was rendered far more forthrightly in the manuscript. There he is so hard-pressed he is brought to tears by the hired man’s guffaw. In unpublished 160

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passages he weeps disconsolately over his mother’s death. In the end those responses are expunged, and the boy’s emotional vulnerability is nearly erased. The boy is at a loss for words. How could he speak of what would scarcely be credible, in any way thinkable, to the hired man? How to speak of what evidently is the latest in a series of demonstrated inadequacies? What opportunity could he find to absolve the moment or to lift the shame? What could return the boy to good standing? He would seem to have fallen irretrievably beyond reprieve. It is perplexing that the fall should be so unemotionally and so laconically rendered. But it is. The story presented in a few short lines: the hired man’s mocking dismissal, the father’s puzzled reaction that borders on retraction, the mother’s brief intercession. Readers may find that the mother’s invitation, which recurs later in the text—“Bring me the radish seeds, my mother whispered”—strengthens her role and enforces the boy’s distress. And yet, is not her death, within the few words of its naming, deflected to near inconsequence? The narrator’s acknowledgement of it becomes almost obliterated in story and seemingly unrelated detail.13 But the story of his mishap doesn’t go away. Laurie Ricou has identified the strange power of the scene when, in a discerning early review of Seed Catalogue, he finds that “Kroetsch’s way of growing a poem is to listen to…apparently insignificant incidents and images until they come to take on mythic (anti-mythic?) proportions” (Rev. of Seed Catalogue 114). Ricou helpfully sketches in the stream of references to horses in the rest of the poem. A reader could put more weight on the mother’s role to the extent of hearing in her call a tenderness bordering on intimacy. The voice would seem to be near and complicit, he the distraught son and she the nearby and beckoning mother. He possibly would be reassured a little by her summons and implied comfort. Her intercession promises to dissolve the tableau14 and to draw the son away from the sting of his shame. Her gesture would bring him to a place that is less openly demanding and where, we might speculate, he could act as her accomplice in the garden. Clearly, she seeks to slip him out of a narrative that measures the male by acts of physical strength and skill. What does the kid think? How does he face the adults who surround him? Would not the mother’s rescue perturb him and bring him into further discredit, her act immobilizing even as it is meant to be unlocking? Would the hired man’s scathing judgement not be lifted but intensified by the mother’s absolving words—proving that her son is a sissy hiding behind his momma’s skirts? What

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does the kid think of his own huge failure, his mortification exacerbated by the hired man’s horselaugh? Reminders of that scoffing spill over into the narrator’s extravagant obsessions. He is much taken with talk of horses and riding horses (the rodeo horse; the horses that are no longer available on farms; the horse that repeatedly is “standing still”; the Cariboo horse that Kroetsch and his drinking buddy, Al Purdy, gallop through the restaurant in the Hotel Lacombe).15 Above all, he is haunted by the romantic figure Pete Knight, king of all cowboys, who, despite his skill as legendary rodeo rider, got killed when he fell off a horse. The narrator is so preoccupied with Pete Knight that he shouts his name to the anonymous woman he calls “Lady.” A “Knight” and his “Lady,” then. It seems obvious that Knight plays in the narrator’s imagination as a horseman who tests himself in trials of skill and courage. Jane Tompkins has reminded us of the romance of that world: “The horse, like a colonized subject, makes a man a master. Its association with knighthood, chivalric orders, lordly privilege, and high degree reinforces the image of mastery that a man on horseback represents” (101). Dick Harrison summons another kind of respect for the Western figure, the cowboy or the rider of horses, who is demeaned in contemporary reassessments: “The horse becomes the appropriate image for the vanishing agrarian prairie not only because of its literal part in pre-industrial farming but because it carries all the associations of freedom and power and pride we attach to the open spaces of the plains” and that attach themselves to skilled horsemen (Unnamed Country 206). Kroetsch amplifies his own admiration for those who by day and by night inhabit pubs in nobly creative ways, in knightly demeanour we might almost say. They appear as a burgeoning force of “A-1 Hard Northern Bullshitters” (21), Kroetsch’s father eminently among them. What then is the boy’s relationship with a baffled and perhaps hapless father (what can he possibly say?) who elsewhere proves to be endearingly affectionate with pestilential creatures, ingratiatingly inventive and self-mocking, and winningly adept in telling tall tales? We have earlier seen the father as a tender and vulnerable man.16 What now do we make of his paralysis in the scene of falling? Is there for him a fatal difference between words he can summon in public entertainment and words he cannot call upon in personal suffering? What of the boy’s soft-spoken mother who hovers on the edge of the scene? Why is the narrative so truncated and the event so seemingly diverted? What is it that is not said? 162

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F Why, for that matter, does the narrative of the mother’s death and burial so immediately follow the story of the fall, and what does the sequence do to our reading of the poem? And why does the graveyard scene occur so obliquely? Peter Thomas has intriguingly proposed that the narrator has sought to repudiate “the maternal song” because the boy has been “seduced by paternal song.” A sign of that struggle can be found, Thomas argues, in how Kroetsch deals with his mother’s wake. It is, he finds, “described in such a way as to imply the weakening of her influence” (Robert Kroetsch 26). In an earlier review of the book, Thomas made the claim even more strongly: According to him, “the rejection [of the maternal song] is by no means complete, for the mother’s ‘whisper’ continues to be heard,” even in the funeral scene, “which is dominated by her, the description of her wake is significantly prosaic, anecdotal” (“How Much” 112). Thomas comprehends the separation from the mother, perhaps in a Jungian way, as something that is necessary, even desirable. In his mythic reading, the mother represents “the closed structures of the agrarian mythos” from which the lover-poet must flee. He must “appear to evade and deny the mother’s request” so that he can occupy a place within “the boundlessness and flight of hyperbolic story” (Robert Kroetsch 24). The aspiring young poet must repudiate the female song of love and intimacy in favour of paternal hyperbole.17 The reading is provocative, but a counter understanding of the mother, as Thomas concedes, is tempting (“How Much” 114). In telling about the funeral, the kid’s attention gets turned to a distant and distracting narrative, to an eminently safe, public, and (perhaps) male narrative— the World Series. The reality of the heavy rain and the mired road—emblems of a heart-broken and mourning son—surely would have registered grievously with him, as does his painful memory about the horse standing at the grave side, almost lifeless we might surmise, compared to Knight’s bronco. Consider the details the narrator reports before he once more includes the mother’s speech: This is what happened—at my mother’s wake. This is a fact—the World Series was in progress. The Cincinnati Reds were playing the Detroit Tigers.18 It was raining. The road to the graveyard was barely passable. The horse was standing still. Bring me the radish seeds, my mother whispered. (Completed Field Notes 31)

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The voice opens in reportorial style—“This is what happened”—as if with little or no emotion recounting (remembering? admitting?) some event in which the speaker is not, or does not want to be, deeply involved.19 The grammar of the opening sentence obscures the narrator and presents the situation as if were uninvolvedly there, a landscape and a weather spread visibly before him; and the world brought to arrest (“The horse was standing still”) beyond the boy’s intercession or recovery. We do not find a construction—“I remember” or “When we”—that would insert the boy and his adult self actively into the scene. The abstract pronoun, “This,” and the oblique verb, “is what happened,” bypass the narrator and abolish human agents. The language bespeaks a then- and nowspeaker discounting what he is about to say. He seems focused on remembering and gathering himself toward speech. We might hear in what follows a turning for relief to the sheer and guaranteed ordinariness of the baseball games. The anecdote arguably would then amount to sought oblivion, the result of the boy’s trying to manage his grief by finding “something to diffuse, deter, postpone the horror of what has happened” (Dana Cooley, message to the author, 20 March 2006). The passage draws attention to what follows the dash: “This is what happened—at my mother’s wake.” Without the punctuation, the sentence would proceed with little stress and the locating words, “at my mother’s funeral,” would arrive with less notice. The dash enables us to see, probably requires us to hear, the moment as expressive in pitch and intonation. It reveals how hard it is for the boy when his language turns from a disengaged mood (“This is what happened”) to a deeply personal manner (“at my mother’s wake”). The voice, despite its bald assertions about a solid reality (“This is a fact”: this is something you can count on, something to hold on to) sounds almost distrustful of its own credibility: “This is a fact—the World Series was in progress.” “This is,” “This is” the sentences begin—oral in rhythm, almost evasive in non-naming. The syntax is crucial to the effect. The pared, matter-of-fact sentences refuse amplification or admission. The emphatic brevity, we might suppose, encapsulates the kid’s tight-lipped attempts to contain his loss. The mother’s voice surfaces, not in command saying “Get me the radish seeds,” as once in the manuscript it did, nor in summoning loudly from the corner of the garden, as in the archival material it had done; but in whisper gently beckoning. She is offering words meant for herself and her son, for his ears only. The mother’s speech in the final version of Seed Catalogue is no longer slightly peremptory; it has drawn near, become more encouraging, inviting: 164

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“Bring me the radish seeds.” The mother’s speech would reach her son and rescue him from the men’s disallowings. Her words would bestow quiet protection alongside the hired man’s loud clamourings. The softness of her speech is probably not simply a sign of reduced status or limited power, as Ann Munton has proposed (“Robert Kroetsch” 111), for it is the mother whose words prevail. It is not volume but sensitivity that wins the day. The mother words bring us into comedy too, one that would accord human death its small part in the larger patterns of nature. Douglas Reimer had perhaps some such notion in mind when he observed that Kroetsch’s “mother’s death, though mesmerizing as a voice speaking from the grave, is not lamented by the poet—even here there is incompletion and powerful, unfulfilled, interrupted desire” (62). But the scene does hover on the edge of trauma. Its heaviness perfectly embodies the boy’s saturated grief. The world is commingled with death and graves, in heavy rain and mud and cold. Was it cold? It must have been cold, the leaves must have stuck in their wetness to the dirt. The mud and gravel would have clung to shoes, the leaves too. And yet Kroetsch does not take us to those specifics, not in any conspicuous way at least. The narrator who speaks of the mother’s death remains detached. His story reduces detail and refuses emotion. On this day the very heavens weep, the earth mires itself in water, the cosmos is brought to a chilled and soggy halt. Yet the poem absorbs that blunt reality in seemingly incidental or insignificant reference. It apparently refuses to name the conditions as felt on the body, as symbolic of the world, or as sympathetic to his loss. Kroetsch is not simply averse to the trope. He ends The Words of My Roaring with a deluge that turns the world sodden while the cold rain falls deep into the night. It serves there as powerful sign of human destitution, Johnny’s inconsolable loneliness in the world’s dissolution. What are we to make of the parenthetical repetition: “The horse was standing still”? We might read something spectral in the iteration, its sudden and inexplicable reappearance. It certainly stresses the horse’s stasis. We might think of it as a momentary suspension of that very male sign—the mobile and sometimes dangerous horse. Yet there is the mother’s own stillness, too, when the boy falls off the horse and the two of them are caught in a frozen tableau. We encounter a near paralysis, a sign perhaps of the boy’s own numbed immobility and the shocking arrest of his mother’s life. His mother has disappeared into a rough wound in the earth, and the raw features impress upon us with their primal and irrevocable power.20

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The poet’s mind lingers on a whispered request for the ordinary and unheralded—the smallest hint of promise, perhaps, in the mud and the rain. Given the tone of the graveyard passage, that notion might be unwarranted. Bring me the seeds she whispered, her words (for the adult poet) achingly beyond wish or consent, past any possible response. The incompletion serves as apt expression for what it was the kid felt somewhere beyond saying. The mother as muse, first muse really. Kroetsch confesses in notes about “The poet’s mother” that her death led to his “first real writing act” (MsC. 591/96.6 47.15). On the surface the mother remains a small part of Seed Catalogue—minimal in quantity that is, and to a degree in emphasis. She emerges only once more, toward the end of the poem, in a rare moment of pathos (Completed Field Notes 45). The garden scene provides one of the most lyrical passages in the poem as once more she stirs at the emotional heart of Seed Catalogue. “The tender portrait of the mother that appears in the poem’s final pages,” writes Wanda Campbell, suggests “that she may well be his most enduring muse” (27). The garden entry (a short and understated version of what Kroetsch had earlier written) appears only after chunks of rambunctious anecdotes. Earlier in the published poem, the narrator lurched across trajectories of often comical bravado in search of words and muses.21 “Start: with an invocation,” he has written, boldly (or is it parodically?) aligning himself with centuries of poets, as if to will himself into language: “Start: with an invocation / invoke—” (Completed Field Notes 37). That’s what poets do, serious poets; they call upon the sources of creativity and call them into play. The convention seems to die on the spot, however. The location of the overture, half way through Seed Catalogue, further implies its inefficacy. Why wait so long to call upon the powers? What is an exordium doing here, this late into the poem? And what then do we make of the earlier and arguably “real” overture in the poem as force of that inauguration: “It arrived in winter, the seed catalogue, on a January / day” (34)? No sooner has the poet summoned himself into action than, as we have already seen, the exhortation loses momentum and in an appeal to yet another traditional expedient nearly peters out (37). The hitches come quickly on the heels of a risky proposition: “His muse is” (37). The lines apparently hover on the tip-toe of definition or discovery. They pause perceptibly, short of something beyond naming. They seem stymied by inscription or occasion. His muse is...is…is what? It may have been this passage especially that Laurie Ricou had in mind when he identified a “groping hesitancy 166

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that lies behind the poem’s various voices” (Rev. of Seed Catalogue 114). The gaps, which might be received as anxious glitch, or as contemplative pause, register the effort of coming into articulation. In “Thought’s Measure,” published several years after Seed Catalogue appeared, Charles Bernstein called for poetry of “weighted and measured” experience (Contents 66) that could register “a life, as it is being lived in a body” in “the viscosity of thought” (67). Bernstein is thinking specifically of Louis Zukofsky, but his point would hold for the muse passage in Seed Catalogue too: “concretizing the language, making it visible on the page, sounding it at the level of each phoneme, so that the phonemes turning to morphemes turning to words turning to phrases turning to ‘poem’ is felt, heard, made tangible, palpable” (70). The effect is caught in Kroetsch’s short, repeated lines, broken after simple rhyming monosyllables—“is,” “if,” “is”—and in the choking which the virgule jams into the line (“his muse/if”). The graphic shape destroys fluency, and hence any great certainty, which the overture might otherwise have found. The unconventional punctuation creates signs of a disquiet. It provides the kinaesthetics of sounding the lines—the hitch in the gait, the catch in the throat. The lineation shows, perhaps, that anyone who would write in the new world of the prairies has little recourse to the confident mellifluence of the traditional poet. The new poet can make the old gestures, and try out the known measures, but they are scarcely available to him—not at least as they have been habitually sought and used. He, missing the muse, may learn to love his step and stumble.

F Aposiopesis: a sudden breaking off of a thought in the middle of a sentence, as though the speaker were unwilling or unable to continue.

F In the trailing off we are left with the unfinished (perhaps unfinishable) thought—the words sliced off in distress or reluctance, as if the narrator doesn’t want to speak or, more likely, doesn’t know what to say, quite. He wavers, at a loss for words. Bemused. Who or where might this muse be? We are presented with a distinct sense that the poet is hard-pressed to find one, if not confounded with the prospects of looking. When within a few words the poem shifts into

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supposition—“his muse/if”—it creates a feeling of doubt, the supposition held in abeyance. Just supposing no one is there? Or is only provisionally there, dependent upon some unspecified or unidentifiable condition? What if she isn’t, or if she is and there is no knowing what will come of that? If she is—what then? The abbreviated lines speak the if-ness of the writer’s predicament, jeopardized beyond prediction. Kroetsch’s finely tuned lineation comes effectively into play when the breakage follows the proposition. The fulfillment is put off and the reader put into a brief delay. The glitch is skillfully expressed in grammatical faltering, as if for a split second the speaker were stuck dumb.22 In answer to such apparent deficiencies what follows in the poem are a series of jocular nominations, none of them identified by personal name—how about this girl? or that girl? Evidently, there is no clear option, none that is unmistakably chosen, and the muse remains aloof and unidentified—provisional at best.23 At the end of Seed Catalogue, however, the speaker allows himself a quiet moment of recall and tribute (45). The handling of the mother/son narrative, when the poem briefly returns to her, fulfills a pattern that stretches across Kroetsch’s life, one that Debbie Keahey has at length delineated,24 and that Kroetsch himself acknowledged in 1972 in what at the time was a private journal: “my slipping away when people get close. And yet my longing back to that closeness” (Lovely Treachery 144). How profoundly he skirted the very intimacy he craved. “I was very close to my mother,” Kroetsch tells Roy Miki, then stumbles a bit in recall: “I don’t know that we talked about that [Kroetsch’s childhood reading] so much—it’s hard to remember.” He adds that after her death he “had this sense of being looked after by all these women”—three aunts and four sisters, all of them younger than he was. He reveals how crucial women have been to him and how distressing he finds the thought of their loss: I think one of my problems in life—if you want to psychoanalyze me—is that I lived a strange contradiction. My mother died very suddenly, and I guess I have a kind of continuing fear of being abandoned by women. On the other hand, I was looked after by all those women. And I was very looked after—I mean, I was loved by them. So on the one hand I have this fear of abandonment; on the other hand I have this great sense of—well, I like to be looked after by women. I love that total sense of the female community. (“Self on Self” 117) 168

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That dependence and need for reassurance can be found in Seed Catalogue. For obvious reasons, Kroetsch’s work is often received as embodying a ferocious and unrestrained masculinity (though often in parody and protest); and Seed Catalogue has just as often been taken as celebrating that condition.25 And yet, Kroetsch knew, and his young protagonist knew, rather distressingly it seems, what it was to fail in realizing an expected version of masculinity. Kroetsch and his surrogate were far from typical males. Their supposed effeminacy in tending the garden certainly would have jeopardized them in a culture where gender was sharply distinguished. Kroetsch’s own penchant for dreaminess and constant reading set him up for embarrassment. In the eyes of neighbours and relatives alike, he was “a weird duck,” “a total misfit,” afflicted with “incompetence and what they [friends and neighbours] would call laziness” (Miki, “Self on Self” 116).

F Years after Seed Catalogue, an excruciatingly tender series of mother poems appears—“Sounding the Name.” Kroetsch’s good friend, William Spanos, wrote from Richmond, Virginia, on February 2, 1986, to express his great pleasure in them: “the poems about your mother are exquisite, alarming in their simplicity, daring—I can’t tell you how good I feel about them” (MsC. 775/04.25 5.3b) Regrettably, the tenderness in Kroetsch’s writing has not received a lot of critical attention. The lack perhaps can be explained in part by Kroetsch’s rambunctious style of writing and reading, by the larger-than-life persona he adopted, and perhaps by the consequences of a sexual politics that did not readily discern those qualities in him. It may equally derive from an implied and at times declared preference among many readers, and sometimes for Kroetsch himself, for a version of postmodernism that disavows emotion and lyricism. Ann Munton is one of the first and remains one of the few to have welcomed the more personal writing. She takes the mother poems, and the female figure that emerges in them, as central to Kroetsch’s writing: There has been a major shift in his poetry from the search for the father to the search for the mother; from the need to speak to the father to the need to speak to the mother...Kroetsch’s poetry is autobiographical to the extent that it is written towards the confrontation with his mother’s death, the final of many absences. (“Robert Kroetsch” 96)

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From the time of the earliest drafts, the mother poems are confident and remarkably accomplished, and they undergo very little revision. Archival evidence would indicate they spring into form almost as if they had been there all along, waiting to materialize, and perhaps they had. The interval between “Seed Catalogue” and “Sounding the Name” perhaps can be understood from what Kroetsch said in a pointed admission not long after Seed Catalogue appeared: After my mother died I had aunts who looked after me, I had sisters... I was living in this world of the garden quite often. And it’s funny how I kept that silent and one of the things that I can see happening, in the next few years as I go on writing, is a kind of enunciation. But I can feel even my long poem, Field Notes, drawing toward that. I told you about finding a picture of my mother when she was sixteen years old and about how my erotic relationship to this woman has shocked me—my sense of desiring the woman in that photograph—which I’m going to have to write about. It denounced all my silence to me. (Labyrinths 22) Among the drafts and notes that lead to the mother poem are these typed words, which suggest that the writing would serve in bulwark and memory to counter the loss: —a conscious writing down of something against death—the list I made in the middle of my grief, my mother downstairs, the wake, her corpse in the bedroom; I made a list of the names of those who brought flowers, knowing he [my father] could not continue to remember unless I wrote down the names of those who brought flowers. (MsC. 591/96.6 47.15) Kroetsch has added a handwritten note to the side of this text, its words not altogether clear, though they seem to read: “my memory of going up to the north bedroom and making a little ‘book’ with the entries” (MsC. 591/96.6 47.15). The thoughts about the photograph come from the early 1980s, though a few years earlier (November 1978, to be exact) Kroetsch publicly mused on his emotional landscape in Seed Catalogue. He tells John Marshall that, in dealing with 170

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“the relationship between writing and kinds of deaths,” he has destroyed and erased himself in the writing, “totally effaced” himself he says, agreeing with Marshall (Marshall 36). And yet within a few pages he is saying something else: Especially with this poem [Seed Catalogue] I began to let the personal in And one of my real problems as a writer has been to let in the personal I find extremely difficult… Maybe that is what is learned in that poem What I learned as a reader When I started to read the poem as opposed to writing it was my own surprise at myself appearing at least slightly naked in the world. (50, ellipsis in original) He goes on in that same interview to say, remarkably, that in writing about when his mother died and he took her place as the family gardener, he engaged in an act of “exorcism”: “So that the seed catalogue was not just a random document When I found that seed catalogue my whole self was vulnerable and exposed” (50). The Kroetsch archives confirm how inspiring the seed catalogue was for him and his family, how much it kindled their imaginations, and how much it consolidated them in the stories they told themselves: It arrived in winter, the seed catalogue. On a January day. It came into town on the afternoon train. Around the kitchen table, that night, we debated the stamina of head lettuce, the taper of carrots, the yield of sweet corn, the impossibility of melons. (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4) In the published poem Kroetsch drops from this passage the long fourth sentence about the family gathered around the kitchen table. The excision removes the domesticity, and the shared anticipation of a bountiful garden. This (potential) garden, in keeping with Kroetsch’s own sense of jeopardy as son and as poet-in-waiting, is subject to trying, nearly impossible, conditions. The breathless promise is yet another one of the if-onlys in Kroetsch’s young life. For some readers at least, whatever Kroetsch may have felt at his mother’s death and in revisiting it in Seed Catalogue, the stricken condition is not very evident. It is, if anything, curiously concealed in ways I am trying to address. Asked in the early 1980s whether he “would never temper down the intellectual input” to make a text more “accessible,” Kroetsch says, “no”: “No, I wouldn’t.”

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Sophistication has not been a problem, but there is something else: “I think if I have failed somehow it’s not because I’m too intellectual; it’s because I haven’t given my books enough emotional weight. I realize there’s the darker side and sentimental side to life which I could play up more. I’m beginning to acknowledge these things” (Twigg 113). Even as Kroetsch concedes this repression, he names what is missing in unbecoming terms. It is not “emotion” (though it is “emotional weight”), “or “feeling,” or even “sentiment” he has avoided; it is something he calls “sentimentality.” The term conveys a sense of cloying or overly precious experience, something so slight and gauche, so false really, it is scarcely to be countenanced. The guardedness never entirely leaves him. As for that phrase “the darker side” in this context—how strange it is. An emotional experience is part of a “darker side”— always? totally? However we measure this darkness (quite possibly something other than the comic?), Kroetsch’s papers reveal an abiding concern, even as he was working on the mother material, that he not lose control or distance.

F In one of Kroetsch’s best-known essays, “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space,” first presented at Crossing Frontiers, the CanadianAmerican Western Literature Conference in 1978, and perhaps in part indebted to Charles Olson,26 he writes about the male’s reluctance “to locate and confront the muse” as that retraction is embodied in a refusal to dance. Kroetsch positions the male hero as outlaw, cowboy, or orphan.27 Outsider, outrider, outlier—he exists on the edges of domestic life. Kroetsch’s later formulation construes the male figure as emphatically dispossessed. Those conditions would seem not to be elected, but required. There evidently are no other options in working, say, as section hand or as clerk or as plain old everywhere-to-be-found farmer—none of those roles that smacked of family and domesticity and community (though Kroetsch must be thinking of an early stage of immigration). Kroetsch admits this leads to a difficult situation: “With those definitions, how can you marry a woman? How can you enter the house again? You have to lose that self-definition. That’s the problem for the male. He must break his selfinflicted definition of maleness” (Twigg 152).28 Remarkably similar terms appear in Wallace Stegner, who has been so important to Kroetsch’s thinking about the prairies. Stegner’s marvellous book Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade 172

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Springs includes a section, “Variations on a Theme by Crèvecoeur,” in which he speaks about the outlaw, orphan, and cowboy. Despite their nearly identical namings, Stegner’s loner looks quite different from Kroetsch’s. The American outlaw/cowboy is, in Stegner’s words, often coarse, aggressive, violent, restless, and utterly immune to social life (99–116), a long way from Kroetsch’s rider who in mixed feelings circles the house. In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins speculates on reasons for the narrowing of human relations in the American Western, with its lonely and withdrawn heroes, fierce relatives to Kroetsch’s riders. She muses on the consequences of “whatever suppression of male desire and devaluation of male experience followed from women’s occupying the moral high ground of American culture” (42).29 Tompkins’s terms may seem unnecessarily provocative in thinking of Kroetsch. That is America, we might say, and that is another genre. Certainly Dick Harrison in Unnamed Country, and Arnold E. Davidson in Coyote Country have pointed out, that Canadian prairie literature, unaffected by myths of the frontier, extreme machismo, and manifest destiny, has never produced The Western, nor the Western hero, not at least of the classical American type. Harrison illuminatingly contrasts the Mountie of the Canadian prairies to the protagonist in American Westerns: The Western hero [of American fiction] resolves the conflict between civilization and savagery by a salutary, almost surgical, application of violence which tilts the balance of power in favour of civilized law and order. By reaffirming masculinity, individualism, and the inevitability and superiority of progress he may articulate “primary cultural values” of American society, but his actions could never express the spirit of the Canadian West. (Unnamed Country 162) As a result, the wild cowboy is virtually uncelebrated in the Canadian literature that Davidson and Harrison are reading, Kroetsch’s included. Still, Seed Catalogue could be read as a variation on the Western. The failed cowboy and the orphan certainly are there—and so, arguably is the outlaw, if only in a modest and slightly comical way. Think of the interdictions, from father and from priest, brought against the incipient young poet; think of his lifelong retractions into privacy and his own thoughts. The orphan and cowboy emerge when we think of the missing mother and the lone son in Seed Catalogue, not to

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mention the (genial and gentle) father somehow unavailable to the sensitive kid when he had taken a fall.30 It is not surprising, perhaps, that Kroetsch dreamt of being a cowboy or a rodeo star. In a Kroetsch text dated “oct 2 78” these words appear: I wanted to be a cowboy too. I liked fixing fence, riding for miles, alone, checking the fences. Now and then getting off the horse to drive in a post or to do some stapling. But best of all I liked roundup, down in the Battle River Hills, bringing in critters that had gone pretty much wild over the summer. My dad doing the cooking, which was mostly opening cans of sardines, slicing cheese and baloney. I liked that, I was happy all day. (MsC. 27.1.1 3.28) Kroetsch, in 1976, confessed that once he fantasized about being a skilled centre in hockey but, “Failing that, I’d like to be admired by the girls for staying on a bronco at a rodeo. Failing both, I go on writing novels” (Hancock 38). Kroetsch had long harboured fantasies about horses and he spent much of his childhood with stick horses and playing cowboy (Lovely Treachery 142). The fascination worked its way into Kroetsch’s thinking of his cousin at war as akin to a rodeo star: Aged: A god: Kenny MacDonald: fell off the sky. Age 21 The horse was standing still. sky He was the navigator. … He was our hero in the summer of that war [the crossing out is Kroetsch’s] Toward the bottom of the page we find the following: When we played cowboy in the poplar-pole corrals behind the cowbarn (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4)31 174

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The wayward outlier “approaches the female. He approaches the garden. He approaches the house…” (Lovely Treachery 82, ellipsis in original). He “approaches,” “He approaches,” “He approaches”—the refrain announces a compulsion in the seeking and a fear of getting there. Would-be cowboy, he falls off his horse, cherishes into adulthood his vision of a romantic Pete Knight, the bronc-busting champion of the world. In 1974, in a move that would be more fully realized with “The Fear of Women,” Kroetsch had in The Studhorse Man depicted his protagonist, Hazard Lepage, as a man among horses and constantly on the move. Kroetsch’s journals draw on, quote actually, what in 1974 Paul Zweig had said about an “adventurer” in flight from women: “Because he [the adventurer] cannot cope with the erotic and social hegemony of women, he flees them unto death.” Kroetsch adds a clipped note: “The fear of domesticity, of community” (The “Crow” Journals 20). With the publication of Badlands the next year, the situation recurs. William Dawe, mad leader of a band of bone hunters, announces peremptorily at the outset, “We have no place for women” (8). Tune, a member of the expedition, later seconds the claim: “They tie you down…Women” (94). The Green Woman, however, inveighs against the wayward and outward men, who drink and fuck without restraint. She speaks on behalf of “the forsaken children, the abandoned wives” (58), requires another member of Dawe’s crew to “embrace chastity, faith, love, fatherhood, wife, family” (60). Zweig’s words appear in a chapter titled “The Flight from Women,” in which he writes about a female power to bind, and to preside over the structures of civilized life, especially the domestication and cultivation of plants: The woman he [the adventurer] defeats expresses the bewitching domesticity of the house, the space of the community—which is immobile, predictable, fenced off against the amoral potencies of the extra-human world. She presides over the safe breathing-space of human—that is, social— needs. Woman rules the home, and home is where the arts of man are nurtured. She creates the ambiance within which culture flourishes. (69) For all his wariness, Kroetsch has also claimed that “the domestic is one of the things that I posit against all that travel stuff…I like kitchens, and all the things that go on in a kitchen. At-homeness” (Miki, “Self on Self” 140). He returns to the point when he tells J’nan Morse Sellery that the wildly priapic Hazard Lepage in

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The Studhorse Man “has a longing for home.” When Sellery offers that “Home for a man is his first home and his mother” and “no other woman actually makes a home for him,” Kroetsch allows that the idea is “interesting,” but he says no more about it (Sellery 26). He does return a few pages later to confide, “I think I have a deep domestic need. I can’t find the narrative of it in a sense” (30). Kroetsch’s rider approaches, always approaches, but he never arrives, for arrival would be fatal to his peripatetic ways. The vacillation speaks the terrible yearning that dwells in the heart of the orphan and the lonesome cowboy. Kroetsch’s binaries in “Fear of Women” (male horse/female house) are reminiscent of those to be found in a source which Canadian readers are more apt to know, Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country. Harrison speaks there of the poles in prairie fiction as “withdrawal and approach” that mirror the “tragic and comic views of man” (xii). Harrison had been in active contact with Kroetsch in the early to mid-1970s, as the makings for Seed Catalogue were perking and as Harrison was working on what became Unnamed Country, which at the time he was calling The Unhoused Imagination: The Struggle for Imaginative Survival in Prairie Fiction (Dick Harrison, letter to Kroetsch, 7 Sept. 1970). Kroetsch had seen some of the material in manuscript before it was published in 1977. There it was—the “unhoused” world. In Unnamed Country Harrison describes a character in Robert Stead’s Grain who remarkably resembles the mother in Seed Catalogue: “The image of the mother is especially poignant, appearing as it does in the spring, in the garden, among the tender growing things” (106). Kroetsch’s infamous formulation of house and horse is perhaps directly indebted to, or at least reinforced by, a Harrison letter written when Kroetsch was contemplating the controversial talk that would become his contribution to the Crossing Frontiers conference held at Banff in April 1978.32 The letter, dated “September 15, 1977,” is addressed to Kroetsch at Binghamton. Harrison reports that committee members who are vetting proposals have “agreed unanimously that your working title promised a stimulating (if not inflammatory) session.” In response to Kroetsch’s request for advice, Harrison offers a few leads on American literature, then adds information that jumps out for readers of Kroetsch: There are some critical things done which an Amlit man could direct you to. And whenever there are discussions of heroes the relationship to women is always laid out, as in Cawelti’s Six-Gun Mystique. Stegner in 176

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The Sound of a Mountain Water and Jim Folsom in The American Western Novel both set up a similar kind of paradigm: West - East Man - Woman Freedom - Order Further, writes Harrison, “the western hero saw women as worse than nesters, more of a threat to his freedom, and that’s how he emasculated himself.” Kroetsch’s binaries may be more than a little indebted to that pattern as it was laid out in the mythology of the American Western and as it was mediated by Harrison. The distinctions between movement and containment—arguably instances of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of separation, penetration, and return33 that was so dominant in literary criticism at the time—might seem to position the female as one who waits in quiet patience. This is not what happens in Kroetsch, as he makes plain: “the male figure, out in this space, out in the open, presumably free, once epic hero, is now the diminished hero. The woman, in the age-old containment of house or town, is, in prairie writing, the more-than-life-figure— but one who is strangely sought” (Lovely Treachery 81). Eli Mandel, participant in the conference at which Kroetsch delivered his famous talk on houses and horses, says that movement in Canadian prairie writing, including Kroetsch’s, is never a constant mobility as it is in literature of the American West (“The Border League” 112). Rosemary Sullivan, at the same conference, comments that in Kroetsch’s formulation the horseman never leaves, he is unable to light out because, though fearing the housed woman, he is being constantly drawn toward her. Sullivan develops the point mainly to distinguish Canadian from American figures: “On the frontier the Canadian always turns back to accept the compromises of the world and his participation in it. To the American dream he opposes an anti-romantic or ironic myth of communal order” (155). On June 21, 1978, shortly after the conference ended, Sullivan, reading connections between Kroetsch’s argument and his own personal life, writes to tell Kroetsch “that the things you were saying in Fear of Women seemed to me truly remarkable. They were brave things, about unnaming yourself. I love the way even criticism can become autobiographical” (MsC. 591.96.6 12.20).34 However personal Kroetsch’s statement may be, for him the male, shaken loose from familial roles, “is drawn to and threatened by the house. The house is

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containing, nurturing, protecting, mothering.” But the house, at least in Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House and Willa Cather’s My Antonia, the two novels that Kroetsch is addressing in his talk, “is closed to the point where it creates… a terrible claustrophobia” (Lovely Treachery 80). In Kroetsch’s redeployment of Odyssean terms,35 we do not get a straight rewriting of the venturing male and the simpering (or resentful) female in forced (or faked) passivity awaiting his triumphant return. We get nothing like the male hero which Kroetsch, in words that echo Northrop Frye or W.H. Auden in The Enchafèd Flood, say, identifies as central to “a patriarchal story”: “a story in which the woman stays in the castle while the man goes into the forest or out onto the sea—or off to battle” (A Likely Story 129). The cowboy in Kroetsch’s account turns out to be a “diminished” figure and the woman “more-than-life.” Though Kroetsch does name the woman’s space as “centering unto stasis” (Lovely Treachery 76), his essay indicates she is anything but inert. She is a lot closer to a queen bee live and humming inside the hive. The woman occupies the house where, Kroetsch in 1979 says, “is the power” (Brahms 123). As muse, the female whom Kroetsch identifies draws the outward figure into danger, into pleasure, and, not incidentally, into dependence. The sense of indirection that characterizes the male as he circles the house like a love-stricken cowboy, swimming in a liminal world, marks his approach to the “more-than-life” woman as transgressive and risky.

F Though Kroetsch writes of inside and outside as female and male, respectively, in Seed Catalogue the spatial boundaries are less horizontal than vertical: up and down, rather than inside and outside. The kid falls off the horse, symbol of male culture and male status. Brought down into the female garden, he gets his comeuppance. The descent, whether sudden or painful or violent, delivers the male figure, who would be riding high, into a female domain. He is laid low and enters the mortal and natural processes of life and death. Think of the adult narrator, still haunted by the still horse, the standing horse, the missing horse (the farmers no longer use horses), and, more dramatically, the rejecting or refusing horse (Pete Knight killed by a horse that threw him). In every instance the horse is halted or lost or immobilized. The poem is haunted by the spectre of the missing horse, one that a man might ride, and one that a boy does not ride. We well might say of the kid that he too “got killed” when he fell off the 178

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horse. What is now lost to him is participation in the cult of horsemanship. He is powerless to exercise the skill in a way that full membership would confirm. For the young Kroetsch that realm would seem to be lost for good. We are left with the ghost of the dead mother, her burial linked enigmatically to a horse that is standing still. It is she whom the speaker remembers, in the midst of his shock and sorrow, and names as keeper of seeds. And it is the young boy who, in the hired man’s unsympathetic projection, might well be covered up with dirt like a potato. The speculation swings the kid into another kind of burial and growth. The leads intrigue. Out of the ground, ground into which the mother is placed, comes the badger, so endearing to the father that he becomes part of his romance. Out of the ground also comes the gopher, who provides some kind of model upon which to build. Out of the ground—out of the grave for that matter—come any number of female characters in Kroetsch’s books in a steady parade of Persephones. The grave is never far from Kroetsch’s books, as Dick Harrison has shown (Unnamed Country 185). Some of the most memorable instances occur in Badlands, which is riddled with coffins and burials. Web pulls Anna Yellowbird, apparition with luminous eyes, out of the “opened earth,” “the small rain of dirt,” “the sliding earth” (6–8) that is part of a graveyard. More dramatic still is the ascent of the mesmerizing “Woman in Green.” She rises out of a coffin, the narrator’s ceremonial rhythms and parenthetical syntax reveals, as if awakening from a dream, new to the light, her dark journey over: “she was black-haired and pale, so pale she might never have known the sun, fish-pale as if she had drifted up from a depth so deep the light had not there penetrated down. And yet she was young, mysteriously young, in her long green dress and her earthblack hair” (57). How haunting is this writing, how haunting are these women— young, spectral, risen from the grave, returned to life, perhaps as surrogates for a mother who died when she was only thirty-eight, to be recovered only in dream and poem. His mother one there among them, more than all others, she whom he would bring back from the dead. Then there is the distant death in Germany: the admired and beloved cousin who is strangely planted, smack into gramma Germany. Oh she was a mothering sort, she with blood on her green thumb—the violent (male) death written within the comic trope of a mother-earth’s life-taking and life-returning. In each case the venturing male is brought down, his riding undone in a death of one kind or another. Understood in Kroetsch’s abiding metaphor, he who later seeks

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to “grow” a prairie poem is brought down off his high horse, lowered down to the female earth, the closeness of the mother’s fecund realm.

F The closeness of love is felt in stealth. “What is the heart,” someone in “The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart” wonders, “What is the heart but the muscular, thick skin of an abiding secret?” (A Likely Story 183). However furtive the male’s love may be, his approach is heady too—heady in the way that a supreme moment in Kroetsch’s world tends to be. The Kroetsch character is almost light-headed in the breathless promise of a yet-to-be: “the artist again, by trespass, by subterfuge, by substitution gaining small access to his muse, remaining still and always the virgin, both feeding and feeding on his fear of the womanliness of woman, delighting in the near miss, lost pleasure becoming his secret pleasure…” (Lovely Treachery 77, ellipsis in original). In an ecstasy of nearness he can almost feel the touch of the beloved. She is just a whisper over there, so near and so imminent he can feel the warmth coming off her body, that close. Here it is, it is going to happen: What I remember with great intensity and a kind of reverence is not the moment of that happening, but rather the moment when I knew the happening was about to happen. (A Likely Story 34) What I remember is the terror and elation that I, a listening boy, felt at the speaking of the wager...“Double or nothing,” the farmers said. I liked the way the coin leapt off the flicked thumb, spun high in the ferocious light, hesitated. (A Likely Story 65–66) We feel the movement in the sentence, its own moment, the delay its commas ask. Its pulse, for a moment held, staves off the yet-to-come letter, the later necessary verb. The young Kroetsch knows the poised and near arrival, the incomplete and ongoing action when things are up in the air. He knows the dreadful and prolonged pleasure of almost realizing his desire. The almost unbearable intensity is caught in Kroetsch’s extravagant naming of the “ferocious” light. Drawing out something of the attraction that the yet-to-be holds for him, Kroetsch speaks of that dizzying, precipitous, delirious condition as 180

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falling off the edge of the world. Always for Kroetsch the dizzying condition of the moment-to-come waits for an absolving word, which, it is the lover’s wish, will never come: Like new lovers both intent on the same praxis, we are stalled by a failure to speak the unlocking word, to make the unlocking gesture. There occurs a kind of perverse or even martyrish prolongation of the delay [shades of the postponed orgasm which, Kroetsch claims, provides narrative energy to the long poem]. Perhaps the erotic is the only paradigm, and that paradigm is ever smudged into unreadability. (A Likely Story 90) “Separation and delay and fulfillment are elements in the grammar,” he writes. “Surprise and temptation take the traveler away from and towards.” In writing the long poem, one experiences “A perpetual delay as we recognize the primacy of the forthcoming and as yet unmade discovery” (Lovely Treachery 119).

F Perhaps such a blockage explains the gap between what in Seed Catalogue is provided and what is elided. It may also account for the lapse between the writing of Seed Catalogue and the appearance years later of the eight closely related poems housed under the title “Sounding the Name” (Completed Field Notes 200–05) and the extension of that impulse into “The Poet’s Mother” (Completed Field Notes 206–10). For years Kroetsch awaited an unknotting that would release him into that speaking. In the dodgy, still later, text we know as “Rita Kleinhart,” and then as “Rita K,” not knowing whom to trust, or what to take away (more indirection, more subterfuge, more feint and sleight, surrogate upon surrogate), we come upon the narrator’s plaintive words: “And why is it that only pain can make us burst into words? Did Rita trump up her occasional rejections of me just so that I might be given the power of speech?” (A Likely Story 207). In redirection, the mother poems, too, dissolve the reticence, the misdirection we might say, that has lain over Kroetsch’s writing.36 Something in the writing of Seed Catalogue, despite its daring, had held him in unspoken grief. Now, decades after Seed Catalogue, he speaks lyrically of the mother who lingers in his dreams.37 The interim has been a willed reticence, too, for in

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suspicion of the lyric Kroetsch had learned to depreciate the very mode he would need and later risk in order to release his mourning: “Is not the long poem, whatever its inward turn, finally the poem of outward? As we come to the end of self...We become, again, persons in the world, against the preposterous notion of self ” (Lovely Treachery 132). In these new poems, texts of pathos we might say, there is an almost naked love we had seldom if ever seen in his writing. “I’m Getting Old Now” opens in great simplicity: I’m getting old now, I can tell. I dream a lot of my mother. In my dream last night she was in the garden, over the hill, behind our house. She was standing. I was playing in the pea vines. We were both happy. (Completed Field Notes 202) “I’m Getting Old Now,” its details intensified by their source in dream, depicts a young mother who watches over a small boy. There is no one and no thing but memory of the mother and the poet’s sense of aging. The two of them, mother and young son, stand, totally unmoving, in oneiric space. The stillness is uncanny, conveyed in part by a series of short sentences, as though the two figures have been brought outside the traffic of living and into a simple tableau: “Neither of us would move.” They could be holding their breath, do hold themselves, in the moment-before, just before the world jostles them loose. The boy seems waiting upon the waiting mother. He kneels, she holds what it is he has given her. In their ceremonial posture (and yes, they resemble Madonna and Child), they remind us of a devoted knight and his lady, lyrical cousins to Pete Knight and the Lady at the bar, that tryst, parody perhaps of chivalry. We have Peter Knight as the unhorsed knight, shaken out of the chivalric story as rodeo hero; and here now, in the garden scene, the unhorsed boy who bows in homage to his lady. The mother/son scene shines with personal affection and humour: “I knew she was watching me. She was / watching me grow. Like a bad weed, she liked / to say. That pleased her” (202). “I’m Getting Old Now,” like other poems in “Sounding the Name” and “The Poet’s Mother,” observes a pattern that Eli Mandel has discerned in his own supple prose:

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Why the Child figure? One obvious reason is that from the adult’s point of view the child’s vision is a vision of innocence, of a lost Eden; another way of putting this is that the child’s vision—again from the adult’s point of view—is of home; and that surely is the essence of what we mean by region, the overpowering feeling of nostalgia associated with the place we know as the first place, the first vision of things, the first clarity of things. Not realism, then, but rather what in painting is called magic realism, the qualities we associated with Alex Colville’s paintings. (“Images of Prairie Man” 50) Colville’s work is regionalist because it “evokes with extraordinary clarity objects, people, places in a design at once objective and dream-like. It is precisely the magical clarity, mistaken for accuracy,” that so powerfully floods the imaginative landscape and that moves us into a world in which “anything can happen” (50). The child’s world then would not be sentimental but visionary, as arguably it is in Kroetsch’s mother poems. The effect can be best felt in “Sonnet for my Daughters” (Completed Field Notes 205), with its crystal clarity and hints of menace. If heard within the psychoanalytic narratives that are hard to avoid when reading Kroetsch, the gesture in the garden enlarges. Is there not another knowing to be found in the proffering of peas, which the young male has plucked and which the woman holds inside the folds of her apron, in her lap? Bring me the seeds, my mother whispered. But “last night” in the dream—the line comes with the accumulated effect of endless garden poems and Kroetsch’s quiet expression—last night, the poet writes in “I’m Getting Old Now,” “I was playing in the garden” (205). A sense of fit and a time of permission emerge. “Sounding the Name” addresses mother as muse,38 (shockingly) as lover, most of all (poignantly) as mother. In the new mother poems, the poet speaks of a lost life with her.39 Something of the emotion that the son felt, and that years later he again experienced, can be heard elsewhere in the series of mother poems—in the astonishing “Sonnet #5,” for example, where he keeps a silent and lonely vigil. Kroetsch had long advocated an active outwardness and often depicted his characters in avid venturing. Now he turns inward, listens to himself listening, allows the world to come to him:



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nothing but nothing but darkness nothing outside my but window darkness outside my window nothing but darkness the shape of water (Completed Field Notes 204) The poet who suffers the absence (“nothing,” “nothing but,” “darkness”) is positioned in nearness to, which is an unfathomable distance from, whatever it is the darkness means for him. It leans like a ghost against the window, “outside my / window,” which, despite its transparency, contains and possibly reflects his isolation. The poem uses very few words (ten actually) and it metes them like warm pebbles from the hand across the page. The words of vacancy haunt him into iteration. Together, the simple refrain (“nothing but darkness outside my window”) and the negations (“nothing but”) appear four times. If ever there were a perfect example in Kroetsch of measuring the weight of words on the page, this is it. The delicate dispersal of the few quiet words—so drastically unlike the burst and pour of language found in many Kroetsch’s poems—mirrors his state. He could be breathing the words, wanting not to be heard, or daring to say.

F Everything will be hesitation, disposition of parts, their alterations and relationships—all contributing to the rhythmic totality, which will be the very silence of the poem, in its blank spaces, as that silence is translated by each structural element in its own way. (Mallarmé qtd. in Bruns, Modern Poetry 112) 184

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F The poem’s minimalism is conveyed by its gaps and breakages, its exactly traced rhythms. The words shoved dramatically to the right, away from an empty centre, only then themselves to be pushed apart by widened vertical spacings, score an awareness that rises within the white field of the page, that silence out of which the small sounds rise. The layout perfectly registers the process of observing an immediate world and remembering a long-lost mother. In responding as Kroetsch does to his mother’s absence, he revokes a near-lifetime of refusal. The rain that in Seed Catalogue appeared at the mother’s grave never registered as emblem of grief; here it invokes the poet’s loneliness. The slowing culminates after yet another wrenching to the left margin when we reach the enigmatic resolution. What is this darkness, this nothing? It is “the shape of”…we read, and we wait, if we are respectful of the poem’s timing. We are left hanging, for a split moment: yes, the shape of…what? the shape of...“the shape of / water.” It is tangible and inaccessible, this condition. It would seem to be raining—the night wet with rain, rain on the window, the film and nubby streaks it makes on the glass. Whatever the nature of the water, or its source, it is what defines the poet’s anguish. The definition of “nothing” is stunning. The water at the window is tangible, visible, immediate. Through the glass membrane, almost permeable, time and place might or might not pass. Its “shape” remains elusive, its boundaries liquid and streaming. The ending speaks brilliantly of the understanding toward which the poet has been groping. The “nothing” at the window and the poet’s aching sense of lack meet in the powerful image—darkness and rain—that speaks of mystery at the heart of an evanescent and slippery world. It is that near, near enough to touch, almost, and that unfathomable and far away. This is not the first time, we remember, that a stricken and silent Kroetsch has sat watching out over water. About to leave his family, he wrote these words: “I have been to the water’s edge / and heard the water’s story” (The “Crow” Journals 13). Nostalgic, the sophisticated among us might say. Sentimental. Maudlin.40 But discounting of personal emotion would mean missing what “Sounding the Name” newly and powerfully does. Dismissal in the name of sophistication would ignore what the poems risk and what they so astonishingly accomplish—something of what Mandel saw in Kroetsch himself when he spoke of his unmistakable agony and vulnerability. We would do well to consider Geoffrey

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Hartman’s remarks that make the claim for memory in an intriguing way. “To recall the past is a political act,” he writes; it is “a ‘recherché’ that involves us with images of peculiar power” (78). Seed Catalogue asks not: how do I recover the past?; but: how do I use the elusive past to write a poem? The closest that Seed Catalogue comes to sounding nostalgic happens in only a few moments and even then the scene is carefully understated: No trees around the house. Only the wind. Only the January snow. Only the summer sun. (Completed Field Notes 31) The three slowed lines, heavily end-stopped, and dragged by the initiating term, “Only,” produce a remarkable constraint. The effect gains ever more weight when almost identical words emerge near the end of the poem on a note of restrained sorrow (46). An understated melancholy will eddy through almost everything Kroetsch ever wrote. We are not, however, left with a feeling of sorrow, or wallowing in what once was or should again be. The final words in the poem cut to the jumpy language of a kid’s joke: “Adam and Eve got drownded— / Who was left?” (46). It seems apparent it is we who are left, we are to carry on. The anguish we discern by the end of Seed Catalogue seems to have been suppressed earlier in the poem. Kroetsch had once contemplated using the following words to describe the yard around the farm house: “sunflower stalks in three feet of snow” (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4). The plants, their dry stems almost buried by snow, their yellow suns dimmed, might then have stood for the boy’s desolation. And yet the stanza before the last lines remains starkly poignant. Its elementary conditions (“wind,” “snow,” “sun”) and repetition (“No” and “only,” “Only,” “Only”) announce a world of acutely felt absence.41 Nothing but.42 Yet there are the sunflowers. The mother in Seed Catalogue speaks in collusion of seed and flower. (This happens even more so in Kroetsch’s unused notes and in what he has said personally about his mother’s love for prairie flowers.) We might especially appreciate her cherishing of flowers. They could have been little more than weeds within the practicality of a farm economy—wasteful, merely aesthetic. 186

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F Kroetsch’s intense relationship with his mother runs through “Sounding the Name,” in no part more dramatically than “Birthday: June 26, 1983,” second in the series.43 In that poem the adult author responds to a picture of his young mother, taken years before he himself was born. It seems necessary to have the poem in its entirety, in order to feel the full weight of its occasion: In the snapshot my mother is seventeen.44 She is standing beside an empty chair. Today is my birthday, I am fifty-six. I seat myself in the empty chair in the snapshot. My mother is standing against the wall of a wooden house. The wall of the house is shingled. To her right, and behind the chair, is a window. I am in the house, out of sight, hiding, so that she won’t remember I am not yet born. Her waiting eyes contain my eyes. Her mouth, almost smiling, contains mine. The window reflects the images of the trees that are in the yard. I am out in the yard, playing, I am not yet her son.45 I rehearse my mother. I hold the snapshot in my hands. I become her approaching lover. (Completed Field Notes 201) Kroetsch startlingly names himself into the scene and into the details of his mother’s location. She, he meticulously notes, is standing beside an empty chair (a chair missing an occupant? an inviting chair?) in front of a wooden and shingled house, in whose window the poet can see reflections of the trees in the yard. “I seat myself in the empty chair,” he writes and, just like that, he enters,

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he is there—“in the snapshot” in his mind. And then, without explanation or hesitation, he writes a greater entrance: “I am in the house, out of sight, hiding.” He is there and not there, occupying what would seem to be, or could be, the mother’s chair. But of course he is not “there,” nor can he withdraw himself from “there.” Not really, we say. Not actually.46 The vexings spin and escalate. The fifty-six-year-old poet, holding the picture in his hand, is in the picture, but he is not in the picture. He is inside the (“female”) house, “out of sight, hiding.” Not yet born? His dream slides to the side, into equivocation and evasion. In Seed Catalogue the mother was located outside, in the garden, that ambiguous space. A halfway house, primarily female, the garden allowed some exemption for Kroetsch as male (handicapped with hay fever), most dramatically perhaps as a young boy precariously positioned within definitions of gender supplied by the rural Alberta of his childhood. In the earlier poem, Seed Catalogue, the mother never appears within the house, nor does the young boy. Now he is in the house and she is outside but near the house. He is inside, hiding. Why hiding? He is hiding, he tells us, “so that she won’t remember I am not yet / born.” The poem unwinds a strange dream of recovery and retention. It is half teasing too. The poet counts on the mother’s affection and readiness to accept his play, she being brought by the reverie into a happy game of hide-and-seek in which both of them agree she will come to find him in a moment of shared pleasure. We are flung through the claims. The mother is presented as one who in acts of memory might be able, almost certainly is able, to access the future. But how can one remember what is yet to happen, or bring back what has not yet occurred? A postmodern text, we know, can refuse “common sense” and so can accommodate those kinds of dislocations. They can be absorbed within a psychological reading, too, through which we would regard the speaker’s account as narrating a situation to meet his desires. In dizzying positionings and repositionings the poet constructs himself as blessed son (“I am out in the yard, / playing”); but then not: “I am not yet her son.” “I am not yet” her son, “not yet” born. The poem multiply informs us of his nullity, though clearly it moves in a reverie within which he would wish to have arrived, perhaps restored, as favoured son. The mother, “standing,” would appear to be arrested in expectancy. She awaits the taking of the photograph, no doubt. But in Kroetsch’s musings is she “waiting” for something else too?: “Her waiting eyes contain my eyes. / Her 188

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mouth, almost smiling, contains mine.” The eyes and the mouth are what make the mother recognizable to the son and assure her continuance in him. The poem offers a self that is confirmed within a narrative of ancestry, “within” the mother too, whose features “contain” his. That reading is there but so surely is another. The eyes are “waiting” in their heralding of “my eyes” and there is a mouth that is “mine.” The terms of studied observation through which the mother is presented as genetic progenitor also name her ambiguously as potential lover—the eyes that wait, the almost smiling mouth, the anticipating face looking out at the camera, at anyone (Kroetsch himself at the time of writing) who looks back, if back it is. Her eyes, intimate eyes, inviting eyes, look (now) on the son who is looking at the picture almost a half-century later.47 When the poem ends in forthright declaration—“I become her approaching lover”—we turn back to the words that have named the scene of “waiting” as “not yet,” the situation held in a perpetual present. The photograph presents a world framed in a window and so it mirrors back upon itself, in self-enclosure. The mother “is” standing, today “is” my birthday; I “am” fifty-six, I “seat” myself, the house “is” shingled, there “is” a window, I “am” in the house, her mouth “contains,” the window “reflects.”48 The simple present locates the speaker, and the mother, in current and virtually unchanging states, the enabling details refracted through the logic of dream. “I am,” Kroetsch writes (five times), the actionless verb identifying him as existing outside of event (not outside of desire: outside of action). Then, in the moment that brings us to the lip of narrative, to the verb that would electrify the text, the poet writes of his own transformation. He, no longer in a state of “am”-ness, shakes off his standing as privileged child and “become[s]” the approaching lover. “Sounding the Name” projects its desire into a second just past the present moment of the scene. Once it announces arrival, the scene closes on the edge of event. There are other times, in the early 1990s, when Kroetsch revisits this memory. One involves the anguished and compulsive words of Raymond, one of Kroetsch’s many perplexing doubles: Forgive me for scribbling on the bottom of that same page nine (and I was a boy when my mother died; Rita’s mother lived to see her daughter celebrated as a poet): The day they brought my mother’s body home to our house for the wake, I went up the low hill behind the house. Rita, I wanted

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to tell you this. I went to a hollow beside a large round rock, and I curled up in that hollow and I cried until I had cried out my life. After that I was empty enough to be a writer. I returned to the house and went to my room and made a list of the names of the neighbors who came with food and flowers. (“The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart” 201) The conditions necessary to authorhood are arresting. Emptiness is required? Is emptiness another word for denial? The near exorcism of Kroetsch’s sense of loss, his near refusal to speak of it, perhaps kept those emotions in abeyance for decades.

F In the mother poems Kroetsch’s grief explodes against all of his early restraints in breathtaking and dazzling lyrics. The archives contains still more signs of his grief, including an uncompleted, closely related poem about a boy seeking comfort in a large rock: In this poem I do not go out of the house to the hill by the garden, I do not go to the hollow in the ground where men perhaps a decade before had tried to dig a boulder from the ground and have given up and there the grass had grown into the place where the man had dug, had created a hole that was a kind of cradle, a womb and I do not go to that place in the earth, into the grass and autumn flowers of that place and curl and and [sic] finally let myself cry; and I do not cry all through the afternoon while the blackbirds And then another which mentions the mother herself: 190

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let the bottom fall out of my heart. I cried myself hollow. In this poem my mother does not die. She lives to be an old lady. In this poem I rehearse my mother. (MsC. 591/96.6 53.1) Yet another narrative about the stricken kid tells of finding solace within a tipi ring, where he “sat…and cried.” The site was deeply meaningful to the young Kroetsch, and to his family too. His father and the hired man, he writes, had discovered “a ring of stones in the prairie grass” and, sensing something about it, they had “strangely, plowed around it.” His father later regretted having given permission to take the stones: “I remember my father one night at supper, saying out of nowhere, he’d made a mistake, letting those men pick up those stones. For reasons he couldn’t understand, he felt guilty.” His mother, perhaps humouring her son, had speculated that “the stones were magical” (“On Being” 71), as evidently they were for the young boy, all the more so when he lost his mother. The boy’s inconsolable grief is evident, as is his later need to admit a long-unspoken sorrow. What is especially striking in the scene of weeping is the image of the young boy encircled in tipi stones or curled foetally inside the hollow beside a big rock, which serves as a strange confidante and comforter.49 A larger connection to several of Kroetsch’s texts seems inevitable, and quite possibly required. It is highly probable that the one big rock to which, in 1941, the fourteen-year-old Kroetsch carries his bereavement is the one big rock to which only a few years earlier, entering puberty, he had brought his wild and burgeoning sexuality. The chain invites a near equation: the female rock is site of both a mother’s and a lover’s love. The two figures situated in that rock—excited, intimate, inviting, responsive to touch—are beginning to align themselves in Kroetsch’s writing. In the simple daring of pronouns “I” and “it” become “we.” Through the boy’s desire the rock is stirred to life as a woman whom he might meet and with whom he might conjoin. Through the hand’s light pressure the boy is brought into writing—“empty enough to be a writer,” as if the act of writing would involve a full dissipating of grief. As though having spoken with the rock muse he would be ready, eventually, to speak of the missing mother. The rock certainly sounds a lot like the rock of which Kroetsch

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speaks so endearingly in “I Wanted to Write a Manifesto,” a talk he gave in 1989, one of several such musings. That rock, he makes it known, was highly sexual and entirely responsible for his complicity in embracing it (A Likely Story 49). And it is this rock, or one(s) very like it, to which Kroetsch goes in grief and longing for the lost mother.

F These narratives embolden us in re-entering Seed Catalogue. When we hear there the mother’s whisper, we are ready to speculate on the texture of that invitation. To whom do we whisper? And under what circumstances do we whisper? We whisper out of courtesy, not to bother others with our noise. We whisper in hiding, so as not to be found; in lack of confidence, not wanting to be overheard. We whisper in intimacy, for “your” ears only, our words coming that near to another, near as warm breath. We whisper in love, in sought closeness. We whisper to befuddle and to intimidate: what are they saying? about me? about her? We whisper in stealth and malice. What are they up to? We whisper in connivance and tenderness. Whisper in fear, in consideration, whisper in shame, in uncertainty. We whisper to be close, or to be far. We whisper and whisper. But what of the mother? “Bring me the radish seeds, / my mother whispered.” Clearly she means to be protective and absolving. It’s all right, it’s all right, the voice would seem to say. The mother words. The mother in love of son offers perhaps what Peter Thomas has called a “maternal song” (Robert Kroetsch 26), a “song of love, which requires the close intimacy of naming” (27). A mother’s love, yes. But a lover’s too?50 The words do that, true enough. And more, if we read Seed Catalogue within our knowledge of the poet’s biography and body of work. If, for that matter, we read the scene alongside other narratives of entrance into adulthood—what then? A boy has just fallen, in the garden. That story invites us to read the event as symbolic and transitional. After the protagonist falls from innocence, he is visited throughout the rest of the poem by the ghosts of horses and men, some of them falling off horses. It is evidently important for the adult narrator to insist on the preeminence of Pete Knight. We can get some idea of the magnitude of the boy’s failure as cowboy when we set his mishap alongside the successes of Pete Knight. Darrell Knight’s Pete Knight: The Cowboy King celebrates his heroic status: 192

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Horse and rider erupted from the chute in a spinning, twisting whirl of white mane, tail hair, and flashing spurs. With Pete’s balance steadied between his clenched fist on the buck-rein, his free clenched hand held high in the air, and his spurs slashing down each side of the bronc... Every leap brought on a counter-stroke of hot, raking spur-rowels, as the horse did his best to lose his rider. By the seventh second, with all of the strength he could muster, Cannonball was flying high across the infield, twisting again and again, determined to buck Pete off...On the eleventh second, Peter spurred Cannonball to a standstill before a cheering crowed of five thousand spectators. (121) The historical Knight, we might guess, would embody the virtues of the Western hero as Lee Clark Mitchell has identified them: “a bearing of stalwart independence, of assured self-reliance, of natural ease in the landscape” (149). Knight does not, however, show signs of a tight-lipped flight from women. According to Pete Knight’s young relative Knight was happily married: “His contentment in their love for one another held greater importance than any trophy or championship title” (128). As for the young horseman in Seed Catalogue, chagrined and ineffectual at riding, he seems neither independent, nor assured, nor ready to refuse a woman’s tenderness. It is no small matter that Kroetsch’s poet-in-waiting—twelve when he took his first love to the rock, fourteen when his mother dies—is thirteen when he falls. How simple it would be to act on that knowledge—a boy entering manhood falls off a horse and into his mother’s comforting. What more could be said, or need be said? The boy is faced with the recoil of two male adults, and the burn from their disappointment. It is painfully evident that he has not managed to do what he ought to have done, perhaps not succeeded in entering maleness, as the men understand it. In his inability to ride he remains unreceived into their world.51 The hired man’s boisterous reaction indicates as much, as does perhaps the father’s stunned silence. Neither of them offers words of support or acceptance. The mother, by contrast, recognizes the boy’s crisis and gives him an out. At the very moment of his jeopardized manhood, when he is humiliatingly unhorsed, she rescues the boy and calls him into a complicitous act. She offers an intimate connection, she of house and garden. For all her tactfulness, perhaps because of her very solicitude, she takes over the initiatory scene and

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offers another version of how the aspiring poet might live his life. The boy and his mother will presumably seek solace in the growing and naming of things. They arrive in the fully botanized world of Seed Catalogue, where almost everything is brought within the garden story. The fact that the mother beckons the boy almost secretively into an act of seeding over which she presides clearly registers with the reader. As the family is “harrowing” the garden, and as the hired man wonders how “in hell” the kid could do what he did, she calls to him. She gestures to the boy and summons him into a world of seeds. In Kroetsch’s writing she becomes one of many Persephones visiting from the underworld and reinfusing the earth with life. She is depicted in a memorably tender passage before the poem ends, and it is she, and only she, who in Seed Catalogue is described in a sensory way as someone whose grace bring her in close touch the smells and colours of a growing world and tutors the son in its magical processes. We well might hear in the scene of fall and comforting a nearly suppressed version of what breaks out so forcefully in “Sounding the Name.” In the last line of “Sounding,” the speculation finds legs when the poet writes of the ghostly mother: “I become her approaching lover.” There are many related scenes in Kroetsch: all those graves out of which women climb, or gardens into which they step, restoring or promising to restore the leaved and flowering world. There is Helen Persephone Murdoch in The Words of My Roaring, also the green young woman in The Studhorse Man rising to new life from the grave. Think of all those Orphic descents. Think of Kroetsch’s own young mother, lover and nurturer of flowers,52 offerer of seeds, buried in a cold wet graveyard, Kroetsch for the rest of his life wishing her back. The stories, however parodic they can be, however reworked or newly read,53 are never in Kroetsch revoked. They speak of the missing woman and of quests to rescue her. “And who among us dares the singer’s task? Or the singer’s journey to the land of the dead?…to rescue the dead bride”? Kroetsch has asked (A Likely Story 69). “Or is it,” he speculates, not so much a rescuing of that figure, Eurydice, but by indirection a rescuing of the lost parent: “a narrative of the father, the lost father, himself rescued in the guise of forlorn women?” (68). He mulls on what it is to grieve that loss: “what is love but a disappearing act that leaves the beholder staggering in blind pursuit?” (184). It is a story which in one version or another Kroetsch tells over and over, and which hovers as subtext—the rescue of the lost and almost inaccessible mother—in Seed Catalogue.54 194

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F Before writing “Sounding the Name,” Kroetsch confessed to the force of his mother’s memory and the weight of her loss: “I kept the mother figures, especially, very silent at the center of the writing, partly because my own relationship with my mother was so painful, that I’ve only recently even put it into print at all” (Labyrinths 22).55 In that same interview Kroetsch speaks about his ambiguous position as tender of the garden, a largely female site which in the world of his childhood marked him as something close to a failed “male”:56 I grew up on a big farm, and there was a high definition of male and female activity, and lots of hired help working. I had allergies so that I couldn’t do a lot of the male work in buildings—but I could work out of doors. I would do out-of-door work but I couldn’t work in the barn or anything like that. But I couldn’t work in the house either because that was the sphere of female activity—and I was the only son and the oldest, and all those privileged things. And the one place where I found a kind of open field was the garden because a garden is ambiguous on a farm. It involves women’s work, but often the men help. Kroetsch adds these tantalizing words: “All this has to do with my wrestling with this notion of erotics right now in my writing” (Labyrinths 21). The Kroetsch archives reveal how deeply shaken he was by the death of his mother, whose role as keeper of the garden he took over in the spring after she died.57 He recalls in touching brevity the neighbours’ attempts to comfort son and husband. It is “Sunday, March 9, 1974” at “Binghamton, New York” that he recalls the death of his mother. A son nearly overwhelmed by his father’s power as narrator,58 virtually silenced by his mother’s death—how is he to come into words? How is he to talk about the unspeakable sorrow?59 Given his inscriptions, how is he to speak?

F “The play between the possibilities of revelation and concealment, with a revealed inclination toward concealment, becomes the trope by which Canadian literature speaks itself and questions itself” (Lovely Treachery 190). So writes Kroetsch in

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a manuscript on Thomas O’Hagan’s Tay John, and so has he written in introducing Mandel’s selected poems. He has written much the same about Rudy Wiebe’s Playing Dead: “Everywhere in the book is Wiebe’s word secrecy. Against the nostalgia for knowing, he posits a willingness to acknowledge the withheld, the unknown, the disguised, the lie” (A Likely Story 104). “To play dead,” Kroetsch surmises in that essay, “is to play a trick. It is, at least by the morality of the center, to lie—to tell a lie. Out of that trickery and lying the world is created” (A Likely Story 100). For Kroetsch deception lies at the heart of writing—evasions and massive secrets abound, sheer fabrication we might say—however forthright Seed Catalogue, say, would appear to be. Feints, false clues, thickenings, shaky terms, are everywhere to be found, or not. Kroetsch lays down trails of dissemblings, under-the-table moves, camouflagings, refusals to speak his own confusions and uncertainties. We write covertly, says the underhanded keeper of secrets, the postmodern skeptic who doubts the words we have, who mulls over the gap that opens between them and what it is we would say. Perhaps this is what Kroetsch engages in, and what he recommends, in spite of his reputation for speaking candidly. The pull between uncovering and hiding puts a charge into Seed Catalogue. Not: what’s going to happen? But: what’s going on? What’s he not telling us? So “tell the goddamn truth for a change,” Johnny Backstrom scolds himself in Kroetsch’s wildly comical novel, The Words of My Roaring (80). His selfreproving derives from the stunned admission of what it has been to have spent a life “sniffing and pawing, crawling and begging and imploring, conniving, cheating, betraying your wife, inventing filthy lies, wasting your money, missing sleep, deceiving your best friends” (126). We know, however, that the poet lieth. It is the gift of language, if George Steiner is to be believed, to be unruly, messy, imprecise, misleading, fanciful: Uncertainty of meaning is incipient poetry. In every fixed definition there is obsolescence or failed insight. The teeming plurality of languages enacts the fundamentally creative, “counter-factual” genius and psychic functions of language itself...“The world,” it says, “can be other.” Ambiguity, polysemy, opaqueness, the violation of grammatical and logical sequences, reciprocal incomprehensions, the capacity to lie— these are not pathologies of language but the roots of its genius. (234–35) What is it that Kroetsch is not saying? 196

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The narrative in Seed Catalogue circles its own traumas to deflect, though it never totally effaces, one of its most troubling concerns—the loss of the mother and what that meant to husband and son. When we read of the hired man’s belittling; the father’s confounded and constrained response; the mother’s tactful intercession, so quiet and so brief it almost escapes notice—we are brought to a secret at the heart of the text. And so the son’s deepest feelings for his parents remain in Seed Catalogue largely unspoken. The poem in one respect evades itself by suppressing material that is highly emotional, confessional, or “poetic”—painful memories to the young and the adult Kroetsch. It chooses a narrative that is increasingly witty, comedic, and ribald—moving toward parody we might say.60 Seed Catalogue is an enigmatic text, a version of playing dead. Inside of it is a shrouded pain—above all the story of a lost mother and an incomplete grieving. No doubt something has to be done. Resisting a repressive past and an unheeding present, Kroetsch lets go with possibilities. He begins to hear voices and to spring them loose. Into his poem rise the sounds of the unsaid and the unheard. His goal is to make a present of the present; not what is pre-sent, the great-given as he sometimes calls it, but what is at hand. His poetry recalls what “was,” but it insists on what might be done with newly accessed texts. It asks what now and in the future they might come to be. Where some have found scarcity, Kroetsch discovers profusion. There is no end to the tones and accents: shouts and whispers, pleas and pleasurings, threats and rejoicings, boastings and reportings, lamentations and meditations, objections and overtures. He opens prospects, raises a spate of what-ifs and just-supposings. He releases onto the page a wild compendium of voices, his own demotic music, his democratic summoning toward the new poem in a new world.

F Not bad. Not bad for starters. There among the catalogues and kings, the squash and the cabbage, the horses and the bullshitters. Around talk of Pete Knight, of family and friends, poets and pretenders. The gardens and the pubs. All that. All that unfinished writing. How about that? we might say. How about /that?

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five

It’s a Lover’s Question Staging Romance in The Sad Phoenician

I’ll send you my next book of poems, due out this spring: The Sad Phoenician. A venture into the alphabet itself. With myriad puns along the way. And an exploration of the function of cliche in our thinking. —Robert Kroetsch, letter to Bill [Nicolaisen], February 20, 1979 (MsC. 0334/84.1 4.27) The love story is the utterance of a single subject, but this subject does not offer to speak from a single place. Lovers speak, and yet in doing so they are spoken by a language that precedes them, that is not at their disposal, under their control; this language is at the same time dispersed among banalities, poetry, the sacred, tragedy. Who speaks? —Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture 84

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The text that became The Sad Phoenician went through several titles. Kroetsch had been considering calling the book “The Anarchist Who Needed Order.” A letter from Daphne Marlatt to Kroetsch on “1/11/78” mentioned a text, “This is a Love Poem,” that he had submitted to periodics (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). “I’ve begun a poem about The Sad Phoenician of Love,” Kroetsch wrote in a journal entry dated “Friday, April 28, 1978 / Binghamton, New York” (The “Crow” Journals 80). He wrote to Connie Harvey on May 12 to say “I’ve been working on a longish poem that somehow violates its way into secret places, and that too is part of what I’m resisting” (MsC. 334/84.1 6.16). This poem almost certainly would have been The Sad Phoenician. Within two weeks Kroetsch submitted parts of the entire manuscript to two journals. A July 3 letter to Descant announced a submission: “Herewith, sections N–Z of a longish poem” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). The “Crow” Journals for July 8 Kroetsch notes his progress: “Smaro giving me ideas about how to use the idea of color in the Sad Phoenician poem” (84). Within a few days, on July 18, he writes to Daphne Marlatt at periodics: “Here are six sections from a ‘poem’ for consideration” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). Karen Mulhallen at Descant replied to Kroetsch on “18 August 1978”: “Yes, I do like N–Z” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). An advanced draft of the entire manuscript seems at that point to have been completed, for Kroetsch speaks to Stan Dragland on September 14 about “a new draft of (as I now call it) ‘The Sad Phoenician.’ You set me going, with your exact-exacting reading—so I’ve modified, modulated” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). On the same day, he writes to Michael Ondaatje, thanking him and Stan Dragland for their advice (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). He has taken great care in producing the poem, a letter to Ondaatje reveals. “Here in haste against the mail strike, a new version of the poem,” he writes on September 17, “this one called ‘The Sad Phoenician.’ Stan’s comments set me to reworking the first part, especially, with care. But I’ve made corrections from beginning to end. I’m mailing a copy to Stan, with thanks. Between the two of you, one generalizing, one hitting the text, you forced me into an extra and painful reading” (MsC. 27.11). Two months later a letter dated “nov 13 78” tells Marlatt “Michael O. is going to do a Coach House book of My Sad Phoenician” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34), and on “January 24, 1979” Kroetsch tells Bill Latta that Michael Ondaatje is “doing my next book of poems, at Coach House. A very short book called The Sad Phoenician” (MsC. 334/84.1 3.47). The publications of the poem, in part and in whole, come in rapid succession: 200

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• Kroetsch, Robert. “This is a Love Poem (Stanzas N–Z).” Descant 9.3 (1978–79): 19–25. • Kroetsch, Robert. “The Sad Phoenician (Sections A–M).” periodics 5 (1979): 5–11. • Kroetsch, Robert. The Sad Phoenician. Toronto: Coach House, 1979.

At some point Kroetsch hived a closely related text out of a larger manuscript that had led to The Sad Phoenician. He crossed out the title of one section, “sad phoenician,” retitled it “silent poet” (MsC. 334/34.1 13.1), and published it later under that title. In 1980 Dale Reagan heralded the poem as proof of “Kroetsch’s emergence as a master of the long poem” (7).

F A stone hammer. A ledger. A seed catalogue. Each of these objects has served Kroetsch as pretext for a long poem. “The Stone Hammer Poem,” The Ledger, and Seed Catalogue all begin in accident. The poet stumbles upon a (sub)text. It is given to him, it is his role to recognize the gift and put it to use. What follows as source is no less impelled by a find. The Sad Phoenician too lays hold on what is “there.” In its case, the “there” has always been there, right under the poet’s nose, in his very ears. The Phoenician’s words are not a oneshot discovery that the poet suddenly happens upon. He taps a compendium of words available in the public domain—invented by no one apparently, and belonging to no one, and circulated with perfect freedom. The source is plural and dispersed and ubiquitous—the idiom of Kroetsch’s sub-literary world—and the poem in taking up the everyday expressions faces new formal challenges. The earlier poems in Collected Field Notes had nudged further and further into polyphony—from the evenly sounded “Stone Hammer” poem, which circled in meditation around a family and an Aboriginal artifact; to the multivoiced The Ledger as it absorbed documents from an actual ledger, pieces from local histories and public documents, and the surprised and concerned sounds of the narrator; to Seed Catalogue with its use of conjoined voices, many of them unlettered or unassuming. The Sad Phoenician appears to reduce the range of voices as it develops within a dramatically new format—in what Reagan accurately

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describes as “dizzying involutions of its word play…taken up in an elaborate system of echoes and anticipations” (7). Eschewing any pretense of being “original,” it raids a store of sayings and cleverly recycles them. The poem is teeming with idioms and clichés—the very stuff a poet is supposed to renounce. Dead on arrival. The difficulties don’t faze Kroetsch. His life, he has admitted, has been a search for the dead. Now, in flamboyant acts of necromancy, he brings back the dead. Kroetsch’s “poems create the clichés in which I gives voice to his loss, his self-pity,” writes Shirley Neuman, “his sense of returning lost; doing so, they expose those clichés and allow the poems as poems to become original and witty statements of a feeling which is in no way diminished or anaesthetized as it would be if the cliché were allowed to remain simply cliché” (“Allow Self” 114). The same can be said for the other species of orality that fascinate him, slang for one. “Slang,” Kroetsch has said, “is perhaps ordered language gone chaotic,” and he acknowledges that using it means risking a poem’s early death. Risking that, he wants to spring loose the expansive energies of street language, see what it can do once it is out on parole and jumpy with life: One of the problems is, and especially with comedy, or humorous writing, that vibrant language is very much based on an immediate sense of that language. These things change very fast, as you say. I want to use the speech that we are speaking. Most of literature, in certain way, at least poetry, is about using another kind of speech— using literary speech. They escape this temporality by using high style. (Gunnars 63–64) Kroetsch says more about why he so often chooses “another kind of speech”: “I think first of all you write in the world you live in it. And there is a wonderful energy in that language that’s very tempting, even if it’s short lived. While it’s there it’s really there, it really buzzes” (Gunnars 63–64). The unliterary language becomes the grounds from which Kroetsch works. In The Sad Phoenician we certainly aren’t looking at an author’s originality, not, that is, if we mean something brand spanking new, like no other, or seemingly like no other, something that seems fully authorized by the author himself. Kroetsch decides on constant quotation, though not of a usual sort. His citations are not hidden, nor for the most part are they “literary.” The 202

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Sad Phoenician includes other texts, but it features those that spread in everyday talk. The great-given in The Sad Phoenician is located in the Phoenician’s daily existence. The orality is brazen, and in quantity it exceeds at least what Kroetsch had written up to that point. The problem is what to do with the already known and often said, all those worn expressions sprung from their corporate existence and eroded from constant use. The problem doesn’t slow Kroetsch. The confiscations are totally frank and seemingly unlimited. Roland Barthes, but for one word, could have been thinking of The Sad Phoenician,1 when he found that he himself was “Born of literature, able to speak only with the help of its worn codes” (A Lover’s Discourse 23). Barthes’s familiar signs are the stuff of established literary practice; Kroetsch’s worn codes are drawn from the eminently non-literary.

F A major challenge for The Sad Phoenician arises from practices that for centuries have underwritten the love poem. One thing is sure: Kroetsch knows what it is to play the stricken lover. He has read all those poems. We have a pretty good idea, ourselves, we’ve read hundreds of them too. The Sad Phoenician enters an enchaining of texts that from the start show how to behave and how to write under love’s tutelage. Kroetsch had actually spoken of The Sad Phoenician in one of its early manifestations as a love poem: “This is a Love poem (stanzas A–G)” written in preparation for the full poem (MsC. 334/34.1 13.1.) The “Phoenician” folder at the University of Calgary includes a typed version of the plaintive love poem, “O Western Wind.” It also contains several lines from Thomas Wyatt’s poems of forsaken love: “My galley charged with forgetfulness,” “Whoso list to hunt I know where is an hind,” and “She flees from me that sometime did me seek” (MsC. 334/34.1 13/3). Wyatt’s symbol of a besieged ship and a stricken lover-sailor strikes a parallel with Kroetsch’s sea-faring and abandoned lover: My galley chargèd with forgetfulness, Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass ’Tween rock and rock; and eke my foe, alas, That is my lord, steereth with cruelness; And every hour, a thought in readiness. (Wyatt 2)

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Kroetsch clearly was exploring antecedents, though for the most part these particular poems recede from his attention. He does later acknowledge his indebtednesses to Giles Fletcher for one, in “I Find Myself Reading the Old Guys Now: December 6, 1983.” Though Kroetsch develops The Sad Phoenician in illimitable foolery, he ends “the Old Guys” (dated four years after the publication of The Sad Phoenician), on a snappy and startling couplet: “You say it’s over now and, click, / here I am, clinging to the moon, seasick” (Completed Field Notes 110). The affinities spread. Ann Munton has shown how much Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example, lies behind The Sad Phoenician (“Robert Kroetsch” 180). Other texts are at least as important. One that suggests itself is Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its mélange of voices and Prufrock’s yearning for the women who elude him. Kroetsch’s sailor is far more given to bluff and bluster, far more vital and expansive than Eliot’s fussy man, but he too looks askance at the women on the periphery of his life. Kroetsch’s Phoenician may well also owe something, too, to the Phoenician sailor who floats through “The Wasteland.” More conspicuous in The Sad Phoenician is a rich Elizabethan rhetoric. The Phoenician’s erudition is largely hidden, allowing us only glimpses of it. He releases information so off-handedly in parody and a toss-off manner that we are not always immediately alerted to the echoes. Nevertheless we can detect some literary precedents and evidence of linguistic knowledge. We can readily discern his interest in the metalingual and the metaliterary, most obviously the alphabet itself, the Phoenician’s naming of himself as seafaring explorer of love and sailor of language, and Kroetsch’s abiding interest in systems of naming and acts of naming. The poem also shows, in brief phrases, a knowledge of old lore and practices. There is Homer, certainly; and the ancient Phoenicians, with their use of purple dye, say; the forebodings of birds as augurs of human life; the mention of other mythological figures. Though the poem bears traces of other texts, the Phoenician is not beholden to literary titles. Nor is he in debt to every unassuming text. He is not without his sources, however. Kroetsch shares with the oral poet expedients that allow him to proceed with practiced ease. The sailor’s speech is not, therefore, a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants performance. Although he pretends to wallow in misery, his complaints sound little more than pretext for a rollicking good takeoff on the destitute and unrequited lover. His behaviour is far more studied than its flamboyance might suggest. Dick Leith and George Myerson’s cautions seem called for when they say that the “technique of extemporization should not be 204

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confused with spontaneity” (21).2 The artfulness in The Sad Phoenician lies in its created illusion, for the sounds of anguish or excitement would not be much more than a sigh or a shout or curse, or a spate of clichés. A careless narrator would not come anywhere near the dazzling contrivances that splash through The Sad Phoenician.

F Kroetsch has long felt uneasy about the status of the love poem. Yet he has written a lot of love poetry and he has written of poetry itself as driven by love and the search for love. We consider the apparently unironic statements of Raymond, Kroetschean doppelganger in “The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart,” published about fifteen years after The Sad Phoenician and later subsumed within The Hornbooks of Rita K: “We write as a way of inviting love. Each text is a request that says, please, love me a little” (Hornbooks 19); “why is it that only pain can make us burst into words?” (43); and “what is love but a disappearing act that leaves the beholder staggering in blind pursuit”? (20). We also have the views of the poet Rita Kleinhart, another and closer double for Kroetsch. Though she remains nearly unfathomable, she does advance opinions that seem to accord with Kroetsch’s. She is clear about “Rejecting notions of the religious or political or transcendental or the Platonic ideal or, apparently, the narrative of love” (12). She is clear, that is, if the perturbed narrator’s report of her views is to be believed. In “D-Day and After” Kroetsch himself diagnoses the “love story” as a waiting: “A painful separation, in a love story, becomes the cause of speech. It occasions the telling. The loved one, by the absence of the lover, is forced into telling the story of that love” (A Likely Story 131). Kroetsch seems quite willing in The Sad Phoenician to tell that story. Residues of the love story glue to Kroetsch’s later work, in, say, Letters to Salonika, and Excerpts from the Real World. A review of Excerpts in 1986 distils the features: “The prose poem teases us throughout with cryptic and decontextualized allusions to a hidden story that involves evasion, jealousy, separation, betrayal, passion, and intellectual exchanges about the nature of poetry. The woman is cast in the role of punishing muse, the male person in the role of suffering poet” (McDonald 76). Everywhere in Kroetsch we stumble over sought or unrequited love. When he speaks of the love story as something to be shunned, he can’t be objecting to the expression of romantic or erotic love. He must be thinking of a

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version that would name it as transporting and irrevocable—a master narrative, Kroetsch might have said. What Kroetsch admitted years later suggests he was never finally convinced of his intermittent renunciations. Asked if it is “possible to write love stories anymore,” Kroetsch replies, “Well, I think so. I made a public statement that I didn’t think so, but I think so” (Sellery 40). It is clear that Kroetsch doesn’t want to be held in “the story,” by which he means a given story, or an expected story, or the great-given, with its limits and requirements.

F What is most obvious in the Phoenician’s manner is the use of what Jonathan Culler has called the “ritualistic character of speech acts in general” (150). The Phoenician cites and recites, draws on the rich reservoir of idiom which he wears close to his skin. He throws himself into a ceremony of summoning what has been already said by countless people on innumerable occasions. An impatient reading of The Sad Phoenician might therefore conclude that the Phoenician is impossibly unschooled. Far from it, he is a keen student of poetry and he is an adept in the arts of rhetoric, so much so that he is able to make his way with ease and effect among the forests of sayings. For centuries, Gerald Bruns reminds us, the measure of an educated speaker required the capacities “to apply what had already been said to the unforeseen situation in which you are now called upon to say something” (Inventions 102). The Phoenician acts as in oral societies the poet would act: he raids his word hoard and he speaks to his people. In adapting a citational mode, he does what poets for centuries had done. As Walter J. Ong explains, “the Renaissance itself still preserved a strong sense that this is what poems and/or other ‘invention’ were, inter alia—assemblages of commonplace materials to which other poets could resort for the matter of their own poems” (Interfaces 179). Richard Lanham asks how you would train a young (ancient) Greek so that s/he will be able to operate effectively in the world. We could find in the student that Lanham describes an incipient version of Kroetsch’s Phoenician: From the beginning, stress behavior as performance, reading aloud, speaking with gesture, a full range of histrionic adornment. Require no original thought. Demand instead an agile marshaling of the proverbial wisdom on any issue. Categorize this wisdom into predigested units, 206

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commonplaces, topoi. Dwell on their decorous fit into situation. Develop elaborate memory schemes to keep them readily at hand. Teach, as theory of personality, a corresponding set of accepted personality types, a taxonomy of impersonation. Drill the student incessantly on correspondences between verbal style and personality type, life style. Nourish an acute sense of social situation. (2) The preparation would lead into what is “rhetorical, chancy, always changing, developing outward or collapsing altogether; process not essence, verb not noun” (47). Lanham’s rhetorician could almost be mistaken for the Sad Phoenician, though Kroetsch’s figure puts more stock in buffoonery, and originality. Kroetsch constructs his own folksy version of the shapeshifter: “Sometimes we Albertans disguise ourselves as ourselves, sometimes we disguise ourselves as others. It fools a lot of people...By our disguises we free ourselves, we speak to each other of hidden selves” (“Dancing with the Time Machine” 300). With his knack for comical and significant narrative, Kroetsch tells a story about himself as an instance of various and shifting selves—presented selves, hidden selves, supposed selves. He has fled academia for the bush country north of Ottawa, and he, a man “wearing” a beard, stops for a beer at a local pub: I made up a story, guessed a story, while I watched. The bored welldressed dancer, I thought to myself, is a hooker, waiting for the Friday afternoon crowd. Then I gave myself a rap on the knuckles for not letting the dancer make her own story. I should explain that I was wearing a red plaid shirt and jeans, a pair of boots, a beard. I was on vacation from myself. That’s why I was surprised by what happened next. After a while the dancer came over to me and said, “Hey, professor. You wanna dance?” I was astonished, and even hurt, I suppose. My attempt at announcing my true self had once again failed me. I couldn’t resist. I got up and joined the woman. We had hardly started to dance when I asked her, “Where are you from?” “Ottawa,” she said. “Just in for two nights.” We were waltzing. “A weekend off?” I said. “No,” she said. “I’m a hooker.” (“Dancing” 300)

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F In his misadventures the Phoenician asks for no intercessions from those who evidently have been disappointed in him. He virtually gives up hope for recovery of his earlier lovers. But he does not give up hope. His language erupts and splays across the book, page after page. It moves with flair and relish. Roy Miki, struck by that convulsion, has spoken of The Sad Phoenician as a book “where an incredible voice emerges,” and he asks: “Is it frenzy—or is that poem a release? Or a relief?” (“Self on Self ” 129). As if in answer, Roland Barthes has written of the spectacle that love creates for him. Its “amorous errantry has its comical side” and “it is also a grand opera” (A Lover’s Discourse 102). Barthes, unabashed poet of love, explains, “I declaim an elaborately encoded aria, without looking at the one I love, to whom I am supposed to be addressing myself ” (175). The words could describe Kroetsch’s own forsaken lover. The Sad Phoenician does sing of, and out of, his wounds—far more frequently and powerfully than at first glance might be evident. But that note is almost smothered by his loquacity. The Sad Phoenician enacts his letdown in splashy displays of wit and bravado. Cast into the role of spurned lover, he cunningly rewrites it, comes to love it, really. He sways between ingenuity and felt compulsion. Mostly he breaks out in spoof: everything’s farcical, one big laugh. He lunges on in self-mocking confessions, zips into flippant asides. He has a fondness for facile avowals, cheeky impersonations; he rallies himself in mock-heroic declarations. He plays things out in a performance any comedian would envy. The display is too clever, too self-regarding, too fond of citation to be mistaken for sustained anguish. It is much too attendant on rhyme and pun, ever to be driven by a wild passion. Kroetsch’s narrator is so pleased with himself, and so clever, that what begins in bellyaching gives way to showy and prolonged speeches. Wise fool, he sustains himself through mask and costume. It’s all an act, almost, as the sailor struts and frets.3 According to Bakhtin’s strikingly contemporary argument, the mask “rejects conformity to oneself” and is implicated in “transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries.” It operates in “such manifestations as parodies, caricatures, grimaces, eccentric postures, and comic gestures” (Rabelais 39–40). The Phoenician is and is not himself, is and is not Kroetsch, who himself is beside himself with speaking. The Phoenician in his varying and wobbling selves lets on that “I’m hardly the same myself” 208

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(Completed Field Notes 49) and smirkingly lets it be known that “I’ve sworn off myself ” (29). He stands outside of himself, more amused than bemused. “For me,” Kroetsch tells Russell Brown, “a comic vision is one that recognizes the importance of chance and absurdity much more than a tragic vision would. A tragic vision involves a sense of inevitability; the comic world contains sheer chance and the kinds of absurdities which are neither logical nor rational” (“An Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 8). The question is, though: how much of a trickster is the Sad Phoenician in his iffy and comic world? He certainly is not fully committed to a comedian’s role. There can be no denying his disorderly conduct, but he is never simply joking, nor is he unreservedly anarchic. He may well be compared to Shakespeare’s Fool4—shrewd, perceptive, mocking, wise, melancholic, speaking uncomfortable truths; less gnomic perhaps than the Fool, but a recognizable fool all the same. He is something of a bon vivant, comes close to being a trickster. For much of the time the Phoenician’s anguish is occluded by devil-may-care posturings and a torrent of language. He laughs off everything. Do we not find his words spellbinding? They seem for him at least to be intoxicating. His unhappiness does not lead him into self-pity, not usually, and when it comes it never lasts for long. Mostly it springs him into zany remonstrances, screwball fantasies, unbridled games, shameless bragging. The narrator cannot help himself, can hardly keep up with himself, perversely takes delight in making a scene. Flurries of idioms are piled one upon the other as if to press home a point or to display ingenuity. The unflappable Phoenician wants to generate plenitude from a state of destitution, from a state of platitude one might say. He heaves himself heroically into that achievement.

F Not long after The Sad Phoenician was published, Kroetsch’s “On Being an Alberta Writer” contemplated the writing of love: “One way to make love is by writing. Indeed, without writing, I sometimes suspect, there would be no such things as love” (70). In 1996 Kroetsch is still mulling over the condition: When one becomes the lover and the demand is for sincerity and truthfulness, and yet I wonder if you aren’t aware that you’re...Well, you see you’re caught up in discourse in a certain way, you’re aware that you’re

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entering into a discourse. And I don’t think that makes it false, what you’re doing; it doesn’t mean you’re being false. Because, going into disguise is to enter into a certain discourse. (Müller vii, ellipsis in original) Do we love because we are in love, or do we love because we say we are in love? Richard Lanham asks. Kroetsch uses almost identical words: “I realize that I fall in love by saying I fall in love. But I also know that I then have fallen in love in love” (Neuman, “Unearthing Language” 238). So does Ovid, whose example hovers very close to The Sad Phoenician: “Often, though, the imposter has started to love for real; / often what he’d pretended at first he became” (84). Do the words beget the condition? “Is desire a matter of fact or fiction?” Catherine Belsey asks. Her answer is persuasive. It is also bears on Kroetsch’s poem: Fact, self-evidently: its effects are visible on the surface of the body; its experience changes lives. Or fiction? The role of fantasy in the construction of desire cannot be overestimated...Is desire real, the only reality, or unreal, precisely romance, fairy tale, a temporary madness, an obsession from which we recover (what was I thinking of?). (78) Kroetsch clearly aims for a new entry in the long tradition of the love poem. He also draws on the text of his own life, if his statements were to hold that the poem originated in “some rather personal feelings or experiences” (Kamboureli 51). He proffered these enigmatic words: “The people who suggest the poem is not about reality make me mad (laughter), because it’s very much about reality” (47). He also has said of various figures in The Sad Phoenician that all the “lovers are versions / of myself” (MsC. 334/34.1 13.1.) As if in confirmation we read Barthes on love: “there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is for someone” (A Lover’s Discourse 74). The autobiographical impulse is never far from Kroetsch. Despite the elaborate structures of many of his texts, a fair bit of his life does creep into them. A novel he is working on is prompted by the accidents of his life, though the events are certain to be obscured in it: “I am trying to start a new novel, confronting in myself the American-Canadian dilemma, trying to give the experience form...The proposed novel is complicated by life, which is perhaps 210

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the way it should be—with an attractive, for me exciting, girl from Toronto on our faculty now. She brings out the nihilism that is so thinly disguised by my professorhood” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.23). A poem inspired by a colleague’s wife, he tells himself, is completely fabricated: “I was persuaded at the time that I’d invented the poem—made it up, as we say. I kept the poem a secret and ‘exposed’ it at the same time, as writers are wont to do, feeling the pride and shame of authorship” (MsC. 334/84.1). Yet it is not simply imagined: “I am not so sure I even know when a poem is or isn’t autobiographical. After all, I had flirted with Mrs. So-and-so at a party one night and even now I remember, etc, etc.” (MsC. 334/84.1).

F The Sad Phoenician (if it is a poem)5 implicitly asks: How do you write a postmodern love poem in a new land? The challenge is not easily met. The difficulty becomes especially evident in later Kroetsch works such as The Hornbooks of Rita K where it is knotted in tautology. The trope there gains force by a lineation that generates a pattern of near exasperation. The lines resist our taking-for-grantedness in what we say: When I tell you that I love you I am trying to tell you that I love you. (97) If to say “I love you” is to say what has already been said, millions of times, how is one to say “I love you” in ways that are meaningful or interesting? How does the poet say what has already been said without saying only what has already been said? How can declarations of love be someone’s actual words, or sign of a particular person speaking, “sincerely” we might say, if s/he merely is using the words that everyone else has used since forever? If love is itself a long series of quotations, how does the poet speak anew, or awry? or effectively? or credibly? The issue holds for all poets, but probably it hits with special force for the postmodern poet who denies that one can be simply original or truth-telling. And still we still speak of love. Catherine Belsey has compellingly argued that when texts that recently precede postmodernism couch avowals of love in

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allusion or quotation, they probably would be heard as lacking in sincerity. The speaker would simply be guilty of passing off another’s words as poor substitute, not genuine because not the lover’s herself. That would be no love at all. What has changed with postmodern writing is that it does not deny its takeovers, which is to say its own fundamental derivativeness: “it foregrounds the citationality of desire, affirms it, puts it on display. And in doing so it both speaks desire and defers it, draws attention to the loquacity, the excess of textuality that constitutes the postmodern recognition of the implications of difference” (Belsey 82). Across every page the Phoenician spills words he never attempts to make his own exactly. In “quotation, allusion, pastiche and parody” (Belsey 83) the confiscations of love run amuck. The Sad Phoenician quotes unusual texts, but the effects are the same.

F A short excerpt from the poem could hardly provide all of its swift shifts in tone and pacing, its range in allusion and learning, or the author’s pleasure in language. An uninterrupted selection can only begin to display the joy and cumulative force: but and but and but and but

why she developed a thing for adverbs, that’s too rich for my blood, I want to tell you shortly she’ll repent, ha I do respect her privacy as for the one who runs after doorknobs now: the world is not so round as she would have it, nor the door always hung to swing open I keep my trap shut, I was dealt a tough mitt any port in a storm they say: the dreamer, himself: lurching, leaping, flying; o to be mere gerund; no past, no future; what do you do in life: I ing the door, cracked, opened; the lover who would, did; the night knelt into morning (Completed Field Notes 53)

Wary of fixed definitions or immutable essences, Kroetsch produces a persona who in an almost dumbfounded manner rejoices in what he is saying. Oral syntax and rhymes and reversals and clichés and puns and conceits spin dizzingly 212

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through the lines (the dense and entangling “the [k]night knelt into mo[u] rning,” for example). The wayfaring sailor fidgets with grammar, revels in his audacity, ties us up in puzzling references, contradictions, nagging repetitions (what’s with all these doors—closed and opened?), and what may or may not be non sequiturs. The passage is packed with clever and unnerving meanings. It has become the Phoenician’s job to dispute the default role for lovers and so he emerges out of his brilliant twists and riffs as a highly engaging poet of love. Kroetsch’s poem is deviant. The “romantic” love poem customarily represses the idiomatic and the vulgar, and it avoids the second person other than in stylized apostrophe. The sensitive and afflicted poet normally would not accept solecisms, violent shifts in grammar, comical appeals to auditors, irregularities in typography and punctuation—the very traits that riddle The Sad Phoenician. In Kroetsch’s poem we get audacity where we might have expected reticence, amplitude where we might have anticipated brevity. We might have been prepared for gravity; here we encounter a near recklessness. On every page we trip over excess, a scuffling of idioms and asides. There can never be enough. The results may at a glance look unpremeditated or highly improvisational, but the poem is demonstrably resourceful and skillfully managed. Its unorthodox strategies almost absorb the antecedents in ways that Linda Hutcheon finds generally to be the case in postmodern writing. It “paradoxically enacts both change and cultural continuity.” As the prefix, para, suggests, parody “can mean both ‘counter’ or ‘against’ and ‘near’ or ‘beside’” (A Poetics 26). When read along Hutcheon’s lines, Kroetsch’s poem is, and is not, a love poem. It is a love poem because its enormous skill and savvy, realized in the Phoenician’s own display of intelligence and knowledge and quick-wittedness, sets the poem into a generic relatedness with the tradition. The effect is caught in David S. West’s review of The Sad Phoenician. West thinks well of the book, though he is conflicted about the writer’s role in it: “There is always, here, a sense of the author lurking behind the language, manipulating, contriving, and interjecting at will. There is much willfulness, but little restraint, little attempt at control or discipline” (122). West prefers a text that suppresses signs of its artifice and the extent of its diegesis.6 A major virtue can be found in what has troubled West—the skilled and robust redoing of conventions. For centuries love poets have been in the habit of fastening upon a beloved. Our lover laments not a lost lady but, in unperturbed élan, several beloveds. Further, those loves—muses, surely—are not

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limited to certain attributes and behaviours. The narrator construes them not according to their beauty, or the fineness of their souls. We hear nothing of their smiles, nothing of their eyes, little of their hair and arms, pitifully little about their voices (though we do hear their voices). We see practically nothing of their quiet patience or easy grace or their effervescence or distant ethereality. Though the four women in The Sad Phoenician are not delineated in detail, they figure forcefully as “elemental ladies,” as Dieter Meindl has cheerfully pointed out: Hurray, then, for the four women whom this voluble Sad Phoenician wistfully remembers from his sea-faring days: “the girl from Swift Current” now shacked up “with that photographer from Saskatoon, the one who takes those sterling pictures of the wind” (58)—air, positively; “Ms. R, the woman in Montreal, she who follows fires to firemen” (60)— fire, unequivocally; “the woman from Nanaimo, she who lives in a submarine”—water, yes, sure; and “she down / there in upstate New York” (63), who cares about doorknobs, thimbles, rocking chairs, trundle beds, dry sinks and fly swatters and whom it takes a little bit of imagination to identify as a paragon housewife and down-to-earth woman as among the “elemental ladies” in the poem. (49) The women—odd, showy, willful—become known by their geography and their predilections. The discarded Phoenician identifies them as spirited and aligned with the basic powers and substances of the universe. We can fill in the colourful details. The “bird woman” from Swift Current the sailor nimbly associates with wind and air, with trees and birds: “a bird in the hand” (Completed Field Notes 55); “she did say something about my being for the birds” (58); she “follows large flocks of birds…calling my name / and pleading” (52); “a bird lit on her bare left shoulder, a long-legged squawk, out of nowhere” (65). The woman from Montreal carries a flame for firemen, runs after fire trucks, she with “a tongue like a wick,” she of whom the Phoenician asks, “where’s the fire” (64); the Phoenician holds a flame for her. The water lady from Nanaimo is “hung up on clams” (57) and finds “the water her sky” (55), goes in search of a submarine. The expressions crazily proliferate. Given those affiliations with the elements, readers might wonder whether we simply have a case of woman-as-nature all over again. That seems not to happen. The straying women author their own speech, often in scorn and comedy, and they 214

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go their own and several ways. They are active and forthright, intent on their own purposes, unbeholden to old what’s-his-name. Roland Barthes has written that the beloved “shifts without warning from one regime to another, from intimate tenderness and complicity to coldness, to silence, to dismissiveness” (A Lover’s Discourse 125). And vice versa. The diagnosis holds only in rough way for The Sad Phoenician, perhaps because of Kroetsch’s views on the matter: “I’m very uneasy about that [‘finding a female muse’] because I don’t want to think of a muse as passive” (Labyrinths 23). With the exception of the button woman from upstate New York, the Phoenician’s muses seem to have shrugged off warmth and intimacy and simply turned their backs on him. Although the button lady is presented comically as one who runs at odd objects, she materializes in touching ways. The poet who has himself sailed off somewhere continues to imagine her loneliness and yearning: “all her Saturday, longing: o button of gold, he loves me not” (Completed Field Notes 62). It is entirely possible to read this report as emblem of the speaker’s vanity, his sense that of course she would miss him. How could she not, kind of man he is? It may be that, but it cannot be only that. Though the poem presents the New York woman more conventionally than the others, it does provide her with strong speech and confers on her rather more presence than what within a more traditional treatment she might have been accorded. Her passage begins and continues in a familiar lyrical mode, but it also turns drastically upon itself: and

button of seed, of shell, o button of linen, button of patent leather; he loves my arms in the sun, he loves the circle of my hair; o button of bronze, of opal, of amber; o button of jade or iron, hoard happiness, honour the past, buy government bonds (62)

Talisman of fortune: O button, button, who’s got the button? Would she, as she sings, open-mouthed supplicant—“o,” “o,” “o,” “o,” “o button of”—touch and hold the items? Would she rub them in her hands, feel them near, possible, the fascinating buttons and the round pleasing vowels? Does she finger them as if she can draw from them or impress upon them the very thing for which she wishes? Her need and vulnerability is powerfully realized: this is her speech, “improved” and “mannered” though it may be.

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She speaks “charm,” sings really, a distinct form of poetry. “The language of the charms is a language of power,” Andrew Welsh writes, “and that power comes primarily not from lexical meanings, archaic or colloquial, but from other meanings hidden deep in the sounds and rhythms” (153). It is efficacy they seek: “Many primitive charms simply repeat a few words or a single line over and over as often as is necessary for the charm to work its effect” (137). The button lady’s poem is highly aural, parallel in structure, and ceremonial in rhythm. The simple words, repeated phrases, the flow of vowel and consonant, all register a wishing or willing. The woman seeks to infuse the age-old buttons with something answerable to her desire. Her stylized speech casts spells that might endow the buttons with powers and imbue in them something commensurate with her thoughts.7 How else are we to speak of her breathless appeals to button—of seed, of shell, of linen, of (patent!) leather, of bronze and amber and jade and iron, as if they were prayers she is counting on? The enumeration makes no sense otherwise. The immediacy of her hopes is reinforced by the references to arm and hair and sun—the sort of apprehensions that befit a traditional love poem. In invoking the stuff of dress and undress in romance, she seeks to activate a magic, something that might bring herself and her beloved into a “circle” of electrified intimacy. The passage gives voice to her close and embodied calling upon unnamed powers. It certainly struck a powerful chord in the poem’s first readers. Karen Mulhallen must have had the passage in mind when in a letter to Kroetsch she commented on the sections she was publishing in Descant: “I am curious as to why you are embedding yourself in David’s form so deeply. Perhaps all poets come back like Christopher Smart to the psalms” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). Daphne Marlatt evidently also had seen the passage. She loved “those chant-like movements (the buttons!)” and added that “the whole poem is Shakes-ee-hearian rich all right” (MsC. 334/84.1 13.3). Meanwhile, back at Coach House, Stan Dragland was writing a fan letter to Kroetsch in which he singles out several passages for praise, the button charm being one of them. The passage is affective in its sought results but it is also expressive in what it tells of the woman’s feelings. “It is not ‘the things which are’ that we say,” writes George Steiner, “but those which might be, which we would bring about, with the eye and remembrance compose” (220). Among the items which might be are the New York woman’s words of self-advice: “hoard / happiness.” The realization that her happiness needs a hard holding on to hits with sudden and touching sobriety. 216

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The Phoenician sets free his own feel for the language when, imbued with the beloved’s speech, he picks up the button refrain in a mix of wish and comedy: “O button of braid, of brass, she loves me; of quartz, of silver, of pewter or wood; or button or hole or hook, she loves me now, she loves me; o button of celluloid, she loves me not, of sapphire, she loves me, of paper, of paste, she loves me not, of mother-of-pearl, she loves me, of tin, of polyester” (63). The jarring disparity created by the phrases “of celluloid,” “of tin,” “of polyester” among the lexia of traditional romance and age-old material is immediately evident. What has paper and glue to do with such talk of high romance? They might be less conspicuous than the unusual buttons, but they serve a similar effect. Nevertheless, the antiphonal music, anxious in recitation, far-fetched and self-undermining though it may be, conveys the Phoenician’s plaintive desire to bring her love into being with his words and to uphold it there. In the two charms, the conventions of the love lyric are briefly shaken, but the major line is not annulled. Though the button woman speaks from within her vulnerability, we can read verve and perseverance in her recitation. The woman, anonymous though she may be, is known by what she seeks and not by what she supplies. Her stance is needful, true, but she is no placating or hapless figure. She certainly is capable of her own wit and undermining when she explodes the domain of breathless romance with her sudden talk of finance. The other three muses are conspicuous, verbally proficient, and spunky. The fiery one from Montreal possesses a little more identity in acquiring a title and an initial: “Ms. R.” (54); and then even a last name: “Miss Reading” (59, 63). The name depicts the woman as one who engages in language, perhaps in deconstructive error, or creative feats of will, that come with her active reading and misreading. Either way, her name asks us to consider that she verbally, or semiotically, processes what she comes across. She, it would appear, is well-read, she that red and fiery lady (one of many feisty red-haired women in Kroetsch’s world). Miss Reading proves to be even more active in a literate world when we learn she is also a writer (63). The woman from Nanaimo gets in on the action. A siren, she is “all for shipwrecks,” we read in the speaker’s slightly mocking (and apprehensive?) words, and she stands enigmatically as “guardian of the tree” (64). The woman from Swift Current, strong-willed and apparently immune to the Phoenician’s call, has lit out without explanation or apology, as his indignation and laughable self-pity reveal.

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So much for the acquiescent or immobilized woman who has little say in the love story. The four females in The Sad Phoenician prove to be anything but compliant. In one way or another, they shrug off claims the sailor puts upon them, and show they are more than able to author their own narratives. Peter Thomas has found them “skilled in the transformational grammar of their roles” and easily able to keep “a jump ahead of the speaker” (“Talking on the Run” 38). None of them is realized at any length, or in any depth, however, presumably because the text commits itself to the narrator’s situation and the outlandish conventions of comedy, but they are emphatically there.8 The Phoenician himself eschews a customary role as moaner and moper. Kroetsch’s swashbuckling sailor-poet, four sheets to the wind, flaunts his capacities, assures us time and time again that he is doing just fine, thank you, despite the terrible wrongs with which he has been so cruelly afflicted. His disavowals are strong and persistent: but and but and but

I’m all right, don’t feel you should worry, the responsibility is mine, I can take care of myself the next time you feel like deceiving someone, why not try yourself I have my work to sustain me, my poetry, the satisfaction of a job well done even if I don’t get the recognition I deserve, so what, who cares time will tell: I keep thinking of Melville, who nearly went mad, possibly did, out of sheer neglect (52)

The audacity is evident, as is the swift resourcefulness. Yet the repeated professions of well-being are constantly undercut. Even as the speaker proposes that he alone is responsible for his life (what is felt and what is feigned?), he persists in bellyaching. The protests and threats are ridiculous. They also are sobering, especially if we hear in them traces of autobiography. The narrator’s speech includes dubious projections of reputation, woeful claims of victimization, sulky assertions of self-sufficiency, bitchings about unrecognized merit,9 and unexpected fears of going mad. The informational overload is so great it tilts the poem into a terrible disquiet. The gripes amount to nothing laudable, though it is hard not to hear in them fear or feelings of neglect. How is it, we might 218

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wonder, that a sailor should be troubled by his reputation? What reputation? And with whom? Neglect, possibly—he might feel that he has been left unfairly in the lurch by the four fickle women who are free willy-nilly to roam in a universe that can only let him down. When Melville, himself a literary figure of no small ambition, comes to mind, we may remember Kroetsch’s statements about his own literary aspirations and his remarks about characters being versions of himself and hear a darkening in the sailor’s protests.

F Roy Miki has shrewdly proposed that Kroetsch’s writing is neither “organic” nor “processual.” It is governed by arbitrary and sometimes mathematical systems, which are susceptible to departure and interruption: “But within the random or chance structure there is an element of process—I mean, moving from one point to another point to another point in time” (“Self on Self” 135). In terms reminiscent of Oulipo, Kroetsch agrees: “There is a play between design and chance, and maybe a certain kind of design makes chance possible” (Miki, “Self on Self” 139). The point clearly holds for The Sad Phoenician. It opts for three major structures: the alphabet as overreaching frame; an algorithmic interplay between the recurrent conjunctions “and” and “but”; and a splurge of idioms and other textual incursions. Kroetsch separates the poem into twenty-six large sections, arranged and lettered in alphabetical order.10 The individual letter that heads each successively guides the text that follows below it, that letter featured to some extent in the section. The supervision holds only in small ways in the early parts of the text, and it weakens as we go on until it virtually dissolves. The original Coach House edition took great care with the design. The individual letters of the alphabet are singled out to be printed on the left-hand pages. They are enlarged, and parts of them shaved in such a way that they begin to lose their defining edges. They are printed in brown ink (as are the rectangles that frame the texts on the right-hand pages). Sliced into strange and lovely shapes,11 the letters make us tangibly aware of them and of their status as almost not-letters. In generating that apprehension they ask us to consider the optic qualities, and maybe the arbitrary power, of the alphabet itself. Vividly foregrounded, the letters reinforce the text’s interest in the complexion of language and its dependence on twenty-six small constituents, much as the poem’s title, and certainly the author’s statement on the back cover, prompt us to reassess

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the origins of writing. The bold layout has led Pamela Banting eloquently to wonder what in “an economy which alternates between insufficiency and excess” is “the ratio between the single composing/decomposing letter of the alphabet on the left-hand page and the profusion of language on the right-hand page?” (“Archaeology of the Alphabet” 122). The design lasted only into Field Notes of 1981. At that point, the pared and coloured letters were gone for good and much of the graphic power featured in the Coach House edition was lost. Kroetsch always sought new forms for his long poems—double columns in The Ledger, blocks of found prose in Seed Catalogue, and now in The Sad Phoenician yet another structure in an ongoing oscillation. This against that. The poem establishes a strong visual frame within which the parts lurch between assertion and denial. Kroetsch makes it impossible for us to slip easily past the two small words—“and” and “but”—clicking alternatingly down the left side of the page. The layout (and the frequency) ensures that the conjunctions will be far more conspicuous to the eye than are the words which follow in what we might consider stanzas. The blocks of words are accorded greater space and normally would command almost all of the attention because they are lexically loaded, however shaky or loopy their meanings may be. Against the hulk of those parts, Kroetsch positions the conjunctions so that we can’t bypass them in habitual neglect.12 As a result we now hear them in a special way. We stress them, experience their weight and duration, pick up their rhythm and inflection. At the gaps they (we) gather toward the next movement, before pushing on to the inner text. If we were to remove the white spaces and place the conjunctions as continuous with the rest of the text, the effect of Kroetsch’s layout would become immediately apparent. The words would then glide almost imperceptibly into what follows and would lose most of their stress and pacing. The poem makes its way between “and,” which asserts an opening, and “but,” which signals a rejoinder or redirecting. The pattern for the most part holds in a rhythm of advancing and impeding, proposing and countering. The conjoiners function in other ways too. The “and” serves to addend and to extend, also to extrapolate. It serves to narrate, as in: and then (after)…It also brings us into causation: and then (because). The “but” signals rebuttal or resistance; it also diverts into second thoughts and adjustments. In ruminating on his use of “and” and “but,” Kroetsch remembers an essay by William H. Gass that is “supposed to be a terrific essay. You know, this wonderful sense of what ‘and’ could do was 220

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just wild” (Miki, “Self on Self” 129).13 An undated letter from Stan Dragland, mindful of Kroetsch’s formal daring, makes a point of saying how much Dragland loves the “‘and/but’ business” and Kroetsch’s “finding forms where one wouldn’t think to look” (MsC. 334/84 2.1). Stephen Scobie has aptly described the swinging back and forth in proposition and counter-proposition. The words alternate in supplying “firm, structuring principles,” “the connectives of continuity and contradiction, holding the flux in check like the bounds of a tennis court” (14).14 Kroetsch himself has said in looking back on his formal decisions that, wanting “to find those grammatical possibilities that would generate,” he “tried ‘if/or’ and all those things, but ‘and/but’ was the one that really spoke to me: the ‘and’ as an addition; the ‘but’ as a taking away” (Miki, “Self on Self” 129).15 It goes without saying that the structure mirrors the narrator’s own vacillations.

F Lover though the Sad Phoenician may be, he auditions for many parts. In one of them he has a go at “steadfast.” He plays the man of reason who speaks as though careful in argument: “and could it not be argued” (58), and “but if I am not mistaken” (55). His words hint of modesty in conceding the possibility of error. Who could be more reasonable? But this is a Kroetsch poem, and the attempts soon break down: “yet we do, after all, reason from analogy: is it not a commonplace, for instance, to compare the undulating hills of whatever distant horizon to the breasts of a nearby woman, or vice versa” (56). Sweet reason gives way to self-exoneration. That the comparison would leap immediately to most minds is perhaps doubtful; that it would lead immediately from “distant” hills to nearby breasts is even less likely. Why that trajectory? Having read the undulations of the landscape, a person would as a result immediately and almost inevitably turn attention to the body of a woman standing next to him? Possibly, but—as a matter of course? The thoughtful voice is undeterred: “yet The Song of Solomon, taking the first text that comes to hand, is chockful of just such analogies” (56). The sudden shift to erotic terrain and jumpy idiom is here legitimized by special precedent: what I am doing is hardly unwarranted, as a matter of fact it enjoys biblical warrant. The disingenuous claim of innocence—“taking the first text that comes to hand”—is typical of the speaker. The tongue-in-cheek appeal not incidentally observes the pre-Romantic practice of calling upon textual authority and precedent.

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The voice of moderation—considered, judicious—continues to speak averred truths about human conduct. Of course we “reason from analogy,” that is our nature, our practice. The narrator brings up the claim as gentle reminder, allows for possible doubts (“after all”). He, fair-minded, or calmly confident of agreement, appeals to our good sense (“is it not”?). He helpfully offers an illustration of a principle he has already established (“for instance”). What could be more nicely considered? Who more accommodating, more appreciative of possible demurral? Few could be more scrupulous in evidence or more respectful in address. Or more amusingly deluded. The Phoenician’s self-diagnosed virtues collapse inside Kroetsch’s parody. The Phoenician makes other claims to personal worth, among them a close grip on honesty and reliability. “I’m honest, I’m nothing if not honest” (51), he asserts at the very outset, and likes the thought so much he later repeats the last five words verbatim (58). These and other forms of self-esteem are accompanied by intensified, and highly idiomatic, appeals to auditors: “believe you me,” “you better believe it” (51), and “you bet you me” (52). The slangy insouciance has got to produce more than a little entertainment. The self-promotion continues even as it is jeopardized by trivial example and bawdy pun: “fair play, that’s my motto; I’m first to put out the cat, not one to lie down on the job, except of course, ho” (62). Oh yes, “virtue will out; I have my integrity; I know my own worth” (52). The Phoenician everywhere breaks out in litanies of his own excellences: “but then, consider, I’m afflicted with common sense, the picture of decency, I, hard-working, dedicated, running over with the milk of whatever, generous even to a fault, gentle with horses” (62). The words humorously construe goodness as a curse so severe it can be neither chosen nor revoked. Within the boasts and excuses examples of foolish bumbling abound. The speaker is so intent on enumerating his good points that he remains unperturbed even when he stumbles in forgetting or imprecision: “the milk of whatever.” What does that phrase have to do with anything, anyway? The self-congratulation finds sustained realization when the narrator steadfastly enumerates his merits. He is: given to elevated thoughts, careful never to slurp soup, surprised by the stains in my clean shorts, a drinker who knows his limits, a whist player of some repute, a lifelong student of Empedocles, the last of a dying breed, embarrassed though not exhausted by too frequent masturbation, 222

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a crackerjack at the two-step, unpedantic, slow to anger, a decorous farter, respectful of my elders, even when they haven’t got all their marbles (62) Shining example of Kroetsch’s strategy, the passage delightfully exposes disparity and impertinence in the Phoenician’s self-satisfaction. His attempts to impress collapse in a zippy slang (“lost their marbles,” a “crackerjack” at dancing) and in preposterous exaggerations (“of some repute,” a “lifelong student,” “the last of a dying breed”). The list is wonderfully bizarre. Why, we might wonder, does playing whist acquire such cachet? Or the “two-step”? Who does the “two-step”? What is the two-step? How could it possibly count? How can we treat “seriously” someone who professes to be overtaken by “elevated thoughts,” only to confess without a blush that his mind runs to indelicate thoughts of the body? The narrator’s professions shipwreck on alimentary and sexual experiences—slurping soup, staining shorts, masturbation (itself humorously justified), and farting. The discrepancies skillfully captured in the phrase “a decorous farter” are bound to elicit a guffaw—an abstract adjective of refined existence yoked crazily to a concrete noun of physical crudeness. What, for that matter, would it be to be decorous in farting? How would such a thing be possible? Or worth mentioning? Or worth doing? In what world would this be cause for personal pride? Would anyone this invested in corporeal life be devoted to Empedocles? Why Empedocles? The name sounds utterly arbitrary. (Yet— shades of the four fled women and the sailor—Empedocles, we know, perceived a world composed of the four elements governed by love and strife, the very stuff of the Phoenician’s consternation, which brought them together and tore them apart.) What would it be to devote a lifetime to Empedocles? Who is that values whist and Empedocles equally? What have the various achievements to do with one another? It is a strange and astonishing summoning of credentials. And who is this strange voyageur anyway, that he should be so unguarded in manner and admission? Kroetsch’s writing brilliantly establishes the oddity— that the sailor should be so openly pleased with himself, yet leave himself open to ridicule. The text creates a speaker so disarmingly innocent and unaware, it’s hard to hear his claims as credible or offending. The hilarity arising from the collision of registers—solemn or banal—he carried into the rest of the text. Take the following words, plucked from different pages: “poor dear Kierkegaard, nagging his way into heaven, wiping his ass on the end of the world” (53); “who goes there, speak / and ready to call it quits”

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(53); “I had my peek into the abyss” (51); the Song of Solomon is “chockful” of analogies (56). Despite the sophistication revealed in these allusion, the narrator lapses pitifully into immature behaviour: “I, The Sad Phoenician of Love, surveying the stars, the old singer, his foot in his mouth, have a right to my opinions” (58). The Grecian singer of the gods creates his own comedown when he stumbles in gaucheries and lapses into petulance. The comedy is conveyed by a device that, according to Kroetsch, Canadians favour: “On the one hand: our concern with self-mockery and self-parody. The self-revelation of self-mockery. The self-protection” (Lovely Treachery 68–69). It is that warding that would interest us here. Kroetsch will write, years later in his last book, these words of self-appraisal: 
 His sadness is so funny. Hurtin’ makes him sing, and flirtin’ is his way of putting up a curtain. (Too Bad 55) The Sad Phoenician itself lurches between exposure and diversion, though most often, and most conspicuously, Kroetsch’s character checks himself into protective comedy. It is an old ruse, this capacity for self-effacement and self-ridicule, Kroetsch believes: “American writers have commented to me on the self-mockery in my work. They see it as self-mockery—before Canadians do. Perhaps the posture is so natural to Canadians, they’re slow to recognize it” (Hancock 47). Kroetsch’s characters do it up proud, all that modesty, butts of their own good-humoured derision. At other times the comedy occurs when Kroetsch’s Phoenician is caught with no apparent discomfort in moments of ineptitude from which he struggles to rescue himself: “the theory itself fails, the doctrine of, I forget what; not the chain of being, Christ knows, I’ve tried that one on” (57).16 The bemused narrator reports in the anacoluthon his moments of humiliation with little apparent regard for the consequences, perhaps with no small pleasure, either, that even in midst of his consternation the joke is on him.

F The character that emerges in The Sad Phoenician is dramatically fuelled through pragmatic language. R.A. York has explained that 224

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Analysis of this sort tends to present all literature as being dramatic, or at least dialogic...For what it suggests is that literature is a picture of the way people talk to each other, that it represents forms of social contact: persuasion, confession, challenge, invitation to sheer excitement or shared pathos, reprimand, aggression, ingratiation, appeals for sympathy and admiration, and many more; that it treats such contacts as exemplary, as typically constituting or enhancing social personality, or at the very least as demanding full awareness; that it is, often, concerned with the nature of relationship rather than the content on which it operates; and that it creates a special harmony by making the conditions of utterance spectacularly appropriate to the utterance’s total import, thus allowing language to justify itself. (11) York’s approach could take a reader page by page, line by line, word by syllable, through Kroetsch’s poem. The Phoenician’s assertions are everywhere inflected by the second person, which almost everywhere imbues Kroetsch’s writing with vitality: that’s ok, don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right, I don’t give old what’s-her-name a second thought. The Phoenician doesn’t simply address his auditors. Though he is the hero of his own piece, he reports and at times quotes the words of others. And so, he (re)presents himself as constituted by others. He speaks in response to, or in anticipation of, voices felt within his own speaking. His declarations seem to answer implied quotations from (almost) absent voices that have proposed, or might have advanced, their own understandings. The pressure of that speaking generates much of the drama. When it encroaches on the speaker, it throws him into protest and prediction. Though he speaks in what sounds like one long and uninterrupted monologue, he constantly cites others and finds himself answering to them. It is his audience, as conversants, to whom he responds and with whom he jousts. In Bakhtin’s words “precisely in this act of anticipating the other’s response and in responding to it he [the dialogic figure] again demonstrates to the other (and himself) his own dependence on this other” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 542). The persona loves that engaging pronoun—“you.” He seeks the other person, announces the speaking self as overwhelmingly enmeshed in a social fabric. His auditors, existing through the grammar in close proximity, can virtually breathe on him. The sailor’s life is built on personal pronouns that

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are more often implied than spoken. Not simply: her or him or them. Not that mainly, finally. But: you. Not: I and them. But: You and I. The same holds for Kroetsch’s criticism too, but there he extends the speaking into the inclusive: we, us, our. In those reciprocities Kroetsch’s rhetorician shows a capacity to woo the goodwill of his auditors and to enlist them as accomplices. At times he flatters, supposing we are aligned with him, or soon will be. There are “adverbs, you may remember, of manner, of place, of time,” he tactfully reminds us (58). Often he simply acknowledges presence in a way that is warm and welcoming, almost disarming: “I was, you might say” (58) and “that brings to mind, if I might say so” (53). However aggrieved he may be, or pretend to be, he is remarkably agreeable with the second person and careful to cultivate allegiances. At times he confides in ingratiating terms: “but I’ll tell you something, I’ll let you in on” (57). At these points we find, or seem to hear, a shift in voice, a slight readiness to let us in and to make himself vulnerable. We have to be good on our feet, though, for this narrator is adept in feint and redirection. He is quick in taking on one role after another and in sudden about-face taking us in. The speaker’s grasp at certain moments of what is apt to be a disapproving audience prompts him, somewhat recklessly, to lead with his chin. Jests and puns are followed often by a pattern of discountings or half-hearted takings-away. Examples abound: “the prairie this morning, frost on the growing grass. The tree house wearing its leafy parka. Yuk” (60); “even in, to stretch a point, ha, my being at sea” (52); “sins of omission, ha, emission” (54); “the sacker said: two of those, please, the big ones / but wait, don’t wrap them, ha,” and “avoid cracks, ha” (55); “you try sitting in your room, sit on your butt, ho” (56). “Ho,” “ha,” “yuk”—the awkward interjections reveal a knowledge of risk and attempts to diminish it. Kroetsch has named the ploy “The ha at one’s own working” (The “Crow” Journals 39), something akin to Derrida’s partial cancellation of words. Kroetsch’s self-conscious narrator feels the force of a culture that has taught its lessons well. He is more than ready in a peremptory move to provide the obligatory groan or the habitual disclaimer—“no pun intended.” The breezy disavowals hedge the currency of the puns, or at least the Phoenician’s willingness to guarantee them. Yet he leaves them in place, only partially stricken, and the text mischievously retains what the Phoenician pretends with us to spurn. He has found a way of having his pun and hating it too, and so, blushingly pleased, he persists in his ways. 226

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F Signs abound that the speaker has put recrimination behind him. Man of the world, he works his wiles upon us and manoeuvres to gain our regard. What deficiencies may be his he names in clever and disarming fashion: “I might add that more than one woman has said of me, he is, for all his distance, his peccadilloes, his passing infidelities, his inability to boil water, really, the best intentioned of men” (56). The opening ploy seems polite, no more than gentle and slightly formal intercession: “I might add.” The sailor, not being one to affront, could be asking for our go-ahead. As part of a sneaky defence, he then establishes the quantity of the supporters (“more than one”) who will vouch for him. Unfazed, he plunges on. His admitted faults he denotes as harmless “peccadilloes” and “passing” infidelities. In his diminishings they become small indiscretions, really, slight, almost incidental, and of little consequence. The same goes for his failure in domestic skills, passed off merely as an inability to boil water. For that matter, the offences in his love life matter no more than that small ineptitude, all of the affronts mentioned in the same breath as more or less equal in importance. What rhetorically consolidates his position as worthy lover is, finally, his good heart. He comically exposes himself still further when he tries to strengthen his case by supplying proofs of his basic goodness, as a reasonable person of course would. He begins riskily by admitting words of accusation but he moves quickly to forms of acquittal, as they purportedly come from various ladies, reliable ladies. Those women, he makes it known, would be best positioned to vouch for his character. He has witnesses, first-hand witnesses, appreciative ones. Witnesses and testimonies. These are witnesses who have some acquaintance with him. In effect, he implies, it’s not me who said this, don’t take my word for it; it was those ladies themselves, they said so. And who could be better informed or more credible? The flaws are hardly more than a whim, then, harmless enough. They’ll tell you, the ladies will: whatever my mistakes, I am fundamentally a good man. The narrator deftly attests to his own generosities in choosing the equivocating word “really,” as if the women themselves felt a flush of incredulity: yes, though it may surprise you or, just now, now that we think on it, it may surprise us, it’s true: he was a good man. Really. And so “for all” that, they loved him, his offences lessened charitably in an expression the narrator provides them with.

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Where could there be offence? Kroetsch’s humour here, as elsewhere, is warm and tolerant, reluctant to moralize, ready to smile at folly and foible— Chaucerian we might say—and the rhetoric induces our own species of assent, for the moment at least. Whatever we may think of the Phoenician’s adventures, we admire him for his skill and joy in playing the game to the hilt, much as take pleasure in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath for her unbridled verve and versatility in debate.17 The narrator, master rhetorician that he is, does not stop there. The play goes on and the Phoenician ups the ante. In outrageous temerity he announces it is he who has been wronged. These women are not slighted or poorly treated. They beseech his attentions, by god, they veritably palpitate in remembering him. He is hardly to be blamed, chosen as he is, victim practically of their insatiable claims and their inordinate desires: “she told him nothing, at least not a particular of her (unacknowledged) need for me”; “I recognized in an instant that I’d been the cause of her sweating, her shortness of breath” (51); “but she follows large flocks of birds, I hear, calling my name // and pleading” (52). What is he to do? They’re crazy mad in love with him. But faults he has, galore. We might suppose that he got his comeuppance in the women’s departures. It serves him right for being so cavalier, so cocksure and so full of himself, so fleeting in his affections. Often as not, whatever declarations of indifference or toleration he may make, he speaks in mocking indignation and in inklings of cosmic justice that are almost querulant. One ex, he bleats, “didn’t have the decency to say goodbye” (52),18 and so good riddance to her: “she’ll get her just reward; there’s a reckoning in this world” (52). Oh yes, “she’ll learn what it feels like to be ignored” (51) and “Don’t I know how he felt” (53). The Phoenician would know, he being a man who suffers unjustly, who time and time again has been wronged, mostly by women who slip away without apology or a single word of farewell, much less a promise of return. In one fractious move he portrays a miscreant lover with a black humour that is Ontaatjean: “she hollered uncle, the huntress, she with her glasses strung to her neck, the guide concealed in her canvas purse, a Franklin stove for a mouth, a rocker her hat or hair, two vinegar bottles under her blouse” (59).19 Though the Phoenician professes to not being “a vindictive man” (56), he does sound begrudging here. He likes to get in the odd shot (and does not the verb “hollered” generate the best of humour here?), however guffawingly preposterous it may sound. He contemplates verbal reprisals, though the threats 228

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seldom amount to more than bluff and bluster. “I should sue” (52), the narrator fusses in an amazing and hilarious self-pity he couldn’t begin to justify. Sue for disappointment in love? And what restitutions would be possible or sufficient? Kroetsch in comic genius parades the infantile complaints across the pages: she “can go climb a tree, I’m human too, you know” (50). The narrator is constantly in a snit: “I do have feelings, just because I’m a poet doesn’t mean I have no feelings of my own, poets are human” (52). True to form, Kroetsch envelopes disappointment within a rollicking comedy. We have far more information than we could possibly need if the Phoenician’s purpose were mainly instructive, which of course it is not. Not by a long shot. Prince of periphrasis, adept to irony, zealot in hyperbole, the Phoenician dazzlingly stages himself in tropes that defile clarity and defy brevity, not to mention “honesty.” The Phoenician, never one to be satisfied, escalates his case still further. The very gods have picked on him and he is met everywhere with cosmic injustice and human malfeasance, he rails, enjoying the preposterous scene and his own outlandish role in it. The complaint is rare in Kroetsch. “I was dealt a tough mitt” (53) the sailor declaims, the off-hand epithet locating him as comic and self-pitying figure when set against, say, a Lear agonizingly caught in storm. Less often the Phoenician operates within a more educated rhetoric. For the odd moment he holds forth in high-falutin language—everything swollen in magnitude and mocked—that he has had a “brush with the verities, such as they are, my astounding fall from innocence” (51). Evidently this trauma has been visited upon him by at least one of his old sweethearts, for “it was she who resisted; she, wronged by refusing” (58). Her unwillingness he preposterously construes as an affront to him. It’s her fault. She has gone and done him wrong, virtually violated the natural order itself, not to mention the mariner’s rightful position in it.

F The grousings are impressive in amplification and comical in gusto. They spread zanily outward. Our narrator, paragon of virtue, is everywhere beset by treachery. Though he has enlisted himself into subterfuge and guile, he summons and thickens the trope to try the four departed women and bring them to some kind of judicial or cosmic reckoning. Lies, subterfuge, out-and-out theft bedevil him. Massive injustices jam his life. Criminals of speech abound. He knows, because

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hidden stealth and double-dealing are everywhere to be found, or not found, because black is not “the absence of deceit” (53). He knows that “the woman in Montreal” is given to chicanery, though at least she “is not so evasive, not so given to outright lies, deceptions” (51) as is the woman from Swift Current. The Montreal woman is bad enough, but she’s nothing alongside the one from Swift Current who, we learn from the narrator’s gloomy suspicions, feels “like deceiving someone” (52). He, Phoenician, like his ancestral namesakes, finds himself in treacherous waters where he is denied credit for “the whole works… in a world that ignores them,” all their accomplishments and all his own work stolen from under their very noses (52), just as that thief, “the girl from Swift Current…more or less took everything” (52) from the Phoenician. The speaker effectively escalates the charges, and brazenly offers himself as one who holds steadfastly to a principle of integrity despite a world that abounds in “just plain outright lies” (54). What is he to do in a place where “the eye is a liar” (59) and where a “guide concealed [something] in her canvas purse” (59)? Usurpers and crooks and sneaks, most egregiously the wayward women, lurk at every corner, skulk behind every door, crowd every boudoir—would, that is, if they hadn’t lit out for good. He, “fresh from the coast of Ampersand, a cargo to Upsilon bound” (64), deplores the guile and guise of the four feckless women whose gift to him is the outlandish poem he writes. Yet, in one of many self-contradictions, he threateningly lets on, “I have a few tricks up my sleeve myself” (51). The Phoenician, tormented by pervasive acts of dishonesty and subterfuge, nevertheless confesses to harbouring his own mysteries whose importance he darkly hints at: “I’ll tell you something, I’ll let you in on a secret” (57). But he never does, not really—let us in on his secrets. He certainly does have secrets to spare, as we can see in the astonishing passage that mentions “the one who runs after doorknobs” (53). In the simplest of words, the sailor hints of intrigues he manages almost to suppress and only half manages to express. The lines crowd with talk of doors and ports and hinges and gates; talk of what is open, what closed; talk of privacy and the blackness of deceit and lovers kneeling in the night; and doors swinging open, cracking open. The passage provides provocative clues, yet it reveals little. It supplies something commensurate to Kroetsch’s own self-declared capacity for evasion, obfuscation, and outright lying (A Likely Story 75). This lover deals in evasion and camouflage, not unlike a famous poet whom Kroetsch occasionally mentions. In La Vita Nuova Dante took great pains to 230

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hide his interest from his readers and to divert their suspicions. Page after page is rife with elaborate attempts to cover up. Kroetsch’s Johnny Backstrom may not be quite so urbane as Dante, nor so Platonic, but when it comes to duplicity in love he’s right up there with Dante and the Phoenician. Backstrom’s rollicking complaint (including a wicked turn on words: “a miserable week of joy”) nakedly admits to connivance: Add it up for yourself. How long is it really great: maybe eight seconds. A man comes for the grand total of six days of his life he will go down in history as a heroic performer. One miserable week of joy, including a day of rest. And to do that you spend seventy years; three score and ten you spend, sniffing and pawing, crawling and begging and imploring, conniving, cheating, betraying your wife, inventing filthy lies, wasting your money, missing sleep, deceiving your best friends, risking the creation of further ridiculous lives, wrecking your clothes. My God, a two-week vacation is longer. (The Words of My Roaring 126) It’s not at all clear what the Phoenician does reveal about his love life, but he professes to be in a position to pull off something big if he wished, for his “piratical self, is thief / and thieving” (62–63). He, like so many Kroetsch characters, cloaks his life in bluster and privacy. For Kroetsch, poetry as pillage and expenditure “is a radical form of stealth” (The Hornbooks of Rita K 45).

F Of course the text is openly “contrived” and “clever.” Mannered, the unsympathetic will scoff. Gimmicky, too, riddled with tricks and schemes—all that, and lacking human depth too, weak on tragedy and sobriety. Of course it is. Once we give up on romantic notions of an inspired and sensitive self, immersed in transfiguring and “authentic” experience, the properties of language come to the fore and we begin to hear with a new ear and a new pleasure. Kroetsch’s poem is not totally committed to aberrations, however. Unlike many language poets, say, he is working deliberately in a rhetorical and theatrical mode, within which he provides a dominant persona. Lanham’s pointed analysis helps us to say just what a rhetorical figure could be and what s/he might do. Above all s/he is game:

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Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily reenactment, even though the gestures are unconvincing, for him as much as his auditors. He is thus centered in time and concrete local event. The lowest common denominator of his life is a social situation. And his motivations must be characteristically ludic, agonistic. He thinks first of winning, of mastering the rules the current game enforces. He assumes a natural agility in changing orientations. He hits the street already streetwise. From birth, almost, he has dwelt not in single value-structure but in several. He is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to prevailing in the game at hand. He makes an unlikely zealot. (4) Lanham’s account goes a long way toward explaining Kroetsch’s narrator. Initially we may be disposed to hear the narrator’s clutch of words as worn and drained, but he carries the day with his ingenuity. Ludic and ludicrous, the Phoenician relishes his moves. At every turn he preens and crows, careens through jumped-up speeches. He breaks out in paroxysms of pleasure. He revels in clever leaps and dodges and recursions, takes pride in speedy and uninterrupted ripostes. He glories in melodrama, refreshes himself in a steady rain of words. Even in these inward parts the polysyndeton governs the text as phrase runs on into phrase into phrase at near-breakneck speed and rejoicing. Pamela Banting has welcomed the “form of gladness. Indeed the abundance of language within the poem is an indication of celebration and joy, despite the rhetoric of complaining, neglect and bravado” (“Translation, Infidelity and Sadness” 138). And why not, just for the fun of it? Jean-François Lyotard knows what it is to take pleasure in “language games”: A move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that labor of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by literature? Great joy is had in the endless invention of turns of phrase, of words and meanings, the process behind the evolution of language on the level of parole. But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary— at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation. (10) 232

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Deborah Keahey, however, has found another figure. Where some are hearing ebullience and self-mockery and extravagant invention, and a few are hearing melancholy, she finds an “exasperated and furious” narrator. The Phoenician is for her a “bitter and resentful jilted lover,” who cruelly mocks women’s suffering, and who “angrily attacks and belittles” them (136). The claim, I think, misses the rhythm and tone. What gibes we discover derive from a figure who more often than not is playing at resentment and likely to turn the joke on himself. His heart is not much into reprisal. For all his high voltage, he is not belligerent or confrontational. He fears, finally, not the beloveds’ disdain but his readers’ boredom. It is they whom he seeks to please and they whose approval he covets. It is his audience’s amusement he wants to induce, whose goodwill he hopes to win. The poem does not answer to what likely has set it off, then. The lover, it turns out, is far more crafty than aggrieved, and he is not at all averse to showing off his epideictic skills. He takes pride, actually, in moving past the story of disappointed romance. How adroit he is in keeping the words in the air, in daring and dexterity how able. The one sin would be cessation; to fall still would be a fatal error. Even abatement would be failure. And so Kroetsch’s narrator cheerily milks whatever he can out of what is given to him from centuries of romantic verse, from his storehouse of expressions, from his own history of crashed romance, and from the peculiar structure accorded him. Silence is a condition he can scarcely abide and he floods his world with garrulity, rinses it in moments with lyrical grace. The Phoenician’s ruses are so transparent they make his moves almost harmless and endearing. Most of his arguments are flimsy, laughable, and so irrational that he himself, that phony, that sly and nimble rhetorician, is in on the fun, amused as much as we are. His repeated appeals to “nature” elaborate the knowing delusions. He speaks as though the behaviour of the disappeared lovers were an affront to the very essence of things; or, more importantly, to his personal wishes, which, being themselves natural, evidently coincide with the structures of the universe. And so he throws himself into preposterous statements, huffy with dudgeon: “but there is nature, you know, there is such a thing as nature / and I don’t think anyone has ever been the worse for—well, I was going to say, a call of nature—I mean, a visit to nature” (54). The double insistence—“there is,” “there is”—bespeaks a desire to be right, a certain desperation underwriting the Phoenician’s brief for his love life. The

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grammar, devoid of agency, constructs his calls upon nature as manifest in the order of the universe, beyond perhaps even the power of the gods. They are not, certainly, the result of the narrator’s own wily schemes. And yet, the fluster of dashes, interpolations, and self-corrections impede his purposes and he loses focus in turning from assertion to association. He attempts to amend the idiomatic gaucherie (“a call of nature”) with a polite construction (“a call to nature”). But it is “nature” nonetheless. The specious moves are everywhere apparent. Things might be different, the Phoenician sniffily supposes, “but if the fish complain of water: / and when the goat wears a halo, then I too shall be faithful” (55). Kroetsch exposes the sailor in an illogic so great it is absurd. If creatures were to deny their very character, the sailor asserts without a blush, if things were not to be what they are (if goats were not goats—and why not goats, those embodiments of lust and lechery?; and if fish were not fish), then we could find “a man faithful, a woman satisfied.” Fat chance, implies the redoubtable lover of women and dealer in false logic: “if I am not mistaken, night follows day, cows eat grass” (55) and, by the same token, and for the same reason, “there’s no satisfying women, so why try” (55). The odds of things being any different are unthinkable. This is what they do, what they are—the cows, the fish, the goats. The women.20 Nature being nature this is what happens. How could I be wrong about this? How could I be mistaken? It is in women’s nature to be feckless, ornery, unfulfilled. And I, Sad Phoenician, I too perk to the call of nature. What could I do elsewise? Only a fool would believe otherwise. On occasion the narrator cunningly undercuts his theses: “could it not be argued, the grease gets the squeaking wheel, the bridegroom the bride, the knot gets all or nun, ha, the sea sits firmly on top of land” (58). Of course we could not have the wheel without grease, or the bride without the bridegroom. That goes without saying, that’s the way things are. How obvious can you get? But the knot that gets the nun? What about that not? That none? The Phoenician anticipates the usual response, but will not forego the pleasure he takes in his own dexterity. Having long past given up on any pretense of talking the women into bed, or at least luring them back, he commits instead to a verbal panache that remains only residually connected to his original grievances (the none of sexual denial, the not and knot of refusal; the multiple jilting by absent and abstinent women who would have nothing—not and none—to do with him).21 It would be easy to locate examples of the Phoenician’s more egregious claims of proof for known and straightforward truths. The squeaking wheel and the grease, yes 234

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we have heard that one before. As surely as the sea and the land…These too are truisms we long have known. Old saws, both of them. We may easily pass them by as signs of more exaggeration, more babble, more piling on. That’s him, isn’t it?—nothing but mindless rants on every page, the old windbag, words splashing and surging over the deck. Here we go again—the same old things, only more. And yet: the grease gets the wheel? The sea sits upon the land? The wily Phoenician has a few surprises for us.

F In other passages the arguments from nature take a different tack, and adopt another rhetoric—one that is far more “literary.” This talker is no illiterate, however fond he is of shovelling cliché upon cliché. In patches his voice slides into highly metaphoric and even archaic phrasings. Sometimes he animates the mineral world and personifies the animal. In an Elizabethan style that is quite astonishing, the lonely sailor broods on the dizzying energies and the prodigious processes of the cosmos: but I can love, even the black holes, even the gaited sun, the galloping night, the earthworm riding the silver grass and the busting guts of this old cinder … and only the surge of blood commends the folly, the belly’s worth, the rotund making of round, the reason why monks look hollow, the wind has full cheeks (57) The entries reveal that the narrator is far from the glib and bawdy figure he pretends to be and often is taken to be. His stunning awareness of life reappears elsewhere in sudden and chilling words, suggestive of Shakespeare or Stoppard: “possibly not a tree at all, a sail, slumped in the windless air, or only a gallows hung with sleep” (64). Several passages in their strange and affecting arrangements, their heightened diction and sustained metaphor, their sonorous tuning and apostrophes and stylized pronouns of address, play an archaic and lovely music, so close in syntax, in iamb and anapest, to Elizabethan verse they might well have come from The Tempest:22 “the bodies

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caressing the sand, with tongue / and foot, the clams carouse: deep now she lurks, down; ship boards of fir, she announces, to cradle the broken sea: a cedar, O Sad Phoenician, to make thee a mast” (64).23 Then there are these powerful lines: “maybe even stones have discourse, perhaps there is a music of the spheres, heard on quiet nights, far from water” (58). How like are they to the evocative words Kroetsch wrote when he was on the verge of leaving his family in Binghamton and changing the course of his life: “I have been to the water’s edge, / and heard the water’s story” (The “Crow” Journals 13). And how like his unspoken thoughts at Echo Lake when he sat gazing over the water (The “Crow” Journals 21). The passages in The Sad Phoenician, even when they record suffering, arrive as unexpected moments of relief and elegance. Their rhythms present a gentler and an anguished self. Though they include robust moments (“the clams carouse” and “cradle the broken sea”) they provide meditative, deep, wondrous stretches—lyrical we might say, lyrical and deeply touching. Belsey’s distinctions don’t entirely hold for the poem, then. Oddly, the moments when we might almost be convinced of the Phoenician’s love occur when he speaks very simply or when he draws most overtly on early poetry. Signs of “authenticity” are tied to allusive bits that are literary and archaic in manner. The most citational passages (in the traditional sense of the word) figure as the most authentic, or so it looks to me. The other parts that constitute the majority of The Sad Phoenician—colloquial, showy, high-energy—less poignantly speak of the sailor’s deepest feelings.

F What most marks the narrator as more inventive than vindictive is his prolific humour. Above all, he rejoices in self-parody and invention. The text explodes with dazzling ingenuity. It moves on, faster and faster, faster perhaps than even Charles Olson would have imagined. Keep it up and moving, Olson urged in 1950: “get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen” (“Projective Verse” 17). Always the rush of words, their constant churn and renewal, the surprising redirections. The narrator shakes loose within the strictures of grammar and alphabet in a movement that delights Fred Wah: 236

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The engaging energy in this is the poet’s mind at every turn. No sooner does the literal margin provide the place-from-which than the mind at work encounters the people, the sex, the saying, the places, the sea-going, poem/prose, page/stage, I/he-she-it-you. And it’s moving very fast, this double edge, into what’s stumbled upon or discovered in the making of it. (Rev. of The Sad Phoenician 180) W.H. Auden, or was it Valery?, once wisely said that a poem is never finished, it is abandoned. The principle emphatically would hold for The Sad Phoenician. The ands and the buts, the nuts and bolts of its edifice, could hold indefinitely; so could the avalanche of banter and idiom that fills the lacunae. The form leaves an author with a problem: Who would not get winded? The limits would be tested against everyone in what are not always literary measures: an editor’s sense of what would fly, a publisher’s fretting over costs and sales, a reviewer’s stamina and goodwill. A gargantuan poem would try the patience and energies of its readers. When is too much too much? Not even Rabelais went on forever. In the meantime, the trick is not to succumb to habit or to halt, not to flag in invention, not to lose momentum. What’s needed, everywhere, always, is pleasure, novelty, range, richness. Speed. The sad lover must keep things moving. He knows he has to show dexterity and style in juggling. Look Ma: lots of ands. Kroetsch’s sailor may try to pass as an ingénue driven on a torrent of words, but we know what he is up to. So does he. “Wanting to be noticed,” Richard Poirier has written, “is wanting to be loved” (99). Wanting to be heard is wanting to matter.

F The temporal position in which the Phoenician finds himself corresponds rather well to the third stage of the love narrative that Roland Barthes has diagnosed. The first two of them have for the Phoenician already dropped into the irretrievable past: first comes the instantaneous capture (I am ravished by an image); then a series of encounters (dates, telephone calls, letters, brief trips), during which I ecstatically “explore” the perfection of the loved being, i.e., the unhoped-for correspondence between an object and my desire: this is the sweetness of the beginning, the interval proper to the idyll. This

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happy period acquires its identity (its limits) from its opposition (at least in memory) to the “sequel.” (A Lover’s Discourse 197–98) Kroetsch’s sailor, rapture having dropped away into the preterite, has fallen into Barthes’s “sequel.” In the simple and continuous present Barthes’s lover talks through his troubles: “the long train of sufferings, wounds, anxieties, distresses, resentments, despairs, embarrassments, and deceptions to which I fall prey, ceaselessly living under the threat of a downfall” (A Lover’s Discourse 197–98). For him there can be no progression, no clear conclusion, no exeunt stage left. No transmogrifications. He moves toward no discovery, seeks no revelation, arrives at no resolution. He is all talk and no action. He finds no way out of his loss other than the temporary respite (or pleasure) to be had within a barrage of language. The aim then becomes a matter of middle. The text is all middle, the poet half loopy and smack-dab there in the middle, muddling along, fair to middling. He wants to amuse himself, needs to put off the end. Kroetsch calls what breaks out “the language itself” in its own “excitement” as it impedes “narrative” with its “old grammars” (Lovely Treachery 133). In that respect he is unlike the narrator of Seed Catalogue, for whom anecdote offers release from a formal and cultural impasse, or the speaker in The Ledger, who seeks understanding of family history through narrative. The Phoenician is suspended in a perpetual present, unable to extricate himself or in no hurry to retrieve himself. Perversely, what empowers him is the continual pique of his loss. He’s going nowhere fast. What sustains him is an unrestrained desire to put on a good show. And so he talks his way through a mad hilarity. He exists virtually as scene without narrative function. Only small spatterings of the character’s own past are discernible in the scattered narratives. What anecdotes we do hear concern the narrator as peripatetic lover. Some of the women are more distant than others. Some have only recently withdrawn into their own lives. Most of the reported events evidently occurred in the near past and concern the woman in Montreal, though the woman from Swift Current gives her a run for her money. The Phoenician does supply some narratives, which are not much more than hints. They mostly involve recollections of the four women, but there is no retroactive narration to speak of, and certainly none that leads to amplification or resolution. The narrative line is so drastically elided that we get only glimpses at “what 238

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happened” in the first place. The stories are even more diluted inside fable and hyperbole, where they function somewhere between secrecy and gossip. The stages of Barthes’s “instantaneous capture” and ecstatic “series of encounters” remain obscured. Otherwise we learn almost nothing about the narrator’s own life, past or present. We don’t know his age or (when he isn’t rhapsodizing) his habits. He never tells us if he lives in an apartment, how he dresses, what he does at night. We learn nothing about his taste in food or music, his conduct in public, his work, his involvement in politics or sports or cars or cooking. We don’t get a word about his personal interests or preferences, what he reads or where he was raised, don’t know about friends or family. He has no name. We don’t know what city he lives in, though he does seem to be at a fair distance from the women who evidently are located from Atlantic to Pacific in New York, Montreal, Swift Current, and Nanaimo. The narrative paralysis at the heart of The Sad Phoenician resembles what we find in Waiting for Godot. Though Beckett’s characters are haunted by the dread that they have been abandoned in their search for ultimate meaning, and though Kroetsch’s character is immersed in sublunary concerns, Kroetsch’s characters and Beckett’s characters all lead suspended lives. In comic staging and in bursts of poetry they act out their unchanging states. Martin Esslin has persuasively adduced that the Absurd “is a theatre of situation as against a theatre of events in sequence, and therefore it uses a language based on patterns of concrete images rather than argument and discursive speech to make in the spectator’s mind a total, complex impression of a basic, and static, situation” (403). Kroetsch, we might argue, uses idiom where Absurdists use image, but the narrative effect is similar. Beckett’s characters, like the Phoenician, never get anywhere, have no way, really, of going. They suffer the pain of their waiting and the disappointment of their wishes. Kroetsch’s narrator circles around his loss. His is not a story but a situation. It asks us to consider not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what is going on. There is in Kroetsch’s sad funny figure something more of what Esslin finds in Absurdist theatre. As examples of “man trying to stake out a modest place for himself in the cold and darkness that envelops him” (Esslin 401–02), Absurdist characters, Esslin tells us, are “at the same time broadly comic and deeply tragic” (338). It’s not hard to see something of their comedy and their anguish in the Phoenician.

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The situation encodes the male lover in a peculiar way. We recognize the signs in Barthes’s ruminations: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is, by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I—I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense...Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you. (A Lover’s Discourse 13, italics in original) When Barthes positions withdrawal and waiting in a gendered way, he names the kind of site the Phoenician occupies as “female” (as does the lonely figure in a later Kroetsch poem): Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings...It follows that in any man who utters the other’s absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized. (A Lover’s Discourse 13–14) The Sad Phoenician virtually reverses the terms so famously laid out in Kroetsch’s house/horse polarity. In that formulation the female occupies the house and the male swings out and away from it. In The Sad Phoenician, however, it is the female characters who head out on their own. They leave behind a male figure who “gives shape to absence” and turns his solitariness into wickedly funny and deeply moving theatre. There’s nothing left but to make the best of things in a barrage of zany talk. Much of the action in The Sad Phoenician occurs in what rhetoricians call schemes—the deployment of words in sequence, including their repetitions, variations, and repurposings. To take an example: the cliché “to lie down on the job” succumbs to a second cliché, “elevated thoughts,” and the collision of “down” and “up” arises from a succession in syntax. The tactic runs wild in Kroetsch’s poem, which is relatively sparse in image and radical metaphor, qualities which for many decades were considered the very stuff of poetry, certainly of “good” poetry. 240

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Nimble is the Phoenician who is a grammarian of love. “I haven’t the foggiest,” he says and adds that “to paragon is elsewhere” (56), shifting the parts of speech—adjective to noun and noun to verb. A negative verb cleverly becomes an adjective: “I’m down today, I’m don’t” (57). The Phoenician’s hopes and desires, every ripple of his fantasies, land with a thump on the refusals and forbiddings. A speculative or promising verb turns into a negation: “but the plural of would is not” (61). Or is it negation into noun? Either way, the rejigged English says that denial writes the speaker’s life, full time. One single wish is met with multiple rejections. All the “what-if”s and all the “just-supposing”s scrape their bottom on an immovable wharf. The response to the sailor’s speculative “would” is an emphatic “forget it.” The grammatical twiddling continues. A strangely compounded pronoun revolves into a noun, a personal name, and an interrogative—“poor old Who?him”—and the objective case (“him”) performs as nominative (“he”) (55). The first person becomes synonym to third person: “he is a manifestation of I” (57). Elsewhere, an expressive transforms comically into a noun: “if oops is the right name for accident” (59). In grammatical sleight (this passage invariably set off laughter at Kroetsch’s readings, as it delighted Dragland in his reading of the manuscript), the gerund becomes a defining noun and a verb that names the sailor’s arrest in time: “o to be mere gerund; no past, no future: what do you do in life: I ing” (53). The narrator’s very self gets forthrightly delineated within a system of gerunds. He declares himself to be someone who fills a grammatical function: cows moo, dogs bark, I “ing.” In another case, a letter of the alphabet migrates into an old and a new understanding: “G, in outline, the camel’s head / and neck, carry on; hanky-pank” (63) when in “head / and neck,” “neck” as noun gives way in a subsequent line to “neck” as verb (go ahead and “neck, carry on”), which then begets a synonym in a slangy expression, which in turn slips into a verb—all this without supplanting the word’s initial status.

F When the language of Kroetsch’s narrator slows and clarifies, as occasionally it does, we hear a murmur inside the play. The persona is thrown, in moments of unhappiness, into something close to despair. It is this self that Stan Dragland recognized in 1978 when he wrote to Kroetsch about the text that was to become The Sad Phoenician: “There’s a great energy to this whole thing that

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permits a surprising range of tone. Parts of it are very funny, but the fun, puns and operating clichés & the rest of it, don’t disguise the sadness & even desperation that seems to be the ground of it all” (MsC. 334/84 2.1). Sandra Djwa recognized the melancholy at once when the poem came out. For her, though the poem is “a verbal jeu d’esprit” (“Poetry” 347) in “cataloguing and ‘flyting’ of the female as temptress and destroyer, a task which Kroetsch accomplishes with great colloquial vigour” (350), it is also ultimately “a lament,” “an elegy for lost love” (349). But the “elegy is not immediately apparent because of the racy idiomatic flavour of Kroetsch’s language” (349). When the rush of bravado subsides, we too get a glimpse of the forlorn character Djwa and Dragland have identified. This Phoenician feels insufficient. “I am dwarf to her needments” (Completed Field Notes 57), he at one point confesses, sotto voce, because, as he says, there can be no satisfying women. The Phoenician presumably would speak in accord with Raymond in The Hornbooks of Rita K, who plaintively says, “We deceive ourselves into words when all that cries out is the body, wanting touch and taste and smell and sight. Do you hear me?” (34). The language is at once strange and moving. A reader might be tempted to speak of a “genuine” self or at least a nascent version of the self, creeping into visibility, one of many versions of self the Phoenician adopts. When the Phoenician speaks in a voice of sad profusion, he gives us one glimpse at what it is to be human. Not that this voice is the voice of the speaker, the voice that centres the true core of the figure, around which a carnival of selves whirl; but that the voice is one of the voices, one of the selves. E.F. Dyck has helpfully outlined the rhetorician’s position in Kroetsch: by noting the ways in which Advice (to My Friends) is essentially rhetorical, I am not suggesting that it is merely rhetorical. Rhetoric begins with the view that language is both referential and reflexive (it refers to the Other as it reflects on itself) and that any instance of language usage involves a community (ethos, logos, pathos). (“Trope as Topos” 93) Which self is it, whose selves are these, that speak in The Sad Phoenician—the “serious” self or the “rhetorical” self who fills the pages with voluble and ingenious fooling? Both, Lanham would have answered. Both of them, Dyck would agree. Though doubts can be raised about the Phoenician’s “sincerity,” the following entry might allay them: “love hurt him; don’t I know how he felt; just 242

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ask me” (53). The folksy and stagey phrasings that complete the statement fail to annul the first three words, which appear to be free from irony or other destabilizings, at least until we arrive at the next two clauses. The interlude articulates what is “sad” in the Phoenician, what it is that he has deeply felt in his loss. It reveals the nimbus of melancholy and loneliness he has carried around him despite his devil-may-care precipitance. Yet some readers have not heard the pain and loneliness. Di Brandt speaks of her “dismay at the heartlessness that seemed to characterize much of postmodern theory, that seemed reflected back in the less than supportive world around me” (71). She singles out Kroetsch as perpetrator, for there is “something that’s missing, if you look for it, in the Sad Phoenician’s embroidered litanies” (73). That something evidently would involve feelings of tenderness or hurt. Robert Enright found something else: “There is a lot of love in your poetry,” he says to Kroetsch, “something I think I deliberately blinded myself to…Yet your reading voice tends to support the image that this is a boisterous and a rowdy man, a man who is undercutting himself and the poem. Then much of the real gentleness is lost.” Kroetsch replies simply: “I’m glad to hear you say that. I guess it is Prairie to be uneasy about gentleness” (Enright and Cooley 30). The tenderness may not be everywhere evident in The Sad Phoenician, but it permeates the poem. When the Sad Phoenician sets aside the high-energy talk, a few monosyllabic words quietly slip out—as in “love hurt him”—simple, unadorned, and unmocking. They appear without pretense or duplicity, I think. The pathos stands out in a stretch of utterly ordinary words, which take on rich and gnarled meanings: but and but

enough: let one be the square root of one lonely is only lonely, it has no other name like hand or hope or trust, or pissing against the wind, it has no habit of upside-down, it slams no doors, it does not fly south in autumn I love you (59)

The passage opens as if in godly ordinance—“let one be.” The Phoenician behaves as if in syllogism, in the daring of his words: Let there be. As in creation: Let there be light. As in a proposition: Let there be…The result may take

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us aback (math as metaphor for separation, one as the square root of one), but it raises a question about what it is for one to remain irrefutably one who is alone. If “one” is “the square root of one,” is “one” destined to be only one in a perpetual state of oneness at the root of existence, one that precludes connections with others? And yet, we read, in seeming denial, “lonely is only lonely.” The almost metaphysical tautology creates a peculiar effect. The words speak of facing a condition that, though deeply painful, must be quietly accepted. It “has no other name like hand or hope or trust,” names which, once found, presumably could point to an overcoming of loneliness. The words name the speaker’s condition in an unembellished way, one that is caught also in an unexpected definition that is as poignant as it is jocular: lonely is not a “pissing against the wind.” Loneliness, which “has no habit of upside-down” and “slams no doors,” exists in the impossibility of ever erasing it. Loss and inconstancy beset this lover. He speaks of loneliness as unnamable condition, but he does name his despondency. It appears in words of nearness (hand, hope, trust), and in words of frustration and blockage (the black comedy of pissing against the wind, habits of upside-down, slamming doors, buggering off). The swashbuckling hero, who tries to hold onto human connection or to recover it, knows only too well what it is to be lonely‚ the “one” to be found in “lone.” The rhetoric, despite its knottedness, or because of it, pulls the Phoenician into a forlorn condition, a sad state of onely—the quiet speech a long way from his flamboyant posturing at self-sufficiency. What Kroetsch has said in interview about the experience of loneliness perhaps reflects on his character’s state: “Coupling—an interesting word… There’s a kind of incredible loneliness sometimes in sex. Yet it’s the ultimate attempt to deny the loneliness, to join the world and have consequences. Like writing” (Hancock 50). Yes: like writing. “Did you have a problem with loneliness when you were beginning?” Hancock asked. Kroetsch painfully replied, “I certainly did, yes. Almost anybody who wants to write spends years being alone. It was very hard to find the community, and I suppose one is pretty shy as a young writer” (37). The Sad Phoenician, too, trying to talk his way out of his loneliness wants more than anything to touch someone with his words and his body. The words that conclude an enigmatic passage sound a harrowing note of sadness and disappointment for what has gone missing or been put on hold in a perishable world: 244

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and but and but

is it not true that black is the absence of deceit do not ask asking, do not wait for the sun to bring light nor for the rain to fall, nor for women to remember, nor for interest to gather capital, nor for dictators to open gates, nor for laughter to win elections, nor for grey hair to darken, except in the earth that’s okay, we study (53)

The list of disappointments is poignant, but the brief mention of hair that will not darken except in a grave hits like a blow. Not much frivolity there, in the end, in the words of denial and final denial. Not a lot either of “something that’s missing…in the Sad Phoenician’s embroidered litanies” (Brandt 73)

F At some such junctures, readers of Kroetsch might be tempted “to displace the ideal of copiousness—the rhetorical ideal of the plenitude of memory and the command of things to say—with various doctrines of inward power” (Bruns, Inventions 91). Think of the ululations of Vera Lang or the sounds of the feral boy in What the Crow Said. Think of Kroetsch’s poems about his mother, after a lifetime of muted grief. We remember Johnny Backstrom, shaken and deeply moved, fumbling to connect with his neighbours. Though we might object that there can be no denying Johnny’s loud and chest-thumping talk, if that is what it is, Kroetsch himself thinks Backstrom is reaching for something more: “Well I think Backstrom’s outcry is against the silence. You know, who’s he talking to, did you ever wonder? I really think he’s talking to the silence, creating himself into it, whatever.” Is that “Self-justifying?” asks Russell Brown, to which Kroetsch replies, “It has many dimensions in the Canadian voice. Quite often it’s self-deprecating, as Backstrom sometimes becomes. Sometimes self-justifying…but sometimes it’s just that terrible need to hear a voice, even if it’s your own voice” (Brown, “An Interview” 15). We remember Backstrom, disconsolate, guilt-stricken, hauling his way through the cold night and the dark soaking rain. He knows that his arrival means certain success for him in the provincial election, and deep anguish for him personally. His feelings

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are brilliantly caught in a single adjective: “It was blistering cold in the wet night, I have never been so alone” (The Words of My Roaring 168). Then there are Johnny’s thoughts about the lovers who, come to a dance, fumblingly, achingly, find one another in parked cars: “struggling to make the old contact, moaning in the darkness and lying still and feeling comfort and joy and guilt and sorrow and shame and fear” (109). We could recall the understated feelings that emerge in the lines about the lonesome father in the “Stone Hammer Poem,” (The Stone Hammer Poems 54–60) and in a particularly poignant father poem, “Projected Visit” (The Stone Hammer Poems 39).24 What if? “Projected Visit” asks repeatedly. What if my father “does not stoop / from the grave to / love me home?” (The Stone Hammer Poems 39). We can recall the hesitations in Seed Catalogue when the speaker becomes almost tongue-tied. These moments fall outside of the fluency derived from assurance in what one is saying, or confidence in being able to say anything at all. Readers of Kroetsch will think of the silence and absence which a motherless Kroetsch attaches to the almost barren yard in Seed Catalogue?: “only the wind. / Only the January snow. / Only the summer sun” (Complete Field Notes 31). In Kroetsch we always are encountering the taciturn and the unsaid and we may consider how often the Kroetsch text—and Kroetsch himself—invites psychoanalytical readings, as Larry McDonald for one has proposed (78). It’s hard to disagree with Stan Dragland when he says that The Sad Phoenician, and other works by Kroetsch, far from being devoid of emotion, “are actually fuelled by…an achy-breaky heart.” He finds in Kroetsch’s writing an “(electrical) grounding in pure emotion” (“Potatoes” 107). Kroetsch’s distress, he supposes, is “a pain that no amount of comedy will ever entirely disguise” (108). Northrop Frye would not have been speaking of Kroetsch, though he could have been, when he wrote that there are “two central themes in Canadian poetry, one a primarily comic theme of satire and exuberance, the other a primarily tragic theme of loneliness and terror” (Bush Garden 166). The observation can stand as apt comment on The Sad Phoenician. Kroetsch certainly explodes gladly into language and in one wild joyride shows how fully alive we can be. It is true: the Phoenician turns and returns, as if compulsively or capriciously, conducted on the whirlwind of words, to a tide of travesties and witticisms. And he reaches out to touch the loneliness and the terror. 246

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F We need some way with which to speak of those experiences that we know from outside of particular texts and that when we are reading we bring into operation. Kroetsch deeply wanted to make that leap. As we saw in “getting there” he was passionate about bringing “our” world into literature and of providing something in which “we” might recognize “our” potential or (un) realized selves. He also sought a world in which “we” might feel at home and in which “we” might take pride—the “we” in Kroetsch varying from “we (Canadians)” to, more often, “we (western Canadians).” Asked, after decades of writing, whether his intention is “to move readers into a love of the actual western Canadian world,” Kroetsch, in what may be a nothing-to-lose frankness freed through his aging, answers simply, “Mine is, yes, I want people to like it” (Sellery 23). John Thieme has spoken of those aims in Kroetsch’s intricate engagement with region and theory: Kroetsch’s work is not “like the post-modernism of Borges and many of his American followers, an essentially asocial stance, but rather a direct response to the sense that a Prairie literature needs to be remade in an image which bears some relationship to the land”; and, he might have added, in some nearness to the histories of human habitation (91). Arguments for cultural expression don’t sit well with those who say that all words, even as we ourselves use them, repeatedly, in representational (and, of course, many other) ways—in everyday conversations, in conducting our affairs, in making arguments, in teaching, composing email, seeking directions, applying for services, making reports, checking the news, talking to our doctor, ordering drinks or tickets, reading newspapers, delivering speeches, scanning flyers, writing papers, reading them—remain utterly detached and unverifiable. There is formidable power in realizing that language is never simple or straightforward, that invariably and gloriously it flows in all directions, but at times the skepticism hardens to a point that it is of limited use in reading Kroetsch whose postmodernism presses close to postcolonialism, as Frank Davey has brilliantly explained: In Canadian writing the postmodern is frequently viewed as postcolonial. In this the Canadian diverges from American and British writing, in which the quarrel between modernism and postmodernism is seen as largely an inter-generational and family dispute, and resembles instead the Latin

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American and South Asian, in which the modern is typically viewed as an international movement, elitist, imperialist, “totalizing,” willing to appropriate the local while being condescending toward its practice. (“Some. (Canadian.)” 119) What is it, we might ask ourselves, in the name of poststructuralism, or cosmopolitanism, to rule out appeals to local experience as being either narrowly provincial or naively deluded? The arguments can be single-minded, perhaps naive in their own way. In insisting that representation, and intention in language, are suspect, we can end up simply discrediting any expression of the “local” or of the “real,” as if uncertainty requires us to give up on all attempts at reference and legitimacy.

F Still, an impatient reader might suspect that The Sad Phoenician is simply an act of trifling self-indulgence, mere rhetoric as some might have it, trivial or mannerist perhaps, if not something worse—postmodernist. We might consider more fully Richard Lanham’s distinctions between “serious” and “rhetorical” views of language. In Lanham’s view, the philosopher (“Plato” that is), the “serious” man, was prone to “glacial narcissism” (46) and to a “monstrous Platonic egotism” that—this is crucial to reading The Sad Phoenician—shunned whatever was “rhetorical, chancy, always changing, developing outward or collapsing altogether; process not essence, verb not noun...What is left out is play, just the spontaneity and difference that Plato cannot tolerate” (47).25 The other option—“rhetorical”—Lanham finds more defensible because it is more accommodating. For Lanham rhetorical figures are “not pledged to a single set of values and the cosmic orchestration they adumbrate” (5). They are “provided a training in the mechanisms of identity, offered a selection of roles” to “try out” (7). As a result, the rhetorician can gain tolerance and acquire a sense of humour, which comes from knowing we “not only may think differently, but may be differently” (5). Lanham does not dismiss the “serious” figure, he disputes that figure’s hegemony. Similarly, for Dick Leith and George Myerson the rhetorician is able “to show ourselves whatever we wish” and to set free “a playful power of representing the world according to our desires” (96). Their words strongly accord with Frye’s: 248

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We may therefore see the creative imagination as polarized by two opposite and complementary forces. One is sense itself, which tells us what kind of reality the imagination must found itself on, what is possible for it, and what must remain on the level of wish or fantasy. The other pole I shall call vision, the pure uninhibited wish or desire to extend human power of perception…without regard to its possible realization. (Fables of Identity 152–53) Far from being simply capricious, or unreliable in matters of truth and consequence, gamers such as the Phoenician in this view are sanely open to what we and others might become. When we experience life as drama, as always social, we see it is immersed in complications and amenable to negotiations. Lanham finds rhetorical acts—it is here he makes his boldest move—well fitted to what we are as humans: “Posit a rhetorical, rather than a serious, reality” (18) and gaming becomes as true as philosophy and as important as tragedy. Posit poetry, George Steiner would say, and you will realize what is most life-enhancing and most life-sustaining in language. It is the genius of language, he says, to deal in falsehood and supposition. So it is that “At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and to the development of man in society” (Steiner 229). In both reckonings, Lanham’s and Steiner’s, the performances that Kroetsch’s sailor stages tap what in us is most dynamic, most valuable, most “honest,” and most promising. The devious sailor becomes a hero of possibilities and his grand drama a stage that opens the world to us. What appears to be so radical in Kroetsch’s writing, strange to say, may in part at least be a reworking of an age-old, long-deplored understanding about how it is we might know and behave. His artifice lies at the very heart of poetry and the core of what we may wish or need to do in fashioning our world. Lanham says this of an outrageous, irreverent Ovid, who flings himself into the moment of self-performance: “All efforts go toward dramatizing the present...Thus you can love two people at once...No hypocrisy is involved. Situation determines self: different situation, different self” (52). Like Kroetsch, the Ovid of Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris delights in an “excessive, glib show-off style” and in “an act of pure display” revels in “poetic virtuosity” (56). The resemblances are startling, so many of them it seems almost certain Ovid has been an inspiration, if not a model, to Kroetsch.

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F At the same time, we recall Kroetsch’s words about obscured identities: “By our disguises we free ourselves, we speak to each other of hidden selves” (“Dancing” 300). Finally, it is more than possible to discern in Kroetsch’s Phoenician a troubled figure who emerges as something more than a cagey performer inordinately pleased with himself. Granted, he does love himself, and he does clatter across the footlights. He revels in his vaudeville—protean, irreverent, making faces. He delivers songs, gags, clamorous pantomimes, comic skits. A one-man troupe, he sails acrobatically, whistles through risqué jokes. He stages his own versions of Shakespeare, creates his own repertoire of dances. You can’t get him off the stage, he hogs the show. No sooner does the curtain twitch open, and the lights slam on, than there he is. The Phoenician is his own unrestrained barker. His words revolve lavishly, flashily, about him—as tonics, salves, capes and wands, rings, balls and pins, miraculous elixirs. He stages the whole affair. And what vaudeville it is—two-stepping, high-stepping, soft-shoeing, doesy-doeing, square-dancing, jitter-bugging, high-fiving across the floor. Almost consumed by his costumes, the sailor needs no one to prompt him, no one to feed him his lines, no one to cover for him, no one to handle the lights and the props, no one to applaud. No one, that is, but everyone. From beginning to end, he quotes unknown others, repeats what he has heard, and what we ourselves have often said, one damn thing after another. The words are given to him, practically, and in gladness received, in wit delivered. He returns our own speech, jived-up, to us. It is largely for our benefit that he plays the hick, the unstudied and unsteadied man. He plays his part, plays it to the hilt. He plays for us, plays us for fans. Without let up, he woos and cajoles. It is our love he values and our favour he courts. There is something grand in the magnitude of the outcry. The language flares and jumps, as he—fool, clown, lover, jester—prances his id before us. He is full of bravura in a world that cannot satisfy his desires. In midst of all the joshing, the Phoenician aches for something intimate, something enlarging, something sublime perhaps. As the poem nears the end, he speaks touchingly of his longing for a woman’s love (62), however uncertain he is of realizing it.26 He speaks in injunction to button and paper, celluloid and tin, talismans which might summon a fitting response. His anxiety is articulated in a quiet that seems deeply felt and strangely realized. The most personal and poignant passages 250

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appear in the most traditional kinds of poetry, small patches that we readily read as “literary.” The shifts reveal a vulnerability and a fear that the whole truth (the possible lack of love) may be more than the speaker can handle. And so he clowns. We remember all the fools and charlatans that bicycle through Kroetsch’s carnival. They are almost falling over where they teeter on the edge of high-wire tears and laughter. At any moment they will trip on the cloak of their gestures, sprawl in their jumbled pain. Through his pages move variations on the skinny man in his raggedy pants and his oversize suspenders, and his terrible need to make a few dollars. Ripped open by a bull and dying, Kroetsch’s rodeo clown blinks, pitifully small and alone behind his outsized duds and crayoned grin: His costume was baggy and had billowed when he ran, but he was skin and bones. The only thing that moved on him now was his eyelids; they kept opening and staring in a sleepy confused way, and all the make-up, the white paint and black and yellow, was smudged with sweat and dust and the blood from his nose. Then he tried to say something. His mouth moved small inside the smile that was painted on his face. He kept trying to say something to me, a perfect stranger, but he couldn’t make it. He tried to raise a hand and point but couldn’t and I wanted to point for him but didn’t know where. (The Words of My Roaring 88–89) Pained in the world’s lapsings, Kroetsch’s Phoenician wraps himself in camouflage and stretches it across the carnival of his longing. He answers his destitution in run-away ebullience. The drama is clever and entertaining, his various selves lively and funny. But we respond, also, when the distraught sailor bends over basins full of grief and dips his hands into them, touches the ripples and whirlpool of emotions. He splashes water over his made-up face, and we glimpse the forlorn look in that self. Kroetsch’s tour-de-force writing— evasive, risky, erudite, strutting, yearning—shows his surrogate self to be a badly shaken clown, one whose disquiet shadows his divagations. Impaled on his hurt, he chooses to be the painted hero of his own hilarious suffering and to embrace the lead role in a festival of disappointment. Conniving, contriving, lamenting, blustering, railing, showing off—he peeks through his fingers, hopeful and sad, gestures toward something that is bothering him. He wants to point but he doesn’t know where. He peers out at us. And now and then we catch a

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peek of another “him” in or under that goofy, loopy, knowing, lonely, bashful, hurt, loving, and (though-you-can’t-see-it) lopsided grin. That deeply distressed self is not the “real” Kroetsch, not a fixed or final self obscured by a series of false or temporary selves. But it is one of the selves and in many ways the most denied of the selves, one that shows its face only now and then among the cast of motley and jostling others. Kroetsch rejigs the love poem in wild and dazzling flourishes. What he ends up with is refreshingly new, wickedly entertaining, expansively clever, and deeply moving.

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six

Noted & Quoted Kroetsch in Conversation and at the Podium

I could well believe the question of the peculiar authority that attaches to some critical writing in Canada might well be illuminated by means of a stylistic analysis. —Eli Mandel, “‘Life Sentence’: Contemporary Canadian Criticism” 7

I: Labyrinths of Voice

For decades Robert Kroetsch has been one of the most widely sought and most quoted authors in Canada. He has been one of the most interviewed too, so much so that Ann Munton could write in the early 1990s, “Kroetsch may have more interviews in print than any other Canadian writer.” She adds that “as

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a record of his own views about his work and the creative process, these are invaluable” (“Robert Kroetsch” 86). What he has said in interviews and in his many talks has affected the kinds of readings critics have brought to his works and the kinds of conversations we have been having about writing in Canada. The extent of that influence has been so great that Aritha van Herk has raised concerns: “This writer…mistrusts the author/himself so much he over-glosses his own text. Not one of his works has managed to escape his own arm’s length and after-the-fact commentary” (“Biocritical Essay” ix). She laments the degree to which Kroetsch, with the conniving of spellbound critics, has presided over that reception: “Kroetsch’s willingness to talk about his work becomes itself an intertextual device that intrudes on the isolation of the text, impairs its integrity.” As a result, “the critics are delighted: they criticize his criticism, re-read everything in light of his after-the-fact annunciations, tie themselves into knots with his language” (xxxiii–xxxiv). It’s hard not to sympathize with Van Herk’s point, though Kroetsch also has something to say about the isolation and integrity of a text. His remarks appear in “The Writer Looks at Academia,” presented in 1980 at an Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) conference in Vancouver. The talk exists in scattered notes and drafts, and for stretches in a handwriting so indecipherable it makes everyone else look like a calligrapher. One part, dated “TUESDAY, MAY 13, 1980,” makes it clear that Kroetsch rejects the notion of a self-contained text: “One is slightly embarrassed now, at the old notion of poem as artifact; one is embarrassed, also, for those professors who cannot generate notions of context” (MsC. 334/84.1 1.20). He reiterates the point over a decade later: “It is thus our responsibility to be responsive to the text, to the culture and lives that are its context—and to the voices that…engage us in generous dialogue” (Foreword Reverberations, ix).

F Clearly creative writers have found multiple avenues for advocacy and speculation, the desire to intervene and to participate spilling out where they find need or opportunity, but the interview in recent decades has become a major form in Canadian literature. It arguably has supplanted the literary letter, whose long and formal statements appeared often to be more a convenience for the writer that a greeting to the recipient. Literary letters furnished a place where authors 254

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could work out thoughts, get them down on paper, quite possibly for posterity. At times the correspondents may not have been much more than custodians of them. In more recent times the role and the dynamics of the interview, product of new technologies, of shifts in how we view authors, how we view leisure, and how we experience travel, has succeeded the letter and altered the ways authors participate in the reception of their own and others’ work. The evolving of the position of professor-writer has probably also had something to do with the nature and function of the interview. For Kroetsch this certainly has been the case, especially in the 1970s when he was beginning to establish himself as a major writer. Most of what lies behind an interview will remain unknown to readers and may seem of little consequence to them. But the conditions and the process do matter, and have a big influence on what gets said and what doesn’t get said all the way through to the final from of the talk. The record of Kroetsch’s work with Donald Cameron on their conversation that led to “Robert Kroetsch: The American Experience and the Canadian Voice” gives some idea of what can happen. On October 4, 1971, Kroetsch writes to thank Cameron for his editing of a transcript and indicates that he himself hopes to have “tied up some of my too long statements.” On November 3 he reports that he has “reworked the interview a bit”: “What I’ve done simply is this: I’ve tried to sharpen and focus my responses to your questions...I tried to make my answers a bit more valid.” Other correspondence mentions material that has been selected, or restored, or left out; mentions the importance of context, and the consequence of reducing colloquialisms and conversational tags. Concerns emerge about what those circumstances meant for the actual interview (the presence of the actual stone hammer which figures centrally in Kroetsch’s “Stone Hammer Poem,” for example) (MsC. 27.28.2). Almost twenty years later, Kroetsch writes to “Susan” about changes he proposes for the transcript from an interview: “Here is an emended version of what I say in response to your excellent questions in the poetry interview. I’ve corrected errors and made my responses, I would hope, livelier. PLEASE use this version and destroy all others” (MsC. 719/02.6 1.6). Roy Miki notes at the beginning of his interview with Kroetsch, “Self on Self,” that the printed text consists of “Excerpts from this [recorded] conversation, at times considerably edited.” He says that, from the initial transcription, “this printed version has been edited,” and he thanks Kroetsch “for collaborating on some changes to the final drafts” (108). Aside from what impingings occur

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after the initial conversation, other complex variables matter. What leads into an interview and what goes on during an interview can have a big effect on what finally ends up in print or in recordings of one kind or another. Yet the “manner” of Kroetsch’s speech in interviews has scarcely been addressed. His views are well known and widely cited. His rhetorical role in them, though conspicuous, has been less studied. Reading the “secondary” material for its artfulness will show how entertaining and effective it is, demonstrate how much it collapses distinctions between “primary” and “secondary” texts, and perhaps say something about why those statements have carried so much weight.

F Take Labyrinths of Voice, the first and still the only, major collection of Kroetsch interviews—the 1982 book-length conversation, spread over several months and several cities, in a mix of transcription and citation. We can say something about the interviewers in it—Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Central to Labyrinths, they act also as editors of the material and as authors of the introduction, “An Entrance.” In the introduction, they meticulously date material and they show keen awareness of the interview as a mode that has developed and is in the process of modifying its own conventions. They make note of the situation that underwrites their book and how it affects the interview: “Three speakers, they [Shirley Neuman and, from an earlier occasion, Rudy Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch] discovered, rupture the conventions of the interview, break the predictability of its question and answer format, forestall the stances of interviewee (Victim or Duelist) and interviewer (Acolyte or Grand Inquisitor)” (xi).1 We also learn from the compilers that various portions of the interviews took place at “Winnipeg, Edmonton, Banff” from “April to November 1981” (209), and we get a small bit of information on material that was added after the interviews were “complete.” We can also surmise from internal evidence something about the roles the two interviewers played in the conversation. Neuman posits provocative questions, seeking Kroetsch’s response. He was the focus of her interventions. Wilson is more inclined to make statements, to summarize positions, and to explain. The recorded speeches in Labyrinths are interlaced with allusions to and quotations from a panoply of contemporary theorists who stirred the intellectual ferment at the time. Their impact was heightened by the addition 256

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of explanatory notes and a substantial bibliography. The contextualizing of what Kroetsch and the other participants said frames their words as part of an ambitious, cosmopolitan, and ongoing conversation. They may also have served to satisfy the research institutions that funded the work. The inclusions affronted those who evidently were expecting a more conventional format or a text focused wholly on the speaking author. Jamie Conklin finds them “irritating” and thinks they show the editors to be “self-satisfied” and given to “critical posturing” with the unfortunate result that the book is “pretentious and silly” despite the value of Kroetsch’s contributions (11). Paul Wilson finds the book to be “an ungainly hybrid” and that as conversation the book fails “because the tone is so self-consciously academic” and clogged with passages “torn out of other contexts” (23). An exasperated reviewer in Canadian Materials found “a monkish hierarchy of pundits” who indulged in solipsistic games and escapist fables. Labyrinths, he scornfully observed, was engulfed by “pretentious” “mandarin” moves and “a coveted irresponsibility” that produced “hagiographies” (Wheeler n.p.).

F Whatever the affect of those embeddings, an orality and a keen awareness of second person is everywhere evident in Kroetsch’s speech. The point may seem hardly worth mentioning. Of course, we know, the speeches show signs of their speaking, what else could they do? Still, it is important to observe Kroetsch’s remarkable force in interviews, the kind of self or selves he constructs in them and what that in turn does for those who read them. An interview hardly requires the style that Kroetsch opts for and that few other published interviews demonstrate. Many (most?) interviews are shaped by a fairly studied voicing that derives from print culture and that in editing is brought still closer to that language. That more formal voice—the kind more typical of the Labyrinths interviewers, say—normally would mark a statement as credible. We have only to think of the forbidding paragraphs, crowded with long complex sentences, prolonged statements, and amplified arguments, that occupy any number of literary interviews. It is these expectations that Kroetsch does not meet. Take the phrasing in the following passage: “Sure, Williams gave us the perfect beginning of a new story when he got mad and said we have to rebel against all those guys who went to Europe” (197). Or this one: “I mean they just

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swept the boards, those guys, Jung and Freud, didn’t they? They left no leeway at all for other interpretations” (121). Kroetsch’s almost off-hand naming of illustrious figures as “those guys” and “all those guys” may be the most obvious sign of his orality, what Walter Ong would probably call a secondary orality. Kroetsch names with familiarity William Carlos Williams’s dissatisfaction—“he got mad.” The preference for a casual, almost slangy speech tends to erode the cachet of those (Jung, Freud) who had been heavyweights in intellectual and cultural circles. It also signals Kroetsch’s great discomfort with pretentious or obfuscating language, his pronounced loathing for verbal affectations. “I’m a prairie democrat,” he says in another interview, “ferociously egalitarian, and I don’t like muckymucks of any sort. I prefer beer parlours to cocktail lounges” (Hancock 51). The orality of his speech includes fillers and expressives (“Sure” and “I mean”) that reflect awareness of immediate auditors. It also includes double, triple, and even quadruple subjects (they / those guys / Jung and Freud / they). The syntax proceeds in a series of delayed and added subjects. It conveys a felt need to clarify as a sentence goes along, the references becoming increasingly precise as seems necessary for the occasion. A formal written syntax, constructed for the page, drawing on foreknowledge or depending on editing to impart information or well-shaped argument, might have arranged the structure with greater economy and in a more evenly modulated voice. It might have produced something such as this: Jung and Freud virtually swept the boards; or, in a more scholarly voice: Jung and Freud dominated critical discourse. Once the more conversational sentence is in our minds, other features in the statement emerge. Consider “just swept the boards.” The language obviously is more idiomatic and less formal than scholarly or analytical practice normally would allow. The word “just” is both breezy and less precise in its qualifying than, say, “virtually” or even “nearly.” The word is also more indicative of the speaker’s mood; it conveys his sense of how strongly the results had registered and how confounded he himself has felt about that. The speech is not premeditated, it would appear, nothing measured out in unruffled syntax at least. We are not presented with a speaker who is more or less effaced or shaded off somewhere behind the page. Kroetsch’s forthrightness arrives with the oomph of an oral style. He gets the point out there emphatically—“they just swept the boards.” There’s the grievance, no pussyfooting around. That’s the trouble right there. To emphasize the point he draws out the names by repeatedly stressing the sources 258

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of his dismay, and he zeros in on the offending parties. First they are “they,” then “those guys,” and finally at the end, his voice loaded up for an extra kick, the culprits are named out of protective anonymity—“Jung and Freud.” Kroetsch finishes with an appeal to his interlocutors: “didn’t they?” The second person again. The move is typical. As a whole the language presents a speaker who is less inclined to speak in lofty statement or incisive clauses than to seek personal engagement. Kroetsch is keenly aware also of a second and subsequent audience, the rest of us who figure later as readers, and it is to them as well that he speaks. Knowing that down the way others may well be listening in, he conducts a double conversation. He addresses those in his presence who generally ask questions and, to a lesser extent, offer comments or, even more rarely, challenges, but he is speaking, too, past those auditors, to unseen and future readers who will find the words, edited (slightly or drastically), amended (probably but not necessarily), and located in a context almost devoid of paralinguistic information. We, the unknown and subsequent auditors, eavesdrop, knowing that Kroetsch is talking to us too. Those present at the actual talks also know that we are “there.” The risk is that readers who arrive to the printed text might resent being positioned as unnamed others, cut off from some circle of intimacy or thread of shared histories. That’s what happens when a text takes its life and its manner from modes of oral delivery: those in attendance are apt to “infringe” on the text in some way or other, perhaps to a degree acting as collaborators. The quality of Kroetsch’s language is no less evident in his nimble imitations of others’ speech or easy admission of their words into his own talking: “you have the feeling that everybody was just writing down everything with a high sense of story: tomorrow this is going to be important, so I’d better take notes” (198). The accommodation is equally evident in a segmented, verbless sentence: “The old joke about men in prison telling numbered stories—twenty-one—and everybody laughs” (162). The phrasing, mindful of not overdrawing on someone’s time and attention, and in keeping with the speaker’s preferred informality, omits the full introductory or transitional structures we expect in expository prose. What lead-in we do get is clipped and tends toward caption: “The old joke about the men in prison…” We are provided with the minimum of setting and only bare-bones deictics. Kroetsch’s syntax, groping toward the information it must impart, moves laterally for a moment into quotation (“twenty-one”) to take in others’ words. The repetitions in another passage show a similar desire

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to make a point, as the second mention of a word intensifies the accent: “Which is modernist, one has to admit; those are modernist stances” (31). A more sustained example reveals in emphatic rhythms and short sentences a speaking subject who is receptive to others and who opts for an expressive manner that is responsive to occasion: “I like the sense of active reading, of being an active reader. I like difficult texts—that’s what it comes down to, texts that demand a lot from the reader. And I accept that. It engages my sense of play” (162). The sentences shun subordination, preferring an appositive style that offers further definitions in an amending or paratactic way. The additive sentence unfolds as if the speaker were absorbed in strengthening and reaffirming a point, or working his way toward an adequate formulation of it. The grammar is cumulative rather than hierarchical, and in that sense too it is highly oral. The manner conveys a strong sense of annexing words as they occur to the speaker. We respond to the hesitating rhythms of second thought that is trying to firm up a possibility or giving weight and duration to a speech. This occurs even as the voice, aware of possible objection or demurral, trails close to apology (“that’s what it comes down to,” “And I accept that”). The speech shows a willingness to listen to others’ words, and it is bent by the felt pressure of them, whether or not they are actually spoken. The implications ripple across the book. Laurie Ricou has written a whimsical but shrewd meditation on the role of appositives in Kroetsch’s writing—“The Majesty of His Loyal Apposition.” Ricou says that apposition in Kroetsch serves to amplify, to identify, to illustrate, to include. Above all, it enacts an “erotics of reading, the aching pleasure of delay.” It “slows us down, makes it hard to skim, makes us pay a little more attention.” It also “plants in print the pause in speech, the indecision, the stumble toward the ‘right’ term” (64). Ricou’s analysis does not identify a principle of exuberance and unbridled expansion, which informs Kroetsch’s rhetoric, and that would point to something more assured and prodigious as well, but his insights obviously do not preclude that awareness. Signs of a language spoken on the spot are everywhere. In stressing a point, the phrase “active reading” turns into near tautology when we arrive at the phrase “being an active reader.” The expression “difficult texts” is followed by “texts that demand a lot from the reader.” The iterations mark the passages as oral. So does the accumulation of pronouns—“what it comes down to,” “I accept that,” “It engages”—which conveys a tolerance for ambiguity, and a dependence on contextual or tonal cues that are so important in spoken 260

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language. The manner of address shows someone strongly committed to words that function in expressive and affective ways, then. It is immediately distinguishable from the more grammatically complex and informationally oriented prose composed for the page and later processing. The kinetic stresses and pauses indicate immediate involvement, and not the articulation of an already formulated thought, certainly not a premeditated phrasing laid out in a considered syntax. Kroetsch’s speech leaves a record of someone who is not simply setting out ideas he has already arrived at and for which therefore he has ready and complete expression. His speech registers a falling out into further thoughts, as he goes along. Take the following: “They are part of a culture that is caught in the same posture. Economically. Socially” (180). Why add the qualifying words after the verb and after the main point? The post-modifying shows someone who hasn’t already decided what he will say. What choices the transcribers or editors have made in punctuating the adverbs as discrete one-word sentences intensify the effect, or, more likely, catch it. They signal a hiatus after the first thought. What then follows is a oneword gloss (“Economically”). The period provides a second halt. As a result, the next opening gains an emphasis that simulates the rhythm of Kroetsch’s thought: and then, come to think of it, a second point—“Socially.” Yes: that too. The amending style is well caught in the notation. Because the “revisions” or “come-to-think-of-it”s derive from the recording of oral speech, they are there for us to hear and cannot be erased (supposing, of course, that the qualities are not later lost in editing for publication). They’re already out there. An already-known and already-revised structure that is apt to be part of a scholarly essay might (re)position the adverbs before the verb, as in: “a culture that economically and socially is caught”; or in a different post-modifying: “a culture that is caught economically and socially.” Either way, the adverbs would be made more readily a part of the main expression and would appear with little or no hesitation, as if part of a fully shaped formulation from the outset. Kroetsch’s language bears other marks of redirection. In “I let myself fall… Or maybe I was pushed” (113, ellipsis in original), for example, Kroetsch is coyly second-guessing himself, adjusting his understanding, or at least his awareness of situation by reworking his phrasing as he goes along. More dramatically, perhaps, the sequence allows him to be gathering himself, brought to the verge of an admission that is risky or that makes him uneasy or uncertain. (The editors’ decision to insert the ellipsis, I am assuming, indicates an actual delay and not an excision.)

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Kroetsch’s unrehearsed observations in Labyrinths, despite the enthusiasm in his voice, sound tentative: “It may be” and “It may be that” or “Perhaps an exceptional insight…[though] I’m just not sure” (105). Also: “I think it could be” and “What if it’s…?” (65). It’s true, of course, that the reservation can in part be attributable to the presence of questioners of whom Kroetsch is keenly aware and with whom he is respectful. Nevertheless, we discern his abiding preference for a language of give-and-take. The words establish a speaker who in admission or confession is perfectly amenable to what others say, or might say: “I find that” (110), “I think I’d be a little irked” (161), “Which is modernist, one has to admit” (31), “I now think” (116), “I realize more and more how much” (107), “I don’t think I understood at first,” and “it’s only recently that I came to see” (142). There are more: “I’m uneasy about my own interest, really troubled. In fact I am uneasy about” (158); “I suspect that I haven’t thought enough about this business of special emotion,” which is “a very sobering thought, actually” (71). The qualifiers—“really troubled” and “actually”—demonstrate a felt need to acknowledge a point and not to slip by it. They indicate that there is more to say. The phrasing in the admissions comes close to being deferential, at least in cumulative effect: “I think so. I have learned a little bit more clearly that” (117), “I would like to think that” (113), “I see anecdote as” (11), and “O.K. I think” (189). This kind of talk offers appreciation to his interviewers’ (and readers’?) words—actual or anticipated—to an extent hardly guaranteed by the genre. For Kroetsch the moves find theoretical explanation in a favourite thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin, who has written about the influence of others’ words as they enter dialogically into what we say and how we talk. Identity, Bakhtin writes, is “the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (“From Discourse in the Novel” 532) and always, Bakhtin finds, we are crowded with the words of others, a swirl of them coming and going in our speech. We live in anticipation of others and constantly respond: We can go so far as to say that in real life people talk most of all about what others talk about—they transmit, recall, weigh and pass judgment on other people’s words, opinions, assertions, information; people are upset by others’ words, or agree with them, contest them, refer to them and so forth. (530) 262

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There is no escaping them. In Kroetsch there is no desire to do so. In interview after interview and talk after talk, he delights in hearing them and bringing them in. In Labyrinths the wordings soften claims and present the speaker as ready to concede a point, amenable to what others have said, or might say: “The notion of a collective unconsciousness, or whatever, makes me flinch” (104). It’s not that for Kroetsch a view—here, particular arguments about the collective unconscious—is wrong or foolish or untenable, or simply dismissible out of hand. Rather, it causes disquiet, a sense that it doesn’t quite satisfy him. Objection is registered as something short of outright rejection and it leaves room for demurral. The seemingly throwaway phrase, “or whatever,” presents a rhetorician who is vulnerable and who does not presume he has spoken the final word. His manner says we could name this differently: some might dispute the term, I know that. These attenuations do not speak from somewhere beyond negotiation. Often Kroetsch’s agreement comes in enthusiastic and unequivocal approval: “I like that. Now that’s very interesting” (61), “That’s right, that’s right” (209), “I quite agree” (41), “I agree entirely” (172), “Exactly” (116), “Exactly. Exactly” (149). The assent is frequent and immediate. The utterances code the speaker as agreeable, even obliging. He is one who appreciates his interlocutors, who is swayed by their words, and from time to time compliments them: “That’s great” (76), “I find that very exciting” (41), “Yes. Glances is the right word. I like that” (112). What perhaps is especially respectful is a willingness to pick up what the interviewers have said by repeating it and doing something with it. He is taken by what others say and he takes in their words. He welcomes and openly confirms them. At one point an interviewer says something about reworking narrative, to which Kroetsch replies, “That’s right. You tell your way out of story, in a sense” (96). When Shirley Neuman proposes that “We in fact create a grammar and lexicon for every book,” Kroetsch without hesitation says, “That’s right. And we do it for the instant of our reading” (161). What is no less remarkable in the pages of Labyrinths, drawn from hours and hours of talk about complex and contentious issues, is the virtual absence of dissension. The accommodation that characterizes the conversation, and that is so much a part of almost all Kroetsch dialogue, whether recorded or not, is not simply the result of academic etiquette or deference accorded a renowned writer. Nor is it the product of cowed or admiring interlocutors. The avoidance is likely based on more than intellectual or ethical choice, the tone owing something to

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Kroetsch’s aversion to conflict. He tells Roy Miki, in what is easily one of the best interviews with him, and by far the most personal, what happened when he went to university: “I got a job almost immediately on the school newspaper. I wrote a couple of funny things, but I discovered I was too shy to ever be a journalist; that kind of aggressive confrontation you had to have with people was utterly alien to my nature” (Miki, “Self on Self” 118). The revulsion may have something to do with Kroetsch’s readiness to affirm others in acts of permission and agreement. Friends and colleagues all knew him as deeply modest. He told Russell Brown in 1970 that the Canadian, far from being borne on overweening assurance, wonders, “‘Do I exist at all?’” (“An Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 16). It may be this feeling of inconsequence that accounts for a Canadian readiness to embrace postmodernism, if Kroetsch is to be believed. His infamous claims about Canada as a postmodern place might find grounds in the condition he mentions: a Canadian feeling that we are in charge of nothing, that what we say doesn’t carry much weight, and that nobody’s listening anyway. If you don’t think you decide things, don’t much want to either, you may be ripe for small truths, provisional decisions, a modest advancing of arguments, a willingness to negotiate and adjust. The “little” and famously “civil” Canadian may be a postmodernist in hiding. And yet, diffident and considerate Canadian that Kroetsch may be, he wrote all those bawdy and drastic texts, fired off affronts to no end of proprieties. Good-humoured as he was, he would greatly shock his friends on the rare occasion when he would burst out in anger.

F And what of his personality? The sheer power of his presence? There he was in all those intoxicating talks—charged, adamant, allowing, wondering, charming, agitated, articulate, considerate, amused. He was bashful, flamboyant, affable, brilliant; often as not, quick, flirtatious, rejoicing. In conversation he could be gentle, bemused, brooding. At one time or another, a few beer into an evening, he would throw himself into mock indignation, surrender to outrageous fantasies. He specialized in telling stories in which he appeared as a man comically caught in folly or ineptitude. He would also nod wisely over others’ words, include his audience in his talks, listen quietly to the small overtures of friends and strangers. His personality carried the day. 264

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The world will know Kroetsch as an accomplished man of letters. His friends will know him also as warm and approving, and at times anguished. For all his renown and sophistication, he remained true to his origins, without an ounce of self-importance. Many will recognize something of him when, sharing pleasure in discovery, he would say: “Look at that! Look at that!” Some will remember his appreciation in receiving reports: “Is that right? Ttkk ttskk ttkk. Is that right?” It was never clear whether what caused his appreciation was old news to him, a startling revelation, or something so outlandish it was beyond even his powers of acceding. He invariably was courteous to those who spoke. Though Kroetsch spoke eloquently and forthrightly to literary matters in classes and in countless conferences and interviews, in person he often was reticent, even private—“neurotically private” were his words (“On Being Influenced” 17). He was a shy man, painfully so at times. The footage of him as a young boy that, in 1997, Carl Bessai included in The Impossible Dream depicts a kid who is excruciatingly bashful. A few glimpses, taken from a Kroetsch family film, show a very young Kroetsch (nine years old?) glancing out painfully from a garden or from family get-togethers. The photograph that accompanies Miki’s “Life on Life” (113) shows a barefoot eight-year-old Kroetsch, head bent and scarcely able to look up. Robert Kroetsch: Essays includes a picture of a six-yearold kid with hands dangling and head hanging (16), and one of an even younger Kroetsch sitting cross-legged and clutching the step (90). He is so uncomfortable in front of the camera, he almost cringes. Those who knew Kroetsch will attest that a lot of that self-consciousness never left him and that he would glance up, offer a small nod, a sideways smile. He would catch your eye for a second, but only a second. There, in the photo on the front of Robert Kroetsch: Essays, you can see. Kroetsch sits behind shadow, sits behind glasses, pen in the hand on the face, partly covering his face. The grin is slightly pained, aslant. The face looks a little uncomfortable, being so visible, so public. He was in profound ways private, at times enigmatic. Reluctant to speak when he was off the podium, he often drew back into memories and ruminations. And he listened. He inquired amiably of those who might have expected he would not have paid them any attention, invited them into conversation in midst of his own busy and preoccupied life. He listened as no one listened to the woes and wishes of others, would in patience and diffidence and animation hear what they, or others, were or were not saying. Among dozens of examples, here is one: “Drinking a bit, the men. And swapping stories in a way that once again makes me

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realize where the method of What the Crow Said really comes from. I listen” (The “Crow” Journals 83). And another: “This evening: packing books. Again, I must move. I go to Fort San on July 9. Tonight: coffee, capuccino [Kroetsch’s spelling], at Basil’s. Handsome people, talking. I listen” (69). Surrounded by egomaniacal wall-to-wall talkers, he would endure even them, though at times he was driven to distraction when he felt especially bludgeoned: “Went to a party. I bombed out, failed in every way. A guest, after ten minutes of monologuing at me, asked point blank if I had anything to say. I fled to the side of a pretty girl” (61). He has sometimes existed as (unwilling) designated listener: So there I was, trying to explain how TV puts you into a state of bodily passivity, into surrender, while radio allows you to (?)—and Marshall breaks in on me; Marshall McLuhans me/ ha—his rap about the telephone and no body and all that and I listened; yes, in the global village, somebody’s got to do the listening. (68) He had, in like consternation, told David Antin, “Dialog as monolog sounds like paradox but in fact is evasion. I have on occasion managed to perceive the party bore as artist, but I usually go home early from such parties” (MsC. 27.1.9.77).

F you and i /we/our/ours we we we he said all the way home Kroetsch’s propensity for bringing in others gives birth to his use of the collective pronoun. The examples are numerous and conspicuous. One can stand for hundreds of others: “Once we lost our belief in the verbal structures…once we lost that sense…we came back” (Labyrinths 143). Some might balk at the phrasing and feel that the pronoun is presumptuous, if not imperious—speaking as if for all people in all places. Almost certainly, though, Kroetsch’s use of the embracing plural is benign and provisional. It actually seeks to temper egotistical claims—I said, I did, I think, I wrote, I I I I I I—within which a speaker 266

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is inscribed as heroically stepping away from others and acting as if he were somehow superior or unbeholden to them, or existing in drastically different realms. His use of the collective pronoun seeks to affirm shared understanding in so far as some others—but not all others—may tacitly assent to a proposition, to entertaining it at least for the time being. The pronoun does not imply that our experiences are identical or unconflicted, but it does say that they are never simply unique. Kroetsch, democratic to the tips of his digits, hopes not to be speaking only for himself, or about himself; nor does he seek in imperial first person to be pronouncing or delivering truths. He wants to speak from among. The grammar of “we” and “our” in his usage is a gesture of modesty and generosity, a wanting to include and to honour others and to minimize confrontation. What Kroetsch says about Glen Sorestad would hold for him too: “He refuses to dramatize his own presence in the scene. Quite often he is submerged in the pronoun ‘we’” (Lovely Treachery 18). The habit is something Roberta Rees has felt in Kroetsch: “a genuine interest in people and ideas, and an enthusiastic humility and generosity…He offers a vision of writing that isn’t about aggrandizing the self as a literary hero so much as a daring exploration and celebration of individuals in community with each other” (qtd. in Melnynk 8).2 M-phatic The questions sprinkled through Kroetsch’s entries further reveal his position as an engaged and engaging respondent. It’s not that he turns the tables on his interlocutors, exactly, but he does seek contact: “Don Quixote has that faith right away, doesn’t he?” (172); “could become a Levi-straussian ‘raw and the cooked’ metaphor, couldn’t it?” (38); “Saying I is a wonderful release from I, isn’t it?” (209); “Whereas oral is embedded in silence, isn’t it, in a very reassuring way?” (164); “Exactly! Whether the deuce is wild or not is an incredible thing, isn’t it?” (65). These forms occur all over the place, the question marks tacked onto and into his sentences: doesn’t it? doesn’t he? couldn’t it? isn’t it? isn’t it? The structure invites others in to the conversation. It softens a claim and it solicits a response, perhaps seeks assent, if only tacit. The question is invitation to collaboration, at the very least an acknowledgement into presence. When Kroetsch speaks in disagreement with his colleagues (and he treats them as colleagues), his objections invariably are gracious and accommodating. Typically they open in concession and sometimes agreement before raising doubts: “Yes. It is embedding, but” (Labyrinths 115), “Yes, but it’s not metaphoric” (150), “That’s true.

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I have to admit that you are quite right. But” (116). On the rare occasion when Kroetsch foregoes the “yes / but” construction for a more direct negation, he still ameliorates his answer and couches it in qualifications that take the edge off his objection: “No, I wouldn’t go that far” (129). Courtesy The speaking author who enjoys such a privileged site in Labyrinths of Voice hardly occupies it in overweening or self-absorbed ways. He does speak energetically, sometimes even forcefully, particularly when he criticizes writers who seldom engage with language or challenge their readers, or when he laments readers who seek easy passage through a text. A refusal to put effort and care into language deeply affronts him: “I want the reader to play very hard and a lot of readers just say, ‘I won’t play’” (57); “One of the things I find most offensive about popular novels is that kind of invisible language. It isn’t written for people who like language; language becomes total vehicle” (165). His irritation is never felt by his interlocutor. Kroetsch respects the conventions crucial to polite and mutually purposed conversations. In almost every respect his speech is in keeping with what Geoffrey Leech calls principles of politeness: tact, generosity, approbation, and modesty (105). Judged by those terms, the Kroetsch of Labyrinths emerges as eminently civil. Leech has proposed further measures of courtesy. He names these moves “according to how they relate to the social goal of establishing and maintaining comity”: a. b. c. d.

COMPETITIVE: …ordering, asking, demanding, begging. CONVIVIAL: …offering, inviting, greeting, thanking, congratulating. COLLABORATIVE: …asserting, reporting, announcing, instructing. CONFLICTIVE: …threatening, accusing, cursing, reprimanding. (104)

Leech’s terms help us to appreciate that Kroetsch’s goodwill is hardly inevitable. Think of the sharp-tongued or impatient or opinionated or self-promoting authors who occasionally pop up in such situations. In Labyrinths Kroetsch’s speech is short on “competitive” and “conflictive” qualities and long on the “convivial.” Passages characterized by what Leech calls “collaborative” (though it would be easy to name Kroetsch’s “convivial” behaviour as “collaborative” in the more ordinary sense of the word) are few and far between, and when they do come they are hardly coercive. They are scarce because, in interview, Kroetsch seldom 268

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proffers uninvited opinions or seeks to direct others. Kroetsch’s role as subject within that genre remains largely an antiphonal one. It is Wilson and Neuman who initiate topics, however much they sought to explode the Q&A structure. Even when Kroetsch is engaged in the forwarding of positions, and even when he is faced with words that might be received as trying or provocative (88, 62, 58, 70, for example), his language remains genial (“convivial” Leech would say). The degree of amity demonstrates how much Kroetsch has chosen to underplay the role of “hero.”

F In a perceptive response to Labyrinths of Voice, David Arnason has said that Kroetsch, “who must be the most interviewed writer in the country, or at least, the writer most often asked serious questions about the craft of writing” (Rev. of Labyrinths 62), “has become one of the most significant works of art yet produced by the prairies” (63). That work has been so successful that “there has rarely been in any of the arts in this country, a figure so all pervasive or so powerful.” In Arnason’s view something more than Kroetsch’s learning and intelligence has made him widely sought and constantly cited. His personal charisma has been part of that appeal: “Robert Kroetsch has become a legendary figure. Like the characters in many of his novels, he is larger than life. His name has become a synonym for energy, audacity and verve.” So also (Arnason implies) has his modesty: “He doesn’t seem to have sought this power or to relish it, but it is there for all of that.” Kroetsch’s influence, Arnason adduces, owes something as well to the ease with which he addresses complex issues: “the answer comes in Kroetsch’s voice, earthy, full of energy, often colloquial. Kroetsch translates complex aesthetic theory into clear, concrete language,” speaks always in “the same generous, intelligent and vital voice” (63). Arnason’s remains the best explanation we have for Kroetsch’s enormous popularity as literary guru.

II: Robert Kroetsch: Essays

“All along he has been not only writing the literary essay, but also reinventing it...he has produced famous essays. They have introduced famous phrases into the literature,” says George (Bowering) Bowery in his illimitable and

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fooling-no-one style. There are no “waxed and polished fruits of his research.” He takes chances and there is “excitement in the finding.” And yet, “standing by his words, not behind them,” “he is the most readable critic” (22). Darn tootin’.

F Kroetsch writes in fear of the old certainties, the overriding patterns we inherit—climax, closure, the reassuring story. Against hierarchies and fixities he offers a coordinate imagination, inordinate in what it will attempt. A gnomic language. In fits & starts. A new criticism.

F Kroetsch with his passion for beginnings. In the beginning: these seeds, these lists, our names, our alphabets. We enter a burgeoning of tall tales and wordplay. Gardens. Fresh starts. To start with naming. Do an inventory. The things of this world: “Begin: the body writes the poem. You must stand close to the plate: even when the ball comes straight at your skull. You must be that innocent. First/ things first. You must come from a distant place, a bookless world” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 67). But not of the Old World. Not the same old words. Here now, we learn to hear. In other words, others’ words / out from under the overlay. Kroetsch shuttles between an audacious localism and a semiotics that draws him to operations (maybe) outside that knowing.

F Local: of this place. A language of reference / reverence, possibly; possibly a recording. He attends on a world “out there.” A local motive drives his writing. Semiotics: the making. A literature that is sufficient unto itself. Looks after its own best interests, loves itself. Shamelessly messes around with other texts. Preening before the mirror. & then what/ of localism? Of this? These? 270

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F To begin. With pieces. They are erratic (erotic). Phonemes tickle the fancy, stick to the tongue. Kroetsch is tricked by words, tickled pink by thoughts of what writing is or can be, graphemes trickling down the page. Think of that. His sometime distrust of explaining or of making plain. His love of making strange, playing with self, others, fooling with others. Playing the fool. Standing under the words, among them, that kind of understanding. Being over taken, taken over by words. Daring to be carried away. The perpetual dreams of origins. Where do we begin? Always / all ways. We seem only to have begun. We speed through plantings, new crops, new starts. And just wait’ll next year. How’s this for starters? Kroetsch taken with what he has found, as if for the first time speaks “of loving words. Of loving/ words” (67).

F Kroetsch dreams of naming the prairie out from under an official language that tells us we don’t matter. Don’t even exist. You have heard the one about the priest in hiding: “He’d never even heard of buffalo wallows. But more: he made considerable show of not caring that he hadn’t heard. He was educated...History as I knew it did not account for the world I lived in” (70).

F One answer is idiom, the breezy smart-ass language of prairie folk: “The bastards can’t keep us from talking” (30). To “decreate the literary tradition that binds us into not speaking the truth” (20). To desecrate the old sanctities. Always the need to uncrate the old decorations and give them the heave. Where creation begins. Always the talking back, bad-mouthing your betters. Such a rude man, he does not know his place. Colonial boy, he needs to know his place.

F Kroetsch himself, in his very criticism, violates the givens of discursive writing: “Those are moral questions as opposed to moralistic questions. The minute you

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ask answerable questions, you’re beat as a novelist” (38). On Susanna Moodie’s prissy superiority to rioting immigrants: “One has the feeling of having missed one hell of a good party” (113). Sinclair Ross’s Mrs. Bentley: “Granted, she takes the pliers” to her husband “a bit” (53). A little too folksy for “legitimate” criticism, perhaps?

F The words move rapidly, vitally. They respond to one another, open to their own music. The undermining in wordplay, in parentheses, in prying free at the virgules. Piecemeal, in “entrance / en-trance” (107). The words speed past: To be for play, for foreplay. The self, returning from the self. Look out. Lookout. (82) I suspect it has to do with the nature of the experience—in one word, often harsh (that’s two words). (74) For a while I was tempted to argue that the only way we can avoid dodging, at this point in time, is by accepting everything. After the vacuum, the plenum. Take the “Official Ballot for the Selection of Canadian Novels” (and how Canadian that is: please, no blood, no loud noises, no pissing in each other’s boots), add the glaring omissions, and let every reader exist in an existential situation. (39)

F Two voices take turns in the writing. The snappy vernacular leaps like fleas on a beagle, as vigorous and as ineradicable. It grabs the world as it is lived in, bodied forth (bawdied first, and foremost). It provokes itself, interrupts itself, wisecracks, jumps off the tracks, leaps to the spoor. It has a nose for its own energies. Then there’s the thoughtful, considered voice—the urbane sophisticate who has read his Derrida and his Barthes. That Kroetsch, the studious one, is drawn to a reflexive art, a formal diction, a more deliberate unfolding of syntax. This Kroetsch will agree that “‘Modern poetry is nondiscourse: the modern poetic act is not intentional; it is a refusal to mean”’ (Bruns 99). That’s 272

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drastic—an out-and-out no-hesitation withdrawal. Which doesn’t make any sense, really. What could it possibly mean: not to mean? Not to mean? He’s got to mean “mean” in some special sense—Universal Truth perhaps? Hence the language of paradox and near epithet—those species of resistance. Whatever is to be said for denying representation, the argument derives from reading Derrida inattentively, or failing to hear what you yourself are saying. J. Hillis Miller lays out the misapprehension in a passage worth quoting at length. Meaning may be unstable, but it doesn’t go away. Words do “mean,” because we agree, more or less, in a work-around way that they do: Derrida affirms…that we can never mean what we say or say what we mean. Whatever we say or write is broadcast or disseminated by the fundamental dehiscence of all marks. Whatever marks I make are cut off from my intention and left free to have meanings and ever new meanings in all the potentially different contexts in which they may be read. These meanings can never be controlled or seen beforehand, even though they are not limitless and are controlled or limited by the specificity of the marks in question, for example that they are in one language rather than another. This means not that intention does not exist or have effects… but that it never straightforwardly in all rigor and purity achieves what it intends. (Speech Acts in Literature 93) Language “means,” but it never can mean clearly, immediately, totally, or finally. It occupies the fuzzy spaces that surround an atom, and the indeterminate positions of its parts. We have Kroetsch’s brief admission of the problem: “The connection between the name and the named—the importance and the failure of that connection—is one of my obsessions” (71).

F So there is this violation of traditional criticism. The offences include dividing the text into sections that deny any seamlessness we may prefer. In further affront they are numbered. Then there is the gnomic voice, the terse and riddling notes. What are we to do with them?: “There is, in a grave-like frame on the bottom half of the cover of the book, a photograph. A faded picture, in black and white, against the brown

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and blue of the book’s cover.” Then, self-correcting, self-erasing—the halting and rhyming that arise in a moment by moment attention to the words: In the brown and blue. Six jazz musicians, at this point nameless, in static arrangement. Posing. Posed. Poised. Silent. As the great musician, Buddy Bolden, is silent; because we have no record (no record) of his playing. Here is the “real thing,” anticipating, refusing, creating, destroying the fiction that is to come. Photo: arrest. Killing. Going. The camera as weapon. With, but against, the novel. The positives of the negatives. Realized in acid. Ruined in acid. The reader, being read. (61) Kroetsch loves these cryptic vexations. The strategy means passing up or simply ignoring a lot of stuff. Where is the background? Thesis? Evidence? What’s become of the authorities? What about building a case, providing a simple conclusion? Where have they gone—the addings up? the transitions? the deliberations? Where is the language of logic and subordination? What’s become of an organized and gathering argument? Where are the assurances of careful assessment? Where has all this gone among paradox and ellipses? What ease or clarity is to be found in the jerky one-word sentences? Where is the structure of explanation? for example for instance as an illustration to illustrate specifically as a case in point in particular in general as such to take for example as ____ says according to ____ where _____ proposes the following actually further additionally furthermore again for all intents and purposes taking into consideration incidentally also indeed in fact besides lastly equally it is important to note likewise similarly by contrast moreover finally what is more not to overlook not to mention not to forget above all especially that is in fact undoubtedly surely most important quite likely taking into account considering 274

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in other words obviously that is to say under certain circumstances inasmuch as up to a point indeed put another way as a matter of fact in this case in any case therefore as a consequence for this reason as a result hence because logically as has been suggested thus indeed consequently subsequently accordingly as already mentioned as has been shown in conclusion as can be concluded All this gone missing in action. Laurie Ricou, in “The Majesty of His Loyal Apposition,” muses on “all the function words which apposition elides, the connections, and clarifications, which a more linear prose would make explicit”—the very words I have just listed. The very words—“markers” is what Ricou calls them—are “so often hidden, unmarked…that their collective directives, imperatives, guides to the reader, are avoided” (65). In peeks and glimpses, Kroetsch raids the disreputable and taps the unspeakable. He seeks the choked off, speaks his mind. A mad verbal play abounds, ferocious speculation runs free. Hunches and guesses. Provocations too. To call forth voices. Prevarications. Vocal. Local.

F The structure goes lumpy as kneaded dough. The argument tumbles from one section to another. Claims appear without substantiation or linkage. Bold claims and indecent generalizations proliferate. Examples are scarce. A snubbing of academic protocol.

F How personal and idiosyncratic they are, these pieces. There is nothing lofty, nothing heavy or distanced, nothing authoritarian about them. In them we make do without the “objective” scholar weighing and placing—heavy, distanced,

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surveying, summoning a large body of scholarship and entering into acts of agreement, qualification, extension, dissent; but showing always explicit and commanding knowledge of the scholarship and weighty replies to named interlocutors. Kroetsch’s criticism eludes the scholar-figure that he parodies in The Studhorse Man, a biographer buried in a fussy gathering of books and index cards.

F Then there are photos. What is their provenance, their semiosis? “With Smaro Kamboureli at Lantzville, 1981.” Looking beachly. A drink in the hand. Another: “in wagon leading a studhorse for breeding, Heisler, Alberta, 1932.” Well, he did tell that story. “Heisler, Alberta, 1934.” Lone boy on a step. Alone. Kroetsch in his perpetual monkdom. “Breakup at Mills Lake, N.W.T. 1949.” The first novel. Macho writer on a rugged expedition. The inter texts / inter chapters. He, there, person ally / in his writing, provisionally. And yet not. He forever ducking and feinting, hiding and deflecting.

F And the aphorisms. Persuasive. They act in their own form of power, their expectation of agreement. Aphorism—to move away from, to bind or to detach. The persuasive force of neatness, its symmetry. Its poetry. Its power. How do you quarrel with a proverb? News from the Heisler Oracle: the penis: external, expandable, expendable; the vagina: internal, eternal. The maleness verges on mere absence. The femaleness verges on mystery: if it is a space that is not a space. External space is the silence that needs to speak, or that needs to be spoken. It is male. The having spoken is the book. It is female. It is closed. (47) This is brilliant, surely, memorable, explosive. A wonderful, stunning poetry. By any measure, it speaks an amazing and powerful rhetoric. It is bold, exempt from equivocation or substantiation, devoted to intense expression. The brief definitions, suspended within emphatic halts, are enigmatic. Eli Mandel, 276

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Kroetsch wrote approvingly, “dares to be wise, enigmatic, epigrammatic” and “he dares to become the all-journeying shaman, in a time when the tradition of wisdom literature has come to mock itself” (Lovely Treachery 13). Knotted with wisdom. Or not. Not that we could know for sure. For who can say, who reply in question or demurral to the condensed syntax of stress and duration? There’s no dislodging it. What room is there to enter and move among the words? No wonder the passage hits with such force. And then there’s this one, once again closely related, equally dazzling, every bit as striking, most famous of all Kroetsch sayings: The basic grammatical pair in the story-line (the energy-line) of prairie fiction is house: horse. To be on a horse is to move: motion into distance. To be in a house is to be fixed: a centering unto stasis. Horse is masculine. House is feminine. Horse: house. Masculine: feminine. On: in. Motion: stasis. A woman ain’t supposed to move. Pleasure: duty. The most obvious resolution of the dialectic, however temporary, is in the horse-house. Not the barn (though a version of resolution does take place there), but whore’s-house... But the hoo-erhouse of western mythology is profane; against it the author plays the sacred possibility of the garden. (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 49) The words are based on two books—Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House. Refusing causation, renouncing caution, disregarding logical sequence, spurning illustration. A bunch of inspired notes, really—jokes, meditations, jottings, sayings, contentions, enthused guesses, volatile suppositions, canny intuitions, magnetizing rhymes. This is criticism with the tightness and force of poetry, Kroetsch’s own kind of wisdom poetry, a fascination with words that skitter and spark and fit. Harold Innis. Marshall McLuhan. Hédi Bouraoui. Their crabbed notes, audacious leaps, disjunctions all over the place. By their very brevity, the sheer force of what is new and compressed in them, they (ironically) ask, even expect, our assent. The rhetoric makes the statements strong and noticeable. The forays are wildly inciting and they can easily catapult us into wonder and rejoicing and, if endless scores of responses count, they dramatically do. Their “halo of literary manifesto” (Bertacco 65) can also fling us into adamant objection. That’s the risk. What the apothegms don’t

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do particularly well, I think, is to invite a quiet conversation or a slow mulling over. Much of the time, as we have seen, Kroetsch’s speech is provisional and soliciting. These entries act in quite another way. They are more striking, but they are less accommodating too. Faced with such emphatic and unqualified utterances, such sparkling and stirring expression, such dazzling and eccentric claims, there doesn’t seem much room left to readers other than (excited) approval or (irritated) refusal. Northrop Frye could have been talking about Kroetsch when he found in another text “a series of gnarled epigrammatic and oracular statements that are not to be argued about but must be accepted and pondered, their power absorbed by a disciple or reader” (The Great Code 212). Edict and ordinance set the utterances apart. The aphorism induces assent, excites readers to surprise and sudden sense of rightness of fit (that’s right! that’s perfect!). Is it not gratifying in roundedness, in expression pithy? It sounds compelling in its firmness and concision. Its articulation is complete, nothing to add, nothing to take out. The edict acts above all in verbless sentences within which it arrives as a declaration of being, virtually unauthored by a mortal (he somewhere behind the dazzling words): “Horse: house. Masculine: feminine. On: in. Motion: stasis.” Kroetsch has put the words through the wringer. Unencumbered with subject, undiluted by adjectives or adverbs, the precept comes into existence as if delivered from the mouth of god. It is the god’s own truth. It so neatly encapsulates things there seems no call or opportunity to say more. Explanation would be clumsy and unnecessary, equivocation profaning. The masked agency, the balance in phrasing, the repeated stress patterns, the strong rhymes and corresponding syllables, the confidence in diction, the assuredness in punctuation (the exempla beautifully marked into equivalencies by period and colon), concreteness in image, flair in metaphor—all these confer authority and memorability on the statement. The brilliant style gives weight and durability: as if the few words stood, eminently quotable, somewhere beyond mere utterance. The very qualities that make the expressions so striking are what shelter them from objection.

F Against a penchant for aphorism a deep distrust of authority. The digging under or around it. Writing is a rummaging for “authenticity.” The badger was the 278

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model. The naming, then: “4. Dear Novelist: Please make us feel at home. The naming. The domesticating” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 43). And more gently: “The mapping. The naming. The unlearning so that we might learn: the unnamed country. How to see the vision, how to imagine the real” (30).

F Then there is the listing. A love of lists, he, RK, in a “desperate need to count, to list, to catalogue” (14). There is an awful lot of this in Kroetsch, ampersands without end.

F We also are asked to consider a move from overriding fictions and polite voices into document. The critical voice becomes more helpful, more prepared to cite, to explain and to clarify: It is a kind of archaeology that makes this place, with all its implications, available to us for literary purposes...Archaeology allows the fragmentary nature of the story, against the coerced unity of traditional history. Archaeology allows for discontinuity. It allows for layering. It allows for imaginative speculation. (76) Finally, archaeology subverts the singular narrative. It offers the kinds of bits and pieces that characterize Kroetsch’s discontinuous prose: Poems in which archaeology supplants history; an archaeology that challenges the authenticity of history by saying there can be no joined story, only abrupt guesswork, juxtaposition, flashes of insight. A perpetual delay as we recognize the primacy of the forthcoming and as yet unmade discovery. (93)

F Robert Kroetsch: Essays—ten years of writing (many pieces given first as talks)—moves towards its fullest engagement with text and theory in “For

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Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem,” and “Carnival and Violence: A Meditation,” where Kroetsch pulls into enlarged understanding many of his long-standing concerns as he has found them addressed in Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin.3 On the long poem, first, a condensed understanding: Delay, in the contemporary long poem (that necessary resisting towards the condition of art), has devolved upon the language itself, instead of into new resources or narrative. The language has become so foregrounded that the dialectic with narrative very nearly fails. (107–08) Then a piece inspired by Bakhtin, naming Susanna Moodie and Thomas Halliburton in their offended responses to carnival. Everywhere in Kroetsch’s writing he celebrates an eruption of speech and sex and laughter. In grand and bawdy passion his characters poke their noses and other parts into circles where they oughtn’t to be.

F Wonderful insights everywhere. A lot of inside information. An inside job, these erotics. The “bookness of book” in Ondaatje’s work, Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter, we learn, impedes narrative—“to violate the consolation of narrative” is how Kroetsch describes it (61). Take what happens when Buddy Bolden attacks Pickett in Slaughter: What makes the slicing off of the nipple a violent act is not simply the act itself. But more: Ondaatje refuses to give the scene a traditional beginning, middle and end. His refusal of form releases the experience of violence into the reader’s experience of reading. The violent act is not contained, manipulated, accounted for. (62) It may not be apparent how a poem could exist without form. Surely it has form, it simply doesn’t have a readily discernible narrative line. Kroetsch’s shorthand implies as much. Again, as they say, there is more. These brief Kroetschean arguments, packed with meaning, are well distilled. 80 proof. Proof against sobriety. 280

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F Sometimes, even for the pleased or the persuaded, the writing becomes too opaque, too esoteric. There are places when a reader must feel simply lost beyond recovery. What can be made of these words from “The Continuing Poem”? The self, returning from the self. Look out. Lookout. Do not feed the apocalypse. Metamorphoses please. Maybe the long poem replaces the old kitchen cabinet. (82) The lines arrive right out of the blue, jammed, incongruous, mystifying. What’s needed possibly, is a little more help. a little old fashioned explaining. a little hand-holding.

F What we do get is an excited reader who refuses to play it safe, to be tired and true. Listen to the hilarious flare of indignation: there is so much half-assed-prose in Canadian writing, so much surrender to subject matter. There are writers for whom it would be an embarrassment, even a disgrace, to write an interesting sentence. There is something in our literature that is a linguistic equivalent to the national crossing of the legs. (44) Kroetsch charges into texts with an ecstasy for ungodly speech that leaves us reeling. He rewrites the rules, flaunts the proprieties, produces a jumpy shinynew criticism. These are statements written as if he were actually having fun. Cared how he spoke. As if it mattered. He is badly over-texted, no doubt about it. Indulgent, the high-minded will say, and they will be with us, always. Indecent, they will sniff. They are not amused.

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III: A Likely Story

Years later (in 1995) Kroetsch gathered in A Likely Story an odd assortment of material, including what in the collection are three anomalous pieces—a long poetic elegy (“Poem for My Dead Sister”), a rollicking doggerel poem (“Family Reunion Cowboy Poem”), and a complex, challenging, and intergeneric piece of name-it-what-you-will (“The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart,” which later expanded and transmogrified into The Hornbooks of Rita K). Those three entries are out of keeping because the other parts, seven in all, consist of talks about literary life in a fairly consistent style. In a gesture towards situating the material, Kroetsch wrote a mock promotion (now to be found in the University of Calgary archives) for the editors and staff at Red Deer College Press, allowing that they “will guess that I had fun composing it.” In beguiling whim he cannot resist outrageously praising the book: “A Likely Story is a (literally) astonishing assemblage that contains confessional personal essays, one of the principal elegiac poems of our time, a cowboy poem, and speculative pieces that defy classification.” None of the items included in A Likely Story was prepared for learned journals. Other than the quirky “primary” pieces, they were talks, and sometimes presentations, produced between 1989 and 1994, that spoke about Kroetsch’s own writing and that of a few others. All of them were peculiar as literary commentary. Before presenting one of them, “I Wanted to Write a Manifesto,” Kroetsch said, “It took me a long time to find a genre, or actually a space between genres, that enabled me to say what I want to begin to say and proceed to say for the next few years” (17 Nov. 1989, videotape). Despite their erudition and sophistication, the essays are not what we normally would think of as scholarly, and to an extent they are therefore like most Kroetsch statements on writing. They are amusing, lively, anecdotal. They are full of illuminating and colourful stories about Kroetsch’s writing life. It’s not obvious what to make of them generically, though they are feeling their way into a mode that is as beguiling as it is affective. In a way they are archaic—versions of belles-lettres. They can also be read and perhaps can be better understood as tantalizing ventures into postmodern criticism.

F One of Kroetsch’s very best talks, and a remarkable statement in its own right, “Becoming a Writer Is Unbecoming: My Twenty Years in the USA” (MsC. 282

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775/04.25 30.46), never made its way into the collection. Kroetsch may have hoped to include it, as it matches in tone and purpose the essays in literary biography that are there, and it fills in a lot of his personal and literary history.4 Whether there were institutional obstacles, practical difficulties, problems with timing (as seems most likely), or some other reason for its absence (the manuscript is dated January 26, 1996, and A Likely Story came out in 1995), it is not there. Humorous, illuminating, the “Unbecoming” piece remains regrettably unpublished. It includes more than one story that is well worth reporting. It is the early 1950s. There he sits, at a desk in Goose Bay, Labrador, or perhaps a pub. He is advisor to American airmen who are thinking of attending university after they leave the air force. A young professor, a fellow Canadian it turns out, shows up at the air base to teach a course, and soon befriends Kroetsch. The professor takes to advising him on an academic future. He “told me that I was confusing place and entropy. His statement sounded so perceptive that I didn’t dare ask what it meant” (4). As a result, “I went to the U.S. and I stayed there, sometimes restlessly, sometimes entropically, for a long time” (9).

F Sometimes the pieces in A Likely Story speak with unaffected and touching language. Sometimes, in tautology, in maxim and epigram, they offer a confident knowing: “To wait is to alter violently the momentum and purpose of Western culture” (19); we may engage in “those strategies of recital we call invention” (13–14). In pun and puzzle, in paradox and riddle, the style constructs Kroetsch as a wise and entertaining figure. Kroetsch loves these sorts of statements—the ones that offer perplexing definitions in brief and unshaken terms. At times his talk turns to an inspired language of myth and metaphor: We persist in the conviction that the author begins from a blank sheet of paper. This assumption has held among writers and readers at least since the beginning of the Romantic Period. Tabula rasa. Ab ovo. Sprung full-grown from the brow of Zeus. Making something out of nothing. The writer as creator. Virgin Mother or Big Bang…The very notion bestows upon the author a kind of godhead. (148–49, ellipsis in original)

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These moments are compelling. All of them represent lively departures from well-known modes of scholarship and new directions in an already unorthodox critical practice. The mix of memory, metaphor, and analysis engenders a writing that few in Canada have attempted or achieved.

F The new book is rich in metalingual and metaliterary understanding. That response is not new for Kroetsch, but it becomes more frequent and amplified. The trope of Canada as blank sheet, or as full and already-written page, is the most striking and the most skillfully articulated. Its prominence indicates how much Kroetsch is now working to sustain a figure. The talk of empty paper amplifies his already acute understanding of multiple colonizings and the struggles a Canadian must go through in coming into language. The vividness with which he identifies what is blunted and unsaid, alongside what is established and already spoken, intensifies the expression. On page after page Kroetsch writes what it means to live and to write in an overrun or simply invisible culture. I remember the books of my childhood that did not even mention the prairie world I lived in. Full of words, those pages were blank...I realized I had not two pages to write upon but rather two margins to write in. I could write alongside, with and against, the blackly printed page of our inheritance. I could write alongside, with and against, the unspeakable white glare of what I call…North. (96) How does one write with and against that [full or empty] page?… Tradition has created much of the fullness...It is the fullness of that page, its overflow, not its emptiness, that enables Morag Gunn to write, even as she is threatened with a silencing. (152) Having something against which to write, crippling though that can be, is still easier, perhaps, than starting from scratch.

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F What virtually ensures Kroetsch’s welcome as narrator and commentator is the manner in which he presents himself. He wants to bring his erudition into play but he also is modest in his instincts. He is repelled at the notion of the Guru or the Great Man who supplies truth and edict. He has no interest in obfuscation or intimidation, not a whiff of the imperious or the condescending. He will not bludgeon us with jargon, nor weary us with half-page sentences, nor bore us with infinitesimal arguments that could put even a lively brain into seizure. He remains suspicious of turgid talk and jaw-breaking polysyllables, wants also to avoid the self-satisfied authority and the cultivated talk of the “gentleman.” His narrative style; his buzzing insights and jumpy idioms; his leaps of fancy; his creation of an attractive and disarming narrator winningly aware of auditors; and, ironically, his avoidance of long and detailed exegesis—all those qualities make the essays readable, entertaining, and memorable. The statements are advanced with such forthright vigour, such winning turn of phrase, and such good humour it would seem almost a failure in decency to feel in reservation anything more than small quibbles better kept to ourselves.

F Alongside Labyrinths of Voice, A Likely Story may seem lightweight to readers hoping for some muscle-flexing, but it proves to be no less knowing. Labyrinths had been committed to questions of theory and it was (for Kroetsch) fairly low-key. Essays derives from heady times and the vigorous interventions of a writer exploding into his prime at the heart of a new and vital writing. In those two books Kroetsch was trying to open a space for what most urgently mattered to him. The talks in A Likely Story are gentler, less urgent, less embattled, and they provide, if this is possible, an even more personable Kroetsch. A Likely Story offers a more retrospective understanding that is less drawn to argument and advocacy. The passage of time probably accounts for some of the differences, though the variations may have just as much to do with a shift in genre. In A Likely Story there are no immediate auditors to ask questions, one after the other, with little or no forewarning. Kroetsch is under no obligation to respond on the spot, nor to overcome inertia or prejudice. The occasions position him in the ease of

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his standing. He is assured that he has been able to prepare his words, initiate speech and, without interruption or distraction, deliver the words he has already chosen.

auto / bio / graph Kroetsch names his recurring subject in the subtitle, “the writing life,” but he also hints that A Likely Story will be a variation on a genre whose terms he calls into doubt and whose purposes he finds unrealizable. One of the epigraphs, in flamboyant paradox, announces, “I am attempting to write an autobiography in which I do not appear” (7). The claim is rendered somewhat doubtful in as much as it is attributed to Rita Kleinhart, yet another Kroetsch double and perplexing protagonist in one of the pieces. Other comments on autobiography circulate uncertainly through the Kleinhart material. Notes at the back of A Likely Story add to the confusion: “This is (not) an autobiography. These fugitive pieces, with only minor exceptions, are concerned with the writing life, not with the personal life, of the writer” (217).5 Quite why “the writing life…of the writer” would not be autobiographical, or has not been often autobiographical, is perplexing. Kroetsch, however, does admit to some such belief: “The writing of this talk [for Augsburg, Germany] gave me the notion of assembling a collection of pieces on my writing life” (218). The book, subtitled in modest lower case, is highly autobiographical then; and it is, and is not, an autobiography. He resists certain kinds of autobiography—presumably those that would attempt an explanatory narrative.6 It seems reasonable, nevertheless, to expect in the Kroetsch texts some version or versions of the person named Robert Kroetsch.

F The speaker in A Likely Story is unhurried, unharried by time or auditors. He is also more expansive, and his talks unfold in larger spaces than once they did. In the new talks he speaks in affable and less demonstrative tones. He appears to be more ruminative, as one might expect of a character in an autobiography, constructed well into an author’s career, whatever kind of autobiography this may be. The Kroetsch to be found in A Likely Story is, perhaps for generic and historical reasons, more self-exposing and more self-correcting. The arguments also get fuller and more patient analysis, though narration may be the better 286

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word. The statements about culture and writing, above all about prairie culture and writing, are more realized than are any of those to be found in the earlier Labyrinths of Voice. The new pieces, for all their idiosyncrasies, consolidate Kroetsch’s thinking around issues of hindered and arrested speech. A number of talks reflect on the North as place of challenge and permission for the writer. So there is that figure—the thoughtful man who is always conscious of his letters.

The Old Sweet Talker A Likely Story is fraught with knowledge and wisdom, but what marks the criticism as unusual and especially appealing is the role that Kroetsch assumes. The orality reaches an especially high level now and A Likely Story increases the engagement with audience. Speculative, wise, retrospective, explanatory though the talks may be, they reveal a persona who is predominantly comical, personal, digressive, and given to stories that take us in. The persona he constructs is confiding, self-mocking, and more than occasionally stumped. He offers a version of self that is easily distracted, forgetful, prone to error, and amusingly smitten with his own expression. The strategies almost immediately ingratiate himself with his listeners. More reassuring perhaps is the fact that he is generous with virtually everyone. He likes to pretend to know less that he does, and in his friendly “reminders” he lets us see ourselves as perhaps more informed and less forgetful than we are apt to be. The Kroetsch who here ruminates over his preoccupations—anecdotally, passionately, humorously, distractedly—puts us at ease. We are invited to bask in his compliments, take heart in his confidence, and enjoy the skill of his performance. He moves with such grace and flair that few could feel bored or intimidated. Or slighted. What else are we to do with his professions of unknowing, his frequent claims of being a lifelong naïf who has grown befuddled by adults? He openly avows that “Bafflement, all my life, has been one of my versions of marginalia” (94) and unsparingly provides evidence against himself. One pattern involves acts of second thought, as though the speaker were making adjustments on the fly: “For some reason I thought of Ed Basil—or perhaps I only think of him now” (63); “Or is / the other way round? I / forget” (114). Within minutes the fessing up is repeated, slightly relined and reworded: “Or is it…” (118). In like manner, Kroetsch lets it be known “I’m troubled that I cannot begin to guess

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how old I was at the time” (41) and with equal trust reports that “I recently found on one of the pages in one of the pads I carried North” some particular bit of information (24). He now has “no recollection of the writing” of a passage (27) and is almost confounded when scanning records he had kept to restitute a forgotten past: “In my notes for 1950 I’ve written” (31), “It says in my notes that” (29). The present “I” goes in search of a different “I” who has disappeared down a tunnel into a past from which he sends strange messages to himself. In similar absentmindedness the Kroetsch of A Likely Story in mid talk says, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this” (57). The aside (rueful? abashed? amused?) reappears in a second talk: “I don’t know why I’m telling you this” (96). Whatever the credibility of the profession, the speaker has no qualms about presenting editions of his earlier selves in all their flustered misreadings. His account of heading into the North produces what appear now, in retrospect, to have been dubious motives. The older narrator construes the plans as misdirected: “I do confess, almost blushingly, that my generation still believed strongly that one should go out and have experience.” The italics puts “experience” into a gentle derision which he fully expects his auditors will forgivingly share with him, or at the very least permit him. He adds in parody of Victorian manner words that further mock that now-ridiculous faith: “—and that mostly of a mean and miserable sort” (23). What at one time he saw as estimable now seems simply laughable, though the humour is warm and affectionate. “The logic of that intention seems less evident today than it did in 1948” (13), he protests mildly, but “The sheer folly of this will be clearer if I remind you that” (15). Having established the wrong-headedness, Kroetsch lets it be known that he “delivered to that airport an innocence colossal in its magnitude” (18). The trope is wickedly clever. A personal condition is transferred onto an outer and portable object, and then magnified out of all proportion. The wrongheaded view had become an encumbering piece of luggage, which it was the speaker’s unwitting burden to carry and properly to dispose of. An accident of the psyche turns out to be a misdirected item. More disarming is the fact that only recently has the narrator been brought into adequate understanding: “Only years later did I recognize,” “I did not at the time know” (128). This former self, though victim of the older speaker’s drollery, emerges as someone so susceptible to mishap, so easily buffaloed Kroetsch might have said, so surely discombobulated, it seems only right to say that he exists beyond guile. The construction is deft and sure. 288

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The humour turns frequently to a mock indignation that is self-exonerating. What, for example, becomes of the Kroetsch who is infamous for his thirsts? How is he to admit his frailties and yet to justify himself? Easily. Here’s where he begins: “To be honest, I was desperate to have a drink.” A dubious proposition perhaps for the steadier among us. A little incriminating, you’d think. Then comes the immediate gloss: “One internalizes the dominant conventions and becomes their slave” (89). It is a slick and winning dodge. In one tongue-in-cheek sentence he catapults himself from agent to victim. Not that he himself opted for a drink, mind you, it was pretty much foisted upon him. Thrust wouldn’t be too strong a word. The world bullies you into having its way with you. The literary autobiography goes through other warpings. The persona in A Likely Story, he would have us know, is given to neither subterfuge nor maneuvering. He makes a show of construing himself as one to be trusted, ethically, if not epistemologically. As if he didn’t have designs upon us—courting our goodwill and counting on our compliance.

F The pretense of having led a life of harmless deceit and blundering misjudgement permits other ploys. “And I caution you,” the smiling narrator writes, “that I use [Kroetsch’s word] to, as a boy, make up sins so the priest wouldn’t think I was lying” (60). A typical Kroetschean admission, this—a warning against duplicity that in disarming frankness alerts us to a habitual capacity for deceit. Further: “I should caution the reader that I’m renowned for my ability to misread the question—even my own—and for my ability to answer the question by indirection, misdirection, deferral, delay, rhetorical dodges, postmodern artifice, sexual innuendo, and just plain outright lies” (73). Who could be more forthright? He’s come clean, laid all his cards on the table. We’re forewarned, not to be taken in. No way can we feel mislead or taken advantage of. But we know better. That’s part of the game. We don’t trust the guy, not even when he’s telling us we can’t trust him. Not even when, telling the story of an inspiring teacher and deftly trying to use the story as exoneration for his own subsequent behaviour, he claims, shades of the Sad Phoenician, that he is only looking out for the (“red-headed”) ladies: “I’ve tried, sometimes by feigning and deferring, sometimes by self-erasure and self-mockery, to please each and

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every one of them” (42). It’s been one self-denial after the other. He proceeds in this spirit—joking and punning, showing off and hiding—to please us and win us over. He knows we will make allowances, for is he not winning in admission, honest in his vulnerabilities, needful of our understanding as members in a shared and erring humanity? The rhetorician plays on our goodwill. Would we not accept and confirm him in a we-ness when he comes to us in open admission? Is not his own reputation buffer to less generous thoughts?

F In an old school workbook now stored in the University of Calgary archives, Kroetsch, as if in catechism, has several times instructed himself that the speaker must do his best to interest his listeners. He has added in another workbook, “English II: Language,” many notes on how to prepare and how to present material. They stress the need in giving talks to be clear and entertaining for the audience’s sake, specifically to make eye contact and speak to the audience, not simply in front of it (MsC. 860/09.4 1.1).

F This rhetor certainly knows how to present himself. The comedy is perfectly evident but it may be wise to think of it as instances of that old Kroetsch standby—self-ridicule. The moves are charming to listener and reader alike: here is a man who is not jealous of his standing, nor given to flattering versions of himself. In one incident he names himself as a “spoiled brat” who, though he has few responsibilities, has thrown himself into a snit simply because he has been asked actually to lend a hand: “The walk to the barn was long and tedious, and I was being asked to interrupt a busy life of my own, even if I had appeared to be doing nothing. I felt a certain resentment” (45). The disparity between the kid’s self-pity and the adult’s amusement with his once-self could hardly have been handled more elegantly. Kroetsch is so pleased with narratives of personal error that he tells a lot of them: “I entered into a secret dialogue with a strange and uneasy voice that turned out to be my own” (59). Fancy that: a distracted Kroetsch listening to a voice and for inestimable stretches replying to a voice, that, startled, he 290

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eventually realizes must have been his own. The liaison, as Kroetsch constructs it, is so transgressive the kid has to keep it hidden and its voice unheard. Comically furtive, they carried on, boy and voice, the two of them. Kroetsch takes pleasure in telling the story of the artist-in-hiding, hearing voices, halftetched with otherness. And then comes the sudden understanding (ludicrous, but profound too) that he has been talking with his own unknown and disturbing self all along. The stories are part of a ruse in which Kroetsch plays at getting caught out or surprised by life. The narrative repeats itself in the young Kroetsch’s social life, including a scene when an earlier self gets tutored in the rituals of grown-up males. In one memorable scene the boy is introduced to the ceremonies of drinking. Kroetsch actually provided the narrative for the first time before a group of wine experts in the famed Mosel wine-growing region of Germany: The wine in the barn, unlike the same wine in the house, was expected to have kick. Kick, I have since learned, is not generally thought of as a key word in the vintner’s lexicon. Professor Zirker, for instance, did not assure us that the delicate and precious Riesling that he offered as a “starter” would have kick. He used other towards. Erotic words that had to do with leg and nose. Kick was unambiguously a word from the margin and for the margin. When you knocked back your glass of wine in the barn you made a face, and then you made a noise that was free of the usual signifying phonemes. (93) How typical this is of A Likely Story—the younger self as comical ingénue and the older self as cunning narrator. There could be no wittier way of depicting the sounds of the rural drinkers, himself included, than to speak of their lacking “the usual signifying phonemes.” Who, hearing Kroetsch’s account, would not guffaw at its skilled juxtaposition of names and practices? Who would have supposed that the uncouth utterances (“noise”) of the Heisler wine-gulpers would surpass (be “free of”) the finely tuned speech of the European oenophiles; or that the culture of wine in Heisler would be a matter of unusual phonemes? Kroetsch craftily speaks of wine—its conventions, etiquette, vocabulary, its arts and its prescribed narratives at home and abroad. The protocols for drinking in the barn squat far from the exquisite discriminations observed at Professor Zirker’s table. Yet Zirker himself becomes a winning and dangerous character in

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the comedy. Kroetsch winkingly decides that Professor Zirker in his unassuming way is a worker of borders, margins, and peripheries. In centuries-old Europe, he who knowingly makes discreet adjustments in the narrative of serving and sampling, becomes affectionately enlisted as a radical against the imperial claims of centre. One might assume that one or two instances of personal folly would be plenty, but this is Kroetsch and so the strategy continues. A second version of misfitting yields still more embarrassing information: “Let me say [the narrator agreeably says] that in a community where baseball was more of an obsession than was hockey I was not a gifted player; even I, in fleeting moments of self-knowledge, recognized as much” (140). Though the young man is named as prone to think rather too well of himself, the treatment again is so tolerant that it lifts much of the sting: the young Kroetsch was not a “bad” or “unskilled” player, he simply was “not a gifted” player. The adult Kroetsch gazes back almost indulgently at the earlier version of himself. Who when reading those words, “in fleeting moments of self-knowledge,” could not smile with the narrator, reminded of our own manoeuvres to preserve our self-esteem?

F Coimbra, Portugal May 31, 1995 10:30 a.m. Last night: Kroetsch tells us about growing up, he’s been speculating on what it’s meant for Canadian writers to be born into the end of WW II. (He is preparing for his “D-Day” talk we realize, years later.) Tell us that story about when you played baseball, Bob. He tells the story very quietly. I was just a kid when the war was on and I played first base and then when the war was over they just drove up the lane one day and said where is the uniform? The men had come back from the war and they took the uniform. They didn’t explain or ask me to play, they just took the uniform and I didn’t play any more. He tells the story simply but he is hurt by the memory still. That big kid throwing his heart out in your novel, was that you?

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No, no, he says, putting it aside, no that wasn’t me...Couldn’t possibly have been me his voice says, and you can hear how much that would have meant to him, what the story must be for him.

F But I kind of liked the big dumb scared kid who was out there on the mound, throwing his heart at us. (The Words of My Roaring 100)

F The narrator in A Likely Story is touchingly flawed, reassuringly imperfect. He is aware of his faults and perfectly willing to admit to them, those very human failings, rather quick to report them as a matter of fact. He does so trusting that his audience will not turn on him. And so he speaks in a voice that expects forbearance. We understand one another, it says; you will understand my Chaucerian friends, understand and, when I tell you this, make allowance. What, his posturings seem to ask, what are these but negligible mistakes—small slippages that you too will recognize as part of our own natures? The ruse is disarmingly effective.

F Johnny Backstrom in The Words of My Roaring: The chuckles were intimate and warm, like those of old companions forgiving a foible. They understood about wives and foibles. Maybe that’s what worked on me—that touch of intimacy. That little touch of genuine mercy. (92)

F The stance that Kroetsch assumes in his affable and unassuming manner can be named within classical rhetoric. Walter Nash identifies the introduction or “exordium” as the place where the speaker



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would do his best to make himself agreeable to his audience. The rhetorical manoeuvres this involved are still recognizable: …flattering allusion to the eminence of the auditors, …the speaker’s confession of his own inadequacy, …the appeal for goodwill and a fair hearing, …the identification of the speaker’s personality and interests with those of the audience. (9) It is these parts that Kroetsch, though he poses as innocent, ingeniously acts, milks really, in the talks that became A Likely Story. The rollicking and explosive energy which reels through Kroetsch’s novels has here actually subsided and a voice of amity comes more to the fore. “Let me begin with wine” (A Likely Story 87), he says simply, politely, in words that bring him close to seeking our blessing. Friend among friend, the comedian is always there with us, he is one of us. The modalities show a conciliation that would probably put listeners at ease. “I suppose the trick is” (16), he allowingly says and in like vein, inviting trust, elsewhere admits “and believe me, I have never been one to fly by instruments” (23). Showing confidence in his auditors and an apparent need to take them into his confidence, he writes simply “It is more likely, I would guess now” (23). Reasonably assured of our goodwill he amends his own terms without any great fear of being called out: “cranberries (mooseberries, she called them)” (30).

F The humour persists. Even as Kroetsch tempers his language—“‘Unsuspecting bride’ is my expression: it was not Thelma’s” (62)—he teases. When in avuncular mood he pretends to scold, his language is so droll it is immediately apparent he is having fun with the role. Take the place where his voice floods with life as he enlarges upon the sensual qualities of a boulder: “In my exact memory it is a composition of pure and erotic curves. Lying where it did in the buffalo grass, it invited my darkest complicity” (49). The sheer verve and extravagance is remarkable. The large boulder that he describes lay near his childhood farm. This stone, he tells us in animation so sudden that is at once risky and comic, was no ordinary stone. Not this stone. This stone was striking for its size and its singularity. Above all it was noteworthy for its unearthly earthly properties: 294

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It had been transported hundreds or even thousands of miles by glaciation, that boulder. I remember exactly what it looked like, and yet it cannot possibly have looked the way I remember it...In my exact memory it is a composition of pure and erotic curves. Lying where it did in the buffalo grass, it invited my darkest complicity. At its highest, at what I must call the inverse swoop of its top curve it rose almost as high as my waist. (49)7 Kroetsch adroitly supplies the terms of the unusual encounter. His claims for “exact” memory inform the passage at every turn and allow us in on the fiction, ask us to humour him. A folksiness felt in the double subject (“It” and “that boulder”) furthers the disarming effect, as does Kroetsch’s readiness to measure the world by his own bodily proportions (“almost as high as my waist”). There, surely, is the language of truth—that high. He quickly escalates the claims. He presents the encounter as kinetic and the stone as so alive it could be breathing: it lies in the grass, it invites the boy, it swoops through the space, it beckons and invites. The audacity of the trope might seem a little much, or at least out of keeping in Kroetsch. Strangely enough, he actually uses a lot of personification in his writing, despite his frequently declared suspicions of metaphor. When he aestheticizes the boulder (its “composition” of curves and “inverse swoop” in “its top curve”), and speaks in the apparent frankness of confession (the boy acts in his “darkest complicity”), the moves are so transparently fanciful they invite our connivance in the game. Is that right? we might in Kroetschean manner ask. Is that right? Kroetsch cleverly chooses the verbs of permission (“it invited”) and the terms of compulsion (“what I must call” and “complicity”) in his attempts to win us over. He who begs our assent claims he himself has had no choice in the matter. Under felt coercion and temptation he reports merely what he must, did what he had to do. It may be a bit odd, if not embarrassing, but what is he to do? What can he do? Who, having heard such things, could be unmoved or doubting? In mock protest Kroetsch does his work on us: “You must abandon all your assumed notions about boulders.” What we have to realize is that that rock was “smooth without being shiny; its remembered color reminds me of the bodies I have seen on the curved, lubricious, hot beaches of Greek islands” (49). Lubricious rock? Salacious stone? This lumpy old prairie rock likened to the worldly sophisticates of European beaches? A rock that lures to secret and joyful

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liaisons? The notion is outrageous. He gets awfully familiar with that rock. And yet the figure pleases, convinces. The compulsive protests arrest skepticism and prompt us into the fantasy. The claims, we recognize, flirt with the old belief that poets inhabited animate worlds where the waters listened and the rocks spoke. In the wonderful reach of Kroetsch’s mind, we begin to understand what it was for Kroetsch to be twelve that summer when, he tells us, he was “shamelessly and ferociously fired by desire” (50). In his story he is brought by the collective pronoun “we” into a remarkable conjoining: “I became quite literally aroused at the sight of that rock. My hands were sufficient journey, and I reached for universes of grass and stone. Not I—we—touched. We knew a rough and blind joining; we knew the bereavement of separation. We found our lovers’ talk and found, also, the limits of all words” (50). The boy’s hands take on a will and purpose of their own, their motion impelled by hope for discovery. Once arrived, the boy exceeds himself and is brought with the rock into shared agency and carnal intimacy. Their romance (tactile, erotic) bears all the signs of romantic passion: the boy’s arousal, the exploring hands, the reaching for what is primal in the world, a tenderness in meeting, an intense and consuming union, an acute sense of loss. And, finally, the insufficiency of language when it comes to love. The strategies are clever and invite us to our own kind of collusion. The horny kid, who has projected upon the rock his own sexual fervour, pretends (or the adult in retrospect now pretends) to be labouring under compulsion. He “must” speak as he does, think as he does, act as he does, as he did. His purported efforts to suppress the lascivious nature of the rock are equally ineffectual, “futile” he says. He couldn’t do much more than forestall the overtures, so compelling were they. The properties of the rock are said to be surpassingly elegant, finely tuned and provocatively curvaceous. They are so exquisite, so irresistible, they might draw an artist, or, god knows, a geometrician, into acts of lust. The exonerating fantasy goes on. The rock, “pure and erotic,” is brought into a state that is at once corporeal and aesthetic. Not even the young lad could spurn the rock’s come-hither or deny the darkness it summons from him. The worst that can be said of his behaviour is this: his is an unwilled act of “complicity.” He is unsuspecting, surely, unquestionably pure in intention. These things happen. They happened to him. What was he to do—vulnerable boy seduced by a tantalizing lady? Kroetsch laughs about his own narrative credibility when he insists he has been relying upon his “exact memory.” 296

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The pleasure is in the telling. Kroetsch has anticipated doubts and he turns to a mock scolding of his audience. He brazens it out: “You must abandon all your assumed notions about boulders” (49). Whatever our dispositions, we are asked to make allowances, large and generous allowances. We are asked to throw over our clinging to the ordinary world and with the narrator to embrace the story. We’re supposed to be in cahoots. He is pretty confident, if only for the moment, we will go along with the ruse. The piece is an accomplished invention from beginning to end: the boy construed as unwitting though pleased partner, the narrator as winsome confidant, the audience as mild skeptics prepared in their goodwill to assent. The mix of conniving and supposed blamelessness works its magic.

F In brief, graceful asides Kroetsch supplies information that at least part of his audience for various reasons may not be in full and immediate possession of, and he does so without making anyone feel awkward. In “D-Day and After,” an address that he gave at a University of Manitoba homecoming in 1994, he recalls as a schoolkid keeping a scrapbook during the Second World War. He pauses in mock modesty to say, “I must mention one other detail here that has escaped most historians” (139). And what is this matter of weighty oversight? Suspenders. They didn’t talk about suspenders. You have no suspenders, no proper suspenders with full elastic, and it’s one hell trying to jitterbug, he lets the alumni know, or helps them to remember. Ever thoughtful, he responds to the reality of the situation. “I suppose I must at this point explain” (33), he avers, and elsewhere says, “I realize that right here and now I should come clean and tell you, lucidly and without equivocation” (60). The narrator frequently slips in helpful words: “on what was called in those days a mercy flight” (22); “You may recall that the young woman who plays so important a part in the later life of Lord Jim” (32). He looks out for his readers: “The two men, I should, in a readerly gesture, tell you” (47). In “The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart” the gesture finds its way into Raymond’s speech. Raymond has been using the word “township” and, realizing the word may be unknown to at least some, pauses out of consideration for his audience: “I should explain to the unwary reader that a township,” he says, “is a square of land measuring six miles by six miles” (180). Kroetsch’s recurrent reminders demonstrate an abiding tact.

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Some occasions are given to acts of pedagogy and allegory. Kroetsch has long shown a readiness to read events in symbolic and sometimes instructive ways, in speculations on a national psyche, say. But in A Likely Story the impulse arises rather more forcefully. “D-Day and After” is particularly given to tutelage, as the occasion might especially have warranted. The temptation of allegory he has sometimes found hard to resist. Elsewhere in A Likely Story, in “Why I Went up North”— the remarkable piece on Albert Johnson—allegory appears more than ever. Johnson had been the subject of one of Kroetsch’s earliest poems (The Stone Hammer Poems 48) and Kroetsch returns to him in A Likely Story to read Johnson as a renegade artist: “He wore the silence of the artist like a badge, an indication of his will toward self-destruction. In his transgression he lost his name to his story; he was the death of the author” (31). Another part of A Likely Story mulls over secrecy in Wiebe and yet another dwells on imperialism in the Franklin expedition (100–01).

F Because most, if not all, of these talks occurred in response to invitations, Kroetsch almost certainly would have known something of the sites, the occasions, and even the anticipated audiences. Partly for that reason his criticism tends to move away from the informational modes honoured in traditional criticism. A Likely Story foregrounds language that would hardly be countenanced within received conventions of criticism or the requirements of a formal scholarly essay, which customarily would be written almost as if the audience were a corporate everyone or no one. Kroetsch’s love for the second person undoubtedly increases the differences. In foreknowledge he would have been able to write identifiable members of audiences into the texts, as on a few occasions he actually did. Friend among friend, he addresses those in attendance. In “The Cow in the Quicksand” and in what may be the finest talk in A Likely Story, “Playing Dead in Rudy Wiebe’s Playing Dead,” he acknowledges his friends and honours them by naming them into the story. The inclusions demonstrate how social the address is.

F Kroetsch is not much concerned about a traditional structure of argument or explanation in A Likely Story. Very early in the collection the persona confesses to his wiles: “As you have guessed by now, I proceed here by willful digression 298

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that instructs the novice against the illusion of knowing” (18). The talks make a virtue of that digression, if digression is the word, for it is not always apparent where the talks are going or just when it is that they arrive. Kroetsch meanders in and out of his subjects, setting them aside, sometimes setting them side by side, without transitions; sometimes joining them in moments of almost confounded reawakening. The re-engagements are sprinkled across the book: “But already I” (15), “By the way” (94), “But I was telling you” (18), “But as I was saying” (20), “But to go back to” (22), “As I was saying” (43), “But I was going to tell you a story” (77), “But I was going to tell you a story” (78), “But we were about to” (89), “But we were talking about” (91), “I could go on” (109). Lacking a developed cohesion, the narratives speed ahead, lose their way, give way to other narratives, reattach themselves in simple transitions. The pattern works most clearly in “Playing Dead.” A review of Wiebe’s book is embedded within the charming story of wine drinking, which itself is dispersed and interrupted by other asides, witty and touching stories, about Kroetsch’s personal history, among them an endearing story about the packaging of grapes and their alleged effects on him as a farm boy (91). He is pleased to follow the lateral skiddings as stories arise inside his “main” topic. The effect furthers the autobiographical momentum, loosens cohesion, increases variety, and provides opportunities for the sly enunciation of the author’s poetics. The larger argument, such as it is, is almost inundated by waves of entertaining narratives. Above all the speaker is a storyteller (inviting, honouring his listeners, confident in his permissions). Everyone knows that sooner or later he will get around to making “the” point, if that greatly matters, or if there actually is one. What in A Likely Story Kroetsch says about collage leads him to contemplate discontinuous narrative of the kind he himself is typically engaged in. He is forthright about his strategies: The scrapbook becomes a model. A paradigm. It tells us how to organize ourselves. It tells us how to think about what we are. I have already mentioned the idea of collage, the placing of stories or images side by side in such a way that they suggest a possible meaning without insisting on it. There is also in the scrapbook the notion of the interrupted story, or, more significantly, the digression. The digression often tells us what the main line of narrative cannot accommodate; it tells the reader what is being left out in order to make the story hang together. (146)

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The formulation—to “suggest a possible meaning without insisting on it”— gives us a way of describing how Kroetsch proceeds in A Likely Story, though, in a rambunctiously deconstructionist West Coast talk in 1981 that appeared elsewhere, he showed (as on several occasions he has shown) little faith in meaning: “We were getting meaning before we were given anything else, and I had to defer all that, play with the voice itself, the story itself, and fuck the meaning. I don’t care about meaning very much; somebody else can have the meaning” (Miki, “Prairie Poetics “87). The exasperation makes perfect sense, and it was probably increased because of the occasion there among those Vancouver poets, but once more it carries Kroetsch into a hyperbole that obscures what is happening in his writing, or in virtually anybody else’s work. Any number of similar claims are sprinkled across Kroetsch’s talks and interviews, and they have heartened some readers who have lost faith in the capacity of language to address our experiences. Still, one wonders: how is it possible to write outside of “meaning,” even in texts that we might call “nonsense”? Kroetsch’s thoughts about suggesting meanings and the dangers of message-laden writing makes more sense. He uses delay in writing “So [that] you’re not swallowed up in a meaning already given and you begin generating speech out of the delay” (88). He had made much the same distinction when he protested against a belief in “some larger meaning or coherence in the world” or the asserting of “some vast meaning, poor Eliot” (Neuman, “Unearthing Language” 233). Whatever denunciations Kroetsch has made from time to time, he clearly does believe in meaning, in small and multiple meanings that is. What he said in 2000 reinforces the appreciation of referential language: “what intrigues me is what the connection between language and world is” (Bertacco 227). E.F. Dyck has provided a plausible view when, in “The Law of Undecidability,” he proposes that Kroetsch’s poetry offers a “‘third’ possibility between meaning and meaningless” (58).

F As we have already noted, we can trace how far A Likely Story stands from traditional scholarship in its grammar and in its style. The scholar’s means can be named: evidence, proof, explanation, considered prose, restrained voices, sobriety, economy. The scholar prefers third person, readability, aims for objectivity, and has learned to be chary with humour and slang. Scholarship points 300

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and describes, effaces the writer, aspires to deliver material almost as if it were unauthored. It advances clear explanations and cogent arguments; its voices are subdued and uniform, and its narrators nearly unaware of auditors. A literary scholar will most likely operate among a handful of reading strategies—interpretation and hermeneutics, close formal analysis, contextual understandings, or high-powered theorizing. The scholar will provide introductions, transitions, summations, various sorts of aids and supplements. S/he will report and explicate and unriddle. S/he will scrupulously acknowledge sources and other scholars. Kroetsch’s speakers, above all those in A Likely Story, are oral and narrative. Their speech jumps with humour, dialogism, speculation; it is pragmatic and heavily diegetic. Whereas a scholar, or a critic, would prefer referential language fit for fact and reason, Kroetsch throws himself into the speaker’s role and appeals to auditors. His speakers cultivate verbal play and prove susceptible to poetry. In A Likely Story a slightly eccentric speaker loosens himself into mixed modes—personal memories, statements of poetics, lyrical interludes, lists, large cultural claims, inventive fantasies, anecdotes, jokes, provocative readings of texts, this and more. Kroetsch is not after an explanatory system, he wants provocations, openings, incitements—what is vital at the heart of language. In his hand criticism becomes an art form that lies somewhere between what once we confidently named as “primary” and “secondary” writing. What may be most scandalous of all, Kroetsch’s criticism goes for outright pleasure.

F Kroetsch has spread his electrifying words across the nation, and much of the rest of the world—in goading reviews, formal and informal talks, asides, hints in classrooms, personal and professional letters, clamorous conversations in pubs, impromptu entertainments, countless interviews, small admissions to friends, brief outbursts at conferences and readings. He has spoken in large generalities and extravagant gestures that at their most theatrical show limited zeal for qualification, and that at their most personal show remarkable patience and hesitation. His most cited words are given to stout claims, spirited assertions, lively and provocative guesses, memorable phrase and rhythm. Always, the interventions are compelling in care and eloquence, seductive in their leaps of imagination and courage.8 The open and familiar style invites complicity.

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The gnomic utterances provoke enthused citation. The critical performance is so accomplished, so stimulating, so entertaining that, among at least those who share his sense of cultural aspiration or linguistic adventure, it sparks creative responses. Sometimes the words brush against us and they alter the wayward wiring of our brains, and we flare and fizzle, if only faintly, if only for awhile.

F Over the years, between Labyrinths of Voice in 1982 and A Likely Story in 1995, Kroetsch’s style as critic evolved. The earlier work was activist, interventionist, and it sought to shake up the way we think about literature and how we produce it. What Kroetsch wrote then sits somewhere between scholarly convention and literary manifesto. He wrote as inspired reader. He was a fan, an advocate, a champion. He promoted texts, celebrated their achievements, sympathized with their aspirations, diagnosed their assumptions, and teased out their apprehensions. Through the vigour of his intellect and the sweep of his passion he dared us to new and imaginative readings. His criticism has always been animated and urgently engaged in cultural struggles. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he was delivering the talks that are brought together in A Likely Story, he had developed a narrative style that was even more personable and considerate of his auditors. It was gentler, certainly less disruptive; it rejoiced in humour and confession too.

F not by a long shot

and that’s not all

We could say more. Lots more. But already I digress—

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Notes

one Getting There The Long Road Home







1. The Robert Kroetsch archives at the University of Calgary Library include notes for a talk, “Restlessness as Western Template,” in which Kroetsch speaks humorously of his disquiet as a dissatisfaction with a conventional or “domesticated” language that, unhappily, leads to cessation and completion (MsC. 719/02.6 1.1). 2. In “Becoming a Writer Is Unbecoming” Kroetsch talks of his life as congenital fidgeter, a condition which, he amusingly claims, his mother diagnosed and sought to suppress. The ailment never left him, he writes, and the state of disequilibrium impelled his most powerful writing and personal experiences. In that state he “often felt uneasy. But I became addicted to the creative intensity of that unease” (MsC. 775/04.25 30.7, p. 9). 3. A friend, “Joe,” advised Kroetsch, “you don’t have to squander your energy that way” (MsC. 3.59). Kroetsch confessed in his correspondence that his heart finally was not in editing. 4. The frustration had been long rankling, as this humorous letter from “29 April 66” shows: “Meanwhile back at the fort—nothing happens and everyone is impossibly busy. Committees meet to appoint new committees. The administration bldg grows black against our rural horizon—but will soon be made red by infinite bricks. Endlessly the paper flutters down to my basement office” (MsC. 27.1.1 3.29).

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5. Frank Davey has astutely written about how Kroetsch’s postmodernism differed from Spanos’s (“American Alibis” 246–47). Kroetsch offers his own account in “Boundary 2 and the Canadian Postmodern.” 6. Kroetsch was born on June 26, 1927, and so would have been fourteen on October 3, 1941. Oddly, Kroetsch sometimes says he was thirteen, as he does in an interview with Roy Miki (“Self on Self” 117) and even in the passage from The “Crow” Journals (16). 7. In “For Play and Entrance” Kroetsch argued that “The long poem, since the time of The Odyssey, has been a kind of travel book. Since its beginning, you might say. The travel book as poem contains a version of narrative” (Lovely Treachery 129–30). 8. See “Meditation on Tom Thomson,” Northern Journey 3 (1973): 90–91; “F.P. Grove: The Finding,” The Lakehead University Review 6.2 (1973): 209–12; and “Poem of Albert Johnson,” The Lakehead University Review 6.2 (1973): 211–12. 9. In that same year, 1974, when Kroetsch is negotiating with the University of Lethbridge and the University of Calgary about becoming a writer-in-residence, the University of Calgary chief librarian approaches him about acquiring his papers, which he sends to Calgary in 1975–76, in what it is tempting to read as a gesture of repatriation. The accrual would have been helped by Kroetsch’s belief that Canadian papers ought to be available at Canadian sites. Six years before he had raised that concern with Rudy Wiebe:









perhaps you (as have I) have been asked by Boston U or someone for your manuscripts. You ought to persuade the Alberta library to start buying up Canadian manuscripts. This is not an effort to sell my own: for various reasons I will not part with mine. Rather—Canadian libraries ought to do some collecting, or scholars in the near future will have to come to the USA to study Canadian writers. (MsC. 334/84.1 6.32)

10. The men in What the Crow Said, overhearing Vera Lang’s unearthly and unnerving voice when she is thrown into orgasm by a swarm of bees, are stricken: They heard the outcry of her painful joy, those men, the extremist coming; they heard, each of them, and they knew. Not knowing her name, or where she was, or what had touched her into the fierce and passionate and desperate ululation: they knew no man would satisfy her. Not one. No mortal man would satisfy her. (What the Crow Said 6)





11. In a letter dated June 3, Kroetsch wrote to his good friend William Spanos to report that “Last Saturday night our daughter Laura fell off her bicycle” and fractured her skull. One might note (the disparity in dates aside) that in the face of “the total misery of that knowledge” Kroetsch responds in great reserve: “I realized how I too destroy myself with this fucking compulsive silence” (MsC. 591/96.6 11.63). 12. Michael Ondaatje visits Kroetsch at Lethbridge to work on a film script based on Badlands. The entry for “Wednesday, April 14, 1976” indicates that Kroetsch is “to drive

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14.



15.



16.



17.



18.



19.

to the badlands. Michael Ondaatje arriving tomorrow” (The “Crow” Journals 52). The film was never produced. Glen Sorestad’s Prairie Pub Poems is full of pieces that came out of the prairie beer parlour. The passage comes from a short piece, “Prairie Pub Poems,” published in 1977 in a small periodical, freelance (12). Kroetsch once gave a talk at the University of Lethbridge, “The Beer Parlor and the Perception of Space: A Writer’s Geography of Western Canada,” in which he mused that within the privileged space of the beer parlour the social order and the economic order are put on hold. A seven-page outline for that talk, most of it handwritten, can be found in the University of Calgary archives. Kroetsch’s entry on July 15, 1977 startlingly echoes words from Mandel’s “Writing West,” which had itself appeared that year in the Canadian Forum (June–July 1977) and in Mandel’s Another Time. Mandel grew up in Saskatchewan and worked at the University of Alberta for years before he moved east to take an appointment at York University. In the mid-1970s he began in a series of visits to return to the prairies, to lead workshops, and to assume a writer-in-residency in Regina. During the period, he did some of his best work in writing about Saskatchewan in Out of Place and Another Time. He was in close contact with Kroetsch at those legendary summer schools of the arts. Ronald Bordessa’s “Moral Frames for Landscape in Canadian Literature” similarly sees landscape as an “inexpungible ground (and therefore necessary referent) of the postmodernist modality…Landscape is not an external objective reality to be written about, but a defining ingredient of the constitution of the Canadian experience [and it]…can be expected therefore to be writing from landscape—rather than about landscape” (67). Earlier in The “Crow” Journals (September 14, 1974) Kroetsch has admitted his unawareness about New York: “One time, Dave Carpenter, visiting here from Alberta, drove with me into the Catskills, showed me a poisonous snake, told me the history of all these famous trout streams that he’d never seen but knows so much about. I, living here, not knowing” (25). Despite all his years in the States, he was never quite at home there. The intimate and intense response he felt for the features of the prairies can be found in many publications. One of the most vivid, “Listening for Spring in Lethbridge, 1976,” was not published until 2010. The second of its three stanzas reads: What was might be. We wait to hear the cracking of ice. The roll of thunder. The creak of geese in a blank sky. (Whetstone 27)



20. A few weeks after Kroetsch moved to Winnipeg, he and I were joined for coffee on campus by a graduate student in English. She reported, rather bitterly, that a recently separated friend of hers did not have total custody of her children. It’s got to be



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terribly hard on a woman, she said. I said, Why would you suppose that a father wouldn’t miss his children? Kroetsch got up and left without saying a word. A few days later he said thanks for saying that. 21. A state of melancholy is never far from him. He speaks haltingly of it in 1996: I think the melancholia comes out of our sense of the connection not quite working, and the sense of all that you don’t know and can’t know. Including— including all the traces that are operating in us. It’s forty—not forty for you, but ten—years ago somebody touched you and it’s still reverberating. It’s a…you know the word sadness appears in my work. Literally—Jeremy Sadness—and in disguise, and I think maybe I should think about hiring somebody named Melancholy. (Müller xxv)









22. Dick Harrison, thinking about Kroetsch’s decision, wrote: “About Manitoba, at one point seeming not far enough west [for Kroetsch], there is something about Manitoba’s older brother status on the prairies, its more established, less raw and unformed condition” (Letter to the author, 1 Feb. 2012). 23. I adopt the practice of using quotation marks for words that are useful but whose innocence cannot be assumed. 24. The statements come from a manuscript entitled “dreaming backwards,” evidently notes for a talk to the Twelfth Western Canadian Studies Conference held at the University of Calgary in 1980. 25. In “National Frontiers and International Movements: Postmodernism in Canadian Literature,” Robert W. Wilson has written dismissively, almost condescendingly, about Canadian interests in the local: “Despite the regionalism, and the sentimental traditions of local criticism, international influences do cross Canada’s frontiers and take root” (61). Kroetsch’s fiction (Wilson regrettably does not here mention Kroetsch’s poetry, or the reception of it) figures for him as shining example of a writing that has been able to withstand the forces of provincial naiveté and rudimentary thinking. That condition apparently bedevils a place longing for simple realism—“too often dominated by regionalism and a sentimental moralism,” Wilson finds (61). For Wilson any aspirations to regionalism and accedings to postmodernism are totally irreconcilable, and interests in the local seem destined to be “sentimental.” It seems, however, that Kroetsch himself never quite shook the blight of regionalism. In the special Canadian issue of boundary 2, Kroetsch sounds a note of protest about who made it, or rather who did not make it, into the issue. In a slightly jocular style, he objects to the slighting of prairie writers: “It cost me, as general editor, huge effort to keep from asking: Why did you leave out western poets like Jon Whyte, Gary Geddes, Andy Suknaski, Ian Adam, Anne Szumigalski?” (2). The absences may in part be explained by the geography of the two Canadians who chose the contributing poets—Margaret Atwood in Toronto and Warren Tallman in Vancouver. 26. Kroetsch has been the source of several such statements. Take his infamous claim in boundary 2 in 1974: “Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern” (1). Sandra Djwa’s objection was abrupt. “I can’t accept Kroetsch’s

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28.



29.



30.

Superman theory of Canadian modernism; that is, the notion that Canada leapt from Victorianism to post-modernism in a single bound. We have had at least three, perhaps four, waves of modernism since the 1920s,” she writes in “To Be Here Now” (21–22). We would be better off arguing that what modernism there was in Canada had not acquired anything like the manner or magnitude that heavyweight modernists in the United States and Britain commanded. The absence of an overweening modernism in Canada may have left the territory open for later writers to enter. Kroetsch actually made some such point years later when he said that the gap he found between modernism and postmodernism was actually enabling. It sheltered writers from an enormous authority: “we were spared the burden of modernism. As a result, Canadian writers in the sixties could write without its weight holding them back. I was living in the States at the time, and I felt the pressure that young writers in the States felt from Pound or Eliot” (Future Indicative 18). Not that there was no modernism, then, but that there were no huge and momentous figures (Geniuses) that predominated in high modernism. Davey’s “American Alibis: A Search for Kroetsch’s Postmodernism” traces shifts in Kroetsch’s understanding of the term “postmodernism.” “I fall back on paradox,” Kroetsch tells Margaret Laurence: “you’ve got to be absolutely self-conscious, self-aware; and yet you are absolutely at the mercy of the muse. I guess I believe in the muse, if you press me” (“A Conversation with Margaret Laurence” 58). It’s hard not to appreciate the dismay when “primary” texts get engulfed or simply overlooked. When readers muscle past the texts they purportedly are studying, one has to wonder where “literature” (if this is not now an exploded term) has gone. Theorist side-swiping the text. Disrespecting it, perhaps, unwilling to accord it full attention and due modesty. At times one wonders if the critic has even bothered to read the text, or to read it as if it were different from any other text, or that its features actually mattered. Another kind of reader might ask if a poem or novel were anything more than pretext for an argument, latest opportunity to announce that meaning can only be found within a system of language. Text as nuisance, no more than opportunity to get on with other things, more important things, possibly without even acknowledging the work of other readers. A lot can be said for the reader as creator, but in as much as a critic is commenting on a text or pretending to be responding to it, need s/he set it aside or risk obliterating it? Need s/he literally misread? Scholarship largely or even wholly committed to theory is not the problem; but scholarship that pretends to gloss texts is. Stan Dragland points the issue rather well in “Potatoes and the Moths of Just History” when he observes that “The posts and potatoes are the quotidian, the down to earth, the earthy, the localisms of voice and place that are so important to Kroetsch,” and goes on to lament that for at least some critics of Kroetsch “emphasis on these matters is minimal. It’s a telling selectivity…because it scants the contribution to meaning made by the highly specific textures in which so much of the life of Kroetsch’s writing resides” (101). When, at the end of 1976, Robert Enright and I interviewed Kroetsch just before Seed Catalogue came out, Kroetsch spoke of having a calling as a poet. Asked about a calling, he said, “That’s a reckless thing to say. I guess I am high modern in the sense

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that I take the role of artist seriously, even if it now becomes the role of uninventing” (Enright and Cooley 35). 31. Those Canadian long poems that excite Kroetsch “stand in opposition to the Romantic song of myself and its tradition, from Whitman through Olson’s Maximus” (Lovely Treachery 131). But Kroetsch was wary of Olson and on occasions could be scathing about him. As early as “20 dec 68” Kroetsch had expressed reservations: “Have been teaching Olson’s The Maximus Poems. The man is one brilliant poet. But I still resist the Black Mountain fanatics howling their Plain Prose out of Creeley’s ass” (MsC. 2.22). Kroetsch senses something missing in Olson. This on February 27, 1974: “Olson lacking a heart in some sad way, lacking a way to let in the variety, the plainness, the extravagance. But Williams is there all the time: taking the risks” (The “Crow” Journals 15). “You should fear certain things about the bastard,” he writes to Andrew Suknaski in 1974 (MsC. 334/84.1 5.17), and the next year, with real anguish, he denounces Olson: “Olson was taken by the solitude only, was ultimately and in some sad way gutless, Jesus, I hate to say that” (MsC. 27.2.2.31). This too, On “May 10, 1974,” a letter to Andy Suknaski: I have grave reservations about the way you western poets use Olson. You don’t read with enough skepticism. You should fear certain things about the bastard, even while learning how to write about PLACE. (MsC. 334/841. 5.17)

And yet another Kroetsch letter on August 5, 1975: “received your letter/outcry (hurray) (yes, let’s get PAST Olson” (MsC. 27.2.2.31). 32. When Kroetsch was in Iowa he took a shine to Frye. He introduced The Anatomy of Criticism to a graduate seminar, and later gave a talk, “Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye,” on him (Lovely Treachery 151–62). 33. Most pointed, perhaps, are Atwood’s words about Paul Hiebert’s novel, Sarah Binks, which satirizes the poetry of the sweet songstress of Saskatchewan. For many years the novel was much beloved by CBC Radio, though few actual prairie poets ever appeared on the network. The disparity might go a little way toward explaining the CBC affection for the book. To Atwood’s mind the novel essentially belittles the region itself: “much of the humour…is based on the assumption that there is something intrinsically unpoetic about Saskatchewan and especially about farms and Regina…and that a poet from Saskatchewan is a contradiction in terms…Throughout the book Saskatchewan (and by extension Canada) is treated as funny per se” (182). 34. When Kroetsch revisits Snow twenty-five years later, he finds Snow busy on his new project, “a huge mural, twelve feet by eighteen feet, for an open-to-the-weather, righton-the-street wall” (Alberta 6).

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35. The Kroetsch poem included in that issue of Museletters was “birthday: June 26, 1983,” the deeply personal piece on his dead mother.

two Or So It Has Been Alleged The Ledger



1. Carl Bessai’s 1997 film The Impossible Home: Robert Kroetsch and His German Roots takes us to Kroetsch’s immediate family origins in the German settlement at Heisler, Alberta. Part of it presents the family’s previous settlement at Formosa in Ontario, and part of it takes us, with Kroetsch, to the family’s still earlier European origins in Kotzendorf, Germany. 2. Andreas Schiffmann, in an email dated September 29, 2007, provides the following translation and notes (I have put his words, German and English, in italics): LORENZ KROETSCH gestorben den 13th Feb 1860 alt 38 Jahre Ruhe nun im sanften schlummer In der erde kühlem schoos Hier entwichen allem kummer Ist der friede nun dein loos Noch umringen wir dein Grab Schauen wehmutsvoll hinab Doch zur ruhe gehn auch wir Gott sie dank wir folgen dir.

now rest in soft slumber in the cool lap of the earth free from all earthly sorrow your destination now is peace still we stand around your grave looking down in sorrow but we, too, will go to rest thank god we will follow you

if you write the German text correctly and in prose, it will probably read as follows: Ruhe nun in sanftem Schlummer in der Erde kühlem Schoß. Hier entwichen allem Kummer, ist der Friede nun dein Los. Noch umringen wir dein Grab, schauen wehmutsvoll hinab, doch zur Ruhe gehen auch wir. Gott sei Dank, wir folgen dir. It is clear from the archives that what German we find in the long poem has been sought rather than produced with the ease of a native speaker. In one draft Kroetsch writes in English, “I cannot believe my eyes.” He has written in pencil to the right of the line these words: “in German.” And then, after a small gap, he writes “Das ist doch nicht möglich.” Another expression, the single word “VERDAMMT,” is printed by pen on a corner torn from the page of a foreign-language paper dated April 14, 1971 (MsC. 27.19.5). 3. Later, in Seed Catalogue Kroetsch will quote his friend Rudy Wiebe, who disparages poetry as mere “song.”



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4. Kroetsch will later name these contrarieties “narrative” and “language.” 5. Kroetsch was no less frisky a few years earlier when Spanos was proposing a literary collaboration. Kroetsch jokingly accuses Spanos of being “still afflicted with the departmental fantasy that someone might support a literary journal on this campus. bullshit…If you can come up with an idea that’s worth working on, I’ll engage, along with you, in all the mean nasty work of getting blood out of turnips, …manuscripts out of busy critics, poems from the arrogant young who requisition unto themselves the title of poet” (MsC. 334/84.1 5.9). 6. The “sheerly visual discriminations [which] were a delight, along with reproduced maps and ledger sheets” have disappeared, as Louis K. Mackendrick has lamented. He observes that in subsequent printings of The Ledger “the separate styles are democratized and the optical wit is compromised” (101). Julia Moss in “The Particulars of Space” has lucidly outlined what effects the differences would have on a reader. 7. In Bessai’s The Impossible Home Kroetsch speaks with wonder at the sheer size of forest and trees his ancestors wiped out with astonishing speed. 8. Whalen goes on to decry postmodernism in general and much of Kroetsch’s own work, for being “stalled in linguist sink-holes marked ‘language quibble,’ ‘irresistible pun,’ ‘epistemological afterthought,’ ‘reminder about signifer/signified problem’ and so on.” Whalen is “almost overcome by the number of pages that are taken up with little more than marginal notes, scraps, arrows, inside jokes, and gainsaying cleverness” (75). It seems likely he is thinking here of Kroetsch’s writing after The Sad Phoenician. Larry McDonald raises a similar concern about the political implications of texts such as Excerpts from the Real World that move whole hog into indeterminacy: “what kind of reader is predicated by a style which, despite its marvelous energy, threatens to cancel, at every turn, the bases for shared assumptions, perceptions, moral conviction and social ideals that are the necessary preconditions for liberation into shared social action” (80). It would be easy in the name of sophistication about plastic and constructed identities, and a firm belief that language can give us no real hold on anything, to object. Yet, what would it mean to dismiss such concerns out of hand? 9. In A Poetics of Postmodernism Linda Hutcheon turns to E.L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times, which, in 1960, tells of money and power among American pioneers. What may be especially striking for readers of Seed Catalogue is the fact that Doctorow “writes his [revisionist] story on the ledger book, where the town records are also kept” (134). 10. See Spanos’s talk, “Retrieving Bob Kroetsch,” which is part of the material collected from the symposium in celebration of Kroetsch’s seventieth birthday at St. Jerome’s College, University of Waterloo, June 12–14, 1997. 11. “When the whites finish their prolonged and unsatisfying rape, perhaps a few Indians will come riding down out of the foothills and take an anthropological look at the derricks and the grain elevators,” Kroetsch writes to Earle Birney, a few years earlier, “April 8, 1969” (MsC. 334/84.1). 12. Manina Jones taps the dictionary in showing how the word “gazette” in Kroetsch’s poem works in “skewed” fashion to incite something more than we might have supposed. The word “is used by the newspaper in the basic sense of an expository

310

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13.



14.



15.



16.

news-sheet, but its history and etymology also align it with the economic realm of the ledger: a gazette is traditionally a compendium of financial notices, and the word ‘gazette’ comes from the Italian gazeta, a kind of coin (OED)” (“Kroetsch’s Balancing Act” 65). Who would have thought? Perhaps not Kroetsch. Jones’s expenditure surely would have pleased the author. The spreadings were greater when The Ledger was published as a separate and regular-sized book. The spacious use of the page there meant the entries benefitted more greatly from a reader’s sense of leaving the narrative and then at a greater distance re-entering it, experiencing the pleasure of its returns and recessions. The passage finds another strong reverberation in David Arnason’s Marsh Burning, which appeared a few years later in 1980 (42). In addition to the enormous influence of Williams’s radical formal moves, we can find in The Ledger other specific echoes of Paterson, among them: entries on items and prices (Paterson 45–46), bits about loss and extinction (Paterson 119, 125), a census (19), and a table of drilling data (165), which resembles Kroetsch’s list of trees. I take the phrase, gratefully, from ledger domain, a book that Charlene Diehl-Jones and Gary Draper edited for, and in commemoration of, the Robert Kroetsch symposium held at St. Jerome’s College, University of Waterloo, in 1997.

t hree Hearing Voices Seed Catalogue





1. Kroetsch had thought of including, and at one point did include, texts written by friends, including Lorna Uher (Crozier), Andy Suknaski, and Terrence Heath. 2. In personal conversation Kroetsch has said that his father, though Catholic, was fiercely wary of priests and that his parents were very liberal about religion. 3. It was in Lethbridge, where Kroetsch was writer-in-residence from January to May 1976, that he did most of the work on Seed Catalogue. Though there is no clear evidence that Kroetsch happened upon the original seed catalogue during the previous term when he was writer in residence at the University of Calgary, it seems highly probable that he did. 4. W.L. Morton in “Seeing an Unliterary Landscape,” an essay published in 1970 (seven years before Seed Catalogue appeared), ruminates on having felt such sense of cultural inferiority: “If Burns could sing of Sweet Afton, why not I, or another, of the local stream, the Whitemud? But it was a daunting thought; the Whitemud, even when it ran clear in early summer, ran through raw clay banks, and in any case nobody had ever heard of it” (5). 5. Linda Hutcheon has identified similar monuments in Kroetsch’s novels (“Seeing Double” 167). 6. What the Crow Said seems almost to have been inspired by the call to excrement. The book is flooded with shit. 7. One of Kroetsch’s most admired poets, Wallace Stevens, was, according to Geoffrey Hartman, “purging Europe from America, but enjoying and exploiting the thought

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that it can’t be done.” And so, “Compulsively we wash our hands of the old culture, of its opera (in the sense of masterworks as well as the baleful Wagnerian instance); we denounce it for being sublime junk, an artificial resuscitation of decadent art; we ritually strengthen ourselves for a rejectionist type of verse close to improvisation and prose poetry” (Hartman 119). 8. E.D. Blodgett holds a somewhat different view. He like certain commentators on Derrida believes that a text can never provide anything anterior to itself: “It is evident that all the metaphors of the poem tend toward one fact: literature is an artifact of books, words, pages, and ‘a spoor of wording’ that they leave behind” (“In Search of a Canadian Literature” 19). In “Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue,” David Arnason make a similar argument, citing Derrida about the non-existence of “a signified outside the text” (80). To my mind the text derives from a greater plurality than that. The experiences are mediated through words, to be sure, but the words are not limited to a verbal universe amputated from the larger world. 9. In a free-wheeling article, “The Plains of My Youth,” Kroetsch takes relish in telling about two of the Heisler bullshitters:





Philip Hauck, a studhorse man and a grain buyer, and Jerry Peevee, who had six beautiful daughters, were a great pair of yarn swappers. They’d outdo each other telling stories about trying to grow wheat where you couldn’t scratch the clay with a glass-cutter. Or how, when it did rain, the gumbo was so slick that one time a duck trying to land in Jerry Peevee’s wheat field slid on its ass for a little over a mile. (11)







10. “My father and his brother put up the money” to rebuild the hotel, Kroetsch has revealed. They needed “a place to do some talking, my father explained” (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4). 11. Kroetsch seldom describes the body. For that matter, he doesn’t do much describing of anything. He has, however, a remarkable knack for depicting the body in reaction. In The Words of My Roaring he brilliantly portrays Johnny Backstrom’s kinaesthetic apprehensions of the world. Here is one of many instances: “She was so damned beautiful that first my stomach began to feel upset…Then the muscles of my legs began to feel the way they do when you walk out to pitch the last inning of a no-hitter. Then I had that urge just to snap my jaws open and shut a few times” (51). 12. In an address to Alberta librarians in 1971, Kroetsch, reminding his hosts of the shape of the small tables in prairie pubs, assured them, “we in Alberta also have our knights of the round tables, and you know where these round tables are found” (“Writing from Prairie Roots” 7). 13. Kroetsch was more aware of Classical texts than readers might suppose, as the following passage indicates: “I did at some point, somewhere in my cabin on a riverboat somewhere above the Arctic Circle, one day attempt, somehow knowing the model of Virgil, to write an Alberta Georgic. I had that small instinct to tell the story over, but didn’t quite know the story that I would tell, didn’t quite know how to go about retelling it, into the newness that I knew as desire” (Lovely Treachery 153).

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14. The brief slight to Yeats encapsulates the poem’s restlessness with imperial culture and its presumptions of universality. Seed Catalogue recoils from appeals to disembodied truths of a kind evident in Yeats’s sages standing in God’s holy fire and an artifice of eternity. Kroetsch admits to mixed feelings: “as much as I may have liked say, Yeats—I felt no access to the ‘poetic’ world” (Miki, “Self on Self” 123). I can add that on February 7, 2011, Kroetsch had been avidly rereading Yeats and spoke admiringly of what a great writer he was. 15. The swing of the breathless phrases sounds a long way from the wooden rhythms in an early attempt: Germaine lifted up her skirt and took off her panties. I took off my pants and my shorts. We crawled up into a granary that was full of wheat. On top of the wheat lay old sacks that had contained binder twine. We spread the sacks on the wheat. (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4)

The earlier passage sounds dull and deliberate, shows none of the rush and joy that makes its way into the final version. In another rejected version of the confession itself, the language is sexually blunt. 16. There are alternative explanations that would mean overlooking the kid’s excitement, his palpable joy in recounting what happened, not to mention his apparent lack of self-consciousness. The boy’s precipitance, a reader might suppose, could express an anxiety about the priest’s probable or expected response, and the boy’s own feelings of guilt and embarrassment—a nervous blurting then. Or: the kid could be wildly eager to provide whatever it is he thinks is called for and nervously throws himself into a statement that he supposes the priest would require. We do have Kroetsch’s report on himself as a kid supplying a fraudulent confession out of a felt need to fulfill his part of the bargain: “And I caution you,” he smilingly writes, that he used to, “as a boy, make up sins so the priest wouldn’t think I was lying” (A Likely Story 60). 17. Though the priest is often denying in his teaching, and in his most categorical rulings could be read as a failed teacher, other characters in Seed Catalogue are shown in moments to be wise and grounded pedagogues. The poet’s mother, Kroetsch wrote, “taught” him the “grace” of morning, of noon sun, the colour of prairie grass, the smell of morning and human body—something intimate, something practical, and perhaps also something sacramental (45). Arnason has overlooked these kinds of moments when he argued that in the poem all the females exist as “figures of male fantasy” (“Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue, 91). Aside from the tutoring mother, we also find the poet’s uncle, Uncle Freddy, who registers wounded dismay: “Don’t you understand anything?” (43). 18. “Up until the time of World War II, not one of the migrating members of my family had ever made it back to Germany,” Kroetsch tells us. Not until Kenneth MacDonald

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19.



20.



21. 22.



23.



24. 25.



26.



27.

arrived, that is. “The ironies of the first return are part of” Seed Catalogue (MsC. 775/04.25 4.4). Kroetsch’s parents, Kroetsch told me, made a point of not speaking German at home, evidently wanting their children easily to enter the Anglo world. Havelock contrasts the nearly irrevocable quality of words inked on a page, and for the page, with the fluid passage of spoken words: “Once inscribed, the words in a document become fixed, and the order in which they appear is fixed. All the spontaneity, mobility, improvisation, the quick responsiveness of spoken speech vanishes” (70). Kroetsch’s work, which insists on that fluid language, flies in the face of what, not long after Seed Catalogue appeared, had become almost an article of faith in contemporary theory. The world was bedeviled by phonocentrism, scholars constantly heard, and a lot of them said. Perhaps phonocentrism was privileged in the tradition of Western metaphysics. It certainly was not in literature, not that is in texts that were received as credible and accomplished. A fixation on writing as a system that subsumed speech, or as a langue that swallowed parole and took it out of play, rendered it silent or embarrassingly naive. “Writing becomes, by virtue of its independence from speech, the principal expression of a desire for a language that is systematic rather than versional,” writes a resistant Gerald Bruns (Inventions 106). My “Placing the Vernacular: The Eye and the Ear in Saskatchewan Poetry” and “The Vernacular Muse in Prairie Poetry” speak to the nature and value of speech in that poetry. Kroetsch added these gentle mockings only very late in his rewritings of the poem. Walter Ong explains the comforts of such familiarity: “It is more satisfying to avoid novelties and to listen to what you know and can recite, so that you can mouth, taste, savor knowledge. Oral culture manifests…its ultra-conservatism, its drive and need to remain with what it has, to downgrade what is novel as inconsequential—in short, its commitment to repetition, which, despite certain shortcomings, can be a beautifully human thing” (Interfaces of the Word 260). Kroetsch suppressed or lost track of another wonderful line that depicts the summerlong tryst between man and beast as humorous warfare in which the badger figures as some kind of sapper: “he was surrounding us with badger holes.” There is a similar but longer passage, in the end jettisoned, which accords the magpie comparable attention. The smart-alecky additions go on. “Boh” is short for “Bohemian,” the name of a then-popular beer in Saskatchewan. And before that change, he has written of a less provocative transgression, one less liable to risk or offence, “a dozen cold Bohs,” not in the car but “in the fridge” where, presumably, they would be less furtively stored. In the first 1977 version the text read “clean across” rather than, as it does now, “clean over” the principal’s new car. Kroetsch had written to Turnstone soon after the first edition had appeared, making this change and correcting a typing error in a name that had first appeared as “Aneneas.” The changes appeared in all subsequent printings. This from the Kroetsch archives: Here’s to temperance circle jerk – each put in a coin-

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first to come takes allgrade 9 -“at the creek” down by the river – secret place- smoking & sex on your mark – get set – go (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1) And this too: jacking off story – boyssowing seed on the ground. i.e. circle jerk (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1)







28. When Kroetsch performed this passage in public readings, he would recite the repetitions in an unvaried voice and simply stop a short way into it. 29. The disapproving and disallowing man bears little resemblance to Kroetsch’s own father, who by all odds was an accommodating man. Though that actual father, Kroetsch later said, would be “totally mystified by what I was studying” (Miki, “Self on Self” 118) at university, he was infinitely patient with his young son. His father would get up early on a cold winter morning to provide for his kids: “again, my dad spoiled us: he would go out, hook up the horse, and start the fire in this little stove” in the sleigh that they would ride through the iron-cold winters “quite toasty and warm.” His father was far from being a taskmaster: “I think my father was very tolerant, first of all. I mean, I don’t think he ever got mad at me.” In what Kroetsch has said, there are clear indications of his father’s gentleness. This is a father who never scolded his son for dismantling his watch beyond repair (“Lonesome Writer Diptych”) or for cutting down a favourite tree. 30. The father’s objections are not based solely in assumptions that writing is unmanly. His concerns almost certainly would have been practical as well: poetry is unproductive, a waste of time. The reservations are understandable in residually pioneer cultures whose members learn to work hard, and who internalize the work ethic. What good will it be for a man if he gains the word, yet forfeits his homestead? 31. See Ronald Rees’s beautiful book New and Naked Land, which provides a lucid account of government policy and the surveyors’ work. In language that speaks its own kind of poetry, Rees discerns the rationale for the system and the consequences of it (especially 60–67). “Hornbook #61” in The Hornbooks of Rita K (16) explains the system as a ploughing back and forth through the acreage, the words echoing classical Greek language for lines of poetry. 32. It wouldn’t do simply to complain about an erasure in Kroetsch of those who knew an earlier and much longer habitation of the region. Kroetsch often and eloquently spoke (in The Stone Hammer Poems, for example) to the prior and continuing presence of

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Aboriginals in the New World, the region around Heisler included. The trope in Seed Catalogue centres on the invader-settler culture. 33. Kroetsch had written more detailed passages about the farm that would have made it feel still more settled and homey: at the end of the lane to the right, a big white house [the word “green-colored” is written in by hand] with a windmill directly in front: of the barn: a terrible symmetry. And another version: the home place; at the end of the lane to the right, a green-roofed house; to the left, a red barn; a windmill directly in front of the barn; a garden directly behind the house. On another page the home place is named as “a big cream–coloured house”: at the end of the lane to the right, a big cream-colored house to the left, a big red barn A windmill directly in front of the barn:



34. The mention of “a terrible symmetry” was less puzzling in an unpublished version of the scene that depicts the symmetry of a prairie field: No trees. Only the sun. Only the wind. Only the square fields of wheat. A terrible symmetry.

The “terrible symmetry” might owe something to Northrop Frye. See Kroetsch’s “Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye”: “Ours is indeed a fearful symmetry” (Lovely Treachery 154). 35. In 2002 Kroetsch is still turned on by gourds: “Two huge green warted squash…letting the green rind swell with is hidden cargo of yellow-orange flesh, its flat, slippery seeds” (“Lines Written in the John Snow House,” 3 [MsC. 719/02.6 1.16]). 36. In a review of the first Field Notes, Albert Moritz finds a narrator disappointed by “an agony of not-finding” (“Scaffolds in Chaos” 21) in “the barren newness of the prairie landscape” (22). Moritz reads the list of absences in Seed Catalogue as proof that Kroetsch’s world is devoid of what agonizingly he most needs rather than as sign of what impairs him. He seems not to hear the crazy outpouring of energies and rejoicings. 316

notes

four What It Was Seed Catalogue





1. Kroetsch has reported that Turnstone asked him for the manuscript of Seed Catalogue (Miki, “Self on Self” 126). That may have happened but it is doubtful since the press was brand new and run by a motley crew who would have been reluctant to make such a request. My memory is slightly different: Kroetsch, Enright, and I are going our various ways after a beer in the student pub at the University of Manitoba. It must be “Wednesday, September 22, 1976” if Kroetsch’s “Crow” journal is to be believed. We teeter for a moment at the top of the stairs, above the University of Manitoba bookstore. It is there in the student union building that Kroetsch hesitates, and then speaks. Might Turnstone be interested in a book? Kroetsch’s voice is quiet, tentative. He looks up askance. He is almost apologetic. Might Turnstone be interested in Seed Catalogue? He offers the manuscript, which Turnstone published in 1977. 2. Kroetsch told more or less the same story on other occasions. See “On Being an Alberta Writer: Or, I Wanted to Tell Our Story.” The New Provinces: Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1905–1980. 12th Western Canada Studies Conference. Ed. Howard Palmer and Donald Smith. Vancouver: Tantalus Research Ltd. 1981. 217–27. Also: Robert Enright and Dennis Cooley. “Uncovering Our Dream World: An Interview with Robert Kroetsch.” Arts Manitoba 1.1 (1977): 32–39. Later printings of “On Being an Alberta Writer” dropped the subtitle: • “On Being an Alberta Writer.” Open Letter 5.5–6 (1983): 69–80. • “On Being an Alberta Writer.” (Abridged from Open Letter) A Passion for Identity: An Introduction to Canadian Studies. Ed. Eli Mandel and David Taras. Toronto: Methane, 1987. 335–41. The material also appeared in “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues.” The Lovely Treachery: Essay Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989. 1–20. This longer essay compiles several shorter pieces, virtually all of which Kroetsch had already published. Part 1 of this essay is an abbreviation of the fuller “On Being an Alberta Writer” that appeared in New Provinces. The altered essay removes some of the primary texts that appeared in the original essay. Part 4 is an adaptation of the Enright and Cooley interview. Part 5 is a reprinting of “Beginnings” from Salt. Part 6 is Kroetsch’s introduction to Mandel’s Dreaming Backwards. Part 7 is Kroetsch’s review of Harrison’s Unnamed Country in Essays on Canadian Writing. Part 8 is Kroetsch’s “Prairie Pub Poems,” his review of Glen Sorestad’s One for the Road that had appeared in freelance 8.3 (1977): 11–12. Section 9 is a reprinting of “voice/in prose effing the ineffable” from freelance 8.2 (1976): 35–36. The section called “Beginnings” first appeared as “Beginnings.” Salt 16 (1977): 2–5. That section was later retitled and put into a collection of Kroetsch essays, “Taking the Risk.” Robert Kroetsch: Essays. Ed. Frank Davey and bp Nicol. Spec. issue of Open Letter 5.4 (1983): 65–67. 3. It is October 28, 2003, and Kroetsch is speaking about Seed Catalogue in an English class at the University of Manitoba. He says that when he was working on the poem in Winnipeg he had written a big “baggy” version of the poem. He then went off to Binghamton where, having left his notes and drafts back in Winnipeg, he rewrote from



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4.



5.



6.



7.

318

scratch: “Without any of my notes I was able to reconstruct a version, a version of the poem. And that’s the version you have here. I had to go and look up some quotes and stuff but it is interesting because I had been buried in my research in a way. There is so much you can look up about gardens that are important, and Adam and Eve and these things, that I had to have a release on my material.” Asked what happened to the older version, he says, “Well, I imagine I didn’t know enough to keep it as a document because I wasn’t aware one must create archives. I thought I would just dismantle it. I wish I had kept it, but I didn’t.” (Class visit, 28 Oct. 2003). Some of the archival evidence appears on the back of ads for boundary 2 in 1973 and at least one on the back of a boundary 2 sheet advertising the Canadian issue, which was scheduled to appear on December 1, 1974. The entries might coincide with what we find in “Lovely Treachery: My Upstate New York Journals” in a section dated “Wednesday, April 24, 1974”: “Two days ago, got started on a long poem. After months, years, of waiting for the poem to begin itself” (Lovely Treachery 149). There is a still earlier entry from “Monday, September 3, 1973” that speaks of related work: “I’m toying with the basis for a long poem of my own—‘Winter Count’” (147). However, Kroetsch told me that “Winter Count” was never a draft for, or a version of, Seed Catalogue. We do read in an entry from The “Crow” Journals, dated January 1, 1975, these words on what he has found in a bookstore: “second-hand books on / Japanese prints” (28), a glimmer possibly of the Tokaido section in Seed Catalogue. He seems soon to be under way on what almost certainly is the makings of Seed Catalogue. On February 13, he writes MacLean Jamieson at Applegarth Follies about his latest work: “I have a long poem started, I think; part of what we’ve been talking about, the groping into the silence” (MsC. 27.2.1.23). A letter dated “Oct 1, 1975” reports, “Sheila Watson a kind of muse figure in the book of poems I’m commencing” (MsC. 27.23.3). See “A Conversation with Margaret Laurence” (55). Also this: “what he really liked was farming with horses; when tractors came in, he was already starting to lose interest” (Miki, “Self on Self” 110). In earlier versions, Kroetsch had considered other words: pumpkin seeds, bean seeds, and sweet pea seeds. On one page Kroetsch has circled the word “radish” in “Bring me the radish seeds, / my mother said” and he has drawn a line from the circled word to an empty box he has drawn below. Is the box waiting for substitution? amendment? Why does Kroetsch settle on the word “radish”? Evidently it wasn’t because of any distinct memory, for the alternatives came readily to mind as he was teasing the text into shape and before he settled on a word. Could the choice have been made out of a desire to distance the occasion? If the mother had called for flower seeds (as in at least one variation she had), she would have been named (unbearably?) as keeper of something perhaps too anguishing, something too effeminate, for the aggrieved (adult) son, who a few lines later in Seed Catalogue will speak of her death. Gerald Hill has, in Barthean spirit, written a lovely gloss on this passage, a readerly moment of bliss, his own memories and his own lines tuned to Kroetsch’s garden and mother:

notes

Mother and marking and twine. It is her space I kneel beside. She marks (“here hold this twine”) just the two of us, a line stretched between two pegs. (107) Hill presents only the mother’s measures of the earth, her lines (of poetry). She with her son, just the two of them. 8. Earlier editions read “¼-section” where now they read “quarter-section.” 9. Kroetsch confesses as much: “I’m told I was spoiled rotten from the day of my birth; I had many aunts, cousins—” (Hancock 36). And, similarly, he told Alan Twigg: “Mind you, I had a relatively easy life, don’t let me fool you” (Strong Voices 149). There are signs that his own family agreed: “Aunt Mary O’Connor and others telling me I was the most spoiled child in the community, because of my doting parents” (The “Crow” Journals 42). 10. In 1977, the year that Seed Catalogue appeared, Kroetsch also published “Canada is a Poem” in which he scorns General Wolfe at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham as “a sort of sneaky bastard, climbing that cliff-side in the dark,” but he saves special contempt for General Middleton at the Battle of Batoche. Middleton is so lacking in human worth, he is totally unfit to be near horses: “For Middleton I was only embarrassed, a man of such ill-consequence, allowed to ride a horse” (“Canada is a Poem” 14). For someone who holds failure in horsemanship in such scorn, Kroetsch is rather frank in admitting to his own ineptitude: “I couldn’t be trusted with a team of horses, partly because of a tendency to daydream, partly because of a perverse identification with the horses, against men” (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 73). A report on the relationship appears in yet another account of childhood: Beginnings: I drove a horse and buggy to school, in the spring and fall, a horse and cutter in the winter. Four and a half miles, forty-five minutes, each way. My sisters were busy with their friends. I hated to touch a whip to a horse. Each school-horse of mine grew fat; and in its slowness I learned the seasons, with their birds, their plants, their weather. I made stories. I made stories that were continued, changed, elaborated. (Lovely Treachery 10) “I was not exactly a skilled horseman,” he admits in Kroetschean amusement: “I wrecked the whole outfit three times” (“A Thank You Prologue” 2). 11. When I presented an earlier and briefer version of this argument in Calgary in 2005, the moderator protested. I myself, he said, would sooner have been addressed as “a little bugger.” A lesson in cultural codes, perhaps, or personal preferences. 12. The archival records on several pages assign the notion of planting to the adult narrator and not the hired man. Transferred, the words take on some real bite. Other earlier terms (“fell into the soft dirt—a kind of planting.”) were quiet and tentative, and in no way aggressive or demeaning.



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13. For that matter, there is not much information about any of the family members, as Douglas Reimer has pointed out (53). 14. It is tableau, but a tableau missing the third figure that Dick Harrison identifies as part of a statue in the Provincial Museum of Alberta that provides a suggestive emblem for the prairie pioneer as he is found in the fiction: a man kneels, holding the bridle of a horse that bears his wife and infant child. The larger-than-life proportions of the statue, the obvious strength of the man, the gazes fixed ahead into the distance, all speak of the romance of pioneering. And there is something redemptive about this new beginning. “The grouping of man, woman, child, and patient beast suggests a nativity scene,” Harrison remarks, except for the “squared metal-survey stake with its cryptic notation of range, township, section, and quarter section” (Harrison “Cultural Insanity” 284–85). In Kroetsch’s familial landscape, the son and mother have uneasily withdrawn, set aside from patient beast and discomposed father. 15. Purdy had written to Kroetsch on June 12, 1975, when Kroetsch was in the midst of writing Seed Catalogue, to say “Lone [long?] time since we sat in that revolving restaurant in Edmonton” (MsC. 4.48). 16. He was lonesome for the hot wind on his face, the smell of horses, the distant hum of a threshing machine, the oilcan he carried, the weight of a crescent wrench in his hind pocket.

He was lonesome too for a missing son, absent daughters, a dead wife, his own sisters and brothers, his own mother and father (The Stone Hammer Poems 59). 17. See also David Arnason’s “Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue,” especially p. 81. 18. The names of the baseball teams were added in handwriting some time into the composition. In an early draft Kroetsch had simply entered blanks where now the names appear. It seems probable this is a simple matter of not remembering. An author, many years after an event, would not likely summon up immediate kinds of detail, especially in the precipitance of writing. It would seem reasonable that he would put off checking, carried by what was coming into notice as the poem was taking shape. He would follow that trajectory and later ferret out the data. And yet: we could think of the blanks as instances of a larger structure of diversion. In the facticity we could imagine something defensive, perhaps something evasive—something assembled against grieving. Almost any old thing would do, so long as it is of no matter. The passage situates the traumatic memory within a sprinkling of trivia, information so ordinary it might be reassuring: these things go on in their perfectly ordinary way and the world is not lost, not altogether it isn’t. On the other hand, we could imagine that the scene would have been so traumatic that even incidental information would cling unshakably to it, in which case the mundane details would not point to feint or diversion or cover-up, they would register the razor-sharp clarity of what stuck to the boy in the vast power of metonymies. 320

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19. The kid’s dry-eyed response is matched by other Kroetsch protagonists. “At my mother’s funeral I couldn’t shed a tear to save my soul,” says Johnny Backstrom (Words 128). And then, insistingly, only a few pages on, he reiterates the point: “For my own mother, I could not shed a tear. I loved my mother. I went to her funeral resolved to cry. I strained and squeezed and groaned. I rocked and shook. But not a tear.” And yet, “Out there,” in the eroticized garden with the nubile Helen Persephone Murdoch, Johnny confesses he “had to fight back the tears” (132). 20. Kroetsch has written more abruptly in manuscript about the mother’s death: The wake was held in [word unclear] [word unclear]. The corpse was to be viewed in the bedroom where my mother suckled five children. (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4)





21. A strategy of hyperbolic protest rolls through a later text, The Sad Phoenician, in a bravura performance that is interrupted by outbursts of hurt and longing, the moments so brief they are easily overlooked underneath the energy and protest that dominate the text (as they do also in The Words of My Roaring, for example). 22. Marjorie Perloff has identified in Robert Creeley’s lineation an effect that is also working in Kroetsch’s muse section (though, unlike Perloff, I am hearing Kroetsch’s broken lines as expressive of a speaker who is “present” in the language). In Creeley, Perloff notes, the sputtering words occlude the ‘I’s’ halting presence…There is no image complex to control the flow of speech; indeed the shift from line to line is by no means linear…calling attention to the play of signifiers…rather than to what is signified… The syntactic ambiguity…coupled with the insistent word-stress, produces a rhythm of extreme weight and fragmentation—a kind of aphasic stutter—that is both heard and seen on the page. Each word, to cite Gertrude Stein, is as important as every other word. Sound becomes obtrusive…as does the creation of paragrams, formed by cutting up complete sentences or clauses […and] the consistent detachment of words from their larger phrasal or clausal environment—a practice that goes way beyond what is known as enjambment. (Poetry On & Off 156)

Perloff’s analysis might prompt us consciously to hear Kroetsch’s words as parts of a continuous sentence, and as fractured bits of speech. We would then be fully aware of this configuration: His muse is his muse if memory is. The muse is available (can be the muse) only through memory—its “is”-ness present and active. 23. Deborah Keahey, in Making it Home, has extended Kroetsch’s comments about the quiet mother figure to “linking the inspiration or drive for writing with the sexual quest, which is also associated with his absent mother” (133). In consideration of the



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24.



25.



26.



27.



28.



29.

mother as she appears across Kroetsch’s poetry, Keahey notes “a connection between the failure of love and Kroetsch’s urge to continual movement” (142). See pages 126 to 143, “Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes,” in Keahey’s Making it Home. T.L. Cowan finds that Seed Catalogue “mythologizes heterosex, or perhaps more accurately, it reproduces the norms of heterosex, which circulate as/through myths of origin” (122) and that therefore occupy a position of dominance bordering on exclusivity. Cowan identifies the young boy in Seed Catalogue as himself on the outs with prevalent codes of masculinity (125), but Cowan sees Kroetsch’s extravagant masculinity as so fully occupying the myth of gender on the prairies that it has nearly prevented the emergence of other expressions of sexuality. Olson writes in Call Me Ishmael, “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America” (11) and “As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives” (12). Wanda Campbell, citing Kroetsch’s own invocation of Northrop Frye, traces “the death of the male myth of the conquering hero,” realized in Pete Knight’s violent end, and the poet’s supplanting of the epic hero (33). In 1955, a quarter of a century earlier, Kroetsch is contemplating marriage, getting a job, and moving away from Montreal. He has met “a pretty nice girl [Mary Jane Lewis]…at Bread Loaf…And she’s really got me thinking.” A real ambivalence shows itself: “there is the possibility that marriage would make me settle down a little.” Jane sends him a letter in which she speaks of what sounds like an arrangement for a marriage, evidently a quick getaway. A letter dated “Sunday” expresses concern that Kroetsch is too undecided about things. Another letter says, “I’ve read your letter three times and I sure can’t figure it out (your plans).” The folder in which these letters appear contains a typescript of “Reflections while half asleep alone in a cold bed in a strange room on a cloudy morning,” a long enigmatic processual piece that shows wildly conflicted feelings about romance (MsC. 775/04.25 2.2). Tompkins further explains: The discourse of Christian domesticity—of Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the heart, the home—had [in the United States] spread from horizon to horizon in the decades preceding the Western’s rise to fame. And so, just as the women’s novels that captured the literary marketplace at mid-century had privileged the female realm of spiritual power, inward struggle, homosociality, and sacramental household ritual, Westerns, in a reaction that looks very much like literary gender war, privilege the male realm of public power, physical ordeal, homosociality, and the rituals of the duel [and the handling of horses?]. (42)





30. At the moment of the kid’s falling off the horse, the father described in the archives acted in awkward and uncertain mediation, when he “tried to lift me / back onto the horse.” 31. Even Kroetsch’s father, responsible leader that he was, could not as a young man resist the lure of cowboy lore. He appears in a picture with another man decked out in showy

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western garb. Kroetsch’s caption explains: “When my father arrived in Saskatchewan, he posed for a postcard to send back to Ontario” (“The Plains of My Youth” 10). A later text, “Lonesome Writer Diptych,” shows how much the rodeo shaped Kroetsch’s imagination, as figuration of the world itself: Riding the bucking bull of plate tectonics, we hang on for dear life to a floating world. (A Likely Story 116)

32. Norman O. Brown, who was widely read, feted really, in the United States when Kroetsch was teaching at Binghamton: The wandering heroes are phallic heroes, in a permanent state of erection; pricking o’er the plain…All movement is phallic, all intercourse sexual. Hermes, the phallus, is the god of roads, of doorways, of all goings-in and comings-out; all goings-on… All walking, or wandering, is from mother, to mother, in mother; it gets us nowhere. (50)

All movement, Brown writes, occurs in space; and space is a “receptacle, a vessel,” a “matrix,” also a “mother” and a “nurse.” 33. The hero’s adventure brought him (always a “him” in Campbell) through “a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a lifeenhancing return” (Hero 35). In the mid-1970s Kroetsch was keenly interested in the quest myth and heavily influenced by Jung. Signs of Jung are particularly evident in Kroetsch’s Badlands, with its many symbolic stages of transition and transformation. Jung may stand behind Kroetsch’s faith in early morning as a moment of renewal from dream: I like to write after I have had a good night’s sleep without too much drinking because I find that coming out of the dream stage is very important in my writing…After sleeping I wake up very fresh, a sort of high energy level and feel like going right to work for at least three hours…I need that condition of daylight, but coming right out of night. (Enright and Cooley 32) The Jungian Campbell says similar things on the stages of consciousness: “in the abyss of sleep the energies are refreshed, in the work of the day they are exhausted; the life of the universe runs down and must be renewed” (Hero 266). 34. There is a connection, too, in the historically uneasy interplay between rancher and farmer, one figure who moves out and one who settles in. See Ronald Rees’s luminous chapter, “Ranchers and the Prairie Landscape,” in his New and Naked Land, 136–54. 35. In Letters to Salonika, published in 1985, Kroetsch invokes Homer: “Penelope was the artist, in that story. Odysseus, only the dumb and silent one, approaching and being

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unraveled and approaching again. Odysseus, unraveled, approaching. Penelope gave the story to herself. She did not give the story to Odysseus” (Completed Field Notes 142). Within a decade the binary has been nearly turned around. The male figures are now depicted as ineffectual, the “housed” woman as creative and self-sufficient. In 1981 Ann Mandel, in part drawing on Kroetsch’s “Fear of Women,” eloquently laid out that pattern as it informs Kroetsch’s comic-grotesque novel What the Crow Said (“Mandel on Kroetsch”). Kroetsch’s last full book of poetry, Too Bad, includes “Time to Spare,” a brief understated piece of wisdom literature in which he unsettles still more his earlier binaries of male horse and female house (92). 36. In 1989 he quietly dedicates his collection of essays, The Lovely Treachery: In memory of my mother Hildegard Weller





37. Long after the appearance of Seed Catalogue and several years after “Sounding,” Kroetsch wrote “Poem for My Dead Sister,” in memory of a sister with whom he had been very close. See Kroetsch’s account of the origin and the writing of the poem in the Butling and Rudy interview (14–17). Julie Beddoes responded positively to it. She articulates a wariness of “so many poets [who] seem to think that their only task is to relate mawkish little stories in commonplace language” (30). The point is a good one, though it is probably overreaches itself in setting Kroetsch’s almost metaphysical poem against what for Beddoes appears to be the main alternative—poems that are “little” and “commonplace” and “mawkish.” The argument almost assumes that a more personal or intimate style would be inherently susceptible to those deficiencies. The praise for Kroetsch’s elegy may be no less excessive. A less enthusiastic reading of the “Sister” poem would see it as a retreat into high modernism, and a lapse into the kind of writing which Kroetsch seems elsewhere to have left behind. It is possible to find in the Latinate diction, the neologisms, the tight lines, and crabbed stanzas, and at times the near refusal of semantic sense, an avoidance of emotion. The poem arguably reverts to a verbal slanting, a thickening so great that it packs a narcotic around the loss. Where Beddoes discerns a “grief beyond anecdote with an exploration of language beyond anecdote” (30), another reader might find strategic evasion. The poem would then be one written from a need to cope with the shocking immediacy of the experience, but it would still show a density and an entangling that actually deflects the sorrow. 38. W.H. Auden has outlined what he takes to be a typical upbringing for the poet. The features, though they may sound overly schematic, bear remarkable resemblance to what we know of Kroetsch’s life: According to Ibsen, the predisposing factors in childhood are, first, an isolation from the social group…and second, a playmate who stimulates and shares his imaginative life—a role played by his mother…All fabrication is an imitation of motherhood and, whenever we have information about the childhood of an artist,

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it reveals a closer bond with his mother than with his father…Many poets, it would seem, do their best work when they are “in love,” but the psychological condition of being “in love” is incompatible with a sustained historical relationship like marriage. The poet’s Muse must either be dead like Dante’s Beatrice, or far away like Peer’s Solveig, or keep on being reincarnated in one lady after another…But Peer has so far been lucky: “He had women behind him.” (440–41)

39. Lorna Crozier’s “Gardens,” though it never names Kroetsch, shows every sign of having been written about him and possibly for him. A typed copy of the poem in the Kroetsch archives includes this note, dated “Jan 15, 1990,” from Crozier: “I had you and the wonderful poems you wrote about your mother in mind” (MsC. 391/96/6 12.59). Crozier’s piece is a touching and astute imagining of a lost mother. “He’d give anything to be there,” she writes, “Back where he was born,” with his mother who “would be soaking seeds.” He would be “crossing time as if it were / a landscape he had dreamed, a garden / / large enough to hold desire.” Crozier provides the homely and reassuring details he might have conjured, before she adds words about the sudden and devastating loss: the oilcloth his mother wipes and wipes, setting supper plates for people he’ll never see again. he and she in another time, waiting for the earth to tilt. (117–18)



40. Fair enough, we might say. A deluded sentimentality only diminishes us and impedes our understanding. Yet, should we be so taken with “nostalgia for the future,” or so infatuated with a deconstructionist present, that the past must be set aside as inaccessible or as irrelevant—as ultimately so useless it is to be shunned? (Carey 198). Linda Hutcheon is wary: what this [skeptical] view misses is the critical, rather than affirmative, stance of the postmodernist problematizing (as opposed to humanist valorizing) of the notions of history and tradition. It makes the assumption that any recall of the past today must be a sign of nostalgia or antiquarianism or “a pastiche of historical consciousness, an exercise in bad faith”…But should we therefore also accuse anyone from Picasso and Joyce, back through Shakespeare and Dante of the same sin? There seems no reason not to, by this argument…The combining of the new and the old is not an innovation, nor is it necessarily subversive—or affirmative. It can be either; it is not, by definition, negative, however. (Poetics of Postmodernism 208)



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41. Kroetsch had at one point considered ending the poem on an “up” note: —end with a set of lyrics —or end with love letters —end: ready to become a writer Love is a leaving. (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4)



42. In what we now know as the “absences” section in Seed Catalogue, Kroetsch had at one point included his mother. Among the sustained lists of absences, the simple fact of her absence is registered in a brief handwritten line: “the absence of my mother.” Had Kroetsch retained that line, it would have conveyed enormous power. The simple and sudden mention would have jumped out from the array of known and esteemed items that crowd up the list. On another handwritten page of absences, Kroetsch speaks in more detail of his mother: “the absence of my mother: Hilda Marie Weller canning dill pickles on a cool morning her bright apron in the garden her apron full of fresh-picked p [? peas, likely] her apron [open?] pocket full of clothespins” [the second and last word in the last line are unclear]









43. Kroetsch added by hand to a typescript of “I’m getting old” this subtitle: Oct 3, 1983 (MsC 591/96.6 53.1). 44. The folder containing the “Sounding the Name” material includes a picture of “Hilda Weller (Kroetsch) aged 16 or 17” and three postcards of Rembrandt’s mother, as well as self-directions to check on Rembrandt’s mother and Whistler’s mother (MsC. 591/96.6 53.1). 45. Kroetsch elsewhere refers to another photograph of his mother. Asked to caption one of the photographs he sent to Weekend Magazine in 1976, he wrote: “#2 the people with the car: Millie and Fred (mentioned in the essay), my father (Paul) and my mother (Hilda): my mother is, yes, pregnant with me in the picture. The first time I was photographed.” The page on which the note appears is not dated though it would have had to have been written after January 20, when Sheila Paterson asked for photographs (MsC. 334/84.1 13.10), and before July 9 when the enormously entertaining article was published as “The Plains of My Youth.” 46. The most daring and breathtaking lines, those that are anachronistic and that involve claims for knowledge and presence that would be physically impossible, are all added after the poems in “Sounding the Name” are well under way (MsC. 591/96.6 53.1). 47. The scene strikingly resembles one in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Barthes, happening upon a picture of his mother taken years before he was born, experiences what he calls the prick of the “punctum.” He is thinking of a moment of sudden and transfiguring connection during which he sees his mother, in effect (which is to say

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within his mind) brought back from the dead, and into an extraordinary connection with himself (Camera Lucida 67–72). He names that relationship as a reaching with love (of a kind, I’d venture, comparable to Kroetsch’s) into such a photograph: “I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die” (117). What at moments Barthes finds so powerful in photographs is, he thinks, “a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead” (32). There is yet another passage in Barthes about how he finds in a photograph of his mother a figuring of his grief and mourning: It is said that mourning, by its gradual labor, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable. (75) I am indebted to Dana Cooley for these thoughts (message to the author, 20 Mar. 2006). 48. In working on “Sounding the Name,” Kroetsch at one point had been thinking of calling the sequence, or at least some part of it, the “window poem” (MsC. 591/96.6 53.1) in recognition of the situation he occupied, physically and mentally, in thinking of the mother, in “looking” back (out) on her. The window with its transparency onto the world, and the frame that positions and confers ways of looking, serves as apt symbol for the poet’s poetics and his personal text—he looks at the world, but he looks through the frame. Oh, no no no, said William Blake. I look not with my eye, but through it. 49. A buffalo wallow perhaps. Kroetsch remembers when he first learned about one: I was playing in a large, shallow depression in the ground, a depression that somehow wasn’t natural. My father came by, looking for me. I asked about the place where I was playing. He said, casually, that it was a buffalo wallow. It’s where buffalo rolled and scratched, he said. He could tell me a little more—the lake never went dry, he explained, the buffalo came here to drink. (Robert Kroetsch: Essays 70) Guy Vanderhaeghe provides a vivid description of a buffalo stone and wallow in Chapter 12 of The Last Crossing (123). 50. In her study of prairie writing, Making It Home, Deborah Keahey has proposed that “the garden in ‘Seed Catalogue’ is less a site of gender ambiguity than of sexual ambiguity, with the mother’s whispered request taking on erotic overtones” (133).



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51. The narrative of falling recurs years later in Kroetsch’s “Lonesome Writer Diptych.” Again there is the fascination with riding, even heroic riding. In this piece, the kid falls off a young bull when he and his friends are “playing rodeo.” Kroetsch recounts the experience as so upsetting that he wanted to call it quits. His exaggerated and somewhat simpering protests (“I thought I might be dying and said so”) are met with the abrupt and aggressive disapproval of another kid, evidently a more “manly” boy: “Someone told me to get up off my ass and get back onto the bull.” It was then, Kroetsch in typical self-mockery tells us, that he decided to forego life as a rodeo hero and to take up life as a writer (“Lonesome Writer,” 112–13). If you cannot ride, you write. It may or may not be important that in “Lonesome Writer” the mother watches over the young boy and in the end deflects any consequences the boy might have faced for taking apart the father’s watch (117). In both cases—falling off the bull, and wrecking the watch—the boy seems to have failed some test of manhood, and to have sought, or received, protection from his mother. 52. On Remembrance Day, 2009, Diane Cooley and I drove with Kroetsch from Leduc, Alberta, to visit Heisler and to look around the countryside. He showed us the schoolhouse, still standing, that his mother had attended. (A picture of it appears in “Our Odysseus,” Aritha van Herk’s recent tribute to him. In the accompanying photograph, Kroetsch, purple-shirted, sits on the steps to the old school, in front of its rough white door, rough yellow siding, the grass way up past his knees.) What about your mother’s knowledge of flowers? I asked him. She always liked them, he said, and she knew them from looking around the prairie. When she was young it would have been filled with wild flowers, she knew the names of all the flowers. Kroetsch’s early work on Seed Catalogue included a lot of notes on flowers and on his mother’s prizing of them. On one page, below some material on a flower book he has written a list of flowers and their properties that displays a fastidious sense of them. The words show an attention to colour and visual pattern that is virtually unheard of in Kroetsch’s entire body of writing: deep claret and chocolate striped and flaked on a ground of light heliotrope “a delicate blush with a deeper suffusion of pink towards the edges” --“a dark magenta colored self, wings plum color” --“deep claret and chocolate, striped and flaked on ground of light heliotrope”

Several passages connect the mother and the home with flowers, and accord a lyrical expression to household and female space. His mother, he wrote, in words that begin to aestheticize the mother’s affect, 328

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taught me the silence of blue the laughter of yellow blossoms, the black of blood “flaked on a ground of light heliotrope” (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4)









53. Kroetsch rethinks this story with typical irreverence: “in my youth I identified with Orpheus himself and the death-dealing gaze of the poet; now I identify with Eurydice, fearful that the asshole up ahead might look back” (A Likely Story 55). 54. Kroetsch’s troubled memories of the lost mother may or may not stand as exception to Dick Harrison’s observation that the disappearing father haunts prairie literature (Unnamed Country 188). 55. As early as 1970 Kroetsch had conceded a need for the personal: “I used to, I think, distance myself greatly—keep myself and my work far apart. But in writing poems like ‘Stone Hammer’ I have taken the risk, so to speak, of looking at my own immediate experience rather than shaping it into fiction” (Brown, “An Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 4). 56. Robert Thacker, speaking of earlier, and American, settlement on the grasslands has noted that women, rather than trying like the men to dominate the prairie, “sought to see and respond to the land’s garden-like qualities, to respond to its potential for domestication” (80). 57. The succession is apparent in the archives: do you grow a garden? How did I become the gardener? My mother died. That’s how. My mother died. I grew the garden the next year. 1941. 1941. I was fourteen. I was desolate. In January I read the seed catalogues. In May I planted (MsC. 334/84.1 11.1–11.4)

On the way to publication, the drafts get stripped of indications of grieving. Excisions eliminate overt mentions of emotion (the simple admission, “I was desolate,” disappears) and the revised version names the succession as something close to necessity, as if the role has fallen in default upon a dutiful boy. Kroetsch has briefly spoken in person to his raw pain when taking over his mother’s role as family gardener. Once opened, the story is carried by a force of its own. Kroetsch intimately knows the garden planted in memory of the mother, the boy coaxing it into new life, the radical return of life on the prairies. 58. See Wanda Campbell’s excellent account of “the confrontation between ‘talking father’ and ‘writing son’” (23).

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59. Russell Brown has found the most crucial expression of loss in Seed Catalogue to involve the poet’s acute realization of his own mortality. Oddly, Brown doesn’t mention the mother among the losses he identifies (“Seeds and Stones”). 60. The finished version also leaves behind a few pieces that were wildly ribald or rudely satiric, one of them about a modern-day Adam and Eve, another about Canadian tourists in Europe.

FIVE It’s a Lover’s Question Staging Romance in The Sad Phoenician

1. It is hard to believe that Barthes wasn’t a direct influence on The Sad Phoenician, given the remarkable resemblances between Kroetsch’s poem and Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and given the dates of publication (A Lover’s Discourse appeared in English in 1978, and The Sad Phoenician in 1979). But there was no indebtedness apparently. Kroetsch told me that at the time of writing The Sad Phoenician he didn’t know A Lover’s Discourse. He had been affected, he said, by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whose novel Concrete consists of the relentless monologue of an obsessional man (personal interview, 23 Oct. 2010; personal interview, 8 Feb. 2011). 2. Kroetsch has confessed, “Yes, I do rewrite a great deal, but you see when I rewrite, I do it at a level where it’s spontaneous again” (Brown, “An Interview with Robert Kroetsch” 12). His papers indicate that he does a lot or preparatory work and a lot of revising. 3. The Phoenician’s self-congratulation in playing to an audience, in auditioning for his own role, resembles Johnny Backstrom’s hind-teat speech in The Words of My Roaring, which provides a colourful match: “I swung my head this way, that way; I paused as if to listen to myself ” (92). This self acts as mirror to himself. Backstrom, like the Phoenician, turns an eye, tunes an ear, to his own performance. Serving as his own audience, he scans himself and monitors his performance. He takes soundings, he keeps track of how he’s doing. He is enormously adept at this. Even as Backstrom rallies destitute constituents, he pauses for effect, plays with consummate skill on patterns of stress. He invokes with considerable efficacy passages from the Bible, poses knowingly, gesturing with the finesse of a practiced actor, openly admires his own show. He winks at his audience and invites them into connivance. How theatrical, we might think. How vain and self-centered. How rhetorical, Lanham would say. 4. The “Crow” Journals entry for “August 23, 1975” reads: “Managed to get a ticket to Stratford—Twelfth Night. Disappointing second half. But fascinating on the clownfool figure” (37). 5. The poet Daphne Marlatt wrote to Kroetsch about sections he had sent to periodics. She and her colleague, Paul de Barros, had “argued about whether it is a poem or not” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). Marlatt reiterated the uncertainty in a letter dated December 21, 1978, before adding these words: “And of course what we’re really interested in is just

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6.



7.



8.



9.



10.



11.



12.

that area you work in ‘The Sad Phoenician’ where poetry & prose move up against or into each other” (MsC. 334/84.1 4.34). Reading the rambunctious and nearly throw-away style as revealing some derangement in the speaker might satisfy West’s objections. Readers of a postmodern bent would prefer to hear the style as evidence of the instability that sits in all identities and all language. The argument I am making plays between these reading strategies. In “from The Remembrance Day Tapes,” published in Island 13/14, Kroetsch has supposed, just before The Sad Phoenician appeared, the “breaking of form is spell-casting” and that “When we break form we break what has come to be accepted as reason a kind of logic become primary So you destroy that or subtract you take it away and you’re left with spell-making” (Kroetsch and Marshall 33). We might wonder, given what Kroetsch has said about the personal basis to his poem, whether the women’s anonymity as “actual” characters, or as characters endowed with unusual names, may derive as much from personal tact as from literary strategy or a fondness for pecliar names. Kroetsch mentioned more than once in conversation that he was disappointed in the reception of The Sad Phoenician, for which he felt a real affection. “The alphabet intrigues me by the utter rigidity and the utter meaninglessness of the system,” Kroetsch has said (Miki, “Self on Self” 134). The character Liebhaber in What the Crow Said is profoundly obsessed with the alphabet and unnerved in contemplating its arrangements, manifestations, and disappearances (54–55, 68–69, 73, 74, 115–16, 163, 197, 216, for example). In recognition of Kroetsch’s love for letters, the press Imprimerie dromadaire has printed a striking chapbook, Liebhaber’s Wood Type, foregrounding letters in various styles, sizes, and colours. The Coach House book, George Bowering enthuses, is “sumptuous” and among Kroetsch’s books is “the nicest looking yet” (Miki, “Self on Self” 131). Gerald L. Bruns has argued that, for Aristotle, stringing words together makes them appear as atoms in space, available for combination into molecules according to a linear model. This linear model is clearly at work in Aristotle’s discussion of diction in the Poetics, where he distinguishes, together with the letter, noun, and verb, the syndesmos and arthron, two anatomical terms meaning “ligament” and “joint.” Such words (which approximate roughly our notions of conjunction and article) have only a purely grammatical function: they are ‘insignificant sounds,’ serving only to bind the parts of the sentence together. (Modern Poetry 29)



13. That superb and eloquent essay, “‘And,’” appears in Gass’s Habitations of the World. 14. Kroetsch had been thinking about the physical presentation of the text. In a letter dated January 2, 1979, he says, “About the typesetting of ‘Phoenician’--all I’m certain of is that the left margin should be as is--with the ands and the buts emerging from the mass of type” (MsC. 334/84.1 13.3).



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15. Kroetsch’s notes show that he was considering a more tentative structure: “and” and “but” at end of lines: into verse form, each stanza beginning in turn, and and but; i.e., then the and and the but at the ends of the lines ---and if but then a series: which becomes and then but if (MsC. 334.34.1 13.1)

16. The abandoning of a sentence in failure to remember resembles, as do many other things in the poem, what Beckett, a Kroetsch favourite, does in, say, “The Unnamable,” where the speaker loses his way through a snarled and looping syntax that collapses in uncertainty: “but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter” (333); Beckett’s title, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, is reminiscent of Kroetsch’s own despairing words when he left Binghamton for good: “I couldn’t go on. And I couldn’t go back” (The “Crow” Journals 36). There are other parallels. Kroetsch’s alternations between “and” and “but” find some equivalence in Beckett’s experiments with “yes” and “no,” which can be as entertaining as they are unnerving: the screaming silence of no’s knife in yes’s wound, it wonders. And wonders what has become of the wish to know, it is gone, the heart is gone, the head is gone, no one feels anything, asks anything, seeks anything, says anything, hears anything, there is only silence. It’s not true, yes, it’s true, it’s true and it’s not true, there is silence and there is no silence, there is no one and there is someone, nothing prevents anything. And were the voice to cease quite at last, the old ceasing voice, it would not be true, as it is not true that it speaks, it can’t speak, it can’t cease. (361–62)





17. Chaucer, Kroetsch often said, was a revelation and a favourite author when he attended university. The poem “American Mistress” echoes “The Knight’s Tale.” As for that, The Sad Phoenician emulates The Canterbury Tales in its respect for a set of given conditions within which and according to which it must proceed, the aim of authorship being a test of wits to keep the game going. 18. The original Coach House edition reads “goodby” (11). 19. Ondaatje, we remember, was one of the editors who worked on the manuscript for Coach House. 20. For Ovid the chain of illogic runs through bird, deer, ewe, mare, woman (The Offence of Love 116). 21. Smaro Kamboureli was quick to identify the move. The Phoenician’s “language overtakes the other aspects of love. I think that the way he talks about his different women

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is a sort of practice, a praxis almost, the trying out of language, in all its possibilities, rhetorical and others” (50). 22. Eliot again. Prufrock’s anguish as he looks longingly out across the ocean: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. // I do not think that they will sing to me” (17). Shakespeare and other poets swirling in lyrical and sonorous grace through the turmoil that is “The Wasteland.” Marlatt’s jocular reference—“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag”—seems to have sensed something fuller in the affinities. The lines appear in “A Game of Chess,” Part II of The Wasteland: O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent (67)









23. Is this an echo of Ezekiel 27.5?: “They have made all thy ship boards of fir trees of Senir: they have taken cedars from Lebanon to make masts for thee.” The Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture offers an even closer wording: “From the cypresses of Sanir they built All thy planks. The cedars of Lebanon they took To make thee a mast” (http://www.spaceshipsofezekiel.com/html/ccohs-613.html). 24. Kroetsch elsewhere discusses his personal exposure in “Stone Hammer Poem,” at which he had been working from at least 1970: “I used to, I think, distance myself greatly—keep myself and my work far apart. But in writing poems like ‘Stone Hammer’ I have taken the risk, so to speak, of looking at my own immediate experience rather than shaping it into fiction” (Brown “An Interview” 5). 25. Lanham’s words might go some way toward explaining Kroetsch’s rather cryptic advice to David Antin: “Postmodern, at its best, restores to first place the temporality of language over the spaciality [sic] of image. Forget your Socrates. Remember your Homer” (MsC. 27.1.9.77). 26. The University of Calgary archives includes these scattered handwritten notes: concealing of vulnerability men pretend they aren’t vulnerable i.e. don’t need women—and the women go along with the game men seldom make it on their own (MsC. 334/34.1 13.9)

six Noted & Quoted Kroetsch in Conversation and at the Podium

1. The interview first appeared in NeWest Review as “We Both Do Begin,” and was reprinted as “Unearthing Language: An Interview with Rudy Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch,” in W.J. Keith, ed. A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981), 226–47.

notes

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334

2. One of the most sustained statements of membership in a larger community occurs in “Writing Saskatchewan: Ten Years and a Celebration” where Kroetsch says, “I presume to use the pronoun we” (MsC. 775/04.25 6.3.2). 3. B. Hariharan in The Carnival World of Robert Kroetsch makes a strong case for a Bakhtinian reading of Kroetsch. 4. The paper was presented in the Munro Beattie Lecturer Series at Carleton University, February 2, 1996, and later published in a shortened version as “Translating: My Twenty Years in the USA.” 5. The disclaimer persists into his last book, Too Bad: “This book is not an autobiography. It is a gesture toward a self-portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish” (n.p.). 6. The distinction is one that Kroetsch is not always careful to make. He does separate “autobiographical” from “autobiography,” however, at one point in Labyrinths of Voice: “It may be that my journals and this interview are as close as I can get to autobiography…There’s no way that I could ever go on to those conventions that enable somebody to write a traditional autobiography—if there is a traditional autobiography. I couldn’t make enough sense to write my life as a continuous autobiography so I see it as an archaeological site” (“The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart” 207). 7. It may well be this very stone that Kroetsch elsewhere admits to desiring: “I remember one time, as a kid, trying to screw a large stone. A boulder left by the retreating glaciers, I suppose…across the fields east from our house to where the O’Connors lived” (The “Crow” Journals 25). 8. “Reading Across the Border” in 1990 is vintage Kroetsch: exciting, stimulating, engendering; it is also skimpy on example and analysis.

notes

Bibliography

Primary Sources Kroetsch, Robert. The Words of My Roaring. 1966. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2000. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. Alberta. Toronto: Macmillan, 1968. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. The Studhorse Man. 1969. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2004. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. “A Conversation with Margaret Laurence.” Creation: Robert Kroetsch, James Bacque, Pierre Gravel: Including the Authors’ Conversations with Margaret Laurence, Milton Wilson, J. Raymond Brazeau. Ed. Robert Kroetsch. Toronto: New Press, 1970. 53–63. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. “Writing from Prairie Roots.” Alberta School Library Review 8.1 (Fall 1971): 7–14. Print. A typescript version also appears in the University of Calgary archives (MsC. 27.25.12). Kroetsch, Robert. “F.P. Grove: The Finding.” The Lakehead University Review 6.2 (1973): 209–12. Kroetsch, Robert. “Meditation on Tom Thomson.” Northern Journey 3 (1973): 90–91. Kroetsch, Robert. “Poem of Albert Johnson.” The Lakehead University Review 6.2 (1973): 211–12. Kroetsch, Robert. “A Canadian Issue.” boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature 3.1 (1974): 1–2. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. Letter to Dick Harrison. 23 Jan. 1974. TS. Kroetsch, Robert. The Ledger. London, ON: Applegarth Follies, 1975. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. The Stone Hammer Poems. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan, 1976. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. “voice/in prose: effing the ineffable. “ freelance 8.2 (1976): 35–36. Print.

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Index

Aboriginal peoples, 78, 310n11, 315n32 Absurdist theatre, 239 achieved literacy, 98, 109 administrative duties, 20, 303n4 advertising, 146 Alberta (Kroetsch), 3, 13–14, 21 Alibi (Kroetsch), 23 A Likely Story (Kroetsch) autobiography in, 286 humour in, 294 information passed on in, 297–98 material in, 282 metalingual and metaliterary understanding in, 284 narrative style of, 285, 286–87, 298–300 persona in, 287–89, 289–90, 293, 294 rock story in, 294–97 self-ridicule in, 290–92 social inclusion of, 298 style of, 283–84, 285–86, 297, 301 allegory, 298 alphabet, 132, 141, 219–20, 331n10 American literature, 91. See also Western genre “American Mistress” (Kroetsch), 332n17 anecdote, 89. See also tall tales Antin, David, 57, 81, 99 aphorisms, 276, 278 aposiopesis, 112–13, 167 Applegarth Follies, 53–54 apposition, 260

archaeology, 79, 279 archives, 304n9 Aristotle, 331n12 Arnason, David on Deleuzean distinctions in Kroetsch, 148 on Kroetsch’s popularity, 269 Marsh Burning, 311n14 on Seed Catalogue, 100, 157, 312n8, 313n17 art, 127 asceticism, 20–21, 158–59 As For Me and My House (Ross), 178, 277 Atwood, Margaret, 44, 68, 111, 308n33 Auden, W.H., 178, 237, 324n38 audience, 225, 290 authoritative words, 121–22 autobiography, 210–11, 286, 334nn5–6 Badlands (Kroetsch), 11, 175, 179, 304n12, 323n33 Bakhtin, Mikhail on advertising, 146 on carnival laughter, 103 on interacting with audience, 225 on interacting with words of others, 121–22, 262 Kroetsch and, 280 on masks, 208 Banting, Pamela, 220, 232 Barbour, Douglas, 55, 59 Barclay, Byrna, 152 Barros, Paul de, 330n5

351

Barthes, Roland déjà lu of, 96 familiar signs of, 203 on love, 208, 210, 215, 237–38 on male/female binary, 240 photographs of mother and, 326n47 The Sad Phoenician and, 330n1 baseball, 292–93 Bates, Hilary, 53, 58 Beckett, Samuel, 239, 332n16 “Becoming a Writer is Unbecoming” (Kroetsch), 282–83, 303n2 Beddoes, Julie, 324n37 beer parlour, see pubs “The Beer Parlour and the Perception of Space” (Kroetsch), 305n15 Belsey, Catherine, 199, 210, 211–12, 236 Bernhard, Thomas Concrete, 330n1 Bernstein, Charles, 148–49, 167 Bessai, Carl The Impossible Home (film), 2, 265, 309n1, 310n7 Binghamton University departure from, 3, 14–15, 16–17, 28–29, 332n16 office at, 20–21 reflections on, 26, 27 time at, 2, 4 Birney, Earle, 96 “Birthday: June 26, 1983” (Kroetsch), 187–89 Blodgett, E.D., 312n8 Bloom, Harold, 42 body, 102, 312n11 Bordessa, Ronald “Moral Frames for Landscape in Canadian Literature,” 305n17 boundary 2 ( journal), 2, 306n25, 318n4 Bowering, George, 269–70, 331n11 Brandt, Di, 243 Brick Books, 56. See also Applegarth Follies Brown, Norman O., 323n32 Brown, Russell, 5, 45, 330n59 Bruns, Gerald L. on copiousness ideal, 245 on educated speakers, 206 on modern poetry, 272 on rhetorical improvisation, 56 on systems, 95 on vernacular voices, 117–18 on writing as system, 101, 314n20, 331n12 buffalo wallow, 327n49 bullshitters, 108, 109, 312n9. See also pubs But We Are Exiles (Kroetsch), 2, 29 Cage, John, 58 Calgary, 18, 30. See also University of Calgary Cameron, Donald, 255

352

index

Campbell, Joseph, 177, 323n33 Campbell, Wanda, 118, 134–35, 166, 322n27 Canada, 43–44, 264 “Canada is a Poem” (Kroetsch), 102, 319n10 Canadian literature archives and, 304n9 comic in, 42–44 destruction in, 107 Kroetsch on, 13, 37–38, 44–45, 46, 89–90, 281, 284, 306n26 modernism in, 306n26 on naming own condition in, 114–15, 284 poetry in, 246 postmodernism in, 247–48 regionalism in, 89–90, 306n25 revelation and concealment in, 195–96 self-deprecation in, 44–45 theory and, 37–38 yearning for inarticulate in, 111 See also prairie writing The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 332n17 The Carnival World of Robert Kroetsch (Hariharan), 334n3 Carpenter, David, 54, 55, 79, 305n18 Cather, Willa My Antonia, 178, 277 cbc Radio, 308n33 Chambers, Iain, 114 charm, 216 Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales, 332n17 child figure, 135, 182–83 Classical texts, 312n13 clichés, 202 collage, 299 collective pronoun, 266–67 colonialism, 43–44, 72, 106 Colville, Alex, 183 comedy, 42–44, 123, 202, 224, 290 comic vision, 209 Coming Through Slaughter (Ondaatje), 280 community, 11, 244, 267, 334n2 Completed Field Notes (Kroetsch), 32, 70. See also Field Notes (Kroetsch); specific poems in Concrete (Bernhard), 330n1 conflict, aversion to, 264 Conklin, Jamie, 257 containment, and movement, 177 “Contesting ‘Post(-)modernism’” (Davey), 37 “The Continuing Poem?” (Kroetsch), 281 conversational language, 124, 131 Cook, John, 56 courtesy, 268 Cowan, T.L., 322n25 cowboys, 173–74, 178, 322n31 “The Cow in the Quicksand” (Kroetsch), 298 Coyote Country (Davidson), 173

Crane, Hart, 41 Creeley, Robert, 321n22 Creelman, Daniel, 89 criticism, 253, 271–72, 273–76, 301–02, 307n29. See also A Likely Story (Kroetsch); Kroetsch, Robert, essays by; scholarship Crozier, Lorna “Gardens,” 325n39 Culler, Jonathan, 206 cultural inundation, 96 curses, 124–25. See also dirty words “Dancing with the Time Machine” (Kroetsch), 1 Dante Alighieri La Vita Nuova, 230–31 Davey, Frank, 11, 37, 304n5 Davidson, Arnold E. Coyote Country, 173 “D-Day and After” (Kroetsch), 106, 297, 298 dead, playing, 196 deception, in writing, 196 deconstructionism, 35, 36, 110 Deleuze, Gilles, 135, 142, 148 Derrida, Jacques, 226, 312n8 descriptions, 28, 312n11 desire, 12, 210 destruction and recovery, 107 digression, 299 dirty words, 103, 124–25 disappointment and hope, 12 disguises, of self, 207, 210, 250 Djwa, Sandra, 242, 306n26 Doctorow, E.L. Welcome to Hard Times, 310n9 domesticity, 172, 175–76, 322n29. See also house/ horse binary; women Dragland, Stan on criticism, 307n29 The Sad Phoenician and, 200, 216, 221, 241–42, 246 on Seed Catalogue, 135, 159 dreams, 128 Dyck, E.F., 242, 300 editing, 303n3 educated speaker, 206 Eliot, T.S., 204, 333n22 emptiness, 190 England, 5 Enright, Robert, 243 Esslin, Martin, 239 Europe, 91–92 Excerpts from the Real World (Kroetsch), 205, 310n8 exile, 29 experience, 97–98, 103, 114, 248, 329n55, 333n24 Ezekiel 27.5, 333n23



The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 204 farmers, 323n34 father figure, 132, 329n54. See also male figure “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction” (Kroetsch), 16, 172, 176, 178 “fiction makes us real” statement, 35–36 fidgeting, 303n2 Field Notes (Kroetsch), 11. See also Completed Field Notes (Kroetsch); specific poems in First Nations, 78, 310n11, 315n32 Fletcher, Giles, 204 “For Doug Jones: The Explanation” (Kroetsch), 12 form, 74, 220, 331n7 “For Play and Entrance” (Kroetsch), 304n7 Fort San writing retreats, see Qu’Appelle writing retreats forward-dreaming, 114 Foucault, Michel, 280 Frye, Northrop on Canadian poetry, 43, 246 on comedy, 123 on epigrammatic statements, 278 on imagination, 248–49 Kroetsch and, 308n32 on literature, 42 male hero and, 178 on oaths, 125 “terrible symmetry” and, 316n34 gardens, 188, 195 “Gardens” (Crozier), 325n39 Gasparini, Len, 54 Gass, William H., 36, 220 geodesy, 139 Gobard, Henri, 142 Godard, Barbara, 67 Goose Bay, NL, US air base, 3 gourds, 146, 316n35 Grain (Stead), 176 graves, 179, 194, 329n53 Grove, Frederick Philip, 107 Guattari, Félix, 142 Hariharan, B. The Carnival World of Robert Kroetsch, 334n3 Harlow, Bob, 41–42 Harrison, Dick on Canadian prairie literature, 173, 176 on father figure, 329n54 on graves in Kroetsch’s work, 179 on horses, 162 on Manitoba, 306n22 on prairie myth, 146 on tableau at Provincial Museum of Alberta, 320n14 Unnamed Country, 146, 173, 176, 179 on women in Westerns, 176–77

index

353

Hartman, Geoffrey, 97, 185–86, 311n7 Havelock, Eric, 98, 124, 131, 132, 314n20 Heisler hotel, 106–07, 108, 312n10 Hiebert, Paul Sarah Binks, 308n33 Hill, Gerald, 318n7 home for Kroetsch, 13, 31–33 restlessness for, 2–3, 13, 14 return to western Canada as, 3–4, 5–6 in Western writing, 3 See also homecoming; home place; house/horse binary homecoming, 32–33, 45, 46, 47 home place, 138–41, 316n33 hope and disappointment, 12 “Hornbook #61” (Kroetsch), 315n31 The Hornbooks of Rita K (Kroetsch), 120, 211, 242, 282. See also “The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart” (Kroetsch) horses, 162, 319n10. See also house/horse binary house, 6–7, 11. See also house/horse binary house/horse binary, 22, 175, 176–78, 240, 277. See also male/female binary Hutcheon, Linda, 36, 117, 213, 310n9, 311n5 identity, 36, 262. See also disguises, of self idioms, 202, 271 “I Find Myself Reading the Old Guys Now” (Kroetsch), 204 imagination, 249 “I’m Getting Old Now” (Kroetsch), 182, 183 The Impossible Dream (film), 2, 265, 309n1, 310n7 Imprimerie dromadaire, 331n10 interjections, awkward, 226 interviews, 253–54, 255–56, 257. See also Labyrinths of Voice (Kroetsch) introductions, 293–94 invocations, 112 “I Wanted to Write a Manifesto” (Kroetsch), 192 Johnson, Albert, 298 Johnson, Jay, 144 jokes, 123–24 Jones, D.G., 111, 135 Jones, Manina, 49, 70–71, 75–76, 103, 310n12 Jordan, David M., 35 The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Atwood), 111 Jung, Carl, 323n33 Kamboureli, Smaro, 332n21 Keahey, Deborah, 31–32, 168, 233, 321n23, 327n50 “Keyed In” (Kroetsch), 8 Klein, A.M., 111 Knight, Darrell Pete Knight, 192–93 Knight, Pete, 192–93

354

index

Kroetsch, Robert administrative work and, 20, 303n4 in American northeast, 4–5, 305n18 anti-European attitude of, 91–92 aversion to conflict, 264 birth of, 304n6 childhood of, 6–7, 12, 157–58, 195, 265, 319n9 Classical texts and, 312n13 on daughters, 17–18, 26, 304n11, 305n20 desire to be cowboy, 174 editing and, 303n3 father of, 128, 132, 152, 311n2, 312n10, 315n29, 322n31 fidgeting of, 303n2 horsemanship of, 319n10 interviews with, 253–54, 255, 256 (See also Labyrinths of Voice (Kroetsch)) intimacy desired by, 168 marriage and separation from Mary Jane Lewis, 14–15, 15–16, 26, 322n28 masculinity and, 169 melancholy and, 306n21 on mother, 157–58, 313n17, 326n42, 326nn44–45 (See also “Sounding the Name” (Kroetsch)) on mother and flowers, 186, 328n52 on mother’s death, 7–8, 151, 152, 168, 170, 171, 190, 321n20 offices of, 20–22 oscillation between public and private, 8–9, 9–10, 25, 26 on parents, 157–58, 314n19 personality of, 264–66 popularity of, 269 restlessness of, 2–3, 13, 14, 303n1 return to western Canada, 3–4, 5–6 sense of freedom, 11–12 silence of, 304n11 women and, 168 See also Kroetsch, Robert, as writer; Kroetsch, Robert, essays by; Kroetsch, Robert, writings by; specific works by Kroetsch, Robert, as writer approach to writing, 33–34, 36, 39–40, 41–42, 247, 283 autobiography and, 210–11, 286, 334nn5–6 becoming settled as, 2, 15 on existence and writing, 31 “fiction makes us real” statement, 35–36 on form, 74, 220, 331n7 on muse, 307n28 on personal experiences, 96–97, 103, 195, 329n55, 333n24 as poet, 307n30 postmodernism of, 22, 34, 35, 36–37, 74, 310n8, 333n25 as regionalist, 33–34, 35



on voice, 39 on wanting to write, 30 on writing in new land, 104–05 writing process, 38–39, 330n2 See also Kroetsch, Robert, essays by; Kroetsch, Robert, writings by; specific works by Kroetsch, Robert, essays by analysis on, 281 as aphoristic, 276–78 archaeology and, 279 Bowering on, 269–70 distrust of authority in, 278–79 as esoteric, 281 insights from, 280 lists in, 279 local and, 270 against old certainties, 270 photos in, 276 prairie writing and, 271 Robert Kroetsch: Essays, 265, 279–80, 285 two voices of, 272–73 wordplay in, 271, 272 See also A Likely Story (Kroetsch); Kroetsch, Robert, writings by Kroetsch, Robert, writings by characters of, 113 childhood and, 12 clichés in, 202 collective pronoun in, 266–67 criticism by, 271–72, 273–76, 301–02 descriptions in, 312n11 design and chance in, 219 graves in, 179 Kroetsch on own work, 254 language in, 115 lists in, 97 male figures in, 24–25 masculinity in, 169 melancholy in, 186 mother figure in, 169 personification in, 295 poetry of, 7, 8, 45–46, 47–48, 54, 55, 220 psychoanalytical readings of, 246 questing figures in novels of, 11, 323n33 sadness in, 152 tenderness in, 169 See also Kroetsch, Robert, essays by; specific works Labyrinths of Voice (Kroetsch) audience of, 259 autobiography and, 334n6 collective pronoun in, 266 courtesy in, 268–69 critics on, 257 disagreements in, 267–68 focus of, 285



give-and-take language in, 261–62, 263 interview process in, 256–57 lack of dissension in, 263–64 narrative style in, 257–59, 260–61, 285 openness to others in, 259–60 LaCapra, Dominick, 70 landscapes, 6, 27–28, 305n17 language authoritative words, 121–22 conversational, 124, 131 four functions of, 142 joy in, 232 Kroetsch and, 110, 115 meaning of, 273 performative function of, 32 in pubs, 109–10 referential, 32, 142, 242, 300 regional literature and, 90 rhetoric and, 242 “serious” and “rhetorical” views of, 248 slang, 202 Steiner on, 249 system of, 95 vernacular, 110–11, 117–18, 142 when written, 314n20 See also orality language poetry, 88, 231 Lanham, Richard, 206–07, 210, 231–32, 242, 248, 249 laughter, 103 Laurence, Margaret, 115, 125 “Laurentian Shield” (Scott), 111 layout, see form Leacock, Stephen “My Financial Career,” 43 “Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye” (Kroetsch), 308n32 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques The Violence of Language, 98, 128 The Ledger (Kroetsch) analysis of, 54, 59, 70–71, 85 archaeological approach in, 78–79 beginnings of, 201 binaries in, 71–74 birch-bark scene, 76–77 Brick Books on, 56 conclusions drawn in, 75–78 definitions of “ledger” and, 79–81 as elegy, 69, 74–75 first edition of, 58–59 first words of, 47, 51 found texts and, 51–52, 59, 60–61, 201 German in, 309n2 homecoming and, 46 influences of on later poetry, 57 juxtapositional and repetitious method in, 62–65, 78–79 Kroetsch’s ancestors in, 62, 68, 69, 80, 82

index

355

layout of, 59–60, 65–66, 74, 310n6, 311n13 list of tree names in, 66–68 narrative in, 81–83, 84–85 narrator in, 61, 142, 238 Paterson (Williams) and, 52, 58, 83–84, 311n15 pond-draining scene, 82–85 publication of, 27, 53–54 rhetorical improvisation and, 56–57 structure of, 58, 79, 220 “terror” and “chaos” in, 69–70 titular ledger of, 49–51, 52 verbs in, 99 writing approach to, 61 See also The Ledger (Kroetsch), critics on The Ledger (Kroetsch), critics on Barbour on, 59 Carpenter on, 54, 79 Cook on, 56 Jones on, 49, 70–71, 75–76, 310n12 Keahey on, 32 Kroetsch on, 57 Lee on, 61 McCarthy on, 52–53, 54 response to critics, 53 See also The Ledger (Kroetsch) Lee, Dennis, 61, 114 Leech, Geoffrey, 268 Leith, Dick, 204–05, 248 Lethbridge, 19–20. See also University of Lethbridge Letters to Salonika (Kroetsch), 205, 323n35 Liebhaber’s Wood Type (Kroetsch), 331n10 “Listening for Spring in Lethbridge” (Kroetsch), 305n19 lists, 97–98, 99, 279 literacy, achieved, 98, 109 literary letters, 254–55 literary theory, 4, 38, 48, 307n29. See also modernism; postmodernism Livesay, Dorothy, 40 local pride, 33, 34, 48, 104 loneliness, 9, 25, 165, 244, 246 “Lonesome Writer Diptych” (Kroetsch), 322n31, 328n51 longitude and latitude measures, 139 long poems, 45–46, 55–56, 182, 220, 280, 304n7 love, 180–81, 208, 209–10, 211–12, 215, 237–38. See also love poetry; love stories The Lovely Treachery of Words (Kroetsch), 324n36 love poetry, 205, 213 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot), 204 love stories, 199, 205–06, 237–38 Lyotard, Jean-François, 114, 232 Mackendrick, Louis K., 310n6 Macpherson, Duncan, 43

356

index

Madden, Marian, 30 “The Majesty of His Loyal Apposition” (Ricou), 260, 275 Making It Home (Keahey), 31–32, 321n23, 327n50 male/female binary Barthes on, 240 Kroetsch on, 175, 178, 179–80, 195, 323n35 Tompkins on, 158–59 See also house/horse binary male figure, 24–25, 172–73, 176, 180–81, 193. See also house/horse binary; male/female binary Mallarmé, Stéphane, 184 Mandel, Ann, 323n35 Mandel, Eli on Canadian postmodern poetry, 105 on child figure, 182–83 on criticism, 253 on Kroetsch, 114, 185 Kroetsch on, 196, 276–77 life of, 26, 305n16 on movement in prairie writing, 177 on Qu’Appelle writing retreat, 152 on Seed Catalogue, 103, 118 on writing in the West, 3, 105 Manitoba, 306n22 Marlatt, Daphne, 42, 216, 330n5 Márquez, Gabriel García, 41 Marsh Burning (Arnason), 311n14 masculinity, 169, 322n25 masturbation, 135, 314n27 McCarthy, Dermot, 52–53, 54 McDonald, Larry, 246, 310n8 meaning, 273, 300 Meindl, Dieter, 214 melancholy, 30, 186, 242, 306n21 Melville, Herman, 219 memory, 186 men, see male figure metered verse, 120 Miki, Roy, 6–7, 9, 74, 208, 219, 255 Miller, J. Hillis, 273 minor literature, 148–49 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 193 modernism, 247–48, 306n26 “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues” (Kroetsch), 317n2 moment-to-come, 180–81 Moodie, Susanna, 272 “Moral Frames for Landscape in Canadian Literature” (Bordessa), 305n17 Moritz, Albert, 316n36 Morton, W.L. “Seeing an Unliterary Landscape,” 311n4 Moss, Julia, 310n6 mother figure, 31–32, 152, 194, 195, 321n23 mother poems, see “Sounding the Name” (Kroetsch)

movement, 177, 323n32 Mulhallen, Karen, 216 Munton, Ann on interviews of Kroetsch, 253–54 on Kroetsch’s return to West, 46 on The Ledger, 62 on mother poems, 169 on Qu’Appelle writing retreats, 23 on The Sad Phoenician, 204 on Seed Catalogue, 165 muse Kroetsch on, 215, 307n28 memory and, 321n22 prairies as, 27–28 rock as, 191–92, 294–96, 334n7 in Seed Catalogue, 103–04, 112–14, 115, 166–67, 168 women as, 178 My Antonia (Cather), 178, 277 Myerson, George, 204–05, 248 “My Financial Career” (Leacock), 43 mythic language, 142 narratives, 99. See also story Nash, Walter, 293–94 “National Frontiers and International Movements” (Wilson), 306n25 Neuman, Shirley, 36–37, 202, 256, 263, 269. See also Labyrinths of Voice (Kroetsch) New and Naked Land (Rees), 315n31 New York state, 305n18. See also Binghamton University Niederman, Michael, 58 oaths, 125 O’Banion, John D., 99 O’Connor, Mary (aunt), 49–51 offices, 20–22 official language, 121–22 O’Hagan, Thomas Tay John, 196 Olson, Charles, 41, 172, 236, 308n31, 322n26 “On Being an Alberta Writer” (Kroetsch), 90–91, 92, 122, 209, 317n2 “On Being Influenced” (Kroetsch), 45 Ondaatje, Michael, 280, 304n12, 332n19 Ong, Walter J., 206, 258, 314n22 orality badger story and, 131 familiarity in, 314n22 high literacy and, 115, 124 regionalism and, 89, 90 secondary, 258 and writing in early Greek culture, 132 See also language oral syntax, 98 oral tradition, 23, 90



Ovid, 210, 249, 332n20 parody, 213 “Passage by Land” (Wiebe), 136–37 past, 95–96, 106, 186, 325n40 Paterson (Williams), 52, 58, 83–84, 88, 104, 311n15 performative function, 32, 114 Perloff, Marjorie, 58, 68, 321n22 personification, 295 phonocentrism, 314n20 “The Plains of My Youth” (Kroetsch), 312n9 Plato, 248 Playing Dead (Wiebe), 196 “Playing Dead in Rudy Wiebe’s Playing Dead” (Kroetsch), 90, 298, 299 “Poem for My Dead Sister” (Kroetsch), 324n37 “The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart” (Kroetsch), 180, 181, 189–90, 205, 282, 297. See also The Hornbooks of Rita K (Kroetsch) poetry approach to Kroetsch’s, 47–48 as assemblages of commonplace materials, 206 Canadian postmodern, 105 on contemporary, 38, 272 critics on Kroetsch’s, 54, 55 distrust of convention and, 135 language, 88, 231 long, 45–46, 55–56, 182, 220, 280, 304n7 love, 205, 213 for making strange, 127 return to writing, 46, 47 themes in Canadian, 246 from travel, 9 See also specific poems poets, upbringing of, 324n38 “The Poet’s Mother” (Kroetsch), 8, 181 Poirier, Richard, 237 politeness, 268 “Postcards from China” (Kroetsch), 17 postcolonialism, 247–48 postmodernism Canada and, 264 heartlessness in, 243 high and popular culture and, 117 Kroetsch and, 22, 34, 35, 36–37, 74, 333n25 past and, 325n40 as radical resistance, 75 Whalen on, 310n8 See also postmodern writing postmodern writing antecedents and, 213 Canadian postmodern poetry, 105 dislocations and, 188 love in, 212 postcolonialism and, 247–48 processual practices in, 74 regionalism and, 35, 306n25 See also postmodernism

index

357

Pound, Ezra, 41 Prairie Pub Poems (Sorestad), 305n13 prairies, 6, 27–28, 125, 145–46, 305n19, 329n56 prairie writing American Western and, 173 father figure and, 329n54 home and, 31–32 Kroetsch and, 35, 105, 247, 271, 306n25 Mandel on, 105 movement in, 177 oral tradition and, 90 sense of cultural inferiority in, 311n4 withdrawal and approach in, 176 women in, 16, 172, 177 pride, local, 33, 34, 48, 104 professor-writer, 255 “Projected Visit” (Kroetsch), 246 pronoun, collective, 266–67 Provincial Museum of Alberta tableau, 320n14 psychoanalytical readings, 246 pubs, 23–24, 109–10, 305n15, 312n12 Purdy, Al, 320n15 Qu’Appelle writing retreats, 4, 15, 22–23, 26, 152 quest myth, 11, 323n33 rain, 185 ranchers, 323n34 Rasporich, Beverly, 43 “Reading Across the Border” (Kroetsch), 334n8 Reagan, Dale, 201–02 Rees, Roberta, 267 Rees, Ronald New and Naked Land, 315n31 referential language, 32, 142, 242, 300 regional writing, 32, 89–90, 248, 306n25. See also prairie writing Reimer, Douglas, 165, 320n13 Renaissance, 206 “Restlessness as Western Template” (Kroetsch), 303n1 rhetoric, 242 rhetorical figure, 231–32, 242, 248 rhetorical improvisation, 56–57 Ricou, Laurie on sadness in Kroetsch’s work, 152 on Seed Catalogue, 106, 125, 154, 161, 166–67 “The Majesty of His Loyal Apposition,” 260, 275 Vertical Man / Horizontal World, 117 Robert Kroetsch: Essays (Davey and Nichol), 265, 279–80, 285 rock muse, 191–92, 294–96, 334n7 rodeo, 322n31. See also cowboys Ross, Sinclair, 125, 178, 272, 277

358

index

sadness, see melancholy The Sad Phoenician (Kroetsch) analysis of, 250–52 Absurd and, 239 “and” and “but” in, 220–21 awkward interjections in, 226 Barthes and, 330n1 borrowed sayings in, 201–02, 202–03, 206–07 celebration and joy in, 232 Chaucer and, 228, 332n17 Coach House edition, 219–20, 331n11 created illusion in, 204–05 grammatical rejigging in, 241 homecoming and, 46 humour in, 236–37 hyperbolic protest in, 321n21 language of, 47 literary elegance in, 235–36 literary precedents in, 203–04 loneliness in, 244, 246 as love poem, 203, 205, 210, 211–12, 213 male/female binary in, 240 narrative style of, 212–13, 217, 331n6 narrator in, 142 New York woman in, 215–16, 217 Phoenician as bitter and resentful, 233 Phoenician as comic, 208–09 Phoenician as rhetorical figure, 231–32, 233–35, 249 Phoenician’s claims about self, 221–24 Phoenician’s fears, 218–19 Phoenician’s language for women, 332n21 Phoenician’s life as perpetual present, 238–39 Phoenician’s secrets, 230, 231 Phoenician’s self-justifications, 227–29, 229–30 publications of, 27, 200–01 reception of, 331n9 sadness in, 241–45 schemes technique and, 240 second person in, 225–26 self-mockery in, 224 structures of, 219, 220, 331n14, 332nn15–16 tenderness in, 243 women in, 213–15, 217–18, 229–30, 238, 239, 331n8 writing process of, 200 See also The Sad Phoenician (Kroetsch), critics on The Sad Phoenician (Kroetsch), critics on Banting on, 220, 232 Brandt on, 243 Djwa on, 242 Dragland on, 216, 221, 241–42, 246 Enright on, 243 Keahey on, 233 Kroetsch on, 199, 210 Marlatt on, 216, 330n5

Meindl on, 214 Miki on, 208 Mulhallen on, 216 Reagan on, 201–02 Scobie on, 221 Thomas on, 218 Wah on, 236–37 West on, 213 See also The Sad Phoenician (Kroetsch) Sarah Binks (Hiebert), 308n33 Saskatchewan, 308n33 Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts, see Qu’Appelle writing retreats schemes, 240 scholarship, 300–01, 307n29. See also criticism Scobie, Stephen, 221 Scott, F.R. “Laurentian Shield,” 111 Second World War, 106 seed catalogue, 155, 171 Seed Catalogue (Kroetsch) analysis of, 88, 149–50, 155, 197 “26-ounce flu,” 133–34 absence in, 100, 104, 246 absences section, 93–94, 95, 96, 97–98, 98–99, 316n36, 326n42 anecdotes and dirty words in, 100–03, 105 anguish in, 186 badger story, 128–33, 314n23 beginnings of, 18–19, 87, 94, 152–53, 154, 201 boy’s falling off of horse, 156–57, 159–62, 178–79, 192, 193–94, 197, 319n12, 322n30 in Canadian poetry, 105 changes to after first edition, 314n26 chants in, 135 characters in, 313n17 children’s songs in, 119, 120 confession in, 120–21, 122–23, 134, 136, 138, 149, 313n16 on cousin in WWII bombing raid, 105–06, 174, 179, 313n18 curses and oaths in, 124–25 deception in, 196–97 disaster and recovery in, 107 emotional weight in, 171–72 ending of, 326n41 family members in, 320n13 father figure in, 138, 156, 157, 162, 320n16, 322n30 first words of, 47 folk remedies section, 94 found texts and, 144–47, 153, 155, 311n1 garden in, 188 homecoming and, 46 home place in, 138–41, 316n33 horses in, 178–79 humour in, 197, 330n60





hyperbole in, 108–09 inscriptions in, 126–27 invocation in, 112, 166 journalistic dating in, 142 language in, 108, 109–11, 117–18 lists in, 97–98 literary tradition and, 114, 116–17, 313n14 loss in, 330n59 lyric in, 147–48 male/female binary in, 178–79 masculinity in, 169, 322n25 metaphor in, 148 metered verse in, 119–20 minor literature in, 148–49 mother in, 8, 147–48, 166, 168, 186, 188, 318nn6–7, 326n42, 328n52 mother in, and boy’s fall, 156–57, 159, 161, 164–65, 193–94 mother’s death and burial, 163–66, 185, 329n57 mother’s voice, 134–35, 138, 192 muse in, 103–04, 112–14, 115, 166–67, 168 narrator in, 142–44, 162, 238 nostalgia and, 186 outside world in, 32 parenthetical remarks in, 126, 133–34, 314n25 past in, 106, 108–09, 186 permissions in, 138 personal and corporal realities in, 97–98 Pete Knight in, 143–44, 162, 178, 182, 192–93, 322n27 pithy sayings in, 128 point form in, 141–42 prohibitions in, 136, 138, 315n30 publication of, 27, 153–54, 317n1 public reading of, 153 razing of Heisler hotel in, 106–07, 108 sexual adventures in, 120–21, 134, 135, 138, 313n15 on silence, 20 Strauss boy pissing in, 101–02, 134 structure of, 154–55, 220 tall tales in, 123–24 “terrible symmetry” in, 316n34 trailing off in, 167–68 verbs in, 98–99 voices in, 103, 117–18, 201 Western genre and, 173–74 whispering in, 192 Wiebe and, 137–38, 309n3 writing process of, 154, 155, 311n3, 317nn3–4, 320n18 See also Seed Catalogue (Kroetsch), critics on Seed Catalogue (Kroetsch), critics on Arnason on, 100, 157, 312n8, 313n17 Campbell on, 118, 134–35, 166, 322n27 Cowan on, 322n25 Dragland on, 135, 159

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Hill on, 318n7 Johnson on, 144 Jones on, 103 Keahey on, 327n50 Kroetsch on, 170–71 Mandel on, 103, 105, 118 Moritz on, 316n36 Munton on, 165 Reimer on, 165, 320n13 Ricou on, 106, 125, 154, 161, 166–67 Thomas on, 163, 192 See also Seed Catalogue (Kroetsch) “Seeing an Unliterary Landscape” (Morton), 311n4 self-mockery/ridicule, 43, 224, 290 semiotics, 74, 270 sentimentality, 172, 325n40 serious figure, 248 sex, 244 Shklovsky, Victor, 127 silence countering, 82, 245 Kroetsch and, 304n11 sounds arising from, 185 unspeakable and, 125, 195, 332n16 words and, 20 “silent poet” (Kroetsch), 201 slang, 202 Snow, John, 44–45, 308n34 social contact, in literature, 225 “Sonnet #5” (Kroetsch), 183–84, 185 “Sonnet for my Daughters” (Kroetsch), 183 Sorestad, Glen, 23, 267, 305n13 “Sounding the Name” (Kroetsch) anachronistic lines in, 326n46 analysis of, 181–82, 183, 185–86 “Birthday: June 26, 1983,” 187–89 critical reception of, 169 grief in, 190 “I’m Getting Old Now” (Kroetsch), 182, 183 narrator’s mother in, 8, 194 silence in, 245 “Sonnet #5” (Kroetsch), 183–84, 185 “Sonnet for my Daughters” (Kroetsch), 183 as “window poem,” 327n48 writing of, 170 Spanos, William, 4–5, 44, 55, 169, 310n5 speech act theory, 110 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene, 204 squash, 146, 316n35 Stead, Robert Grain, 176 Stegner, Wallace on bridging gap between local experience and learning, 96–97 on geographical surveying, 139

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on past, 95–96 on prairie people, 125 Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, 172–73 Wolf Willow, 95–96, 96–97 Steiner, George, 113–14, 196, 216, 249 Stevens, Wallace, 311n7 The Stone Angel (Laurence), 125 “The Stone Hammer Poem” (Kroetsch), 7, 201, 246, 333n24 The Stone Hammer Poems (Kroetsch), 27, 45, 46, 54–55 story, 99, 100, 151 “Strange Plantings” (Campbell), 118 The Studhorse Man (Kroetsch), 3, 175–76, 194 Sullivan, Rosemary, 177 tall tales, 123–24 Tamarack Review, 53 Tay John (O’Hagan), 196 Thacker, Robert, 329n56 theory, literary, 4, 38, 48, 307n29. See also modernism; postmodernism Thieme, John, 247 Thomas, Peter, 11, 163, 192, 218 “Thought’s Measure” (Bernstein), 167 Tidler, Charles, 54 “Time to Spare” (Kroetsch), 323n35 Tompkins, Jane, 158–59, 162, 173, 322n29 Too Bad (Kroetsch), 8, 323n35, 334n5 “Towards an Essay” (Kroetsch), 2, 11–12, 12–13, 17 tradition, 103, 114 tragic vision, 209 travel, 9, 10–11 Turnstone Press, 153–54, 317n1 “Unhiding the Hidden” (Kroetsch), 34 University of Calgary, 3, 16, 30, 304n9. See also Calgary University of Lethbridge, 4, 16. See also Lethbridge University of Manitoba, 4, 20, 21, 25–26, 31. See also Winnipeg Unnamed Country (Harrison), 146, 173, 176, 179 unspeakable, 125 Vanderhaeghe, Guy, 327n49 Van Herk, Aritha, 32–33, 254, 328n52 vehicular language, 142 vernacular language, 117–18, 142 Vertical Man / Horizontal World (Ricou), 117 The Violence of Language (Lecercle), 98, 128 La Vita Nuova (Dante), 230–31 voice, 39 Waddington, Miriam, 95 Wah, Fred, 236–37 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 239

Waterston, Elizabeth, 43 Wayne and Shuster, 43 Welcome to Hard Times (Doctorow), 310n9 Welsh, Andrew, 216 West, David S., 213 Western genre, 158–59, 162, 173, 176–77, 193, 322n29 West of Everything (Tompkins), 158–59, 173 Whalen, Terry, 70, 310n8 What the Crow Said (Kroetsch) alphabet in, 331n10 carnival laughter in, 103 countering silence in, 245 excrement and, 311n6 Father Basil in, 123 male/female binary in, 323n35 orgasm in, 304n10 origin of method in, 110, 266 publication of first chapter, 16 Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (Stegner), 172–73 whispering, 192 “Why I Went up North” (Kroetsch), 298 Wiebe, Rudy, 136–37, 137–38, 196, 309n3 Williams, William Carlos dissatisfaction of, 258 Kroetsch and, 83, 84, 308n31 local pride and, 104 Paterson, 52, 58, 83–84, 88, 104, 311n15 Wilson, Paul, 257 Wilson, Robert, 256, 269, 306n25. See also Labyrinths of Voice (Kroetsch) wine, 291–92 Winnipeg, 9, 20, 24, 25, 30. See also University of Manitoba Wolf Willow (Stegner), 95–96, 96–97 “Woman in Green” (Kroetsch), 179 women fear of in prairie literature, 16, 172 graves and, 179–80, 194 Kroetsch and, 168 male home and, 175–76 as muse, 178 prairie and, 329n56 in Western and prairie writing, 158–59, 176–77 See also domesticity; house/horse binary; male/ female binary; mother figure The Words of My Roaring (Kroetsch) concealment in, 196, 231 descriptions of body in, 312n11 dry-eyed responses in, 321n19 ending in, 165 grave in, 194 hopefulness in, 113 hyperbolic protest in, 321n21 loneliness in, 245–46 narrator in, 293



playing for audience in, 330n3 rodeo clown in, 251 World War II, 106 “The Writer Looks at Academia” (Kroetsch), 38, 254 writing, see Canadian literature; Kroetsch, Robert, as writer; poetry; postmodern writing; prairie writing; Western genre “Writing West” (Mandel), 3 Wyatt, Thomas, 203 Yeats, W.B., 313n14 yet-to-be, 180–81 York, R.A., 224–25 Zukofsky, Louis, 167 Zweig, Paul, 175

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About the Author

dennis cooley was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan. He later moved to Manitoba, where he helped to start the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, was a founding member of Turnstone Press, and was a professor of English at the University of Manitoba. He has published widely, most recently abecedarium (UAP 2014). dennis cooley lives in Winnipeg.

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