by Anna Porter
On several occasions, after listening to his tirades about my boss, I left Earle and Wailan’s apartment in a fury. Somewhere in the M&S archives at McMaster there is a copy of one of his letters of apology. We had become reasonably good friends by then, and I remained a fan of his writing and of his conversation.
Earle had a lifetime of memories and old resentments to share. His best stories include his travels by freighter in the 1930s; his meetings with Leon Trotsky in Mexico; his partying with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; his disillusion with the Fourth International; his visits with fellow poet and novelist Malcolm Lowry in a British Columbia cabin Lowry shared with his second wife, writer Margerie Bonner; his time as personnel officer in the Canadian Army; and his battles with fellow academics at the University of British Columbia. He had lived an extraordinary life and remembered all of it right up until he was hospitalized in 1994. After Key Porter published Sam Solecki’s Imagining Canadian Literature: The Letters of Jack McClelland in 1998, Sam and I discussed publishing a similar volume of the letters of Earle Birney. I am still sorry I decided not to go ahead with the book. It would be a valuable addition to our literature, but I was worried about the shaky state of the book market.
Meetings with the Messiah
WHEN AL PURDY first met Irving Layton, he thought Layton was “so full of shit he couldn’t make up his mind from which end it would exit . . . paradoxically, Layton was also genuine.” Purdy admitted his comments may have been tinged with envy both of the parade of women who adored Irving and of the publicity Irving never failed to generate.
I felt it was a privilege to know him.
When I reread “The Bull Calf,” I am still amazed by the sheer force of Irving’s voice, and its utter sadness.
The thing could barely stand. Yet taken
from his mother and the barn smells
he still impressed with his pride,
with the promise of sovereignty in the way
his head moved to take us in.
The fierce sunlight tugging the maize from the ground
licked at his shapely flanks.
He was too young for all that pride.
I thought of the deposed Richard II.
“No money in bull calves,” Freeman had said.
The visiting clergyman rubbed the nostrils
now snuffing pathetically at the windless day.
“A pity,” he sighed.
My gaze slipped off his hat toward the empty sky
that circled over the black knot of men,
over us and the calf waiting for the first blow.
Layton had such a commanding presence and sonorous voice that everyone fell into a reverential silence when he recited his poems. Everyone did not include Harold Town, who protested at one of Sylvia Fraser’s parties that he would do a public drawing if Layton insisted on a public reading. Layton, undeterred, read “A Wild Peculiar Joy” and ignored Harold’s heckling. I was relieved he didn’t read the poem about the old Greek woman’s orifices.
Layton was wide, short, square-shouldered, barrel-chested, somewhat hairy, usually tanned, with a bit of a belly that increased in girth during the decades that I knew him. He had bushy eyebrows, a slightly hooked nose, and longish grey hair that made him look like an Old Testament prophet. He often wore a large silver medallion hanging from a chain around his neck. It reminded me of Scott Symons’s medallion.
He maintained that, just like the Messiah, he was born circumcised. On March 12, 1912, Jews came from far and wide to the tiny town of Târgu Neamţ to witness the miracle of little Israel Pincu Lazarovitch’s penis. His grandmother had died young, he told me, because she had made a deal with God to trade her own life for that of his mother.
In search of a better life, his family emigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal’s St. Urbain Street neighbourhood. Irving Layton, all agreed, was a better name for a Canadian poet than Israel Lazarovitch.
He told sad and hilarious tales about his father, the scholarly, frail, religious, rather distant man, and his mother, who railed against fate, and the horse-manure-throwing gentiles who messed up the alleyway in front of her small shop. His moving poem, “The Death of Moishe Lazarovitch,” commemorates both his father and his mother.
Irving learned to use his fists in territorial wars between street gangs on Montreal’s St. Elizabeth Street—the area where Jack Rabinovitch and Mordecai Richler also grew up.I His friends had nicknames like Cross-Eyed George and Benny the Beanpole, and they fought like their lives depended on winning—which they sometimes did. He played handball in the same gymnasium where Jack Rabinovitch played a couple of decades later. Jack, Irving, and Mordecai all went to Baron Byng High School, and studied Latin and algebra.
I used to visit Irving and Aviva Layton in their book-lined house in Toronto. Aviva, small, tanned, vivacious, rivetingly pretty, had been with Irving for a number of years by then. They spent most summers on Lesbos, a Greek island, hence the tans. They were loud and affectionate. She often quieted him when he indulged in some of his verbal pyrotechnics, complaining about Canada’s coldness, its refusal to talk about sex, or its unwillingness to be its best self.
Their young son David would sit at the table or perch on the arm of his father’s or his mother’s chair as his father declaimed. Though he tried a variety of methods, the boy was usually unsuccessful in attracting their attention. He hovered around Aviva, shouted and swore, tried to grab her as she walked past, but nothing seemed to work. The adults continued their conversations, Irving read his poems, Aviva produced more wine and food, and David shrank into aggrieved silence.
I remember sitting at their dining room table, when Irving talked of “Shakespeare, Milton, and I” all sharing the need to reach deep into the hearts of men. Of course he knew his Shakespeare and Milton, but also Keats, Spinoza, David Lewis and Canadian socialism, A. M. Klein, Louis Dudek, Maxim Gorky, Heinrich Heine, Jane Austen, Paul Celan, Nietzsche, and Nadezhda Mandelstam. His conversation ranged over a multitude of topics, including the Bible, Hitler, boxing, politics, Greek civilization, US elections, Vietnam, Roman emperors, the Soviet Union, Marxism, fascism, fads, fetishes, Anglo-Saxon puritanism, and, of course, sex and anti-Semitism. He told me that in the 1960s there were still places in the Laurentians that proudly displayed signs declaring No Dogs or Jews Allowed. Anti-Semitism may have been outlawed but it was alive and well under the veneer of civility.
Irving was surprisingly pro-American. He supported the US war in Vietnam. Most people I knew were fiercely opposed to the 1970 War Measures Act. Barbara Frum, for example, believed it was inimical to Pierre Trudeau’s own sense of a “just society.” Irving, on the other hand, supported the suspension of civil liberties in Quebec.
Like Purdy and Birney, he was generous with younger poets, introduced them to his publishers, gave them advice about poetry and their love lives. Leonard Cohen was his lifelong protégé. Aviva used to say jokingly that she had married Leonard, not Irving (though, in fact, she never formally married Irving). The three of them had gone to a jewellery store to select a ring, but since Irving didn’t have enough cash, Leonard purchased the ring and slipped it onto Aviva’s finger.
Leonard loved Irving. He often travelled to conferences and readings with Irving, listened intently when Irving read his poetry. At an International Festival of Authors event honouring Irving on his eightieth birthday, Cohen made a surprise appearance. He mentioned the theological implications of Irving having been born circumcised. Embellishing the version I had first heard from Irving, he said, “Rabbis and doctors of law came from many miles around to visit Irving Layton in his crib and to look between his legs at that which was not there.”
* * *
BECAUSE JACK PERSISTED in denying that he had editorial talents, I took the lead in discussing Layton’s work with him. It wasn’t easy. I had arrived at M&S just in time for The Collected Poems of Irving Layton. It weighed in at more than a thousand pages and we debated, poem by poem, about two hundred of
them. I insisted that there was a limit to how many pages the book could have; he argued that a “collected” had to collect all his best work and that all the poems here were, indeed, his best. I was afraid the collection would diminish rather than burnish his image—and I knew Irving was insecure about reviews. While I thought he was brilliant, courageous, and passionate, some of the poems were quite dreadful, others were merely flawed. It was on that subject we parted ways.
Still, there is this wonderful poem “There Were No Signs,” in The Collected:
By walking I found out
Where I was going.
By intensely hating, how to love.
By loving, whom and what to love.
By grieving, how to laugh from the belly.
Out of infirmity, I have built strength.
Out of untruth, truth.
From hypocrisy, I wove directness.
Almost now I know who I am.
Almost I have the boldness to be that man.
Another step
And I shall be where I started from.
When it was published, the volume still had six hundred pages. It was accorded a few measured reviews, but many suggested that Layton lacked a critical sense. It didn’t sell as well as Irving’s shorter collections that rarely sold fewer than three thousand copies. However, he credited The Collected with his Italian nomination for the Nobel Prize. He was celebrated by Italian poetry lovers.
Irving felt so beholden to his translator, Amleto Lorenzini, that he talked Jack into publishing Lorenzini’s Assyrian Sculpture in the British Museum—a fascinating book, but it hardly fit into the M&S stable of Canadian literature, history, art, or politics.
A couple of years after The Collected, Irving retaliated with The Uncollected Irving Layton, the book with all the left-out poems and some additional ones he had written since. By then it was obvious that Irving would not be happy with only one new book a year. He demanded at least two despite my, I thought, convincing arguments that he would cut potential sales of each book in half. He ignored all efforts to weed out his weaker poems and raged at the notion that over-publishing was reducing his sales. If we resisted, he published elsewhere.
The year we published The Collected, we also published Nail Polish, a shorter book with a dreadful title and a vituperative introduction. Generally Irving used his introductions to launch unbridled attacks on his critics: “yahoos, sex-drained executives, pimps and poetasters.” He let loose another torrent of vitriol in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, which shouldn’t have been published but was, a year or so later. The book, I thought, would harm Irving’s reputation. But Jack believed in publishing authors, not books, and Layton was an author M&S published.
I was amazed at Aviva’s willingness to overlook Irving’s serial infidelities and not surprised that she fell for a lovestruck sheik in Morocco (while she entrusted David to Scott Symons and his then lover, Aaron) or that Irving took off with his student Harriet Bernstein. I am not sure of the order of these events, but in 1974 Julian and I visited Irving and Harriet in a small house in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Harriet was trying to reform Irving’s lifelong habits of ignoring what happened around him when to observe those events did not suit him. Such events included the birth of children and the disorder that attended their arrival. While he loved the idea of his own virility and the pregnancies of women who loved him, he was more interested in the idea of fatherhood than in the children.
Eventually Harriet decamped with their baby daughter.
The poem that always brings me to tears is “Song for Naomi.” Perhaps it’s because I have daughters and have seen them running, carefree, through tall grass.
* * *
I. Much later, Jack Rabinovitch founded the Giller Prize.
A Land of Poets
IRVING LAYTON USED to talk about Leonard Cohen with the pride of a father in the achievements of his own son. They wrote poems about and to each other. Several of Leonard’s poems make reference to Irving or to one of Irving’s poems. He regarded Irving as his “poetic master.”
“I taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever,” Leonard said. Irving’s The Swinging Flesh and Leonard’s The Spice Box of Earth had been launched at the same time in 1961. Both were sensations.
I read a lot of Cohen in the 1970s when Jack and I were engaged in a battle with Malcolm Ross, the editor of the New Canadian Library series, about including Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers in the New Canadian Library. In order to persuade Malcolm of the worthiness of the novel, I quoted what I assumed were persuasive literary passages over the phone to the progressively less and less polite Malcolm. The book had first been published in 1966, and Jack thought it was a literary bombshell. He wrote to Leonard: “It’s wild and incredible and marvellously well written, and at the same time appalling, shocking, revolting, disgusting . . .”
I had found it difficult to read, its language overly florid, its characters hard to believe, but it does have some extraordinary writing, its lack of structure is mesmerizing once you decide not to care about structure, and it has what Malcolm found so distressing: very graphic sex.I
I didn’t hear Leonard sing until about 1972. He was performing in Toronto and Jack had two seats close to the stage. Though he took up only a small portion of it, Leonard seemed to occupy the whole space, blue shirt, guitar, mic, and a spotlight. I don’t remember all the songs, but I know he sang “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire.” I was humming them for several weeks. Some days, I still do.
Jack seemed restless and harrumphed from time to time. When the show was over, he announced we were going backstage. In the small dressing room, he had barely introduced me before he launched into a speech about why Leonard was wasting his talent singing. His voice was shit but he was a great poet. His Selected had been a bestseller and had even won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.II
Leonard mainly nodded and smiled. Having first seen him on stage, I was surprised at how fragile he seemed. In the end he talked a bit about his new book, The Energy of Slaves, but I no longer recall what he said. The book was published the following year, but I didn’t meet Leonard again till 1978.
* * *
JACK WAS CONVINCED that Canada was a land of poets. He believed that more poetry was written and read in Canada, per capita, than in any other country (and Edmonton, he thought, was our poetry capital). We certainly sold enough poetry books to support his theory.
The seventies saw Layton, Cohen, Atwood, Purdy, Birney, Ralph Gustafson, Raymond Souster, Doug Jones, Milton Acorn, George Bowering, and John Newlove attesting to that theory, and M&S was attracting some younger poets, Joe Rosenblatt and Susan Musgrave. Storm Warnings, Al Purdy’s two volumes featuring the work of young poets, were successful and well reviewed. Musgrave’s The Impstone and A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury got her the attention she deserved.
A plethora of new literary journals showcased Canadian poetry. Alongside the Writers’ Union, there was the League of Canadian Poets (founded in 1966), where Purdy, A. J. M. Smith, and Earle Birney could support newer arrivals such as Dennis Lee,III Sid Marty, David McFadden, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Patrick Lane, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, and Michael Ondaatje. I went to one of their meetings in Calgary, and tried to hawk poetry books from a hastily set-up table outside the hall. The poets bought one another’s books and had them autographed. Purdy added to his large collection of other poets’ signed books.
I didn’t meet Michael Ondaatje till late 1978 or early 1979, when I was ready to leave the company. He had brought the manuscript of There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems 1963–1978. He was lovely to look at, his strange blue eyes, the curly dark hair. Everyone wanted to see him. The editors ducked out of their warren and the salespeople walked down the corridor to the “reception” for a better view. What I remember about the poetry is the immediate, tactile, often abrupt, and wildly colourful imagery. And these lines from “Letters and Other Worlds”:
My father’s body was a
town of fear
He was the only witness to its fear dance . . .
After reading Ondaatje’s 1982 fictional memoir Running in the Family, I understood what the poem had already told me.
* * *
I STILL LOVE poetry but not with the questing urgency of my early years. Yet each year I listen to the Griffin Prize’s short-listed poets read. Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries has taken up residence next to my bed, along with Al Purdy’s Naked with Summer in Your Mouth, George Jonas’s Selected Poems, Irving Layton’s Selected, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and a rich assortment of books I am reading or plan to read one day.
Scott Griffin created the prize in 2000 along with trustees Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. Scott seems to believe, as I do, that words can change the world. He is a most unusual businessman because, in addition to his founding and supporting an internationally lauded poetry prize, he pursues personal goals of derring-do, such as circumnavigating the globe in a sailboat, flying his aging Cessna 180 solo across the Atlantic and volunteering for the Flying Doctors Service of East Africa. My Heart Is Africa: A Flying Adventure is his account of the two years he spent working for the NGO.IV He is a romantic, an adventurer, a storyteller, and a publisher: his Griffin Trust bought the House of Anansi in 2002.
* * *
I. Beautiful Losers, the book Malcolm Ross objected to (“The book turns my stomach. Quite literally, Jack!”), did finally find its way into the New Canadian Library in 1991 after Ross had retired and the stewardship of the series was taken over by David Staines.
II. Leonard rejected the award.
III. I used to look for early versions of some of Dennis’s poems, trying to understand why he changed them.
