Daddy's Girl: Dorothy Livesay's Correspondence with her Father

by Pamela Banting


Throughout her poetic career, Dorothy Livesay has been absorbed by the attempt to understand, to come to terms with, and even to exorcize, the influences her parents have had upon her. Parental influences are powerful, of course, and there is nothing strange in a writer drawing on her family background, but in Livesay's case, the preoccupation with her antecedents and their influence upon her is especially pronounced. The body of her collected poems is essentially one life-long autobiographical poem. A Winnipeg Childhood is an attempt to recapture the voice and the vision of the child Dorothy. Right Hand Left Hand is a memoir of the socio-political activities of a decade, but it is also a book about the critical years when, as a young woman, Livesay was trying to break "the chains/ that parents make".1 As the evidence of the documents in the Dorothy Livesay Collection at the University of Manitoba Archives reveals, all her life Livesay has been engaged with literary memoirs, memoirs of her parents, documentaries, letters, biography, and autobiography.2

     Of course, this desire to write about the period of her own childhood and young adulthood can be explained in part by noting that Livesay's poetic draws upon the notion that the child is father/mother of the [wo]man, but there is much more implicated in her repeated returning to her childhood for material than this limited explanation alone can accommodate. It is no doubt also significant, for example, that it was not until 1973, when Livesay was sixty-four years old, that a selection of her prose about this important time of her life was published. Although some of the stories which were eventually published in A Winnipeg Childhood were written at least as early as the 'forties, they were not accepted for publication at that time. The psychological need to see this autobiographical project completed spurs her on. In 1985 she was working on a memoir of the years between 1920 and 1930.3 Furthermore, Livesay's interest in the documentary impulse has also heavily influenced her creative decisions with regard to subject matter, as well as style, technique and genre. Her passion for the documentary is consistent with her family background.  Both her parents were journalists, and her mother also sustained a lifelong interest in her ancestors.

     Both Livesay's father, John Frederick Bligh Livesay (JFBL), and her mother, Florence Hamilton Randal Livesay (FRL),4 were strong individuals, often or perhaps even perpetually at odds with one another, but having in common large ambitions for their daughters, Dorothy and Sophie. The father's letters in particular reveal his hopes that his children will become artists, will "create", Sophie as a visual artist, Dorothy as a writer. A letter from Dorothy to her father, written when she was a child, illustrates both his very early championship of her as a future writer and the attendant mixture of awkwardness, embarrassment and pleasure this encouragement produced in the young girl:

Dear Daddy, Just got your wire. Those verses are not my own didn't you look and see on the bottom and see what I said about them that it was not my own? I said that I had copied them. Don't for pity-sakes go and show them to every-body. Sorry you were so mistaken but it is rather a joke. Don't you think so? Look on bottom of page again and see [undated letter].

The father, in his eagerness, misread his daughter's letter and proudly misrepresented the poems to friends and relatives as Dorothy's own.

     In interviews Livesay has attributed her father's ambition for his daughters to become creative artists to the fact that he himself was a failed writer: "No, it was that he was a failed writer. He wanted to be a novelist. He's done some very good short stories and he should have been a writer himself, but he got caught up in the newspaper game"5. In saying this, she is echoing statements he himself made many years prior. He claimed that, unable to work as a writer, he was eating out his heart first in the Isle of Wight where he grew up and then between the ages of twenty and twenty-eight while he worked at farming in Canada. When the opportunity to get into the newspaper business presented itself, he bit so hard and deep, he said, that he was never able to let go again. He regretted that he would "die in the harness". In a letter to his daughter Dorothy, dated February 25, 1930, he wrote:

Yes, I wanted you to create. I wanted to create myself, passionately. Time ticks along, we have not done what we set out to do, but we find we have done something other, perhaps more solid. My creation is the CP [Canadian Press], two girls, a garden. 'Canada's Hundred Days' was an accident florescence [sic] of early ambition. No, you, not Sophy, is [sic] the creator. If you never wrote another line, you have done enough, you are secure. You will endure. This is not 'fond parent' — I know. When your book [Signpost] comes out you will be established. It is natural enough you should feel a let-up, a rift in the vein of creation. You are going through experiences and one cannot live intensely and produce intensely at the same time — or at least it is unusual. You have a great store tucked away that later on you will work over and recreate. Study the French peasant mind, so intensely interesting. Yes, I see in you what I hoped to be, but a great deal more. I am well satisfied!

For political, practical and personal reasons, JFBL was never able to write the "utterly frank autobiography"6 he longed to write and instead redirected his literary ambitions into his newspaper career, his garden and his two daughters. Whereas Dorothy's mother gave her daughter encouragement and practical assistance in sending her poems to magazines and in corresponding with publishers on her behalf, her father lent his financial support and exerted considerable emotional pressure to "create" in his name. For Dorothy Livesay the relationship with her parents was also one of literary mentors and apprentice.

     The apprentice did not disappoint her mentors. Her first book was published in 1928 when she was just nineteen years old. A young woman beginning her literary career at such an age and at that moment in history entered an almost exclusively patriarchal literary tradition. The female 'ephebe'7 had to efface her gender in order to gain more than token admission to the tradition. Furthermore, Livesay was born into the tradition of English literature in Canada, where poetic precursors of either sex, but especially female precursors, were relatively few in number. Livesay embraced British and American writers, of course, but with a Canadian reserve. She was searching for a poetic ancestor in her own country:

The only woman poet predecessing [sic] me was Isabella Valancy Crawford who died in 1884, and she'd had a very rough time. [Charles G.D.] Roberts, the editor of The Week, would never see her or encourage her. I think she died of a broken heart, really, for not getting a reception. So her work was not recognized at all, back in the 19th century, whereas my mother's work was recognized in 1917. Then, in the Twenties, Margery Pickthall received acclaim and I began to be recognized by 1930 and 1932 when my second book came out, Signpost.8

Livesay later became fascinated with such Canadian precursors as Isabella Valancy Crawford, Mazo de la Roche, and Raymond Knister, devoting much biographical and critical research to their lives and works, but in 1926-1928 when the poems which would be published in Green Pitcher were being written, the most direct literary influences upon the young Dorothy would have been her mother and her father. When asked in June, 1985 about the role of autobiography and memoir in relation to her work as a whole and about the extent to which her mother was a poetic mentor for her, Livesay responded as follows:

My mother had discovered my poems in a dresser drawer when I was about thirteen and I was furious because she pried into my private things in the dresser. But she was nonchalant about it, said they were good and sent them to the Vancouver Province and they published them. From then on she had real control over me, encouraged me to write poems and mail them out. Eventually my father paid for the first book, Green Pitcher, and sent copies to all his newspaper friends across the country. . . .

[FRL's poem "Time"] is almost a model for my poem called "Time." Yes, my mother had a very strong influence. My father wanted me to be a novelist because he was devoted to the Brontës and George Eliot, indeed to all works of women writers. . . . So when he found that I was really working at poetry, . . . he swung around and let her (my mother) take over.9

     Much of Dorothy Livesay's literary apprenticeship took place at a distance from home while she was studying at the Sorbonne in France, and the surviving correspondence documents both the advantages and the strains caused by this overlap between the family romance and the family of literary predecessors. It is worth noting certain general features of the family correspondence as a whole before proceeding to discussion of individual letters. For example, it was a more or less standard practice of the Livesay correspondence that family members refer to themselves and others by their initials rather than their names (i.e., FRL, JFBL, D(ee), S for Sophie). Seldom was a letter addressed to more than one correspondent, although letters or copies of letters to or from one were sometimes enclosed with a letter to another. Livesay typically wrote separate letters to each of her mother, her father and her sister. In the entire Livesay Collection at the University of Manitoba, there is only the very rare letter written to the family as a unit. In combination, these features of the correspondence would have created and reinforced a strong sense of family drama. The preference for initials over names would have produced a distancing and fictionalizing effect such that those referred to bordered on becoming characters in a drama rather than simply Mom and Dad and little sister Sophie. The deliberate "literariness" of the letters — characterized by their frequency, descriptive setting of scenes, inflation and dramatic excess, significant closures, the enclosure of letters to others which broadens the narrative context, a tone of "philosophical" musings, especially in those letters passing between Dorothy and her father — would have further amplified the dramatic overtones.

     If his letters are an indication, it would seem that from quite early on in his marriage JFBL transferred much of his love and affection from his wife to his daughters. He actually conspired to form an alliance between himself and his daughter, the apparent object of which was to exclude his wife. The letters flowing between JFBL and DL weave a web of written tissue that binds father and daughter together in a mutual complicity and somewhat overblown intimacy. The content of these letters ranges from repeated derogatory remarks about FRL's faults and shortcomings to secrets shared between father and daughter, a pronounced but undirected tone of desire and longing, discussions about fluctuations in DL's menstrual cycle (which he has co-opted from her correspondence with her mother) and her virginity versus her sexual desires, stories of her encounters with other men, and talk of "safeties", promiscuity and women's sexual lot.

     In fact, the daughter literally did take her mother's place on the occasion when she met her father in England to accompany him during a major month-long conference for newspapermen. The letters leading up to the event are saturated with expectation and excitement, particularly on the part of the father. In turn DL writes that his wife would have been the wrong choice of companion indeed:

But thank you so much for letting me come [on the trip to England]. Mother indeed would have been hopeless, being entirely without a sense of proportion Her simplicity is refreshing in the home but impossible in society. However: a "social" wife would not have understood you.

     Sorry if my wailings have reached your ears. I naturally would never have the intention of burdening a man with such things [her menstrual irregularities]. It is too bad you have not trained your women at home to hold their tongues! However, what you do not realize, and cannot realize without great intuition, is that mother enjoys hearing about my little ills. If I do not tell her the condition of my health, when I come home I will never hear the end of it. She prefers to know and to worry all over everybody else, than to suspect and fret inwardly. She cannot think in abstract terms, as you or I; instead of thinking she hops from one little concrete twig to another — and that occupies her mind.

     You have accused me often enough of being like her, but you must admit that in this respect we are poles apart. We would be very intimate if I had a mind like Kathleen's [Dorothy's aunt]: we are not in the least intimate [February 9, 1929 or 1930].

In this letter to her father, DL is desperately rejecting the connection with her mother. She indulges with him in clandestine discussions about FRL. The mother lacks supposedly masculine qualities: she is simple and has no sense of "proportion". She cannot think in abstract terms "as you or I". She hops from twig to twig: she is a birdbrain. She is preoccupied with little things and with sickness. "It is too bad you have not trained your women at home to hold their tongues!" DL exclaims [emphasis added]. The women at home, of course, are FRL and Sophie, but not DL. At the same time, DL pays tribute to perceived male superiority in referring to her discussion with her mother of menstrual irregularities, which her father has taken up, as her "wailings" and by saying that naturally she would not have dreamed of burdening a man with such abject matters.

     But even as DL is forsaking her mother and allying herself with her father, she claims a measure of superiority to both in implying that she possesses, in addition to the ability to think in abstract terms like the father, access to the powers of intuition. She claims to be not a woman of words but a woman of action. And the action she is about to take is to cut her long hair, a symbolic act of female defiance at being slotted into the confines of a traditionally-defined femininity. It is also an action designed to challenge parental authority. The letter continues:

     [. . .] today I have washed my locks for the last time. I have an appointment at the hairdresser's. My head will be shorn tomorrow. But it is no use getting agitated over this until you hear in my next [letter] that my hair really is cut.

     (At these words, as you will notice by my writing, the window whirled open, the door creaked and suddenly whanged, my pen fell to the floor and is now, I fear, ruined, the nib having got twisted . . . a sign of defiance from the gods?)

     Well, this letter will have to end itself — with nothing as yet said. For example, the long dissertation on your ambitions for your children. Subconsciously following you, perhaps, I always said within myself: "It does not matter if I create or not — really — so long as one of us does: so long as Sophie does. But one of us must" [February 9, 1929 or 1930].

Significantly enough, and the significance does not escape her, just as DL writes these words announcing her decision to rebel against her father, to cut her hair, her pen is dashed to the floor and the nib is twisted. She temporarily loses her access to the symbolic and to the act of writing.

     Some of the letters the young DL writes to her father when she is studying in France are addressed to "Zeus" or "Jove". These appellations ostensibly derive from a plaque or statue he kept in his bedroom at home. However, the significance (of his owning the figure, of its symbolic connotations, and of its location in the house) would not have been lost upon either the well-read JFBL or his daughter at the beginning of her literary career. Needless to say, if he is Zeus, then she is Athene, said to have been born from Zeus's head, after he swallowed her mother. Dorothy is Daddy's girl, his brain-child.

     But there is evidence to suggest that JFBL's interest in his daughter's literary success was motivated by intellectual reasons as well as his own psychological needs. He loved the work of novelist Dorothy Richardson, for example, partly because "Like Marcel Proust and Katherine Mansfield she is in the direct lineage of Henry James, but of course she is more marvellous than any of them because she is woman to and as woman and not woman for man" [JFBL to DL, February 11, 1932]. In a letter to Mr. R.A. Scott-James of The London Mercury, JFBL writes, of Dorothy Richardson:

From psychological, not vulgar, curiosity, I want to learn something about a woman quite as extraordinary as Charlotte Bronte or K. Mansfield. "The Proust of Woman," I think Powys calls her. To me the most entertaining thing of "The Pilgrimage" is to not[e] how hard she tries, how ever she fails, to give away the secret, the riddle of woman, that has baffled man (Hypo) these many thousand years — and will! [December 16, 1935]

On the basis of statements such as these, one might speculate that Dorothy's father was an astute and open-minded literary critic with a very advanced understanding of women's writing. In turn, he encouraged his daughter to read these authors and gave her an open account at Bumpus, a London bookstore, so she could buy all the books she needed.

     JFBL was very much involved in his daughters' lives from the time they were small children. His letters to DL during her childhood sometimes refer to himself as Big Bear, who loves to chase and pretend to frighten DL and her little friends and to play games with them. And apparently the children's dollhouse was kept in his bedroom. When DL is older and studying in France, JFBL mentions in a letter that he had had lunch with her friend Jim [Jean Watts]: "Jimmy lunched with me the other day when we discussed in detail her beastly parents and all the rest of it" [April 13, 1930]. He seems to have been unusually involved in the lives of his offspring, perhaps reliving through them his own youth or the youth he felt he never had.

     In many ways he was probably a very good parent, actively participating in the girls' upbringing, or at least in the creative aspects. But his transference onto the girls, especially Dorothy, of rather intense emotions, and the tension and conflict between him and his wife, must have placed a great deal of pressure on Dorothy during her formative years. Even after her marriage, with the economic hardships of the times and the Macnairs'10 inability on a single salary to make ends meet, Dorothy's father continued to help support her and her children through outright cash gifts and by financing the Macnairs' house purchases.

     JFBL encloses, in a letter to DL dated July 9, 1931, two letters, one which he had written to his wife, and her response. The content reveals something of the tenor of the Livesay household, and a great deal about JFBL's perceptions of the situation, but it is the mere fact that he would send these letters to his daughter that is especially significant. An excerpt from his letter to "Florrie" follows:

Under such conditions it is impossible for me to go home to a continual wrangling and bickering, or I should shortly have a nervous breakdown. If the family is to continue to live together, therefore, either at Rosemount or at Clarkson, it must be on condition my authority prevails unquestioned, and this nagging, not only at me but at or between the other members of the household, shall cease at least while I am under the roof. My health is the paramount thing for this family.

In his letter to DL, her father claims that in her response to this his wife "misses the point altogether". Her reply, which he encloses to DL, does not in fact seem to miss the point, except maybe insofar as there is the hint in her letter that he is not the only one under a strain.

     One letter in particular, perhaps the last he wrote to his daughter before his death on June 15, 1944, indicates a great deal about his perspective on the relationship between him and his wife:

     What you say about FRL being in the same mood is all too true. Ever since it has been definite you are coming she has been in a fever of apprehension and imagines all sorts of ills, especially for Marcia [DL's daughter] — the creek, the dogs, horses, skunks and squirrels.

     All winter she has been so much better, and, living alone, with no triangle woman [housekeeper] present, she has been on the whole very amiable and 'livable', and, as I have said before, quite devoted to my infirmities.

     So I'm glad you've made up your mind there'll have to be more 'give' than 'take' on your part — we've a right to be sorry for the poor old thing. But today, disappointed she had no mail, she said: "That's all I live for." I might have added: "Yes, and for several bushel baskets of ancestors!"

     As usual, she's jealous and disappointed that you have got out a book and she hasn't — not for lack of trying indeed: one must admire her pertinacity. I hope she doesn't start arguing about the book [DL's Day and Night] — she has a lot to say. We both thought your Forum piece admirable [April 3, 1944].

In his later life, in both his business and his personal correspondence, including letters to DL, JFBL rarely misses an opportunity to disparage his wife. In the following excerpts from two different letters to DL he writes:

You are devastatingly true about your mother — I don't know but I think I would have been happier and perhaps less of a success in affairs if I had had a woman who was companionable. She has always cut me off from society — the society if [sic] gay cultured people — but the old thing has her good points, she is steadfast in adversity and simple and direct. But a woman who comes down to breafast [sic] with stockings flopping down over bedroom slippers — an untidy mind to match — is a bit depressing [February 25, 1930].

Your poor mother never had an aspiration beyond pretty-pretty!!! [January 17, 1930]

Photographs of Florence Randal Livesay show that she was a very lovely woman indeed, but given her prodigious energy and considerable productivity as a poet, translator, editor, and journalist throughout her life and on into her old age, it is a ridiculous statement to say that her aspirations never went beyond "pretty-pretty". Indeed JFBL's disgust at her coming down to breakfast careless of her looks is a direct testimony to this fact. He seems to have been jealous and resentful of his wife's accomplishments and possibly intimidated by her beauty as well. He confesses his competitiveness in letters to his daughter, and the bitterness and envy is plain:

If you like I will have a talk with him myself [Lorne Pierce]. He is the only person I have met with intelligence enough to know that your poetic gift comes from your father and not your mother! [May 18, 1936]

Here's your Xmas cheque. But after this, if you want anything write to me at the office and don't go circuitously through that unpleasant person FRL (I'm not that formidable — but you never learn how damned lucky you are in your male parent! [December 7, 1937]

Thanks for nice letter — we've now a clear understanding not to communicate through that awful womman [sic]! [December 16, 1937]

I think Annie's analysis is about right. In reverse, your case and his [DL and her husband, Duncan Macnair] is very like FRL's and mine — a deathless struggle to see which is top dog [October 31, 1943].

It is quite clear that Dorothy Livesay was first impelled toward writing by her father's pressure on her to create in his name. Her mother also encouraged the young girl, sending her work out to magazines in Canada and the United States, the first time without Dorothy's knowledge or permission. Then the influences of her own maturing sexuality and desire, the father's displacement from his wife onto his daughter of an unusually intense emotional attachment, and her own realization that at least her immediate future as a writer was governed to a frightening extent by her father11 combined to create a potentially volatile situation for the young poet and her family. "By the way, what shall I do when you're dead? Earning my own living will mean an end to writing. What shall I do? I want a rich, adoring, unpretentious husband. Alas" [undated], writes DL to her father in a coyly flirtatious voice.

     It is appropriate then that the first major rupture between DL and her father occurs during the press junket they took together to England, the trip that the father anticipated with so much submerged desire. According to Livesay,12 the cause of the rupture was simply that he wanted to take her to see his childhood home in the Isle of Wight on the same day that she had an opportunity to go to hear George Bernard Shaw (a conflict between his past and her present and future, as well as a conflict between poetic "fathers"). An argument ensued, and DL walked away from the hotel. She walked and walked all day long. Meanwhile her father notified the police and all the hospitals, fearing she may have committed or attempted to commit suicide, a somewhat inflated reaction, one might think, to a quarrel of this nature, suggesting an absence of perspective on his part about their relationship. The father lays down the law to his daughter, disobedience to which is, in his mind, if not punishable by death, at least tantamount to a death wish. In the interval between his daughter's disappearance and her return he sits down and writes a letter to his wife. The imagined suicide of his daughter provides an occasion for writing to his wife, not to inform her, since in the event of an actual death a telegram would have been sent, but rather to ease his own climaxing tensions by writing them out. It was probably inevitable that the submerged, almost erotic tendencies in the father-daughter relationship would erupt at this specific point in their lives. A few years later, immediately following DL's marriage, there is a definite note of relief in JFBL's correspondence with her.

     This pattern of rejection of the mother and alliance with the father which forms such a distinct drama in the Livesay correspondence is a common psychological motif with direct implications especially for the daughter who would be a writer:

In family structure, it is generally — but not always — the parent of the same sex who faces rejection. . . . On a deeper level, the alliance with the parent of the opposite sex is only ephemeral, a screen set up to facilitate the rejection of the same. Indeed, if there is a fixation on the parent of the opposite sex without a rejection of the parent of the same sex, the process of rejection cannot be renewed; such a blockage not only prevents all signifying production but also brings about profound disturbances in the symbolic function itself.13

In the patriarchal family, for the daughter to enter into free symbolic functioning, that is, to write, she must separate herself from her mother and set up this screen of complicity with the father. Within a rigidly patriarchal system, women are prohibited from traversing the "hinge" between nature and culture, since the very prop of the system, namely, the concept of supplementarity, depends upon their exclusion, their relegation to a state of eternal otherness. When a woman decides to become a poet, to cross over from nature to culture and herself to manipulate the symbolic order of language, her womanly status as supplement becomes even more overtly problematical. I would suggest that Livesay's obsession with her personal and familial past stems from her conscious and unconscious confrontations with the foundations of the patriarchal system as they are manifested in the structure of the family and in language itself.

     Hélène Cixous, who has done considerable work on the relationship of the female writer to language and the literary tradition, makes some observations about the family romance and its impact on the woman writer which are pertinent to the process of Dorothy Livesay's poetic develop ment. Cixous says:

One has to say that nevertheless the gesture of writing has been a gesture of mastering language and at certain levels, a gesture of very strong symbolization which presupposes phallicization even if it is minimal. Women who have written are women who have been phallicized by their father, that is to say whom the fathers allowed and did not prohibit to write, to whom the father permitted that act like to a darling son.14

As we have seen, pervading the letters DL wrote to her father when she was a young woman is the sense that she is consciously trying to please him and carry out his design. One such letter is even signed "Yr obedient Pup".

     Essentially the message contained in the letters of Dorothy Livesay's father to his daughter is for her to appropriate language and gain access to the power to create symbolic meaning in the world. Perhaps he accurately, if inadvertently, summed up the impossible, paradoxical, ridiculous position in which the female writer has traditionally found herself in our culture, but at the same time provided his daughter with a clue as to its inherently creative possibilities as well when he urged her in effect, to write out of what Jacques Lacan would call her "lack" as a woman, but to regard that lack as a positivity and a source of inspiration. "Keep your pecker up — only you haven't got one!" [undated letter], JFBL exhorted his daughter, punning on the multiple meanings of the word "pecker" as the literal penis, the symbolic phallus, and courage or good spirits.

     But it would be wrong to conclude simply that Livesay's father exerted the dominant influence upon his daughter. Just as he pressured his daughter to keep her "pecker" up and to write (in Lacan's terms) "in the name of the Father", so her mother pried into her secret places and "private things" to seize her earliest scribblings and have them valorized through publication. Just as JFBL controlled the family purse strings and solicited reviews of his daughter's books from newspapers all over the country, so FRL had access to literary publishers and magazines. After all, according to Livesay, her mother's poems were published in Poetry Chicago, along with those of Ezra Pound.15  Livesay's obsession with her personal past can be traced to these early parental interventions and "violations" which initially propelled her, by force, into writing. Her ongoing exploration of and dialogue with her antecedents, in a variety of genres and forms, is a manifestation of the kind of anxiety of influence described by Harold Bloom and his disciples.16  For Dorothy Livesay the family romance overlapped with the Bloomian intra-poetic romance of the family of literary precursors.


Notes

  1. Dorothy Livesay, "The Unquiet Bed," Collected Poems: The Two Seasons of Dorothy Livesay (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), p. 292.[back]

  2. Acknowledgements are due to the Department of Archives and Special Collections, Elizabeth Dafoe Library, University of Manitoba, where for the year of 1985 I was Research Associate for the Dorothy Livesay Research Tool Project, a SSHRCC-funded project. This paper was first presented in the Department as part of an ongoing lecture series. 

         I refer the reader to the finding-aid to the Collection, The Papers of Dorothy Livesay: A Research Tool (Winnipeg: Dept. of Archives and Special Collections, 1986), which comprises a complete container list to the University of Manitoba Collection, as well as to Livesay materials in other archival repositories in Canada, a full index, plus eight detailed essays by myself and Kristjana Gunnars on Livesay's autobiographical and biographical papers, correspondence, poems, short stories, autobiographical fiction, plays, reviews, and essays. The Dorothy Livesay Collection is now open to researchers.[back]

  3. Conversation with Dorothy Livesay, Archives and Special Collections, Elizabeth Dafoe Library, June 12, 1985. See also the interview of Dorothy Livesay by Pamela Banting and Kristjana Gunnars in Prairie Fire, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn 1986), 8-13, where Livesay talks about her parents and their influence upon her.

         It must be noted that my decision to focus in this paper primarily on the father-daughter correspondence and the relationship outlined therein is not intended to suggest a privileging on my part of this relationship over that between mother and daughter. The mother-daughter correspondence is also a rich archival resource and deserves separate treatment. Admittedly, however, this focus does reflect Livesay's own intense preoccupation with her father, particularly during her childhood and early adulthood, as I propose to demonstrate.

         For an introduction to Livesay's correspondence with her mother (and for a general introduction to the Livesay correspondence housed at the University of Manitoba Archives) see my article on "The Correspondence" in The Papers of Dorothy Livesay.[back]

  4. To avoid the obvious confusion that would result from using the family surname alone, the cumbersomeness of using full names for family members, and the artificial familiarity of using first names alone, I have followed the precedent established in the Livesay family correspondence itself of adopting family members' initials rather than their names in appropriate instances.[back]

  5. Joyce Marshall, "Dorothy Livesay: A Bluestocking Remembers," Branching Out, 7, (1980), 19.[back]

  6. See the letter from JFBL to DL, dated 10/9/1942, Archives and Special Collections, University of Manitoba.[back]

  7. I borrow the term from Harold Bloom. In his usage it refers to the young male poet confronting the literary tradition as represented by strong precursor poets. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'ephebe' as a young man of eighteen to twenty undergoing military training. Etymological roots refer to 'early manhood.' Strictly speaking then, my use of the term "female ephebe" refers to a female poet in her early manhood! This deliberate misuse is intended to be allusive of Bloom's argument, both its strengths and its limitations with regard to the female poet.[back]

  8. Marshall, p. 19.[back]

  9. Banting and Gunnars, pp. 10-11.[back]

  10. Dorothy Livesay married Duncan Macnair in August 1937.[back]

  11. Livesay's father was both financier and publicity agent for her early career. In the Dafoe Library Archives there is a large stack of carbon copies of letters he wrote to every newspaper in Canada, enclosing a copy of his daughter's book and requesting the kindness of a review. He was at the time General Manager of the Canadian Press and in a position of enormous power and influence.[back]

  12. Informal discussion with Dorothy Livesay, Archives and Special Collections, Elizabeth Dafoe Library, June 12, 1985.[back]

  13. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Lanaguage, trans. Margaret Waller, intro. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), p. 175.[back]

  14. Hélène Cixous and Verena Andermatt Conley, "Voice i , Boundary 2, 12, (Winter, 1984), 67.

         For a discussion of the development of Livesay's poetic career which also speculates about the career of the female poet as such and which focusses on Livesay's poetry rather than her correspondence, see my article "Dorothy Livesay's Notations of Love and the Dance of the Female Poet in Relation to Language", CVII, 8, (September, 1984), 14-18.[back]

  15. Marshall, p. 18.[back]

  16. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973). See also Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981).[back]