Pratt Twayned

Robert G. Collins, E.J. Pratt. Twayne, 1988, pp. xii + 211.

Under the editorship of Robert Lecker, the Twayne World Authors Series has been examining Canadian literature and introducing it, one hopes, to a wider audience. The Twayne studies are intended for school and university students and for the general reader, and as everyone familiar with the series knows, its volumes all follow a comfortable, even soothing pattern. The quality and interest of individual books will vary, but all share a common approach. All are introductory surveys devoted to the career of a single author. Each presents a frontispiece; a chronology of the author's life; a biography briefly tracing major events, decisions, traumas, turning points and triumphs; a chapter by chapter chronological account of the major works; a short summation, in this case "The Achievement of E.J. Pratt"; and a selected bibliography. This format is reasonable, workable and useful, but it carries with it a theoretical view and style which the critic is pretty well obliged to accept from the moment he or she signs the contract.

Since it uses biography and chronology as points of departure, the Twayne style fosters a strong awareness of the developing personality of the author under investigation, and of the role of authorial intention in shaping a literary work. It imposes a close correspondence between "background" and "foreground," for example between life and art, intention and effect, private and public personalities, social history and aesthetic form. Given this interplay, psychological, thematic and stylistic balance (or in special cases, imbalance) becomes a critical value and almost an inevita­ble discovery. Twayne is an appropriate name for a system that welcomes such neat balances. As a result of the Twayne devotion to chronology, a discursive structure based on continuity, development and culmination also becomes an artistic and critical virtue. Barring accident or suicide, the author's talents usually progress from precocious hints to youthful promise to mature refinement to fruition. Adapting the titles of David Pitt's recent biography of Pratt, we might say that the poet develops from truant to master. Finally, given the audience of the series, its critical approach encourages a certain amount of paraphrase and of diligently reading through the works being studied. The traditional and worthy goal of the Twayne style is all that is implied by the word "appreciation" — a deft balance of understanding, enjoyment, respect and judgment that will foster the growth of these same faculties.

It happens that Pratt lends himself nicely to just this treatment. He is the perfect candidate for twayning, since balances of all kinds pervade his character and career. We begin with the Newfoundland-Toronto polarity: his wild, tempestuous, elemental, primitive birthplace as opposed to his sophisticated, scholarly, urban adopted home. We then note his late nineteenth-century upbringing adapted to an early twentieth-century sen­sibility; his youthful commitment to religious orthodoxy complicated by humanistic scepticism, his interest in science and technology joined to a devotion to art; his fascination with heroic deeds and sacrifices expressed through rigorous, scholarly documentation. The list goes on (sea-land, country-city, past-present, history-fiction, idealist-realist, etc.) because Pratt himself has testified to the intricate duality of his life, as we find in Susan Gingell's collection of occasional writings, E.J. Pratt on His Life and Poetry (1983). This book, on which Collins draws frequently and usefully, especially assists the Twayne project of aligning background and foreground, because it supplies so much pertinent personal information, including the poet's comments on details of composition and purpose. He is also a good candidate for twayning because there has been considerable agreement among commentators about the salient points of Pratt criticism. Despite a few quirks and deviations, such as Vincent Sharman's attempt to turn Pratt into a heretic, most critics have followed the orthodox line introduced by Northrop Frye in his few influential essays and introduction. To Frye we owe the suggestion that Pratt is unique, yet also the most Canadian of poets, and that his Canadian interests include communication, community and communal heroism, a dark quasi-Anglo-Saxon fatality, Newfoundland rhythms, and an epic vision of ordeals and redemptive sacrifices. Collins endorses and gives a thorough account of all these themes.

Collins clearly recognizes the conventions, duties and, I suspect, limitations of the critical model that he has adopted. Although he offers too much paraphrase for my taste, he always exhibits a fine sense of command or, to use his Prattian term, seamanship. He easily navigates through his subject's long life and long poems until he reaches the safe harbour implicit in the Twayne formula — "The Achievement of E.J. Pratt." He surveys a varied career by showing how its dualities are united by the recurring themes and styles just listed, by Pratt's personality, and by his consistent though not necessarily secure moral values, such as intelligence, obliga­tion, responsibility and integrity. The book is always authoritative in tone and treatment. It is enjoyable to read even when it indulges in flights of eloquence. Collins' style frequently shares in the atmosphere of the poem that he is examining, for instance in this description of the cold embrace of iceberg and Titanic: "With a hull designed to take incredible blows, to withstand the assault of thunderous waves without notice, the solidity of that light kiss had been the ruin of the maiden vessel" (74). Collins is willing to find fault in Pratt's writing: its occasional lapses into doggerel (33), its weak portraits of individuals or treatment of personal tragedy (80), its awkwardness in disciplining historical detail in Towards the Last Spike (136). But Collins is more concerned with Pratt's strengths, and for the most part he offers the kindest or most favourable interpretations which come closest to the poet's declared intentions or to his documentary sources.

For example, Brébeuf's extraordinary eagerness to accept hardship and suffering might provoke speculation about hidden motives in Brébeuf or ironies in Pratt, but Collins warns:

Collins' interpretation is plausible and orthodox, but it does not settle the issue. Since Pratt is a modern poet, one is justified in being a modern reader who resorts to "twisting," which is, after all, a feature of modern criticism. Some critics, like Harold Bloom, see twisting, swerving, falsifying and misreading as the fate of all textual criticism. It is not necessary to endorse his extreme, idiosyncratic system or to deconstruct Pratt's elaborate historical construction in order to realize that in a poem like Brébeuf some twisting is inevitable by both author and reader. Even if Pratt does succeed in recapturing the spirit of the seventeenth century or the epic ideals of the Counter-Reformation, then that project of imaginative reappropriation is a singularly modern one. It is impossible to suspend our modernity. There is no way of re-entering the past and immediately sharing its temper; the poem is far from naive in that sense. It is a sophisticated performance, and to appreciate it we must recognize how Pratt twists his material to achieve certain effects, and how the reader must realign his or her sense of the past. My purpose is not to disagree with Collins' interpretation so much as to suggest that the Twayne style presumes that its own approach is straight while others are twisted. It encourages an orthodoxy which it discourages us from questioning.

Another example of this difficulty occurs a few pages later when Collins describes the pastoral vision of Canada — "the New Jerusalem in the wilderness" — which is made possible by Brébeuf's dreadful torture and death:

Surely there is an unintended irony in this disavowal of irony. If the Iroquois have disappeared, what is the nature of the triumph, love and harmony that the poem celebrates? Has the Church been a trifle too militant? Again it is not necessary to take an extreme view — for example, to be sternly anti-imperialist — in order to see a twist in interpretation that cannot be fully explained by referring to Pratt's purpose, as always a touchstone of Twayne criticism. Collins' appeal for corroboration to the "history from without the poem" opens a dangerous avenue which he does not follow, since it suggests that we need not accept the poem solely in its own terms, even assuming we all could agree on those terms. It suggests that the poetic evocation of "ideal civilization" must be measured against real history, and vice-versa.

My impression is that Collins sometimes strains against the Twayne format. He seems to grow impatient with its regulations, especially when he detects larger themes or logical imbalances that the critical style is reluctant to recognize. He dutifully follows the path of chronological development, but periodically prefers to argue comparatively, for example, when he notes Pratt's "basically romantic outlook" (116). To explore this subject, he would have to move freely back and forth between the poems in defiance of chronology. He would have to link the "romantic view of biological history" (38) with the "Platonic concept of justice" (145) with the "romantic" parallel between human and natural processes (151). He would also have to link these subjects with a series of related and recurring themes such as power, deeds, sacrifice and the search for the lost — all problematic notions with which Collins tantalizes us. He is very good at pin-pointing these themes in individual cases, but he never has an opportunity to co-ordinate his discussion. Touching on the nature, use and abuse of human power, he notes in passing that there is "much of Nietzsche in Pratt's generation and in Pratt particularly" (145), a comment that tells us little, but makes us wonder where the argument might lead. Similarly when he calls Pratt "a near-existentialist" and then modifies the term to "a social existentialist" (194), he stirs up debate on the last page of the book.

As an example of critical imbalance, consider the fate of Pratt's scientific optimism, humanism and "basic faith in a world made better through reason put to useful human ends" (38-39). These attitudes, which are clearly apparent in some poems, are elsewhere set in a universe where they seem strangely out of place and bound to be frustrated. They must be reconciled with both nature, which often seems bleak, impersonal, violent and alien, and with the perversely creative cruelty of human nature (96). Collins is well aware of this difficulty, but when he concludes (speaking of the submarines in Behind the Log), "Pratt had by no means become a pessimist, but there is a mature sobriety in these views, a chastened sense that goes past the skepticism of The Titanic" (123), his gentle reassurance strikes me as a Twayne solution to what is really an insoluble dilemma. When in Brébeuf he notes that "the Indian code is based on physical endurance; the delight in torture comes out of this code" (97), his explanation contributes neatly to the physical-spiritual balance by which he examines the poem; but he does not go on to observe that physical endurance also distinguishes the primitive life of the Newfoundlanders, whom Pratt so admired.

Pratt named one of his war poems Behind the Log to suggest that he wanted to delve behind the official record of military duty in order to disclose the hidden, human reality of "`blood, nerve, flesh, pulse. Behind the log there is always the man"' (121). It is easy to apply this formula to Pratt's poetry and to the duty of the critic, whose job is to explain how logs (literary structures) work and what sustains them. For some readers, Pratt is our poet laureate: he provides an eloquent, epic, official version of Canadian geography, history, enterprise and character. The fact that Behind the Log was actually requested by a naval commander and that Pratt's research was then assisted by the navy reinforces the impression that he wrote in an official capacity, even when he claimed to be reporting personally and eccentrically. His account of building the railway in Towards the Last Spike, presents the same, odd official-unofficial imbalance. When F.R. Scott complained in his satirical barb that Ned had conveniently ignored the hard-working coolies who did the physical work, he was rejecting the official Tory version, which he found too glossy and glamorous. But Pratt knew exactly how carefully he was tailoring history; another balance/imbalance in his work is the way he uses precise documentation for romantic purposes. The point is not that he is inaccurate, but that he invests history with "ideal significance and emotional intensity" (192). Collins too recognizes the issue, but defuses it when he explains how Pratt's rhetorical hammering on the word "gangs" transforms mindless labour into corporate dignity: "The repetition is like the clang of hammars, beating out an anthem, hammering together a marvelous structure for the future" (142). Obviously this structure is both the railway and the poem, both official versions.

My reservation in this review is that Collins, guided by the Twayne style, remains too content with the official version, which appreciates marvelous, well-balanced, celebratory structures. Even when he concludes with the paradoxes that Pratt was a traditionalist with a "vigorous contemporary consciousness," an idealist and a realist (193), we feel little strain in the paradoxes because they remain so nicely balanced. I am not asking for debunking or extravagant twisting or even disrespect, but for more sceptical attention to what lies behind the log.

J.M. Kertzer