A Sense of the
Medium: the
Poetry of A.G. Bailey
by M. Travis Lane
It is time
we took another look at the poetry of Alfred G. Bailey, who has for many years excelled in
the practice of a poetics that has increasingly interested contemporary critics: an
emphasis on the imprecision, textuality, and potential duplicity of the "word,"
whether as "writing" or as habit of thought, and on the uncertainty, fluidity,
and verbality of "fact." Bailey, in his poetry, has always emphasized the
fluidity and mutability of the contextual situation and/or medium, and the relativity,
dubiety, and metamorphic nature of "guiding words" or sought-for
principles. He has presented history as memory, legend, emotion, conflict and
interaction, and as presence not as a stable description, but as a living and
mutable web. Further, as Bailey's frequently Joyce-like word-play robustly reminds
us, he has always been aware of the context, intertext, and textuality of the text
of the function of poetry as a liberating play in the medium (verbal, emotional,
prejudicial, skeptical) of our intellect. Above all, Bailey's poetry reaffirms for
us his strong sense that life is lived most intensely in the emotional intellect rather
than in unexamined sentiment.
It seems to me that the contemporaneity of Bailey's poetry may be ultimately more
ascribable to his training as ethnohistorian than to the "New Poetry" which
belatedly caught his attention upon his return to graduate school in 1930. Yet for
Bailey himself, the introduction to the poetry of T.S. Eliot was a significant
revelation. Although interested in reading and writing poetry from earliest youth,
Bailey has never been primarily a poet. After the publication in 1930 of his second
small chapbook, Tao, and upon his return to academia after a post undergraduate
period as journalist, Bailey became aware that he was out of touch with contemporary
writing. "I had never even heard of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie
hardly any of the contemporary poets except Edgar Lee Masters!" Then,
while a graduate student at the University of Toronto (in history, anthropology, and
economics) Bailey became a member of the "Nameless Society," a group interested
in the study of Canadian literature, presided over by E.K. Brown, and, as well, made
friends with Malcolm Ross, Roy Daniells, Robert Finch, and Earle Birney. When Roy
Daniells returned from a year abroad and introduced Bailey and some others to The Waste
Land and "Prufrock": "we had never heard of Eliot
before." Eliot seemed to offer new ways of writing about what most concerned
Bailey's contemporaries: "The subject of the urban wilderness was so concerning
us then and Eliot's rhythms caught in one's mind. There was a lot of
imitativeness for a while. Smith, Scott, all the people who were writing at that
time were very influenced by Eliot. I had a few of my poems in my new manner
published by The Canadian Forum in 1932, 1933, and 1934." ("Best
Seller" is one of the earliest of these.) Bailey felt that "Eliot had
pronounced an epitaph on the past. It was necessary to pass through that phase,
incorporate its effects, and transcend it."
While going through "that phase," Bailey and his friend Daniells, and later
Finch, met weekly and "did exercises in poetry, on T.S. Eliot's advice that one
should keep ready like a well-oiled fire engine."1
They wrote on subjects chosen at random the result of one such exercise with Robert
Finch is "Pieces of Silver." A similarly Finch-assisted effort was a
translation, "The Troubled Fawn," (from a French poem neither can now
locate). The effect of such exercises seems to have been far more lasting upon
Finch, with his early developed and long retained facility for writing gracefully even
occasional and light verse. Bailey's own lighter poems are rarely graceful, and the
poems in his "new manner" show the complexity of thought and the historical and
sociological ponderings that typify his mature writing. It is probable that Eliot's
historical and anthropological casts of mind were more available, because more
sympathetic, to Bailey than to Finch. Certainly "Hochelaga," a poem of that
period which Bailey characterizes as being a little too much Eliot-like, not merely in its
rhythms, but in its combination of the image of the modern citizen drinking tea
superimposed upon a doubled image of the bloody and wicked present and the bloody and
wicked past, is most un-Finchian.
Bailey did not
work closely with Birney, the strongest poet of the group, and while there are affinities,
especially in intellectual and historical interests, between Bailey and Birney, Birney has
been much less interested in self-conscious intellectualizing than Bailey, and much more
interested in nature. Bailey's interest in the speech rhythms of maritime and
professorial Canada show an affinity to Frost (to whose poetry Bailey's "His Age was
On" may be read as an indirect reference), although Eliot, too, made colloquial
speech rhythms poetically available to his readers. Of the group, Daniells' work now
seems the least influenced by the "New Poetry."
Thus, although
the effect of the "New Poetry" upon Bailey's generation was shocking, in
Bailey's words, "putting into the discard"2
the reputations of earlier Canadian poets, what each poet learned from the "New
Poetry" differed according to each poet's interests and needs.
Bailey did not go on to become a major Canadian poet of the 'thirties. He was too
busy as historian, archivist, librarian, administrator working to rescue and
reawaken New Brunswick's cultural heritage. His first collection of mature work, Border
River, did not appear until 1952 by then he had not only read and assimilated
Eliot, he had also read and assimilated Frost, Auden, C. Day Lewis, and Dylan Thomas.
Bailey's poetic style has not significantly altered since Border River,
although the majority of his latest poems, as collected in Thanks for a Drowned Island (1973)
and Miramichi Lightning: the Collected Poems of Alfred G. Bailey (1981), are more
often specifically "historical" either as speculation or as
re-creation. But it was, indeed Eliot, who first showed Bailey how to use his
historical and sociological training, his cultural insights, and his native wit in the
poetry which replaced the Carmanesque poetry of Bailey's youthful writing.
Eliot had shown
the way to writing about something other than nature or love. He brought back
vividly to the imagination the possibility of writing about the things that, to Bailey,
seemed most intriguing, that demanded new thought. Bailey's own interest in the
"urban wilderness" is strengthened by his historian's belief that there "is
a dynamism in the life of people stimulated by different varieties of cultural strains. .
. . Contemplating the beauty of nature is all very well, but it doesn't accelerate mental
interaction. I prefer the city."3
The place where ideas interact, where cultures conflict and mutually stimulate each other,
the city of the mind, is where the poet should be, and the historian. So believes
Alfred G. Bailey.
Poems such as Eliot's The Waste Land and
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" were using the ideas of the modern world
and the experience of the mundane, urban, and unlovely as both the matter
and the medium of poetry, as much the medium of poetry as myth and natural images.
Eliot had broken the constrictive, thematic definition of the "poetic
subject" and had returned wit, intellectualization, and even the grotesque to the
uses of poetry. Without rejecting the beauties of nature,or of poetic melody (as so
very present in Bailey's beloved predecessor Bliss Carman), Eliot introduced the effective
use of the unbeautiful, and, in particular, the construction of an image for an emotion or
an idea rather than simply as a way of describing one thing in terms of another thing.
Eliot showed us how to use the antipoetic and the irreverent he showed us,
above all, the wordiness of words.
With the "New Poetry" came a
much greater freedom to regard words as artificial constructs, a much greater feeling for
words as things, as objects, subject to context and mortality there came along even
a degree of Humpty-Dumptyism ("When I use a word it means just what I choose
it to mean neither more nor less"). Pleasure taken in the buried words
within words, the semantic possibilities of the pun, the decorative and sometimes almost
irrelevant surface detail of the text, and the literary suggestiveness of context
all added up to a kind of verbal dandyism which remains one of the characteristic traits
of Bailey's writing (and also continues to exist, but to a lesser extent, in the writing
of Gustafson and Finch).
Much of the verbal dandyism in Bailey's
work occurs in the playful poetry (the majority of his work), but it occurs also in some
of his serious poems, where it can assist the effects of intellectual and emotional
tension. Like anchovy paste, it can be spread too thick, as in "time down
end."4 More commonly, however,
Bailey's verbal dandyism is mild. Rarely obscuring his meanings, it exists primarily
for the effects of metrical compression and textural liveliness. Typical examples
can be examined in the dedicatory poem to the collection Miramichi Lightning,
"The Winter Mill." The line "And there's no stoic tethers soul to
eye" is an example of Bailey's frequent omitting of metrically dull parts of speech.
He also allows himself to use the shorter forms of words, even where not
grammatically correct, as in "like tooth once bitten and forever ache."
And Bailey likes to use phrases that can be read in more than one way. We are
in the just-quoted phrase reminded of "once bitten twice shy;" we are reminded
that a tooth bites; but the sub-text reminds us of a tooth-ache. Winter's bite is
like having a tooth-ache. And Bailey likes to use puns and secondary meanings.
"The winter mill will not return" includes come back, bring back,
and revolve. The last line of the poem, "with batting of this
scene" adds the meaning fending off to the cotton-batting appearance of
snow. And the term "winter ambit" means boundaries, but suggestions
ambition, bite (and bit, auger, ache? Agenbite?)
The oddness of Bailey's diction provokes such semantic ponderings. "The Winter
Mill" is stuffed with literary allusions. Falstaff, discovered dead, lurks in
its complexly textured, half-grotesque, half-romantic lines; so, too, does Carman's
yearned-for April. "The Winter Mill" spoofs itself yet is, at heart, still
serious: "with book and pen record these / cries" the poet urges himself,
introducing the gritty tonalities playfulness and seriousness together that
inform his collection.
Frequently Bailey's verbal dandyism consists of a witty use of and reference to formal
academic language; he enjoys deflating pomposities and the grandiose by relishing their
manner, as in, for example, the poem "The Habitat of Unexorcised Notoriety,"
which remarks:
If indeed it can be said that "try" is the right
word for the sightless and clearly undocumented instigations that resemble the antics of a
trybal global village of the purposeless and unrequited.
(The "trybal" is a whole
commentary in itself on the familiar McLuhan term "global village.")
Bailey also likes to play with images for
academic or philosophic ideas "Waasis," a surprising illustration for
Lamarck's theories, or "Gluskap's Daughter," which plays with a Kantian /
Berkleyan theme. "Jones" presents the "hopeful" human creature
from "australopithecan root" to "cherubim bar-dextrous." In
"The Sun the Wind the Summer Field," an image of pathos from Spengler's Decline
of the West, Volume One,5 becomes
celebratory.
Many of Bailey's poems celebrate the fertility and vitality of nature, usually in terms of
its oceanic or fluvial condition. Poems such as "Water, Air, Fire, Earth"
celebrate sexuality and creation. Poems such as "Plague Burial" and
"Noroua" celebrate destruction. "Noroua" is "full of the
heartless grotesqueries of natural incident, where what is destroyed is destroyed with
indiscriminate gusto, and where the signatures of danger are as marvellous as fairy
tales." The poem concludes with "all, except Lieutenant Herbert
Arlington-Jones" drowned. Indeed, "the fish of the sea are lifted out of
the water by the wind and drowned in air." That the fish are beluga and drown
like balloons is, like the Lieutenant's name, a further example of Bailey's
dandyism. "The poem is a bracing hymn to the destructive vigor of reality:
the noroua, the wind of the Saguenay . . . is a manic, comic demon."6
Obviously Bailey finds Eliot's comic
streak sympathetic. It is instructive to read Bailey's tribute to Eliot's Prufrock,
"Variations on a Theme." Rather than present an image of immortal, mythic
sexuality, Bailey gives us a Marvellesque Charon as Father Time (the historian's Fisher
King) and, instead of mermaids, Queen Dido mortal, individual sex. (Note,
too, the lawyers with their "sandy briefs" who suggest the sands of time and
out, out brief candle and add just the dry, legallese note that so often
distinguishes Bailey's dandyisms.)
However the main effect of Eliot's art and
criticism upon Bailey's thinking, his sense of the medium, must have been to reinforce
attitudes, motives, and images that had been coming to Bailey already through his studies
in history, anthropology, ethnology, economics, and Oriental and Western philosophies.
The Tao, The Golden Bough, The Decline of the West, and Toynbee's A Study
of History were part of Bailey's world independently of Eliot. And, again
independently of Eliot, Bailey had from his earliest childhood a strong sense of history
as multi-cultured, multi-layered. The geological strata and the natural violence of
the Saguenay; the historical strata, conflict, and tumult of Quebec and of Maritime
history; letters and visits from travellers abroad, from China, from Europe all
reinforced Bailey's sense of human history as a fluid and altering web of interactions
rather than of stable patterns.
The combination of patriotism, loyalism, and romantic love of nature which was Bailey's
inheritance with his ethnographer's sense of change and relativism has produced two
sorts of history poems. The first is a representation of the past, most often from
the wider perspective of present memory and attitude, but occasionally as a "period
piece" (like "Edwardian Outing") or as a kind of dream of the past in which
the past speaks to the present (as in "Lament of the Montagnais"). In
poems such as "Hochelaga," present and past are seen together, like geological
strata intermingled by recent diggings and upheavals. The past is a very vivid ghost
in such poems "Grandfather's Gray Top Hat" is still redolent and
quickened with anecdote; "The Shadow of Mr. McGee" is still eloquent in
Parliament Square.
A second variety of "history" poem is the Bailey quest poem, in which the
directing impulses of a society are imaged by an individual or a group (often shown as
travelling in a fluid medium) consciously seeking a vaguely sensed destiny, definition, or
enlightenment. These quest poems can arise from historical incident, as does
"The Angel Gabriel," but more often they are abstractions, modifications of the
Toynbean myth qualified by Bailey's sense of the ambivalences and uncertainties of the
social, human situation. These poems repeatedly emphasize that the quest is not
defined by a clear notion of what is being sought. It is the impulse Bailey
describes, not a destination. Thinking is necessary and profitable, but it is a
process, a motion in flux, not a seizing of precise patterns, as "Searched for,
finding" reminds us. In "The Unreturning," Bailey turns Peter the
founding rock into the insubstantial medium of the sky, and the travellers are guided by
the "lost bearings of an unfound star" towards no "haven," and
"no certain bound." The travellers of "Night Country" can only
guess their destination, ask if "time's hand upon them" was "their own
contrivance" (a Kantian question), and conclude with a decision, not uncommon in
Bailey's quest poems, that
unless they could make
utterance
of the holy names
there would be no way out,
and no end of the night country.
There is
no end of "night country," Bailey would affirm, but so people feel about "utterance, holy names,'' the
guiding word. "North West Passage" and "Go, the Word, Go" reiterate
the theme.
"The Isosceles Lighthouse" is a
particularly interesting example of Bailey's quest poems for the lighthouse is not
gone out to. Instead it is very much like the unclimbed mountain in Robert Frost's
"The Mountain," as well as reminding us of Virginia Woolf's lighthouse in To
the Lighthouse, the eventual visit to which is so much less than the
anticipation. In all three examples, the lighthouse / mountain exists more
importantly as an idea than as a thing. In Woolf the actual thing is less than the
feelings about it. In Frost, the actual thing is less than the pleasures to be got
talking about it. In Bailey the actual thing need not, may not, exist except as a
"concrete unit of mind" something to measure or think by, "the
middle point of the visible world" and a "focus of force," but possibly not
real in itself, only a "copy of what they had in their minds," "whatever it
was." The major facts about it are that it is believed "empty," that
it is never reached, that it has a "name to leave alone," and that it "drew
the eye, the questioning thought." For Bailey, the mind is the seeker, the
name, the "unit of mind," that is sought.
Bailey's recurrent and characteristic questioning about the certitudes of ideas recurs
even in such charmingly patriotic poems as "The Shadow of Mr. McGee":
One thing is sure they could not thereafter claim
to identify a phenomenon with other than a classified name
drawn newly minted and whole
from the vocabulary of the putative national soul.
A word to be drawn, newly minted, from the putative? Supposed is
not proved; the lighthouse is not reached.
Bailey does not, however, debunk the
quest. He shows nothing but reverence to the seekers, the founders, the ancestors,
who have preceded us, and he insists on the value of thinking. The closing poem to Miramichi
Lightning, "Reflections on a Hill Behind a Town," sums up his credo:
knowledge was in itself a good
and would bear issue
in season.
That knowledge, like all things, should be seasonal, does not devalue
its pursuit. Again and again Bailey's poetry reminds us of the search for knowledge
as an inner necessity of our biological beings. Thinking, seeking for
"nomenclature "cogitations":
it would not be well to
abandon, (let us say)
for a trip to the woods in Spring
to admire the skill of the trailing arbutus
in decanting its
fragrance
("The Question, Is It?")
For, as "Trump" asserts:
and so I will write
down
what I must
or go to wordless fields of stuff
beyond the nones
cradled in the great stare
unrocked uncomforted
so I will if I can
I will write away the emptiness
make a firmament of words
the Word
name pain, invoke an ark
become
if to utter is to live.
. . .
"Trump" may be
taken as the voice of the word user, word maker; it may also be taken as the voice of God.
God is certainly the speaker in "The Curve of the Ethereal," God in
process, creating the "cellular," "coding my creations into multitudinous
dictionaries, / and who will there ever be to gainsay my nomenclatures?" Like
all makers, this God is within history, within flux; in "The Curve of the
Ethereal," God has not yet created other word makers. But, as Bailey makes
sometimes frighteningly clear, the Word contains its own destruction, as life contains its
death: "the wolf that sleeps in every prayer / will slay the man-child as of
old" says "The Blood of the Lamb." Both original sin and the holy
ghost reside in the word, sleep in it, kill it for the word lives within nature
like a seed, or an ever re-forming idea. History, the story with ever changing
words, is our medium.
And the other sense of the word "medium" also serves to describe Bailey's work
the moderate, the un-overdone. Bailey avoids the swoony
passivities of Carman, Swinburne, Tennyson, or even Eliot. And, although Bailey's
depicted nature quivers with vitality, his dandaical method of speaking about it reminds
one more of Marianne Moore's witty proprieties than of the sturm und drang passions
of Whitman, Jeffers, Crane, or Thomas. Bailey takes mythology and religion more
relativistically, more lightly (though not irreverently) than does Eliot. And Bailey
is far too Canadian to attempt the Grand Legendary Manner of Williams, Olson, and the
American Dream Company. He differs from Marianne Moore in preferring imaginary
gardens to the "real toad" in preferring ideas to things. Even his
decanting arbutus is nearer to being an idea than a flower. And although Bailey has
a somewhat Frostian manner, in his relish for the ways we can talk about things and in the
ambivalence of some of his reassurances about relativism (as in "The Human Form is
Practically Resilient"), his darks are never desert places. Cheerfulness keeps
breaking in.
I have an acquaintance who prefers the music of Charles Ives to the music of Beethoven on
the grounds that Beethoven's work is "pompous." I find this remark
Baileyesque, even if Bailey does not share her opinion. (I doubt he is immoderate
enough to do so.) But the "wordiness" of Ives's music its
intertextuality, its echoes, its self-conscious references and artificialities, and its
blatant, sentimental patriotism its wit, its vigor, and its moments of sadness,
tenderness and its announced preference for interaction and conflict make it
a very good simile for what Bailey is doing in verse. Like Ives, Bailey likes
unresolved and mutually interacting, mutually grating situations gaiety and seriousness
together; and the grotesque in preference to the over-sweet, to the over-grand, to the
"pompous" certitudes and the great pronouncements. There is a kind of
friskiness, like that of a small, lithe animal unobliged to make Great Pronouncements,
that typifies a particular kind of Canadian verse I have grown very much to admire:
I find it in Bailey, in Gustafson, Gotlieb, Macpherson and in several
others. I think of Bailey's muskrat, in his "The Muskrat and the Whale,"
as a figure for this moderate, medial, medium-conscious, poetic gaiety.
If one reads Bailey's "Statement of Persons Once Classed in Category 'C' " as a
clue to an alternative reading of "The Muskrat and the Whale," one begins to
suspect certain cultural, sociological, conflict-laden historical motives for the
muskrattiness of so much of our best poetry, and of Bailey's poetry in particular.
The persons "once classed in category 'C' "have left a nation of
swelled-headed people (like Ahab and his whale? like the multitude-containing
Whitman?) whose "self esteem was egregious" and whose "vanity and
underhandedness were nourished by an outlandish local quirk in semantics." The
un-swelled-headed people decide to abandon that vain, outlandish language; they cross
"over the border" to a language which, they feel, does not easily lend
"itself / to guile or evil intent." Or, at any rate, the category 'C'
types think, a language less vain, less big-headed. They take a great deal of pride
in not being quite so big-headed. Although Bailey is here, in part, making fun of
Canadian anti-Americanism, he, too, dislikes bigheadedness.
In "The Muskrat in his Brook," I spoke of Bailey's muskrat as a "humorous
apologia" for Bailey's own poetics. The muskrat's gift is "seen as lying
in his play," in "his natural medium" "liberated by reason."
A muskrat, I wrote:
is unportentous and not uncommon; he is confined to a smaller habitat. Whales are
huge, rare, frightening and, the image implies, profounder of element
perhaps thus, indirectly, of subject. They surely write larger and longer
poems, and less playful ones. The Whale is the Great Poet and the muskrat isn't.
But, as the poem truthfully asserts, the muskrat has his own dignity, and, even, the
poem hints, a plus of liberty.7
I have grown to see more motivational
force in Bailey's favourite words: "mete" and "feat," as
I have learned to see how much his sense of the medium as verbal, as textual, as
temporal flux, has punningly intertwined with his sense of the moderate, his sense of
proportion, his sense of relativity. The "feat" insists on a sense of the
medium.
All of Bailey's seekers, whether ship-wrecked swimmers or land- racked thinkers, are
maritime or fluvian, often "storm-bound" and "tidal"
("Guide") as well, but they are liberated and strive and live mostly, and
perhaps only, in the exercise of their reason. The muskrat does not yearn for
grandeurs greater than it can cope with intellectually after all, it can not step
twice into its same brook! Its featness depends on the meteness of its efforts, of
its knowledge of and acceptance of and its play within its medium.
And, while the muskrat has "bliss" in its blood (and we need not forget, here,
Carman), the whale has only "sedate" fluids. The whale is self-consciously
important. The muskrat is unconcerned with proof, portent, or self-image. He has the
dignity of being a thinking being:
even though his habitat is narrow
and confined because
of certain data of existence
best known to himself and
other frequenters of the shallow
bed of gurgling water that he works and plays in.
His reason
liberates his nights and days in
the medium this reason both foreshadows and reflects.
His medium
is our context, our sense of proportion, our "putative national soul" it
is the language we found, or invented, "over the border." It is Bailey's
language, Bailey's medium. Genius, Bailey has written, is:
regarded as a function of the social and cultural
milieu, and as a supreme expression of the
processes and impulses latent within it.8
The muskrat, having chosen his stream,
having crossed the border, is no longer deracinated, but native. He has made his
context his medium.
Notes
Alfred G. Bailey, Interview with M. Travis Lane, September 1985, for Studies in
Canadian Literature.[back]
Bailey, Interview.[back]
Bailey, Interview.[back]
Alfred G. Bailey, Miramichi Lightning: the Collected Poems of Alfred Bailey (Fredericton:
Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1981). All poems quoted in this paper are from this
edition.[back]
Bailey, Interview.[back]
M. Travis Lane, "The Muskrat in his Brook," Fiddlehead, 100 (Winter
1974), 98-9.[back]
Lane, "The Muskrat in his Brook," 100.[back]
Alfred G. Bailey, "Literature and Nationalism in the Aftermath of
Confederation," Culture and Nationality (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1972), 61.[back]
|