Frank Prewett:  a Fragment of Biography

     Frank Prewett was born near Mount Forest, Ontario, in 1893, and was brought up in Toronto. He left Canada with the Eaton Machine Gun Battery in June, 1915, for the war in Europe. He was recuperating from shell-shock in a Scottish hospital in 1918 when he met Siegfried Sassoon, who seemed to find in him another Wilfred Owen.³ Sassoon encouraged Prewett to become a poet, and when Prewett went to Oxford in the fall of 1918, introduced him to the Garsington group and Lady Ottoline Morrell, Aldous Huxley, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, and W.B. Yeats. After a year at Christ Church, Prewett was repatriated to Canada, but early in 1921 he returned to make his life in England, and to try his hand as a poet.

     Prewett published two books of poetry in the early 1920s: Poems (1921), hand-set at the Hogarth Press, and A Rural Scene (1924), with Heinemann, but no more of his verse appeared until Robert Graves brought out a collection of his poetry in 1964, two years after Prewett’s death. In his introduction to the collection, Graves wrote: “Dedicated poets like Frank Prewett are few in any age, and lamentably so in this.”⁴

     Prewett’s dedication to poetry was thoroughly tested during his year of repatriation to Toronto. Besides entertaining Siegfried Sassoon in Toronto, and thus being reminded of the attractions of the literary life in England, Prewett renewed his acquaintance with the Slee family. He had met Muriel Slee through her older brother Reginald when the two men were students at the University of Toronto. During the summers of 1913 and 1914, Reginald had taken Prewett out to swim at the Slee family home at Humber Bay on Lake Ontario. Frank first signed Muriel’s autograph book on October 11, 1913, when he was twenty and Muriel was sixteen. The friendship continued until Prewett sailed for England in 1915, and the two corresponded for at least the first two years that Prewett was in Europe. A month before he sailed, Prewett wrote a poem to Muriel on the frontispiece of her autograph book. The poem, juvenilia though it is, foreshadows the concision and control of Prewett’s later work (and provides a gloss on a later poem addressed to Muriel):

                 A Song of Hope (s.o.)

I know that every girl is sweet
Bedecked in lace and ribbons neat,
So how, oh Muse, am I to greet
                                   My Muriel.

She is a darling skilled in slyness,
She steals my heart by feigning shyness,
Till now my senses I am minus,
                                   Oh Muriel.

When other girls are sweet, she’s sweeter,
My heart goes thump whene’er I meet her,
I know how I would like to treat her,
                                   This Muriel.

I’d dress her up to her ambition,
But give her careful admonition,
Her taste is not above suspicion,
                                   Poor Muriel.

She’s young and lavish of her charms,
She loves to count the hearts she harms,
And fills my own with sad alarms
                                   Does Muriel.

But soon she’ll older grow and wiser,
She’ll wear her boots to fit and size her,
And then for me her charms she’ll miser,
                                   Young Muriel.

To all the world she’ll wear a stare
A horrid look and stony glare
Till other heroes will beware
                                   Of Muriel.

But since I’ve brought her up this way
And made her frown all men away
To me her frown’s a smile, I say,
                                    Eh Muriel.

May 6 ,1 915.

Prewett here is admitting his attraction and appears to be asking Muriel to wait for him, but beneath the teasing of the fourth tercet lies a subtle equation of ambition with suspect taste, and a suggestion that even before Prewett left for the war, he was rejecting the materialism of the life in Canada. When he returned to Canada in late 1919, he wrote Lady Ottoline he found “nothing but business, selling motor cars, land stock, anything.” He had no profession, and he was not disposed to become a “veneered barbarian,” or a bank clerk, in order to marry. “Life is so isolated here,” he told Lady Ottoline, “that people must marry, and marriage is a bad thing for very young and unambitious men.”⁵

     That Prewett’s attachment to Muriel was real, however, seems certain from the evidence of the undated poem, “To Muriel,” published in the Exile edition, and probably written at the time of Prewett’s final departure for England in January, 1921:

So here we end:—I hoped it might have been
A different way, more kindly, gently said,
Or angrily perhaps:—in any vein
But this so deft and cold exactitude
That parts us two at last,
The while you smile, and makes a dream the past,
And future, fear—insistent solitude.

                                    *   *  *

I loathed to marry;—you were right, no doubt,
And girls must marry soon, or lose the race,
And have no man to dine and take them out;
Oh it was best, and that I hide my face
And weep a while in pain,
Brutal, uncomprehending, vain,
Is nothing, nothing, and leaves not a trace.⁶

     Canada was not the place for a poet. Prewett left for Garsington, Oxford, and eventually, life, not as a poet, but as an editor, agricultural writer, and broadcaster. The only letter from Prewett remaining in Muriel Slee’s papers, dated January 16, 1923, contains not a trace of feeling. It is a letter thanking Muriel for a Christmas card, speaking of the weather, and asking to be remembered to her brother.

Notes