Shadow Maker

1. Gwen's Magic

My friend Gwendolyn MacEwen, died in Toronto on November 30, 1987.A terse obituary in The Globe and Mail said she was the "author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, theatre and travel,"and dutifully mentioned her most notable poetry titles, Armies of the Night, Magic Animals, Earthlight, T.E. Lawrence Poems, and AfterWorlds, reprinted a year after her death. At forty six,"Gwen"died far too young, leaving me bereft of a close friend and mentor. I had come to depend upon her for moral support on days when writing poetry seemed less socially relevant than harvesting dragonfly excretions, and I hung on every word of her gentle criticism. This despite the fact that as an alphabetarian learning the craft of poetry in the sixties I was eight years her senior.

I remember our first meeting; It was sometime in the spring of 1961. She was 20 years old and was just starting to blossom poetically. What struck me instantly was that was stunningly voluptuous, not so much in the curvaceous sense, but her face possessed me with its classic Nefertili loveliness. My first impression was that, at last, I had seen my goddess. Yet more mesmerizing was her soft voice. So gentle was it that I sensed it would have challenged the fellinity of the most contented cat's purr. That satiny voice was damned sexy, and so, for that matter, was the acute intelligence which accompanied it; that and her haunting hazel eyes which held you in their pools of pure light. All those features played a molecular role in endowing her with a charisma so potent, that at times it seemed almost as if it were an entity all to itself.

I first met me her through Milton Acorn who was my mentor. She was romantically involved with Acorn, who was 18 years older than Gwen. In a short time they both took a poetic shine to me, and soon I was publishing my nimble rhymes in Moments, a magazine that Milton started, although both he and Gwen were editing it by the time I entered their sphere of influence. Gwen had already published two slim volumes of poetry, Selah and the Drunken Clock, both by Aleph Press (those two arcane volumes, I fancy, would now fetch a king's ransom at any antiquarian bookstore, that is to say if you could find an antiquarian bookstore owner who would part with them ). In the 26 years that would remain for her she would write impressive works of the imagination: mature volumes of poetry like A Breakfast for Barbarians (1966) and Shadow Maker (1969) that would assure her a salient place in modern English Canadian poetry. She also published two novels, Julian the Magician (1963) and King of Egypt, King of Dreams (1971) , a children's books, and a travel narrative, Mermaids and Ikons: A Greek Summer (1978). Until I left Toronto for Vancouver Island, and a new life, she would replace Milton Acorn as my poetical parent and museful ideologue. With her passing, I had, in effect, become orphaned, and time has done nothing to rid me of that feeling of loss. A blue vapor still follows me about like a lost kitten wanting to keep my enigmatic Gwendolyn MacEwen on a high metaphysical pedestal, and fearing she would be demystified at the hands of a biographer with a talent for onerous detective work, I approached Rosemary Sullivan's biography with a spoonful of trepidation.

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Sullivan, who won the Governor General's award with this book, describes well the life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. There is a fridgid hyper-real current to this biography, with lengthy accounts of Gwen's horridly dysfunctional family background, her bouts of alcoholism, her father's dipsomania, her mother's insanity, the tough romances. Those general adversities of trying to survive as a poet in a material world are described in all their cruelty: raising a little cash to buy food, pay the rent, and maintain the most minimal of human comforts. Throughout the book, the reader is treated, thanks to Sullivan's super-sleuthing, to the most painful and confidential aspects of a poet's stormy life. To MacEwen's external world, what is referred to as the real-work-a-day world. Sullivan has applied herself with panache. She has filled her account with medical data on MacEwen's family history, but to my taste over-cooks the stew with hair-raising accounts by friends and family members. She recounts the horrific extent of the mother's dementia, the father's alcoholism, a vivid picture of her super-powered aunt Margaret--- the father's sister-in-law. A religiously devout Christian, Margaret seems an extraordinary person, a larger than life character. We learn that Margaret, along with her plebe husband 'Charlie,'continually intervened to buoy up Gewendolyn and her protective sister Carol during each family crisis, providing them with a secure home environment when their parents, Alick and Elsie, pulled by a tide of misfortune, weren't able to look after them.

As ironies go, the grand matriarch Margaret would be now sneeringly cast as a 'control freak'by the baby boomers, but Sullivan doesn't go that far. Aunt Margaret didn't take any patriarchal lip, excepting Jesus, and I'm certain this would also be the case with Gwen's other aunts. So it wasn't just Margaret and Charlie who provided a shield for a troubled Gwen (or Wendy as she was then called) and her older sister. Another striking character in this literary psycho-drama is Gwen's childhood residence, the stuff of Hollywood classic horror shows, a darkly Gothic house--38 Keele street--in 1940's Toronto, south of the slaughterhouse. The house has a forbidding, frightening character. I was glued to the extended metaphor of that salient domicile, and the house traveled with me throughout the book. The description of that proletarian neighbourhood dominated by the slaughterhouse, whose awful stench violated my own nostrils especially during a summer heat-wave, also stayed with me. I was fascinated by the opening chapters of Shadow Maker . I even envisioned drawing a psychic outline of that sickly area. And to think I was almost hired by Swift Meat Packers!

The voyeurs out there won't be disappointed by Sullivan's offerings. They range from psychiatric medical reports on Gwen's alcoholic and mental breakdowns to the most intimate correspondence between her and her lovers. A biographer, I imagine, is supposed to bring the raw truth forward to feed such a readership. Still isn't there an oath of confidentiality between patient and doctor? Or does this only apply to living patients and their animate over-paid shrinks?

Sullivan gives too much credence to the psychiatric priesthood. Indeed not so long ago before super tranquilizers became all the fashion, those very boys in white coats were driving a pick through a patient's eye and into that poor devil's brain, for a prefrontal lobotomy--- to zombify their "hysterical "subject. Sure enough, the shrinks gave their opinions of Gwen's state. Upon admission to Toronto's Clarke Institute, she was assessed in the cool detached language of a head-fixing clinician: It is offsetting: Mental Status Examination: 34 year old woman looking about 45 years old. Fairly well groomed. Facial expression was anxious and twitching. She had some stammering. She walked slowly and her gait was a little unsteady but no significant thought disorders (...)

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The report goes on to diagnose her as a "hysterical personality."Now I've been to the Clarke Institute on at least one occasion to visit an artist friend who had gone off the edge, and I must state that without having imbibed in the demon rum, it didn't take me long to feel just a little disoriented, and wobbly at knees; I was intimidated because the sheer oppressiveness of the concrete, hard-edged interior atmosphere gave me the willies. There are other banal psychiatric assessments conveyed by Sullivan: "She has become well-known in the literary circles in this country, 'notes a typical report. 'The patient met her husband approximately six years ago, and they were subsequently married. He is a Greek folk singer (...) Gwen in this case had neglected to tell her doctors of her mother's mental illness and her father's alcoholism. Shortly after that report Gwen started binge-drinking (brought about according to her biographer by the dissolution of The Trojan Horse, a nightclub she and her folk singer husband operated). They were five thousand dollars in debt, and for a poet scrambling for every dollar, it was a blow. Eventually this situation, combined with Gwen's alcoholism, led to their marriage breakup.

MacEwen, notwithstanding her family history, was also a product of her time. No longer feeling like a literary castoff from Britain, yet cogently aware of the dangers of being absorbed into the cultural fabric of our southern ogre, English Canada was discovering its emerging icons, summed up in the cynical sobriquet . . . "Canlit." Still, before the onslaught of''chains 'sent chills down the erudite spines of the "independents,"poet tasters looking for a home grown fix could find tomes by Canadian poets on some ghettoized shelf of a Canadian bookstore. I wish that Sullivan had written more about the upsurge of Canadian nationalism and how it affected the careers of rising stars like Gwen and her close friend, Margaret Atwood. To her credit, Sullivan does go into the history of the Bohemian Embassy, an after hours'club in the sixties patterned on the San Francisco beat poetry scene, before the hippy phenomenon, and many a poet had his or her mettle tested in reading at the Bohemian Embassy. Some of course never made it upstream . . .to the fishladders of success. Sullivan also describes with delight the free speech fights that developed at Toronto's Allan Gardens in the summer of '62. It was over the issue of the poet's right to read his or her poems at the park especially on a Sunday, when preachers were allowed the right to quote chapter and verse from the bible. Milton Acorn played a prominent leadership role in having that antiquated park's bylaw changed. Poets could now read at Allan Gardens, but they have to first obtain a parks permit.

The 1960's Muse demanded certain life-style adjustments, which not a few young poets maturing witinh the circle found as frightfully radical as a Danish sex-change operation. Either you dissipated your creative energy at a 9-to 5 job, giving only a fraction of your time to your disease, or you lived on the serrated edge, you earned your bread writing radio verse plays, conducted a creative writing workshop, or did the unthinkable (and it was unthinkable to Gwen)--tried your hand at reviewing! In the relatively prosperous 1960s, 1970s, and to a smaller extent the 1980s, the poets found an ally in a country searching for its ingrown cultural navel. A poet could readily receive a creative writer's grant from the Canada Council, then a weightier federal octopus, with longer patriotic tentacles to feel the nation's cultural pulse.

Despite the nationalist fervour, poets were still derided for receiving state funding. Gwen would fire off a caustic letter to the newspaper in their defense. She'd criticised a columnist who'd attacked poets for not getting a real job to support their habit. Besides, weren't they supposed to waste away as consumptives in some cold water garret? Sullivan describes in detail the poverty that dogged Gwen, and her humiliation of having to approach close friends for money. Her pauperization became particularly acute at the beginning of the 1980s when cultural grants to creative writers were just starting to thin out. Alas, some public attitudes never change.

Living so near to the financial abyss provided its share of anxieties, but the poets had a little. They helped each, for one thing, and Gwen was very generous with me. Gwen declared it wasn't unusual for the poet to feel that every poem he or she wrote was the last. Would a poem be a poem, she queried, if it arrived as easily as toast popping out of a toaster? None of us arrived easily in this world. So why should it be any different with a poem? I'm sure it was exactly this same advice she gave her creative writing students when she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1986 (and according to Sullivan, Gwen was 'shocked to discover that the position carried little kudos with the institution'). There was pain involved in a poem's birth process, and maybe just a little blood. . . with the very real possibility of a poem's miscarriage

"Nobody cares, Gwen,"I declared, bemoaning the public's apathy to poets and poetry.

"Joe. . . Joe. . . really" she replied, and began chiding me for my cynicism. Her voice and sigh that followed was a voice softer than her cat Dingbat's silky meow. (She had this penchant for adopting felines with bent temperaments. Dingbat proved more startling than her predecessors. She was one hard looker, giving me a half whammy while whining eerily in agreement with Gwen.)

While this biography is impeccably detailed, it seems more honed, and inspired, when it deals with the personal life of the poet, and her relationship to others in the literary community. Yet the biography strangely tends to ignore the literary contribution of individuals who played an essential role in Gwen's intellectual life.

Milton Acorn was one influence that seems under appreciated by Sullivan. While it is true that Acorn was married to Gwen for only a very brief period, and their breakup was savagely bitter, mainly because of him, he nonetheless shared an important part in Gwen's development as a poet. Gwen and Milton for a while shared a mystical bond in their poetry in their poems often cross-pollinated with the same archetypal pollen. In time, Gwen's poems became more steadily sublime, while Milton became more driven in his commitment to Marxism, thinning out the sublimity in a good portion of his poems. Such are the travails of a proletarian poet who invites the oppressed masses in to sup with his Muse. Acorn was more than just an awkward prol poet who had a 1960s truck driver's mentality (emphasized by Sullivan) when it came to women as poets; he was himself a victim of tough love. But he is useful to the biographer; he has the right stuff to titillate those who associate dementia with poetry. All the grisly ingredients are there: he was a highly eccentric individual who had his share of hell, like Bells's paralysis, diabetes, bouts of alcoholism and he too went through a rinse cycle of nervous breakdowns brought about by a failed love affair, and too frequently, was prone to infuriation, that is in crossing the raptus goal line-especially toward the end of his life when he considered the rabid mullahs of Iran secret communists---cleverly working for a world socialist revolution.

There is a priceless description of Acorn, "a self-declared Trotskyite "in Shadow Maker. According to Sullivan he 'was the workingman's poet, the butt of the stogie always between his red-necked fingers. His face was a craggy rock, made asymmetrical by a nervous tic, and seemingly anchored only by heavy ridged eyebrows. It was said that he has suffered Bell's paralysis, which had left him with little control over the muscles on one side of his face. 'When I first met this extraordinary man I was taken back by impressed by not his heavy eyebrows, but by his eyelids which were always beet-red and puffy . I suspect it was a chronic infection which he continually ignored, and when I had the temerity to ask him after a Trotskyist meeting (the group was then called The League for Socialist Action---I was one of its cadre, a youthful fire- breathing Bolshevik, a red fundamentalist if you will, and an anti-Stalinist stoned on the vision of a World Socialist Revolution) that he should really have his infected eyelids treated, he looked aghast, and roared: 'that's my Mongolian flap you're talking about, comrade---never!'And his protest jarred other straight-laced comrades seated nearby, who were too terrified to support my wisdom conveyed to this Cro-Magnon, but he had a heart of butter that would melt in its sympathy for the downtrodden world proletariat. It also liquefied for a young woman folksinger, whose name I can only recall as Vicky; she had a kitten who died . . . inspiring him to him write both a heart-tugging love poem and elegy for her and her dead pet. There were many Vicky's in Acorn's life, but it was Gwen who for a brief time tamed the beast in him.

So Sullivan's description of their romantic relationship is deadly accurate. With considerable inspirational detail, she describes that 'beauty and the beast'arrangement; imagine a stunningly beautiful and charismatic young woman with Nefertiti, and an acute talent and intelligence for the creative process in poetry and prose falling in love with a man who is ruthlessly short-changed in physiognomy by the Creator, but given instead in the way of creatural compensation, a talent for crafting intensely beautiful romantic lyrics, not for the materialistic working class, but for a purer and more spontaneous spirituality that he would find in womankind. Nowadays, such sentiments are treated with political disdain, if not downright outrage by some in the women's movement as symptomatic of phallocentrist behaviour. At the start of the 1960's, however, it was still accepted as inspirational currency, by and for the Muse, by romantic men and women.

But the point is that when he was quite balanced, Acorn was undeniably one of our most notable romantic poets. Far from serving the Marxist-Leninist cause that is playing the role of a godless dialectical materialist, he was an extreme theist---who would go on to write a masterpiece of the English language, The Natural History of Elephants, where God takes on the shape of a blustery cosmic elephant in heat, who

That elephant poem pales D. H. Lawrence's inspired poem to a pachyderm.

Without blatantly dismissing the influences of the mental hospital, the company of a rising generation of young poets, and of a more accommodating culture and of their absorption by osmosis into a poet's psyche, I think it would also be safe to state that a poet is born with a poetic interior. Economic or social determinism isn't always the exponential generator to fuel a poet's imagination. If Gwen was so engrossed with her fear of abandonment, wouldn't it have become a motif central to poetry? Should the result of trauma due to the absence of her manic depressive mother in the poet's formative years, not to speak of her gentle and kind father's decline into alcoholism, imbue her work?

Perhaps, but most importantly, MacEwen's work was powerfully inspired by her mysticism. She was sensitive to the internalized 'force'of the somewhat corny 'May the force be with you'of Star Wars fame, serving as a supra protective parent, working tandem with the other imperial heroes and heroines on the terrestrial plane. And I know for a fact that she really believed in Luke Skywalker and 'force.' She spoke often about it to me. The fact remains that the child in Gwen wasn't as powerless as Sullivan sometimes makes her out to be. Gwen had a protector---herself, her confidence in her abilities to write memorable poems and prose. That strength was always there. But it was no match against an insipid disease like alcoholism.

The trick of the good biographer is to detect the inspiration. Instead of that gristly psychiatric jazz which seemed to go on almost ad infinitum, I wish Rosmary Sullivan had employed her considerable skills to explore various drafts of some of Gwen's best poems. Wouldn't it have been nice to have seen just one draft of a poem, for example, in a biography about a major poet? It seems almost a contradiction in terms not to have any drafts in such a study. I would have liked to have seen, for instance, those worksheets that led up to the polished version of The Breakfast, which Sullivan elaborated upon in chapter 10, Breakup/ Breakdown. The poem was inspired by Gwen's trip to Israel and influenced by the sixties'hostilities between Jews and Arabs. There was (and still is) a very real possibly that the situation might develop into a nuclear war:

Sullivan does sporadically get into the metaphysical current of Gwen's poems and delves into the'mythopoeic'.... a term that Gwen disliked (but then poets, whether you call them post-modern, surrealist, or mythopoeic, don't like being even remotely pigeon-holed .) Touching on the mythopoeic base, Sullivan declares that for Gwen 'the world had taken up the myth of the Last Supper, of sacrifice, and distorted the meaning of love in codes of humility and self-effacement. She had found her first and perhaps favourite metaphor. She would celebrate appetite and the subversive Breakfast---breakfast is the most profound and sacramental meal (....) ' Perhaps I misread the metaphor wrong concerning The Breakfast, but I've no objection to mythologizing that conflict in terms of eating The Cosmic Fire because the cosmos was in her best poems, and I can well imagine there's a little bit of cosmos in the ensuing nuclear explosion's puffball and colours. The few theological valences presented in Shadow Maker are skimpy. There was a great deal more to Gwen's mysticism than A Breakfast For Barbarians, a poem written in the early sixties, and read at The Bohemian Embassy to an enraptured crowd which included a young, wide-eyed Rosenblatt about to embark on a mystery tour of Museland. (that poem alone later stylistically influenced a 1960's suite of my egg poems, and encouraged me to travel deeper into metaphysical hyper-space.) But it sometimes only takes one poem to change your creative life. The same could be said with paintings, films, and a good novel. I wish Sullivan had gone deeper into those essential archetypes haunting the inscape of MacEwen's poetic world, and given MacEwen's mysticism equal value to those external societal forces (psychiatric reports-- alcoholism, etc.) in shaping the direction of her poetry. There is a question that hovers over every biography of a poet or writer and that keeps on begging for a firm answer: If every unhappy childhood background determined the career choice of an individual, what would we have in terms jf poetry, or for that matter, material wealth in this country? I know of no person who hasn't been scarred growing up, depressed, and insecure because of a dysfunctional familial environment.

MacEwen was affected by timeless free-floating archetypes and read widely the work of this century's poets, especially Robert Grave's The White Goddess, a book Gwen loved (despite the concern that this masterpiece is tainted by misogyny). Sullivan should have dealt with those poets who influenced Gwen (who, like me) as a high school dropout in the late 1950s. What principle poetic influence changed the course of her poetry? Was it the mythopoeic American poet, Hart Crane, who Gwen suggested for my reading list? Under no circumstances had I read a lesser light than Yeats, since in devaluing the Muse's sacred currency I just might find myself outside that circle.

Attention had to be paid to the Muse's insatiable appetite, its need for wholesome stylistic influences. For brain food Gwen emphasized absorbing tones and textures of their memorable poems, until we could taste them in our dreams. After I ingested the essence of Yeat's masterpiece Sailing to Byzantium, Gwen assumed I wouldn't keep asking her the same tedious question: what is a poem? How could I, after reading Yeat's shimmering lines to an early Byzantium Christian emperor in his gilded palace:

Reading and re-reading the masterpieces of the major poets, and ingesting their intellectual illuminance, Gwen assure me, was especially helpful during a 'a dry period,'when a poem stubbornly refused to form on the page. While the results wouldn't be immediate, an intractable poem, she assured me, would become more pliant when the Muse was properly fed. A poem arrived only when the time was right, for it wasn't the poet who wrote the poem, but the poem who wrote the poem. Unbeknownst sometimes even to the poet, the very act of mulling over a poem was a form of writing it. Grave's book is marked by a pervading moon goddess, and linked Gwen up with those timeless mythic personalities that would people her best poems, like Isis, Nefertiti and other ancient kohl eye-lined beauties. Sullivan, who is not merely a biographer, but a poet as well, should have gone a lot deeper into MacEwen's symbolical language in her biography, for it begged for more suns, moons and other cosmological delights.

My case for the generative power of the mythic inscape rests with Gwen's infatuation with Akhenaton, the monotheistic sun-worshipping pharaoh , and his wife, the dazzlingly enticing Queen Nefertiti (whom MacEwen idolized to the extent that she outlined her eyes in khol when she read her poems to the faithful.)

Sullivan remarks that Gwen's face had an uncanny resemblance to the carving at the Temple of Denerra, Quina, Egypt of Hathor,"goddess of love, fertility and joy"And speaking of all things Arabic, what are we then to make of Lawrence of Arabia---who Gwen adopted as one of her male cultural idols, not to mention that blond Aryanized Lancelot of a cosmonaut--- Luke Skywalker who had to do battle with that nasty cosmic stormtrooper, Darth Vador, the epitome of evil in the heavens.

Sullivan, by way of archetypal example, discusses Gwen's Dark Punes Under Water. Its pristine opening stanza subtly stirs subliminal minnows of the brain:

This land like a mirror turns you inward
and you become a forest in a furtive lake;
the dark pines of your mind reach downward,
you dream in the green of your time
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Sullivan declares after quoting the above poem, that 'as moderns we are too literal minded and the spirit is dead.' Sullivan goes on to explain that Gwen needed 'to go back in time to the ancient myths, both beautiful and terrifying, that we lost at our peril. Other poets like Robert Graves had led the way. There was truth in the ancient myths we had missed. Sullivan makes a startling point in stating that 'Gwendolyn did not believe in time. Whatever time is, the common sense everyday version of it as linear, marching from right to left, from the past through the present to the future, is either nonsense or a trivial version.' That one segment says worlds for the mystic in the poet. More revelations like that should have crowed out the tedious literal psychiatric jargon. Instead, Gwen's metaphysical dark side had to fight for spiritual room in this commodious biography.

Gwen's love for cats is abundantly documented in the biography, that she cared for them, and was enraged when she suspected a neighbour with poisoning the strays on Robert Street. Sullivan uses the poem Seeing Eye Dogs to illustrate Gwwen's love, selfless dedication, and obsession for the feline tribe:

If my cat sits long enough on my typewriter
She might write something wonderful
Meanwhile the dog stars, the bondages, those fake suns
Blind us who are addicted to light and dark, whose eyes
Are windows often peering into nowhere
Into the houses of our lives . . .

The key to that poem, and a powerful core of Gwen's other poems, is the use of the sublime which regrettably passes like a magic bullet through a literalist. In reading this poem in its entirety, or a healthy portion of it, and mulling over the s-word, which twists and turns through the valleys of Gwen's metaphysical landscape, I keep asking myself: would I take a highly neurotic cat to see a shrink? Of this I am certain. That cat certainly would have benefited in seeing Barbara, Gwen's blind psychiatrist, for whom that poem is dedicated. But wouldn't we all benefit in seeing Barbara?

I still have this image of a young sable black sentinel perched on top of Gwen's typewriter keeping us under surveillance while we sat at the dining table in her sparsely furnished apartment drinking herbal tea and munching on cucumber sandwiches. It wasn't the stare alone that irritated me, but her peepers: they were mismatched in colour. This may have been the reason she adopted him. Dingbat had somehow padded her way into Gwen's life. What did they communicate in their cross-fertilization of felinity? The answer might lie in a witty feline poem titled Magic Cats, a catechism of cat, with the following lines revealing that cats believe that:

I see Dingbat as a miniature leopard drawn to a "deep dark pool of water." A thin skin of duality divides the temporal sector from the darkness in the water conveying that life and death are subtly interchangeable, or a state of being where the poet comes and goes without barriers. Gwen's dark pool has two faces, a unity of life and death negation. I'm drawn to this double-face of opaque water and perceive it at primal evening. Touching the pool's surface, I'm aware of Gwen's definition of psyche and outer reality -- that fearful in-between world where no distinction exists between poet and poem. In referring to Gwen's "last testament, Sullivan touches on this interior space "in her poem The Tao of Physics, addressed to the ultimate knight.

How this biography could have been enriched had Sullivan gone into the poetic process and published those drafts of Gwen's poems to illustrate the process! Sullivan has instead followed the tried and tested methods of the biographer. She has put together many of the missing shards of MacEwen's intensely private life that had remained a mystery to me and the others in the literary pond. In this sense, the guessing game about Gwen's background is over, although a lot more detective work will have to be done to take us into the interior world of Gwen's magic.

Joe Rosenblatt.