Germaine Warkentin, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto, presented this paper on James Reaney’s A Suit of Nettles on January 7, 2011 at the 126th Annual Conference of the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, California. It is reproduced here by permission of the author.
Modern Language Association, Los Angeles, January 7, 2011; “Spenser as the Poet’s Poet”
“Out of Spenser and the Common Tongue”:
James Reaney’s “A Suit of Nettles” (1958)
Germaine Warkentin, University of Toronto
James Reaney may be the best poet you never heard of. We all know enough about Milton, Stevens, and Merrill to engage in the conversation of this session, but apart from the Canadians here and a few Americans aware of my interest, I can guarantee that Reaney, who died in 2008, is a name unknown to you. In Canada I would not have to say this. Between 1950 and 1970 Reaney wrote prodigiously outside of the modernist framework then dominating Canadian poetry, and endured being unfashionable – too learned, too mythopoeic, too fixated on his home territory around London and Stratford Ontario. There was no cultural “Arcadianism” like that of the 1580s behind A Suit of Nettles. But Reaney was a playwright as well, busy developing a major career in the Canadian theatre, the masterpiece of which is his encyclopedic trilogy (1974-75) on the Black Donnellys, a legendary 19th century family who were at murderous odds with their Southern Ontario neighbours. It was the achievement of his plays that led more recent audiences back to the poems. I confess an interest – in 1972 I edited Reaney’s poems in a volume that helped turn the tide. Reaney was an amazing man: the most learned Canadian poet before Anne Carson, a civic icon in and around London and Stratford, a deeply responsible member of the professoriate at the University of Western Ontario, and a licensed mischief.
All Reaney’s characteristic features come together in the sequence of twelve poems known as A Suit of Nettles, which won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry in 1958, and in various editions has remained in print for at least half of the 52 years since its publication; it was recently re-issued. A Suit of Nettles is based on Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, though with a difference: its twelve eclogues, a brilliant display of Reaney’s virtuoso poetic technique, are set in an Ontario farmyard, and the figures who converse in its eclogues – Branwell, Dorcas, Mopsus, Effie and Fanny, Valancy, Scrutumnus – are all barnyard geese. What do they talk about? Love and its frustrations, poetic inspiration and the lack of it, pedagogy, literary criticism (Scrutumnus, not much disguised, is F.R. Leavis), Canadian history, and the turning year, which will bring most of them to the farmyard kitchen and the Christmas oven.
First, that virtuosity, in a brief rain of quotations:
The ending of the invocation to the Muse of Satire:
Here, lady, almost blind with seeing too much,
Here is the land with spires and chimneys prickly …
Has no one seen the country where your cure has cursed?
It is a land with upturned privies with occupants inside them
Crawling out through new tops like astonished moths
Bursting from their unusual, foul cocoons.
The January eclogue introducing the geese:
With the other geese within the goosehouse
There lived, I know not how, various kinds
Of geese: some like a cat, some like a mouse
Some like a groundhog, and some like lions,
And some like two straight parallel lines.
The September eclogue when (hee! hee!) farmhouse boy and girl hastily marry:
By parents strong pegged young Peter and Ann
Were wedded in welter by waspish minister
In the same eclogue, the drunken preacher’s sermon on the Last Supper:
What did those white souls eat while their Lord talked:
I don’t know, indeed I don’t, maybe sandwiches.
And He said haughtily head up to the twelve,
“I’ll ask you assafoetidae1 again I will,
Isn’t there one, one disciple with the spunk to betray me?”
And finally the opening lines of “February,” which I must quote entire to this group, for reasons which will be evident – one of the most beautiful things Reaney ever wrote:
The sun begets, the moon bears, tides away
Rush into coastal caves: “Men do bear not”
(The Courtier) “their children for a day,”
But women longer, for a nine-moon trot;
The young cub forms like a dim loose star-knot
In the lioness as down the sun sets,
Night wobbles in, and spirit goslings sought
To dance this month through the small small eyelets
Of birth before birth, death before death pinned
Resolved & tight in each large goose egg’s centre inned.
Which brings us of course to Spenser.
Reaney wrote A Suit of Nettles at breakneck speed in 1956-57 on sabbatical from the University of Manitoba. Bringing his wife Colleen Thibaudeau (also a fine poet) and two small boys to Toronto, he was desperately trying to take all his courses for the PhD, and write his thesis, and write A Suit of Nettles all in two packed years, and he did it – courses, thesis, and poem sequence.2 The thesis was supervised by Northrop Frye, and was called “The Influence of Spenser on Yeats.” Critics of A Suit of Nettles (including myself) have generally assigned its mythopoeic richness to the influence of Frye, who was just then publishing Anatomy ofCriticism. Certainly Reaney’s writing at that point took a sharp turn away from the narcissistic minor “symbolisme” of his earliest book The Red Heart (1949) towards the encylopedic power of all his later writing. He never ceased to honour Frye, but his own learning (he had begun as a classicist) gave him a very rich instrument on which to play that tune. And at the University of Toronto in the 1940s and 50s he was surrounded by distinguished Spenserians and Miltonists, Frye of course, but also people like ASP Woodhouse and Arthur Barker. Thinking about Spenser was one of the things Toronto did to you in those days.
And thus the thesis, which has much to say about Spenser, though oddly little on TheShepherd’s Calendar. In it Reaney argues that the early Yeats failed to understand Spenser; in the preface to his anthology of Spenser (1906) Yeats depicted Spenser as “torn between … the aestheticism of the Bower of Bliss and the morality of the Seven Deadly Sins.” But as Yeats developed, “he no longer regards [him] … as having an imperfect, divided genius but as a poet who has successfully fused the two worlds of aesthetics and morality into an imaginative synthesis.”3 Like Reaney himself five decades later, in his own poetry Yeats had “exhausted the possibilities of the ornamental and sensuous.” The catalyst for a solution was his friendship with Lady Gregory, who “gave his imagination its moral and practical turn.”4 Yeats’ very Spenserian “The Shepherd and the Goatherd” draws on the interplay between Spenser’s Astrophel and The Doleful Lay of Clorinda for a vision balancing the two opposing states of consciousness, and seeks equilibrium by as Yeats puts it, “measuring out the road that the soul treads / When it has vanished from our natural eyes.”
Reaney too seeks this equilibrium, as the fine reflection on mutability in his December eclogue, on your handout, shows. He does so by challenging us to bridge the seeming gap between the Spenserian model of the pastoral eclogue and the Ontario barnyard. He found his bridge in Yeats, who he writes “delighted in grotesque contrasts; the sharper and the more vinegary they are, the better they express his system. One thinks of the very filthy swineherd in ‘A Full Moon in March’ set over against the very haughty Queen. But the comic, filthy swineherd is an extremely sacred person. I think that Yeats must have been attracted by the gaiety of the contrast.”5
Reaney didn’t write a Faerie Queene to succeed his pastoral eclogues. Instead he wrote a major dramatic cycle, the trilogy of Donnelly plays, in which the encyclopedism Spenser empowered in him took a very different form. Once Reaney, using his thinking about Yeats’ relationship with Spenser, had worked out for himself a concept of equilibrium, he was free to employ virtually any genre to give it voice. Yeats gives him access to “the gaiety of the contrast,” and we get the puzzled Ontarians peeping out of their overturned privies. But Spenser gives him the structure, one so solid it could even provide him at the end of “December” with the ourobouros of the yellow-beaked Winnipeg streetcar, signalling the fuller meaning of his exile from the east. By 1960 he was home again in Ontario, himself a “poet’s poet,” energizing for the next forty years an entire poetic and theatrical community.
***
Endnotes
1. Asafoetida: a herb that smells disgusting when raw but is not offensive when cooked.
2. Richard Stingle, to whom A Suit of Nettles is dedicated, confirms that Reaney had said nothing about plans for such a work before he left Winnipeg (R.M. Stingle, personal communication, 8 November 2010). Alvin Lee, the Beowulf scholar who was Reaney’s contemporary in graduate school and later wrote a book about him in the Twayne series, confirms that courses, exams, thesis, and suite of poems were all completed in a manic two years (Alvin Lee, personal communication, 20 November 2010).
3. James Reaney, “The Influence of Spenser on Yeats,” University of Toronto doctoral thesis, defended May 14, 1958; from the author’s abstract.
4. Reaney actually says this with respect to Leicester’s influence on Sidney, as reflected in an image from The Ruins of Time of the unclean fox taking over the noble badger’s den that turns up a number of times in Yeats.
5. Reaney, “The Influence of Spenser on Yeats,” 43.
The following pages were also included in Professor Warkentin’s presentation:
James Reaney (1926-2008); the “December” eclogue, from A Suit of Nettles (1958)Teachable moments from Reaney’s use of Spenser
Copyright Germaine Warkentin, 2011. Reproduced with permission of the author.
Althouse College students in London, Ontario will present James Reaney’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass at Althouse College at the University of Western Ontario on February 13-16 at 8 pm. Tickets are available from the Grand Theatre Box Office, the Faculty of Education, and Western Connections.
Best wishes to the Althouse 2013 Production Team for a rousing performance — see you there!
Alice Through the Looking-Glass at Althouse College in London, Ontario, February 13-16, 2013
Update February 14, 2013 from Susan Wallace:A wonderful show… excellent dance numbers and some fine physical comedy from the White Knight, quite hilarious. Four different Alices, showing her path to maturity as she travels to Queenhood. For more details, seeJBNBlog: Just Ask Alice Through the Looking-Glass.
Martha Henry, long-time performer and associate of the Stratford Festival, has written to James Stewart Reaney with news of this special event:
I thought you might like to know that the Birmingham Conservatory, which is the training program at the Stratford Festival that I’m in charge of at the moment, is doing a reading on Sunday night, January 27th, of The Killdeer. We do these readings throughout the five months the Conservatory is in situ, from mid-September to mid-February every year. I give the actors the category (Jacobean, German, Restoration, American, etc. etc.) and they do everything else. They read plays of the period, they choose the play they want to do, they cast, rehearse and produce it themselves and then read it in the Lobby of the Festival Theatre at 7:30 in the evening.
Your Dad’s play comes from the (no kidding!) “Canadian Classic” category, which – although the other categories change from year to year – we always end with. I’m thrilled that they’ve picked The Killdeer and Ann Stuart, the Conservatory Coordinator, suggested you might like to know – or even might like to come! We would be thrilled if you could, needless to say. Even if this isn’t convenient, I wanted you to know it was happening. They are as excited as if they’d discovered the play themselves……which, in a fashion, they have!
These readings are open to the public and we have a lot of loyal patrons who are grateful for some winter activity – especially those who have retired to Stratford because of the Festival – and consistently come to see what their young favourites are doing.
Please join us if you can. If that’s not possible, we will think of you on the evening of the 27th.
Martha Henryappeared in the first production of James Reaney’s Names and Nicknames in 1963 at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and also the first production of Colours in the Dark at the Stratford Festival in July 1967. Both plays were directed by John Hirsch (1930-1989).
The Killdeer was first performed on January 13, 1960, by the University College Alumnae Society at the Coach House Theatre in Toronto. The Alumnae Theatre will present a new production of The Killdeer, April 12-27, 2013 in Toronto.
January 27, 2013: Update from Susan Wallace:“We’ve just come back from Stratford where we saw the most amazing rehearsed reading of Jamie’s The Killdeer in the lobby of the Festival Theatre.
Ruby Joy, niece of our friend Robin McGrath, was Madam Fay, and she was outstanding. She also co-directed the production. No sets, they just sat on chairs and used lecterns when they stood to read their parts, but what a story they told. It was more alive than any other production I’ve ever seen of the play, and what great jokes, told with perfect timing!
We talked at length to Ruby and the other actors, who are part of the Birmingham Conservatory. Martha Henry was there as the boss lady and she got us arranged into a photo. She was full of praise for her trainees and for Jamie and his play.”
Thank you again, Martha Henry and the performers of the Birmingham Conservatory!
All the best for your work in the future. ♦♥♦
For more about this performance of The Killdeer, see JBNBlog.
On his birthday there is a blue sky In the swale there’s clear ice Two boys skate an X, the Greek letter Chi Because it stands for Christ
MERRY CHRISTMAS
from the Reaneys 1965
James Reaney made this linocut design in December 1965 and printed a set of Christmas cards for friends and family at the Alphabet Press in London, Ontario.
Four productions of plays by James Reaney are planned for 2013. Colleening, a new play by Adam Corrigan Holowitz, features the poems and letters of Colleen Thibaudeau.
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS February 13-16 Althouse College Auditorium, London Ontario
COLLEENING A play with music using Colleen Thibaudeau’s poems and letters Created and Directed by Adam Corrigan Holowitz March 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, and 9 at 8 pm March 2 and March 9 at 2 pm The Arts Project, London Ontario
STICKS AND STONES Directed by David Ferry March 14-17 Bishop’s University Sherbrooke, Quebec
THE KILLDEER Directed by Barbara Larose
April 12-27 Alumnae Theatre, Toronto, Ontario
THE EASTER EGG Directed by Jason Rip May 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, and June 1 at 8 pm May 24 and June 2 at 2 pm The Arts Project, London Ontario
Updates and further details to follow in the new year. Hope to see you there!
Thank you all for coming on Sunday October 21 to hear Jean McKay talk about her memories of being part of James Reaney’s Wacousta workshops in 1981 in London, Ontario. She also spoke about being James Reaney’s research assistant for The Donnelly Documents: An Ontario Vendetta. Jean was a student of James Reaney’s in the mid-1960s and a long-time friend of the family.
Thank you, Jean, for bringing your fiddle and reminding us about all the good times shared.
October 21, 2012: Jean McKay regaled us with jigs and reels and other period music from the Wacousta workshops and the Donnelly plays.October 21, 2012: Jean McKay remembers James Reaney.
Many thanks to the organizers of the lecture at the Stratford Public Library — Charles Mountford, Anne Marie Heckman, and Sam Coghlan — for your continued support of this event.
From the 1982 Illustrated Historical Atlas County of Perth, here is James Reaney’s history of North Easthope. (James Reaney grew up in neighbouring township South Easthope, and his mother, Elizabeth Crerar (1898-1981), was born and raised on a nearby farm in North Easthope.)
The Story of North Easthope Sometimes pronounced NORTHYSTOPE and for reasons of space herein called N.E.
Prepared by James Crerar Reaney, 1982
They named the township after Sir John Easthope, a Canada Company director. Although he also owned a British newspaper called The Chronicle, I doubt if Sir John ever found out what farmboys in his township liked to do on Sunday afternoons in the 1890s. They’d go down to the Huron Road [Hwy. 7 & 8] to fight with their South Easthope contemporaries about which township was better. Picture them lined up on either side of the boundary exchanging stones, scoffs and fisticuffs. Well, whose is the better township has still not been decided. Born in the southern one, I say this: they’re very different from each other. With road names like Porkstreet and Hessenstrasse, musical instruments brought over from Germany such as pianofortes and trumpets, S.E. feels like a gently rolling part of Germany: with its steep roads going up into higher and even bluer hills and also with its kilted pipers at picnics, N.E. seems like a translation of Scotland.
But N.E. is not just Scottish; it was settled and still is made up of two racial groups, one Highland Scots and one Hessen Darmstadt Deutsch, originally about equal in size. One of my maternal great grandparents was born in Schiffelbach (Hessen) and another was born in Glenquaich, Perthshire. Their backgrounds are almost exactly the same as those of the groups mentioned above.
The cairn by the highway at Shakespeare commemorates such N.E. Highland settlers as Stewart, McTavish, Crerar, Scott, Fraser, Fisher, et al. They were crofters in Perthshire whose laird said in 1832 “Get out. I need my land back to raise sheep and you do nothing but distill illegal whiskey and marry your first cousins.” Be that as it may, there was, just before they came, a big fight with excisemen who tried to intercept a shipment of whiskey on its way to Breadalbane. When they came to N.E., some of them had their distilling equipment with them already to start again, but there was more money in growing wheat with no landlord to skim off the profits. Descendants have returned to Glenquaich (glen of the drinking cup!) and come back with snapshots of ruined cots and empty heaths. Such recent formations as a N.E. Pipe Band in the 1950s and an Easthope historical group in the 1960s responsible for making Brocksden School into a museum show that this group has no identity problems.
In 1835, Reverend Proudfoot of the London District sleighed past the new settlement and wrote: “50 Scotch families, most of them Highlanders”; he also describes the Dutch settlers around Helmer’s Tavern on the east border of the Easthopes as having “noble farms” and as holding “no man a preacher who is not inspired by the Holy Spirit and if he get his preaching talent so easily he needs no pay.” By “Dutch” Proudfoot means the Pennsylvania Germans of Wilmot Township, Mennonites, some of whom were settling in N.E. But what his statement also reminds us of is the fact that the Canada Company not only advertised local land for sale in Glenquaich, Scotland, but also in Bremen, Germany. In 1842, the company’s agent in Stratford issued 60 location tickets for N.E., most of them to settlers with such names as: Eidt, Erb, Faulhafer, Henkell, Herman, Hoffmeyer, Wettlaufer, Nafziger, Neeb, Paff, et al. Family tradition has it that avoiding conscription was one reason for leaving Hessen-Darmstadt. A persistent story is that their fathers sometimes held a boy’s foot under the horses’ hooves so he would be lamed and not grow up to march away as cannon fodder. To both groups then, Canada represented a release from unpleasant European constrictions, particularly poverty and repression. They were soon much better off in North Easthope. Descendants go back to tiny villages in Hessen-Darmstadt and return with snapshots of timbered, medieval farmsteads, still run by relatives as they have been for hundreds of years. How do you write a historical sketch about people who left Europe to get away from history?
In a sense nothing happens to happy people, but in N.E. what does happen in another sense is – “plenty”. Here in 1850 is what a hundred acre farm produced:
♦ wheat – 1,000 bushels, barley – 30, peas – 20, oats – 500, potatoes – 50; 12 tons of hay, wool – 100 lbs., maple sugar – 60 lbs., fulled cloth – 50 yds., flannel 50;
♦ supported 12 oxen, 7 milch cows, 10 calves, 5 horses, 35 sheep, 30 pigs, 200 lbs. of butter, 50 of cheese, 4cwt of beef and 20 of pork; also 10 people!
Katherine Fisher, who went to New York as a home economist, points out the drudgery involved: “Housework involved much heavy manual labour for our older sisters and rule-of-thumb methods invited contests with Lady Luck.” Also unpleasant must have been the strictly kept Sabbaths and Rev. D. Allan’s bringing up of young people before the session for their immorality in going to Stratford on Saturday nights. However, Lloyd Herman remembers “when we drove to Berlin to celebrate the change of name to Kitchener. My dad stopped off at Seagram’s Distillery in Waterloo and bought a five gallon jug of Rye Whiskey for $10 to make sure he had enough ‘medicine’ for the kids when they got bad colds in the winter time.” F. Addison Brown remembers a drive with his father down the Sawdust Road (Concession X) “through the little crossroads hamlet of Hampstead with its old-time tavern kept by the Peter Hoffman family, on west on our road bordered by rail fences, stake and rider fences and now, before reaching ‘The Gravel’ we traverse ‘The Sawdust Road.’” What one would not give now when making a journey to Stratford, as they were, to make it on a noiseless road of pine slabs covered “with a deep layer of sawdust from nearby mills.” Minnie Thomson, whose son named his famous artifact museum after her, tells of mischief in her corner of the township – near Ellice and the Irish School, the one part of N.E. neither Scots nor Deutsch: “Young David Clark dearly loved playing tricks. One day he sauntered along – espied Mary Gillan’s chopping block, the axe and her cat basking in the sun.” Young Clark chopped off the cat’s tail and ran, but its eccentric Irish owner hit him with a heavy sled on his way home from school so heavily that he was in bed for months.
These and countless other anecdotes represent the real history of the township, but the political and economic context should be sketched in although it’s not much different from that of sister townships: the council meets at the township hall, rebuilt in 1963 beside the Hampstead-Amulree-Shakespeare road, the political centre of the township. Mention Ross McGonigle who held the position of township clerk for 25 years, retiring in 1975 and you get some idea of the community’s stability, not to be outdone by the father and son, A.M. and J.D. Fisher, who were clerks for almost 75 years. Nearly every family has, through the generations, been involved in serving the township whether in political or in public service, the latter represented by such projects as school fairs, Junior Farmers, Women’s Institutes, agricultural fairs and plowing matches. For a long time, grassroots politics could best be observed at the annual meeting of the ratepayers to select three trustees for each of the eight public schools: “The aim was to maintain the most basic cost of education possible in an atmosphere of seeming generosity.” In 1967, eight one-room schools – Brocksden, Bell’s, Clachan, Hampstead, Ratzburg, Irish, Burnside, Gadshill – were centralized into a township elementary school at Clachan. For further context, you should know that the township’s present acreage is 43,725; it has 335 farm residences, 303 non-farm residences and a population of 2,106, almost what it had in 1850.
A further surface history of N.E. would go something like this: 1835 – only five men own enough land to vote at Goderich against the Family Compact; 1837 – at the Little Lakes Militia parade, some N.E. settlers beg off for reasons of health. Because they’re Mackenzie sympathizers? 1850 – James Trow starts to build up a power base from buying cheap land at tax sales which sends him to parliament and a manufacturing career in Stratford; 1855 – Crimean War produces wheat boom – up go stone houses and big barns; 1870s bring in cheese factories which take pressure off grain production; 1880 depression makes 1,000 leave for Michigan and Southwest Manitoba; 1905 – hydroelectric towers march across to Stratford, but no power for farms till 1938. W.W.I. produces N.E. names on Stratford Cenotaph; veterans sally out in the early thirties to prevent a returned soldier’s farm from being taken over for the mortgage; 1939 – the Tweedsmuir books initiate historical research in the Women’s Institutes, a local, kitchen history movement instigated by a local woman; W.W.II, the end of the hunting clubs going up north for deer in the fall, margarine ends creamery cheques, more tractors after gas-rationing ends, no horses, bigger and bigger farm machinery, bigger fields, bigger all-the-same crops, i.e., corn. What next? How much farther can you go with mechanical farming? Back to 1850? Horses? Hay’s cheaper than oil?
But underneath, here is a real history contained in things that I have heard township people say:
“There were two kinds of gipsies used to camp in the bush. Scottish and Russian. The former sold lace.”
“Indian Sal used to pull flax. Drank vinegar.”
“Never played baseball at the Irish School. Always cricket when I was there.”
“If there’s enough blue sky to make a Dutchman a pair of trousers, then it won’t rain.”
“When it snows, there’s an old woman up in the sky plucking her geese.”
“I’m not pro-German, I’m real German.”
“25 men attended her coffin; she’d been midwife to their mothers.”
And in the Beacon for June 1, 1851 – “Queen’s Birthday at Shakespeare – 10 horsemen tilted for the gold ring.”
On Sunday, June 6, 1982, I attended the Annual Decoration Day Service at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, one concession up from the township hall, the oldest kirk in N.E. My mother and her ancestors are buried there. As I put flowers on her grave using a juice can, I noted others doing the same – some with theirs wrapped in tinfoil. The church was packed, many young people and children in evidence. The Minister in charge was Rev. Sandy Fryfogel, scion of the first settler in the county. As I look over the programme now I see many Scottish names and also German ones; the programme mentioned a hymn sing that evening at Lisbon United Church, which originally was a United Brethren Church brought to N.E. by German settlers. Also mentioned was the coming 125th anniversary of the Presbyterian Church at Shakespeare. The singing of the psalms was loud, clear and enthusiastic; the sermon excellent – on the balance between the past and the ever-present, as a matter of fact. As we drove back down to Shakespeare, we saw the sheep on Bell’s farm. In 1832, David Bell was the very first settler in North Easthope.
NOTES
For further background to Glenquaich, see Walter Scott’s Waverley, Annie Swan’s novel, Shelia, and Douglas Stewart’s Mactalla/More Scottish-Canadian Poems (Toronto, 1974).
See The Proudfoot Diaries, Militia Lists, and other early records at the University of Western Ontario Regional Collection. Also see Perth County Archives where James Anderson provided the notes and quotation for the political context paragraphs.
For information on German settlers, see Stafford Johnston’s “Hessian migration to the Canada Company’s Huron Tract”(Ontario Genealogical Society). Alice (Paff) Watkinson has compiled a book containing names of all Wilhelm descendants.
Katherine Fisher (Concession II, Lot 33) became Director of the Good Housekeeping Institute. See their Cookbook (New York, 1942). Lloyd Herman (Concession II, Lot 10), “Memories,” 12 June, 1982, The Beacon Herald. F. Brown (Nithburg), letter in Perth County Archives, 1935. Mrs. Minnie Thomson, Avon W.I. Archives, 1947.
There’s a great deal more, both written and spoken. I hope some young N.E. historians get to work on the fuller account this great township deserves. J.C.R.
“The Fryfogel Tavern” by James Reaney, 1962“St. Anthony’s Chapel” by James Reaney, 1990 (St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church, a pioneer cemetery, is near Shakespeare, Ontario.)
Join us on Sunday, October 21 at 3:00 pm at TheStratford Public Library Auditorium in Stratford, Ontario, for a talk by Jean McKay, James Reaney’s research assistant on several projects, including The Donnelly Documents: An Ontario Vendetta. Jean will also share her memories as a student and workshop participant in James Reaney’s play Wacousta.
The annual lecture is a project developed by The Stratford Public Library and Poetry Stratford, and features a talk by a person who is knowledgeable about the life and work of Stratford poet and playwright James Reaney and of writing in the Southwestern Ontario region, which is such a strong element in Reaney’s writing.
From Alphabet Issue 11 (1966), here is John Hirsch’s poem “My Grandfather”:
My Grandfather
Old men love the sun. My Grandfather, eighty four, in black bowler, black overcoat, in the same chair through Spring, Summer and Fall always against the same white-washed wall sat soaking up the sun. Hands spread on his knees— Skin like dried guts cracked with veins like the indigo ink he dipped his pen in to write in velvet covered, silver-locked ledgers.
Dozing in the sun his skin drew the heat till he seemed to glow like a black swathed mummy of a gold-leafed Pharaoh.
John Hirsch, 1966
John Hirsch (1930-1989) lost his family in the Holocaust and came to Winnipeg, Canada as a war orphan in 1947. With the help of his foster family, he pursued his love of the theatre and became one of Canada’s most renowned directors. John Hirsch directed James Reaney’s play Names and Nicknames at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg in October, 1963.
Colleen Thibaudeau: A Biographical Sketch by Jean McKay from Brick, Issue 5, Winter 1979, pages 6-11.
Reproduced with kind permission of Jean McKay and Stan Dragland.
The following sketch is composed primarily from two interviews with Colleen Thibaudeau, the first, in January 1976, conducted by Stan Dragland, Peggy Dragisic and Donand Jean McKay, and the second in December 1978 with Jean McKay. The interviews themselves each lasted a couple of hours.
The patchwork chart [pages 12 and 13] is the result of a “memory game”. We went through the places where Thibaudeau has lived (the left-hand column, on the chart) and she snapped out quick reactions to the various categories.
PD: How does a poem start?
CT: You generally have a line, comes into your mind, I don’t know from where. Or maybe more than that, even… and if you’re adroit enough to write that down fairly quickly, and its follow-up will come almost right away, then even if you can’t go on with it any more at the moment, if you can get that much down… (this morning, the line hasn’t come yet, but I know the feeling it’s going to be, let me think now, it’s something about calendars, little boxes on calendars being like panes in windows that you can see the day through? Now this morning that sort of came into my mind)… and then the light, it seems to come, either light or music or some movement in the room, or if you’re outside, seems to add another element. I don’t know what that is, I’m just trying to explain it to you. Out of that a line comes. Now, you might change that line, it might have to be longer, or more beats, or different things. And then, if you sit down and work on that, you’re going to have a poem or a story.
Colleen Thibaudeau was born in Toronto on December 29, 1925. Her father, back from the war, was a student at the University of Toronto. He came from the Markdale area of Grey County, Ontario. Her mother was a war bride, from Belfast.
CT: My Dad took us to church, and insisted that we go to Sunday School. My mother only went once, that I knew, and then she hated the smell of the lilies, and never went again. She’s very positive. It was Easter and she asked one of the ushers to open a window, and he wouldn’t, so she said that was that.
When she was a year old, her father took a teaching job in Chesley, a small town back in Grey County. Here her brother John was born. After three years in Chesley, Thibaudeau’s father became Principal of the high school at Flesherton, also in Grey County.
CT: Then in Flesherton the Depression came on, and they were going to have to cut all the salaries in half, and the teachers were so sweet, they were going to give Dad an eighth of their salaries if he’d stay. He did PT too, and he took the debating classes around…
JM: Was he a person with a lot of energy?
CT: I think so, yes, I think he was very energetic. I think he wouldn’t have changed over from being on whatever level he was on there at Chesley to this Principalship even in a tiny little school, except that he felt he would really do something for them, and try to do what had been done for him at Owen Sound. This Owen Sound high school that he went to, I think made people very very… conscientious, and so on. They had very high standards… it’s a Scottish connection up there that’s very high on education… and Dad had wanted to be a journalist, and he had taken part in a lot of debating and so on so it wasn’t hard on him. It was easy for him to train his best kids who were talented, and take them around to debate and they won things. And they were very good in soccer, which is the other thing he was good in.
Rather than stay on in Flesherton, the family moved again to Toronto, where Mr. Thibaudeau (the name is Acadian/French, the Acadian connection being several generations removed) went back to University to improve his degree. The younger daughter Shelia was born there.
Then they moved to St. Thomas, where Thibaudeau attended the last few years of public school, and then high school. Her life in St. Thomas sounds idyllic.
CT: We liked going down to the creek. My mother always let me go to the ravines, because one friend had a police dog, and another friend had a dog… so I think I had a much freer existence probably… we just did everything… We didn’t actually camp overnight because we didn’t have any camping stuff, but we’d go down early in the morning onto these little islands and just stay there and light fires and roast things. That went on for ages, I adored doing that. I never went to Girl Guides or anything like that… We all kept journals, we were all very influenced by Arthur Ransome, that sort of book… running up flags, and signaling, and lookouts, and skating on the river.
During her school days she wrote poems, and some of them were published in Sunday School magazines.
CT: Then the war came, you see, just as I was going into high school. All the extra-curricular activities stopped. Probably if I ever had a chance to got to, say, a literary society, or something like that or a dramatic society it would have helped me a lot ‘cause I would have had to work with other people, you know, the way we did in the Junior Red Cross, you worked together, and you made up your little plays, and so on, and it was quite fun. But there was nothing, see, all the activities stopped because of the war. We had a nice time. We skated, and did First Aid, and I use to work in Gould’s store… just a small town life. There was very little, really, going on. Then the Air Force came, and there were, you know, lots of young men roaming around the streets so you got to know people from all over Canada and Australia.
Thibaudeau’s father’s relatives were still in the Markdale area, and the family sometimes went back there in the summers.
CT: During the war there was gas rationing, so we didn’t go up as much as one would think. The big summer that I remember up there was the summer that my mother went to Ireland, so we had to look after all the kids – my brother and I, and Dad, and my little sister – on what we called “the back place.” There was a house, and some animals, it was next to our bush, and Dad went into the bush with John and fixed up the fences…. I think there was an icebox; I’m not certain, maybe not. I guess we just went every day and got some milk, and kept it around the pump.… My sister had fantastic hair, and it was very hard to keep, and it finally just got beyond me. I couldn’t keep her hair right. She was in the woods all the time, burrs and so on. I tried. I had to do it in three plats instead of two. So my mother just was hysterical when she came back and saw her hair.
From St. Thomas, Thibaudeau went to University College at the University of Toronto.
CT: I was the oldest child, you see, so it was sort of assumed that I could go if I got a scholarship. I wanted to go to UC. My dad had taken me to look at Western, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the floors. They were all marbly, and I just wasn’t used to that, it wasn’t like old St. Thomas Collegiate, you know with its nice wooden floors. Stupid.
She received a BA in English, with options in French, and then an MA in English. She met several people who were interested in writing, among them James Reaney, and she contributed both poems and short stories to the student literary magazine, the Undergrad.
CT: I went to the Modern Letters club, which I suppose would be the closest thing to a “literary circle,” but I was the very underperson of that, I would say… My husband never talked very much about writing or anything, he just did it. Phyllis Gotlieb, who was then Phyllis Bloom, was quite a good friend, and Phyllis talked more seriously about doing things. Phyllis was quite confident about what she was going to do. She was already working on certain novels and things, and I never thought in these big terms. I guess I always have thought in fairly small units because I just felt I couldn’t get [larger things] finished, and as long as you keep thinking that way you don’t get them finished, of course.… Henry Kreisel was in that group, and Dorothy Cameron… and Jamie, of course, and Duncan Robertson, Bob Weaver… fascinating people…
JM: Where did you meet Margaret Avison?
CT: I think what happened… Margaret had gone to Victoria College. She knew Northrop Frye, and she wanted very much to meet Jamie. Northrop Frye took Margaret Avison and myself to lunch at Eaton’s College Street, and we had sort of cranberry-like things on blanc-mange, as I remember; you know, it was very nice and light. And the idea was that then I would see that she would meet Jamie. She was so shy that she couldn’t meet everybody all together…. A lot of unexpected things have always happened to me like that, I don’t go looking for them.
DM: One of the stories that you published in the Undergrad, “Wild Turkeys,” seems to be recollecting the Markdale experience.
CT: Well, see, I lived [while at U of T] with my great aunt. Great Aunt Belle was the second sister of my grandmother Stewart.… It was just a pleasure to live with her because she had a slightly easier way of remembering things. My grandma was fun in many ways, but she was just so hurried and harried all the time that she never told you anything. But Aunt Belle was a more gentle easy-going person. And a couple of times, you see, she’d just begin to go into stories like that. So it was from a couple of things she said to me that I reconstructed or made up that story. She wouldn’t have said more than a couple of little hints.
Thibaudeau also had poems in the Northern Review and Here and Now.
SD: Were you at University when Here and Now started up?
CT: Oh yes. It was such a very beautifully designed magazine, that grew out of the Undergrad. You see, Paul Arthur was the Undergrad editor, and very autocratic, and wanted to do everything his own way. He had studied typography and so on with “Graphis” in Switzerland, he’d been in the navy and had gone there before he came back, so that he changed the Undergrad into that gorgeous format, and was very strict about what he put in…. Here and Now started because Arthur was tossed out of the Undergrad, because he was too snobby.
SD: It was quite an impressive magazine.
CT: It’s a lovely magazine, yes. He had contacts from Europe and so on, from his father, I suppose.
SD: Did he know people like A.M. Klein?
CT: Oh yes, he brought the Sitwells over, and did he bring Spencer and Auden? Something like that. They’d be on a circuit, a reading circuit…. Maybe this is a sidetrack, I never knew this man so well, except that he gave me his naval greatcoat when I got married and was going to Winnipeg, he took it off, and he said “you’re going to need this more than I will.” He was funny like that, he was very stuffy in some ways, you know very sort of English, but then he was very spontaneous in other ways….
SD: Was Northern Review going then too?
CT: In ’47 [summer] I worked in Montreal, and that was my first real contact with Northern Review. I’d had a couple of poems in so I phoned them. I didn’t know anybody in Montreal… and they said would you come over tonight, and there was some great to-do about the laundry, I remember…. They had no money, the Sutherlands, John Sutherland, Audrey Aitman. Irving Layton was married to Betty Sutherland who was John’s sister…. Anyway, while I was there (this is terrible, you see I knew very little, I had worked in tobacco and all this stuff, but I didn’t really know how people managed because my mother always managed so well)… while I was there this intricate thing took place, there would be a knocking, so we’d all fall silent and practically hide under the table, in case [the knocker] would be looking through the key hole, and it was that they owed for their laundry… where Audrey who was very very clean took everything, and they would go and pick it up and make some nice little remark and get it away, you see, but it wouldn’t be paid for ages. Everything in the apartment was spotless. She worked nights as a proof reader and so did Betty, but they made so little money, and the men were not working, and they were financing the magazine…. It was very simple…. It was just that summer, I only saw them a few times. John was hand-setting all his magazine.
Thibaudeau completed her MA in 1949, and worked for McClelland and Stewart for a year, doing advertising. Then she spent a year in France, in the town of Angers, teaching and studying. “How to Know the True Prince,” which appears in this issue of Brick, derives from that experience, as do other stories in a planned series that has not yet been completed.
DM: Were there really African Princes in Angers?
CT: Oh yes, that’s not made up. Elements of the story are made up; there was no thievery or anything like that…. The Janine character, I don’t think that was really true, I think that was sort of a friendship, and I made it into a love story. You see, it’s just what is suggested to you by stuff…. There were two African Princes, one was very nice, very above-board, and the other one was very… this white-suited guy that was so different from anybody, and he was involved in some sort of shady dealings, but I don’t think it was exactly what I said. And there were Japanese, and Chinese, and Norwegians… or there had been, other years. People told you about what had been, other years. It was very fertile ground for stories.
In the fall of 1951, back in Toronto, Thibaudeau worked on the Canadian census, and for the post office during the Christmas rush. On December 29, she married James Reaney. They went by train to Winnipeg, where he was teaching English at the University of Manitoba.
JM: Did you feel like you were having a big adventure, going off to Winnipeg?
CT: Oh yes, I loved it…. The only thing that was very difficult about everything – none of the packing or anything like that seemed to be too bad, or the wedding, none of that seemed to be too difficult, although it was very bad weather, but the thing that was the worst, was that Jamie was bound that he was going to teach me how to play chess, and I couldn’t seem to learn…. I wanted to look out the window or do something else.
At first they lived in Reaney’s boarding house, then in a series of apartments. Their first son James Stewart was born while they lived in an apartment on Warsaw Avenue, in 1952. Then for three years they lived in a house in King’s Park, at that time a little German village outside the city. Their second son, John, was born there in 1954. Reaney’s father came to live with them at this time, and remained with them until his death in 1972. They bought a house on Balfour Street in Winnipeg, and were there for another three years.
Thibaudeau was writing and publishing poetry fairly steadily, in a variety of magazines. While she was in Winnipeg she decided to use a pseudonym. She felt that her name was becoming familiar to editors, and she’d like to start fresh. She used the pseudonym pretty consistently from 1951 to 1962.
JM: Did you feel like you were a different persona when you were M. Morris, or was it merely a convenience for publishing? The poems themselves were different, but I wondered if you were writing them as M. Morris.
CT: No, I don’t think I felt any different. The poems were different, I agree, and it made it sort of pleasant to have a different name with them. I just had… problems getting things published and all of a sudden it hit me, let’s put these under different names and see how it goes along…
JM: And it did go along.
CT: It went along much better, and it also sort of separated these ones out, somehow… it’s hard to remember how it felt at the time, but I don’t think it felt like a different persona, actually. I think it was more like, almost like a little house or shelter you built around those, because they weren’t like the others…. I don’t know exactly how I got the idea. It just seemed to come all of a sudden, “OK, let’s try a pseudonym.”
JM: Almost like a prank.
CT: Yes, it didn’t seem to mean very much. Probably that heady atmosphere of Winnipeg makes you think of things like that.
JM: Too much oxygen in your blood.
CT: I had just met this Margaret Morris, who said, “Oh sure, a good idea, I’ll take your mail at my house.”
[In 1956]* the family moved to Toronto while Reaney did his PhD. After two years they returned to Winnipeg, and Susan was born, in 1959. Then, in 1960 they moved to London, where Reaney began teaching at the University of Western Ontario. They lived on Craig Street for a year, and then moved to Huron Street, where they are at present. In 1966 their son John died, from a sudden attack of meningitis.
DM: How do you feel about “the region”?
CT: Around here, it’s a very pastoral sort of region. I used to really miss Grey County…. I don’t think I did like London at first, but now I sort of like it better, and see more in it…. I don’t know whether I feel that [my poems] belong to any particular region or not, really…. I felt really attuned to Vancouver Island, that little region where we were in there [in 1968-69, for a sabbatical year], you know it just felt perfect, and certain other places where we’ve lived I’ve just felt really right in that place, and at some times of the year I feel fine where we live now. Other times, no.
JM: I feel your poems are “domestic” in the sense that you’re not trying to get away from what’s happening to you. They seem to derive quite naturally from the life you lead.
CT: Yes, I’m not a researcher, see, I think you can add a whole new world if you’re a good researcher, and I’ve never really got going at that.
JM: Well, it’s the homogeneity that appeals to me. That’s why I like “The Glass Cupboard” so well, because you’ve got those glasses holding the reflections of everything… all the different worlds really do seem to balance for you.
CT: Yes, they should…. You get energy form using energy, you get more from it, energy to go around faster, and eliminate the things that are unimportant. It’s interesting. We go though different phases, I think. Sometimes you feel as if you don’t have that content within you to express… there’s a sort of bubbling up of the content so that you know you can do it, you don’t know what it is, yet… but you know that that’s there and that you can just keep drawing on whatever it is, endlessly. Well then you go through other periods, where you don’t feel confident that that content exists….
Balancing writing with domestic concerns has indeed been difficult. Nor has sharing living space with another energetically creative individual always been easy.
CT: People were always asking me about the archetypes and things. Well, I never studied the archetypes, and they’re a little bit mentally beyond me, I mean if someone explains it to me I can remember it for awhile, but I can’t work that way. Like he [Reaney] will draw it all out, and he knows from which column he’s drawing his images… and I think that’s good, to be conscious of what you’re doing, but with me they either seem to come instinctively from the right area, or…. It certainly expands your world.
SD: It sounds like your ways of working are different.
CT: Yes, well, I just don’t seem to have the mentality to understand what that is. I understand the net result of what happens to you when you do it, that it expands, and that it also gives you pegs on which to hang your thought. It makes your mind tidier, and so on… but as far as remembering it all, I don’t have that.
I think you have to have a place where you can leave stuff out a little bit. And although we have lots of rooms in our house, we just don’t seem to have that kind of set-up. I usually work on the dining-room table…. I found out long ago that I could not work while he was… fermenting up an idea…. It just created such a whirlwind around the place, that I couldn’t seem to get out of it. Now that is partly just a thing that you feel; if you wanted you could overcome that… but it just seems the intellectual energy or something is just…
JM: Flying around the house.
CT: Yes, and so you can’t always keep your own thoughts straight, you see, and I don’t want to write what he’s thinking, even if I could tap in on it, I would want to continue what I was thinking. I found that very hard. So, poor soul, he goes over a lot to the office.
JM: What do you want a poem to do?
CT: Well… I really would like very much if they were as good as songs… songs that people could hear, and that would be sort of going round in their head…. They’re not, nor is there any music with them, but I was always interested when occasionally someone would set something to music to try and see if it would be a good sort of song…. I like Robert Burns, I like the feelings of those older popular but good, very very good things. I’ve never been able to achieve that, but that’s the ideal sort of thing….
JM: So you want them to belong to people.
CT: Oh yes, if they could. Now the only way they can, is if they’re good enough, and if they really are relevant, or whatever, if the words areright, you know…. And that’s sort of what you’re struggling toward, in one sense…. However you have problems of time and technique, and lack of, what shall we say, getting the thing across properly, or of getting it published, or of this or that, and it’s sort of easier, always, what you do you’ve done because it’s sort of the easy thing you could do at that moment, you see, and it probably isn’t what you were interested in doing.
JM: But it doesn’t make it bad…
CT: No, sometimes if things have that feeling of ease about them, they are very very good…. It isn’t that you want it to last forever.
Memory Game /Patchwork Chart: In January 1978, Jean McKay went though all the places Colleen had lived (the left-hand column), and Colleen gave quick responses to the various categories (Weather, Colour, Bird, Cloth, Music, Land Forms, and Water). [Brick, Issue 5, Winter 1979, pages 12-13].
June 10-14 at Fanshawe Pioneer Village, Alvegoroot Theatre presents Take the Big Picture, a two-act play based on James Reaney’s 1986 children’s novel. Director Adam Corrigan Holowitz describes his adaptation as a story about a family in conflict with the modern world: The story:The Delahay family is more than a little off balance and seventeen-year-old…
In celebration of London’s bicentennial, the City of London launched the first Forest City Facts earlier this week at Gibbons Park on the Thames River. Each lawn sign displays a short historical fact about London people, places, and events. In partnership with the London and Middlesex Historical Society and other local history groups, Forest City…
To celebrate National Poetry Month, here is the “April” eclogue from James Reaney’s long poem A Suit of Nettles. April ARGUMENT: With Duncan as judge the geese hold a bardic contest in honour of Spring. [DUNCAN RAYMOND VALANCY] Here is a kernel of the hardest winter wheat Found in the yard delicious for to eat.…
James Reaney 