Francis Webb’s America

THIS PAPER ARGUES THAT FRANCIS WEBB'S PHYSICAL AND intellectual escape into Canada was also one into US poetics and that Webb's US engagement has been hitherto underestimated due to confusion around the origins of Dawn Wind on the Islands, Melville at Woods Hole, and Serenade to the Favourite Movie-actress in particular. New evidence around these poems suggests Webb's chief Canadian period from 1947-1949 gave rise to a unique poetic weighing of Australian, Canadian and US histories of land and mind in his second collection Leichhardt in Theatre (1952).Biogeographically, the teenager who declared he would pin my faith on slipping images/Twisting like smoke or a fish caught in the hand (Webb, Collected 21) can be a little slippery himself. Yet since his younger sister Leonie Meere and her husband Peter published Webb Poet and Brother: Some of his Letters and Poetry (2001), this can be cross-referenced with God's Fool to give a clearer picture of the poet's three trips to Canada from 1944-1945, where he trained as a Wireless Air in Winnipeg (nine months), with brief stints in Calgary, Paulson and his point of entry and exit in Vancouver. Early works directly attributable to this period are Mountains and by Rail, as well as Gunner, which immediately precedes Dawn Wind on the Islands in Leichhardt in Theatre:Listening, you crouched in the turret, watchful and taut-Bogey, two thousand, skipper, corkscrew to portMarvellous the voice: driving electric firesThrough the panel of sleep, the black plugs, trailing wires.(102)Though Webb returned to Australia with the rank of Sergeant (Meere and Meere 9), he is often overlooked as a war poet. Here the gunner, or ex-gunner, is asleep while his internal dream-war rages on in a subconscious pantomime of the role Webb himself performed only in simulations, the war ending before he saw combat. Gunner is a cleaner poem, worked on for a longer period than the channels of silence, iron chasms and cold drags of snow of Mountains and by Rail, though at the same time less located psycho-geographically.Webb's war-sleep theme becomes more tragic and less abstracted in Dawn Wind on the Islands. Yet to fully appreciate the US-Canadian context behind this poem, Webb's second Canadian trip and fallout with illustrator and literary tyro Norman (1879-1969) needs some elucidation. Why did Webb return in 1947? was fascinated with Canada, especially Vancouver and later Montreal; at the same time he was devouring Melville, Eliot, Crane and Lowell with relish and becoming interested in Canadian literary journals, though he never speaks of Canadian poets [2]. I'll never get the chance to travel again. prophesized, incorrectly, to Lindsay. One outburst of travel, firmly believe, is a good thing even when conducted in my crude fashion, sans amenities and in pretty total solitariness (Webb, MS40 13). However, these pull were far outweighed by the push factors, outlined at length by Michael Griffith in Francis Webb and Norman Lindsay (1989) and God's Fooi. Griffith cites Webb thus: I set out for Canada: too much praise, a bit stultifying, had been accorded me for this first essay in poetry, and yearned for full freedom and solitude (Webb, qtd. in Griffith, God's Fooi 81). The reality was that A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948), illustrated by and also influenced by Lindsay's interpretation of Robert Browning's dramatic monologues and championed by Douglas Stewart (1913-1985) in the Bulletin, hadn't even been published in book form. It may thus seem counterintuitive for a young poet on the brink of success to jump the country, but Stewart's recollection of Webb's reaction upon reading that A Drum for Ben Boyd was considered major poetry is especially telling: He looked stricken rather than pleased, as if the whole burden of his hopes or his dreams had suddenly been loaded upon him (Stewart, qtd. …

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