Earle Birney and William Stafford: An Unexamined Poetic Association

The poet and novelist Earle Birney (1904–95) was a leading figure in modern Canadian literature; his long life granted him a place in postmodern literary history as well. His first two volumes of poetry—David and Other Poems (1942) and Now Is Time (1945)—each won the prestigious Governor General’s Award, and his narrative ‘David’ was widely taught in schools and universities in Canada, making it, for a time at least, one of the best-known poems written by a Canadian author. It was treated at some length and in representative fashion by Margaret Atwood in Survival (1972), an influential if now largely discredited overview of Canadian writing. ‘David’s name’, she noted, ‘is suggestive: where there is a David in Canadian literature there is usually a Goliath, and the Goliath, the evil giant (or giantess) is, of course, Nature herself. David has been challenging it to combat by fighting his way up the mountains, but as in many Canadian David-and-Goliath stories, Goliath wins.’1 Critical attention to Birney has waned, however, in the decades since his death—partly as a consequence of the enormous diversification of the field of Canadian literary studies and partly as a result of a related shift in attention away from figures associated with the nationalist era of the 1960s and 1970s. A curious critical stasis has thus ensued, with much still to be examined in the life and works of an author whose centrality could once be assumed, but who now resides on the periphery. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of many of Birney’s contemporaries, including the celebrated poet Al Purdy.2 One aspect of Birney’s biography in need of elucidation is his relationship to the prolific American poet William Stafford (1914–93), who is perhaps best known for Traveling through the Dark (1962), which won a National Book Award. Stafford is also remembered as a pacifist and a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Birney, in contrast, enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1940.3 Now Is Time and especially the novel Turvey: A Military Picaresque (1949) drew on his wartime experiences. In 1963, Birney gave a copy of his collection of poems entitled Ice Cod Bell or Stone (1962) to Stafford, inscribing it as follows: ‘For Bill Stafford/in friendship and admiration/Earle Birney//12 Sep 63/Vancouver’.4 The inscription alone reveals little about the poets’ ‘friendship’. Birney’s message was succinct and generic, and there is no immediate way to assess whether its formality, the diminutive (‘Bill’) notwithstanding, implies sincerity, distance, or a sense of occasion. Yet whether earnest or merely polite, the inscription raises possibly significant questions: to what extent did Birney and Stafford know each other, and what role if any did their relationship play in the professional and imaginative dimensions of their lives? Elspeth Cameron’s lengthy biography of Birney, published in 1994, hardly mentions Stafford, yet various correspondences in the lives of the authors may be observed.5 A memorable poem by Stafford called ‘At Earle Birney’s School’ was published in 1959, and as its subtitle attests, it derives from a visit to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where Birney taught in the Department of English.6 Stafford was likewise an academic as well as a poet; he taught at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. A little later, from March to June 1961, Birney was a visitor at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, and it is plausible that he may have seen Stafford again then or during subsequent travels in Oregon.7 Birney’s ‘Looking from Oregon’, a poem published in The Atlantic in 19648—‘a special supplement on Canada plus a full regular issue’, the cover stated—and again in the Canadian literary journal Quarry in 1966,9 was eventually collected in Memory No Servant (1968),10 an American edition of his poems, the introduction to which was provided by Stafford.11 ‘Looking from Oregon’ was also included by Stafford and Clinton F. Larson in Modern Poetry of Western America (1975).12 Several other poems by Birney were reprinted in the regional anthology: ‘The Bear on the Delhi Road’, ‘Biography’, ‘Bushed’, ‘El Greco: Espolio’, ‘Irapuato’, ‘Man Is a Snow’, ‘Song for Sunsets’, ‘There Are Delicacies’, ‘War Winters’, and ‘Wind-Chimes in a Temple Ruin’. The editors were evidently enthusiastic about his work. Most of the poets in the anthology were American, but Canada was represented by Robin Skelton as well as by Birney—perhaps to the annoyance of the latter. In a review of Ice Cod Bell or Stone, Skelton had all but dismissed Birney’s book as ‘a piece of monumental cleverness calculated to impress those who can be impressed by cleverness.’13 A second skeptical account appeared a year later, again to Birney’s displeasure.14 ‘Looking from Oregon’ refers to ‘my friend and his two sons’ and again to ‘my friend and his two boys’.15 Birney gave the poem a location and a date: ‘Florence, Oregon, August 1964’.16 He travelled to Eugene in 1964 as well as to Florence;17 it is therefore conceivable that the friend in the poem is Stafford, who indeed had two sons (and two daughters). The epigraph is taken from Robinson Jeffers’s ‘The Eye’, while the poem itself alludes plainly to Robert Frost’s ‘Neither Out Far nor In Deep’ (‘I can’t look farther out or in’).18 If Stafford is the fourth poet involved—after Birney, Jeffers, and Frost—his appearance would be fitting given his pacifism and the possibility that Birney’s poem is, as Robert McGill suggests, ‘the first Canadian literary text about the Vietnam War’: the poem refers to the Gulf of Tonkin debacle of early August 1964.19 I am not the first reader to suppose that it is Stafford who is present in Birney’s poem. In a review of Memory No Servant, Gerald Burns noted that ‘William Stafford wrote the Introduction, and I believe may be found later on, fishing.’20 Burns however gave no further explanation. Birney lived much of his life in Vancouver and was principally although not exclusively a poet of the Canadian West, while Stafford, although he was born in Kansas, came to be closely associated with the Pacific Northwest of the USA. In Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest (1964), Skelton—an English poet who found himself teaching at the newly established University of Victoria—gathered poems by Stafford, Kenneth O. Hanson, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, and David Wagoner.21 One of the twenty poems by Stafford that Skelton included has an obvious relevance to Birney: ‘Letter from Oregon’. It is an epistolary poem addressed not to Birney but to the poet’s mother, yet the closeness of the titles ‘Looking from Oregon’ and ‘Letter from Oregon’ is striking. The two poems are different enough, but their similarity as meditative dispatches from Oregon permits speculation that the poets themselves recognized a resemblance. Skelton’s anthology was dedicated ‘to the memory of Theodore Roethke’22—the American poet, who taught at the University of Washington, had died in 1963—and while the editor in his introduction observed that ‘good poets rarely fit easily into “schools,”’23 he cast Roethke as the presiding literary spirit of a broad northwestern region: ‘as a teacher and visionary, he affected the poets of the area in more, and in less superficial, ways than any “influence-hunter” could detect.’24 More recent commentators have likewise discerned the influence of Roethke on regional poets, noting too, however, that certain authors tried to resist the conventions of a ‘Northwest School’ of poets: ‘Others like Mary Barnard, Vern Rutsala, Kenneth O. Hanson, William Stafford, Judith Barrington, Earle Birney, Robert Wrigley, and John Haines had to distinguish themselves from the Northwest School so as to put their own distinctive stamp on the region’s poetry. The effort required to emerge from Roethke’s shadow demonstrates the strength of his influence.’25 Here Stafford and Birney are placed in proximity to each other once again. Consequently, the aim of this note is twofold: to propose a task for commentators on both Birney and Stafford, and to offer a broader critical observation. The undertaking is to investigate the scope and nature of biographical and textual relations between the two writers. Stafford’s papers include at least fourteen letters from Birney, sent between 1961 and 1974, and three to Birney, one from as late as 1989.26 Other letters may exist elsewhere.27 The observation meanwhile is simply that Canadian literature and American literature cannot be understood in their full complexity if the two national literatures are held to exist in isolation from each other: the national groupings that hold sway in literary studies are categories of convenience rather than perfectly objective reflections of writers’ lives and works. There exist innumerable examples of cross-border exchange between Canada and the USA, not only because Canadian authors have sought access to the lucrative American market,28 but also because of the inescapability of American culture.29 At times, Canadian writers have criticized or opposed American cultural power, as in the examples of the poet Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies (1968, 1972) and Purdy’s The New Romans (1968), a compilation of nationalist statements.30 (As their dates suggest, the books belong to the time of the Canadian centenary and the Vietnam War.) A poem by Birney, ‘Billboards Build Freedom of Choice’, published earlier in his Near False Creek Mouth (1964), was included in Purdy’s anthology, and as Cameron writes, it was ‘suggested by billboards he had driven past in Oregon’.31 Or as Birney said of the billboards, ‘They stood between me and one of the world’s most beautiful views, as I drove down the coastal highway of Oregon. It was in 1961. And what those billboards said was “Billboards Build Freedom of Choice, courtesy Oregon Chamber of Commerce.” And I was alone, driving, and I brooded about the enormity and stupidity of these ugly signs and their phony message.’32 Again a possible link to Stafford is tantalizing. Connections between national literatures are made tangible in the lives of individual authors. Stafford himself wrote various poems, such as ‘At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border’, that refer to the country to his north: ‘This is the field where the battle did not happen,/where the unknown soldier did not die.’33 Birney and Stafford represent only one instance of an international dialogue, but it is through such minor examples that larger stories may be told.

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