sewn paper
e-mail the Author The Black Turtleneck Conspiracy
Literary Criticism
March 2002
192 pages
ISBN 0-88984-240-X
$19.95
`In Canadian literary circles,
the opinions you express
continue to be a function
of who you know rather than
what you think.'
- Stephen Henighan
at The Miller's Tale
Almonte, Ontario
`Young fogeys afflicted
by mediocrity and the itch to
write ... have never hesitated
to reveal their animus against
high spirits, wit, irrepressible
creativity and my fame both here
and abroad. I sympathize with them,
for their suffering and deeply felt
humiliation must be intolerable....
Clearly, Stephen Henighan
lacks both common sense
and common decency.'
- Irving Layton.
Layton and the Feminist
Stephen Henighan
A few years ago a friend of mine announced her intention of
writing her master's thesis on the poems of Irving Layton. Her
father, who had been taught by Layton in high school, recoiled.
`You're not going to interview him alone!' he said. `Irving
Layton was a dirty old man even when he was a young man.'
Layton owns up to this charge, in his irrepressible way, on
the opening page of his collected love poems, Dance With
Desire. In `To the Girls of My Graduating Class,' first
published in 1953, he confesses to feeling `fierce and
ridiculous' as he slavers over the `saintly breasts' of his
female students.
To readers better acquainted with Layton's bombastic public
stance as Canada's leading lecher than with his verse, that
`ridiculous' may come as a surprise. As Layton has aged, he has
displayed little sensitivity to the absurdity of an old man
ogling women several decades his junior. The Layton of the 1950s
and 1960s, as represented by the first third of this book, was a
more subtle, perceptive man. He was also an exceptionally fine
poet. This was the period when Layton was writing such enduring
works as `The Birth of Tragedy' and `A Tall Man Executes a Jig.'
His best love poems of the time are highly accomplished. By
dressing up his romanticism in appropriately lavish language,
replete with classical allusions and risky inverted syntax,
Layton succeeded in wringing genuine feeling from his fleshly
obsessions.
His downfall lay in his penchant for satire. A poem like `The
Day Aviva Came to Paris,' in which Layton imagines the French
capital struck dumb by his wife's arrival, succeeds wonderfully
both as a statement of devotion and a vehicle to lampoon
Parisian-style stuffiness. Layton's satire, though, eventually
fused with his titanic ego, creating the bloated self-parody all
too familiar from his poems and interviews of the past twenty-five
years. Dance With Desire is top-heavy with poems in
which Layton's rambunctious public persona bludgeons any visible
glimmer of insight or feeling.
`Am I mad to see soft breasts everywhere?' he writes in one
poem. Mad, no; infantile, yes. Layton's women seem to consist of
little more than pairs of surging breasts. They scarcely have
arms or legs - let alone hearts, heads or brains. Layton may
love women, but like most philanderers, he doesn't seem to like
them very much. Lines such as `I plug the void with my phallus'
suggest a fear of female sexuality; a poem detailing his
inability to come to terms with his wife's menstruation
reinforces this theme.
These days, Layton's posture as a sexual rebel seems merely
foolish. Like any aging revolutionary, he has lost touch with
forces he himself helped to unleash. His explicit praise of
female body parts made him a literary outlaw in the 1950s and an
icon of the hip in the late 1960s, but subsequent generations,
for whom the pursuit of desire has become both highly politicized
and potentially lethal, have regarded him as either boorish or
outmoded.
Curiously, the love poems that made Layton notorious now
appear to be a fragile part of his poetic legacy. Dance With
Desire may prove to contain a portion of the Layton oeuvre
destined to slip into obscurity.
`Half the men you've ever met/ will rape you/ if they think
they can/ get away with it,' writes Montreal poet Sharon H.
Nelson in the opening sequence of her collection, The Work Of
Our Hands. Turning to Nelson's gritty analysis of sexual
politics after being immersed in Layton's odes to seduction is a
bracing experience. In Nelson's work, desire becomes merely one
more tool of a controlling patriarchy.
Nelson's direct, unadorned phrasing works best in poems
focusing on everyday tasks such as household labour. A tension
arises, though, between her efforts to evoke the workaday world
and her need to elaborate a theory of how language alienates us
from this world. Her plain style becomes flat when propounding
theoretical verities which, while sometimes persuasive, are not
startlingly original. A happy exception crops up in the long,
free-form poem `Making Waves,' where Nelson develops a richer,
more untrammelled language capable of embodying her search for a
poetics rooted in physical experience.
Even when she overstates her points, Nelson's voice,
alternately genial and caustic, remains engaging. Irving Layton
should read this book.
1992
No work I have written - full-length books included - has
elicited as much response as this article.
Letters of protest streamed into the Montreal Gazette
for weeks after the publication of this piece. Middle-aged and
elderly readers recalled Layton as a beacon of light in the
constipated darkness of the Canada of the 1950s. The Layton media
persona, I learned, was sustained by a core of devoted readers to
whom he had given an elegant vocabulary for longings they had
scarcely dared to voice.
The best letter was from Irving Layton himself. Demonstrating
that his ego had not smothered his sense of humour, Layton wrote:
`Young fogeys afflicted by mediocrity and the itch to write ... have
never hesitated to reveal their animus against high spirits,
wit, irrepressible creativity and my fame both here and abroad. I
sympathize with them, for their suffering and deeply felt
humiliation must be intolerable.... Clearly, Stephen Henighan
lacks both common sense and common decency.'
Layton's riposte was a natural response to a sour review.
Sharon H. Nelson, who turned out to be the founder of the
Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets, confounded
expectations by rushing to Layton's defence. In a three-page
single-spaced letter that she faxed to more than thirty prominent
cultural figures, Nelson denounced my dastardly attack on a
sexual liberator. She went on to threaten various libel actions.
The Gazette's managing editor issued a formal rebuttal to
Nelson's threats. Maclean's magazine got wind of the
tempest and ran a short article on Layton's `new alliances' and
my lack of repentance for my cultural sins.
Yet the Layton-Nelson axis was no new alliance. Why did the
founder of the Feminist Caucus side with the self-proclaimed
slaverer? I later learned that, early in her writing career,
Sharon H. Nelson had been a Layton protegée. The incident
underlines the prime law of Canadian literary debate: differences
of opinion, aesthetic creed or ideology are overruled by personal
allegiances. Unlike the United Kingdom or the United States,
where friends and acquaintances may cordially and vigorously
disagree in print, Canada remains a colonial society; here
friends must think alike and unanimity among the Family Compact
of the chattering classes is still the hallowed aim of public
utterances.
In Canadian literary circles, the opinions you
express continue to be a function of who you know rather than
what you think.