[In the following essay, Aichinger addresses the influence of Birney's extensive travels, political allegiances, and global perspectives on his development as a Canadian poet.]

I THE LONELY OBSERVER

In the 1940s Birney and some of his contemporaries—F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, and P. K. Page—had begun to define a new attitude in Canadian poetry; where Canadian poets in the nineteenth century had tended to settle for a glorification of nature's beauties and the morally invigorating challenge of the frontier, Birney and the others “… sought in man's own mental and social world for a subject matter they can no longer find in the beauty of nature—a beauty that seems either deceptive or irrelevant.”¹ Thus, poems like “David” and “Climbers” acknowledge the beauty of the landscape while they underline its harshness and indifference to the existence of man. Similarly, Birney carefully describes the jeweled landscape of a Nova Scotia winter in “ARRIVALS—Wolfville”—

                                                                                                    a snowscape
clean and cosy as any Christmas card
the small firs like spunwhite candy
spaced on the ice-cream hillocks

—but this observation of the natural scene is only a backdrop upon which Birney projects the experience of a man's death. More to the point, “ARRIVALS—Wolfville” expresses most succinctly Birney's awareness of the solitude of the human condition. The train passengers who alight to see the body of the man whom their train has killed are

… anonymous one to the other
but our breaths write on the air
the kinship of being alive
surrounding the perfect stranger. …

It is not only the dead who are perfect strangers to one another. The title of “four feet between” is an ironic reference to the fact that Birney and the big old Fijian stand only four feet apart as they struggle to communicate while in fact their thought patterns and their backgrounds leave them light ages away from each other. The title also refers to the fact that between them they have four feet, but even this is a barrier to their understanding of each other; the “civilized” man's feet are cut to shreds by the coral while the “primitive” man is unharmed: “… most of all he couldnt understand what hurt my feet.” Finally, by making the Fijian laugh at a witticism, Birney manages to achieve some kind of a rapport, but it is a small dividend considering the effort he has had to make.

This consciousness of man's confusion in the presence of his fellows also provides the theme for “A Walk in Kyoto.” In this poem sex is a metaphor for truth or reality, but it is Birney's problem to decipher the complex riddle of a strangely inverted world. He does not know whether the magnolia in his room is male or female; the resident Deity is hermaphroditic; the actors in the kabuki and takarazuka plays are male and female transvestites; the “small bowed body” of the country itself seems to be symbolized by Birney's inn-maid, or is it in fact vigorous and masculine? If Birney can penetrate the disguises surrounding flower, deity, actors, country, he will be free to communicate with the people and not have to “stand hunched / and clueless like a castaway in the shoals of [his] room.” Then, as in “Cartagena de Indias,” Birney is abruptly provided with a flash of insight. The maid silently points over his shoulder to where a small boy is flying a kite in the shape of a golden carp, a traditional Japanese symbol of virility.² Suddenly the riddle of this mysterious nation is resolved and an answer provided for the question of

Where in these alleys jammed with competing waves
of signs in two tongues and three scripts
can the simple song of a man be heard?

The boy's act, specifically masculine and clearly sexual—

a carp is rising                    golden and fighting
thrusting its paper body up from the fist
of a small boy

—is one which unites him with boys and men everywhere. His kite, rising “higher / and higher into the endless winds of the world” is a symbol of man's ability to pass over the oceans of ignorance and carry messages to his fellow man.

Still, for every small triumph of this sort there are any number of instances in which Birney is forced to recognize the difficulty if not the impossibility of establishing communications. Too often the barriers of language or custom or economic privilege stand between one man and another. Sometimes, as in “Turbonave Magnolia,” a stupid racist regulation may be blamed for interrupting a blossoming friendship; sometimes, as in “the gray woods exploding,” Birney's instinctive gesture of sympathy is rebuffed out of human pride and fear of getting hurt; more often Birney simply admits that loneliness is the natural condition of man.

This recognition, coupled with Birney's characteristic sense of ironic detachment, tends to set him in the observer's stance, watching, assessing, yet willing to accept friendship if it comes or express love if he feels it. “campus theatre steps,” for example, is a pastiche of excerpts from theater posters and the noises of the world moving freely about its business on foot, in cars, and on trains, set over against the sight of a woman in a wheelchair being laboriously hauled up the steps of the theater. The poet silently observes the suffering of the individual in the presence of an indifferent world bent upon seeking its own pleasure and takes a couple of the blaring poster headlines to express his apocalyptic vision of what will become of such a society: “Tomorrow at 8:30 : : : the Griffins are / COMING.”

It is logical therefore that one should look through Birney's eyes, as it were, to deduce who it is that he admires in the human race. Surprisingly, considering his avowedly pessimistic view of humanity, there is a considerable number of such people, and they include everyone from small children to aborigines, from simple working men to explorers, and certainly one of the most striking of these groups is the series of young men—David, Mickey in the short story “Mickey Was a Swell Guy,” Conrad Kain, Gordon Saunders, Joe Harris—who crop up regularly in Birney's works. Despite their youth they tend to be mature, patient, kindly, generous, and physically robust. Like Beowulf, Percival, and other heroes of antiquity they learn about life through intense personal suffering. In fact, only those people who suffer, including the young professor in “the gray woods exploding,” actually learn about life; the rest tend to be immature or to remain vapid tourists gaping uncomprehendingly upon a life that streams past them.

Occasionally one of these young men makes the journey into self-knowledge alone. Gordon Saunders does this both physically and spiritually in Down the Long Table; the long trip by freight train from Toronto to Vancouver teaches the aloof young academic something about his own country and its inhabitants, but it also initiates him into the world of political and economic reality.

Joe Harris and the professor of “the gray woods exploding” also make their journeys alone in the sense that death has left them bereft of their loved ones, but both are all the more poignant figures in that they are apparently condemned to continue their journeys forever. The young professor is living “a long way off / So he's still alive in a way somewhere,” and the disembodied voice of Joe Harris still pleads, “Which are my sins, padre?”

More often, Birney's young men are accompanied by an even younger follower who also matures and loses something of his innocence as a result of what happens to the principal character. Thus, David is accompanied by Bob, Mickey by the unnamed narrator of the story, Kain by a series of fellow mountain-climbers who are at least junior to him in terms of experience, and Turvey trots doggedly in the track of his hero, Mac, learning, under the veil of humorous predicaments, progressively more bitter lessons. And the bitterest lesson of all for these disciples is the fact of their hero's mortality, and their own, for whether Birney's young men make their journey alone or in the company of a disciple, in the end they are destroyed. Gordon Saunders is brought down by old political enemies; Joe Harris, Mickey, and Mac are killed in one war or another; David chooses his own death rather than life as an invalid; the young professor is hounded by a relentless bureaucracy and the memory of his beloved wife.

In many of these cases, Birney employs the destruction of the young man to make a specifically political statement: the lives of Conrad Kain, Mickey, and Joe Harris are blighted by a perverted economic system which denies them food and education in their youth and any hope of social advancement in later life. They are all, in one way or another, pawns in a system that crushes their potential to live fully as human beings. Yet, the lives and deaths of Birney's young heroes are sometimes dignified by a grandeur of surprisingly godlike and even Christlike quality. Mickey battles for the weak and helpless schoolboys and is wounded in such an encounter; Kain is the good shepherd of the mountains who injured no man:

He seized his land for no sovereign
and left it uncivilized still.
He was reckless only in rescuing others
and his proudest record was this:
that on stormiest edge
or through deepest crevasse
he led no man to his hurt.

But much more striking is the Christian symbolism in “David” and “Joe Harris.” David accepts the blame for Bob's mistake; both David and Joe Harris are wounded in the side; the counterpoint to Joe's words is provided by a chaplain intoning the Christian service for the burial of the dead.

Still, if one reads these two last poems more closely, one realizes that the references to Christianity are misleading. David's death is more suited to a Stoic than a Christian, and Joe denies the existence of a God who can restore him to life: “Nor is there any Lord that will close the wound in my own side.” Perhaps the key to these two poems lies in a third: “Takkakaw Falls.” The river, clearly linked to the ancient river gods, like David loses its foothold in the mountains and plunges to its death, whence after a time it is reborn to rise and thunder once again. The underlying implication of the poems about Birney's young men dying young is that they have become transmuted by their deaths; they have left an ineradicable mark upon the people they have known and have become gods in a New World Parnassus reserved for heroes.

These young men are also linked by their attributes to the explorers whom Birney so clearly admires and who keep cropping up in his poetry. Perhaps his own insatiable wanderlust made him feel a kinship with these men, whether they are figments of his imagination like David and Gordon Saunders or real-life explorers like Cook, Bering, and Bingham. What they all have in common is a restless desire to search and discover even at the risk of their own lives. Birney's early “Atlantic Door” invokes the memories of “Gilbert's hearties and Jellicoe's,” and its companion-piece, “Pacific Door,” acknowledges the sometimes inadvertent heroism that helped to open the West Coast and the Pacific:

long pain and sweating courage chalked
such names as glimmer yet
Drake's crewmen scribbled here their paradise
and dying Bering lost in fog
turned north to mark us off from Asia still
Here cool Cook traced in blood his final bay.

This is the other side of the Birney who despairs of mankind because of its intransigence in the face of self-made disaster. Here he admires the human stubbornness, perseverance, curiosity, and intellectual power that lead men like Hiram Bingham to rediscover lost treasures like Machu Picchu.

Birney also seems to feel this sense of sympathetic rapport with those simple farmers or workers whose labor lends them an ennobling quality. Sometimes, as in “Joe Harris,” the ethos of the working man is direct and poignant: “It is a brief sleep only I need. … And after that to work as never before, in my own land, with my own hand and brain, and to eat the fruits I have grown.” Or, in the thoughts of the “Man on a Tractor” who, unlike Joe Harris, has survived the war and returned to work his own land: “I have come through with my hands and feet / and won the right to plow black earth of my own.” Sometimes Birney's consciousness of something decent in simple men is focused by the fact of death. In “ARRIVALS—Wolfville” his habitual sarcasm is muted as he acknowledges the fragility of human beings in the face of natural forces. Even the dialect-speaking locals, usually the object of Birney's satire and contempt, here have something decent and humane about them; one of them gathers up the scattered papers of the dead lawyer, another brings a blanket from the train to cover the shattered body. Sometimes, as in “the gray woods exploding,” Birney uses his own experiences as a laboring man to bridge an otherwise insurmountable gap between himself and another man. The young professor remains shy and aloof until Birney reaches out to him with stories of his own youthful labors.

Yet, there is another dimension to Birney's sympathy for the worker: not every job requires the skill of a carpenter or a mountaineer. Some jobs—most, perhaps—never provide the satisfaction of conquering Mount Robson or fitting together a beautifully crafted cabinet or cross. The title of “The ebb begins from dream,” for example, refers to the fact that the working masses form a huge tide that daily sweeps from the depths of sleep down to their workplaces and then ebbs wearily back to dreamland each evening. The tide imagery also suggests the manner in which the laboring life wears the individual down; from the flood tide of youth the incessant demands of toil reduce man to a neap tide, glad to trickle back to his final sleeping place and forgetful of the ideas and ideals which inspired him at his setting out. Despite the fact that the closing lines of the poem imply that there is a great, if unconscious, dream of a better and more fulfilling life present in all of mankind, too often the “morning vow” is forgotten in the weariness of the evening; the working man's promise to himself of a better world becomes

salt evening weeds that lie
and rot between the cracks of life
and hopes that waterlogged will never link
with land                    but will be borne until they sink.

This awareness of the harsh and dehumanizing quality of modern industrial life is one of the factors that causes Birney to romanticize people and places from long ago and far away. “November Walk near False Creek Mouth” implies that the mead-tipplers of King Alfred's time and the “tiffin-takers” of British India were in some way aesthetically or even physically superior to Birney's Vancouver contemporaries who drink their “fouroclock chainstore tea.” Something of this tendency can be detected in Birney's poems about exotic places—Peru, the Caribbean, the South Pacific—all of which contain echoes of a belief in the grandeur of the “natural man.” Margaret Atwood noticed that Al Purdy in North of Summer and Farley Mowat in The People of the Deer identify with those Indians or Eskimos whose tribal life has been destroyed by the white man's “civilization,” i.e., those aborigines who are dead and who exist only in artifacts and legend, not the degenerate, contemporary, living ones.³ The same thing can be said of Birney's poems, including Trial of a City, “the mammoth corridors,” “what's so big about GREEN?” and “The shapers: Vancouver”; he does not have a living Indian anywhere in his work. What is more, in “charité esperance et foi” Birney's ironic admiration of the savagery of the three Indian girls and of their conduct in the face of Samuel de Champlain's efforts to civilize them is exactly the opposite of Pratt's attitude toward the Indians in “Brebeuf and His Brethren.” In Birney's estimation the white man deserved all the suffering he got from the natives.

Yet, if his work is taken as a whole, no one could accuse Birney of being rabidly anti-Canadian or of seeing all foreigners or aborigines in a totally flattering light. Although he never becomes rapturous about Canadians, and though many of his poems like “Six-sided square: Actopan” and “To a Hamilton (Ont.) lady thinking to travel” are marred by a condescending irony in favor of the natives, he does come to recognize that other people have their defects too. The speaker in “Sinaloa” is clearly in favor of industrial exploitation of his own country; the Japanese in “Small port in the outer Fijis” are as rapacious as any “northamericans”; while Birney and the old Fijian in “Four feet between” do not condescend to each other or even overrate each other. Birney's early works certainly reveal a typically Canadian naiveté in his tendency to overestimate the moral qualities of Jamaicans, Mexicans, and French Canadians, but with the passage of the years this has been replaced by a more balanced judgment, a willingness to take his friends wherever he can find them. Where once his poems of friendship were directed to people in Belgium, Holland, or the Caribbean, he now writes love poems to a girl in Toronto and friendly banter to a fellow poet in Ameliasburg, Ontario. Foreigners may still be his friends, but the fact of being a foreigner is no longer a necessary condition for earning Birney's admiration.

A similar modification has been extended to Birney's view of the rich and rapacious. When Now Is Time was published, E. K. Brown remarked in a review of the book that for Birney the life of the rich “… is seen from below angrily, and without any real sense of [their] motive. The dramatic quality of Mr. Birney's poetry suffers by the contrast between his ever-ready sympathy with the poor, a sympathy grounded in understanding, and his summary unconvincing presentation of their masters. His bitterness of mood forces its way into almost everything he writes, sometimes to give it great energy and vigour, but often to weaken a note of delight or triumph, or to destroy a touch of reality.”⁴ In the context of poems like “Hands,” “Joe Harris,” and “Man on a Tractor” these remarks were certainly valid, although the same volume contained poems such as “Anglosaxon Street” and “And the Earth Grow Young Again,” poems which either were not directed against the rich or which specifically satirized the follies of the working class. In any case, in the twenty years between the publication of Now Is Time and Selected Poems Birney's emphasis upon the larceny of the upper classes gradually was transmuted into a stance which committed him to the defense of no party, group, or class, but which rather permitted him to underline the moral failures common to mankind as a whole. As a reviewer of the later book said, “He points constantly and consistently to the contradiction of what would seem to be the legitimate human interests of happiness and fulfillment by the vulgarity, vacuity, sterility—and what would appear to be the wilful plain foolishness—of contemporary purposes and aspirations.”⁵ Two years earlier, Birney had explained his own sense of identification with Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and the other Beat poets by saying that “it was a means of passionate identification, by all of us, poets and non-poets, with resentment—an all-out expression of hate, hate of ourselves and detestation of the whole lousy fear-ridden world our ancestors have made, and of our own pious smug daily defence of it.”⁶ In his 1948 poem “Images in place of logging” Birney had compared human beings and their machines to destructive animals and insects; in “Cucarachas in paradise” (1969) he suggested that cockroaches compare favorably with human beings. Taken in its entirety, then, Birney's poetry does not really show a consistent class bias; it tends to reveal anger and disappointment with the shortcomings of the human race as a whole.

Certainly one of the shortcomings that angers him the most is man's habit of pillaging the environment and exploiting his fellows. Even his earliest poems, like “The Road to Nijmegen,” are passionate condemnations not just of the ravages of war but of the misuse of man's intellectual powers. Anyone who has seen the shattered landscape and the starving children of one war should, theoretically, be capable of preventing another such tragedy, but even then Birney was admitting that mankind was on a “road / that arrives at no future” and that he himself was tortured by the “guilt / in the griefs of the old / and the graves of the young.” Then, after he had returned home and seen New Brunswick, a “great green girl grown sick / with man,” had read the “page of Gaspé” like an old illuminated manuscript carelessly scribbled upon by modern man's factories and banks, and had observed the desolate “Images in place of logging,” he came to something of a watershed in his expressions of contempt for the ravages created by man exploiting nature. “Way to the West” (1965) continues in a more fierce and explicit form Birney's condemnation of a rapacious mankind. Up to this point he had permitted himself the luxury of ironic laughter at foolish developers like the speaker in “Sinaloa.” After all, there is a good deal to be said for the man's point of view; the people of Sinaloa are poor, and a breakwater would be economically better than palm trees; sugarcane plantations are more important than egrets; a grain elevator or a boxcar full of rice is much better than an old fort when one is hungry. The speaker is perfectly correct, from a developer's standpoint, in preferring tractors, refrigerator trucks, and new highways to machetes, oxcarts, and “bugumbilla.” The only point that he is missing is the one made by Birney in “Prosperity in Poza Rica,” namely that wealth derived from the uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources all too seldom trickles down to the poor and hungry. In this poem, oil brings quick profits to lawyers, drillers, and casual laborers, but a few miles away the Indian farmer still scrabbles for his living, plowing his land with a sharpened stick.

By the time he wrote “Way to the West,” however, the softening element of humor had disappeared. Sudbury is evoked as a perfect example of man's ability to create hell on earth. The images are all selected for their shock effect: young demons drag-race their shrieking cars through the sulfurous atmosphere; older ones spit gobs of brown slime on the pavement; with smarting eyes Birney notices that the local rock formations look like “glazed guts on a butcher's marble.” Outside of town, with still twenty miles of this horror to endure, the travelers stop. There is no sound because all nature is dead. They are shocked to realize that in the background the murmuring of a river can be heard; until now its sound had been obscured by the roaring of the pandemonium through which they have just passed. Birney has painted other portraits of this same area, notably in “North of Superior,” which dwells upon its emptiness and solitude, but at least in “North of Superior” the land still has a certain integrity, however barren, of its own. There may not be any knights or dragons in these sparse reaches of rock and spindly trees, but the seasons come and go; the odd trapper follows the track of other living creatures; trees, flowers, and even lichens do live out a natural cycle. In “Way to the West,” on the other hand, man has ensured the destruction of even this simple life cycle, and implicitly has condemned himself as well. Aside from the beer-sodden residents coughing their lungs out, the slogans about “Centre of Free Enterprise” are linked to images of the battlefield, Cape Kennedy, and Vietnam. Free enterprise in the form of unbridled greed seems to involve death and damnation on an international scale.

In contrast to the traditional enthusiasm of poets like Carl Sandburg for the spectacle of North American industrial development, Birney is more impressed by the fact of man's becoming a victim of that which he had wrought to serve him. The last line of “Oil Refinery,” “Eala! we are lost in the spell of his loopings,” is the petroleum-based society's cry of despair when it realizes how it has entangled itself; there is no victory or even heroic death for industrial man.

Birney also came to admit that the exploiters and despoilers of nature are not just “northamericans”; they come in all shapes and colors. From the eager Mexican babbling on about “developing” the state of Sinaloa to the Australian businessmen busily stripping coral off the Great Barrier Reef in “the gray woods exploding” to the Japanese fishing conglomerates sweeping the Pacific Ocean clear of tuna, swordfish, and even sharks, Birney expresses his disgust at the despoliation of a planet. The poem “a small port in the outer Fijis” is especially pertinent here since a variety of races, all of them supposedly civilized, have combined to rape a paradise. The Japanese fishing company is working in close partnership with the Australian port authorities and the New Zealand fishmeal processors. Meanwhile,

The British are all back in Suva
plotting to set Fiji free
The Indians are keeping the shops          & procreating
There are no Fijians in view.

Although Birney's view of humanity is a despairing one, it is often softened or modified when he deals with a specific human being: David, Conrad Kain, Joe Harris. Like Swift, he loves Peter and Paul but detests mankind as a verminous entity. In a sense, the Swiftian analogy can be extended: Birney's vitriolic poems are his Drapier's Letters, an attempt to save mankind's moral coinage from becoming totally debased. In “the mammoth corridors” he reflects upon the fact that “from my own lusts and neckties and novels / from ulcers vitamins bulletins accidia / i lie unshielded.” Accidia is the ultimate form of moral debasement, a state of spiritual sloth and indifference and one to which Birney is well aware that modern man is all too prone.

Birney once said that E. J. Pratt's poetry had been shaped by the belief “that we are men, uniquely nonanimal, and capable of great devotion and splendour either in the preservation or in the destruction of ourselves as men.”⁷ The other major poet whom Birney seems to admire most strongly is Chaucer, another cheerful humanist, and yet Birney himself, except in rare instances like “Vancouver Lights,” seems incapable of sharing these poets' good-natured acceptance of human folly and their admiration of human grandeur. His work tends rather to be marked by the bitter experience of the Depression, the intellectual constipation of academe, and the facts of war, nuclear proliferation, and ecological disaster. As a result his final judgment of the human race is harsh, often bitter, and sometimes despairing.

II POLITICS: “A CREED, NOT A DOGMA”

From his earliest years Birney had been exposed to those factors which contributed to the radical political views he was to adopt in adulthood. The sturdy nonconforming spirit of his mother's people, his father's beliefs resulting from a lifetime as a Canadian working man, Birney's own exposure to political corruption as a student in Vancouver, and the political activism of the Depression years all contributed to his adoption of the Marxist outlook as a young man.⁸ When World War II broke out, Birney felt that if the conflict were to have any sense or justification at all it would have to be in the political realm.

The possibility that men might find the strength and unity to reform a society which had produced such debacles as the Great Depression lent a tinge of hope to the prospect of war, and it is this hope which colors those few optimistic passages in Birney's poetry of the 1940s. In “On Going to the Wars” he was able to write confidently that

No hell unspilled by lords of war
Upon the people's flesh has ever
Parched the human heart's endeavour,
The human will to love and truth.

Both “Joe Harris” and “For Steve” are preoccupied with revising the social order. In “Joe Harris” the thoughts of a soldier killed at Dieppe are interpolated with passages from The Shortened Service for the Burial of the Dead as Approved for Use in the Canadian Army. The soldier recalls the events of a life which lasted only twenty-nine years and which included suffering, deprivation, roaming about in a near-hopeless search for work and for some meaning in life, a brief moment of married love, and then the trip overseas to his death. Unlike the soldier in Rupert Brooke's “If I should die,” with his fatalistic and even willing acceptance of death for a beloved country and social order, Joe Harris beseeches “that the world we have builded, and that has brought us to this, will perish with me.” Joe is willing to accept peacefully his own destruction “only if such as my son may go in no fear of mousy hunger, of yard-cops, and the slammed door in a Canada mildewed with the fat and unheeding.” What Joe Harris desires is a socialist society based upon love, reason, and generosity: “Yet it was nothing I learned in pews or glossy books that brought me here or availed me in these times, but only the gods that live in such words as freedom, and truth, love and reason. … I am dead for a creed, not a dogma.” To some extent at least the poem implies Birney's belief that such a society would emerge from the ashes of the war.

In any case, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the extent of Birney's optimism even during the early stages of the war. His very first book of poems contained, among others, such pessimsitic works as “Hands,” “Monody for a Century,” and “Dusk on English Bay,” all of which to a greater or lesser degree are forecasts of the impending slaughter. The title of “Monody for a Century,” for example, suggests that World War II will be the last significant act of the twentieth century. “Hands” is a bitter series of contrasts between the relative innocence of the natural world and the depraved purposes of the human intellect. “Dusk on English Bay” gloomily concedes that there is no Joshua capable of arresting the destructive forces that man has unleashed in the world. In other words, Birney's occasional expressions of hope for a better social order after the war are counterbalanced by the unhappy realization that there may be no world left after this particular war; in such a situation there is very little point in arguing over differing political theories or planning for a better world. Birney's essential pessimism about the future of society is summed up in “War Winters.” The miseries caused by the wretched winter of 1942 are not so much a result of the natural laws ruling the solar system as they are of man's folly; the “winter” to which the poem refers is in the heart of man as much as it is part of the natural world.

Whatever faint optimism Birney felt about the possibility of reforming the social order can also be detected in the companion poems “Man is a Snow” and “… Or a Wind,” which he wrote in the two years immediately following the war. The “snow” of the first poem refers to the coldness of man's heart: “Man is a snow that winters / his own heart's cabin,” and the “useless windows” are his eyes, through which he refuses to see the “lost world” of beauty, myth, and social justice. The second poem, however, suggests that a different course of action is open to mankind if it refuses to be governed by selfishness and acts instead with fraternity and courage. “… Or a Wind” tells us that knowledge can be gained through suffering; mankind's “acid tears” can eat away “these mountain walls,” the walls of ignorance, prejudice, and oppression that have kept man in misery for ages. As long as there is life, “something renews us” and in the end “we may yet roar free … / the great wind of humanity flowing free … / streaming over the future.” This seems to be substantial evidence that as late as 1947 Birney still held out some hope for a new political and social order.

Still, it would be a mistake to overrate this small degree of optimism. Birney was perfectly aware of what could happen to Western society, and in poems like “Ulysses” and “Status Quo” he outlines some of the dangers awaiting an unreformed world. The “soldier” and “sailor” of “Ulysses” are the Canadian veterans, men like the farmer in “Man on a Tractor.” Birney warns them not to be seduced too easily by “Peace, the bitchy Queen.” The “old dog Time” has granted them one last chance to establish a better rule; failing that, the “phony lords” and “suitors”—the prewar Establishment—will be only too quick to enslave the country and its workers once again. On a more universal scale, Birney warns the world at large of what is sure to happen unless profiteering, hatemongering, racism, narrow nationalism, and the unequal distribution of wealth are brought under control.

Birney had actually not been affiliated with any political dogma since he broke with the Trotskyite movement in 1941, and in a sense the poems included in Now Is Time and Strait of Anian were nearly his last hurrah as an optimist for the human race. After this, he rarely expressed a belief in the powers of the human reason. By a curious irony it was not so much the events of World War II as it was his continued observation and experience of the human race that exhausted whatever limited store of optimism he had started out with.

The critics later commented on “Birney's war poetry of the forties with its sense of involvement from the western edge of things, its Canadian scapegoats for a war they never made and yet were somehow responsible for: … its equivocal relations between (and even identity of) guilt and innocence.”⁹ This awareness of the working man as a pawn of the militarist system is reflected in much of Birney's work written in the late 1940s, as, for example, in the very fine poem “Moon Down Elphinstone,” about two young men who hide out in the mountains in order to escape military service. One of them sneaks back into town to see his friend's sister, finds that she has jilted him, gets drunk, and is picked up by the military police and forced into the army. Some time later he goes back up Mount Elphinstone to tell his friend that his mother is dying; the friend sees only a soldier coming for him and shoots him. When he realizes who the soldier is, he kills himself and the two young men lie together, unburied, in the rain.

This remarkable poem sums up all the sense of fear, frustration, and impotence experienced by ordinary working men in the face of a political system so vast and implacable as to assume the dimensions of Fate. The poem is technically a ballad, but instead of having the aristocratic heroes of the traditional ballad its heroes are New World proletarians; like Turvey, they are poor working stiffs rather than Young Lochinvar or Bonnie Dundee. The action, set in the coastal mountains, ends with typically North American violence, and thematically the poem deals with the perturbing questions of civil disobedience and Canada's fighting of foreign wars in the service of an imperial power. Whether these men serve that power or whether they try to avoid it, it kills them in the end. In “Man on a Tractor,” “Joe Harris,” and “For Steve” there was in every case a living survivor to carry on the struggle, to set right the system that had destroyed the dead soldier. In “Moon Down Elphinstone” there are no survivors; the poem ends in death, rain, and silence.

Most of Birney's work from 1949 to 1960 is marked by his horror at the nuclear calamity hanging over the head of mankind, contrasted by his enunciation of an existential belief in the power of the human heart to find a way through political and social chaos. If, for example, there is a form of socialism implicit in Conrad Kain's actions—he leaves home to help his family and to escape a stratified society, and his personal qualities help him cross the barriers of wealth and privilege in the New World—it is incidental to the central motif of a man succeeding as part of the human race because of his selflessness and his indomitable courage.

These same qualities are fundamental to the character of Mrs. Anyone, the heroine of Trial of a City. Mrs. Anyone does not subscribe to any political creed; in fact, it is her totally nonpolitical stance that saves the day for humanity. Mr. Legion, who questions the successive witnesses in an effort to shape a defense for the capitalist free-market system, only manages to elicit the most damning evidence regarding the effects of such a system. Mr. Powers, the prosecutor, on the other hand, represents a form of suicidal, world-weary nihilism; he is that part of the human spirit which bases itself upon pure reason and, being rationally convinced that man can never produce anything good, resigns itself to self-destruction. Both Legion and Powers base their arguments upon reason and logic, but the deadly impasse which their logic creates can only be resolved by a suprarational, i.e., an existentialist, position based solely upon the sanctity of life and the power of love.

It has been suggested that Legion is a fraud because he is in reality not a member of the working masses but a “folksy capitalist” who exploits them. His expulsion by Mrs. Anyone at the end of the play and her preempting of the name of Legion may thus be seen as representing Birney's long-standing dream of the overthrow of the capitalist exploiters by the masses.¹⁰ It is more likely that Trial of a City is one of the works which marks the era in which Birney quit propagandizing for socialism or any other “ism,” realizing, like Mrs. Anyone, that the world wags on regardless of philosophic or political systems, that life is more important than any system. He would continue to remark, often bitterly, upon the ironies and injustices of contemporary life but he no longer advocated any formal party line.

Something of this attitude is also reflected in the outlook of Gordon Saunders in Down the Long Table. Having awakened to the truth about political parties and dogmas, Gordon Saunders still must face the dilemma of what he as an individual can do for the welfare of humanity; does he feel that action of some sort is necessary or even justified? The questions are made all the more urgent by the fact that the time is now the early 1950s and he is facing an inquiry into his activities of twenty years earlier. Like Mrs. Anyone he has a great deal at stake. She was faced with an omnipotent force threatening the life of the race; Saunders, now an eminently successful man, faces professional destruction and possibly jail. Like Mrs. Anyone he responds, not rationally, but existentially:

I believe in man …, even in [his persecutors], for somewhere in them, as in me, is the power, however denied, to achieve the grandeur of the thinking beast, to hope and to imagine, to adventure into change, to create beauty and to share it, and in self-denial itself to assert the importance of their separate selves and the inconsequence of their mortality.¹¹

It was a fortune thing that Birney could still believe in the power of the individual spirit, because during this decade there was much evidence of the failure of mankind to act in concert. He was very depressed by the prospect of nuclear war¹² and by the political situation in the world as a whole. In 1957 he concluded a survey of the North American theater, which he considered, with the exception of O'Neill's work, to consist of diverting pap, by saying that the floundering drama was a manifestation of the fact that the world lacked a positive creed:

We know only negatives—that our democratic way of life is not very good and not very democratic but it is not as bad or as undemocratic as the totalitarian way of life; that there is no creed which can yet unify the world and no science, exact or political, which without a creed, may not destroy us. We do not know even whether anything in human affairs is really either comic or tragic any more.¹³

Here, as in his fiction and poetry, he comforts himself with a belief in the existential power of the human spirit, for in another article he says that the world needs and can attain “that necessary leadership not by a Leader but, as it were, by masses of leaders, men and women who do not necessarily draw their strength from the too-rare commodity of saintliness, nor from the too-abundant reservoir of ruthlessness, but from rational faith based on world knowledge, and some desperate hope, and much charity for that world.”¹⁴

This concept of the religion of man may be discerned in Birney's poem “El Greco: Espolio,” first published in 1960. In a sense, the carpenter who is the focus of all eyes in the painting is guilty of the crucifixion; he is a member of the society that condones such a method of execution and he earns part of his living from the manufacture of crosses. Yet he, like Conrad Kain, is essentially apolitical; the fine points of the law are a matter of indifference to him. By his devotion to his craft, and by the skill with which he works, he transcends political and legal considerations. He and Christ are related through the fact that they are both carpenters, and on another level they are the kin of all humanity through their honesty and devotion to what they do. The soldiers, servants of the political hierarchy, may dice and squabble over the prisoner's garments but the honest workman is exonerated from guilt and freed from political entanglements by his preoccupation with doing well the task which has been set for him.

Essentially, the poem deals with the question of whether religion derives from man or from God; the gesture which Christ is making in the carpenter's direction is one of “curious beseechment”; Christ may be seeking “forgiveness or blessing.” For Birney, the only religion that exists is that of the honest craftsman working as best he knows how according to a set of rules that derive from his own spirit.

Birney's experiences in Latin America form the basis of many of his political observations in the early 1960s, possibly because the effects of an inequitable system are much more obvious in that region than they are in the industrialized nations. In Latin America the evidences of poverty, illiteracy, and disease are apparent on every street corner while in North America and Europe they tend to be camouflaged or hidden away out of sight in ghettos. The vivid contrasts between rich and poor and the violent measures taken by the rich to maintain their status must have reminded Birney of the bad old days of the 1930s. In “Cartagena de Indias,” for example, he makes the point that the poor and not-poor form two distinct constituencies, one of which seeks to interact with the other and one which seeks to avoid its social and economic responsibilities. As a result, human beings are reduced to the status of plunderers. Cartagena was long the target of pirates like Drake and Cole and later traded the independence it won under Bolívar to the power of the multinational corporations and the armed forces. Now, Birney, as a tourist, feels that he is one of a new generation of plunderers, profiting from the low tourist prices that result from the country's poverty, and being plundered in turn by the various hawkers and pitchmen who molest and shortchange him.

“Caracas” is another Latin American poem which deals with the theme of men being reduced to ciphers by the pressures of the capitalist system. Men, buildings, the national hero, all are reduced to numbers—“9-mile ooze of slums,” “89 skyscrapers,” “206 bones of Bolívar”—and the numbers ultimately become dollars or are equated to dollars, the “bright bloodsmell of / ＄＄＄＄＄” that draws the sharklike exploiters in their Cadillacs. The fact that the country is the prey of exploiters reflects the persistent failure of revolutions to assuage the woes of the masses. Bolívar's bright promise, like that of the young priest in “Letter to a Cuzco Priest,” has been swept aside as the monied interests ignore the declaration of independence and the “7,000,000 lesser organisms”—their countrymen—in the pursuit of profit.

The picturesque beauty of Latin America is therefore everywhere overshadowed by the threat of revolutions past or to come. The strawberries for which Irapuato is famous remind the poet of the hearts torn out of living prisoners after the long succession of battles fought there, tribe against tribe and nation against nation. The “Sestina for the Ladies of Tehuantepec” sinuously uncovers the menace for all mankind that is inherent in the human character; the “gray iguana” of the poet's brain contains the elements of a murdering dictator like Diaz; the radioactive hotsprings and the earthquakes for which the area is noted are metaphors for the nuclear explosives and the wars that the superpowers are capable of unleashing upon each other. Here, as in “Letter to a Cuzco Priest,” the dangers facing mankind must be staved off by man's own wit and courage; no outside force can do it for him. In this case it is the women of Tehunatepec who represent everything that is enduring, beautiful, and hopeful in the human character.

Unfortunately, there is always the problem that people are too intimidated by the regime, or else live too close to the ills of their own society or are too ignorant to realize what is happening before their very eyes. The speaker in “Most of a Dialogue in Cuzco” is the typical tourist, willing to be hauled bodily over the Peruvian mountains, to admire what the guide tells her to admire, and to accept the opinions of the English-speaking guide, appointed by the government, as to local conditions. It takes not only a poet, but usually a foreign poet, to recognize the defects of a given society and to have the opportunity to speak out against it. Cartagena's Luis Lopez was in self-imposed exile for most of his life and thus felt free to criticize, however benignly, the shortcomings of his countrymen. In the case of Argentina the situation is much more dangerous; a poet who criticizes too loudly is risking death or imprisonment. Therefore, in “Buenos Aires: 1962” Birney is suggesting that only the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has written with satiric insight about the political oppression in the Argentine; the Argentinian poets have all been effectively silenced.

If Birney was perturbed by what he saw in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, he was even more horrified by the war in Vietnam. “Looking from Oregon,” which was written just after the American intervention in the Gulf of Tonkin, is a gloomy reflection upon the casual, thoughtless, recurrent fashion in which man wages war and invites his own disaster. The waves rolling in from the Pacific remind Birney of what is happening halfway around the world where they had their origin, and their recurrent motion is symbolic of the recurrence of warfare in human history. The poem is reminiscent of Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach” in that the poet's musings include a fatalistic vision of an indifferent natural world, but at least the cruelties of that world involve no sense of guilt, whereas man's persistent movement toward the “thunderheads” of war and destruction necessarily produce an overwhelming sense of guilt and depression over the perversion of his powers of reason.

Birney's views on Canada's involvement in the Vietnam war are set forth in “i accuse us,” a speech which he gave at an anti-Vietnam war rally in Toronto in 1967. To Birney, the Canadians are specialists “in waging / neither-war-nor-peace”; they are unique only in their “dynamic apathy.” At the same time that they remain officially neutral on the Vietnamese war their industries are reaping huge profits selling war materiel to the United States. This hypocrisy vis-à-vis the foreign war is only a reflection of Canada's persistent hypocrisy regarding its domestic problems; while it pretends to be the peace-loving, unified inheritor of two cultural traditions, the British and the French, it is in fact a patchwork of hostile governments each disputing the authority of the national government. Its understanding of its cultural heritage is nebulous, and in the realm of foreign affairs it lacks even the United States' ruthless willingness to wage war openly.

Birney's progressive disenchantment with Canada and its internal squabbles is recorded in the various versions of “Canada: Case History” that he published between 1948 and 1972. The first version was a mildly satirical and fairly accurate musing upon the past and future problems of a vast young country. The prognosis was uncertain, but not hopeless. Twenty years later, Birney was moved to revise the poem for Canada's centennial year, and this time the satire was more scathing; there were references to failing health and moral turpitude. Then the violent aspect of the Quebec separatist movement inspired another version, and a fourth was published in 1972 in which Canada was now diagnosed as being “Schizoid for sure and now a sado-masochist.” After this last bitter effort to express his disgust with Canada's international ineptitude and history of internal discord Birney finally withdrew permission for any of the four versions of the poem to be printed; he was “tired of being forced, by this jeremiad, to pose as a permanent sociological judge-and-jury of my own country. …”¹⁵

The decade of the 1970s did nothing to reassure Birney about the political situation either on the national or the international level; if anything, he became even more vitriolic than before in his comments upon current events and the nature of man. In 1974 he told Al Purdy:

The U.S. is an imperial power, which is difficult to like. They are sloughing off whatever democracy they have left with succeeding waves of reaction, neo-fascism and imperialism. Nothing short of a major catastrophe will stop that drift. They may even be breaking up right now, while we are watching. We in Canada must have the courage and willingness to sacrifice and wait for the time when the U.S. will no longer be able to bully.¹⁶

This pessimism is reflected in his poetry: his perception of the natural beauty of the Firth of Forth is marred by the shadow of the American nuclear submarine lying beneath the bridge upon which he stands; the garrison mentality that has brought on all the misery and slaughter of the twentieth century is revealed in his “found paean to vancouver by rudyard kipling (1890)”:

… what Vancouver wants
is …
a selection of big guns
a couple of regiments of infantry,
and later a big arsenal. …

In the same volume, what's so big about GREEN?, there is a poem, “underkill,” that brings into focus much of what has happened to the world since Birney published David and Other Poems. “underkill” is about an old trading tavern that used to draw tourists because it had been the scene of a spectacular murder. Now it is boarded up; it can no longer compete for public interest with the massive slaughter of the wars of the twentieth century and the ultimate prospect of total nuclear annihilation. People who used to be titillated at one man's murder now look for bigger things.

In an essay on several Canadian poets, Northrop Frye asks how one can define the Canadian character and answers the question by saying, in part,

We should expect in Canada … a strong suspicion, not of the United States itself, but of the mercantilist Whiggery that won the Revolution and proceeded to squander the resources of a continent, being now engaged in squandering ours. … The Canadian point of view is at once more conservative and more radical than Whiggery, closer both to aristocracy and to democracy than to oligarchy.¹⁷

All this is very true of Birney; he has a fierce contempt, expressed both in poetry and prose, for northamerican “mercantile whiggery.” The Damnation of Vancouver [commonly known as the verse play Trial of a City] is based upon this theme, and if one considers that Vancouver is the most American of all Canadian cities, the point becomes even more important.

But what of Birney's democracy, and what of his aristocracy? His democracy has always been of the socialist type; as long as he held any hope whatever for a better political order, he insisted upon the development of a socialist democracy free of the cycles of poverty and warfare that had plagued the Western world throughout most of his lifetime. As for his aristocrats, they tend to be either dead or else they are natural objects: the mountains, the forests of coastal ranges, the changeless sea. These are phenomena which man at his best may admire and even worship; at his worst he may pollute and destroy them. The fact that Birney's human aristocrats, including the Salish chief in Trial of a City, the pre-Conquest Incas, and explorers like Cook and Bering, are all dead suggests that modern man is, after all, a fallen creature.

Notes

1. A. J. M. Smith, Book of Canadian Poetry, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press / Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1943] pp. 28-29.

2. Birney, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, p. 96.

3. Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto, 1972), pp. 95-96.

4. E. K. Brown, review of Now Is Time, University of Toronto Quarterly, 15 (1946), 273.

5. Theodore Holmes, review of Selected Poems, 1940-1966, Dalhousie Review, 47 (Autumn 1967), 262.

6. Birney, The Creative Writer, p. 6.

7. Birney, “E. J. Pratt & His Critics,” Masks of Poetry: Canadian Critics on Canadian Verse, ed. A. J. M. Smith (Toronto, 1962), p. 93.

8. For a detailed description of Birney's political development see Frank Davey, Earle Birney, [Toronto: Copp Clark Pub. Co., 1971] pp. 1-19.

9. Milton Wilson, “Letters in Canada: Poetry, 1964,” University of Toronto Quarterly 34 (1965), 350.

10. Davey, Birney, p. 98.

11. Birney, Down the Long Table, p. 298.

12. Cf. “The Writer and the H-Bomb: Why Create?” Queen's Quarterly 62 (1955), 37-44.

13. Birney, “North American Drama Today: A Popular Art?” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd series, 51 (section 2) (1957), 41-42.

14. Birney, “The Modern Face of Hubris,” p. 59.

15. Birney, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, pp. 90-91.

16. Purdy, “The Man Who Killed David,” 17.

17. Frye, “Letters in Canada: Poetry 1952-1960,” p. 101.