The noteworthy documentary projects of Canadian literary scholars are too often parcelled out and undermined by the limited resources of the nation's academic publishers. A heartening exception is the exhaustively compiled and nearly complete works of A. M. Klein emerging from the University of Toronto Press during the past decade. A multivolume, complete collection of the letters of Irving Layton is similarly among the desiderata of our period in literary-critical history, but the letters are necessarily made public instead in a handful of independently published volumes such as Wild Gooseberries: The Selected Letters of Irving Layton (1989) and the present item of review, Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978. The volume's interest and usefulness are unfortunately limited by the editors' cost-enforced decision to select from Layton's innumerable correspondents of the 1950s another “great man”; their prudent choice of an American poet doubles the volume's potential market. The better reason for the choice of Creeley is that he provides the pipeline between Layton (hence Canadian poetry) and Black Mountain poetics, one of the vexed questions that this volume stands to illuminate. It can nevertheless be frustrating to hear of this crucial period of Layton's creativity solely from the distorted perspective of his loaded relations with Creeley.

The editors of this collection, Ekbert Faas and Sabrina Reed, could have battled those distortions with an introduction that situated the correspondence within the wider aesthetic debates of the period. Instead, a rather bloodless 20 pages provide little beyond synopses of key exchanges in the letters. One series of questions the introduction never raises that I consider begged by the correspondence is: What stage had Layton reached in his poetic development before exchanging letters with Creeley? What can one argue was the effect on his poetry of that correspondence? When the correspondence ceased, was Layton's poetry altered again? This lacuna is particularly odd in that the editors obviously consider their material important precisely because the years of the correspondence were striking in Layton's creative growth. Their unwillingness to take up such an issue is an absconsion from one of the editorial responsibilities peculiar to the present period of Canadian publishing.

The editors are far more successful in their annotations and index, which I constantly found useful as I proceeded through the text, especially since Creeley's intimates were unfamiliar to me. Annotations to the letters let nothing pass, and the editors' infrequent failures to identify figures referred to are acknowledged with a summary of the possibilities. Faas and Reed have done a great deal of this historical work, and its burdens must not be minimized, or its rewards for the reader. The index is similarly detailed, accurate, and useful. The volume thus offers greater access to and illumination of the letters in its conclusive than in its introductory apparatus.

The letters themselves make stimulating enough reading, although far too many of them are taken up with the interminably boring details of book and magazine production. The real span of the volume is the period from 1953, when Creeley first contacted Layton, to mid-summer 1955, when Creeley's separation from his wife and subsequent wanderungen ended the stability of place and literary purpose that had fuelled his letters. (After that two-and-a-half year period less than two dozen letters were sent through to 1978, so the book's subtitle is misleading.) At first Creeley was the more energetic correspondent; it was his habit to fire off two or three letters in a row without waiting for responses, an exuberance that can make for difficult cross-referencing as one tries to follow the exchanges. Layton was the more careful, thorough, infrequent writer; during the school year his backbreaking routine crippled the correspondence. From September 1953 to January 1954, for example, 17 letters from Creeley were exchanged with 7 from Layton. When Creeley left Mallorca to teach at Black Mountain College, however, his academic duties greatly reduced his letter writing, so much so that Layton had to write two or three times, often on urgent matters, to receive a reply. By the fall of 1955, the chief subject of the correspondence was the frequency of the correspondence—a sure sign of imminent postal death.

As stylists, the two men offer fascinating contrasts. Creeley gives the effect of great spontaneity; he deploys curious interjections (“OK,” “well,” “voilà”) like grapeshot and clearly never bothers to organize his thoughts before writing. This can give his reader a feeling of greater access to “the real man”; Layton's letters are more consciously and carefully structured and styled. A juxtaposition of the two styles indicates significant differences of temperament and (oddly enough, given Layton's persona) energy:

I had damn well sworn not to write till I had got a poem for you. Which is stupid, etc., etc. Ok. And to hell with that. Did I send you letter about (or in answer to) yr poems for booklet, i.e., I had one here but don't know whether or not it got mailed, in chaos, etc. Don't damn well mind. I'll write again soon, i.e., I want to put out another mailing piece along with O/s book (late October), and will need title for yrs, etc.

(Creeley to Layton, 18 Sept. 1953, 42-43)

By the sound of your short note which came this morning, I think you didn't receive my last letter to you, which was a substantial one and which contained about five new poems. Judging by your previous letters, I feel certain that you would not have left them go by without some comment; all the more so, since two or three of them were among my happiest efforts. A pity. How does one go about tracing a lost letter?

(Layton to Creeley, 23 Sept. 1953, 43)

This battle of expletive parataxis and defensive hypotaxis continues throughout the letters, although in late exchanges Layton's loud familiar voice begins to sound. Early on, however, he clearly feels that he must interpose syntax and polish between himself and his correspondent.

This matter of style relates to the roles the two men took up in relation to one another, and the difficulties of enacting those roles for long. At the beginning Creeley is clearly mentor and Layton ephebe (despite the American's juniority). Layton, neglected and impoverished in an indifferent country, was grateful for and flattered by Creeley's notice. He subjected himself happily to Creeley's critique, referring to him quickly as the “ideal reader” he had been looking for all along (8). Creeley wisely shrugged off the appellation (13), but continued for numerous letters to offer detailed responses to Layton's poetry. He was in fact astonishingly generous in the time he gave it; I suspect however that he was disappointed if not hurt by Layton's inability or unwillingness to do the same. Poems Creeley sent to Layton received little more than polite admiration (33, 37, 40-41, 44). And when Creeley urged Layton to involve himself in detail in the editing of the Black Mountain Review, Layton never really intervened. To Layton, Creeley's international literary contacts were daunting evidence of the American's having “arrived”; he felt himself noticed by a far more respected poet than was in fact the case. This explains his reticence, but as Creeley thought himself as much marginalized and ignored in Mallorca as Layton in Canada, he must have hoped for a more equal meeting of minds.

By the time Layton felt confident enough to engage Creeley more candidly, the correspondence was waning. The difficulties of Creeley's personal life were taking all his attention, and he was not able to respond in kind. After Creeley's Divers Press published Layton's In the Midst of My Fever in 1954, Layton became more argumentative, partly because of the volume's success, partly because he and Creeley were now on more even terms. He prepared the ground with a major offensive against the obscurities of Creeley's prose style, aligning them incautiously with the stylistic affectations of Charles Olson and Cid Corman (168). He then proceeded to stake out poetic territory for himself more forthrightly, acknowledging that his was different from Creeley's and suggesting frankly that they would not be able to agree on all issues (169-70). Although Creeley responded in relatively good humour, his letters came farther and farther apart, the urgency of the friendship having—for him at least—passed.

Creeley's readings of Layton tend to be technical; an interesting early exchange over Layton's “Vexata Quaestio” reveals the predilections of the two minds (6-9). When asked by Creeley if the poem was “self-satire” (8), Layton replied windily, “subject or theme, Hebraism vs. Hellenism; modern man torn between the Hebraic/Christian impulse toward good and the Greek impulse toward beauty and self-expression …” (9). To this Creeley responded, “You don't ever want to speak for ‘Everyman,' when you can speak so damn finely for yourself” (13). He charted the ironies of the poem and concluded,

For myself, there is an active line or movement all thru [“Vexata Quaestio”], i.e., a present action, etc. That makes the tension, etc. Here [in “Composition in Late Spring”], not so much. And bunches of simile & metaphor then apt to bog, since action isn't pulling them along thru. Well, fuck it.

(14)

Creeley's attempt to work a new lean structure into American poetry made him respond to Layton's own cleanness of line, and his comments on Layton's poetry are primarily useful today if we share an interest in Creeley's aesthetics.

As self-critic Layton was not usually so obtuse as he was about “Vexata Quaestio” (the earliness of that exchange perhaps initiating a desire to impress Creeley). As the letters increased in frequency, he became more articulate and exacting in his sense of his own writing and subsumed Creeley's interest in technical matters. I suspect that these self-commentaries will provide the meat and potatoes of the book for its scholarly audience, as future readings of Layton poems will necessarily address Layton's own thoughts at the time of their composition. When, for instance, he lists “the main ideas” of “The Birth of Tragedy” as

the necessary antinomies of action and thought, love and death, the relationship between intellect and passion (“the sensual moths,” “the insurgent blood,” the ascending orders), poetry that holds everything in suspension and reconciles all contradictions, the “genius” of the universe (I'm no mystic, though) who blows birthday candles for the world (N[ietzsche]'s doctrine of eternal recurrence) and for the artist.

(20)

Layton shows himself to be an acute reader of his own poem and usefully illuminates some of its more difficult images. Each of the book's readers will decide the critical status of such pronouncements; those going in fear of intentionalism will eschew them. I have found it useful to have in this volume a compendium of Layton's comments on his own poems, juxtaposed with careful examination of the various drafts of the poems concerned. These letters will indeed provide some real insights into the nature of his creativity.

Another scholarly virtue of the book will be its biographical news. Layton's life during the period of intense correspondence was stable and relatively quiet; his marriage to Betty Sutherland was still on an even keel, and his professional situation was constant. We hear amusing titbits about a rather flat “orgy” held to celebrate an issue of CIV/n (131), we have a full portrait of the publication history of In the Midst of My Fever (184), we get new insights, however cryptic, into the notorious squabble between Layton and Louis Dudek (216), and wonder whether Creeley's devastating opinion of Dudek's poetry fomented the rupture (74-83); but we really have no profound news here about the Layton biography. Of Creeley, on the other hand, we have a dramatic portrait of a turbulent life, leading him from Mallorca and marriage via Black Mountain College to Bohemia, divorce and Vancouver. We see him as poet, publisher, editor, and academic, as well as literary networker extraordinaire. I suspect that Creeley scholars will have the more exciting “read” from the book for these reasons.

As for my question of influences, it will take careful examination before we can conclude that Creeley influenced Layton's poetics substantially, or failed to. (The question of the broader Black Mountain influence upon him is pretty well settled here; he responds negatively to Olson and “projective verse” throughout the correspondence. If there was such an influence from Black Mountain poetics it was mediated almost entirely by Creeley.) There is one example of Layton adopting Creeley's poetics so clearly that the American poet responded a little diffidently (166-67), but the case is isolated. And, as I have remarked, later in the correspondence Layton became far more resistant to Creeley's readings of his poetry and of poetic form in general. This debate will continue. One thing we can conclude safely for the time being is that the contact with Creeley stimulated Layton's creativity enormously: any student of Layton will remark the coincidence of Layton's greatest period, the years of “The Birth of Tragedy,” “The Cold Green Element,” “First Snow: Lake Achigan,” and “In the Midst of My Fever,” with the years of exchange with Creeley. But these were also the years of Contact and Contact Press and CIV/n, years of marital stability and relative prosperity. Creeley may not account solely for the Layton anni mirabilis, but he figures large in the sources of that achievement.

For me the most fascinating current in the letters, however, is the gradual emergence of what we now think of as the popular Layton persona. In late 1954 the diffidence, politeness, and stylish syntaxes of his early letters decreased, and the brusque and challenging tones of the counter-philistine emerged. By the end of the volume, we have heard familiar tirades against the favourite Layton targets, from critics and academics to politicians and governments, in the familiar Layton mood of nose-thumbing and bombast. Contrast the polite style I noted above with the following diatribe:

For this country the shits and pisses etc., the sex and scatology are a necessary antidote to the prevalent gentility and false idealism. Aside from the purely local and geographical I am convinced that the only protest, the only effective protest that a man can make today to the pressures seeking to annihilate him either physically or spiritually is the biological one. … The teachings of a vaporous Christian idealism for almost two thousand years has [sic] falsified our position; to remind ourselves that men in addition to being God-seekers and truth-seekers are also farting and excreting animals is a piece of wisdom that might save us from the follies of pride and over-weening ambition.

(Layton to Creeley, 20 Mar. 1955, 221)

The passage would slip easily into any of the forewords and prologues Layton was to compose in the following years. It's difficult to say whether this is a truly new note in the 1955 Layton persona or whether unfamiliarity with Creeley made him repress it earlier, but other shifts in his personality at the time suggest the former alternative. It was at about this time that he really began to resist Creeley's responses to his poetry; that he began to apotheosize sexuality as a clearer of the spiritual air (177); that he noted his rupture with Dudek, another major determinant of his later persona (216); that he began to write simplistic poetry celebrating his salacious reputation, enclosing “Admonition and Reply,” for example, in a letter to Creeley, circa early February 1955 (208); and that he began to rationalize the publication of any and all poems, throwaways, and squibs, bad with good (214). These typical aspects of Layton's notoriety are distinctly absent from the first year and a half of his correspondence with Creeley. It is noteworthy moreover that Creeley's declining interest in the correspondence coincides roughly with these changes. Certainly some of them would have displeased him: Layton's using Canadian gentility as an excuse for verse scatology, for instance, would have struck him as parochial, and Creeley was meticulously discriminating in his policy of inclusion in collections of poems (hence the success, indeed, of In the Midst of My Fever, for the arrangement and selection of which he was mostly responsible). It may be that Creeley's divorce and subsequent rootlessness were the superficial reasons for an end to a correspondence that had become difficult for other reasons. At any rate, the spectacular emergence of the newly constructed Layton ego in these letters is one of the volume's chief pleasures for those who do not take that ego as the basis of a judgement of Layton's literary achievement (all too small a constituency).

Other critical agendas will no doubt prompt more and less favourable responses to the matter available in these letters. I find enough of interest in them to justify their publication and to promote some interesting speculations, but I persist in feeling that a different net might have caught some more nourishing fish. This volume provides an important documentary source for Creeley and Layton scholars, and will continue to be referred to until it is superseded by complete editions of the letters of both men. It does indicate, however—and this as a last word—how much needed in Canadian letters exactly that supersession is, so that we can one day edit the works of important writers in the exhaustive, comprehensive and critical way that is now possible in other English-speaking literary traditions.