Time doesn't cure all wounds.
More than 20 years ago, the Montreal poet and critic Louis Dudek trashed Patrick Lane's Poems: New and Selected in a group review in The Globe and Mail that was headlined The Poet As Rapist. Lane's poetry "reeks of blood and carnage, mangled animals and people, and the tone of his voice has the hard reality of an executioner's bark," complained Dudek from his academic perch at McGill University, where he taught English literature. "What bothers me is the state of barbarism that poetry has reached," he continued. "What began as a call for realityhas ended as coarseness and brutishness of emotions, cynicism, sardonic humour and suicidal rage."
The review provoked furious letters, including one from Lane himself, claiming that there is "truer humanity in my poetry than anything Mr. Dudek has ever written." Then, as if in affirmation of that rebuttal, Lane's book won the 1979 Governor-General's Award for poetry. That should have settled the matter.
Not so.
"Does Louis Dudek still have the power to hurt you?" Lane was asked, as an afterthought to an interview prompted by the publication of Lane's new book, The Bare Plum of Winter Rain, his first collection of poetry in five years.
"He didn't hurt me, he pissed me off," Lane says after a reflective pause and a bark of a laugh. "He pissed me off big-time. He implied that I used violence to titillate rather than as a legitimate aspect of the human world. When I got the GG, I sent him a telegram: 'Dear Louis, the rapist just got the GG's award.'
"I thought, 'Who is this guy sitting in his little ivory tower in Montreal teaching at a university?' He's never been in the bush, never worked in the mills, never worked in the mines, never saw people with their hands cut off. I know everyone suffers in his own way, and everyone's suffering is legitimate, but for him to think that the things I was writing about were invented . . ."
Startlingly bitter words from a man who, through the course of our conversation, had seemed so mellow about a catalogue of tragedies -- his older brother's tragic death from a cerebral hemorrhage; his father's random murder when a disgruntled customer shot up the business where he worked; years of poverty and manual slog in a succession of logging and sawmill towns in British Columbia; his broken marriages and ongoing battle with the bottle.
True, there have been times lately when life has overwhelmed Lane and muted his poetic voice -- when he was caught up with the death of his mentor, Al Purdy, and the criminal madness of his close friend, B.C. writer Stephen Reid, who famously went back on the needle, robbed a bank, and ended up in prison. "I felt I had lost that central voice that carries through a whole book," he admits.
But then he printed out all the poems he had written over five or six years -- and in them he heard all sorts of different voices dealing with moments of tragedy and love and, he says, "I fell quite in love with it."
The Bare Plum of Winter Rain (Harbour) is the result. It is elegiac in tone, and has poems dedicated to Purdy, Lane's mother Dixie, his brother Richard (Red) Lane and Gwendolyn MacEwen, "one of the finest writers of her generation in the English language."
Beginning with Water, a poem about the pain of being human, it culminates in The Sealing,in which Lane places his poems in an envelope sealed with "my insignia, my mark, my making" and presents them to a person who is unnamed, but who is clearly meant to be his partner, Saskatchewan-born poet Lorna Crozier.
"You are the one I have made them for," he writes, "in the quiet of my room, in the dead of night, one word and then another, and no one can break it but you."
Over a bowl of corn chowder and a glass of tomato juice, he says he saw a lot of death when he first looked at the poems, but then, "I began to find the affirmative love poems about Lorna.In the middle of death you have to find sensuality or some kind of human contact; otherwise you are lost. For me, that has always been her."
Such a serene maturity, I thought, even though I could catch an occasional whiff of his ongoing struggle with addiction oozing out of his pores. Moreover, as shown earlier, the wounds from an ancient, if hostile, review from a largely forgotten poet like Dudek can still be felt and reacted to.
Lane's anger is more than a cautionary tale for cavalier reviewers; it is a glimpse into the desperate man the poet once was, what Leonard Cohen might have meant when he said, "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Born in Nelson, B.C., on the cusp of the Second World War, Lane and his two older brothers grew up in a female-dominated world. Storytelling was a major form of entertainment in a pre-televison era, and in a family that couldn't afford a piano.
"I always knew that what happened during the day was not enough," he explains. "You had to invent and expand and decorate things to make the day more interesting." For Lane, that ability to "lie," as he puts it, is what writing is about -- it is "a kind of lying that tries to reach the truth."
Nothing changed during those years," he remembers. "It was an absolutely seamless sequence of events in a world without men, and the men who came back were damaged" -- not really knowing who they were, and having no connection to the children they had left behind.
Looking back, Lane thinks that a lot of the storytelling grew out of a desire to "validate a period of our life to our father, to tell him who we had been while he was away during the war."
There's a poem in Plum called The Night of My Conception,in which Lane writes about his father searching for him and his mother, "her mouth urgent, whispering, Find him, find him," while his older brothers cry out to him from their "cages behind the wall." Finally, Lane goes to his father and, he writes, "gave myself into his hands, into the dark of my mother's only body, long and white."
What Lane is saying in that poem, he thinks, is that his family is the three boys who grew up together -- and that there is another, separate family that consists of his mother and father and the two children they had after the war.
Lane himself was married for the first time when he was still in high school. "My brother Johnny got married in June because he got his girlfriend pregnant," he recounts. "My brother Dick got married in September because he got his girlfriend pregnant. And I got married in February because I got my girlfriend pregnant."
He still remembers telling his father the news, driving to school one morning. "Your only trouble is that your brain is between your legs," was his father's response. "You made your bed, now you must lie in it."
Memories of those years resonate in poems such as Morpho Butterfly, which is dedicated to his first wife, Mary, and the time when"You still/ lay in bed with our first son in your arms,/ your thin breasts bleeding milk."
It was, as well, a time when Lane "was building a highway in the mountains/ so far away from my mind I don't remember it . . ."
From this same era comes The Macaroni Song, a jaunty yet tender lament in which Lane atones for the three tomatoes he stole from Mister Sagetti's garden because "I was poor and I/ wanted, for my children,/ a little more."
It was Al Purdy who finally gave Lane "permission," as he describes it, to become a poet. Lane had starting writing in 1960 or '61, "out of the world of northern B.C. logging camps, which was the world I was living in," he says, but I had no sense of any living writers."
He thought all writers were dead, he recalls, until he moved to Vancouver in 1964, and went to hear "an absolutely amazing man" -- Al Purdy, as it turns out -- read poetry. Later he and Purdy went drinking at the Cecil Hotel in Vancouver.
"He was 10 or 15 years older than me," Lane remembers, "but he was real and he was a poet and he was a man's man, which was important to me coming out of the '40s and '50s, as I had." At some stage in the evening, they decided to visit poet John Newlove. They bought a lot of beer on the way, although neither of them needed more to drink.
Lane was so "excited about being with this guy," that he hauled off and threw a bottle of beer at the moon. Not surprisingly, it smashed and the beer splattered over the street. Purdy, older and wiser, stopped and gave Lane some advice: "Only throw empty bottles at the moon."
Lane laughs delightedly at the memory. "It was the greatest metaphor that I had ever heard in my life, and Al was shaking his head at me sort of to say, 'I'm not sure this guy is going to make it, he shouldn't be allowed outside by himself.' "
And now Purdy is dead, and Lane is standing on his metaphorical shoulders and writing memorial lines for his old friend, like these from the poem The Old Ones in Plum:
. . .all that time
gone now. Still, they must have dreamed
or maybe it was only him,
balanced on his haunches in a frieze of wild rose
staring down at them and taking his body
among them for a moment,
snow cutting his eyes, the wind not yet
ready to die in those sagebrush hills
where the coulee lay below Six Mile
and the old ones waiting for it to end."
Nobody would dare to question the poet's compassion or his humanity nowadays.
Sandra Martin