A lot of correspondence went back and forth between Robert Creeley and Irving Layton about In The Midst Of My Fever. Creeley was living in Mallorca and Layton was living in Montreal. And Creeley was publishing the book under the imprint of his Divers Press.
The book project began in 1953, but printed copies of the book didn’t make it to Montreal (and to the rest of Canada) until early in 1955. The pub date on the title page says “The Divers Press 1954.”
The book was printed in Mallorca, where printing costs were a lot less than in Canada. Layton knew all about Canadian printing costs, being a partner (with Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster) in Contact Press (1952-1967). Layton had paid a third of the costs for Cerberus (1952), a three-headed dog book he shared with Dudek and Souster. And he had paid the bill for his early Contact Press books: Love The Conqueror Worm (1953), The Long Pea-Shooter (1954), and The Cold Green Element (1955). Creeley was footing the bill for In The Midst Of My Fever.
In the period 1953-1955 there was no greater Irving Layton fan than Robert Creeley. In The Black Mountain Review, Creeley had written:
Irving
Layton may well be for the historian of literature, at any rate, the First
Great
Canadian Poet—he has his bid in certainly. Canadian, English, American,
or
whatever, his poetry can be very good.
Creeley was backing up his praise of Layton by publishing In The Midst Of My Fever.
Although Layton was only two years younger than Charles Olson and fourteen years older than Robert Creeley, reading the correspondence between them reveals that Creeley and Layton were very much thinking of one another as contemporaries.
The publication of In The Midst Of My Fever is a long small press tale. It takes two years for the book to make it into print. In Creeley’s case, life intervenes again and again. On Layton’s end, he keeps writing new poems and sending them to Creeley, suggesting adding the new ones to the book and deleting some of the older and weaker ones. There are problems with the printer. There are problems with Spanish Customs and Canadian Customs. There are quite a number of typos in the book, which necessitates a printed errata sheet. Every change or glitch eats up time.
Finally, in early 1955, there is the book In The Midst Of My Fever, one of Layton’s most accomplished early books hailing from his first decade as a published poet.
Later in life, through chance or fate or luck, Creeley and I wound up being in the same university English department for three Fall semesters. After a short amount of time, we got to talking. One topic area that we visited and revisited was Irving Layton’s poetry. Creeley’s repeated question to me was this: “Ken, why did Irving’s poetry become so terrible after A Red Carpet For The Sun?” I tried out several theories on him, but he wasn’t accepting of any of them. I also didn’t see Layton’s later poetry as being uniformly terrible. I argued that there were two or three good poems in the later books. Bob wasn’t accepting of that theory either. All he knew was that, in the fifties, Irving’s poetry had been so wonderful. And then. . .
*
In the 1950s, Irving Layton was writing the most exciting and most innovative poetry in Canada. At that time, he was a small press author and a poet’s poet. In the Canadian cultural milieu, A.J.M. Smith, Frank Scott, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster were all admirers of his work. In the U.S. he had an even bigger fan club: Charles Olson, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and even Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams were all Layton fans. (He wouldn’t have a presence in the general Canadian culture until Jack McClelland published A Red Carpet for the Sun in 1959.)
The 1950s were, by no means, an uninteresting decade in Canadian poetry. Accomplished books by P.K Page, Louis Dudek, Anne Wilkinson and F.R. Scott all appeared at that time. So did early work by Al Purdy, Eli Mandel, Phyllis Webb , D.G. Jones and Leonard Cohen. However, to a number of observers, Layton’s poetry stood head and shoulders above the rest.
Why might this be so?
Layton wrote nothing like his two Canadian partners in Contact Press, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster. And he REALLY didn’t write anything like Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Cid Corman, Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams. Layton was something of an outsider in the North American poetic tradition, and it was his outlaw status that was one of the factors in other poets latching on to his work. He was a steady contributor to magazines like The Black Mountain Review, Civ/n, Contact and Origin.
In the late 1980s, in conversation, Layton said to me, “Ken, if you write six great poems you’re a great poet.” And I knew that that was something in which he totally believed.
Looking to write masterpieces, Layton found an interesting way to scale his major poems. And it was totally different than the way the other poets in his milieu were putting poems together. Dudek and Souster’s lyric poems orbited what I would call “the sonnet tradition.” Most of their poems were between ten and twenty lines, and their modes of connection worked quite similarly to the way that sonnets work. Creeley was almost epigrammatic in his work; Olson was epic; Cid Corman was flirting with the haiku tradition; Pound was epic and tragic; and William Carlos Williams was pioneering his own convincing brand of Modern free verse.
None of this was what Layton was doing at all.
In his attempt to write “great poems”/anthology poems, Layton had stumbled upon a way to write lyric poems that was solely his own. The poems were larger than the poems in what I am calling “the sonnet tradition,” and they were shorter than the poem-essays that we would see in the sixties from poets like Al Purdy, Dennis Lee and, occasionally, John Newlove.
They were poems that were usually between twenty and forty lines. They took on grand themes. They dramatized and they apostrophized. They dabbled in Surrealism. They struck a blow for eroticism and sexuality in what was (still) a Victorian Anglo Canada. And they placed the poet, in all of his glorious egotism, at the absolute centre of things. The poems were brash and bold and a revelation to his fellow poets on both sides of the border.
*
In The Midst Of My Fever is bracketed by two other Layton collections—The Long Pea-shooter (Laocoon Press/Contact Press, 1954) and The Cold Green Element (Contact Press, 1955)—that deserve more than a glance. In the 1950s, Layton was cranking out a book or two of poetry just about every year. The Long Pea-shooter precedes In The Midst Of My Fever and The Cold Green Element follows it.
The Long Pea-shooter is dedicated to Robert Creeley and mostly contains Layton’s satiric and inside baseball/Can Lit poems. Many of these poems have not survived their moment. In terms of scale, they are either longer than the usual Layton poem (“Prologue” is five pages of rhymey satiric stuff) or are short “punchline poems.” His poem about T.S. Eliot is ten lines long and reads as follows:
T.S. ELIOT
Harvard
and English mist;
the
sick Christian;
the
American tourist
with
an interest in monasteries
rather
than castles:
in
shrines for aging knees;
a zeal
for poetry without zest,
without
marrow juices;
at
best, a single hair
from
the beard of Dostoievsky.
In terms of what is to come, The Long Pea-Shooter can be seen to be the last of Layton’s apprentice work. The short satiric poems don’t do much or say much that is interesting, and the larger lyric poems—like “Look, The Lamps Are All Around Us’ and “Rain At La Minerve-- are still second tier. That is all about to change with In The Midst Of My Fever.
The Cold Green Element is the book that immediately follows In The Midst Of My Fever, and it continues with the breakthroughs that Layton has made. The poems in this collection are far more accomplished than those in The Long Pea-Shooter, and the book has a formidable title poem—“The Cold Green Element”— that can be put forward fairly convincingly as one of Layton’s major poems:
At the
end of the garden walk
the
wind and its satellite wait for me;
their
meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but
the black-hatted undertaker
who,
passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is
also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a
great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,
who
now hangs from the city’s gates.
The poem builds density and speed in the third, fourth and fifth stanzas, and attempts to stick the landing in its last three image-soaked stanzas. Layton speaks of old women:
in
whose old pupils the sun became
a
bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and
hanging from ancient twigs
my murdered selves
sparked
the air like the muted collision
of
fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a
black dog with yellow eyes;
he too
by someone’s inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the
broad catalpa leaves.
But
the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who
sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and
misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a
breathless swimmer in that cold green element.
*
The poetic difference between The Long Pea-Shooter
and In The Midst Of My Fever is considerable. It is as if all of the
lights have suddenly been turned on. Layton’s poetic ambitions have finally
resulted in poetic fruition. For the next five years—from 1954 until 1959—Layton
will write better poetry than anyone else in Canada.
The poems in In The Midst Of My Fever are all quite accomplished and do not suffer from Layton’s more satiric urges or his earlier and later propensity to get overly didactic. He is a lot less prescriptive and proscriptive in these poems. These poems are very much in the moment, and the quality of language and turns of phrase are suddenly finely focused and poetically accurate. Perhaps that is due to Creeley’s influence or Creeley’s editing—it is hard to say. These poems set a higher bar than anything that Layton has written up until this point. In this collection Layton is far less the aspiring prophet and much more a poet in possession of all of the right tools and tone.
Lines move with ease, images sparkle and compel, and a poetic vision of human life and art suddenly blossoms. Of the many fine poems that the collection includes, there are three poems that really stand apart from the rest. They are “Seven O’Clock Lecture,” “The Birth of Tragedy,” and “Composition in Late Spring.”
All three poems can be considered to be some of the best poems that Layton ever wrote. Here are a few stanzas taken from these poems:
Filling their ears
with
the immortal claptrap of poetry
These
singular lies with the power
to get themselves
believed,
The
permanent bloom on all time-infected things;
Indicating the will to falsehood in the hearts of men,
The
music in a pismire’s walk, the necessary glory of dung,
immortal coal of the
universe. . .
(“Seven O’Clock Lecture”)
And I
observe how the sensual moths
big with odour and sunshine
dart into the perilous shrubbery;
or
drop their visiting shadows
upon the garden I one year made
of
flowering stone to be a footstool
for the perfect gods
who, friends to the ascending orders,
will
sustain this passionate meditation
and
call down pardons
for
the insurgent blood.
(“The Birth Of Tragedy”)
When
Love ensnares my mind unbidden
I am lost in the usual way
On a
crowded street or avenue
Where
I am lord of all the marquees,
And the traffic cop moving his lips
Like a poet composing
Whistles a discovery of sparrows
About my head.
(“Composition In Late Spring”)
The reader is ensnared by the seeming ease of
composition, the aptness of chosen adjectives, and by the elevation of some
commonplaces into the realm of poetry. It isn’t so much “a will to falsehood”
or a will to power—“A word after a word after a word is power “(Margaret Atwood)—as it is a will to poetry.
*
In 1956, Jonathan Williams would publish Layton’s first selected poems, The Improved Binoculars, with a praising introduction by William Carlos Williams. It would be followed in 1959 by a larger selection in A Red Carpet For The Sun, published by Jack McClelland at McClelland and Stewart. Layton won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for A Red Carpet For The Sun, and his reputation in Canada was established.
After that he was no longer a small press author or a literary press author. Nor was he any longer involved in Contact Press (he had been replaced by Peter Miller). And shortly thereafter the intense correspondence that he had with Robert Creeley throughout the 1950s ceased to be. From conversations with Creeley, I came away with the impression that, at that time, he ceased to find much merit in Layton’s later poetry, so there now was nothing much to talk about. In the mid-fifties, In The Midst Of My Fever was an intriguing event in North American poetry.
Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. Norris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine, where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing for thirty-three years. He currently resides in Toronto.