Books in Canada

IN 1956, ANTHONY FRISCH, A poet of the day, organized a national writing competition for Canadian high school students, publishing the winning entries in a special anthology called First Flowering. The book is sometimes cited today because it contains the first appearance between covers of a poet named Dennis Lee, "Age 16, University of Toronto Schools, Toronto, Ontario, Grade XII." It also contains the juvenilia of many future journalists, such as Paul Grescoe (age 15), Michele Landsberg (16), and David Lewis Stein (19).

But what's chilling about First Flowering, perhaps, are two poems by Edward Lacey, a grade 9 student at Lindsay Collegiate Institute in Ontario, or rather, the author's footnote to them. "I wish to dissociate my present self from these two poems," Lacey wrote, "as they represent an emotional excrescence of my adolescence of which I am now neither proud nor ashamed, but which I consider neither to be good poetry, nor to give promise of better, unless in the very narrow vein of the nature lyric."

Clearly, Lacey was one bright 13-year-old. Already, in First Flowering, you can see the sensibility that grew into his collection The Form of Loss (privately printed in 1965 with financial help from Lee and from Margaret Atwood) and in the two that followed: Path of Snow: Poems 1951-1973 (1974) and Later: Poems 1973-78 (1978). Along with some memorable critical surveys of Canadian poetry that used to appear in the little mag Edge, these titles are the sum of Lacey's output, but hardly the sum of his importance. Lacey was probably Canada's first significant gay poet (coming along about 40 years after Elsa Gidlow, Canada's first important lesbian one), and like her he was a lifelong bohemian and expatriate.

What he called an early "mishap" with drugs at the U.S.-Mexican border led to his permanent banishment from the States, and his homosexuality (and the attendant guilt about it, tied to his Roman Catholic upbringing) made him intolerant of Canada on the grounds that he thought Canada was intolerant of him. He lived the life of a wandering teacher and tutor, spending long years in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, teaching English as a second language and cultivating alcoholism and outrageous behaviour. At one point, he confessed his sympathetic similarity to Paul Bowles, but actually Lacey was a very different type of expat. I never met him, alas, but my sense is that with his remarkable gift for languages and extraordinary intelligence, combined with expatriation on the one hand and disdain for social conventions on the other, he was a sort of cross between Michael Ignatieff and Milton Acorn. Imagine! His friend Henry Beissel affectionately recalls not only the brilliance of his mind and the luminescence of his talent but also Lacey's "dubious hygienic habits, his alcoholic soirees, his cutting rhetoric, his hypochondriac tantrums...."

The quotation comes from Beissel's nicely turned introduction to a new book, A Magic Prison: Letters from Edward Lacey (Oberon), edited by David Helwig. The letters in question are all to Beissel, and cover the period 1964 to 199 1. Meaty letters they are, too, in their honesty and soul-searching, reminiscent somewhat of Hector de St-Denys Garneau's journals, except of course that the subjects are different. The subjects in this case are mainly Lacey's own problems, how "I left Canada 10 years ago, when I still had pretty firm control on my self, and my crise spirituelle was stiII brewing," and his love/hate -or rather, love/hate/love/love, for it was more complicated than usual -- relationship with the country that he felt had nothing to offer him but that he couldn't quite get out of his system.

This is one of the disquieting facts about Lacey revealed in these letters: he really didn't like Canada much. Others are a streak of both racism and pro-Americanism. Also, the letters reveal a tendency to put down even the people, such as Fraser Sutherland, who were among the few champions of his work. He wrote wonderful travel poems and long, complicated, and frequently hilarious letters describing his rare capacity for getting into trouble with authority. But always underneath there was sadness. "I am now 33," he writes Beissel in 197 1, "and feel impossibly old." Booze and bitterness will do that to a person.

In 1984, Sky Gilbert wrote a play entitled Lacey or Tropicsnows: Theatrical Tales of a Canadian Exile in Brazil. It was performed at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto. Inevitably, it brought a little burst of attention to this at once riveting and contradictory figure. So too may the publication of A Magic Prison. That would be good. For when Lacey died recently, only weeks before his letters were published, he had once again sunk into an obscurity so great that the only report of his death appeared in Xtra, the Toronto gay and lesbian paper. To the mainstream press, he was a non-person, to be ignored accordingly.

Douglas Fetherling's biography of A. Y. Jackson is forthcoming from Quarry Press.