Gwendolyn MacEwen

This article first appeared in The Varsity (Sept. 1995).

Rosemary Sullivan, an English professor at the University of Toronto's Erindale campus, says Canadians are caught in a kind of cultural amnesia. That's one of the reasons she wrote the recently released Shadowmaker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen (Harper Collins, 1995).

"Canadian culture doesn't have as many literary biographies as one would expect at this point in its history," says Sullivan. "And we need to recover those cultural moments and figures."

Canadian literature has reached a point in the 1990s where it can begin to look back critically and with nostalgia on the 1960s, when it made its first major cultural impact.

"In the 1960s a national project was acting as a catalyst to push the writing," says Sullivan.

Social events like Expo '67, which celebrated Canada's 100th birthday, and the introduction of the Canadian flag in 1965 help spur a growing nationalism. Canadian literature as we have come to know it was born in this period. And MacEwen, who published more than 20 books before her often troubled life ended in 1987, was a significant part of that birthing process.

An intensely talented writer with an original, if somewhat odd, personality, MacEwen serves as a emblem of the writers that laid the foundation of the Canadian imagination.

"It's valuable to write about her to show how textured and rich that period of the 1960s was," says Sullivan. "MacEwen had an originality and range as a writer. And she lived in a time when Canadian culture was just beginning to define itself."

Born in Toronto's west end in 1941, MacEwen grew up in the Keele and Bloor district. After she dropped out of high school two months before graduation, she saw her first novel, Julian the Magician, published in New York City when she was only 19-years-old. That novel has since been called one of the great works of the modern period.

Her later books included 11 collections of poetry, two short story collections, a second novel and three children's books. She also followed up her consuming interest in mythology by teaching herself Hebrew, Arabic and classical and modern Greek. Looking back on her life, it is difficult to come to a simple understanding of such a complex person.

Sullivan sums up MacEwen's life this way: "It's the narrative of a young woman inventing herself out of almost impossible odds with fierce intellectual training, turning herself into a remarkable writer at a moment in time that was very interesting."

Simple enough, perhaps. But is it enough to know that MacEwen's mother was in and out of mental institutions her whole life? Can the poetry be explained by the knowledge that MacEwen's father wasted his talent for photography and ended up an alcoholic on skid row, passing on his artistic ambitions to his youngest daughter? Sullivan thinks not.

"MacEwen's life had a tragic cast," she says, though she's quick to point out that no one should feel sorry for her.

"Pity implies a type of condescension," she says, "and there's too much intellectual and imaginative energy there [in MacEwen's life] for one not to feel amazing admiration."

Sullivan says she was anxious to make it clear how exciting the writer's life can be, although illustrating that life is difficult because so much of it is lived in the mind. MacEwen's early life had much pain, she says, but it also demonstrated a remarkable courage and prepared her to be the sort of writer that she would become.

"As her family was falling apart, MacEwen was writing magical books about magicians," she says. "She was always seeking some way of turning pain into affirmation."

MacEwen's only criticism of modern poetry was that it often seemed to be a reflection on pain. And she, who was so aware of the dark side of the psyche, wanted to celebrate life.

A writer with a Romantic temperament, MacEwen took the elements that life had given her and consolidated them in her art. One of her lovers told Sullivan that MacEwen was not an allegorical poet.

"What she was writing was her real life," she said.

"It was as if she lacked a kind of protective covering," says Sullivan. "The world seemed so immediate [to her] and constantly present that it seemed too much of an assault."

It was this assault that Sullivan postulates dragged MacEwen down into the dark regions of her psyche and pushed her towards the binge drinking that eventually ended her life.

The biography reads like a detective story. Sullivan uses the first-person voice to insert herself into the narrative, pointing to the architecture of the narrative. It's a way of demonstrating that writing a biography is a balancing act between the objective and the subjective.

"As soon as you turn a life into a narrative, you're selecting out what you think is relevant," she says. "Someone else would write the life differently, emphasizing different points."

She says MacEwen divided her life into separate compartments. There were many friends of hers who were unaware of other friends, which made writing the biography that much more difficult. There was often only one version of events and no corroborating evidence. But, Sullivan adds, there is always a place for doubt.

"To suggest that one can locate a truth about a life is presumptuous," she says. "An arrogant assurance that 'this is what's going on' is dangerous."

Shadow Maker is Sullivan's second literary recovery project. Her first, a biography of prose poet Elizabeth Smart, was nominated for the Governor General's award for non-fiction.

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Related links:

• Gwendolyn MacEwen (U of T Poetry)
• Gwendolyn MacEwen (Wikipedia)
• The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen (Exile Editions, 2007)
• Gwendolyn MacEwen Park

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Comment:

Reading this 14 years later (cripes!), I'm struck most by this:

"Canadian culture doesn't have as many literary biographies as one would expect at this point in its history," says Sullivan. "And we need to recover those cultural moments and figures."

Canadian literature has reached a point in the 1990s where it can begin to look back critically and with nostalgia on the 1960s, when it made its first major cultural impact.

In the intervening decade-and-a-half, we haven't been overwhelmed with critical biographies, critical cultural histories, critical literary reviews. John Metcalf and Roy MacSkimming provided radically different perspectives on the post-nationalist ferment period. I've blogged on both ot them recently. George Fetherling's memoirs are perhaps the best reflections of the period to date.

There's much yet to be written (and not all of it about the Sixties Generation, either).

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to Amy Lavender Harris's Imagining Toronto (Mansfield Press, 2009) for a different kind of critical review of time and place.