“The heaving green like a crashing wave

            has broken.

            Rubble of black branches

            and wave-worn hillsides appear.

            The leaping crickets, the sleeping birds, grow silent.

            Distant thunder threatens

            A storm at sea.

            One solitary fleck, a butterfly

            hops from dry leaf to dry leaf

            looking for a flower.”

What is the relationship between the person and the ideas? To what degree do the ideas shape the personality, and the personality temper the ideas? Great thinkers and artists wear their ideas as headdresses, towering over, often subsuming, their personalities. Whereas Ezra Pound believed in the artist’s cultivation of the mask or persona (a clue to Pound’s eccentricity— fellow poet Richard Aldington tells of the young Pound in tricoloured top hat and tails drawing the attention of staid Londoners in 1908), Pound’s contemporary T. S. Eliot believed in the negation of persona, which he developed into an aesthetic theory of impersonality. Marshall McLuhan seems to have hybridized Pound and Eliot, his modernist mentors, extracting from both to derive a strange and contradictory composite of hyperactive neutrality, one where the clowning pundit’s “put on” stems from deliberate non-involvement.

In the case of Louis Dudek, also a student of the great American moderns, the personality and the ideas are similarly twinned. Without the eccentricity of Pound, the introversion of Eliot, or the contradiction of McLuhan (the self-involved indifference), the Dudek I interviewed in the hot summer of 1998 was much saner than his teachers or peers had ever been, at least as recorded by their biographers. Hardly an artist, I thought at first meeting, presuming that the artistic temperament had necessarily to involve the eccentric. What I learned over the course of four days and hours of interviewing, however, was that Dudek’s reasoned and civil demeanour was as carefully cultivated as was the outlandishness of a Wyndham Lewis. For Dudek, I concluded, the stakes are so high as to enshroud his ideas in civility, clarity, and genuine good will, those qualities that serve to most effectively advance his thought. His personality is an indication of how much his ideas matter to him.

Below is a summary of some of the discussion we had, the first part in Montreal and the second at Dudek’s cottage in Ways Mills in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. I have chosen to present material that will serve as an introduction to the breadth of Dudek’s work and thought. Since arriving on the scene as a young poet in the 1940s, his literary activities and involvements over the last half-century have defined the way we think of (and practice) culture in Canada. His influence has simply been that important, as outlined by the editors of an Open Letter  number (Spring/Summer 1981) dedicated to his work. The following quotation from that special Dudek number establishes the breadth of his influence:

(Dudek’s) work binds Smith, Scott, and Klein to the writing of the present generation. It links Canadian writing to the great modernist descent from Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Williams. It holds McLuhan’s examination of mid-twentieth-century technology tightly to the context of the modernist struggle to achieve value and meaning despite the overwhelming dedication to commodity to the culture at large. Dudek is a successor to Pound, standing unshadowed in the company of Bunting, Olson, and Spicer. His long poems, the first major modernist poems in Canadian literature, open up formal possibilities which are later to dominate important work by Marlatt, Bowering, Nichol, Lee, and Kroetsch. As Wynne Francis has noted, Dudek is also the first ‘man of letters’ in Canada, the first to follow Arnold and Pound in combining poetry, criticism, polemic editing, and cultural criticism into one multi-faceted cultural vision.

In the final analysis, it is lucidity and concreteness that most readily manifest themselves in Dudek’s work, hence my subtitle, “Ideogram of Reality,” a phrase which comes from his essay “T. S. Eliot.” Finally, to capture both the range and immediacy of Dudek’s thought, I have sprinkled the interview with quotations from a few of his many books of poetry and criticism.

“I must patiently study everything around me, patiently, but with a broad sweep.”

“It is clear to me that living in Quebec, for a poet, is very different from living in Toronto or Vancouver. We do profit from the meeting of two cultures. And that is perhaps why Montreal has been a centre for the development of poetry in the past 50 years or so.”

Tony Tremblay: I want to begin by asking you if there is any significance to a Catholic Montreal producing a Dudek. To what degree did the sensibility and milieu of Montreal influence your work and thinking?

Louis Dudek: Well, I was very much immersed in the Catholic Church for the first sixteen years of my life, and I fondly remember the parish priest, Fr. Bernard, who became a close family friend. With me, he played chess. He was a very good priest and a very simple, pious man. One doesn’t lose or forget those things. Then, in my later teens, I broke away from the church for intellectual reasons. First, there was the incompatibility between normal sexuality and the Catholic Church, and, second, there was a kind of “skeptical” reading of the world offered by the Protestant system that translated into a better education. You see, I was educated in Protestant, not Catholic, schools, which is a story in itself. I was an “illegal” as they called me [a Catholic in a Protestant system], but my exile was self-chosen. I loved my Protestant school and my teachers; they were very humane and decent. My school was at Landsdowne near the Jacques Cartier bridge, which was then being built. Out of my school room window I could see the riveters and hear them rattling away there. We sometimes attended Sunday School at the United Church, just to certify ourselves as Protestants. By contrast, the Catholic schools were very Church-oriented and dominated in Quebec. These were the Duplessis years of the late 1930s. Everything seemed to me terribly backward. A few years later at McGill, another Protestant education, I was taking courses in philosophy and Socrates, debating questions, and so on. So intellectual skepticism and dissent as well as the questioning of principles is very strong in me right to this day.

TT: I know, as well, that your years at Columbia University with J. B. Brebner, the Canadian historian, were important. He was your first tutor of some renown?

LD:  I was the only one registered in his graduate course in British history, so he took me on as a tutorial—saw me once a week, on Mondays. I wasn’t very well-prepared, and it was rather difficult for me to get started. Then, out of the blue, he got a letter from the UNB historian A. G. Bailey, saying that I was a young poet of promise and that he should treat me well. Brebner then invited me to the faculty club, where he presented me to Emery Neff from the Department of English and Comparative Literature. We became friends, and I took Neff’s seminars all the way through. I later used Neff’s book, A Revolution in European Poetry, as a base for my own teaching. So Neff taught me much more than Brebner or my other hero of the time, Lionel Trilling. I admired Trilling very much, but he never gave me any acknowledgment. He was very unresponsive, a cold man, though very ambitious and rather disparaging of others. I once raised the name of Stephen Leacock when he was discussing Mark Twain, and he was dismissive of Leacock as a humorist, calling him trivial and unimportant in comparison with the great Twain.

TT: How did you find New York, as a young Canadian kid out of Montreal?

LD: It was so full of life and vitality of every kind, steam coming out of the corners of the streets, people everywhere. I loved the city. We lived on Amsterdam Avenue when we first went—a little room near Chinatown, cockroaches all over the place, horrifying. Later we had a place on 123rd Street, on the fringe of Harlem. The place was a short walk from Grant’s Tomb and the Juilliard School of Music, and I remember it fondly because it was an apartment house filled with Juilliard students playing pianos, violins, singing. I loved it. Rehearsals were going on all the time, playing Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. I have idealized that place, which I suppose is obvious. There was a pizza store right across the street, where we would order pizzas and bring them up to our room. For a kid from Duplessis’s Montreal, it was quite an experience.

“What I call poetry must have light and air. I hate clinkers, congested blobs, thick clotted abstractions without clear meaning or imagery.”

 “The writing of poetry is a lot like being in love. It’s walking out in the soft night, in early summer, with the big moon out there, and lilac smells in the air, and the stars blinking overhead. It comes in waves, as a delicious impulse that leaves heaps of words; comes from a deep source, makes the hand shake and the lips tremble with words bubbling under your breath.”

TT: I’m interested in the ideas in your poetry. The notion of “Atlantis,” for example, the notion of civilization, of advancement; also the idea of travel, of the broadening of  locale.

LD: Let me give you the core of what I’m doing. This goes back to when I was a student at Columbia. The subject that I chose was the history of the profession of  letters, a subject which interests me to this day and which provides the leading theme for my autobiographical essay [“Autobiographical Sketch 1951” in Open Letter but appears first (and fully) in Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, Vol. 14, Joyce Nakamura, Editor, Gale Research, Inc. Detroit, MI]. Being concerned with poetry and its importance in the past, I was struck from the beginning that poetry today— and in fact any writing with a view to permanence, which is what the arts must have as a first condition of their greater value—does not find a place in our existing culture. While billions of words are being poured out in newspapers, magazines, and popular books, few have any lasting value. By definition, then, we are already in or are entering into a dark age. Looking over eras, periods that have left no permanent record or little of worth are negligible, while great civilizations leave durable works of value. As a young poet having just started to publish, I wanted to know the history of this question—the reason why modern culture seems to prefer the journalistic and the ephemeral to the genuine and the durable in the arts. Once I discovered this terrible irony (the importance of literature and its unimportance in our society), I became strictly focussed in writing and publishing. And notice that this realization preceded my contact with Ezra Pound; in fact, it was more fundamental than knowing Pound or any of his theorizing. It was and continues to be at the root of my passionate concern with the sociology of literature.

TT: Was it the time, then, the atmosphere? Was it what you were reading at Columbia that prompted this realization?

LD: The cause of a thing like this is a personal need, a wound, a pressure point in life that makes you terribly anxious about a particular issue. For me, this indifference was the real threat to what I considered most valuable in life; that is, poetry. You see poetry for me is not just some delightful sentimental stuff on the side. It’s a great, central civilizing force. And at Columbia as a young poet I discovered the enemy of poetry, a satanic thing which is the culture of vulgarity which denies it. It’s from this that all my theorizing proceeds, whether in my writing or satire.

TT: And this pressure point was the realization of what you feared was a loss of civilization?

LD: That’s right. But that’s a key to my prose and my publishing activities, not my poetry. My poetry, you see, doesn’t base itself on that realization at all. Rather, it’s because of my poetry being endangered that I developed this position. My poetry would have been there regardless, as it is a kind of holy light or candle that I have inside me that goes on by itself. My theorizing, on the other hand, has to do with the endangerment of poetry—trying to open room for it.

“I see [modernism] as a great release from traditions, as a great openness to the possibilities of reality and of consciousness. Never in history was such a liberation in art (in the forms of expression) or such a curiosity (about the nature of being, of reality and events, and of the subjective artistic process) made possible to man.”

“. . . in the end, modernism becomes an attempt to communicate pure being.”

TT: I want to ask you a couple of questions about literary modernism, which you’ve written so much about. You’ve described literary modernism as an expression of both exuberance and arrogant intellectualism. Would you elaborate on that binary?

LD: Well, what I said about that dualism is still true because literature has always been associated with class. The arts have always been the entertainment of the upper classes. So when the upper classes are toppled or removed, the arts have suddenly no audience and no subsidies. That’s been the predicament of opera and the symphony. They’ve lost the bourgeoisie. Now, modernism, too, is the product of a literate minority. Though Woolf and Eliot had pretensions, the great modernists were not affluent people. Joyce and Pound lived off patrons and tried to marry as well as they could, which Pound succeeded in doing. But what they all had in common was that they felt threatened by democratic values. I think of Eliot saying in mock tones “I says to her myself, why don’t you get yerself a new pair of teeth.” I mean, he shrieked inside when he heard ordinary people speak simply. Obviously, that’s what he’s saying in The Wasteland. We obviously don’t feel this way today, but I think class prejudice explains the fascistic flavour of the early modernists. They were on the defensive against a rising tide of vulgarity that threatened to wipe out entirely what they most were attached to, which was the finer literate culture of the tradition.

TT: And they were historically positioned, weren’t they, as post-Victorians, born and brought up in an age of high culture—Arnoldian.

LD: Exactly. Now you see, I am not at all concerned with defending the prejudice of traditional literate culture. Personally, I write a more spoken English, the vernacular, and sometimes a rather common vernacular in prose. I don’t want to cheapen it too much, though one can for effect, as Eliot showed. There is a fascinating question as to how, even in poetry, it is valuable to mix levels of speech to enter into the vernacular for the sense of a kind of authenticity of speech—for certain kinds of contrast, for certain bits of irony, for certain kinds of truth. These are the things one can do with language, and without the snobbish, stand-offish feeling that Eliot had.

TT: You’ve also written about modernism as a kind of excessive growth, as a movement that tried to outdo previous movements. You call this “hypertrophy.” Would you explain that term?

LD: Hypertrophy is a term used in medicine to denote the overgrowth of an organ. I’ve used it as a cultural theory for about twenty years now to describe how every human activity breaks through into a new possibility, then starts to work out variations of this new possibility until it reaches fulfillment. When all the variations are used up, that’s hypertrophy. Take chess, for instance. Today, all the opening variations—pawn to queen four, pawn to queen’s bishop four, etc.—are difficult to play because they’ve all been worked out to the 35th move. Masters know all the possibilities of those moves, and you can’t find a new move that hasn’t been done. That’s hypertrophy; new possibilities are hard if not impossible to find. Culturally, this means that in all human activities there exists a potential for blockage or cessation when possibilities have been exhausted. But, conversely, there’s an earlier stage when possibilities expand greatly because new variations open up, and breakthroughs make new things possible. Modernism was just such a breakthrough. It opened up the possibility of free verse, inviting poets into the realm of seemingly infinite variation. And now we’re at a hypertrophic impasse. What followed? Well, a new kind of anarchy, the variations of which have not been valuable. The possibilities in a diapers culture are that the diapers are all full of shit!

TT: So where do we go to find new possibilities now, new truth?

LD: In order to have a breakthrough, there has to be some kind of a controlled structure. Within the rules, there are a lot of variations. So, make the chessboard bigger by one on each side and the game will be interesting for another 50 years. Change the rules, and suddenly you have another new thing.

TT: So, to revitalize poetry, we have to go back to metrics?

LD: No, because those rules are exhausted already. But, as I said long ago, the forms of poetry are infinite, and they are far from being exhausted. New forms will follow the breath, they will follow the movement of the human body in dance, they are not measured by the mathematics of 1 2 3 4 at all. It’s only human narrowness that said you count to 10 syllables or count rhymes or you tinkle with a bell at the end of a line—that’s nonsense. You create a much more interesting form if you follow your emotional current to structure your poem according to a principle balance of some sort you find within yourself. Every new poet arrives with a unique range of gasps and groans. Charles Olson, for instance—nobody breathes the way he does. I find he breathes horribly (very few people have his asthmatic breathing); nevertheless, it is original and creates new possibilities because of its uniqueness. Each human being pulsates differently from the centre of his soul, of his mind, and with his emotions; he pulsates differently from the next one, in an inexhaustibly infinite number of ways. Work this uniqueness out and there are many forms that can be achieved, so many that hypertrophy is a long way off.

“An artist—a poet—is like a tennis player or a dancer. He generates the form from within. The complexity of his inner nature, of which he knows but a small part, resolves itself in the expression of an act, in paint, sound, motion or word . . . a generative process that holds the maker of art in a state of peculiar concentration, or ecstasy, while the work is in process.”

 “One who has not travelled does not know the world he is living in. He can still be very much in the present, as a victim or fanatic, but he does not know where he is or where he is going.”

TT: You have been credited by Terry Goldie and Brian Trehearne for bringing the long poem, a characteristically modern form, into Canada. To begin, why have many of your long poems come from travel?

LD: For me, travel is very stimulating for poetry. Within two of my long poems, travel to Europe and Mexico became a metaphor of search and progression, of moving toward something. And travel in Atlantis, though a fictional place, is the same travel. When I first went to Europe and wrote a series of poems, I intended nothing cohesive, not even a book. The long poem became what it became when I discovered, through writing, the idea of travel as journeying, which is the central idea of all life and the idea that predominates in western literature from Homeric times.

TT: What’s achievable in a long poem that’s not achievable in a short poem?

LD: Immense, immense difference. How do you get into a long poem? You have to be an idiot to try to write a long poem. No one should ever try it; I didn’t. Early in the Unit of Five collection, there is a poem called “The Sea.” It goes on for a couple of pages in little sections. That’s the seed, I suppose, which germinated when I went to Cape Cod and wrote the poem “Provincetown,” a poem about a boy who jumps into the water, hits the deck, and nearly kills himself. The episode shatters the superficiality of Provincetown, forcing minds into a contemplation of the greatness that is missing there, the greatness that the constancy of the sea can provide to them. The touchstone of deep seriousness, of great poetry, is the sea, already evident in my first two long poems. When I went to Europe it was the same: I went down to the south (to France, Italy and Rapallo, Greece), and as I was driving the words were falling into my mind, condensing in a metaphorical way so that the seaside travel became a kind of symbolic event. Travel episodes became revelatory ones. I was tremendously moved by Greece, its people, the traditions from which western civilization grew. All that went into a series of short poems, about a hundred. When I returned to Montreal and started working on them a consistency emerged which further evolved into a long, continuous poem.

TT: But your long poems, to challenge Desmond Pacey’s conclusions, are not narrative poems.

LD: Yes, you’re correct, he was wrong. I could never write a story; he didn’t understand that, nor the fact that I could not predict what would happen, poetically, out of my travels. Two years after my European experience, to give you another example, I went to Mexico, and in a terrible state of confusion, loss of sense and meaning, everything obscure in my mind. I didn’t write any poetry, just little fragments of lines—two lines of this, a line of that—which I accumulated on scraps of paper and threw into my bag. When I returned again to Montreal, I started to arrange the fragments in a plausible order, out of which emerged En México. So, oddly enough, I did write a long poem, but in a way that differed radically from the writing of Europe. En México emerged out of a disintegrated state of mind desperately seeking for some kind of order, whereas Europe emerged out of my youthful and secure (and dogmatic) notions of order. Europe was constructed out of little didactic statements; En México out of wisps of enigmatic aphorisms. And this latter method continues into the present— this method of fragmentary intuitions which add up to something, and which reveal both why the journey is happening and what the mind is looking for. This is very definitely a modern phenomenon, reflective of the discomforts of modern thought and feeling, and not at all reflective of the desire to write a narrative.

TT: You wrote in Atlantis, in at least two places, that you hate travel.

LD: Yes. I insist on that. I do hate travel because I am anxious and uncomfortable when travelling. The anxiety, however, is a very good state for poetry, since complacency is unproductive—too comforting and familiar. At home one doesn’t do anything because one is fitting in and there’s nothing to worry about. That’s why Pound produced his best poetry, the Pisan Cantos, under the threat of death while in the cage. Consider also Eliot just before his breakdown. He was in Switzerland recovering from a mental problem, his marriage was destroyed, he had a very sick wife. What emerged? The Wasteland. That’s the way all poetry comes. It’s what we feel and suffer ourselves that makes poetry. Maybe in Spencer or Milton’s time the poet wrote of some objective thing—while dying of cancer, he wrote joyful poetry. Even Mozart, because of the convention of his time, could write a cheerful or joyful piece while he was suffering. Some critics love this idea: that what you express in art has nothing to do with what you feel in your guts. I don’t like that idea at all.

            “If lovers do not read poetry

            how can they love?

            How can their desires be shaped in the form of a dream?”

            “out of that cloud come palaces, and domes,

and marble capitals,

            and carvings of ivory and gold —

Atlantis

            shines invisible in that eternal cloud”

TT: I’m interested in your comments on unity and order which you have frequently made in relation to modernism. I hear echoes of Eliot when you write, and I’m quoting you now, “Unity . . .comes out of some shaping process beyond our ken, the psychic dream world that unifies; as I say ‘one trusts’ that the unity is there . . . to some extent, there is order.”

LD: Atlantis, which begins by drifting into the open without an outline, revealed to me during its writing that there was an order in what I was doing, and that the order was internally determined by the nature of the material. The order was deeper than I could understand, and it was present in long poems, in large landscapes. We haven’t given much thought to this, this shaping thing that’s inside us. To some it’s a disorder, but in my mind this order invites a kind of groping through the semi-darkness toward luminosity. Looking for the order that’s there, always searching. After Atlantis, I began to rely heavily upon this kind of order in the long poems, especially the Continuation poems, because I believed it was there. And I still do.

TT: Yet you’ve criticized Pound and Olson elsewhere in your work for writing what you call “a vast array of things” in search of an abiding form.

LD: Perhaps I’m being unfair to them because they’re doing the same thing. Pound’s lines in the Pisan Cantos about the rose and the steel dust somewhat resemble this deep order I’m talking about. Philosophically, he’s saying that there’s an inherent order. The chapter “No Digression” in my current book Reality Games addresses this mystery. I say that the method of writers like Rabelais, Sterne, Proust, Eliot in The Wasteland, and Pound in the Pisan Cantos is one of digression. Always digression. But digression is only possible if one is going somewhere; if one is going nowhere, then what is it? Writers have taken a very long time to discover what in fact is the implicit order or beauty in a strong, undirected form of writing. For this is neither progression nor digression. It is pure expression. Notice the phrase, “strong, undirected” form of writing. The writing has to be strong; it has to possess an inner sense of seriousness. Accessing this eternal order is a holy thing that only happens under a state of sustained emotion or concern, or a profound sense of inspiration, since the source of that order and beauty is not in itself known. Writers have rarely trusted it enough to yield to it completely. Eliot called The Wasteland a ragged, shapeless poem because he did not believe in the order of free, associative expression. He seemed to renounce the poem, and he did not write anything more in that form, with the result that his poetry withered away and died on the vine. Pound wrote many of his early cantos in a patterned,  organized way. Only in the Pisan Cantos, after he was ripped out of his secure life and slammed into a military prison, did he begin to write in that spontaneous, disjointed way that allows the deeper self real expression. As a result, the Pisan Cantos are by far his best work, and the best part of the entire Cantos. But Pound was only half aware of what he was doing; that is, he was not aware of the meaning of the shattered form that his mind had manifested. While I was writing the first few pages of Atlantis, at that point untitled, I was travelling by steamboat and approaching Gibraltar when the following lines came to me: “Today we passed over Atlantis, which is our true home.” In a flash I had the title of my poem, and I also had the mythical element which has since played so large a part in my thinking. I was able to give language to the idea that no matter how far I was wandering in my mind and in my travels, there was an inscrutable order and life that existed in poems which had nothing to do with my planning a conscious structure. I am now sure that there is a form in the movement of human life and in the large, free poems that transcends and expresses that movement. This self-generated structure is represented by the idea of “Atlantis.” This ideal order gives shape and meaning to our groping, stumbling, disordered lives, for we are all groping and stumbling toward Atlantis. So you see, it’s a very large idea this notion of Atlantis: not only is the poem organized by some mysterious yet comprehensive unity, but all life is as well. And what a poem does, in this regard, is to help others organize their lives, just as the great religions have done.

TT: Where does it come from, this organizing principle that we can’t grasp in our conscious minds? Is it an instinct? How do you get in touch with it as a poet?

LD: I am not a Darwinian evolutionist. I believe that there’s far more buried somewhere inside us than Darwin ever dreamed of. You are the same kind of human being that I am: we are all deprived of easy knowledge; all cut off, and yet at the same time we are never entirely free of the need to know. We’re always moving towards order, wanting to find that unity, that large order, that meaning which is hidden from us, in existence. It’s as if that submerged order were there, and we were sent here into this world to find it—and to keep finding it because that is the essential mission of all intelligent life.

TT: I see that search, that search for order, unity, all over your poetry.

LD: Oh, yes, with tears I say that, it is in my poetry, this is true. The search is there. And it’s not scientific curiosity; there are no adjectives for it, the emotion is generated, yes generated.

“There are two realms of being: there is the world of human knowledge, and there is the ultimate world which stands behind the other.”

            “So in our time, the poet,

            in need of quiet, order in chaos,

            complete community, wants something he does not have

            in all nakedness. And so he wrestles

            with the maiden, his wild dream, in his sleep.”

TT: Related, in some ways, to what we’ve been talking about is the question of psychoanalysis. I find recurring evidence in your work of an interest in psychoanalysis. Can you confirm that?

LD: Well, the generation to which I belong was surrounded by psychoanalysis. Lionel Trilling was one of my teachers at Columbia, and Trilling was not only always reading Freud, but he was lecturing through Freud, his master. In those years I was married to a clinical psychologist, Stephanie, and she was a Freudian, certainly. And though I was slightly skeptical of the movement, I was also interested in whatever it had to contribute. The Freudian myth or story of the unconscious is indeed fascinating, but what does it really tell us? Is Freud’s view of the unconscious one we can really depend on? What do we really know about the inner mind and the thinking that goes on there? I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and have extensively studied my dreams in the way that Freud and others have done, but I don’t come to Freud’s conclusions at all. Freudian theory doesn’t really get into what I believe about the unconscious nature of things, no.

TT: Well, what conclusions did you come to; what do you believe about the unconscious?

LD: Way back when I was still a young undergraduate poet at McGill, a friend said to me that he thought I was really a psychologist. I don’t know how he understood that, but he was correct. If I look at my 1941 diary, I was psychologizing a lot. For instance, I say to Layton on one page, that what man expresses as philosophy is really his character. This is psychological insight, really. I am interested in psychology because I think we do react and become what we are for psychological reasons, certainly not for physical or sexual ones. Our psyche, or mysterious total self, dominates that small part of us that is our consciousness. And that psyche, being the sum of billions of cells organized in the body, is in control of and knows a great deal more than our conscious mind knows about what’s going on. In the end, that psyche discards the consciousness completely and puts it to sleep. When you fall asleep, there’s another mind inside you that begins to present stories to you in the form of pictures. These things are not coherent communications of any kind; they are simply a series of images, like silent movies, and yet they’re often important. When you are asleep, this mind is definitely conscious and working. And when you are not asleep, this inner mind is probably also conscious and thinking, causing us to walk into a window, or forget a parcel, or do things that Freud talks about. This other consciousness is not unconscious; it’s simply not available to our consciousness, that’s all. Now, what is its nature? It is in many ways quite alien to our conscious mind, you know. I have been studying it; it does not like us very much.

TT: That sounds something like what Freud defined as the Superego, that self-critical, self-effacing censure.

LD: Whatever he called it, this alien psyche is, in my experience, highly impersonal. Perhaps not even judgmental, but seemingly cruel in presenting us with things that make us feel uncomfortable. Why, for example, would I want to be exposed to a memory of something unpleasant that happened forty years ago? Yet this is what the unconscious does.

TT: Does the poet have special access to this deep consciousness?

LD: No more than any human being has. In fact, the reality of our dreams is something we all should be studying constantly, because that study will enrich us. If we do not study our dreams and know something about them, we become more trivial, as the one thing about that other consciousness is that it is dead serious—very large and dead serious. It’s like a mysterious Buddha, and it gives me the shivers, this notion that we’re only one half of a thinking duo.

“. . . for me literature has no other reference, no other ground, as its starting point and its ultimate point of return, than this reality as we know it.”

“Modernism, with the Imagist theory at its origin, is a resolute attempt to found a poetry on actualities and to find the truth in mere particulars.”

TT: You have often said, and repeated above, that the only kind of prose that’s worthwhile is simple and clear prose. I’d like you to talk about that, and about what you have termed yourself—a “practical critic.”

LD: The criticism I write is the kind that would not exist if there were not a practical need for it. The critic is helping the artist. He ought to be. And there’s nothing worse than destructive critics. But a critic who is good has to be sharply critical of bad work, and he better damn well know what he’s doing. If he’s mistaken then he ought to go and put a bullet through his head. You see, I came back to Canada with two purposes: one to write modern poetry, and two, to support it. Canada at the time was sunk in a sentimental late Victoria tradition and there was a need to renovate and to enlighten. I don’t know if I succeeded because the public never became very much enlightened, the pity it never did.

TT: In your poetry, on the other hand, you often reject the practical, especially in your later work.

LD: That’s true. About ten years after first being influenced by Pound’s imagist teaching—which I sought out because I felt my own poetry needed to acquire a greater hardness at the core—I realized the limitation of a poetry which refused abstraction. This realization is contained in the essay “The Theory of the Image in Modern Poetry,” which says that Pound’s Cantos are finally not coherent because of his refusal to deal with abstraction. Because of a lack of abstraction, the poem has no order in it (as we would recognize order), and it makes no sense. For some reason, if you tell the whole story, it’s unpoetic. Poetry does not deal with reportage; it deals with suggestion. Poetry reaches after essence or essential meaning. Of course, it’s still true that a good poem has to have good imagery and good detail, both of which provide vivid experience inside the poem. But what is an image in contrast to an abstraction, after all? Take the average image, say an apple. An apple is an abstraction because it’s a particular apple, an abstraction from other apples. So you see, “apple” is an abstraction, as is every other single word of a concrete sort in the dictionary that is not a proper name. Likewise, an abstraction is also an image. Take abstractions like “length” or “weight.” Both are rendered physical by imagining their essence. I can’t think of weight without thinking of my own. All abstractions have this quality to them. Beyond this profundity, all we know is that the word “apple” functions in some mysterious way more effectively than the word “equality” or the word “truth” or the word “happiness.” All poetry is made of words, just words, and words evoke meaning and essence. Some individuals, we call them visionaries or poets, see things others don’t. It’s a mystery. Pound didn’t think much about the nature of language or communication; Ezra was not a thinking man, you know. It’s obvious that he wasn’t a thinker, he wasn’t capable of it.

TT: That’s quite a statement to make about the foremost poet of modernist high-intellectualism!

LD: Maybe, but one assumes that everybody can think. When a poet devises a theory that suggests we should not be thinking, that we should, rather, write poems that are simply concatenations of images, one must assume that he could not write a clear or philosophical poem. The reason he wrote the way he did, jumping from one image to another, is because that’s the only way he could write. He could not make it cohere in the end (or at the beginning).

“A diet of cream puffs and chocolate creams is what we end up with if we follow only what we like without considering the reasons for eating. And popular culture, in fact, is always on the verge of being poisoned by too much sugar.”

“A popular book is a shallow trough where the sheep feed.”

TT: Our discussion about psychoanalysis and Pound’s own psychosomosis prompts me to ask you a few questions about popular culture. You’ve been pretty hard on pop/mass culture, calling it not only a “sewage back up” but also a manifestation and statement of secularism. Would you talk about your aversions to the popular.

LD: Sure, but my thoughts, again, are no simple matter. No one loves Al Jolson or the music hall songs of the late 19th century more than I do. I have collections of both; I play them on the harmonium and the piano. Popular music has always attracted me, and something I like very much about ordinary people is their music. But I don’t like their recent music, say, from Elvis Presley on. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra are still musical, melodious, and very humane. They sing songs you can repeat, but, with Elvis, music becomes physical and vulgar, even obscene. Music has descended to a lower level of sensibility, where there’s a kind of mass appeal. It’s as if the apes had descended from the trees and are all clapping with their coconuts. What is horrifying about this is the mass response to it, also the fact that this music is based on a poorly informed cultural rejection. As modernists we rejected the previous generational values, too, but these young people today are not making their own choices about this rejection. They are just following along. They’re not great readers of books, they’re not modernists in the way Joyce’s “les jeunes” were. I prefer the arrogance of an Eliot and Pound to the sloppiness of a rocker.

TT: Why do you think, then, that mass culture is called popular culture? Why are those terms, “mass” and “popular,” used interchangeably?

LD: For the same reason that separatism is called sovereignty: because the second term is much prettier and more appealing. Quebecers wouldn’t vote for separation, but would vote for sovereignty. Coming back to culture, there is also something insidious about the term “mass.” “Mass” subsumes individual response, preferring the collective to the individual. The individual ends up going along with everybody else, like sheep. And where are the sheep going? Right over the cliff. That has been the sad record of history.

TT: You’ve written a lot about elitism and democracy. In Atlantis you wrote that the American empire was more communist than the East Bloc in terms of its ideology of levelling all people to the lowest common denominator of its melting pot. And mass culture, as you’ve written, is a reaction against high modern elitism. In your essay, “Is American Literature Coming of Age?”, you wrote that “Democracy was not intended to be a levelling down of values, but a raising up of individuals so that they might aspire to the great hierarchy of values.” I agree with the statement, but I also am mindful of what people today would say: that you are an elitist.

LD: Oh, I am an elitist, no question.

TT: So how do you reconcile your elitism with your belief in democracy?

LD: Well, I’m elitist in the same way that all serious thinkers in the past, who had to make distinctions between what is better and worse, were elitists. Let me give you an example. Beethoven and Bach learned things from a composer named Heinrich Schütz, but Schütz was no great composer, by comparison. So you have to be an elitist to say that Beethoven was better than Schlitz, or that Mozart was a greater composer than Rossini. Mozart is the great thing, an angelic, heavenly voice given to mankind. What was in his head was incredible. Now, what popular culture did with Amadeus, the film based on his life, was a travesty in its depiction of him as a kind of idiot.

TT: Yes, as a punk almost, the timing of which exactly corresponded to the height of the punk movement in the west.

LD: The popular audience required conflict, so the film narrative was based on a rivalry and hatred between Mozart and Antonio Salieri. No such hatred existed. Salieri and Mozart were on good terms, and Mozart liked Salieri’s music. To go back to your question, the distinction between better and worse has always existed in poetry, and this distinction is all a poet has to go by, hoping that the models he has chosen to read and emulate are the better ones. This hierarchy exists in the nature of things and man as well. It has given us civilization: what is of value and importance, and what isn’t. Now, the idea of democracy began as a desire to take those who are rejected, the underdogs of society, and give them equal rights and privileges and justice, which is what Thomas Paine wanted. The spirit of democracy, whether in Puritan America or Enlightenment Europe, was to improve the world for individuals so each could excel on his own terms. Walt Whitman saw this very clearly, and I quote him in a current essay, “Toward a Democratic Art.” He saw that democracy was not intended to make everybody equal, but for great individuals to emerge. And so democracy liberates individuals to become orators, writers, sportsmen, basketball players, whatever. Democracy is about excellence in every field—being a great basketball player is a very democratic achievement. All intelligent people know that in every activity there is always someone better than someone else. Why do people resist this? Why do they want a governing principle that extinguishes distinction while at the same time holding distinction up for worship? To think clearly, and democratically, is to realize that everyone is slightly different.

TT: What’s your advice to people today dealing with popular culture? How do we survive the popular?

LD: Don’t go with the crowd. Once you decide that you are not one of the herd at all, you are saved right away. Also, if possible, deliberately dissent from the herd. What they like, dislike. I’ve done that intuitively and instinctively for decades. I can’t buy a bestseller; I never have. I’ve never read For Whom the Bell Tolls or Gone with the Wind—absolutely wouldn’t touch the damn things. I don’t read Margaret Atwood because her works are of the present. When the present passes away she’ll be less important than Mazo de La Roche.

TT: Of course there’s real risk involved in going your own way. Sometimes it’s difficult to live in culture and be an individual. Do you agree?

LD: Yes, consider Coriolanus. He became an enemy of his own people because of standing away and because of a sense of injustice done him. But if the individual stands on his own feet, I don’t think there’s any danger to him. When something happens he begins to grow a kind of wholeness from his own centre. By difference, he sees what he really does and should prefer, as opposed to what everybody else is following. I say to people who like popular music: why don’t you study music in its widest possible range, the various types of music in the world, and make that your subject for a while? Figure out the tunes of different kinds of melodies that have existed, and always with one finger on your keyboard. See what you can learn about music from medieval and 17th century French Canadian songs. See what you can learn from the songs of tinpan alley in the 1920s. The subject is infinite. Why restrict yourself to the narrowness of the present?

TT: You often refer to music. Have you made music a lifetime study?

LD: I’m just a rank amateur who knows little about music, except I like it very much. I like all kinds of music, just as Pound liked all kinds of poetry, from ancient Egyptian to modern Chinese. Music is even a higher art than poetry in some ways because it’s absolutely pure. It’s without any words, without any ideas, and it goes directly to the feeling and the meaning. And so you can’t say to Beethoven, “What do you mean by the second movement?” All you can say is “Listen; sit there, put your head back, open your heart, and listen.” And when you listen in this way something extremely complex and wonderful happens that cannot be put into words. That’s true of music and poetry, I suppose.

TT: Well, you can’t paraphrase a poem, as Wallace Stevens said.

LD: That’s right. All poets and musicians want their work assimilated this way: reading, listening without criticism. Just reading, thought, feeling. Primary experience.

TT: I want to ask you one more question about teaching “the popular,” as I know that your modernist course at McGill, “Journey to the End of Night,” was a hot item. You taught 300 students in that course, which ranged over two academic years. What were your objectives?

LD: That was a course on European literature from the 18th century to the 20th. It was a history of nihilism, a survey of the undermining of everything the western world had tried to construct for itself for 1000 years. I covered everything I could, from Enlightenment and realist thinking, the extremely noble and wonderful search for the truth, to the emptiness and meaninglessness of Sartre, Camus, and populist decriers. It was not a cheerful course at all; in fact, it was quite terrifying. But it was warning students of what the current intellectual condition of modern man is, and to tighten their belts against it to overcome it. Always the primary statement was: you have to start thinking about how to overcome this problem of postmodern nihilism. Now, you see, personally, I was following the same path, thinking very seriously about how to reclaim the generative and life-affirming. I began asking myself and my students “Where is the meaning in existence?” Where is the meaning in the magnificence of a green landscape, in the magnificence of joy, of harmony? I concluded that we are given a gift that we are here to feel magnificence and joy and harmony. The more I feel this magnificence, the more I am in tune with myself. I discovered this during the writing of Atlantis, and since then I have been trying to reconstruct what was in Plato, what was in the New Testament, what was in the Eastern writings of Tao and Confucius, thinkers that were concerned with the nature of the order of things, and of the meaning of thought. Now, some of these thinkers were strongly nihilistic, too, but they came to a great humanism going through their hell. Pound’s statement—you can’t get through hell in a hurry—is wonderful, but he forgot to add that you can get through hell eventually, and get to the light. My students in that class would ask, what is the meaning? I would say it is the light which cannot be defined in simplistic terms, but can be found by each individual who says I too must find what Dudek is talking about: that there is a meaning in existence, there is a glory in the complexity and the order and the mystery. We all must seek to understand this mystery, to try to see the light and to contemplate the darkness. There is nothing nihilistic or mystical about this quest, which is what I tried to teach in that course. What we, even the nihilists, are moving toward is quite real. It’s a positive realization of the glory of things.

“If you are introduced to a famous writer you should say, ‘Ah! At last, I have           come to the centre of the universe!”’

“. . . the first thing to remember about any man, great or small, actor or artist, is that he too was a poor suffering mortal like yourself, and no matter what his outward appearance or success may have been he was a failure in the end,           a failure deep within, and a failure to those who knew him best.”

TT: What in your mind is the role of the public intellectual today? And I ask the question because you were very much a public intellectual.

LD: Oh, yes, I was, and there were still public intellectuals in my time. Edmund Wilson and F. R. Leavis were such figures, as were Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. Northrop Frye functioned as a public intellectual, and he was always willing to write in the style of respectable English, not the manner of the high academy. It’s to his credit that he did. When Phyllis Webb was in charge of the CBC Ideas program, she told me that Glenn Gould had been greatly interested in a talk I did refuting “Chance in Art,” so, you see, there was a real circle of intellectuals out there in the 50s and 60s talking and listening to one another. Today this kind of public voice is more difficult to find. Where does it occur? On TV, in popular media? Most of it is limited to the American political scene. There are a couple of interesting figures in Canada today, however. David Solway is a severe critic of the illiteracy of the younger generation, and of the bad teaching habits and conditions in the classroom. John Ralston Saul isn’t bad. They seem to be different from Canada’s other public performers, notably McLuhan and Layton, both of whom sought recognition as great discoverers. I felt differently. In all my public appearances, I did not desire to draw attention to myself as being an original creator of anything. Rather, I searched for the truth with a mind to building on it. As a public intellectual I wasn’t interested in subverting all existing knowledge, I was interested in adding to it.

TT: Well, there’s a real generosity in that, and a freshness.

LD: Well, yes, I suppose, but in part, my approach developed as a corrective to the likes of McLuhan and Frye. I had open quarrels with Frye, feeling that he was too rigid and formulaic in his mythological classification of literature. I also quarrelled with McLuhan because I thought he was too narrow in his theory of dominant technologies effecting a redistribution of sense ratios. So it is true that society has changed to the point that the kind of public figure I was is no longer common.

TT: Well, you were the public figure as reader, as opposed to the public figure as observer of mass culture. It seems to me that’s what we have today: public intellectuals are now pundits, their focus almost always media related.

LD: I agree. The intelligent voices and critics of a generation ago who spoke up in the midst of the hubbub have largely gone underground. There are still books by writers of this mentality, but their authors don’t often become public voices. There’s no room for them on prime time. And there are no magazines anymore—no Tamarack Review, no Canadian Literature the way it used to be.

“. . .The poem of the future will cease to be an autonomous made object, and artificial enclosed construction, but will become the authentic record of a poet’s total intellectual and spiritual life, a kind of journal, the experience of one man’s real life contained in the glass of eternity.”

                        “I believe the purpose of all being

                        is to be luminous and reaching like these trees—

                        true to the character of beauty

                        that moves and is whatever moves.”

TT: I’ve got two concluding questions. The first is related to a quality I admire very much about your work, and that is hope. You’ve called this quality your “transcendental optimism.” In the world we live in today there is much cause not to be an optimist. Why do you continue to hold to this position of optimism?

LD: It is not an intellectual choice; it is an inevitable, natural fact, like the fact that my heart is beating at a certain rate. I can’t change what is part of my constitution. I have always been trying to find an answer to nihilism, and as I told you earlier, when I hit Atlantis, I suddenly saw that other side, the affirming / positive side. So this “transcendental optimism,” not a bad phrase wherever I used it, is very true, very true. And, interestingly, it is not proved by any dogmatic claim or based in a belief in God or the absolute morality of Platonic essences, nothing like that. Rather, within the whole complex of the search, within the incomprehensibility of things of the world constantly varying, within the mystery of different forms always renewing themselves, there seems to me to be always a movement towards this transcendental optimism. Something rather wonderful is always emerging, just as a new carnation comes out of a tangled garden. New things are being born every instant. New poems, new children. The child is always an original. How can one help but acknowledge this hope? It is not necessary to formulate the dogma for this philosophy, for if I do then somebody will nail it down, turn it into a system of belief, and then let it harden and fossilize. I prefer to leave it as an open thing, as I say I would have liked my early experience of Catholicism to have remained open and hopeful and optimistic. I wish often for the feeling I once had as a young Catholic when the priest was telling the Christmas story. Everything was possible. Everything could be again if that wonder could be preserved.

TT: As you’re now in the twilight of your career as a poet, a reader, a critic, a professor, a traveler, what does it all mean, this eighty-year struggle to acquire knowledge, to organize for civilization, to write poetry?

LD: What do the dialogues of Plato mean? What do the works of Shakespeare mean? They are what they are. They are all truncated, torn at the edges; they could have continued and said something more. Keats’ poetry is cut off—had he not died young, he would have said something more, something greater. He never did. Civilization is an infinite poem in progress, the vast accumulations of which are hyperbolic. There’s an immense amount already written, and it’s increasing all the time. Even the rejected mountains of stuff are important in their own way. It all amounts to a process I don’t understand, a process I have felt my way into and which I knew was important. It’s the same with my twenty or so Note Books and my Continuation poem—it may have a use, but who knows what that use really is. All I know is that the poem demands to be written, like the question, “What is the meaning of existence,” needs to be asked. Readers are privileged to eavesdrop on these interior worlds, to hear the poet breathing irregularly, his own peculiar drawing of the breath.

“We should all write like John Keats, about to die,

leaving the poem fragrant on the air

like the evening hour, that is its own good reason for being.”