Tony Tremblay
Louis Dudek, 1918-2001: In Memoriam

"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." (from Atlantis)

With the death, on March 22nd, of Louis Dudek, Canada lost one of its great citizens, certainly its greatest cultural worker. The view we have of ourselves today - the view of our peculiar nationality shaped in the cauldron of the 1960s by Layton, Atwood, Souster, Cohen, Nowlan, and other leading poets of the pre-Centennial period - is, in no small part, the legacy of Louis Dudek, the legacy of poet, critic, publisher, editor, professor, anthologist, translator, and, as Michael Gnarowski called him, pre-eminent "literary activist." Dudek's energy and reach were legendary (he published most of the leading poets of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s); his output was colossal (he wrote more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and criticism); and his generosity to artists, poets, and students was unsurpassed. He was our "founding" poet and humanist every bit as much as Yeats was Ireland's.

Born in east-end Montreal in 1918, the Catholic Dudek became an "illegal" in order to attend the better Protestant schools, he and his sisters making requisite visits to a local United Church Sunday School to certify their Protestantism. The memory of this duplicity, and of the narrow political parochialism of the Duplessis years (especially hard on "the Anglo-Saxons" of Montreal), spurred Dudek to look beyond the prejudices of his own place to the larger world. He found the conduit for this transport in poetry, the "timeless beauty" of which illuminated, for him, a constancy beyond human knowing.

Poetry provided an opening to understanding this constancy that his own world denied. His excitement with the discovery of this opening is everywhere present in his early collections, East of the City (1946) and The Searching Image (1952). In "Flowers on Windows" he writes of the mystery that poetry alone can enter and understand:

All moves with a hidden meaning; only the fool denies God (even as the priest-fool simplifies). Tell me, should we see in the revolving seasons mathematics? in the weather, circulating air? Or the answer, then, in any book, or prayer?

What is there in man which builds a city? And where the original city he began? I have ravaged the womb, and the planted seed, and moved mountains of knowledge for this gold. Now look upon the surface - how these flowers unfold!

During the early 1940s, at the time of his early exploration of the possibilities of poetry, Dudek joined with Irving Layton and John Sutherland to continue the programme of literary renewal that had been started in Canada by F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith some twenty years earlier. The renewal, Dudek wrote, "was primarily a housecleaning, a sweep-out of sentimental propriety and moral hypocrisy." Together, through their joint editorship of the literary magazine First Statement, the three resolved "to change the shape of Canadian poetry," releasing our poetry from the shackles of foreign expression and tradition.

But while the energy and bombast of the three - reflecting Layton's rhetorical excesses - did succeed in challenging many of the conventions of genteel Canadian poetry, not to mention the reflective, scholarly authority of their small-magazine rival Preview, Dudek wanted more than vulgar modernism. His own sensibility was too refined for the political or material, both of which human indulgences he had rejected as limitations in the Montreal of his younger days.

To educate himself beyond the bourgeois debates in Montreal cafés and restaurants, Dudek moved to New York in the mid-1940s and enrolled at Columbia University to do an M.A. in History, specifically the history of the profession of letters. While there, he studied under Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, worked with the great Canadian historian, J.B. Brebner (to whom, curiously, he had been introduced by UNB historian A.G. Bailey), and became a devotee, finally, of Emery Neff's comparative method of literary analysis. Dudek's study became the nature of poetry and poets over time, a study rooted in his own frustration with the contemporary lack of reverence for the arts, what he elsewhere called "the unreading public." He wrote of this frustration which fuelled his curiosity:

...in our time poetry, 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 the existing culture. While billions of words are being poured out in printed form, in newspapers, magazines, and popular books, little or nothing of this has any lasting value. By definition, then, we are already in, or are entering into, a dark age. Looking over time, periods that have left no permanent record, or little of worth, are negligible; while great civilizations and celebrated moments in history are those which leave durable works of value. I wanted to know the history of this question - the reason why modern culture seems to prefer the journalistic and ephemeral to the genuine and durable, in the arts.

While at Columbia, Dudek wrote a letter to the pre-eminent literary modernist of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound, who was then incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C. The correspondence and relationship that followed led, Dudek admitted, "to my higher education in the reality of modern poetry." The association with Pound brought Dudek into contact with the best American poets of the time - Paul Blackburn, Cid Corman, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and ee cummings - and, more importantly, exposed Dudek to Pound's own brand of frenzied cultural activism. Dudek became one of Pound's "serious characters" in the late 1940s, working through various means and contacts to carry out the business of civilization through poetry, publishing, editing, and polemical criticism. It is this unique combination of revolutionary poetics and the history of the neglect of the arts that Dudek brought back to Canada in 1951.

Arriving from New York to teach at McGill, his mission was twofold: first, to educate Canadian poets and readers in the literary modernism of the American masters, and, second, to provide outlets for publishing. To fulfill his first goal, he put tremendous energy into the work of being both a teacher and a public intellectual. His classes at McGill were so popular in the late 1950s and 60s that they often neared 500 students, yet somehow he managed frequent radio talks and an exhausting programme of literary journalism. Between 1958 and 69, he contributed over 300 critical essays and reviews to The Montreal Star, The [Montreal] Gazette, and The Globe and Mail, working, he said, to create a literate Canadian audience receptive to poetry and the arts.

But that was only half of Dudek's work, for he knew that small magazines and presses are at the heart of literary renewal. With his old friends Irving Layton and Raymond Souster, and in addition to his heavy teaching and writing loads, he set up Contact Press, publishing the early (in some cases, the first) works of the now best-known poets in Canada: Al Purdy, Alden Nowlan, John Newlove, F.R. Scott, Phyllis Webb, Eli Mandel, D.G. Jones, W.W.E. Ross, Gwendolyn MacEwen, R.G. Everson, George Bowering, Milton Acorn, Margaret Atwood, and others. Through the university, he began the McGill Poetry Series, publishing the first collections of a number of his most promising students, Leonard Cohen, Daryl Hine, David Soloway, and Seymour Mayne. He joined with editor Aileen Collins to help with the literary magazine CIV/n, A Literary Magazine of the 50s, and, in 1957, he purchased his own printing press and founded the magazine Delta, which he edited (and printed in his basement) until 1966. About Delta, the critics have been unanimous, as Terry Goldie admits here: "The little magazine has been an essential part of the development of contemporary Canadian poetry, and quite simply [Dudek's] Delta has been the best of the bunch."

Other magazines and presses followed, as did Dudek's own writing - over thirty books of poetry and criticism, including the pioneering of the long poem form in Canada in his important works Europe (1954), En México (1958), and Atlantis (1967). It is indeed hard to imagine the work of Daphne Marlatt, bpNichol, Dennis Lee, and Robert Kroetsch without the efforts of Dudek in Canadianizing the modernist form of the long poem. It is another of the many contributions he will be remembered for.

If, as Dudek wrote, "The autobiography of a poet that matters has to do with the writing of poetry," then the sense of our literary heritage is part of Dudek's creation. And it is a sense, this idea of Canadianness, that Dudek sought to cultivate and nurture long before Canada Council and Centennial grants made the search for our identity both trendy and absurd. It was not expediency or careerism or the desire for exposure that drove him to action, but the highest and most noble civic calling: the moral responsibility of the artist to work tirelessly toward the building of civilization. That this may sound corny or inflated is just an indication of how much more work needs to be done. As Dudek wrote:

The great periods of art must have a moral quality in the life that supports craftsmen: there must be some integrity in the rulers, or seriousness in their beliefs, that helps to make their works durable; there must be a developed taste and love of art in great patrons; and there must be discrimination and intelligence among readers and buyers of books if there is to be any culture worth the name.

Canada has lost one of its great citizens, and we are diminished accordingly.