Canadian poet Al Purdy once urinated on literary icon Margaret Atwood’s car. Poets often miss the limelight and Canadian poets doubly so on the world stage but Purdy was different – often cited as the first Canadian poet to be different. In one sense he could be called a Canadian Robbie Burns, making his name writing in the vernacular of the common people. Yet he could keep up with the likes of Frost and Whitman. To my ear he has the most in common with beat writers like Kerouac or Ginsberg. Apparently he was friends with Charles Bukowski. But it was Margaret Atwood’s car that Purdy micturated upon.
In mid-century rural Ontario there are many contexts within which one might expressively urinate. This was a time separated from pioneer days only by the great depression and World Wars. It was Purdy’s generation and that of his parents who were the first to leave the colonial farm scheme and move into the growing cities dotting the shores of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence. Born only six years after Stephen Leacock satirized hopeful small towns of Ontario with bright futures Purdy would go on to eulogize them in his breakthrough poem “The Country North of Belleville.” With one foot in modernity and one foot in depression-era-tinted pioneer life it seems fitting that a poet of the beat-down generation like Purdy would barely give thought to public urination.
However, Purdy was famous for his playful side too. Perhaps in an attempt to claim the frat-boy years this high-school dropout never got or simply through his early socialization in mattress factories, box cars, and wartime military service, one could see Purdy giddily (and drunkenly) simply being pleased to urinate on someone’s, anyone’s, tire. Of course being a poet, and especially a poet in the mid-century Quinte area, one would be forgiven for assuming more meaning.
Purdy existed in a culture formed immediately prior to the second wave of feminism and where one’s cigarette was an essential aid to gesticulatory context-building. A culture where strong blue-collar white men were expected to be leaders and few had questioned it…yet. Where emotions and difficult topics were met performatively instead of verbally, if at all. We see this at work in Purdy’s poem “Drinking at the Quinte Hotel.” Rather than admonish the man for fighting, the protagonist scolds him for spilling beer. Both admonishments hold the same meaning but it is approached obliquely and, in a rugged sense, poetically. It is no accident that it is the poet in the room rather than the bouncer who ultimately brings peace in this fantasy. Yet, in this culture, perhaps they are one in the same.
Purdy therefore found himself in a difficult situation. He had spent his young adult life studying and emulating the masters and this is clear from a look through any of his collections. Now he was captivated by a vernacular who did not think poetry buys “…beer or flowers or a Goddamn thing.” Yet in the end it was this audience who paid for Purdy’s goddamn beer and flowers. This is in fact documented in archival footage of Purdy where a ubiquity of stubby beer-bottles is juxtaposed with mid-century Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gentility. In fact, one has to wonder to what degree this is an intentionally curated persona. Some friends and Purdy aficionados claim that this was the true Al. But his wife Eurithe and others claim there was a different Purdy behind a carefully cultivated mask.
What we know of Purdy would seem to back this up. Sure he was a high-school dropout rather than an academic, but so were many successful men who came of age during the depression. Similarly, his Kerouacian cross-country boxcar journey seems quite dangerous by today’s standards but Purdy was far less unique in 1936. While he has the reputation of being the poet who didn’t read, glancing through his early work shows that he certainly appreciated those before him and he was often photographed in front of stacks of books and untidy shelves. In fact he had a reputation as a book antiquarian. While Purdy portrayed a rugged exterior and wrote poems about establishments like the Quinte Hotel, he hung out by the lake with Canadian literati reciting poetry by moonlight on wild-grape wine.
Two things can be true of complicated human beings, as we all are. However, in examining Purdy from the YouTube age one cannot help but make the connection between rural lifestyle influencers. Returning to the land via Thoreauvian simplicity in order to support art is a timeless story that can very easily help support one’s brand. This from a man who would sign his (and Margaret Atwood’s) books any time he visited a bookstore in order to prevent them from being returned unsold to the publisher.
Margaret Atwood was the opposite. From the next generation of writers and a fierce feminist, she would have been both born in the generation where men like Purdy ruled and openly critical of it. She came to writing in all the right ways: growing up in a professional home, Victoria College, and ultimately a writing career via Harvard. The image of such a larger-than-life bombastic white high-school-dropout-turned-poet relieving himself on the car of The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood is therefore quite evocative.
Ms. Atwood tells an interesting anecdote about her early relationship with Purdy in Brian D. Johnson’s documentary Al Purdy was Here. The two are at a party together and Purdy is loudly holding court, potentially needling Atwood, and she simply quietly goes about filling his wine without engaging. This eternal dance between bombastic men and sensible women is disappearing quickly in no small part because of the work of people like Atwood herself. In this tableaux Atwood is not yet her full self and Purdy is at his peak: the symbol of things to come beside the symbol of the way things were. The height of the bombastic white man trope before it gives way to a new and more balanced order. But it is worth noting two things: both are at the same party and Atwood still fills Purdy’s glass.
Al Purdy’s age has catastrophically ended with cancel culture and #MeToo. Purdy certainly did change with the times. However the environment for the poems that made him famous is gone and for people who are not heteronormative white men or the women who love them this is good news. As a bombastic white man myself, I have grown weary of being disappointed by heroes and the phrase “it was another time.” However while it seems many are latching on harder to what has been lost, I for one am excited to see what the future holds. In these complex times men of Purdy’s era are tempting role models – but one must also ask how Purdy himself might have been different had he come of age today.
A boy dipping his crush’s braids into the inkwell is a tired trope yet one that comes from Purdy’s generation. Atwood was everything Purdy worked hard to be. The man Bukowski once referred to as “…this tough son of a bitch up in Canada that walks the line,” would have struggled with someone like Atwood who very well may have inspired both appreciation and intimidation in a woman’s body. Attention she was under no obligation to accept even if they were often found in the same room.
In his poem “The Country North of Belleville,” Purdy captures a land that never fully bloomed. In 1963 he talks of fences drifting vaguely among the trees and piles of stones gathered for some ghost purpose. Today I find myself writing for a magazine obsessed with these ghost purposes that drift among the trees and I must ask whether Purdy is now one of them. An essential foundation in Canadian Literature and a significant departure from the early anglophile approach of this tradition, Purdy somehow brings both a smile and a shift of discomfort. Not unlike the image of this outrageous man bent over the rear quarter of Ms. Atwood’s car. Like the early settlers of this difficult land, Purdy was obsessed with the possibilities of the future and I am thankful that he found enough room between the trees for a wife and some of the more easily kept illusions.
-Greg