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"I "In Miriam Waddington's Poetry

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TRANSITIONAL SPACES: CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE MODERNIST “I” IN MIRIAM WADDINGTON’S POETRY Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Universidad Complutense de Madrid ABSTRACT In her first books of poetry (Green World, The Second Silence), Miriam Waddington explores female identity and subjectivity from the perspective of what she refers to in her poem “The Bond” as the “Jewish me.” In these two books, one finds “the credibility of colloquial speech as an alternative to impersonal modernism” (Arnason). My paper is an attempt to approach the construction of the lyric “I” exploring the dialectic between inner and outer world —a transitional space where the subject engages in a process of transformation. In Waddington’s poetry the modernist lyric was a central means to explore a rupture with the old world (colonial and patriarchal) in her own textual terms. KEY WORDS: Miriam Waddington, Modernism, lyric poetry, jewishness, women. RESUMEN En sus dos primeros poemarios (Green World, The Second Silence), Miriam Waddington explora la identidad y subjetividad femeninas desde la perspectiva de lo que en su poema 169 “The Bond” llama el “yo judío”. En estos dos volúmenes encontramos “la credibilidad de la lengua coloquial como alternativa a la impersonalidad modernista” (Arnason). Este ensayo es una aproximación a la construcción del “yo” lírico en este período, que explora la dialéc- tica entre mundo interior y exterior —un espacio transicional donde el sujeto experimenta un proceso de transformación. En la poesía de Waddington, la lírica modernista fue sin duda el medio privilegiado para explorar la ruptura con el viejo mundo (colonial y patriar- cal) de acuerdo a su singular manera de entender el texto poético. PALABRAS CLAVE: Miriam Waddington, modernismo, poesía lírica, herencia judía, mujeres. In the ninth section of his book of criticism Craft Slices (1985), George Bowering doubts the aptness of the term Modernist as it is applied to poets such as 1 F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith and E.J. Pratt. Other important voices in our time such CONSTRUCTIONS... TRANSITIONAL SPACES: as Robert Kroetsch think Canadian literature entered the Postmodernist period without ever having gone through the Modernist (Kroetsch & Bessai 206-207). REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 54; April 2007, pp. 169-180 11 Esther Sánchez-Pardo.pmd 169 08/10/2007, 11:39 Certainly if we confine our sense of Modernism to the styles exemplified by The Cantos, Ulysses, Paterson, The Making of Americans, and The Portrait of Madame Matisse (to mention works by the writers whom Bowering names), then Canada experienced Modernism late. It is this side of Modernism —the discontinuous forms, the linguistic researches, the Poundian “Make it New” credo, the emphasis on what Whitehead called presentational immediacy,2 and so on— that has had the most lasting influence on post-war literature in Canada and elsewhere. When Miriam Waddington (1917-2004) set out to write the Afterword for the 1986 edition of her Collected Poems —gathering the best of her poems to date plus a good number of uncollected poems— she was still struggling with the legacy of modernism and its aftermath in Canadian letters. At that moment, she stated, “A poem, like any other structure, has its own existence and integrity; it is part of a particular time, place, and person. Once it is written, a poem is an organic thing that has its roots not only in the thought and feeling of the poet but in her/his actual physical existence as well. We tend to forget about the physiological origins of a poem —from which the rhythm, tone, voice and the very breath of the poet are inseparable.” (Collected 411) Waddington, as other women poets of her generation, had been educated to use the code of objectivity, a telling expression of the profes- sionalism of both poets and critics during the modernist period. But her emphasis on the physicality of the poem and its origins places her along the line of an alter- native tradition, that of women’s poetry in its fundamental specificity. In Changing Patters: Women in Canada, Jane Errington notes that “throughout the 1940s and 1950s ideas of femininity, of fundamental differences between the sexes and of ‘woman’s place’ persisted...” (76). In the case of Waddington and her contemporar- ies, to be a poet and female, meant conflict with cultural codes that tacitly assumed 170 female subordination. In Reinventing Womanhood Carolyn Heilbrun notes, as a Jew, a female aca- demic, and a professor of literature in the fifties, “I pretended to be part of two worlds the gentile, the male, to neither of which I belonged” (61). As a poet Wad- dington was in an analogous position in Canada in the forties and fifties with the significant difference that as a modern female poet she was on record in her first books as investigating the “inner underground of life” of herself and her sex. The material world of Canadian literary culture remained dominated by male editors, 1 ESTHER SÁNCHEZ-PARDO GONZÁLEZ A.J.M. Smith wrote the controversial preface to the New Provinces anthology —the first major anthology of Canadian modernist poetry— published in 1936. It gathered together a selec- tion of poems by Robert Finch, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith. 2 Alfred N. Whitehead’s theory of perception is an account that attempted to join two tradi- tional theories of perception: the phenomenological —what is given in immediate experience— and the causal (or physiological) theory —what is immediately experienced in perception is relatively un- important compared to the causal mechanism which contributed to its production. The role of the body in perception finally seemed to occupy the centrality it deserved. He insisted on the simultaneous enjoyment of perceptions in the mode of what he called presentational immediacy and causal efficacy, constructing a theory of perception which is composed of realism and mediatism. 11 Esther Sánchez-Pardo.pmd 170 08/10/2007, 11:39 academics, and critics. Over the years many of these women explored the vocation of poetry and came to agree on the need for a female-centred community.3 As a Jewish-Canadian poet writing in the 40s and 50s, Miriam Wadding- ton faced discrimination due to her ethnic background among other conditions. She was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she lived for fourteen years. She earned degrees from the University of Toronto both in literature and in Social Work, and entered social work with an avowed desire “to help change the social system” (Apartment 19) During those years she described herself as an “outsider” to the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant establishment as a Jew- ish daughter of Russian immigrants. “Being of independent mind and rebellious nature,” Waddington possessed a passionate temperament, however, as a Jewish-Canadian, she knew race-hatred first hand. As a child, and later as a young woman, Waddington faced discrimina- tion because she was Jewish. She recalls that while still living in Winnipeg she experienced anti-Semitism as part of everyday life: “Canadian society during the twenties and thirties brainwashed every schoolchild with British Empire slogans, and promoted a negative stereotype of all Eastern European immigrants but espe- cially of Jews...During all my primary school years, the phrase ‘dirty Jew’ had regu- larly been hurled at me from the street corners and back alleys of North Winnipeg” (Apartment 5). She has written of the resentment she felt as a teenager of her own “differ- ence from my Canadian friends whose parents had been born in Canada of English background” (Apartment 5). The Dworkin family moved to Ontario at a time when “the Muskoka resorts advertised themselves as being for Gentiles only, and the sign NO JEWS ALLOWED was a commonplace... and no Jew could get a job teaching in a Canadian university until after World War II” (Apartment 40). In her first books and 171 beyond, Waddington explores female identity and subjectivity from the perspective of what she refers to in her poem “The Bond” as the “Jewish me.” Her work stakes a place for the “I” traditionally outside the dominant group in terms of both gender and ethnicity. Her first language was Yiddish and the influence of this decidedly other tradition on her work deserves further research. In her book of essays, Apart- ment Seven (1989), she notes that the Montreal Yiddish poet Ida Maza was the first “real writer” to read her poetry (Apartment 3). She recalls, “I had been writing po- etry for about four years, and my mother must have mentioned it because Mrs Maza at once offered to read my work” (Apartment 3). In Apartment Seven, “mod- ernism” is referred to in the context of its second wave period, from the early 1940s into the 1950s, a time when English-Canadian nationalism and modernism fused. TRANSITIONAL SPACES: CONSTRUCTIONS... TRANSITIONAL SPACES: 3 There is a clear perception of a lack of connection among women poets throughout Modernism in Canada. Waddington herself felt very close to Dorothy Livesay —with whom she shared her love for literature and her commitment to social work— and she wrote with admiration of Livesay, Anne Marriott, and also of Raymond Souster “[who gave] voice to the Canadian man and woman in the mass” (Apartment 23). 11 Esther Sánchez-Pardo.pmd 171 08/10/2007, 11:39 Waddington portrays a dynamic Canadian community of men and women in three Canadian cities: Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver (Apartment 24). In her essay, “Outsider: Growing Up in Canada” she describes “two cul- tural aspects —Yiddish and English Canadian— [which] did not come together in me for many long years. They simply existed side by side and I devised two codes of behaviour one to fit each world” (Apartment 40).
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