“To Make a Show of Concealing”:
The Revision of Satire in Earle Birney’s
“Bushed”
Duncan McFarlane
A
long with “David” and “The Damnation of Vancouver,”
“Bushed” stands at the head of Earle Birney’s body of poetic
work: in popular fame and literary craft, earnestly revered
“with a rather schoolboyish veneration” (Purdy 75) by critics and poets
alike. The poem also marks a turning point in Birney’s career. It came
just after the completion of his first novel, Turvey, appearing in the collection Trial of a City and Other Verse (1952), of which Northrop Frye
says “that for virtuosity of language there has never been anything like
it in Canadian poetry” (Bush 16), and in which A.J.M. Smith observes
“a distinct advance on the simple and unified narrative ‘David’” (12).
Yet to look solely at the finished poem is, in this case, to understand a
fraction of its total significance. In the process of drafting and revising “Bushed,” Birney transformed the poem from forthright satire into
something else entirely. From its first draft — which has never before
been analyzed — to its final version, “Bushed” moves between the two
extremes that Frye nominates as central themes in Canadian poetry,
“one a primarily comic theme of satire and exuberance, the other a primarily tragic theme of loneliness and terror” (Bush 168). The published
“Bushed” has more in common with Macbeth than with MacFlecknoe,
or with satire at all. The revisionary energies at work in Birney’s creative
process are driven by an aesthetic bias expressed most clearly in his
criticism on Chaucer, through which he expounds a remarkable and
condemnatory view of satire as the adolescence of irony.
Less than two years after Turvey was published,1 Earle Birney began
work on “Bushed,” a poem with which he struggled. Birney has earned
a reputation as “a frequent reviser” of his own work (Stouck 108) who
made revision not merely a step in the process of composition but “followed a lifelong practice of revising” his poems (MacDonald 120). Nor
did publication render the final word: more than ninety per cent of
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the poems in his Selected Poems were revised in one way or another
from their prior published versions (Woodcock, “Turning” 166; Carruth
62-63). The problematic development of “Bushed” in particular has
been discussed briefly by two prior critics: Richard Robillard, in his
companion volume for McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian
Library in 1971 (42-45), and Laurence Steven, in his short article for
Canadian Poetry in 1981 (1-2). Robillard is concerned with Birney’s
poetic career in general, and argues that the revisions made to “Bushed”
mirror a larger movement away from the satiric and satirical (among
other things). Steven agrees with this analysis, but takes it further:
“While what Robillard says is true on the general level, he fails to take
into account the fact that a very similar movement [away from satire]
takes place in Birney’s creative process itself ” (2). This is an insight of
enormous importance in studying Birney: that the pattern of his finished work reflects, on a larger scale, the nature of his creative process,
which consists in a maturation away from the satiric.
However, the sole source on which both critics base their studies
is Birney’s own account of his revisions to “Bushed” in The Creative
Writer, which first aired on CBC Radio in 1965 and was subsequently
published under that title as a series of essays in 1966. Birney’s annotated typescript drafts of “Bushed” were made publicly available that
very year,2 when he transferred his papers from the University of British
Columbia Library to the Rare Books Room (now the Thomas Fisher
Rare Books Library) at the University of Toronto to coincide with his
writer-in-residence appointment; this collection was accessioned the
same year by the reference librarians in Toronto (Barr 43-44).3 Although
the Finding Aid for the Birney Collection gives a first accession of 1976
(1), Barr’s 1987 Guide makes it clear that this was in fact the third accession since 1966 (44). While both Robillard’s and Steven’s studies predate the comprehensive Finding Aid in 1983 (Shoesmith), both scholars
could have made use of Birney’s drafts of “Bushed” but neglected them
entirely. It must be admitted that neither Steven nor Robillard discuss
the drafting of “Bushed” in great detail. Steven’s article concentrates
largely on two other poems, “Transcontinental” and “Man Is A Snow,”
using Birney’s descriptions of revising “Bushed” by way of introduction. Robillard, who would have had less ready access to these archival
materials in 1971, had, unfortunately, both more occasion and greater
cause to do so, with a mandate from McClelland and Stewart (who
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187
also published Trial of a City) to discuss Birney’s work at large, and the
time and space to consider Birney’s papers in his survey. In neither case
was this most important resource consulted, or even acknowledged;
both prior studies of the revisions to “Bushed” rely exclusively on The
Creative Writer.
Apart from the insurmountable problems inherent in taking a poet’s
account of his own work at face value, Birney’s published account of
his first draft of “Bushed” — “So I began the poem” — is limited to a
recollection of the first two lines that does not in fact agree with the first
draft in his manuscripts (Creative 29; cf. Draft 1).4 Birney claims to
have written “Shouting unspectacled out of the steam,” but the second
line of the first draft manuscript originally read something else, most of
which Birney deleted using multiple passes of x’s and z’s to almost completely obscure the underlying characters.5 Just the first three words of
this original second line survive intact; Birney added a line of type just
above the deleted segment, so that the line reads, “You ask me, peering
unspectacled out of the steam” (Draft 1). The poet later crossed out the
first four of those words with pen and replaced them with “shouting,”
at which point the line reads as it finally does in The Creative Writer.
Birney also states that he “soon scrapped that” draft (Creative 29), yet
the archived first draft is in fact longer than the finished poem and
heavily revised. He goes on to quote from a “second attempt” at the
poem involving a dialogue in “three voices” (“Creative”; cf. Creative
29-30), which does not appear in the Thomas Fisher collection of his
papers. The first three drafts in the collection are numbered sequentially
in pen by Birney; the draft labeled “2” is titled “The light” and begins,
“When the lightning struck the rainbow of his life,” with no dialogue
whatever (Draft 2). This phantom dialogue draft is doubly mysterious
because the eight drafts on file are one less than the “nine drafts” Birney
claims to have written (Creative 31).
Although the original cataloguers of the Earle Birney Collection
have since retired from the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, the
current librarians affirm that it is “extremely impossible that they or
anyone since has lost pages or miscegenated [sic] the manuscripts” (Reid;
Shoesmith). The reasons for this inconsistency between Birney’s account
and his own manuscripts may never be known, but the fact of it should
not be overlooked. The author is equally unreliable (factually speaking) on other aspects of the draft manuscripts: he claims to have taken
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five weeks and seven drafts to identify “Old Sam” and his cabin as the
objects of the poem (Creative 30), yet the second draft in the archives,
and every one after it, have the same unnamed “he” standing in for
“Old Sam” as the final version, and the same figurations of the mountain peak as an arrowhead aimed at the man’s heart, and the barring
of the cabin door. Birney’s account of the poem’s composition, while
certainly useful for supplementary illustration of his own thoughts and
feelings toward his work, cannot be relied upon for direct evidence in a
serious critical study, and could be seen as effectively prejudicial to any
understanding of Birney’s creative process. Moreover, neither Robillard
nor Steven appears to have listened to the archival recordings of the original CBC broadcasts, removing a further source of aesthetic information — the author’s illustrative use of voice — which is not necessarily
prejudicial, but is actually complementary to the drafts, and which, as I
will show, is important to a complete understanding of Birney’s creative
process in revising “Bushed.”
There is a great deal of open critical ground here, unbroken and
unsurveyed. Yet satire is always uncertain territory for criticism. There
is little consensus on any aspect of satire: whether it constitutes a genre,
form, or mode; whether it is a political, sociological, psychological, or
even (some few suggest) a literary phenomenon; whether it is definable at all or entirely protean. Birney may have declared his first draft
unequivocally “a satire” (Creative 29-33), he may in fact have considered
himself a satirist,6 and he may well have been described as one by critics
from Malcolm Lowry to A.J.M. Smith to D.J. Dooley, in relation to
both his poetry and his prose fiction, but that is still not enough to proceed definitively. What is needed here and now is a relevant provisional
definition to get the operation under way; thankfully, we are supplied
with two — both Canadian.
Between Northrop Frye’s provision of satire as “militant irony”
(Anatomy 223) and Birney’s own critical conception of irony as “indirect
satire” (Essays 21), we may appear to be hung up in agreeable tautology,
but the critical advantages are absolute. Both agree that satire is akin
to irony. Both agree that satire is characterized by a definite direction:
it is transitive, taking an object and setting to work on it.7 And both
agree — to an extent that will become more apparent and important
as this essay progresses — to the common bias that satire is the lesser
Earle Birney
189
or more limited art.8 There is even a critical moment in which Birney
characterizes satire in Frye’s military terms: “For a medieval reader, the
inverted gusto of the Monk’s portrait would but faintly camouflage a
machine-gun nest of satiric assault upon everything that was decadent
in fourteenth-century monasticism” (Essays 10-11). Although Frye and
Birney were contemporaries at the University of Toronto, and shared an
enthusiasm for Chaucerian ironies, I do not contend that they had any
substantial theoretical accord: nowhere in Elspeth Cameron’s expansive
biography, Earle Birney: A Life, does she present them as anything more
than friendly departmental acquaintances who occasionally reviewed
one another’s work (205, 336). All I propose is that their conceptions
of satire are in sufficient agreement to allow for a discussion of the
first draft of “Bushed” as satire — that Frye’s thought may substantiate
Birney’s without any risk of confounding the two.
Birney’s first draft of the poem sets out as satire, but gradually disengages from its ironic target.9 Its composition originated, he says, with
a powerful “satiric contempt” directed at two fellow professors he had
overheard in the locker room showers of the pools at the University of
British Columbia (“Creative”). At the start of the first draft, these intellectual nabobs are in the midst of discussing how they might retire to
the mountains in the event of nuclear war:
O professor, letting the gym shower fall on the white cocoon of
your paunch,
You ask me, peering unspectacled out of the steam,
Would the Rockies do? Because they won’t waste bombs on the
mountains . . .
Not atom bombs . . .
Perhaps one should . . . what? — buy a cabin, settle the family now?
But how does one live? . . . (Draft 1; original ellipses)
The obvious answer to this last question, from a lifelong outdoorsman
like Birney, is that they wouldn’t live out a month — no matter how
well stocked and supplied, whether or not the rest of the world was in
flames. It is a pretension of the civilized that civilization is something
they can live without: that is Birney’s satiric target. The same belief that
makes dilettantes feel that they are “roughing it” at their comfortable
cottages in the Muskokas is here expanded by satiric fantasy to apocalyptic dimensions, as per Frye (Anatomy 224). Their lack of physical fitness is stressed: fat and paunchy, blanched and malnourished, inherently
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docile (“letting” the water “fall” rather than washing10), going blind and
quite possibly diabetic.11 The professors are in fact barely maintaining
their health in a comfortable university setting, complete with gym
access, making their pretense of survivalism all the more ridiculous.
Their logic is sound, but their underlying presumptions absurd; fission
bombs might not be wasted on mountains, but their lives certainly
would be. Even more risible is the suggestion that they should “pack
off the family now,” condemning themselves and their loved ones to a
death in the bush without even the reality of nuclear war to force them
out of the city. Crucially, in its earliest form, this first draft of “Bushed”
is not merely unsympathetic to the professors, but expresses real poetic
antipathy. The crossed-out lines about fishing — “the ospreys have been
doing it longer” (Draft 1) — casually imply the eventual starvation of
the professors and their families, if madness does not finish them first.
The poet’s initial satiric contempt is so great that even their deaths
are mocked. Thus the two preoccupations of this draft — food and
death — suggest an implicit imagery of scavenging, the bones of these
pretenders to be picked clean by a succession of unspecified creatures.
In only a few lines, Birney’s satire has been admirably established, and
his militant ironies effectively deployed.
The poem soon deviates from this established satire. The poetic
voice changes periodically, then completely by the end of the draft — a
fact that Birney himself emphasizes in his own reading of the first draft
for the CBC, by changing his tone from declamatory to hushed and
leaning audibly closer to the microphone for a more intimate effect:
There’s a lake the Stoneys say a rainbow was broken in
.............................................
Once as a kid I stroked a porcupine there with my hat
and had quills to trade for a winter . . .
.............................................
Under a mountain so big it slows your mind to look at it.
Alive, too, the mountain sent rocks whizzing down every hot morning,
Boomed avalanches at noon, went asleep on its feet at sundown.
.............................................
First the alpenglow violent on the aguille,
Then the darkness smokes out of the valleys til the peak’s a flint
arrowhead
Poised at nothing
Earle Birney
191
Til the moon rolls silently up to inspect his battalion of clouds.
(Draft 1)
Apart from the obviously martial language of Turvey, which is still
on Birney’s mind here — the battalion of clouds lined up for inspection by their lunar officer — there is another implicit similarity with
Frye’s model. When satire recedes, poetic diction creeps forward, along
with simple, honest, and sympathetic emotions. The personifications
of nature are clearly not the imaginative work of Birney’s stodgy fellow
professors, but of a mature mind more sensitive to the ironies of nature’s
inchoate wonders and dangers — as much in touch with the soft alpenglow as the threatening shape of the mountain. Faced with the memory
of the lake into which a rainbow broke, the poet remembers a gesture of
childhood, a brief, gentle contact with a wild animal that stayed with
him — both in the quills that stuck to his hat and the lingering memory he now reflects upon, as Wordsworth did in quiet reflection upon
Tintern Abbey.12 This almost romantic natural poetry stands at odds
with the cutting satire of the professors that initiates the poem.
That initial satire was as dissatisfying to Birney as the subsequent
images were fascinating; he felt the drafted poem insufficient in almost
every way (Creative 29-31), and so began his revisions. The state of
the first draft reflects this: it is heavily edited, with Birney striking
out words and entire lines, crossing others out with pen and pencil,
writing others and crossing those out too. One of the deleted segments
(the second line of the draft) clearly indicates a stage in which this was
conceived not as a discussion between professors, but as a satiric dialogue between the poet and one of them: “You ask me, peering unspectacled out of the steam” — something that might have resembled Lucian
(cf. Essays 29-30). Birney does indeed read from just such a dialogue
(“Creative”), though the corresponding draft is, as I have said, nowhere
to be found among his manuscripts, and is of dubious authority. This
appears to have been the first of many such revisions away from the
original plan of the poem. In his segment for the CBC, Birney remarks
that after writing the first drafts, he wanted to get at the imagery and
emotions that he felt were behind his satiric contempt. He gradually
recalled that, as a boy, he and his father had watched a group of men
carrying the body of Sam, an old trapper, out of his cabin at the foot of
a mountain. When the young Birney asked his father how the man had
died, he replied, simply and evocatively, “He was bushed” (Creative 31).
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The adolescent13 memory of this man’s hard life and horrific death in
the bush proves to be the catalyst for Birney’s poetic revision: “Bushed!
That was my title, my theme” (Creative 31).
Thus begins each subsequent draft of “Bushed” in the Earle Birney
Collection, which are in substance identical to the final published version: not with the professors in the shower, but with the unnamed trapper confronting the wilderness that will consume him. Compare the
published beginning with the one from the first draft, and Birney’s
satiric sublimation is immediately apparent:
He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it
shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain
so big his mind slowed when he looked at it
Yet he built a shack on the shore
learned to roast porcupine belly and
wore the quills in his hat (Selected 117)
The satire is simply gone. In its place, the latent poetic imagery in the
first draft has been moved up and transferred to the sympathetic figure
of the trapper, who has displaced the antipathetic professors. The rainbow broken in the lake becomes his illusory invention; it is his mind that
slows in the shadow of the mountain, his the hat that holds the quills,
he who roasts the porcupine, and he who builds a sturdy shack on the
shore in spite of his awe. The irony here lies in the sublime disparity
between the small competencies of this single man and the enormity
of the nature he confronts; there is no militancy to it, no malice, and
nothing that might be ridiculed by Birney. The trapper here becomes
the focus of the poem.
The poet’s sympathy is paramount, and the reader’s is clearly sought;
Birney’s commentary seeks to draw attention to both emotional states
(Creative 30-33). The subject attempts to confront nature on genial
terms, first going out each dawn, and then only later and later in the
day, until he is so terrified that he has to wait until nightfall. Soon even
that is too much:
And now he could only
bar himself in and wait
for the great flint to come singing into his heart (Selected 117)
Earle Birney
193
The fear of dying — metaphorically or literally — in cold, solitary
madness is one of the hallmarks of Canadian literature; indeed, it is the
singular expression of the conclusive principle of Frye’s Bush Garden
essays, the “garrison mentality” (225-27). Magdalene Redekop observes
in The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature that “Bushed”
“reads like a gloss on Frye’s vision of a landscape of horror,” citing it as
a seminal example of Canadian confrontational nature poetry (271-72).
Yet this is something of a break from Frye, who considers the garrison
mentality produced by such isolation as a starting point for a peculiarly
Canadian brand of satire (Bush 229, 233, 239). The difference lies in
the implicit plurality of Frye’s concept and the explicit singularity of
Birney’s poetic protagonist. Even Frye’s most desperate garrison contains a small community, but Birney’s trapper chooses to confront the
wilderness on his own. A garrison of one cannot hold out long when
“confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing and formidable physical
setting” (Bush 227). The reality of nature’s violence overwhelms Birney’s
original satire: no trace remains in the final draft, in which the entire
poem has been refocused on a sympathetic protagonist who was only
faintly implicit in the first draft. For Birney, the memory of the death
of the isolated trapper is too heavy on his heart for him to continue the
satire (Creative 29-31; cf. Anatomy 224). This pathetic recognition is a
crucial understanding to be carried forward from an analysis of the first
draft of “Bushed” to its final form.
The opening imagery of the finished poem appears to be in some sense
a reflection of Birney’s creative process, much as Robillard and Steven
describe. The initial thrust of satire is displaced by the old memory of
the cabin by the mountain on the lake, an image that slowed Birney’s
mind from the pique of satire to what he felt was a deeper mode of consideration. Indeed, the only trace of satire remaining in the final poem
is a line that appears earliest in the third draft, and which lies oddly on
the page: “owls in the bear-dusky wood derided him” — with derision
properly understood as one of the chief activities of a satirist. The phrasing and rhythm are peculiar, but the purpose is clear. The owls are
figures of menace; along with the moon that carves cryptic, “unknown
totems out of the lakeshore,” and “the moosehorned cedars trekked
from the swamp” like Birnam wood to Dunsinane,14 they lead the trapper’s deteriorating mind to the conclusion that the wind is reshaping
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the mountain for a killing blow — the very image which concludes the
poem. This Shakespearean allusion suggests the tragic form which the
poem ultimately takes and how it relates to its satiric origins, and affords
convenient examples for a discussion of the interaction of the satiric and
the tragic generally, and specifically in “Bushed.”
Birney’s owls are satirical characters, insofar as they are sketched as
voices of hooting derision, but like Macbeth’s young page, their function
is tragic. An audience laughs as surely at Macbeth’s verbal assault on
the boy’s “linen cheeks” as at the Inverness Porter’s alcoholic hallucinations and equivocations, but each of these two speeches heralds a crucial
moment in the tragedy.15 In both cases, a scene of derision immediately
precedes a scene of immense tragic intensity; as Frye remarks, how “easy
for the same satiric tone to turn bitter and nightmarish” (Bush 170).
In “Bushed,” the mocking owls introduce the threatening approach of
cedars, in turn foreshadowing the tragic climax of the poem. Likewise,
Macbeth’s page is brutally mocked by the protagonist, but his report,
one short scene later, that Birnam wood is on the march, is recognized
by Macbeth as one of the Witches’ fatal prophecies — the first crucial
tragic anagnorisis precipitating the climax (cf. Anatomy 212). The mechanics are different — Macbeth mocks, Birney’s trapper is mocked —
but both instances of the satirical have the effect of ironically deepening
tragic pathos in counterpoint. While “Bushed” cannot be a tragedy per
se, as it is not drama, its final form and effect are those of a tragic poem
both for Birney and the reader.
Bearing with this example16 a moment longer, the nature of Birney’s
revision of the poem from satiric to tragic is perhaps best expressed in
the exchange between Macbeth and the Doctor, which comes, conveniently enough, just before the approach of the woods to which Birney
alludes:
MACBETH. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff ’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
DOCTOR.
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself. (5.3.40-46)
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195
What is being debated here is catharsis: the purgation or purification
of emotions, chief ly pity and fear. Macbeth’s conceit, common in
Elizabethan tragedy, is medical;17 Birney uses similar metaphorical language in saying that the poem’s drafts were “sweated out of my bowels”
(Creative 33). While Macbeth equivocates about the exact location of his
problem — heart or brain — Birney prefers the predominantly mental,
Freudian language of “the awful corridors of the human mind,” “my
twelve-year old psyche,” “suppressed memory,” “repressed association,”
and “schizophrenic moments” (32-33). Laurence Steven rightly seizes on
Birney’s repeated use of the word “purged” in describing the successful composition of “Bushed” (1-2) but does not isolate catharsis as the
mechanism involved.
The process of poetic revision as tragic purgation requires further
insight, and Frye is once more instrumental.18 Understanding that
“in catharsis the emotions are purged by being attached to objects”
(Anatomy 66), Birney’s relationship to the various drafts of the poem
becomes clear. The first satiric draft raised in Birney some suggestion
of what he called “some far deeper emotion . . . flooding in on me”
(Creative 29). After writing the phantom dialogue draft, Birney attached
his emotions tentatively to an object: “The cabin, that was what mysteriously bugged me. Not the unlikely cabin those two profs would
have built, but the old one, already deserted, by Mystic Lake thirty-five
years ago. . . . Why, why, did I keep remembering that cabin. . . .?”
(31). Eventually, Birney identifies the true objects of the poem’s cathartic movement: “my poem wasn’t really about the professors at all, or
about atom-bomb survival, but about a cabin I had never seen, and its
inhabitant, whom I had last glimpsed when he was a corpse muffled
on a pack-saddle . . . a far deeper more scary vision” (31). The poet
wrestled with this “til at last I had given it the words that left me at
peace” in the final draft (32), those emotions having been successfully
attached to an aesthetic object and purged from his mind. The relief and
exhilaration that Birney describes upon completing the poem (31-33)
are exactly those predicted by Frye’s advanced Aristotelian model: “The
traditional theory of catharsis implies that the emotional response to art
is not the raising of an actual emotion, but the raising and casting out
[i.e., purgation] of actual emotion on the wave of something else. We
may call this something else, perhaps, exhilaration or exuberance: the
vision of something liberated from experience, the response kindled in
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the reader by the transmutation of experience into mimesis, of life into
art” (Anatomy 93). This consequent exhilaration, Frye notes, applies
equally to the audience and the author himself (94); it is not a much
greater step to extend the whole underlying process of catharsis to the
author, as well, by which the climactic drafting of the poem stands in
for the climax of the action on stage — both acts of mimesis. Frye does
not specifically address authorial or creative catharsis, but his thought
clearly supports such an extension.
The trapper’s self-isolation is as surely an expression of tragic hamartia as the decision to act on the prophecy of Scottish witches, or to
ignore that of Tiresias; it could also be argued that the confrontation of
man against nature is as pure an expression of hybris as Xerxes in The
Persians, if nature is broadly understood to include both Aeschylus’s
attendant Gods and Fates and Birney’s animated mountain in the same
wide sublime. Indeed, Al Purdy singles out “Bushed” as the poem in
Birney’s catalogue that exemplifies “Greek tragedy” in its singular possession of “a fateful quality which you can lift like a grid and place on
almost any hopeless situation” (75). And because the trapper chooses
this fate for himself, his tragic action falls under Aristotle’s category of
proairesis, glossed by Frye as the “free choice of an end” (Anatomy 210),
the type of heroic action which occasions the highest levels of tragic
catharsis. Susan Glickman astutely observes, contra D.G. Jones and
many others, that in the poem’s final lines we are not in fact told of
the trapper’s death (138-41)19 but of its dreadful anticipation: the very
definition of anagnorisis for Frye, “not simply the knowledge by the hero
of what has happened to him . . . but the recognition of the determined
shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison
with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken” (Anatomy 212). We
are left with two distinct poems corresponding to Frye’s two themes:
the first, forsaken satiric draft, heavily revised and consigned to the
archives, and the final tragic version that was published.
The change in “Bushed” is so oddly complete that it recalls the story
of the philosopher’s sock: purchased in ecumenical black but prone to
growing holes all around, which he dutifully darned with red thread,
until, one day, he declared with due reservation that he had a red sock.
The effect of nature’s violence, red in tooth and claw, overwhelms the
original satire, and the poet’s revision is total: the entire poem has been
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197
refocused on a sympathetic protagonist who was only faintly implicit
in the secondary imagery of the first draft. There is one last question
to ask: why should Birney condemn the satiric in preferring the tragic?
His preference for the tragic “Bushed” could be easily allowed as a function of its cathartic effect — but why should he not have published two
poems, a satiric-tragic diptych united along an axis of shared imagery
and situation? The satiric draft is slashed through with typewritten
x’s, pen, and pencil, betraying the contempt Birney later describes.
It is derided as “too flip, too much on the outside” (Creative 29). In
redrafting, he says, “Here I quit a second time, disgusted. The thing
was getting nowhere,” and eventually dismisses both the dialogue of the
professors and his poetic recreation of it as “vapid talk” (31). To have a
preference for tragedy over satire is one thing; to utterly despise one’s
own satiric poem is quite another. The reasons for Birney’s contempt
for the first draft of “Bushed” and the impetus behind his revisionary
process are most clearly expressed in his criticism on Chaucer, which
holds satire to be a limited, juvenile form of a larger ironic art.
A complete survey of Birney’s criticism — including an 850-page
doctoral thesis called “Chaucer’s Irony” — would be prohibitive in a
paper of this scope; fortunately, just such a synopsis was produced by
Beryl Rowland, herself a Chaucer scholar and the lone PhD candidate
Birney sponsored. She provides the tantalizing suggestion that Birney’s
“approach [to Chaucer] was very much influenced . . . by his own practice of poetry” (Rowland 78). In that potent cross-pollination of criticism and creation, an idea of satire derived from academic work seems
likely to have fertilized a germinal satiric poem. Les McLeod describes
a strong connection between some of Birney’s poetry and his critical
work on Chaucer’s irony in his 1981 study, but does not consider the
role of Birney’s criticism in his creative process — only in its results —
and does not consider “Bushed” in his survey. McLeod also confines his
enquiry to Birney’s 1936 doctoral thesis, rather than his more mature
critical thought in a series of essays published throughout his career
and eventually collected in Essays on Chaucerian Irony, which Rowland
prefaced. Rowland also points out that, like Birney, Chaucer has been
historically overlooked as a satirist. She summarizes Birney’s survey of
Chaucer’s critics, from Dryden 20 on down through G.L. Kittredge, in
which the Canterburian is lauded for his poetry and sensibility even as
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his satire is dismissed as trivial or condemned as obscene. The similarities between Birney and Chaucer accumulate quietly, and the deepest
connection between the two authors lies tacit in Birney’s critical subtext.
Rowland’s singular understanding is that in Birney’s critical view,
satire is an adolescent state of literature — one that comes before irony.
We are so accustomed to speaking of satire and irony in categorical,
Kantian terms, of irony as a priori the condition of the possibility of
satire, that this seems almost impossible. Yet Birney’s point is unmistakable: in his mind, Chaucer the satirist becomes Chaucer the ironist; satire
is, generally speaking, the ground from which well-nourished irony
grows; as irony outgrows its satiric adolescence, it leaves this ground
behind entirely, emerging unsoiled (Rowland 76). Whether or not
Birney’s is a defensible theoretical position — it is, at the very least, a
fascinating one — is of no consequence here. This is Birney’s conception, and he in turn conceived and reconceived “Bushed,” so it demands
consideration on those grounds.
Early in “Is Chaucer’s Irony a Modern Discovery?” — a short but
brilliant survey of criticism from the fifteenth century down — Birney
makes a small, unheralded assertion that almost inverts the idea of satire itself. It is nothing less than the author’s critical formulation of that
same move away from satire that this paper locates in the revisions to
“Bushed.” Antique studies on Chaucerian irony, says Birney, are absent
not because of critical sophistication but semantics: “‘Irony,’ even in
the narrower sense of verbal ambiguity and understatement, is a rare
pedant’s term in English until the Victorian age . . . with reference to
Chaucer, I find no earlier use of the term than in a note of Thomas
Gray’s, about 1760” (Essays 37) — and even this is an ambivalent
employment, as Birney observes. The semantic point is direct and well
taken, but conceals a greater problem of priority: “long before Gray,
readers were smiling with Chaucer at the incongruities of his pilgrims,
exploring his hidden satire, and experiencing the curious grim elation”
of his profound ironies (37).
Birney’s remarkable understanding is that satire precedes irony, historically speaking. This is not a question of precedence as privilege,
but of simple succession. Irony as a literary mode may well completely
exceed and categorically contain satire, but where chronology and history are concerned, he argues that literature came first to satire, then
to irony: only after satire had exhausted itself — as in Chaucer — was
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pure irony refined. In terms of literary craftsmanship, the corollary is
equally revealing: in Birney’s thought, satire comes more easily and
naturally to the author than irony. Satire for Birney is something almost
effortless; irony requires more sophisticated and significant work, and
indeed may be smithed carefully out of more raw and elemental satire.
However, Birney’s characterization of the satirist is not that of a father
figure21 for the ironist, but of a juvenile state that true irony outgrows.
In this he expresses clearly his critical contempt for satire, and illustrates
the reasons for his rejection of the satiric origins of “Bushed” — the first
draft of which possesses irony in Birney’s strict sense of verbal ambiguity
and understatement, but not in his greater sense of comic or tragic irony.
Let us consider once more Birney’s provisional definition of irony as
“indirect satire.” This is not, in and of itself, enough to establish a preference for satire over irony — whether tragic or comic in nature — let
alone an inherent contempt for satire. Yet the character of satire’s directedness is precisely where Birney begins to outline its artistic limitations
in his Essays on Chaucerian Irony: “Chaucer, who was neither a cardinal,
like Jerome, nor a militant feminist, like Christine de Pisan . . . took
care to balance the disputes and satirize the satirizer” (10). While this is
probably unfair to Jerome and Christine, it is an important illustration
of Birney’s disposition toward the satiric. Implicitly, satire is characterized as something unbalanced and single-minded. It is a literary vector,
a method designed to deliver a ballistic, incendiary message — like
those of Jerome and Christine, according to Birney — without seriously
considering what lies on the other side of its attack. Though the phrase
“militant feminist” has been long a patronizing cliché, its echo of Frye’s
“militant irony” cannot but be overheard here. As if to drive the point
home, Birney insists on following up with a military metaphor: that
what little irony was to be found before Chaucer did but “camouflage
a machine-gun nest of satiric assault” (Essays 10-11). The satirist is limited to one-sidedness; that literary technique of “satirizing the satirist”
is about getting beyond satire — about a sophistication that eschews
base satire for the elevated environs of irony, moving beyond the simple
anonymity and obscurity of earlier and inferior satirists (Essays 30).
If satire is at all valuable in Birney’s criticism, it is valued only as the
adolescence of irony: a stage of development prior to literary maturity.
He remarks that before Chaucer, “all previous preachers and satirists
had been crude and forthright,” that the accumulation of their crude
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satiric strength “paved the way for subtlety” thereafter (Essays 11-12).
Crude, preachy, unsubtle, perhaps even sectarian — all of Birney’s terms
condemn satire to the lowest possible levels of literary status. Then
there is “the wooden objectivity typical of medieval satire” in contrast
to “the living, lurking presence” of Chaucer (16-17). Satire, it seems, is
not merely a debased art but a dead one — an art of petrifaction if not
putrefaction. Irony is presented as subtle, alive, subjective, and original.
Satire has priority over irony only in date, in the accidence of birth — as
it does in the composition of “Bushed.” Birney’s dichotomy is reaching
almost Brobdingnagian proportions — and he goes on.
In the essay “English Irony before Chaucer,” Birney traces the history of irony to show it emerging from the limitations of satire to reach
artistic freedom in the hands of Chaucer. He depicts a gradual sophistication of English irony from the “primitive jeering” (Essays 21) of satiric
battle-irony up to the Piers Plowman of Langland, whom Birney holds
as Chaucer’s predecessor. This is, in essence, not much different than
Frye’s specific-to-general gradient of satire; yet Birney’s characterizations of satire are consistently condemnatory, whereas Frye’s display no
such bias.22 When Birney does speak of Chaucer’s “satiric adroitness” as
an ironist, he clearly implies that a mere satirist is somehow hopelessly
gauche, obvious and fitful. To the word “primitive,” Birney quickly
joins “ponderous and pitiless” to characterize the jeering, satiric taunts
of military and religious victors in the earliest Anglo-Saxon “tradition of
literary sadism” (Essays 21-22). Proverbial irony he sidelines as “homely
village aphorism” (23) — a limitation against which Bion and Martial,
to name but two, might have had a choice word or three. We are very
much in the main of Frye’s provisional definition, but could not be
further from Frye’s ultimate estimation of satire’s literary significance.
It is in Birney’s subsequent comparison of Chaucer and his predecessor Langland that this negative critical attitude toward satire is most
developed, and his disavowal of satire as a legitimate art is completed.
Though Birney seems to list Langland at the head of all ironists prior
to Chaucer, he and those like him are adamantly limited by the critic:
“Langland — or whoever wrote Piers Plowman — was potentially a
great ironist” (Essays 31). The implication is again clear: that satire’s
value is merely the potential for irony, its adolescence. The ironist is
somehow a satirist come to fruition, one who has matured and grown
beyond his roots. Langland has merely “the poise of irony” (31) —
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the stance, but not the substance of it to be found in Chaucer. Where
Langland is said to be simply ambivalent with respect to class and caste
in his satire, Chaucer is depicted as more profoundly ambiguous, as
more sophisticated than the disputes between the medieval estates.
Langland is so degraded that Birney ultimately claims that the poet
satirized “impotently yet with perfect self-confidence” (32), adding
emasculation to his prior suggestions of death and sterility in satire, as
opposed to the lively, virile art of Chaucer. Birney’s conclusion is simply
that “Chaucer, being Chaucer, had little to learn from these rare grim
jests of Langland” (32), confirming his belief in a clear inferiority of
satirist to ironist, satire to irony.23
Whether or not Birney is right about satire’s nature24 is, as I have
said, not the issue here: he clearly thought satire limited, and both his
criticism and his creative process reflect this equally. He held Chaucer
above all as the first English writer who outgrew his early satires for a
larger ironic art, much as Birney himself attempted to revise the early
satire of “Bushed” into a tragic poem, intended to be cathartic both to
the poet himself and to his readers. In perfect accordance with Birney’s
description of Chaucer, McLeod notes that Birney “is a man who chooses, for various reasons, to make a show of concealing his satiric thrusts”
(McLeod 130). It is not enough to write a satire and then revise it completely into a tragic poem; he must make a show — and a decidedly
ambivalent one — of his concealment of satire in The Creative Writer.
Revealing (or rather unconcealing) Birney’s attitude to satire in
theory and practice may help to resolve one of the outstanding peculiarities in the criticism. Throughout an otherwise panegyric encomium
which places satire — as many critics do — at the centre of Birney’s
oeuvre, A.J.M. Smith expresses reservation not about the wit or poetic
quality of the many thoroughly satiric or incidentally satirical poems,
but about two rather more speculative concerns: whether they are
“completely successful” (7), and why they so frequently “seem weak
or forced” (8). This is surely an oddity. Birney is celebrated as a satirist, but the quality and consistency of his satires is questioned. Smith
suggests that his peculiar critical position “may be partly due to the
arbitrary typographical eccentricity that has been imposed” by Birney
upon the volume of Selected Poems, but he quickly and rightly dismisses
this criticism as mere “caviling” on his part (8). The problem is resolved
by an insight that might have come straight from Birney’s own criti-
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cism: “Twenty-Third Flight” is especially “successful I think because the
satire here directed against the world of tourism and public relations is
directed, even if ever so gently, against the poet himself too” (Smith 7).
What is tentatively drawn out here is the very idea of the satirist satirized that Birney describes as Chaucer’s primary means of sophisticating
satire into irony, and the sign of a pubescent satirist maturing into an
ironist. While Smith does not make this larger connection to Birney’s
criticism, he does make the smaller but perhaps more important observation that the conclusion, both of the poem and the poet in the poem,
is “tragi-comic,” and ranks “Twenty-Third Flight” among the best of
“the comic poems” (7). The key understanding is that when Birney
makes a move beyond pure satire, it generally involves some deployment
of dramatic ironies — that is, tragic or comic in nature — exactly as I
have detailed in “Bushed.” When Birney turns away from satire, whether
over the course of a finished poem or in the prior course of his revisions,
it is generally the deliberate turning toward the irony he describes in
Chaucer. Like Steven and Robillard, Smith observes this movement
more broadly in Birney’s poetry, arguing that Trial of a City “fuses perfectly for the first time in Birney’s work the two themes that Northrop
Frye has named” as central to Canadian poetry, the satirical-comic and
the isolative tragic (12). Yet this is not precisely what happened in the
composition of “Bushed,” which was revised from a harsher, purer strain
of the former into the latter. Where all agree is in the general turning
away from pure satire that Birney’s work appears to present. Were similar turnings-away from satiric origins to be found in the drafts of other
pieces, they might open the way to more complete understandings both
of Birney’s creative process and his works — perhaps even a fulfillment
of the as-yet unrealized thesis on “Birney’s Irony” for which both Milton
Wilson (20) and George Woodcock (Odysseus 127) had such high hopes.
Notes
1
Turvey was published in 1949; the sixth draft of “Bushed” is dated 1951, and Birney
claims that the poem took him “nine drafts and two months” (Creative 32).
2
It is possible that the drafts of “Bushed” were available as early as 1952 in a collection
at the University of British Columbia, the manuscripts of which “date from 1948 to 1952,”
including an “original draft (ts., annotated)” of the poems in Trial of a City (Barr 16).
Barr’s description of the UBC holdings does not, however, specifically mention the drafts
of “Bushed,” although they are catalogued in the subsequent holdings in Toronto (86).
Earle Birney
203
3
In my survey of the history of the Earle Birney Collection at the Thomas Fisher, I am
indebted to two of its excellent research librarians, John Shoesmith and Tom Reid, who had
the good fortune to have known Birney well.
4
This draft has no line numbers, and because of Birney’s dense annotation of the
typescript, to assign line numbers is almost impossible. The poem is, however, barely over
a page long in the first draft, and less than a page thereafter, so I will simply cite the drafts
in full as “Draft 1,” “Draft 2,” etc., throughout the article.
5
The first four of these deleted words are barely discernible; the line originally appears
to have begun, “You ask me, peering through the steam without,” with the remainder
completely obscured.
6
There is no doubt that Birney thought himself a satirist: at one point, he founded a
workshop called The Scriblerus Club, a name taken from a group of eighteenth-century
satirists headlined by Swift and Pope (Cameron 211) who wrote under the collective pseudonym Martinus Scriblerus; at another, he explicitly identifies himself in artistic spirit with
Juvenal (Birney, TAPE #1).
7
Hence the curious observation of Magdalene Redekop that satire is peculiar in its
verbal activity: one may satirize but neither “tragedize” nor “comedize,” though all three
may be seen as foundational poetic forms.
8
This valuation of satire appears to have originated with the Peripatetic School
(Aristotle, Poetics 4.6-11); it is not without critical pedigree or eminent support.
9
The first draft in particular shows significant revisions in typeface, pen, and pencil,
reflecting Birney’s immediate and enduring dissatisfaction with his satire; the second draft
is a total departure from it.
10
Birney did later cross out “fall” and replace it with “roar,” but this change still attributes the amplification or increase in energy to the water, not the professor.
11
E.K. Brown, reviewing Now Is Time, notes that “what Chesterton called ‘the impudent fatness of the few’ is never far from Mr. Birney’s mind” (Brown 293).
12
By this, I allude both to Robillard’s brilliant description of Birney’s transformation
of nature in “David” from “Wordsworthian idyll . . . into a Canadian deathtrap” (17) and
to Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as originating from “emotion recollected in tranquillity” [sic] in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, with which Birney’s account in The Creative
Writer appears to agree rather nicely.
13
Birney recalls, “I was perhaps twelve” (Creative 31).
14
Interestingly, in Birney’s original vision of the poem, the “moosehorned cedars”
appear animate, but do not move; only in his revisions do they make this uncanny progress.
15
As A.C. Bradley observes, “we cannot forget how the knocking that makes [the
Porter] grumble sounded to Macbeth,” and that “in pretending to be the porter of hell-gate
he is terribly near the truth” (363). He catalogues similar moments of circumstantially grim
satiric jests in Hamlet and Anthony and Cleopatra.
16
Macbeth qualifies as an exemplary tragedy both on Bradley’s terms and on Frye’s,
and, of more immediate relevance, as a tragedy that uses the interaction of the tragic and
satiric to produce the cathartic effect; Birney’s allusion is, as noted, a convenient one for
my purposes.
17
Macbeth is hoping for a quick-fix apothecary antidote or nip-tuck surgery; according
to the classical tragic formula, bloodletting is the only cure, and his is the main ingredient
of that tonic. In the preface to Bywater’s great Oxonian translation of the Poetics, Gilbert
Murray points out that “Greek tragedies were introduced into Rome, not on artistic but on
superstitious grounds, as a katharmos against [or katharsis of] a pestilence,” which he draws
from Livy, 8.2 (Poetics 16).
18
Harold Bloom also springs to mind; I would, however, caution that to figure Birney’s
revision as askesis is likely an unhelpful over-reading, and that Shakespeare was probably
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not the most immediate influence on Birney’s mind in this process. He alludes freely to
later authors, but most of his direct influences are older than Chaucer and quite various.
19
Glickman’s analysis also sharply illustrates a crucial difference between a dramatic
tragedy and a tragic poem like Birney’s: “We are left waiting with the protagonist at the end
of the poem; Birney is not interested in what happens after, he is exploring sublime terror
as it happens” (141). In other words, Birney is not concerned with the completion of a tragic
plot, but with presenting a tragic protagonist in a more immediate and less formal poetic
setting. However, much as I admire her insights, I take issue with Glickman’s assertion that
“‘Bushed’ is about the disruption of ego-boundaries” (140), which seems unsupportable
given the content of the poem.
20
“Paradoxically,” grins Rowland, it was Dryden, a “professional satirist,” who first sent
Chaucerians in the wrong direction (77).
21
The satirist, as characterized by Birney, may be a father-figure to the mature ironist
only in Wordsworth’s peculiar psychological sense, expressed in “My Heart Leaps Up,” of
the child as the father to the man, provided they are one and the same.
22
Frye’s early work on satire is another matter entirely.
23
This rather direct attack on Langland is interesting; Birney uses him in an important speaking role in “The Damnation of Vancouver,” but this critical perspective throws
Birney’s careful “reproduction” of his style, with “exactly the right balance between parody
and recreation” (Bush 16), into serious ironic ambiguity.
24
Given the problems with his definitions of “parody” and “burlesque,” it is unlikely
that Birney’s historical and exclusively British conception of satire is robust or completely
reliable as an overarching theory of the genre (or whatever satire may be). It would make
little sense to call Pope and Swift adolescent ironists.
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