PRF.VIEW FR SCOTT M RG~RET DAY B RUDDICK PATRICK NDERSON N SHAW PK PAGE UMBER 3 ~ Y 1942 ODE TO A POLITICIAN Item: A Sturdy Boy. In simple cotta~e, with scant ceremonial, Observe the birthday of this young colonial. Clutching the nearest good as best he can The helpless mite perc ives no social plan. He grows unhampered in his natural skills And finds companionship in lakes and hills. Item: A Forked Road. But soon this native freedom meets its end And his fresh mind to ancient rules must bend. At school he learns the three Canadian things: Obedience, Loyalty, and Love of Kings. To serve a country other than his own Becom s for him the highest duty known, To keep antiquity alive forever The proper object of his young endeavour. Item: A Young Man's Country. Hence though the orthland calls him to be free He never sheds this first servility. His keen ambition, after several knocks, Soon finds an outlet in the orthodox. He does not recognize the new frontiers Which beckon, as of old, for pioneers. So he is proud, not seeing the distant star, To hitch his waggon to the C. P.R. It m: Doing Well. No matter if his income starts from scratch: In this career he quickly strikes a match. Proceeding on two rails that never meet He lands eventually on easy street. For not a miner digs or farmer sows Unless to this steel ~1st the tribute flows. Item: Doing Good. Now full success has brought him wealth and ease With lots of honorary LL.D.'s From this advanta e point, still hale and hearty, He slips a million to the Tory Party. And in return for this attractive fePder The party promptly chooses him as leader. The public follow at the next election; So there he reigns--the national selection. ., Item: More Business in Government. Canadians now have picked to run their state The sort of man who 'made their country great•. Once in the saddle, swift the whip he cracks. The Mounties spring like thistles in his tracks. When fools complain, or some poor victims squeal, He meets their protest with the iron heel. A simple rule for markets he discovers-To close his own and blast his way to others. To keep our credit good and money sound Some novel democratic ways are found. The rich are paid by taxes on the poor; The unemployed are chased from door to door; The wages fall though dividends are earnedj And people, st·a.rve though surplus food 1.s burned. Item: A Flick,er of Doubt. This chaos kept alive by penal laws In time gives even our politician pause. Some gl1.mmer1ng concept of a juster state Begins to trouble him--but just too late. His own life work had dug the grave too deep In which the peop.le 's rights and powers sleep. Item: An Epitaph. To make the single meaning doubly clear He ends the journey-..as a British peer. F. R. Scott LIGHT. Walking through the streets makes me slightly giddy, as though I were intoxicated. The air 1s surprizingly paJ_pable and there is so much of it. Whole quarters, environs, districts of light. Light fluffed up at the end of the street, coming ·apparently .from nowhere, has been produced by blowing into the breast feathers of a bird. Light arrives, already printed, with the day's news in it, out of a piece of newspaper floating on the ground. The snow lets out its special radiance and, if you look closer, in furrow and drift and ice patch you will see the different sources of light-mica-opaque, granulated, slivered, muddy or dusky blue. A whole facade of stone grey villas, a darker tone in the general movement and expansion, has yet immense sources of light--a door knob, a basement window, the wooden fence around the nunnery a.re all, if distantly, affected. Above and almost crowded out by the tall buildings, or shut out by the mountain to whose sides the rich men's houses cling, is the sky 1ts.elf.. Immense as the sea, dramatic as sailing, it has a mourr1ful, romantic, tattered look--as though it mirrored something completely wrecked, the clouds streaming out between the fingers of someone who has just broken the la.st thing he had to break and is looking on with a dismay which becomes every moment more mask-like and monumental. Believe me, all this is a surprise. There is a midway, down the street, wind and cold of light which clasps the face. ThP-re is the feeling of whole acres of light streaming just behind the focus of the eye; the tendency to keep the head revolving. I exaggerate, perhaps, the drama.tic qualities. All this comes, you see, as a complete contrast to hours of work in my room--cigarette smoke, the fumes of bitter tea, the electric light which must be turned on early but which gives my pencil writing a soft, irritatingly blurred and unreal look. Outside it is so light, so wide, so heady --going out is a kind of darin.-• Th core of it is a sense of drama, as though one were going out into the eyes of a thousand peoole. PassArs by in the street re epic or mysterious. The war enhances these eff cts--my fear, I mean. At any moment, truning through a crowd at a corner, overhearing some conv .rsation, there may occur a crisis, the sudden impact of a new, a heightened danger. There already exists a sub-crisis of light. lready one can see the city broken up, as though by Picasso, into fragments with jagged edges. Som times, walking along, in the dusk {still full of light), I pass one of the innum rable err nd boys nd then in the moment of passing, or just after it, my ears ring with a bell-like tone or the sound of one or two jumbled ords, and I realize the the boy I just passed was whistling er talk ng to hims lf. Yet, in the first instance, it seemed like some effort at communication, a taunt or warningo P. • BED-SITTING ROOM. The sun has beaten its palms flat against glass and getting no answer, strides like a long-legged ghost over the window sill and camps on the rug; releases canaries which perch on the chair and table, hang from a bow on the wall paper and sing like a ne ,dle. The woman is cramped in the cupbo rd of ancient moths nd fon les the smudge of air with a face-clot face, breaths down thP neck of her blouse telling her thre~t of beads with pin-prick fingers. In the drawer her friends are launching their own Armadas of paper boats wlth home truth munition; the photos duel 1n their frames, the smiling boy hurls hts smile like a javelin at the mirror. The friend who will sit in the South of France forever has shot her eyes at the class of ninete n thirty. In the medicin closet behind behind the screen, the doctor squats on his own prescription, l~gs around the bottle, numb with his game and stiff as a flag pole sitter; the authors scream to be set free from their pris • P. K. Page. ITH HIS SCIMITAR LOGIC He pruned their ears. Lopned they fell like 11111es turn~d to toads. 0 Peace," he said. "Now the runelling world Will not whirl raucously to the nerv ." Then, wide-eyed they stood and dumb, lavish with blood, Disordered, Anticipating the n Jural terror. Later, the stumps were unalarming, general and . umb. Ha, he thought, prop rly set and marked For transfixing w th totaling abacus-wire-"Take P.a.se no knowing my aid and am. I am your frock-man, your friend."-Already shifting figur~s to his score and power. Bruce Ruddick • VI Gordie, a Law student, had said, in his fascist way, that the best thing to do with people like Vi was to kill them off or to st~rilize them. From Gordie that didn't shock us, but we thought it a little drastic--especially since we liked so many of these p~ople from the "lower depths". In his . easy French way Eddie had replied, "You have no need to scratch unless there 1s an 1tch,." Gordie had scowled. Around dinner time when I usually sold tickets to the passing tourists Vi would com.e up, and ask for Eddie. If he was anywhere around, she would sit w1th him up front in my bus. If not, she would wait for him there. I was generally on the gun at noon as Wally often gave me the dirty end of the stick and I had to take out the afternoon crowds who were bad for resales on other tours,. But ivith Vi sitting there it made it easier. She certainly was a good come-on with her onderful head of red ha:i.r. A good looking woman in the front of the bus simplifies selli_ng considerably. If Eddie didn't turn up ·by the time I was ready to pull out she would sit there--even through the trip. She didn't bother to ask m~ if she could go, but I didn•t mind having her sitting there behind me. As a matt~r of fact I rath,r liked being ablP to show off my driving. Besides I could always talk to her on those long stretches on the Indian tour when I wasn't sp1e11ng my usual line to the cash customers. That helped keep me awake when the sun beat down on the open topped bus and my heavy dinner drained the blood from my head and m~de me sleepy. When she first turned up I used +-o wonder where she came from. Then Eddie told mP that she was a waitress at the Albertan Hotel. So, long about midnight, after I had turned the bus in and checked out, I used to drop in there for the odd beer on the way home. Vi certainly sparkled among the t1-red hap.s who worked with her. They were on their way do,m if there wa.s any "down"for them. She 11k~d that kind of life. Around nineteen years old, well-fixed and sultry she, showed none of the sif!'nS of fatigue marking the others--fatigue which carne as much from worry and the alchohol that was used to fix that worry as it did from being up all night. Maude, who worked with her once said, "ThPre ain't much romance dishing up chile con carne and beer to drunks when your stomach's turning itself loose." But Vi liked it and the late hours werert't really late hours for her because nothing could scare her out of bed till after mid-day. It didn't take much imagination to see why Eddie e.ttracted her. As a medical student he was far more ram.antic than the regular typ • Still there must have bP.en .something about Eddie himself. I was a student too, but I guess they thought I was queer. I guess I asked too many questions and talked too much, E'ddle used to explain me away by saying that I was a poet and a radical. They laughed at that, but, still, it didn't make things rauch different. How the hell a.re you go!lng to talk socialism to them when they are led to figure s ocialism will take away what little they have. After awhile I gave up trying to educate them. Eddie explained it nicely. "These girls have their fundamental itches and they have to be scratched. And they aren't itches that could be fixed by Carnegie Hall or the People's .Forum. But they have to pretend that they don't need scratch.1.ng. It makes them look better and it might land them a. husband or at the least someon'f who will be kind to them. But if they get the reputation of being easy, no one who counts for anything in their lives pays them much attention. So they steer clear of people who talk a lot." Maude said it was all a matter of face. College boys never kept their mouths shut. Went around boasting to their pals. The first thing a girl knew there wera twenty drunken lustful idiots shrieking and mauling. I didn't know what to believe because when they heard that I liked to write they would often come up and tell me tbe:i.r stori s, which were seldom tragic, seldom •aif.fA · en~. They srll stemmed f'rom some flaw in the social structur~. But I could never figure the cure. As for Vi, anyone with their eyes· open could see where she was going, Most of the customers, liquored up,. were firmly, (if over-hopefully) convinced where she was going. But she knew what she was about and picked her men strategically. Unless she fell in love. And then it would be someone imposslble-•11ke in the movies--like Eddie for instance who knew very well where he was going too. I asked her once if she wouldn't like a more ordered life with steady hours and regular pay and nights off and the chance of a home and maybe kids. You know--the old romantic craperoo. She laughed at me and said that I was a screwball and that she only worked from nine to two and that wasn't any twelve hour day in a sweat shop, and she didn't like kids because they were too much trouble, took up too much of your time and ruined your looks and she liked being around the place with the floor show (amateur kids, blank on talent but long on guts) and the people and th notse. Life, she said, Life. AftP.r a while Eddie got tired of her and stopped going down to the Albertan. She didn't seem to mind. Took up right away wlth a. conswnptive who worked for a bookie. A drawn yellow-faced punk who usually wore pointed tan shoAs and suits of a sickening green with padded shoulders and tight waist. He had a lot of ready money and he was kind to her. AftP.r a while I guess she fell in love with him. Havin~ him for herself madA a snob out of her. She used to walk down the Square at noon with him and pass us by without ev n a nod. Then she disappeared from our sight. I don't think any one missed her, but one night I asked M~uae what had become of her. She was in hospital. Something wrong with her stomach, Maude was kind enough to add. Well you can't be sorry for the whole world at once. The gang of us who orked sight-seeing on the Square (mostly from college like Eddie and mysefl) often used to argue about the Utopias we were going to make. Most of the Utopias were self sh indivudual heavens peopled witb the wealthy and the care-free. None of us seemed to know what was to become of V1 and her kind while we were building these heavens. What was worse-few of us cared. But Vi isn't waiting for the millenium. I saw her the other day, dressed brightly and l_ading a. little dog done up in a plaid blanket-coat. And that wonderful red hair as ble· ched, white and fluffy. I said, "Hello." pparently she didn't hear me. Well that's no skin off my nose. BRUCE RUDDICK THREE STORMS pastoral country, and the quiet window ls flounced to the view like a lady: th pony sunlight buries its nose in her hand while the far-ms crack smiles and snap their laborers• muscles. Nothing 1s lovelier than the plain-sailing sky and the trees' fair dealing in shade like stuff, inscents 1 ke 1ntuitlons: nothing is lovelier than th , quietness in vh1ch nothing happens. But I c 11 my storm: the roaring books of wav s brim in the alchemist's study and the metaphors advance w1th their magic mirrors whilA the foam does conjuring tr cks with empty gloves. Violence intervenes to rust the violet and r·sh alter the flowers, the anchor plows the field-in the iodine lane the vlllag .rs se_e me freed by the art of drowning. My second storm is violent luxury from a clergyman's den and paris, juice pumps in the green and the long-stalked lilies squirt tn the physical folds of the vallAys. I travel ov~rland on the bre sts of a bed freed as I drown in pl asure but both my storms le3ve me too w~ak to escape the discard s nd, the accidie of .iint r. Yet none shall tame my violence. I prepare my third storm stronger that the moral will and the f eling may be joined for a calm of hands fter a ale of hung ,r- Thia storm 1s entle and mercil ss as Spring, flags stream in no wind for the ~ithered state and the slo an without sound in the land without a country. P. • DRINKER Loping and sloped with he t, face thatched and red, hating his engine boots spraying mechanical pebbles he comes through the wh1t block d light to the fountain: his hirt clingin about him wet and rose hangs eaTrily n for~t wlth his chest's sour bracket. He crouches th n: he turns with a se~lous hand the little wh el: hangs, frekcl s ov r th j t rising in~ cru h of wat .r tow rds his flo ting mouth; his eyes ar wide and grav, his act seems private and as his hand spr ads on the green stain d ston his massive workin throat is a colun1n of pure love. He t st Ja vi th the iron lpe the v .ry roots o__ wat r spreading unde the gr und, whic in mult tudinous dirt and in intt~ thr adP-c dark ls purified-he draws the long st lk of w~t r up between his lip and in his sandy mouth th re bursts its melting flow Jr. Then he lelV s off: w pes mouth nd looks around but the glaring buildinps jump through the shabby tre ~ and h cannot have enough of the cl mbing 11m stalk with chrysanth mum he~: he~l ts it ball in his hanging mouth and sboer both fac and thought. When he. has drunk and ashed, he is still prodigal b t no 1 he wears the water with an afflu nt grace as silk and jewels amongst scars and hairs and strolls away, turning oft n like a lighthouse the look of his content upon the place. PATRICK NDERSON H BBOUR The heavy bridge bove which Hurried birds line the air 1th smoothness, And helpless waves below ¥1th clutchi~g hands That shear the stdring land. Then ships , All hazed with frantic lovei Edge into hopeful havens While the city, jewelled woman who spurns her tattered loves, seeks riches in the ,asy clouds. NEUFV-LLE SHAW Cezanne at last was tempt d by an appl To forego women and Vlith fruit to ~rapple. G ODRIDGE ROBERTS