Mariposa Podcast Transcript
1950 Leacock Medal Winner
Turvey
– by Earle Birney
This is an interview
with Professor Elspeth Cameron, biographer of writer Earle Birney, who won the
1950 Leacock Medal for his book Turvey. Birney was himself an English professor and
writer accomplished in many forms of literature. He won the Governor General's
Award for his poetry twice. But his Leacock Medal book was unusual as a
humorous work and one of only two novels that Birney wrote. It was drawn from his experiences as a personnel
officer in the Second World War and tells the tale of a guileless, hapless
soldier, buffeted around by the army bureaucracy.
Professor Cameron,
who published her biography of Birney in the mid 1990s, talked about the writer’s
personality, his famous poem David, and the challenges he faced in
publishing Turvey as well as its link to another Leacock medal winner. She
began by noting how much material there was to work with in documenting Birney’s
life story.
DBD
The Birney
biography is wonderful – you had good raw material there.
Elspeth
Cameron (EC)
It was
incredible. My method was to collect files from Xeroxes in, you know, archives,
special collections, books, whatever, and then I would file them
chronologically, and I put them in liquor store boxes because they were just
the right size. I could lift them and move them - whatever. Anyway, I had I
think 45 boxes of files on Earle Birney. And in each box, there would be
between 50 and 100 files. And that was just the kernels, it wasn't the rest.
I've never seen such a huge archive. And of course, in several different
archives, different universities in different places. It was just incredible.
DBD
So can I ask how
you managed to deal with that mountain of information?
EC
Well, I don't
know how I did it really because I tried to persuade my publisher to do two
volumes because there was so much material. And they said “No,” and so it ended
up being, as you know, a very fat book.
DBD
This is
obviously a function of how prolific a writer he was in different genres. And,
of course, he was an educator as well, so he would have gathered material for
courses. But I was actually thinking of what a personality he was.
EC
He
was multifaceted. He had many different
sides, different persona, even, you know. He wasn't, you know, a multiple
personality or anything psychological like that, but he just did a lot of different
things. And he had so much energy, and he switched easily from one aspect of
his work or his life to another. And he just kept going. I mean, he lived to be
91. And it's amazing, he accomplished a great deal. In that time.
DBD
I guess that we
should acknowledge that he was largely known as a poet although as you
indicated, he was prolific in other genres. David (the poem) is
something that I keep reading that was taught to school students and university
undergrads for decades. I don't remember taking or studying the poem myself.
But you definitely remember the first time you read the poem.
EC
And well, it is
an amazing poem. And it is based on a true incident. (He spent) many years after that dealing with
legal matters about it because really it's a mercy killing. It's about a mercy
killing with two friends, men who are mountain climbing and one of them falls.
And he's very seriously ill - very seriously hurt, I should say. And he asks
his friend to push him over, like a mercy killing, like euthanasia. Let me die,
I'm in such pain, and I'll never be right again. And the friend does push them
over. And this was actually a true incident. And so there were all kinds of
legal ramifications about it. But these came to nothing. He was sued and he had
to defend himself but it just eventually kind of petered out.
DBD
He was even
believed to be a murderer, and it's perversely amusing with the distance of
time, but some people thought he was telling his own story which speaks to the
efficacy of the poetry and, and his capacity as a writer. Of course, my
preoccupation in this context and our conversation is the book Turvey. It
would behoove us, and if you don't mind doing it for the listeners of this
podcast, summarizing Turvey a bit.
EC
Yeah, well, Turvey. He (Birney) had always wanted to be a
novelist in the literary world that he grew up in. And he did have a PhD in
which he focused on Chaucer. In that world, he thought novels were more
important than poems, and a lot of other people did, too. So he wanted to write
a novel. And as early as the 1930s, he tried to write one, and Turvey in
1949 turned out to be his first novel, but it had nothing to do with the early
attempts that he had made. So this was, you know, he called it a picaresque
comedy or whatever. It's really based on two books that are also comic that he
was very taken with. And one was The Good Soldier Schweik, which was by
a Czechoslovakian writer, which, in fact, it became translated into many
languages, and it was very well known. And it was, let's say, years before Birney's
novel Turvey. So it was a big influence, because people in the army during
the Second World War were men mostly. And they were greatly amused by the
oddities of the military. I mean we've seen the same kind of thing in a novel,
such as Catch 22, where everything you're told to do, you're immediately
told to do the opposite. And it doesn't add up to anything, really. And so the
humor in army situations and military setting was something he had read in The
Good Soldier Schweik, and he thought he would do a Canadian version of this
novel.
DBD
What was the other novel that inspired him ?
EC
Well, the other
novel that he was interested in was a work called Sarah Binks - do you know Sarah Binks at all ?
DBD
Oh, yes, Sarah
Binks was the second winner of the Leacock Medal. And I knew he (Birney) liked
Sarah Binks, but I didn't know that
there was an intertwining there.
EC
Yeah, it was a
big influence on him. And he called one of his later books, which was sort of a
memoir. He called it Spreading Time. And, of course, the implication is
spreading manure on the field and spring.
DBD
That was one of
Sarah's poems.
EC
Yes, that was
the title of one of Sarah's poems. Sarah being a fictional character and the
poems just being composed to be as silly and non-poetic as possible. And he was
very taken with that book, which was by (a man), who was, I think he was, a
chemistry professor, perhaps in Saskatchewan somewhere, one of the
universities.
DBD
He was at the
University of Manitoba. A westerner anyways.
EC
Well,
he did it as a joke and it kind of caught on. And, you know, it became quite
well known. I have taught it in my own courses. It's a very funny book. So
those two books influenced Birney in writing Turvey. And they were both
comic. And I think that the whole idea of writing a comical novel based on his
experiences in the Second World War. He was in Britain, but he was never at the
front. He never fought in combat. That was not his job there.
DBD
This is all very
interesting to me. I wasn't really aware that Birney was aspiring to be a
novelist. I had presumed because he was
a personnel officer in the army and had experience that resonated with that of Turvey
that when he got out of the military – he had maybe a burning desire to mock
all this bureaucracy and the silliness of the Catch 22 kind of paradigm.
EC
He certainly
did. He certainly wanted to knock the bureaucracy and, you know, show how silly
all these orders were. There was another thing going on too because he was, as
you say, a personnel selection officer. And the Army at that time had started
using psychological tests to try to place incoming soldiers, recruits, into
positions that suited their personality. So they have these kinds of
personality tests that Birney thought were nonsense. But he administered them
and had a great laugh over them. And he just sent the soldiers to positions he
thought they might do okay in. And I don't think he went very much by the process.
That was where he was positioned in the army. And this, of course, was because
of his high education.
DBD
As someone who
spent many decades working in the federal government, I could appreciate the
paradigm where you have official truth and directions, but then you have to do
what you think is right.
EC
He certainly
wanted to knock the bureaucracy. But there was another part to all of this as
well, and that is his wife back in Toronto. And she had their very young child,
their only child - Bill. And he (Birney)
wanted to go into the army; he actually enlisted on purpose to get away from
the domestic scene. At home, he couldn't stand the baby crying, he couldn't
stand the fact that his wife was paying so much attention to the baby. This is
not an uncommon thing. Irving Layton, by the way, did the same thing. And so he
found a way to get out of the house and away from the whole domestic scene.
Meanwhile, Esther was a social worker. And so they exchanged almost daily
letters; she would write about cases she was working on in her capacity as a
social worker. And he would write back with the cases that he saw as a personal
selection officer. And the whole idea was she was going to write short stories
based on her experience. He was going to write a novel, which turned out to be Turvey,
based on his experiences in the army. And so these letters were meant to be
kept and used as notes for these two literary projects.
DBD
These letters
would have been some of the material you came across in your research?
EC
Yes.
DBD
Was
there any cross-pollination in that he may have taken from her letters, some
experiences ?
EC
No, I don't
think he used any of her social worker experiences. But the idea was they would
each write every day, and they would keep the letters and use them later. Esther for a collection of short stories and Earle
for this novel, which turned out to be Turvey.
DBD
I did not do
research to the degree that you did on Earle Birney but I did go to the
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, which has a lot of interesting,
colorful material. And one of the things that pops out as you do this is that Turvey
was rejected by other publishers in England and the United States in particular.
EC
Yes, the manuscript
was rejected in Britain and in the US, because it was too Canadian – he used settings
from the Canadian West. He had been sent to Calgary, I believe, for training
before he went overseas. So some of his anecdotes in Turvey are set in
Canada, in Western Canada. And in his job, I think he was dealing a lot with
Canadian recruits. And so a lot of his anecdotes had a Canadian twist to them
or had a setting of Canada or references to the different provinces or
whatever. So U.S. publishers and British publishers weren’t interested in that
at all, you know, his so they were rejected.
However, it was
rejected in Canada too. But that was for a different reason. The reason it was
rejected in Canada was that a lot of the anecdotes and of course, we know what
army life is like it's full of swear words, and he reproduced them all. He put
them all in Turvey and Canadian publisher said, we can't sell a book
that's full of obscene language. So he had to take them all out.
DBD
That was
McClelland's - Jack McClelland I think?
EC
Jack McClelland
himself is one of the most foul-mouthed people I've ever met. And he was in the
Navy during the war, and he was full of swearing all the time. So it wasn't a
personal thing. He just thought from a marketing point of view that nobody in
Canada in 1949, you know just before the 1950s, an age of great conformity, was
going to be interested in reading a book full of obscene language. They would
have rejected it.
DBD
So that was a
bitter pill for Earle Birney to swallow. But I've often wondered whether the
book would have been as successful and certainly whether it would have won the
Leacock medal.
EC
No, no, it
wouldn't. It wouldn't. There would have been all kinds of letters of protest
and newspaper editors and all sorts of things had Jack McClelland published it
the way it was in the first place. No, no, no, it would have been rejected by
the public.
DBD
And bless the
Leacock organization, but it is cloaked in the conservatism of the Mariposa
kind of personality. And I don't know, I don't know if in 1950, it would have
jumped on a book with the F-word - the book was finally printed in the 70s with
it.
EC
Yes, yes. You
mentioned that (in your book). And I have no doubt, I'm speculating now, but I
have no doubt that Birney wanted it returned to its original obscenity. So I'm
sure he was part of the revision that included a lot of that language.
DBD
And by the mid
1970s, of course, the movie and the book Mash and Catch 22 and
the Vietnam War and all that had acclimatized us all to the reality of military
life.
EC
It was a different era. And you know, in all areas, pop music, popular culture,
generally, it was a lot of four-letter words came in that were, you know, just
accepted as normal speech.
DBD
So just in
closing, I presume, but maybe you can confirm this, that Earl Burnie might have
had a chance to read your biography before he passed?
EC
No, I wish he
had I wish he had, although I had met him, you know, before he had his heart
attack. But after he had his heart attack for the last seven years of his life,
he was unable to comprehend anything. I
don't know what he had, whether he had dementia or anything. I don't think it
matters. All that matters is that he was impaired to such an extent that he
couldn't read anything and comprehend it. So I went to visit him in the
hospital, Wei Lam took me. And in fact, Wei Lam asked me to write the biography
in the first place, and was very, very helpful. So I talked to him. But he
didn't, he didn't know me, whereas I had run into him three or four times in
his younger days. And I remember being on the Toronto subway with him one time,
and it was a long ride we were taking, and we had a very spirited conversation
about something. I don't remember what it might have been – maybe Irving Layton
because that was around the time I was writing my Layton biography. But he was
a really lively person. He even when he walked, he bounced, like, like a coiled
spring, so full of energy – it was amazing to see. So I had run into him at theater
performances and other kinds of things in Toronto, before he had his heart
attack. So I had a good idea of what he was like in person. But by the time I
was working on the biography, he was not available. It was very sad.
DBD
Well, this has
been really helpful to me, and I really appreciate your time. You've confirmed
some of my perceptions about Birney and Turvey and maybe dissuaded me of
some others. But one thing that is clear, he was definitely worthy of a
biography, and you did a wonderful job.
EC
Ah, thank you.