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1950 Leacock Medal Winner Turvey


Mariposa Podcast Transcript 


1950 Leacock Medal Winner

Turvey – by Earle Birney

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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.