Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English (Canadian Literature) at
Laurentian University.

The editors claim that the letters of this collection cover “perhaps
the most seminal period in recent Canadian and American literary
history.” However, the period in question is not the one the
volume’s title suggests. In fact, the correspondence is negligible
after 1955: only 15 items. But from 1953 to 1955, the two poets
sustained an extensive dialogue, without, interestingly, ever having
met. (They finally met in 1962.)

Creeley and Layton were young men at the time, verbally taking on the
established poets (Eliot, Auden, Pound, Graves, Williams, et al.), and
becoming, in their own ways, established figures themselves. Creeley’s
Divers Press, which he operated in Mallorca, attracted up-and-coming
literati such as Charles Olson, Cid Corman, Louis Dudek, and Edward
Dahlberg. It also published the first volume of Layton’s poems that he
did not pay to have published: In the Midst of My Fever, the book that
gained him a reputation as a major poet. Other important features of the
period the letters illuminate from the inside are several influential
small magazines: Contact, published from 1952 to 1954 by Raymond
Souster; Civ/n (1953–54), published by Layton, Aileen Collins, and
Dudek; and Creeley’s Black Mountain Review (1954–57), for which
Layton was a contributing editor.

Of narrower interest, perhaps, is the correspondence’s revelation of
these two poets’ private lives and opinions. Again from the inside, we
are permitted to observe Creeley’s travels in Europe, the United
States, and Central America, all the while glimpsing behind his personas
of bohemian, editor, publisher, poet, teacher, critic, and professor.
Layton’s biography is duller externally—he was a Montreal
suburbanite who taught at a high school, then at Sir George Williams
University—but this was the milieu out of which grew some of his
superb early poems: “The Birth of Tragedy,” “The Gold Green
Element,” and “The Improved Binoculars.”

Through Creeley’s and Layton’s letters to each other, we can also
watch their esthetic positions develop. Each esteemed the other’s
work, sometimes embarrassingly. Beyond this mutual admiration, though,
they often disagreed in their assessments of other writers—points of
discussion that vibrantly reveal details of the esthetic environment of
the day.

The editors provide a useful introduction and notes, and a
comprehensive index.