Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

This 193-page “poem on impulse” was eight years in the making, like
Scott’s Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (1988), for which it is
a sequel, though not an obvious one. Oversimplifying, we can say the
former poem is political while Listening to the Candle is personal. Here
Scott gives us an autobiographical account of the growth of the poet’s
mind: from his childhood in Quebec in the 1930s and 1940s (immersed in
the literary/artistic/political milieu of his parents Frank [F.R.] and
Marian Scott); through his time at Oxford, where his poetry was
recognized, and his subsequent association with the poets of the
Montreal Renaissance in the 1950s; to his career as a bureaucrat in the
Canadian diplomatic service, largely in the U.S. The last half of the
book deals with Scott’s experiences of the counterculture in Berkeley
in the 1960s and the early 1970s, and its influences on his subsequent
outlook as husband, father, writer, and professor of English at UC
Berkeley.

In the preface, Scott encourages readers to “seek a pleasurable
rather than a disciplined experience”; browsing will “approximate to
the nonlinear way in which the poem has been written.” Given the work
before us, I wonder if this friendly direction is not something of an
excuse for a certain incoherency, because while the sections and
subsections are not necessarily composed linearly, they are on the whole
arranged linearly, and further, the first three sections (up to
adulthood, marriage, established career, and the death of his father)
are connected by recurrent motifs: the “lake beyond language” for
which the growing Scott searches; the lightning in the Alps, which
evokes a terror of inspired madness; the “fear of losing control / in
that large world within us”; the wry recognition of the “limits of
[his] mind”; and the “lapse” into “unimaginable normalcy.”
Sections 4 and 5 largely forget these linking features and become
meditations on friends and episodes known and experienced during the
last three decades. While some of them are intriguing, one wonders what
keeps them together, beyond autobiography. In fact, without the
recurrent motifs of the first half, the book as a whole would smack, far
more than Scott would (or should) want, of literary and countercultural
name-dropping.

A final note: for a “poem on impulse,” the three-line, unrhymed
stanzas used throughout (but for one brief epigrammatic subsection) tend
to monotony if read for any stretch of time. While lengthily repeated
stanzaic structure has a long history, many of its practitioners
countered the monotony by verbal and rhythmic dexterity, as well as by
linkage through rhyme, image, and symbol. Scott needs to cultivate more
of the impulse to poetry inherent in the language if his work is not
going to succumb, for all its scope, to what he refers to as a
bureaucratic “Canadian middleness.”