Nobel Intentions

William Chapman was not a great poet. Not terrible, not the worst, but not very good. That hardly makes him unique. Au contraire! Bad poets are a dime a dozen.

But as Tolstoy might have said, each bad poet is bad in his own way. In Chapman’s case, the absence of genius was not for lack of effort. Born in 1850, in what is now Beauceville, Quebec, he published five collections of poetry. Despite his English name, he wrote in French. (His surname was “something like échappement,” sniffed one member of the Académie française.) His first book, Les Québecquoises, appeared in 1876. It included translations of poems by the American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, famous for Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha, among other enormities. In 1881, he published Mines d’or de la Beauce, a work of cultural propaganda disguised as a geological report; for a time, he was a gold prospector himself. His final book, Les Fleurs de givre, was issued in 1912, a year in Canadian letters notable for Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and the birth of Northrop Frye. He died in Ottawa in 1917, leaving unfinished his “Épopée canadienne,” a multi-volume opus intended to cap his literary career.

Long before, the epicist manqué was an indifferent student at Université Laval. He married disastrously and drank too much. By most accounts, Chapman was unpleasant. He feuded in public with Louis Fréchette, a fellow poet and erstwhile member of Parliament. More grievously, he was an antisemite, and his works betray the almost inevitable racism of the period, especially in their references to Indigenous people.

Even if such failings are set aside, it’s hard to imagine that readers today will have much enthusiasm for Chapman’s overtly nationalist verse. These lines praising the miners of the Beauce region illustrate his style (any resemblance to Neil Young is purely coincidental):

Yet Chapman coveted the Nobel Prize for literature and schemed accordingly; somehow he was nominated four times. He was self-aware, if not cynical, about his chances. “I know how things go in Stockholm,” he wrote. “They will crown me not because I am a great poet but because I am the least bad Canadian poet.” Needless to say, the Swedes had other plans.

In Between the New Country and the Old World, Erin E. Edgington provides a lively, clear-eyed, and not unsympathetic examination of Chapman and his writing. (The translations throughout this review are hers.) Despite his turgid verse, the book is consistently entertaining, one of the more readable CanLit studies of recent years. (If only it had been called On First Looking into Chapman’s Groaners.) In her dual role as critic and translator, Edgington shows that although Chapman has a legitimate place in the history of francophone literature, his significance has always been debatable. To an extent, the problem is one of type. A poet of “faith, language, and tradition,” he produced “thematically and aesthetically conservative” works, putting him at odds with “our contemporary notion of what it means to be a successful author.” Yet he was not sufficiently influential, even in his time, to transcend what we perceive as his aesthetic shortcomings. As Edgington remarks, “In the chronology of nineteenth-century French-Canadian poetry running from Octave Crémazie to Émile Nelligan, Chapman lacks the primacy of the former”— whom he admired —“and the modernity of the latter.”

The problem of what to make of Chapman’s particular ineptitude is exacerbated by a dearth of critical attention, especially outside of Quebec. “If it remains unclear whether Chapman ought to be viewed as a mere footnote to Fréchette or rather as an important poet in his own right,” Edgington observes, “that is possibly because treatments of Chapman have thus far been confined to footnotes, bio-bibliographical sketches, and the occasional article or book chapter.” Her comprehensive study fills that gap in scholarship, placing the body of work in historical context.

Edgington’s generous approach serves Chapman well. It would seem, however, to preclude further commentary. No literary subject is ever truly exhausted, but one has the impression that she has done as much as is reasonable for her topic. She deals sensitively with his self-promotion, for instance, suggesting that his Nobel aspirations were not as risible as the poetry, at first blush, makes them seem: “Clearly, Chapman was following coverage of the Nobel Prizes in the press and using what he read to inform his own campaigning.” More to the point, his zeal paid off, at least to a degree. Edgington finds “ample evidence that the poet was increasingly implicated in transatlantic and transnational literary circles after 1900.” Parnassus was never in the cards for Chapman, but neither were prizes granted with perfect aesthetic objectivity. He knew that old proverb: the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

While reading, I kept thinking about another Canadian poet: Al Purdy. There’s no obvious connection. Born the year after Chapman died, Purdy wrote in English and lived in an essentially different country. But he too published his share of uninspired lines. He even wrote a poem about it: “On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems.”

And though he was beloved by many, Purdy can be seen in an unflattering light. He was an imperfect husband and an inattentive father. His prodigious drinking, once par for the course, looks anachronistic in our increasingly sober times. After #MeToo, male authors of his era appear boorish at best. There were fisticuffs aplenty — and possibly worse, if Purdy’s poem “Freight Train Murder,” from 1990, is to be believed. His views were not always incompatible with today’s progressive sentiments, but his sensibilities can never quite be ours, or vice versa.

I don’t mean to scold Purdy. But the lives of the poets, exemplary or loathsome, oblige us to ask what we expect of authors. Does greatness consist of a handful of superlative poems, a formidable career, or impeccable behaviour? How should we remember writers who disappoint us or poems that have lost their lustre? In life as in art, Chapman wasn’t one of a kind.

The first Nobel Prize for literature was awarded in 1901. By the time Chapman died, the list of winners included Frédéric Mistral, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Rudyard Kipling, and Rabindranath Tagore. A hundred years on, these names survive. We abhor Kipling’s politics, but The Jungle Book isn’t going anywhere. Neither is Kim.

Precious few writers defeat time. However, Chapman all but failed, and in that respect, he resembles the great mass of versifiers. Now poets, scholars, and book reviewers alike face another oblivion: the automation and consequent debasement of language by artificial intelligence (the oxymoron to end all oxymorons). His poetry remains slight, yet Chapman emerges from Edgington’s commentary as someone who deserves grudging admiration. Whether or not he was “le moins mauvais poète du Canada,” he sought to shape the cultural life of his community. Today, when even university administrators, having capitulated to big tech, are participants in our intellectual demise, Chapman’s artistic ambitions warrant a nod of approbation. If nothing else, he respected words.

As does Erin E. Edgington, who teaches, by the way, at the University of Nevada, Reno. We should be grateful that in the foothills of the Sierra, on the banks of the Truckee, someone cares enough to have written the book on William Chapman.