Jay MacPerson
After winning the Governor-General's Literary award for The Boatman in 1957, Jay Macpherson was asked to give a talk about Canadian poetry at Hart House at the University of Toronto. The invitation, which marked the first time the all-male Hart House student union had invited a woman to address its members, provoked such a fuss that women were barred from attending Macpherson's talk.
Such sexist behaviour was the prevailing attitude when Macpherson was making her way as a poet, scholar and teacher at the country's premier academic institution. As modest as she was brilliant, Macpherson found a home in the university as a collegial and hard-working member of the academic community. It didn't hurt that as a very young poet, she had already attracted the attention of three key mentors and literary scholars: George Johnston, Northrop Frye and Robert Graves.
The American literary critic Harold Bloom recognized her rarity from the moment the title poem of The Boatman caught his ear. "She was a woman of the deepest literary sensibility and really very close to a kind of genius in poetry and in deep meditative thought upon the meaning and nature of poetry," he said in an interview in which he recited several of her poems by heart. Bloom included her as one of only two Canadians – the other was Margaret Atwood – in American Women Poets and listed her 1981 collection, Poems Twice Told (a compilation of The Boatman and her 1974 volume Welcoming Disaster), in the brief Canadian section of his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.
Besides writing poetry, Macpherson put her meagre financial resources into publishing other poets. Beginning with her own O Earth Return in 1954, she produced eight chapbooks by emerging poets such as Dorothy Livesay, Alden Nowlan and Al Purdy over the next decade. Publishing was a sideline to her real job, which was teaching undergraduates, including Atwood – a poet as precocious as Macpherson. "She was a very unusual, very, very smart person and converted me from somebody who didn't like Victorian literature at all to somebody who became an expert in it," Atwood said, because "she was a very, very good teacher and she just made it so jolly interesting."
Atwood describes Macpherson as a very significant figure in the history of Canadian poetry and intellectual life and as the author of "very accomplished, really quite extraordinary work."
So why isn't she better known? Several factors kept Macpherson under the celebrity radar: She lacked personal ambition; her muse was elusive; she was not prolific; and she was a ministering angel to waifs and strays, often to the detriment of her own work and health. Finally, she was extremely self-effacing.
Too shy to attend the public ceremony to accept the Governor-General's Award for The Boatman, she asked William Toye, who had designed the book for Oxford University Press, to go in her place. When some of her colleagues at Victoria College, where she had taught for nearly 40 years, tried to nominate her for an honorary degree, she demurred because she was "unworthy." Indeed, said Bloom, if you praised either her poetry or her scholarship she "just shook her head slightly with a very faint smile on her lips."
Instead of celebrity, she had renown; instead of sales, she had respect; instead of power, she had influence and abiding friendships. And for those who seek them out, her poems offer a resurgent pleasure.
Jean (Jay) Macpherson was born in London, England, on June 13, 1931, the elder child of James Ewan Macpherson, an entrepreneur, and his wife Dorothy Macpherson, an organizer of visual arts exhibitions. Dorothy and her two children sailed the treacherous convoy route to Newfoundland in 1940 to become "war guests" in St. John's. The trio had barely stepped off the boat, when she deposited nine-year-old Jay with a local family and decamped to Ottawa with eight-year-old Andrew, her favoured child. There, she began working for the National Film Board, a job she turned into a distinguished career, for which she was eventually named to the Order of Canada.
It is unlikely that anybody would have bestowed prizes for her mothering skills. Jay wasn't invited to rejoin her mother and brother in Ottawa until 1944. That's where she finished high school – at Glebe Collegiate. Peace didn't bring an urge for James and Dorothy Macpherson to reunite as a couple, though, and they continued a separation that the war had initiated.
Jay Macpherson, who was already writing poetry – she had some poems published in Alan Crawley's Contemporary Verse when she was 18 – went to Carleton College (now University). In her final year, she studied Old and Middle English with George Johnston, the author of The Cruising Auk and Home Free. Kindness and gentleness were said to radiate from his sparkling blue eyes; by all accounts that benevolence fell on Macpherson, and perhaps inspired her benevolence to others.
After graduating in 1951, Macpherson went to England, staying with her father in Hampstead and taking courses at the University of London. Through her father's circle, she met Robert Graves, the poet, classicist and author of The White Goddess and I, Claudius, among other works. After reading some of Macpherson's early poems, Graves wrote: "... these are the real thing, though from Canada ... what troubles lie ahead for that girl! I think of Laura," a reference to his own muse and the young lover who had helped break up his first marriage. Macpherson spent the summer of 1952 in Graves's ménage in Majorca, helping to care for the younger children. As a 21st birthday present, he published her first collection, Nineteen Poems, under his Seizin Press imprint.
When he offered her a job as a nanny, she declined. "Much though she liked and respected Graves, she did not feel comfortable about his behaviour as a father," Miranda Seymour reports in Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. Instead, urged by her own father to do something practical, Macpherson enrolled in Library School at McGill University. When she told her friend George Johnston about a class trip to visit the Toronto Public Library System, he insisted on writing a letter of introduction to his friend Northrop Frye at Victoria College.
Frye met her at a Murray's restaurant "as he was escaping a meeting," Macpherson wrote in an explanatory note to Sean Kane, editor of Inward of Poetry: George Johnston and William Blissett in Letters. After a brief conversation they parted, "with the offer ringing in my head that if I could get myself to Toronto he would 'teach me Blake' – by myself, as he wasn't otherwise giving the course."
She did get herself to Toronto and Frye did teach her Blake. He also supervised both her Masters (1955) and PhD (1964) degrees in Victorian literature. The Boatman was dedicated to Frye and his wife, Helen, and contains a cycle about Noah and the ark. The sequence ends with The Anagogic Man, a poem her muse was said to have given her as she watched Frye approach the entrance to Victoria College one day. Knowingness and the affection are all there in its first two stanzas.
Noah walks with head bent down; For between his nape and crown He carries, balancing with care, A golden bubble round and rare.
Its gently shimmering sides surround All us and our worlds, and bound Art and life, and wit and sense, Innocence and experience.
Even as the poet was watching, she too was being observed. "Students thought of her as a more amiable Emily Dickinson as she scuttled by, her waist-length hair trussed up in a bun," writes Rosemary Sullivan in The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. "She was enormously good-hearted but skittishly shy." Macpherson, who augmented her salary by living in residence as don of women, often delivered papers to her students "at midnight in her dressing gown."
In the summer of 1960, Macpherson bought a tiny Victorian house in the run-down Yorkville area, but continued to live in residence. Sensing that Atwood was tiring of the trek to and from her parents' house in Leaside, Macpherson invited her to live in the empty house during her final term as an undergraduate.
"She was extremely kind to me. She noticed when people might need something like that," Atwood said. "Because I lived in her house, I knew her in a way that was not teacher/student." Besides sharing her delight in the Gothic, Atwood trusted Macpherson with early drafts of her poems and fiction. "If she was listening to you, she was really listening." The two women, who were only eight years apart in age, became close friends. "If somebody understands and is interested in you, and likes the same kinds of things that you do, you keep up a relationship with them."
Macpherson's own muse was retreating, but her scholarly, analytical side was flowering. She adapted classical myths for young readers in Four Ages of Man (1962) and completed her impressive study of elegiac and pastoral traditions, The Spirit of Solitude: Conventions and Continuities in Late Romance (1982). She worked very closely with Frye, doing the textual comments on his students' papers as well as teaching her own courses and co-writing Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture, based on a course they gave jointly.
As the years passed, Macpherson's nurturing nature often overwhelmed her poetic and scholarly aspirations. That's why she didn't get more books done, says her niece Diana Macpherson, although she did leave behind an office full of miscellaneous research, including a manuscript, called Seeking the Light, a book-length study of the connections between The Magic Flute and Freemasonry.
Complaining was not one of Macpherson's few indulgences, but she did allow late last year that she was having serious back pain. She was eventually persuaded to seek medical treatment and was diagnosed with cancer in her liver and gall bladder. She died, at the age of 80, surrounded by friends and family on March 21.
She leaves her niece and two nephews. A celebration of her life and work is being planned at Victoria College.
Editor's note: An earlier headline misspelled Jay Macpherson's name as Jay Mcpherson. The current headline is correct.