Making Canada New by Dean Irvine

Author:Dean Irvine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4875-1136-4
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2017-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

and in the third stanza he thinks “of men who preferred to die, / of wounds revealed in the sea, / and brown wide sightless eyes” (22–4).17 This was one of the eight poems in Poems 1939–1944 (1946) not reprinted in No Man an Island two years later. Of the group of excluded poems, Baxter questions why Whalley “decided to leave them out … since they have several affinities in both style and theme” (497). At least in relation to “Behind the Victory,” John Ferns is right to suggest that it was excluded because it is “too personal” in revealing “the temptation to death in the cold water.” Evidence in the private papers corroborates Ferns’s speculation and also leads to new insights into Whalley’s life and thought during the war.

One of the most important items in the private papers is a small black naval logbook Whalley used as a diary. On 28 May 1941, one day after his act of heroism, he wrote, “Swam for 3 – 1 dead when arrived – of other 2, 1 managed to clutch rope only to die a few moments later. Eyes open & fixed yellow-brown, salt-water bubbling from mouth, head often under water. Had to abandon 1 – reached ship side but great difficulty getting man up – exhausted. Left dead man – floated away – his arm badly wounded several deep gashes.”18

Both the poem and the log book do not focus on the man Whalley saved, but on the two he could not save, on the failure rather than the success. The language of “Behind the Victory” draws on the journal entry: the phrase “other two” is repeated, and the line “brown wide sightless eyes” is a variation of the earlier phrasing in the logbook. Some other poems also give a glimpse into the way in which death was a marked preoccupation in Whalley’s thoughts at the time.

The use of Lazarus in two poems can be read in light of Whalley’s leap into the sea and the close encounter with death. How close Whalley came to death will never be known, but the “aloneness” (23) that results as a consequence of a near-death experience after a return to life is signalled in the last stanza of “Wheat” – drafted in Alexandria on 11 May 1943 – where Whalley writes of Lazarus “as he moved among his fellows, / alien and unfamiliar” (25–6). The return to Lazarus in a poem years later, after seeing Jacob Epstein’s sculpture named Lazarus, which is in New College Chapel, Oxford, suggests that the figure, and the thought associated with it, had long-time significance for Whalley. The language of the opening stanza of “Lazarus” draws together the resurrected man and the sea: Lazarus’s neck is “arched back / Like a frozen wave” (7–8), and the women who find him, Mary and Martha, are “rocking to and fro / Like bladderwrack in an indolent undertow” (9–10). The resurrection resembles a struggle to escape the sea: “Out of this undertow he claws his way / To a bitter breach of consciousness” (30–1).

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