The Fiddlehead Moment by Tony Tremblay

Author:Tony Tremblay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

6 Fred Cogswell standing in front of the Poets’ Corner Monument, UNB, December 1990.

Cogswell was thus attaching himself to a particular socio-cultural movement in New Brunswick that Bailey had initiated, proving, in the rather casual way he spoke of it, that what once was the revolutionary idea of modernizing New Brunswick was now normative. As critic, he had fully absorbed Bailey’s dominant form of cultural analysis (the historical sociology of Toynbee and Innis) to examine New Brunswick as an organic field, and as a creative writer he was extending Bailey’s supposition that particularities of time and place could be brought to the point of contemporaneity. What Cogswell could not have known fully at the time, however, was the extent to which both his thinking and practice were embedded in the “unified point of view” that had coalesced around Bailey. By the time Cogswell arrived at UNB in 1945 as an undergraduate, Bailey’s ideas had indeed become normative in the work of the Bliss Carman Society and Fiddlehead poets, in the teaching of Pacey and other members of the English and history departments, in the institutional thinking of UNB presidents Norman MacKenzie and Milton Gregg, and in the provincial desire (informed by John Clarence Webster, Beaverbrook, and Premier John B. McNair) to use post-war momentum to repurpose New Brunswick society. Cogswell’s role in the Fiddlehead movement, then, must begin with a consideration of inheritance and move from there to an examination of what he did with what he inherited.

The first point to be made is how seemingly different Cogswell was from his two principal mentors, Bailey and Pacey. Unlike Bailey, he had come from no intellectual or social aristocracy, and unlike Pacey, his rootedness in the province was deep. More typical New Brunswickers than Bailey or Pacey, the Cogswells knew the province in their bones, having been stewards of the soil for generations. As a result, Fred Cogswell had no need to trumpet provincial fidelity or compensate for a lack of that fidelity with nationalist histrionics. For those reasons he became one of Bailey’s special projects: a brilliant New Brunswick student who would either succeed or fail in the cultural milieu that Bailey had shaped for just such a new generation. Pacey had “come from away,” to use the local expression, in 1944, an orphan seeking permanence and thus given by circumstance to ready embrace. Had Bailey’s project been otherwise defined, Pacey would likely have gone in other directions. But coming from New Brunswick, Cogswell was different. If repurposed localism as trust and vocation didn’t capture his imagination, then Bailey’s work was more theoretical than transformative. Cogswell (and fellow New Brunswick students Elizabeth Brewster, Robert Gibbs, Robert Hawkes, and Allan Donaldson) would be key, and were groomed accordingly. Under Bailey’s watch, and under the leadership of Webster, Beaverbrook, and other influential native sons, there was no bias against talented young New Brunswickers. That lookdown would come later.

NURTURED BY SURROUNDING SOIL

Fred Cogswell’s maternal ancestors were Westmorland and Kent County Acadians.6 Frederick Walter

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