Stewart Donovan

The Dog-Eared Texts
Selected Essays and Reviews by R.J. MacSween

  Ever since I was a boy I have been an 
  incessant and omnivorou-S reader and 
  lived in 'a strong solution of books'.
                         -Hugh MacDiarmid

Those who knew the late Reverend R.J. MacSween realize that the above quotation could easily have been uttered by him. Father MacSween, at the time of his death, left a personal library of over fifteen thousand volumes to the Angus L. MacDonald Library at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish.1 Despite the impressive - if not intimidating - size of this collection none of MacSween's poetry, prose, conversation or classes could ever be said to be pedantic, sententious or abstruse. This is not to say that he was not bookish.2 The writer he devoted most of his life to, both teaching and reading, was Ezra Pound - arguably the most bookish poet who has ever lived. But MacSween wore his learning lightly, forever striving for precision and almost serenely logical, but always conscious of the need for humor, laughter, joy.

Father MacSween's own literary criticism reflects both his wide reading and his love of clarity and precision. In an early essay on Hemingway he talked about the nature of good prose. "It is many things, but it has at least this quality: transparency. It does not make a screen between mind and mind. It carries the reader with a subtle authority along a train of thought or narrative. Above all, it lacks idiosyncrasy."3

If a label is necessary or helpful for defining the often protean figure that MacSween was, perhaps the old standby "classical" is best. Many of the writers he admired, taught, and wrote about were of a classical bent, came from what can be broadly described as the classical tradition: Alexander Pope, Cardinal Newman, Ivy Compton Burnett, G.K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Evelyn Waugh and others. The charge of course that the experienced reader would level against even a short list such as this is that most of these writers are Catholic. This is true. Father MacSween was a Catholic priest and he admired and promoted writers from the Catholic tradition. But like other great Catholic literary figures he was in no way tribalized by his preference for these writers, nor did he tribalize them in his own writing. We need only remember that Ezra Pound - a religious writer certainly, but neither Catholic nor Christian - was his favorite poet. If Catholicism initially piqued his interest in a writer like, for example, Roy Campbell, it was the South African's wonderful lyrics, his control of language, exotic diction and beautiful translations of Saintjohn of the Cross that made MacSween return again and again to the writing.

In his essays MacSween illustrated an ability to capture in a few pages, often paragraphs, the essentials of an artist's work. He was of course a considerable poet, and one day he will be recognized as an important religious and meditative writer.4

Although not all poets are good essayists, in MacSween's case the two pursuits perfectly complemented one another. His essays have the same meditative quality as his most memorable poems, and he wrote those essays with the same craft and care with which he wrote his poetry. I think, too, that there is another, perhaps a private, even personal reason, for the appeal of MacSween's essays. In his poetry and in his fiction MacSween practised, almost religiously, T.S. Eliot's dictum that the best writing is an escape from personality. And for those who knew him or who were taught by him there can be little doubt that his poetry and fiction achieved the classical detachment he so clearly sought. In these works MacSween strove for precision and truth, and the natural beauty that comes from the conjunction of the two. Like Borges, a writer he admired immensely, MacSween was preoccupied both with history and with the infinite. And like another of his favorite writers, Newman, MacSween always wore - in his poetry and fiction - a deliberate "mask of frost".5

It is only in his essays, and in the personal reminicences that he wrote in his last years for the weekly diocesan newspaper The Casket that MacSween appears to take off this mask and give his personality something close to a free reign. Consequently, what we see behind these essays and reviews that follow is MacSween the professor, the legendary teacher, the promoter of writers and writing. In the classroom MacSween was famous for his memory, humour, and insight. Sadly, even these wonderful essays do not capture any sense of the man's great humour. It is perhaps wrong of us to expect them to do so, but so powerful was the figure before the blackboard that we long to hear again the humour, the quiet laugh, the wit of this great teacher.

Father MacSween never wrote for promotion or tenure and, as far as I know, he never published in any refereedjournals. He never had to and he never wanted to. Two years before he died The Globe and Mail' brought him a brief moment in the sun when they asked him to do a feature article on Ezra Pound (Louis Dudek had been asked by a literary editor at The Globe to name someone in Canada who was an expert on Pound. Dudek, without hesitation, gave him Father MacSween's number).

When MacSween founded The Antigonish Review in 1970 its mandate, as he saw it, was to promote writers and writing, both new and established. It was typical, I think, of his humility and perhaps of the way he underestimated and underated his own talents/ that he did not immediately take on the editorship but hired an Englishman, Reverend Brocard Sewell, instead. Sewell had been editor of the successful English magazine The Aylesford Review. But after a year or so MacSween assumed the duties of eifitor and he worked at thejob until 1980 when he retired to devote more time to his own writing.

It is in The Antigonish Review that the great bulk ofMacSween's own writing appeared, but he was writing and publishing reviews and essays long before 1970, mostly in the alumni news magazine of St. F.X. University entitled Contetnporaty and Alumni News and for the Port Hawkesbuty Sun.

Trying to select 90 or so pages of Father MacSween's best critical work, from the 30 or more fall length essays and the I 00 or so reviews that he published, has not been an easy task. Nevertheless, in the selections that follow I have tried to give the reader a sense of MacSween's eclectic and extensive reading and a taste of his subtle, incisive and compelling style. I have, in selecting reviews, omitted the citations from tiie books under review that were included in the originals, and in many cases omitted paragraphs. The articles also underwent some shortening.

I . Kevin MacNeil, long time librarian atSLF.X, estimates, from conversations with MacSween and those who knew him, that approximately ten thousand more books would have been given to students, friends and die library over the forty-six years that MacSween was at the university.

2. I once asked MacSween how many of his books he had read and he estimated 'somewhere between 6 and 8 thousand".

3. "Me Enigma of Hemingway: was it whistling in the dark?" Contemporaly and Alumni News VoI. 2, No. 3 (Sept. 1964), p. 2.

4. In an unpublished letter to MacSween, the well-known poet and critic Louis Dudek praised MacSween for 'a poetry surprisingly effective through plain statement ... You are unquestionably one of the best poets writing in Canada'.

5. See MacSween's essay on Newman at the end of this selection.

6. See 'A wild, brilliant, genius", a review of The Solitaly VoL-ano by John Tytell. The Globe and Mai4 "Books,'January 30, 1988, C3.

7. In an interview with MacSween he stressed that he wrote his poems for a small circle of friends and had no other larger ambition for them.

Back

The Antigonish Review is a quarterly literary journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. The Review features poetry, fiction, reviews and critical articles from all parts of Canada, the US and overseas, using original graphics to enliven the format.

Editorial Office:
The Antigonish Review
P.O. Box 5000
Antigonish
Nova Scotia B2G 2W5
Canada
Telephone: (902) 867-3962
Fax: (902) 867-5563
E-mail: tar@stfx.ca