‘“Am I writing anything? Memos.”’

The Weather & the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003
by J.A. Weingarten (ed.)

Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025
$95 / 9781771126830

Reviewed by Sheldon Goldfarb

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When I finished this collection of letters from the mostly forgotten Canadian poet John Newlove, I thought: There’s nothing more intimate than reading someone else’s letters. Well, next to reading their diary, I suppose. Letters are more crafted and meant to be seen, but still they let you inside a life, which is what this collection lets you do.

John Newlove was a presence once upon a time, an influential poet in the 1960s and ‘70s, important enough to terrify Lorna Crozier, another Canadian poet, when she realized he was attending one of her readings. He did have a reputation, and not just for his poetry but for his persona, which could be short-tempered and even included biting people at parties. (I really should stop that, he said, but I do have a reputation to keep up.)

And we learn not only about Newlove, but about the still-famous Margaret Atwood: Peggy to her friends and Pegasus to Newlove, who advised her on the blurbs to put on her first book and who apparently promised to cast Newlove’s horoscope (but it seems she never did).

What would that horoscope have said? That he was full of talent, but would encounter obstacles? That he would find success but not happiness? That he would go through periods of drought, so much so that when asked if he was writing later in life, when busy with government work, he replied, “Am I writing anything? Memos.”

The government work, for places like the Office of Official Languages (“The Thought Police,” he called it) at least kept him in funds, as did his work for the publisher McClelland & Stewart (or as he called them, McClueless & Stewmeat). But the tradeoff was that he had less time to write. It was the same when he was very young and had to support himself by working in the UBC Bookstore (or Book Sore, as he called it). But it was worse when he had no jobs and had to resort to begging from friends like Al Purdy and John Robert Colombo, or applying for Canada Council grants, which at first turned him down, leading him to become bitter and complaining.

He eventually did get grants, but he never stopped complaining. My wife calls me a grumpy old man, he writes, but I was always grumpy. And gloomy, said the critics, which annoyed him. It annoys his editor, J.A. Weingarten, too, who blames Margaret Atwood for starting the trend of calling Newlove pessimistic. But going just by the letters Newlove does seem pessimistic: a birthday is a chance to announce that he is one day closer to death, and he wrings his hands when he contemplates the younger generation of poets (“beautiful young monsters,” he calls them, still able to write while his moment of divinity seems past).

This collection is clearly a labour of love, but I think Newlove would probably complain about it too, about the editor’s critique of his politics, especially his white-privileged views on the Indigenous, which feature in one of his most anthologized poems, “The Pride.” Poems are not essays, Newlove told one correspondent; what matters is their rhythm and sound, though of course they have meaning too and he hopes he is able to connect to something universal through them. To be criticized for his politics would probably astonish him, but he lived in a different time.

It was a time of typewriters, for one thing, as we are reminded when he struggles to get his typing paper straight, and a pre-Internet time of isolation for poets, as the editor comments. A time when people wrote hardcopy letters which they then gave to universities (or sold to them) so that we can read them later and read their jokes and complaints. He gets to be a “writher” in residence (or “liar” in residence, he says once), and wonders why people come to him: If they want to write, why don’t they just write? But I end up being a combined editor and social worker, he says, mostly social worker.

And we learn about his alcoholism, another obstacle to his writing, along with depression. He finally goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and is able to keep sober for a long time, but is not happy with what he discovers: Christmas sober is even more of a crock than I thought, he says, and in general says reality out there in the world of sobriety is not what it’s cracked up to be. In hospital one time, when nurses ask him questions to test his connection to reality, he says that was never his strong point.

I suppose a poet doesn’t have to be overly connected to reality; we want our poets to be able to engage in flights of fancy, and when we force them into reality’s chair as senior editors or bureaucrats, we risk clipping their wings. In any case, the tale told here seems to be of clipped wings, of a poet who had some early success but who didn’t go on to become Margaret Atwood. He has fallen by the wayside, but he provides a fascinating picture of that process and of the writing life.

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Sheldon Goldfarb is the author of The Hundred-Year Trek: A History of Student Life at UBC (Heritage House, 2017), reviewed by Herbert Rosengarten. He has been the archivist for the UBC student society (the AMS) for more than twenty years and has also written a murder mystery and two academic books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. His murder mystery, Remember, Remember (Bristol: UKA Press), was nominated for an Arthur Ellis crime writing award in 2005. His latest book, Sherlockian Musings: Thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes Stories (London: MX Publishing, 2019), was reviewed in The British Columbia Review by Patrick McDonagh. Originally from Montreal, Sheldon has a history degree from McGill University, a master’s degree in English from the University of Manitoba, and two degrees from the University of British Columbia: a PhD in English and a master’s degree in archival studies. [Editor’s note: Sheldon Goldfarb has reviewed books by Catherine Lang, Reed Stirling, Bill Arnott, paulo da costa, Chris Honey, and Andrew Platten, for The British Columbia Review. He has also contributed a comedic poem, “The Ramen,” based on Poe’s “The Raven.”]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster