JOHNSTON, George (Benson)

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Hamilton, Ontario, 7 October 1913. Education: University of Toronto, B.A. 1936, M.A. 1945. Military Service: Royal Canadian Air Force: flight lieutenant. Family: Married Jeanne McRae in 1944; three sons and three daughters. Career: Assistant professor, Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, 1946–49; lecturer, then professor, 1950–79, and since 1979 professor emeritus, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. Awards: LL D: Queen's University, 1972. D.Litt.: Carleton University, 1978. Address: 2590 Cook's Line, R.R. 1, Athelstan, Quebec JOS 1AO, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

The Cruising Auk. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1959.

Home Free. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1966.

Happy Enough. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1972.

Taking a Grip. Ottawa, Golden Dog, 1978.

Auk Redivivus. Ottawa, Golden Dog, 1981.

Ask Again. Moonbeam, Ontario, Penumbra, 1984.

Carl, Portrait of a Painter. Moonbeam, Ontario, Penumbra, 1986.

Endeared by Dark: The Collected Poems. Erin, Ontario, Porcupine's Quill, 1990.

What Is to Come: Selected and New Poems. Toronto, St. Thomas Poetry Series, 1996.

Other

Editor, The Collected Poems of George Whalley. Kingston, Ontario, Quarry, 1986.

Translator, The Saga of Gisli, the Outlaw. Toronto, University of Toronto Press/Dent, 1963.

Translator, The Faroe Islanders' Saga. Ottawa, Oberon, 1975.

Translator, The Greenlanders' Saga. Ottawa, Oberon, 1976.

Translator, Rocky Shores. Paisley, Scotland, Wilfion Books, 1981.

Translator, Wind over Romsdal. Moonbeam, Ontario, Penumbra, 1982.

Translator, Pastor Bodvar's Letter. Moonbeam, Ontario, Penumbra, 1986.

Translator, Barba. Kingston, Ontario, Quarry, 1986.

Translator, Seeing and Remembering: Verse. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1986.

Translator, Barbara, by Jorgen-Frantz Jacobsen. Norwich, England, Norvik, 1993.

Translator, Thrand of Gotu: Two Icelandic Sagas from the Flat Island Book. Erin, Ontario, Porcupine's Quill, 1994.

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Critical Studies: By D.G. Jones, in Canadian Literature (Vancouver), 59, 1974; George Johnston issue of MHRev, 78, March 1987; "The Later Poetry of George Johnston" by W.J. Keith, in Canadian Poetry (London, Ontario), 31, fall-winter 1992.

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In his author's introduction to Endeared by Dark, George Johnston indulges in a rare moment of self-defense, noting that Canadians have overemphasized the "what" of poetry (sentiment, clarity, observation) at the expense of the "how" (technique). From the time The Cruising Auk revealed him to be a practitioner of what critics liked to call "serious light verse," Johnston has been a master of superbly unforced craftsmanship. But content is present, too, and the accumulation of delightful verbal surprises is evidenced, for example, in the early poem "Night Noises":

   Late at night in night's neglected places
   The busy diesel shunter thumps and grinds
   As to and fro he singles out and chases
   The helpless cars, whose businesses he minds.

The Cruising Auk brought onstage a cast of characters—Mr. Murple, Mrs. McGonigle, Miss Belaney—that Johnston treats satirically yet tenderly. In "Queens and Duchesses," for example,

   Miss Belaney's pleasure is vast,
   Indeed it fills the night;
   She doesn't remember who kissed her last
   But he did it good, all right.

In "Love in High Places," one of two long poems in Home Free, Johnston assembles his dramatis personae, telling the story of how Stan, the son of Edward and Sadie, rose to high political rank from humble beginnings:

   And if you ask yourself where all this comes from
     And answer true
   You will have to admit that his father contributed nothing
     But good nature
   And a nervous tic or two.

Johnston is superb, not just in narrating Stan's background and family history, but also in depicting the anxieties of office, even as his character is shaken by the onslaught of romantic infatuation:

   There were times when his trouble would come back
     And he would shake:
   A wistful evening when the urgency had gone off
     And a warm breeze come on
   Beside a lake,
   Gert there next him behaving like a delicious
   Irrecoverable
     Mistake.

"Under the Tree," the other long poem in Home Free, also mediates between the private and public spheres, powerfully tracing individual and collective complicity in the ritual of capital punishment. But Johnston is far too skilled to make the poem a diatribe against the death penalty. In any case he is dealing with humanity's guilty or oblivious relationship toward "God's suffering ugly cunning beautiful /Wounded creature of earth …" The alliterative last line, "Darkened earth, tell our deeds to the dark," also reminds us that Johnston is an accomplished translator from the Old Norse, as well as from modern Scandinavian languages.

From the 1960s onward Johnston has turned away from the end rhymes and graceful scansion of his first poems to seek out more complex rhythms and to make some sacrifice in melody in favor of imagistic compression, as in "Catpath" in Happy Enough:

   Black on Mrs. Crowder's porch
     watching
   tabby on Mr. Moir's post
     watching
   Mrs. Osborne's bullhead marmalade tom
   footing along the catpath in the snow.

The comedy here resides in the photographic clarity of the scene, the simplicity and aptness of the diction, and the strategically perfect placement of "footing."

"Come Through," in Ask Again, plays with singular and plural and puts a new spin on anthropomorphism:

  All the white brook
    takes his walk
  woodlot to woodlot
    talking
  among his alders.

Ask Again includes a section called "Friends and Occasions," and in fact many poems are elegies, commemorations, or epithalamiums, a taking stock of a long and productive life. "Cold Comfort," in What Is to Come, notes,

   A benefit of age:
   leisure to remember
   the different kinds of skunk
   one has been,
   given occasion—
 
 
   with apologies
   to that gentlemanly animal.

Johnston's innate modesty and gentle irony—echoed in titles like Happy Enough and Taking a Grip—have fallen out of favor, though his work has not so much been disparaged as simply ignored. This is a considerable pity, because Johnston's subtle and lightly carried perceptions are timeless.

—Fraser Sutherland