Bowering on McFadden

George Bowering:

One Saturday night, I sat with David McFadden in Maple Leaf Gardens, watching Toronto beat Detroit 6-0.  At game’s end, when sixteen thousand people began to rise and file out, McFadden opened his book bag and shouted, “Wait, wait, I have some poems to read to you!” He was joking but he was not kidding.  All his writing life he has acted as if the poet has a real function in the social life of his country and world, as if poems are composed by a human being intent on taking his part in the building of a place to live in.  The poet is perhaps not the unacknowledged legislator of the world, but if the citizens could have their ears unstopped they would at least recognize him as a functionary.  McFadden does not want to replace the famous athletes in the workaday dream machine; he just wants to take his turn with them. 

     David McFadden was born (1940) in Hamilton, Ont. , and lived there until 1978.  Canada’s biggest steel-producing city, Hamilton, half-way between Buffalo and Toronto, is the country’s emblem for postwar working-class life.  People who live there, one fancies, participate without choice in the life of hourly wage, producing the element of national “growth,” and accept with no question of will the attendant despoliation of the ecosphere, and the avid leisure hour invasion of the American trash culture.  Under cast-iron clouds, Hamiltonians in Dacron slacks go bowling, eat brown-coated chicken parts, and watch game shows on Buffalo TV stations. 

     But David McFadden’s bungalow was on “Hamilton Mountain,” a petion of the great Niagara Escarpment, a precambrian survivor of God’s geography that almost joins Fenimore Cooper country to the Canadian Shield, that huge rock backbone of Canada, a symbol vastly important to our literary mythologists.  Hamilton Mountain does not rear itself above the smog, but it insists on its priority; it tells the imagination that this part of the continent was all this high once, that the Niagara Peninsula and the Great Lakes were not always a flat stage for coke furnaces and Pepsi shacks. 

     The Escarpment is an important symbol for McFadden, but no more important as a base for his poetic than as a foundation for his house.  McFadden did not go to university, but neither did he choose the idle life of most Canadian “working-class” poets.  He was for a decade a proofreader for the Hamilton Spectator, and for several more years a reporter, chiefly on the police beat.  Thus he was a wage-earner with words, and an artist raising a lower-middle-class family.  Each night he drove down off the Escarpment into the dark of the mills, and in the daytime he wrote poems that took for their subject the lives of regular human beings, divine in origin but compelled to enact their lives in the midst of the trash era.  As Frank Davey put it in From There To Here: “the message of McFadden’s poems is that individual man in evitably is forced to participate in both the lumpen culture and global political forces of his time. “¹ 

     One does not have to read far in McFadden’s verse to find out that he has chosen to be a romantic poet in the line or company of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, and Kerouse.  That choice implies a vision relentlessly connecting metaphysical belief and detailed concern for the quotidian fate of the least powerful people in his society. 

You would see him bobbing proudly along Kenilworth Avenue
dressed in ill-fitting pin-striped suit & flowery tie
bought in a second-hand store,
his right hand bent in a perpetual wave,
two paper bags in his left hand. 

McFadden’s poems abound with the crippled and ill-used, but the word that shows up most often when desire or appreciation is signalled is “perfect. “   more here