Lecture for an Empty Room

wondering aloud if Ralph Connor is my personal Thoreau,

Referencing American Naturalist Henry David Thoreau and the body of water that influenced his infamous Walden (1854) in their 2022 essay “A Walk on Cape Cod,” American poet Eileen Myles offered that “The guy who had lived in the woods was engaged in deep measurement.” Myles describes a childhood spent but a short walk from the shores of Walden Lake (what Thoreau referred to himself as “Pond”), and their connections to the author, in part, through that shared geography. I hesitate to suggest Ralph Connor, pseudonym for the Rev. Charles Gordon (1860-1937), as my own Thoreau, having grown up within the landscape of Connor’s upbringing and books. My Glengarry, as I am aware of it, is an area set within its own history, from the Nor’Westers and Loyalist Museum in Williamstown, the rustic Dunvegan Museum, and various local historical societies to the Glengarry Highland Games, said to be the largest gathering of such on the planet. This attachment to a particular delegation of history offered Connor and his novels a far deeper local presence, even beyond the decades since the author himself had died. When I thirteen years old and reading through Connor’s novel that lightly fictionalized his childhood, Glengarry School Days (1902), my father pointed out that the old swimming hole featured in the story sat on the Hugh Fisher property on Highland Road, just by the former hamlet of Athol, where my paternal grandmother and her sister were born and raised. The one room schoolhouse, as well, once sat two county roads east of us, where that same grandmother and great-aunt caught an education, some forty years after Connor.

Across the length and breadth of his career as a Presbyterian Minister, and then as a founding United Church Minister, Connor simultaneously offered a series of novels that articulated the landscape of perceived moral righteousness of those early settler-descendants. He wrote his own deep measurement, offering an idealized portrait of Glengarry Scots: their stoicism, morality, faith and hard work; of how things were or should be done. In hindsight, of course, it does strike as odd how easily his novels ignored or downplayed the county’s strain of French settler-descendants, or Irish settler-descendants; how easily he ignored the aboriginal people, displaced for this wealth of moral absolutes and stoic piety. At least from our particular household, this was the same mythological landscape I landed in as an infant, a further century down the temporal line from the author. Through my own reading and thinking across those years and since, I absorbed and considered my own deep engagement from within this structure and echo of pre-Loyalist Glengarry Scots.

I remember reading through Connor’s further novel, Torches Through the Bush (1934), which offered a fictionalized look at the 1860s-era construction the Congregational Church building that Connor’s Scottish-born minister father, the Rev. Daniel Gordon, organized. The building still sits on a hill just north of the village of Maxville, the red brick steepled church known informally as the “Gordon Church” at the hamlet of St. Elmo. Reduced to four services a year once it merged with the Presbyterian Church in Maxville in the 1940s, the church building ran the length and breadth of my childhood, as my father both the keeper of the keys and the valuables, as well as the mailing address. When Christine and I were married there in 2012, it was but the third wedding held there since 1972, and the final before the site was deconsecrated.

Perhaps Connor is less my Thoreau than simply the two of us emerging from the echoes of a shared landscape, although Myles suggests they may hold a similar relationship to Thoreau. As Monty Reid pointed out in the early aughts, how there is a morality that exists in my work: how there are right answers, and wrong answers. This whole time, I thought I’d been attempting to pose the correct questions. A few years later, my then-partner offering a description: I’d rather be happy than right.

Contradicting his American expatriate peers, William Carlos Williams returned from a literary life in Paris, France to Patterson, New York and established his deeply American, deeply local, poetic. Can we go home again? Williams’ example suggests that one can; it was where he became himself. Soon after, Charles Olson held a similar local through Gloucester, Massachusetts. North, and a ways west, those TISH kids in early 1960s Vancouver began to articulate their geographic local in ways that hadn’t yet been attempted in Canada, forming their poetics beyond Modernism, and around what they saw as an absence. A Black Mountain influence into what Vancouver writer George Bowering joked as a “Brown Mountain” poetic, well before he learned there actually sits a Mount Brown in British Columbia, just north of Revelstoke.

Do I even know what I’m talking about? What are the right questions?

John Newlove, to close one of his final poems, “AN EXAMINATION,” wrote: “I cannot sleep. Are my children not my own? / Why did my parents die?”

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Oh, and in case such appeals, I’m running a book sale right now.

photograph from the McLennan (Campbell/Aird) family archive: Ralph Connor speaking at the Highland gathering at Devils Cauldron at the foot of Mount Rundle, Saturday Aug. 29, 1930