George (Benson) Johnston Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on George (Benson) Johnston

"My why and how are me," George Johnston wrote in an early poem. Unusual qualities in the way he maneuvers words into verse and puzzles about the motivations for these maneuvers have kept interest in Johnston's poems high over the past thirty years.

George Benson Johnston was born in 1913 into an "urban scene" in Hamilton, Ontario, son of an Irish father, Benson Edward Johnston, and a fourth-generation-Canadian mother, Margaret Black Johnston. He has one sister; a younger brother died in infancy. The family moved to the Toronto outskirts in 1923. Visits to Peterborough and Stoney Lake strengthened and influential friendship with Gordon Roper, later a professor of Canadian literature and critic; before finishing high school Johnston knew that he wanted to be a writer.

At Victoria College, University of Toronto, Johnston entered, in 1932, a heady atmosphere; under the guidance of E. J. Pratt and Pelham Edgar, he read T. S. Eliot, the early William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and added Alexander Pope as a personal favorite. As an undergraduate Johnston published, in Acta Victoriana in 1935, two poems, "The Life in August" and "Annabelle," sufficiently polished to be included in The Cruising Auk (1959) and later in his Happy Enough: Poems, 1935-1972 (1972).

In 1936 Johnston earned his B.A. and traveled to Europe. He cycled through Germany, then stayed in England, writing. A story appeared in London Mercury in 1937. Returned to Canada, he sent his work to British publishers, Canadian outlets being negligible. When World War II erupted Johnston started a four-and-one-half-year stint with the RCAF, as reconnaissance pilot in the United Kingdom, Canada, and West Africa. Near the war's end, in 1944, he married Jeanne McRae and returned to the University of Toronto.

Northrop Frye directed Johnston's master's thesis. The M.A. completed in one year, Johnston began work toward a Ph.D., but moved in 1947 to an assistant professorship at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. He was publishing now in Northern Review and Contemporary Verse. There were three children in the family by 1950, when the Johnstons moved to Ottawa, where Johnston had accepted a job as a lecturer at Carleton College (now Carleton University). Two more children were born between 1952 and 1959; the Johnstons adopted their sixth child, in 1964.

In the 1950s Johnston composed laconic lyrics that appeared in such publications as the New Yorker,Atlantic Monthly, and Canadian Forum. From family and neighborhood experience, a cast of characters had emerged: Mrs. McGonigle, Mr. Murple--and a persona named Edward, amorous, unheroic, doomed to drown. (As a child Johnston had experienced a near-drowning; Northrop Frye, in the annual "Letters in Canada" survey for 1959 [University of Toronto Quarterly, July 1960], noted an archetypal use of the death-by-drowning motif in Johnston's poetry.) By 1959 there were enough poems to make up Johnston's first volume, The Cruising Auk. Meanwhile Johnston had commenced a second line of writing. He had learned Old Norse from Peter Foote of the University of London and in 1957 began translating Norse sagas. International events--the Suez crisis, the Hungarian revolution--distressed the now-pacifist poet; the sagas' fierce economy of language offered distraction. Johnston's first translation, The Saga of Gisli, appeared, with an introduction and notes by Foote, in 1963. Published ten years later by Dent as an Everyman University Paperback, Johnston's Saga of Gisli remains in print. Seven poems from this volume were included in The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation , edited by Charles Tomlinson.

Johnston's poetry collection The Cruising Auk was favorably reviewed by Eric Nicol in the first issue of Canadian Literature (1959) and analyzed by Northrop Frye in "Letters in Canada" for 1959. These "pellucid lyrics," according to Frye, modulate from innocence to anxiety, and from intimate glimpses of childhood to a sense of dauntless energy even in a disconsolate world. The Cruising Auk was also reviewed in Alphabet, which became, along with Poetry (Chicago) and Tamarack Review, an outlet for Johnston's work.

From 1963 new images reflected the Quebec farm where the Johnstons now summered. Political winters in Ottawa seemed darker; a group of poems commissioned by Robert Weaver for the CBC included the somber "Remembrance Day." The new poems were in tune with the Canadian commitment to national identification in the 1960s.

Johnston's second volume of verse, Home Free (1966), is framed by two long poems, "Under the Tree," a poem about the effects of capital punishment that was used on a poster by Gerald Trottier as a plea for the abolition of the death penalty, and "Love in High Places," a satire of politics and family life that gives a final turn to characters, including Mrs. McGonigle and Edward, who had appeared in the poems of The Cruising Auk. Home Free was reviewed by George Whalley in Canadian Literature (Winter 1968). Whalley noted "a new manner and a wider ambience" but also heard "a touch of weary disgust" and "ironic regret" in poems whose "colloquial fluency was generally admirable." In 1971 Queen's University signaled its admiration for Johnston with an honorary LL.D.

New poems in the 1972 volume Happy Enough are more private, in a tightly controlled form, and they speak of the real tensions of modern living. For they are poems about death, winter, butchering, and wrecking; yet they come from a time of "happy enough" home life.

In 1974 the Johnstons visited Iceland, and the next year saw publication of Johnston's translation The Faroe Islanders' Saga. The Greenlanders' Saga appeared in 1976. The steady force of the saga lines contrasts with the quick rushes of rhythm in the Canadian poems; yet themes and language show comparable tensions balancing the stretch or reach of imagination against the control of wit and containing form. Johnston's next volume, Taking a Grip: Poems, 1972-1978 (1978), instances the values of containment: it celebrates talk, stove-fire, fine calligraphy, old-fashioned party fun, friendly affection, food and drink. Increasingly, domesticity and old friendships have occupied his life and become the subjects of his poetry.

Carleton University awarded Johnston an honorary degree in 1979, and in 1980, the year of his own retirement, Johnston contributed a poem to a testimonial dinner for his former mentor Northrop Frye. Johnston's witty poems from these occasions, "Convocation Address" and "A Celebration," are collected in Ask Again (1984) and in many ways characterize his most recent verse. Also collected here are a poem recalling a visit to Venice with fellow academic William Blissett; a retirement poem for another colleague, Albert Trueman, long involved in the Canada Council; a tribute to a younger poet, George Bowering; an acrostic for George Whalley whose collected poems he had edited; poems to celebrate marriages; elegies; and other occasional verse. His forms, as Frank Davey described them in From There to Here (1974), remain deft, his tone genial and unpretentious. In 1986 Johnston produced Carl: Portrait of a Painter, a personal memoir of his friend Carl Schaefer.

George Johnston continues to write occasional verse. He has recently produced two new translation. He has toured Britain on a reading tour with Susan Musgrave and Bill Bissett. Friends find him, tall, spare, bearded, at Athelstan. Quebec, in his orderly farmhouse at the American border, but still in a small corner of Canada.