By George Elliott Clarke
The Walled Garden: Essays
by Mark Frutkin
Guernica Editions (2023)
The Latin, floral epithet for the chaste Beloved in the Canticum Canticorum—The Song of Songs (The Song of Solomon)—is “hortus conclusus.” “She” is a garden enclosed, a private Eden that only the faithful husband may enter and relish. For Mark Frutkin, the book is the Beloved, and so his Walled Garden is a florilegium of subjects, essays on everything from Michelangelo’s temple of sacred art to the masterful cinema of Fellini and Tarkovsky and others. Frutkin’s Walled Garden—like Whitman’s democratic citizen-poet—“contains multitudes”—of interests, observations, jumping-off points, surprising perspectives, unexpected vantages, all compelling, while the world outside artistic regimen is pure, unthoughtful chaos.
An Ottawa-based poet and novelist, Frutkin is surpassingly a man-of-letters, with prestigious awards and multiple nominations for the novels among his 18 books—as well as a generator of such global acclaim that several titles of his appear in Québécois French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Korean, or Turkish. Thus, it is sensible that, having established himself as a gifted novelist, he should turn to the essay, following thus the path laid out by Francis Bacon’s Essaies (1597), to endeavour to comment epigrammatically on whatever he likes.
Frutkin’s “Prologue” works the metaphor of The-Book-as-Walled-Garden, finding that, within its precincts, there is “harmonious chaos” and a steady effervescence of evergreen thought, from roots of ideas to fruits of utterance, from turned leaves falling into silence to imperishable flowers whose scent of sensibility lingers in the mind long after one has exited the garden, i.e., closed the book. Each life reads like a book, anyway, Frutkin finds: None has lived knowledge of what has come before—and no one knows what lays beyond. Even the genealogy of one’s own publications is uncertain: How does a memoir follow a children’s book, exactly, or how does a verse collection anticipate a book of film criticism? In a sense, the Walled Garden is capacious, yet so well laid out, one can wander in wonder: Pick a path, then stray; amble, then ramble.
Thereby, one stumbles upon a passage that notes that the ancients considered The Apocalypse as arriving by deluge and tsunami, though we post-modern types know that it must slam us as fire—as laser beam or mushroom cloud. Elsewhere, one is brought up short by the notion that the “monumental” work of art manifests superhuman grandeur, but ultimately inspires only awe, which is, suggests Frutkin, the piquant threshold to banality: “Awe could be one aspect to a work of art, but awe, like lightning, flashes then fades.” Touché.
Just as Bacon renders assertions that produce questioning or puzzlement, so does Frutkin. Thus, in “Clocks and Bells,” he argues that the advent of clock-time, displacing church chimes striking the hour, represented the triumph of secularism over the “religious”: “Now when I hear church bells, the main feeling inspired is one of nostalgia, pleasant enough in its own way but somewhat de-linked and detached from both the business of life and its genuine spiritual aspects.” To that, I’ll say, “speak for thyself,” for when I am resident in Tropea, Calabria, each spring, cathedral chimes gong incessantly, subversively making the point—I believe—that the moment is passing, and that only the eternity of divinity (Catholic, Christian) is consequential. There is (I’d opine to Frutkin, in discussing his book over wine and cheese), not “nostalgia,” but a transcendence of the diurnal as bells’ clappers clang to recall some poor soul incinerated by medieval heretics, but is now venerated, beatified and posted to Heaven, and tossing out miracles for those who pray with meet gusto.
Similarly, when Frutkin writes that Bob Dylan’s full rhymes (such as “mouth/south”) tend to “clunk on the inner ear when read and yet add marvellously to the music when sung,” and that such problems (in his view) cause us to doubt “the literary merit of song lyrics,” I’d answer that songs are not poems (though poems can become [art] songs); that they possess their own, well, poetics, related to page poetry, but leaning on accenting of auditory devices. In contrast, a poem demands both succinct expression, plus a fusion of image, emotion, and idea. Yet, so long as the song lyric (or musical ‘book’ or opera ‘libretto’) is understood to be a branch of literature (see Linda Hutcheon), then Dylan deserved his Nobel Prize for Literature—just like Frédérick Mistral, who received his 1904 Prix Nobel Lit for his salvaging of Provencal French—in part—by scribing folk songs.
Or, ponder Frutkin’s McLuhanesque “probe” of monotheism, suggesting that the “One God” mystique elevates the attendant scripture to an elect position intolerant of any heretics, pagans, heathens, or dissenters. Still, even monotheisms gesture toward pantheisms by exalting pseudo-divinities like saints, prophets, angels, martyrs, etc. Witness, too, that the monotheism of capitalist globalization gives us rock stars and screen idols to worship. Adam Smith spawns Andy Warhol.
So, while Frutkin’s thought is protean and provocative, there is plenty to tussle with, to challenge, as well as to treasure, such as the poetic touches that enhance the prose: “In the sexual act, there persists a deep human hunger and longing to dissolve the self into the other. That is one reason why it is so satisfying and addictive—we want a taste of the ultimate, to let go of our burden of selfhood, for a moment at least.”
There is a grace to this prose, a graciousness of sharing, even of humility, in posing the queries and posting the resolutions. Frutkin’s writing is itself a tending of garden—to graft this and prune that, to savour and to scent. In Canto CIV, the cantankerous and canonical Ezra Pound states, “The production IS the beloved.” Lookit! Mark Frutkin’s Walled Garden exhibits similar ardour—for the word as not decorative, but nurturing; for the word as the one blessing that God permitted Adam and Eve after they were expelled from Eden, to experience, pain, hunger, violence, and death, in a world otherwise bereft of law and the possibility of love.
George Elliott Clarke, OC ONS is a Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic who served as the Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2012 to 2015, and as the 2016–2017 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. One of Canada’s most illustrious poets, Clarke is also known for chronicling the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. His latest work, Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (2023) is available from Véhicule Press.