Alden Nowlan (1933–1983) was one of Canada’s leading literary figures, a poet, novelist, short story writer and playwright. He was born in the village of Stanley, Nova Scotia, (adjacent to Mosherville, and close to the small town of Windsor) on January 25th, 1933 in what he often described as the worst years of the Depression. He was the first child of Grace (née Reese) and Freeman Lawrence Nowlan. Freeman was 28 and Grace just 14. Child brides, Alden Nowlan once wrote, weren’t terribly rare in Nova Scotia in those days. He wrote about that pregnancy in his poem It’s Good To Be Here. The family lived in a house without central heating, electricity, telephone or plumbing. He recalled having survived an almost incredibly loveless environment during my childhood and claimed I would have been happier on a desert island because there would have been no one around to torment me. Differences in Freeman’s and Grace’s age, and in their temperaments, led to a breakdown in their marriage shortly after the birth of a second child, a daughter, Harriet. Grace took the children and went to live with her mother in the adjoining village of Mosherville. When her mother died in 1940, Grace, left her children with Freeman who brought in his mother to help look after them. Alden rarely saw Grace after that and, as an adult, would claim that she was dead. He was extremely fond of his doting paternal grandmother, Emma, who encouraged his love of reading; but she died in 1947. He never went beyond grade four in school as his family discouraged education as a waste of time. Aged fourteen, he went to work in the village sawmill and, later, aged sixteen, he discovered the library in the nearby town of Windsor, which enabled him to broaden his keen interest in reading. I wrote (as I read) in secret.…My father would as soon have seen me wear lipstick. At one stage he spent several months in a Dartmouth psychiatric hospital (the same hospital in which Elizabeth Bishop’s mother had lived her final years.) He would eventually find jobs as a pulp-cutter, night watchman and worker for the provincial Department of Highways in Nova Scotia. (One of his books of poetry, The Mysterious Naked Man (1969), includes Two Poems for the Nova Scotia Department of Highways.)
In March 1952, at the age of nineteen, he left Nova Scotia, having sent a phoney resume (in which he gave himself a high school education and one year of newspaper experience) to a newspaper in Hartland, New Brunswick, a town sixty miles upriver from Fredericton. This became his home for the next eleven years. He worked as a journalist for the Hartland newspaper, the Observer. For a brief time, while living there, he managed a country and western band, George Shaw and the Green Valley Ranch Boys. (The main problem with the band was keeping them sober enough to play, he once asserted, they were good too.) While working in Hartland, he met Claudine Meehan (née Orser) a Linotype operator at the Observer and her young son, Johnnie. They married in 1963 and Nowlan adopted her son. That marriage proved durable and inspirational throughout the rest of his life. His efforts to get his poems published put him in touch with Fred Cogswell, a poet who edited the University of New Brunswick’s literary journal, The Fiddlehead and who regularly published his poems. In 1958 Cogswell published Nowlan’s first collection, The Rose and the Puritan. After the publication of three chapbooks, he had two collections published by Toronto presses: Under the Ice (1961) and The Things Which Are (1962).
In the summer of 1963 he, Claudine, and Johnnie moved to Saint John, where Alden Nowlan had found a job as a reporter for the Telegraph-Journal . He was soon promoted to the position of provincial editor and then night news editor. Although continuing to work in journalism, his lifestyle in Saint John was different. I’ve avoided meetings of all kinds the way I avoid poison ivy ever since I got out of Hartland, where I had more than enough meetings to last a lifetime. In 1966, Nowlan was diagnosed with a cancer of the thyroid. After three surgeries and radiation treatment, his health began to improve. The surgery removed his thyroid and other glands and left him with scars that he grew a distinctive beard to hide. Subsequently a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to pursue full-time writing and even travel with his family to England and Ireland. His next collection, Bread, Wine and Salt (1967) published by Toronto publisher Clarke, Irwin, won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry.
While he was in hospital he lobbied to be considered for the University of New Brunswick’s new writer-in-residence position which he was offered in 1968. He and his family moved to Fredericton after the university provided him with a small house in the west edge of the campus on Windsor Street. (He called it Windsor Castle, and today this simple building is now officially called the Alden Nowlan House.) Although he continued to write for the Telegraph-Journal and assorted magazines, his reliance on journalism for his income ended. Supported by his now-regular publisher, Clarke, Irwin, he produced further poetry collections: The Mysterious Naked Man (1969) and Between Tears and Laughter (1971). He also produced a book of short fiction, Miracle at Indian River (1968) and Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien (1973), a semi-autobiographical novel. He collaborated with theatre director Walter Learning on a play Frankenstein (1974) which would be followed in succeeding years by other plays for stage and for radio. He also indulged a humorous predilection when he co-founded The Flat Earth Society of Canada and claimed that a friend of his, Jim Stewart, was a a descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the rightful heir to the British Throne. After his first term as writer-in-residence expired in 1971 the university, with the assistance of the provincial government, continued to renew the post and awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 1973 Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia awarded him an honorary degree. In 1977 his collection Smoked Glass was published and in 1982 another collection I Might Not Tell Everybody This proved equally successful.
However, although his years in Fredericton were very productive, he was beset by personal struggles with what he called Nancy Whiskey, Colonel Booze and our brother Al Cohol. His excessive weight, his smoking, and his night-time drinking had for years depressed his breathing, making sleep fitful. One night, at home, on June 11th 1983, he collapsed in the shower that he sometimes took to relieve his breathing difficulties. An ambulance was summoned and, putting on old and tattered clothes, he walked unaided to the ambulance. However he slipped into a coma and the re-routed blood vessels in his neck made it difficult to revive him. He remained in a coma until he died of severe emphysema on 27 June at the age of fifty.
His funeral was held in the tiny Edwin Jacob chapel at the University of New Brunswick. Afterwards, in the Forest Hill Cemetery, there was a graveside service complete with bagpipers, his friend Jim Stewart’s flute (played and then broken so the instrument would not sound another note), and friends and family sharing a cup of Irish whiskey before burying him shovelful by shovelful until the grave was filled. The bottle of whiskey, with some drink still included, was thrown into the grave. His tombstone, in the Forest Hill Cemetery, has these words carved at the base:
REST LIGHTLY ON HIM O EARTH
HE LOVED YOU SO
THE POETRY OF ALDEN NOWLAN
Robert Bly, writing two decades after Alden Nowlan’s death, called him the greatest Canadian poet of the twentieth century. While I may not necessarily concur, evaluation being an evolving aspiration, I can see the rationale behind such a statement. Although he has often being dismissed or categorizedas a regional writer, a poet of the rural Maritimes, I tend to agree with W. J. Keith who argues he is just as clearly one of those authors who, like such distinguished predecessors as Thomas Hardy or Robert Frost or Emily Bronte or William Faulkner, transcend the limits of their regionalism to become writers of national and even international significance. He may have been too prolific, too expansive and too autobiographical but he managed to transcend a variety of influences from Robert Lowell to Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to forge his own conversational and anecdotal style that makes reading him, even in bulk, an enjoyable adventure. He once claimed that if truck drivers read poetry, mine will be the poetry they’ll read. While such a statement might suggest his work was simplified or unsophisticated, that would be to misread his often amazing mastery of tone, register and loose poetic forms. While he could often be sentimental, he had a wonderful ability to undercut that sentimentality with irony and humorous self-deprecation. Even in the brief poems included below, that humorous ingenuity is evident.
While I haven’t seen it noted elsewhere, I see a very loose similarity with the work of American writer Raymond Carver. While Carver is famed for the quality of his short stories (I have no wish, here, to consider the role of his editor, Gordon Lish) he was also a poet. And his poetry, like that of Alden Nowlan, dealt with the marginalized in his community as well as describing his own struggles with illness. What Edna Longley said of Carver’s poetry could also be applied to some of the poems of Alden Nowlan: all his writing tends toward dramatic monologue, present-tense soliloquy that wears the past like a hairshirt. While Nowlan’s fiction is not nearly as polished as that of Carver, it is eminently readable. He may be the lesser short-story writer but he is, in my view, the better poet. In any event, the comparison is one worth pursuing.
Brief Poems by Alden Nowlan
Refuge at Eight
Darkness, the smell of earth, the smell of apples,
the cellar swallowed me, I dread I died,
saw both blind parents mad with guilt and sorrow,
my ghost sardonic. Finally I cried.
***
Background
Where I come from, the kick of love
recalls the laughter in the throats
of boys who knocked the privy down
before the teacher could get out.
***
The Homecoming
They’d never been so long apart before.
So they weren’t sure of what to say. He said,
I guess there’s not much news, the kids are well.
She nodded. Shyly, they went up to bed.
***
April in New Brunswick
Spring is distrusted here, for it deceives—
snow melts upon the land, uncovering
last fall’s dead leaves.
****
The Old People
“Next summer if I live….” they say,
the old people, not with dismay,
for they might add: “I’ll come again
tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain.”
***
Strange Flowers
These flowers are beautiful enough.
Soft-eyed and moist
on their wiry bush.
But I don’t know their name…
and some bushes burn!
Sheepish, I stand
at the fence and look.
***
The Chopper
His axe blade nearing
the red pine’s heart,
the chopper strikes harder,
doesn’t hear or see
the hysterical squirrel
on the topmost limb
running nowhere and back
faster and faster.
***
Three Choices
Having been flogged with belts, not short of bleeding,
badgered by books and flayed by tongues like nettles,
I had three choices: madness, death or verse,
each of which asks more questions than it settles.
***
The Masks Of Love
I come in from a walk
With you
And they ask me
If it is raining.
I didn’t notice
But I’ll have to give them
The right answer
Or they’ll think I’m crazy.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
My wife bursts into the room
where I’m writing well
of my love for her
and because now
the poem is lost
I silently curse her.
***
The Bhikku
I ask for nothing
……..he tells me, except
…………….to be freed from
all desire.
……..No wonder
…………….his voice shakes:
even Lucifer’s
……..desire was less
…………….insatiable than that.
***
Apology
I talk too much
but the manner
of your listening
calls the words
out of me.
You say almost
nothing. Yet
there would be
only silence
if you were not here.
***
The Married Man’s Poem
Five years married
and he has never once
wished he dared kill her,
…………………………..which means
they’re happy enough.
But it isn’t love.
***
Plea
Knock so I’ll know
you’re smiling.
Do not climb the stairs
until you hear me laugh.
Friend, it is night
In my soul.
…………….I hear
a fingernail
scraping glass.
***
Unfinished Poem
Bring me black slippers.
The corpse would dance.
***
He
He has five senses
plus desire.
He is separate
and alone.
He knows about time
and takes up space.|
One day he will die.
He answers to my name.
LINKS
Biography
New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia entry on Alden Nowlan
The My New Brunswick entry on Alden Nowlan
Canadian Encyclopedia entry on Alden Nowlan
A memoir of Alden Nowlan by Greg Cook
Thomas R. Smith on Alden Nowlan and poverty
Wikipedia entry on Alden Nolan
Poems
The Mysterious Naked Man (1969) on the Internet Archive
Between Tears and Laughter (1971) on the Internet Archive
What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (1993) on the internet Archive
7 poems on the All Poetry site
7 poems on the Poem Hunter site
5 poems on the My Poetic Side site
Fiction
Miracle at Indian River (1968) on the Internet Archive
Will Ye Let the Mummers In (1984) on the Internet Archive
The Wanton Troopers: A Novel (1988) on the Internet Archive
Interviews
An interview by Corinne Shriver Wasilewski for the Fiddlehead Magazine
David Adams Richards on interviewing Alden Nolan
Kevin Courrier interviews Alden Nowlan (1982)
Video
Alden Nowlan discusses and reads his poems
New Brunswick Greats on Alden Nowlan
Critique
Poet’s Progress: The Development of Alden Nowlan’s Poetry by Michael Brian Oliver
The Poetry of Alden Nowlan: a Critical Reassessment by W. J. Keith
Michael Dennis Reviews Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan
Bibliography
Selected bibliography of works by Alden Nowlan
Brief Poems 
