Celebrity and passing in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s The T.E. Lawrence Poems

In 1993, Michael Ondaatje said that watching Gwendolyn MacEwen read to an audience “was the first time [he] had a sense of the poet as a public person. [...] She was giving herself to the public. She was [...] the poet who took all risks for poetry” (Sullivan, 1996: 288). ¹ That reading was around 20 years earlier; she was promoting Armies of the Moon (1972), and her celebrity would never again have such promise. Although her celebrity did not reach a height comparable to that of Margaret Atwood or Leonard Cohen, she was known about as widely as Ondaatje during the latter half of what I call the era of celebrity in Canadian poetry. That era began around 1955, when Irving Layton was appearing on television and his poetry was becoming increasingly popular, and it ended around 1980. At a time when no new poets who could be called “celebrities” were emerging in Canada (Hošek, 1997; Messenger, 1997), MacEwen wrote The T.E. Lawrence Poems (1982), which implicitly compared her own limited celebrity to that of T.E. Lawrence, who had gained “world notoriety” (Aldington, 1955: 24) as Lawrence of Arabia. Choosing and modifying phrases for her book from his Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935) and other texts, MacEwen imitated his voice but never lost her own. More than any of her other books (even 1983’s The Honey Drum, her translation and invention of Arab tales), The T.E. Lawrence Poems complicates her voice, invoking celebrity to raise questions about her cultural standing, identifications, and other aspects of her identity.

Needing a way to explain the complex identity politics—personal, racial, and national—of The T.E. Lawrence Poems, yet acknowledging Graham Huggan’s concern in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001: 176) about “what we might call the ethics of artistic passing”, I have ultimately chosen to adapt the concept of passing as an approximate but usefully political term to encompass the grandstanding, impersonation, and ventriloquism that MacEwen enacts in her literary imitation of Lawrence. In the poems analysed below, MacEwen speaks convincingly in Lawrence’s voice, which is stylistically restrained and precise compared to what Frank Davey (1983: 65) calls the “inflated poetic language” typical of her earlier books. She passes as Lawrence to imagine herself as a man, to experiment with her identity, and to appropriate his celebrity. This passing is a critique of Lawrence’s imperialist acculturation into Arab society, and yet she does not entirely denounce him for Orientalism. Her Lawrence struggles to define himself against the normative values of celebrity that were more readily accepted by many other poets of her era, such as heterosexual masculinity and religiosity (Deshaye, 2009); she also struggles against those values, and for a critical distance from him. With an uneasiness that Lorraine York (2007) has found to be typical in Canadian novels, poems, and other texts that represent celebrity, MacEwen comments upon the debt that Lawrence’s celebrity owes to his imperial presence in the Middle East, and she thereby critiques her own appropriation of Middle Eastern fashion, language, myth, and religion—aspects of her own identity that helped her to appear exotic and be recognizable as a celebrity.

Although MacEwen’s career benefited from her exoticism, which was of interest to readers long before postcolonialism was at work in Canadian literary studies (Slonim, 1974), she implies in some of her poems that Lawrence’s celebrity was partly in service of imperialism; his celebrity and hers are therefore relevant to postcolonial studies. In The Postcolonial Exotic, Huggan argues that the glamour of celebrities “shares several features with other, better-known variants of exoticist discourse, among them the creation of a commodified mystique that veils the material conditions that produce it” (2001: 209). Today, we can see that celebrity is in the vanguard of the international cultural and economic promotion that is a form of colonialism. When MacEwen first read Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom as a teenager (Sullivan, 1996: 340), she was doubtlessly attracted to his exoticism and worldliness, among other characteristics. Lawrence’s imperialism was culturally colonial, affecting not only the Middle East but also the imaginations of people around the world—including her own in Canada. Only after her income from books decreased and her financial problems began in the late 1970s did she choose to represent exoticism and celebrity as problems in themselves.

Identifying with these features of Lawrence both as a fan and as a celebrity in her own right, MacEwen understood that becoming too public can have tragic consequences, in addition to the other results of celebrity. The scene of Lawrence’s death at the end of The T.E. Lawrence Poems is in close proximity to poems that reveal his hatred of his celebrity (i.e. “The Desirability of El Aurens” and “There Is No Place To Hide”). MacEwen’s biographer Rosemary Sullivan (1996) suggests that MacEwen’s early enthusiasm for celebrity was soon tempered; Sullivan argues that MacEwen chose Lawrence as her symbolic “twin” to express her frustration with her Western culture (1996: 338). By writing his life from beginning to end, by implicating celebrity in his death, and by passing as Lawrence to involve herself in his narrative, MacEwen imagines herself dying through him. She thereby comments on her own ambivalent experience of celebrity and on the end of the era of celebrity in Canadian poetry—specifically, on the cultural standing of female poets in the 1970s. The end of this era had serious consequences for MacEwen’s career as a poet. Her representations of celebrity suggest that she was thinking personally and fatalistically about its ramifications. All the celebrities in her works die, figuratively if not literally. Their “passing” is crucial to their meaning, especially in the case of Lawrence.

Before going further with the concept of passing and with questions about the extent of MacEwen’s identification with Lawrence, the historical and biographical premises of this essay must be established. MacEwen was indeed a celebrity whose symbolic and actual death gains significance in the context of celebrity, and celebrity in Canadian poetry really was fading when MacEwen was writing The T.E. Lawrence Poems. Space does not permit me to prove these claims beyond a doubt; however, while recognizing the valid concerns of readers sceptical of periodization and biographical criticism, I want to suggest that both are necessary for understanding MacEwen’s critique of celebrity and her experience of it.

In the 1960s, MacEwen was involved in what Louis Dudek called “[t]he great boom of young poets” (1969: 117), but relative to other arts and diversions, the prominence of poetry was in decline by the early 1970s. Medium-sized Canadian publishers are reported to have had nothing but poetry on their lists in 1964, yet poetry represented only 32.7% of their output in 1972 because they were beginning to publish prose fiction and other forms. Large Canadian publishers reserved about 19% of their output for poetry during the years 1963 to 1972, while prose fiction grew from 39.2% to 45% (Broten, 1975: 36). By that measure, the era of celebrity in Canadian poetry peaked around 1964, barely a decade after it started, and then—with the exception of the fervent enthusiasm in 1968 for Cohen’s Selected Poems (1968), which sold in unsurpassed quantity because it followed his first album by only a year—gradually faded until the end of the 1970s. Poetry was actually doing well in absolute terms, only not in comparison with other forms; the total number of books of poetry in print was still rising despite its relative decline (Broten, 1975: 17).

Some poets lamented the shift in attention. In 1984, James Reaney said that “as poets, we’ve fought the novel and lost” (Rae, 2008: 5). MacEwen’s biographer Sullivan, who is also a poet, claimed that by the 1980s “poetry was dying” (1996: 385), and Davey (1994: 79), paraphrasing David Solway, stated that poetry had “entered into a direct and suicidal competition with prose fiction”. These morbid exaggerations reveal how some poets felt about the changes in publishing and taste.

These changes, however relative they were, could not have been encouraging for MacEwen, whose celebrity was mainly the result of her poetry. Her experience of celebrity began when she was barely out of her teenage years and peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After MacEwen travelled from Toronto to Montreal to read to the public from her chapbooks in 1961, she exclaimed in a letter: “best reception ever—sold 50 books!! Am being treated like a national celebrity by these people [....] Maybe I’m God” (Sullivan, 1996: 126-127). MacEwen’s prospects rapidly improved, and Sullivan argues that, by 1965, the two leading players of Toronto’s poetry scene were Atwood and MacEwen (1996: 185). Ondaatje had not yet published his first book, though he was on the scene as a spectator; Sullivan relates that “Ondaatje remembered how important it had been to the young writing community at Queen’s University when [MacEwen] came to read in 1965. She was the poet people most wanted to hear” (1996: 190). Also in 1965, she began “using her sister’s address for most of her professional correspondence, because, she said, she needed to guard her private life very closely” (Sullivan, 1996: 188). MacEwen had become a wary celebrity in the field of literature.

After the peak of MacEwen’s success in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the alcoholism that led to her early death began to affect her public life. She “was giving a great number of poetry readings all over the country” (Sullivan, 1996: 232), and she was more recognized than ever after winning the Governor General’s Award for The Shadow-Maker (1969) in 1970. By 1973, MacEwen’s alcoholism was interfering with her poetry readings, which she often missed, and by 1978, “her books weren’t making any money” (Sullivan, 1996: 312). She had an episode of psychological stress and alcoholism that put her in hospital in December of 1980 and again in February, 1981 (Sullivan, 1996: 321-322). Around this time, she began writing The T.E. Lawrence Poems, which is notably the most biographical and historical of her characterizations of others (not excepting 1971’s King of Egypt, King of Dreams), and which cannot easily be separated from her own biographical and historical contexts.

The T.E. Lawrence Poems is involved in these contexts as a reflection of MacEwen’s celebrity, which rose only as high as the proverbial glass ceiling. MacEwen’s lack of financial success near the end of her career was arguably related to her decision to remain committed mostly to poetry rather than to write another novel, and yet men were much more likely than women to be successful as poets in Canada. In 1993, Atwood explained: “You found yourself at the centre very fast in those days. The writing community [...] was welcoming to any newcomer with talent, including women”; however, she also noted that “[c]reativity in those days was seen as ejaculatory” (Sullivan, 1996: 109, 111). In a different context, Atwood wrote that men “dominate[d] poetry publishing and tend[ed] to exclude women” (1982: xxix). Thus, Layton supposedly discouraged women from writing, and his biographer Elspeth Cameron (1985: 441) relates an anecdote about Layton’s outrageous contempt for Atwood specifically. Indeed, according to Faye Hammill (2007: 21), female writers who became celebrities elsewhere often contended with “various forms of hostility toward women’s writing” including what Aaron Jaffe (2005: 165) calls a “restrictive promotional system”.

Although there is no direct evidence that MacEwen was writing to expose either discrimination against women in Canadian poetry or the constraint on the degree of her own celebrity, ² these possibilities are suggested by her difference from Lawrence. The simple contrast between the degree of their celebrity begs the question of why MacEwen chose to write in his voice when, for example, Atwood chose Susanna Moodie, who was comparatively obscure despite being the “best known of Canada’s early pioneers” (Staines, 1997: x). The answer involves sex and gender among other factors. According to Judith Butler (1990), gender is detectably contrived because it must be performed repeatedly to induce the belief that it is natural, and it can therefore be subverted through parody (1990: 138-41). MacEwen’s imitation of Lawrence is not especially parodic, but it is subversive. Lawrence was more than her symbolic twin. If the most obvious difference between MacEwen and Lawrence is sex, perhaps the most obvious of her implicit goals in re-imagining him is to critique masculinity and, symbolically, to take from Lawrence some of the power that men, rather than women, often have. Her grandstanding—performing as a man of much greater celebrity, her “standing in” for someone more “grand”—draws attention to a notable disparity while also enabling her to take various risks with her own identity.

In these historical and biographical contexts, MacEwen’s passing as Lawrence has other implications, but first the term passing should be explained in more detail, especially as I am relating it to celebrity. Sinéad Moynihan (2009) explains that “[a]lthough the term passing is increasingly used to denote a wide range of performative practices, from its origins it referred most commonly to ‘passing as white’” (2009: 810). Passing is racial; it is an illusion of racial sameness that goes undetected. Race is implicated in the public personas of MacEwen and Lawrence, but it is not a factor in their relationship to each other. Although MacEwen and Lawrence both dressed as Middle Easterners at times, they were both white. He was a British soldier in the Middle East who was often photographed wearing the garb of an Arab prince; she was a Canadian traveller to the Middle East who was often known for wearing the kohl eyeliner of an Egyptian icon (Aldington, 1955: 169; Sullivan, 1996: 107). She was obviously not visibly identical to Lawrence; she does not pass as him in that sense.

By imitating his voice, however, MacEwen begins to pass as Lawrence. Without their images in mind, a reader could easily be persuaded that the historical Lawrence wrote The T.E. Lawrence Poems. In fact, MacEwen annotated and corrected a copy of her book, which is now stored in the archives at the University of Toronto, and she underlined phrases that she had copied directly from various texts by the historical Lawrence. There is underlining in 45 of the 60 poems. She describes four of them as “found poem[s]” that are composed mostly of the historical Lawrence’s phrases. These inclusions are not remarked upon in the published book. One might say that she speaks Lawrence’s voice invisibly or that she silently incorporates his voice into the book. His voice becomes his body. In that sense, she passes as Lawrence.

Although passing cannot actually gain her more celebrity, it raises questions about identity in general and MacEwen’s in particular. Anna Camaiti Hostert (2007) argues that passing—as the historical activity of black people posing as white people for “social promotion”—is too often assumed to be only the recourse of victims of oppression who have learned to hate themselves. Passing is a sign of a “crisis of identity” (Hostert, 2007: 11-12, 33), but it is also a tactic for overcoming the crisis by redefining identity according to chosen identifications, however problematic they might be. In Identification Papers (1995), Diana Fuss argues that identities are formed by people’s identifications with others: “Identification is [...] a question of relation, of self to other, subject to object, inside to outside” (1995: 3). Passing is both a personal and political use of identification—and is subversive especially because it can be undetectable, even enabling what Hostert calls disidentification, “a free fluctuation of identity” (2007: 91). This intense freedom to be anything or nothing is arguably what MacEwen wanted from celebrity.

Celebrities can sometimes define themselves however they want, through performance, but sometimes their frequent performances become a habit in their private lives, and their public and private selves become increasingly difficult to separate. This is the identity crisis that the figure of Lawrence (not Lawrence himself) can be said to experience when MacEwen speculates about his private life and writes his autobiography in poems. The experience of celebrity has been called, in coincidentally postcolonial terms, “an invasive reconfiguration” (Latham, 2003: 110) of identity. Fans change themselves through their identification with celebrities, and celebrities are also changed by the experiences of celebrity—such as their creation of personas and the public’s invasion of their privacy. We can think of MacEwen as a fan of Lawrence who is involved in the public’s invasion of his privacy. By writing in Lawrence’s voice about his life, from start to finish and often in a confessional mode, MacEwen changes him. Never seeming vindictive, she counter-colonizes and even penetrates the male imperialist whose celebrity helped to draw her away from Canada, and alter her thinking about Canada, when she was a young woman.

She also changes herself, redefining herself through an identification with Lawrence, whose questionable status as a role model did not prevent her from reflecting on his crises and understanding herself through them. In the only book-length study of MacEwen’s work, Jan Bartley (1983: 17) argues that the “central concern” of MacEwen’s poetry is “self-knowledge”. In The T.E. Lawrence Poems, MacEwen passes as Lawrence to create a new identity, possibly by destroying her old one and certainly by adopting and adapting that of the historical Lawrence. By passing as Lawrence, she could experience or at least imagine the identity crisis that celebrities of higher degree might have felt. Few people would want such an experience except the most devoted artists (often method actors)—those willing to take, in Ondaatje’s words, “all risks”.

As a fan, MacEwen might have identified too closely with Lawrence as a celebrity. Sullivan claims that MacEwen “found in Lawrence precisely the persona she needed to explore what she herself had been through” (1996: 341), though MacEwen also evidently wanted to go beneath the “persona” and discover something more personal. Surveying other scholarship, Ellis Cashmore (2006) in Celebrity / Culture explains that fans can develop imaginary relationships with celebrities and, seeing them as role models, might adopt their attributes, values, and behaviours. This is sometimes called “over-identification” (Cashmore, 2006: 81, 89). In rare cases, fans might even imitate dangerous behaviours. Among other reasons for her untimely death is the possibility that MacEwen was imitating, consciously or not, Lawrence’s reckless endangerment of himself.

My suspicion is that MacEwen’s readers and critics often wonder about that possibility and others, ³ but no one makes explicit claims; they are reluctant to speculate because speculation might be not only false but also an invasion of MacEwen’s privacy—the very invasion that fans indulge in when they begin to assume they know the celebrity. The individual fan is usually characterized as an “obsessed loner” (Jenson, 1992: 11), but a critic’s persistent work in solitude often verges on obsession. Fans and critics are not always that different from each other: Ondaatje, who wrote a critical book about Cohen, was late for the launch of his own Coming Through Slaughter (1976) because he was delayed by the many encores at a Cohen concert (Rae, 2008: 133). Although critical reservations about biographical speculation are serious and worth constant reiteration, such reservations did not overly influence MacEwen, who engaged in very personal speculation while remaining critical about Lawrence’s flaws and the limits of what she could know about him. She was able to produce a book that comments on Lawrence and herself from the perspective of both a fan and a critic. Arguably, The T.E. Lawrence Poems has value as criticism that would be reduced almost to nothing if it were disconnected from the life of its author. Knowing that it was written by MacEwen—a woman, a poet who had been a celebrity, a student of the Middle East, at a time of crisis in her life—is highly important, even essential.

Studies of celebrity should account for biography because celebrities have learned to use their private lives to promote their careers. Sometimes, this accounting will appear to be the irrational or invasive inquiry expected (sometimes with little justice) of fans. Following Richard Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies (1986), Joe Moran (2000) in Star Authors explains that “the audience’s relation with the star is a compulsive search for the ‘real’—an attempt to distinguish between the ‘authentic’ and the ‘superficial’ in the star’s personality” (2000: 62). Given what little bearing the “real” usually has on celebrity, Moran also states that “any attempt to distinguish between the ‘public’ author and the ‘private’ self [is] a deeply problematic exercise” (2000: 23). In fact, it is likely to be impossible, both for critics and even for celebrities themselves. Nevertheless, the uncanny array of similarities between MacEwen and Lawrence, which Sullivan and Brent Wood (2004) have noted, provokes curiosity about MacEwen’s willingness to associate her biography with his. The historical Lawrence died at 47, MacEwen at 46. He died in a fatal crash after a series of increasingly injurious motorcycle accidents (Aldington, 1955: 387). She died of metabolic acidosis caused by a complete refusal of alcohol and food after a period of binge drinking (Sullivan, 1996: 408-10). This coincidence raises the admittedly disturbing question of whether or not MacEwen was writing about Lawrence’s possibly suicidal death while self-promotionally foreshadowing her own.

Not all critics have shied away from similar possibilities. Thomas H. Kane (2004) introduces the concept of “automortography” in his essay on the celebrity of four authors who wrote about their own deaths while they were dying of cancer. MacEwen might not have expected to die early, but her father had died at the age of 56 from a heart attack associated with alcoholism, and she had initially avoided alcohol because of her father’s addiction (Sullivan, 1996: 83, 250). She knew a similar fate was possible for her. Kane, referring particularly to Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, argues that their “scripting and directing” of their own deaths “enhances their literary celebrity”, partly because their automortography “elicits feeling” in the reader (2004: 410). Combining and literalizing two ideas from Roland Barthes, Kane implies that readers get more pleasure from a text if they know it is about the death of its author. Critics need to consider tactfully the possibility that MacEwen wrote The T.E. Lawrence Poems with special attention to Lawrence’s celebrity, among various aspects of his biography, and conceived of her own potential death—her passing as he did—as the ultimately ironic promotion. If that is the case, then an additional irony is that her promotion extends to Lawrence, whom she ultimately criticizes for his imperialism.

My interest in MacEwen’s decision to write poems in Lawrence’s voice is motivated as much by the poems themselves as by the provocative questions that they raise. The quite different remainder of this essay concludes my argument about her passing as Lawrence—both in giving evidence that MacEwen herself was unsure of how to differentiate her impersonating voice from Lawrence’s voice, and in considering how her poems quote Lawrence without disclosing their sources. To understand MacEwen’s criticism of Lawrence, we need to know when and how she refuses to identify with him, despite the powerful draw of his celebrity. The extent of her identification with him can be gauged when she modifies Lawrence’s phrases, sometimes to assert her differences from him and thereby to involve herself in “disidentification”.

MacEwen’s sources for The T.E. Lawrence Poems were several; her aforementioned underlining of her otherwise undocumented quotations in her annotated copy at the archives adds evidence to some of my earlier arguments about her identity. Her handwritten notes at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library reveal that she was reading various texts by and about Lawrence, such as his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his translation of The Odyssey of Homer (1935), his posthumous The Mint (1955), his published letters, and John E. Mack’s A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (1976). The archive has her copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and a small number of its pages are folded to indicate where she found some of her inspiration (as in the case of “There Is No Place To Hide”). It is otherwise mostly unmarked, despite the high number of phrases (at least 20) that she found in it and used in The T.E. Lawrence Poems. The annotated and corrected copy of her own book contains, as I reported earlier, underlining in 45 of the 60 poems, and her handwriting in a note at the beginning of the book indicates that the underlined phrases “are Lawrence’s”. ⁴ The question is, for whose information did she underline those phrases in her book? A thorough examination of her archived correspondence might yet reveal the answer, but there are two noteworthy possibilities. The first is that MacEwen wanted to reassure her editor and publisher, for reasons of copyright, that she had not used too much of Lawrence’s texts. (His phrases amount to a little less than 20% of the book.) The second is that she wanted to remind herself whether or not a phrase was hers or Lawrence’s; indeed, her handwritten question marks beside the underlining in four poems—“Excavating in Egypt”, “Thunder-Song”, “Apologies”, and “Visual Purple”—suggest that she was not always certain. Her own handwriting attests to the fact that her voice can be indistinguishable from that of Lawrence.

Two poems near the end of the book explicitly demonstrate that her impersonation of Lawrence’s voice is involved in, and possibly motivated by, his celebrity. In “The Desirability of El Aurens” (“El Aurens” approximating the way that some Arabs pronounced his name in David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, which MacEwen had evidently watched because she mentions one of its scenes in the title story of her 1972 book, Noman), Lawrence is ostensibly frustrated that he was accorded the respect due to a sherif (a Muslim ruler, often a religious authority). He is therefore a public figure, and he complains that he was

all dressed up in [his] Sherifian regalia,

looking like a perfect idiot, posing

for the cameras, and hating it

all the way to Damascus. (MacEwen, 66) ⁵

Later in the poem, MacEwen involves herself self-reflexively in such “posing” when her Lawrence says, “A discharged mental patient / with the face of a wrinkled monkey / is reported to be impersonating me” (66). MacEwen was obviously not seeking to flatter herself by associating herself with Lawrence; instead, she identifies with him or “apes” him. The poem is sceptical of her authenticity and his. Referring to herself as a “discharged mental patient”, she also implies that celebrity—at least for a fan—can have psychological consequences.

The potentially inauthentic mutual performance of Lawrence’s celebrity appears again in the next poem, “There Is No Place To Hide”, whose title attests to Lawrence’s impression of the public’s invasion of his private life. He says, “Here is a famous world; I’m standing on a stage / With ten spotlights on me, talking about how I detest / publicity” (67). Ironically, MacEwen’s Lawrence is openly critical of his celebrity in this way only when he is in public. As Sullivan’s biography of MacEwen shows, she also expressed some frustration with “publicity”, at least after the phase of her initial excitement. MacEwen’s own experience helped her to imagine how celebrity of much higher degree must have affected Lawrence.

At the end of “There Is No Place To Hide”, MacEwen’s Lawrence reflects upon his celebrity and implies that madness and self-inflicted injury are possible results of being known as an image. (The poem has the staggered indentation that is common to the book, and which MacEwen probably chose because of similar formatting in the poem “To S.A”. that serves as the epigraph to Seven Pillars of Wisdom.) Her Lawrence says,

Outside my window, a small tit bird bashes itself

against the glass. At first I thought

it was admiring itself in the window.

Now I know it’s mad. (67)

Wood interprets the bird “as MacEwen the poet looking through her imaginary window at the imaginary Lawrence inside” (2004: 158), but the bird initially symbolizes Lawrence who is “talking about” himself; the bird behaves with the same narcissistic self-reflexivity as Lawrence in looking at its own reflection and going crazy by “bash[ing] itself” against its own image. Wood is correct to suggest that MacEwen imagines herself in that maddening situation.

MacEwen evidently appreciated the negative assessment of celebrity reported in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is one source of “There Is No Place To Hide”. Parts of eight lines in “There Is No Place To Hide” are underlined, and one of her sources is chapter CIII, entitled “Myself”, of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. ⁶ The aforementioned page (1935: 583) in MacEwen’s copy of that book, indicated by a fold, includes the source of the line about the “court martial”, which is less interesting than other statements in the same paragraph by Lawrence. His awareness of celebrity’s threat to identity and the self is evident in this statement:

The self [...] was forced into depreciation by others’ uncritical praise. It was a revenge of my trained historical faculty upon the evidence of public judgement, the lowest common denominator to those who knew, but from which there was no appeal because the world was wide. (Lawrence, 1935/2000: 583)

He is complaining of the baseness of public opinion that results in the “depreciation” of “[t]he self”, which MacEwen transforms into a tit bird whose interest in or admiration of itself becomes damaging.

The superficiality of the celebrity’s image in “There Is No Place To Hide” is in contrast with a genuine religious concern that helps to create the mystique of MacEwen’s public persona. Her passing as Lawrence is a representation and even enactment of her quest for mystical emptiness or transcendence. Other critics have noticed that celebrity involves a pretence of religious significance (Frow, 1998: 201, 204; Turner, 2004: 6, 7), and MacEwen was both earnest and ironic in adopting such a pretence. Wood states that numerous critics have remarked on the spirituality of MacEwen and her poetry (2000: 67) ⁷ but that “MacEwen herself belonged to no specific community of belief” (2004: 147). She was a curious but not devoted student of actual religion who was self-taught in mysticism from a wide range of Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and Hindu sources in addition to her knowledge of Greek myth. Although Sullivan thought that MacEwen once “intended to train herself to be a visionary” (1996: 74), Wood has not enough evidence to suggest that MacEwen had actual “visionary experience” (2000: 41); nevertheless, MacEwen’s passing as Lawrence is a metaphoric process, and metaphor can create what J. Christopher Crocker (1977: 62) describes as a “mystical sense of union” between a writer and audience—or a celebrity and fan. The risks here—bad faith, identity confusion, and over-identification—were ambivalent to MacEwen because the politics involved were so complex.

In “Apologies”, those politics are ambivalently postcolonial and are associated with MacEwen’s desire for a mystical emptiness—arguably an absence of desire for attachments and identifications. Both the historical and fictional Lawrences suggest that they occupy or even personify a “void” (Lawrence, 1935/2000: 30; MacEwen, 1982: 64) that is the result of being always between worlds, Western and Middle Eastern, or trying to enter one world from the other as the tit bird at the window tries in “There Is No Place To Hide”. To have an internal void is almost to be empty—another key word from “Apologies”—which is, in effect, the transcendental condition of selflessness that some mystics experience (Underhill, 1912: 318). Quoting the historical Lawrence’s claim that Arabs are “children of the idea” (Lawrence, 1935/2000: 41), MacEwen writes:

The Arabs are children of the idea; dangle an idea

In front of them, and you can swing them wherever.

I was also a child of the idea; I wanted

no liberty for myself, but to bestow it

Upon them. I wanted to present them with a gift so fine

it would outshine all other gifts in their eyes;

it would be worthy. Then at last I could be

Empty. (29)

In “Apologies”, the void is unwanted, whereas emptiness is desirable—both for MacEwen’s Lawrence and in The Mint, where the historical Lawrence describes the “ecstasy” of “go[ing] suddenly empty” (1955: 105) when listening to music at concerts. The void is a condition of being between wanted things, whereas emptiness is a similar space but without desire—in these cases, desire for identifications with other people or cultures. MacEwen might have felt the void and wanted to feel, as her Lawrence did, “how beautiful it is to be empty” (29).

She seems to have understood that sentiment and his ambivalence about the imperialism that underlies his celebrity. The historical Lawrence wrote that his acculturation into Arabia was “an affectation only”: “I had dropped one form [of faith and of appearance] and not taken on the other” (Lawrence, 1935/2000: 30). MacEwen’s Lawrence is both postcolonially apologetic and defensively Orientalist when he claims that his “mind’s twin kingdoms fought an everlasting war” (29). He does not treat these “twins” equally: the Bedouin are “reckless” and he is “civilized” (29), and his presumed ability to have assimilated an Arab way of life into his “mind” is itself colonial. He realizes that the religious pretence of his celebrity, and his celebrity itself, is irrevocably tainted by his imperialism: “I, whatever I was, / Fell into a dumb void that even a false god could not fill, / could not inhabit” (29). Reconfigured by his celebrity, he cannot describe himself except as “whatever”—or as he does in “Mirage”. Whereas he suggested in “Water” (the book’s first poem) that he would be able to transform to fit into Arab culture, here he is a “false god” who could neither “fill” nor “inhabit” (i.e. fit into) that culture. With the emphasis on the “false[ness]” of his religiosity, MacEwen’s Lawrence sees himself as a “soiled Outsider” (29) who would be happier without identifications across cultures.

Although MacEwen seems devoted to Lawrence through her identification with him, at a crucial point later in the book she separates herself from him and sides with the women who have been massacred during the Arab Revolt. Her passing as Lawrence is detectable when her Lawrence refers to his own work as poetry (in “Tall Tales” or “The Void”, for example); it is also detectable in “Tafas”, where the description of violence against women is more graphic than Lawrence’s account of his rape in “Deraa”. In “Tafas”, MacEwen’s voice and that of Lawrence cannot be distinguished by style, except that the politics of their descriptions generate noticeably different tones. Liza Potvin (1991) argues that “MacEwen may not be interpreted as a feminist poet in the typical application of the term; certainly she did not call herself one, and her poetry offers no overtly feminist statements or objectives; on the contrary, she writes [in Armies of the Moon] that ‘all ideologies enrage me’”. Potvin adds, “she nonetheless reserves a great deal of criticism for dualism and sexism as exclusive and excluding modes of thought” (1991: 18, 19). Nowhere is this more obvious than in “Tafas”, especially compared to the historical Lawrence’s account.

Lawrence’s version in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is as horrifying and nearly as moving as MacEwen’s in The T.E. Lawrence Poems, but he points no finger at men, as men, for their crimes in war. In fact, the only individual man that Lawrence mentions is a sympathetic character. Lawrence’s description of finding the bodies of Arab women killed by Turks involves one of his Arab companions, Abd el Aziz, whose grief and outrage makes him inarticulate:

It was a child, three or four years old, whose dirty smock was stained red over one shoulder and side, with blood from a large half-fibrous wound, perhaps a lance thrust, just where neck and body joined.

The child ran a few steps, then stood and cried to us in a tone of astonishing strength (all else being very silent), ‘Don’t hit me, Baba’. Abd el Aziz, choking out something—this was his village, and she might be of his family—flung himself off his camel, and stumbled, kneeling, in the grass before the child. His suddenness frightened her, for she threw up her arms and tried to scream; but, instead, dropped in a little heap, while the blood rushed out again over her clothes; then, I think, she died. (652)

Some of these phrases appear in “Tafas”, too. Lawrence then explains that his company moved along through the village and discovered many women murdered by the retreating Turks:

I looked close and saw the body of a woman folded across it [a sheepfold, a low mud wall], bottom upwards, nailed there by a saw bayonet whose haft stuck hideously in the air from between her naked legs. She had been pregnant, and about her lay others, perhaps twenty in all, variously killed, but set out in accord with an obscene taste. (652)

Lawrence’s response to the massacre is to seek vengeance: “I said, ‘The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead’”; “By my order we took no prisoners, for the only time in the war” (1935: 652, 653). He responds as a male warrior traditionally does, with general brutality.

MacEwen’s Lawrence has the same reaction—“We went after the Turks / And killed them all” (52)—but he blames men more specifically than does his historical counterpart, and the result is that the poem’s tone, compared to that of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is more accusatory. In “Tafas”, MacEwen decides that the wounded girl’s mother is the woman found impaled on the bayonet, but the historical Lawrence makes no such claim. MacEwen thereby accentuates the pathos of the scene and forms a connection between the girl and woman that parallels her connection to them as a person of the same sex. Her Lawrence notices that:

Death’s little silver cock was stuck

between her mother’s legs;

She sat on the tip of a saw

bayonet. And a pregnant woman

Was bent over a sheepfold [...] (52)

All of these atrocities are perpetrated by men against women; they make sexual symbolism real (though they are, in this poem, imaginary). Cohen, in The Energy of Slaves (1972: 117), wrote that poems were “lying down in their jelly / to make love with the tooth of a saw”. Ten years later, MacEwen transforms Cohen’s metafictionally abstract image into a highly visceral image of rape and murder “on the tip of a saw / bayonet”. Here, MacEwen intervenes in the otherwise extraordinarily male texts of both Lawrences (and possibly that of Cohen); her voice has a feminist urgency that Lawrence’s does not.

MacEwen’s intervention in “Tafas” is closer to ventriloquism than impersonation or passing; this intervention is the crucial moment when MacEwen implicitly refuses to pass undetectably as Lawrence. In Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice (2004), what I call “passing” is what Maija Bell Samei would call “non-ventriloquistic cross-dressing or transvestism”, which is evident when the persona is “apparently [...] unitary” (2004: 31). In almost all of The T.E. Lawrence Poems, MacEwen’s voice passes as the historical Lawrence’s voice. Although “Tafas” uses four of his phrases, it is an exception to MacEwen’s usual passing as Lawrence. For the aforementioned political reasons, her difference from the historical Lawrence can be detected in “Tafas”. Samei “use[s] ventriloquism [as the term] for those cases in which the persona of the poet is allowed to surface alongside that of [the poem’s speaker]” (2004: 31). Following Plato, Samei argues that any “entering into the persona of another, this impersonation, need not be so permanent nor so well-concealed; a ventriloquist, for example, allows the props of his impersonation to be displayed before his audience and moves in and out of the persona of the puppet, returning to his own character in the interim” (2004: 29-30). In “Tafas”, MacEwen finally exposes “the props”. She reveals herself behind Lawrence, her puppet, and figuratively speaks with him—not only through him—in a voice that is more her own than his. She partly withdraws from her identification with him. Although MacEwen might be grandstanding by speaking in Lawrence’s voice, she does not believe him to be the bigger man; his complicity in war crimes means that he, too, is an agent of death, and “Death’s [...] silver cock” is “little”. ⁸

What the historical Lawrence did not say explicitly enough, MacEwen does say: men make war—and she says so not by changing how Lawrence expresses himself, but by changing what he says to agree with a more feminist view. The style of the voice continues to be different from that of MacEwen’s previous books and passable as that of Lawrence, but the content becomes subtly incompatible with his biases, and so MacEwen’s identification with him is evidently not total. Her criticism of Lawrence’s imperialist war and of his celebrity is from the perspective of a woman sensitive to her difference from him as a poet and as a celebrity of lower degree. By standing in for Lawrence in poetry, she draws attention to the unlikelihood of a female poet having such cultural standing in the reality of her time and place: Canada after the 1970s. (She is probably also implying that Canadian writers in general never have status comparable to that of Lawrence—but how many English writers anywhere have both military and cultural power?) Ultimately, her passing as Lawrence is both wishful thinking and a study in contrasts that exposes unfairness related to sexuality on levels historical, political, and personal.

A celebrity of low degree compared to some of her contemporaries, MacEwen imagines in The T.E. Lawrence Poems the appropriation of the power of a celebrity who was more widely recognized than any Canadian poet. Partly because she is too late—at the end of an era—to use that power for social promotion as a celebrity and female poet, she uses it against itself, interrogating the imperialism that was essential to Lawrence’s celebrity and, to a lesser extent, her own. She arguably became critical of the affectations that Arab robes or Egyptian eyeliner on Westerners might indicate. Disillusioned, perhaps, by the limitations of both her celebrity and the spiritual development that she had sought in Eastern mysticism, she criticizes—through Lawrence—her own “posing” (as in “The Desirability of El Aurens”) and the postcolonially regretful but Orientalist yearning of her desire for mystical emptiness (which Lawrence expresses in “Apologies”). Lawrence’s status magnifies these issues so that they can be seen more clearly by her public, including her readers—and by MacEwen herself.

Although MacEwen’s passing as Lawrence is ultimately incomplete, their closeness is also evident: in her own potential confusion about whether she wrote certain phrases or whether she found them in Lawrence’s texts, in her deep empathy for Lawrence’s psychological and physical trials, and in her understanding of the relational and performative basis of identity formation. By choosing to write in the voice of a man of such celebrity—a status threatening to identity especially at such a high degree—she gambles with her own sense of self. Her experiment was critical and ironic but also spiritual and possibly fatalistic. She once asked Layton in a letter to explain “how you personally have survived [....] how to guard oneself against the intensity of one’s own vision”, and she added, “I fear my own poetry. Fear the actual strength of the voice” (Sullivan, 1996: 96). Whether or not she anticipated her own death in The T.E. Lawrence Poems, she understood that her devotion to more than one strong voice would push her to the limits of her art.