Remembering THE John Fraser (1928-2023)

Some of us grumbled about the cost of purchasing more than a dozen books for the course, but Professor Monk’s response was august and correct: “These are your tools. Every tradesperson has start-up expenses, and these are yours.” Monk’s course got me reading Michael Ondaatje for the first time, and I ended up penning my M.A. thesis on his work, which thrilled me because he was—and is—a Canadian poet of the visceral and the sensual, the weird and the eccentric. I revelled in his work. Being a Black North End Haligonian de souche, who’d come to poetry first via popular song lyrics and the verses of Black American bards, Ondaatje’s poetry helped me to appreciate that Can Lit need not be bland or timid or concerned only with “the call of the wild.”

But the other course that appealed to me immediately that September was one taught by John Fraser (1928-2023), boasting this indelible title: “Tradition and Experimentation in Modern Poetry: 1880-1920.” Our readings started actually with the mid-nineteenth-century French poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud and ended in the mid-twentieth century with the American poet Sylvia Plath; still, our principal scrutiny engaged the modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and all the other Norton Anthology lights influenced by that constellation. The last sentence of Fraser’s course description was also appealing and intriguing: “This course will be especially useful for poets.” Never in any standard English Literature course had I ever before encountered a professor pitching a class to poets. I had to sign on!  Moreover, because I already owned works by many of the syllabus’d poets, I figured I’d save on Fraser’s class what I’d need to to spend on Monk’s. (In reality, Fraser did not request that we buy many books, for he distributed each week a photocopied selection of pieces by the poet “up” for discussion, analysis, and debate.)

One other unusual facet of Fraser’s graduate class is that we met in his home—in his living room—with the art of his wife, Carol Hoorn Fraser (1930-1991), challenging our eyeballs, while somewhere in the middle of the 7-10 p.m., Monday night salon, Ms. Fraser would appear with tea and cookies, while “Fraser” III—a feline—would step gingerly among our teacups without rattling any or spilling a drop of brew. (The placement of the tea-tray was a delicate operation for it always nestled precariously on a surface of books of different height, which were everywhere—columns from floor to ceiling, or heaps balanced perilously beside gangling student elbows.) Additionally, to illustrate a point about poetry recitation, Fraser would reach for an LP by Dylan Thomas (who read well) or by Eliot (who did not), so our ears could be better attuned to pick out the oral nuances and subtleties of the highly organized word-structure that is verse. So record albums and art books were just as plentiful as tomes of “litter-a-choor,” among which we dozen students nested on chairs or pillows or the floor. We were in the presence of a prof undomesticated by the Ivory Tower, but a “homey” in the cosmopolitan world of the arts.

Thus, a third unique feature of Fraser’s night class is that each meeting began with his asking whether we’d been—the preceding week—to the theatre, the cinema, an art gallery, or a musical concert, and what our opinions might be about the fare on offer. It wasn’t just “break the ice” politesse however:  Fraser was proposing subtly the idea that all arts criticism should strive to offer opinions girded by study, thought, and debate.

Nevertheless, early on, I feared I’d made a dreadful mistake. I couldn’t figure out Fraser’s pedagogy. He wouldn’t “teach”; instead, he insisted that we debate the poets under consideration, delineating the effectiveness of their poetics, their techniques, their diction. I found myself floundering, frustrated, and exasperated—and bored (or pretending to be so).  I spent more time stifling yawns and petting the cat than I did talking about poets who I love. Either I was failing or the course was failing me. When I did look to Fraser for a clue about what to say or think, no hint could be discerned, except that he would nod his head when he heard a good point; or he would frown if he thought one was wrong or that one was relying too much on what some critic had said as opposed to ferreting out the art—the genius—of the poem all on one’s lonesome. Not only did Fraser’s “non” teaching befuddle me, I was also intimidated by my classmates, who quoted “theorists” handily; plus, several were doctoral candidates. I felt outclassed by their knowledge, but also alienated by Fraser’s steadfast refusal to say what he thought. Then, things got worse—really, really fast….

A pass or fail grade depended on our writing of two seminar papers—one for each term. Successful students would have to “hit a homer”—so to speak—twice. I was already unsure of my ability to score well in the class when Fraser assigned me the poetry of Charles Baudelaire as my Fall Term paper topic. I heard the news as a death knell. I went to his office and protested: “This is an English class!  Why must I write a paper on a French poet?!!” Well, Fraser was utterly nonplussed.  He replied simply, “You are going to write the paper on Baudelaire.” 

I couldn’t believe it! I was outraged—and I was scared. How could I write the paper? Who was this John Fraser chap, anyway?

By 1961, Fraser was at Dalhousie University, snapping pictures in jaunts about South End Halifax and setting to work on what would become his landmark book, Violence in the Arts (1974). Fraser was also slender and tall—a plus-six-foot, human tower—and projected a serviceable baritone that could burr with a purr or sound gruffly tough. His gait? Jaunty and determined. Though he wouldn’t divulge a position in class, he was theatrical in conversation, donning accents or facial expressions as masterfully as could Marlon Brando. In some photos, he resembles Ezra Pound, but was never such a crank or a curmudgeon. (The one exception to his patented studiousness was his abortive effort, decades later, to write a book on Mr. Don John Trump. He loathed too much Trump’s anti-intellectualism to be able to critique him without resorting to scathing invective.) So, this intellectual is the scholar with whom I had to contend when trying to escape writing about Baudelaire! I did not succeed.

I spent a weekend writing the Baudelaire paper, subsisting on donairs and rum, coffee and rum, and more donairs, while typing it up on an IBM Selectric typewriter with that very advanced, interchangeable ball head. (Did I use Courier 10? Likely.) No sleep for two nights. Come Sunday morning, I taxied to Fraser’s Oakland Road home, placed the essay under a rock on his front stoop (so he could retrieve the paper and make it available to my classmates to read before Monday’s class), and then taxied to my apartment and slept straight through to Monday morn. I was late getting to class on Monday night because I was fearful of Fraser’s reaction. Well, when I finally arrived, plunked in an armchair, and recited the paper, Fraser responded positively to my recitation by nodding his head vigorously. I’d scored an “A,” I guessed; and my classmates were also approving. So, I’d dodged the guillotine? Aye….

Then, early in January 1987, Fraser tapped me to write the paper on “Free Verse.” But I couldn’t determine a way to research the vast subject and to centre it effectively. By the deadline date, I produced something, but it was an anthology, not an analysis. Shortly after I delivered the paper, Fraser summoned me to his office and asked me what I thought about it. I confessed, “I don’t think it was very good.” His reply? “You’re right.” Could I write a make-up paper? “No.” Surely now I’d fail his course—and the second term had only just begun. Why should I attend further classes? Fraser threw me a lifeline: “You don’t say very much in class. Start speaking up, and then I’ll see where we are when it comes time to assign a final grade.”

Say no more, sir! After that meeting—and that advice—I became an authoritative critic in that class, scrutinizing every poem, discovering the strengths and weaknesses (if any), and willing to debate strenuously all comers, no matter their pedigree or their aspirations. Suddenly, from late January to early April, almost everything that I argued in that Monday night class had Fraser nodding his head vigorously in assent. I’d gone from being a wallflower to being a cactus—one quite impossible to put down or to get around.

Before I continue, I must mention another unorthodox feature of Fraser’s course: We had to tape ourselves reciting poems aloud prior to each class. Then, he’d play back the recordings and determine if we’d truly understood the poem by having recited it with accurate emotion and gut-level consciousness of its assertions. I tended to pooh-pooh this exercise because I couldn’t see why it was necessary: Can’t anyone read a poem aloud? That was my attitude until I picked up William Blake’s “Sunflower,” which I’d read many times beforehand. However, this time, reciting it aloud, I felt it: I heard Blake speaking to me about the weariness of Time and of how all things decay and wither away. When Fraser played back my recording, there was audible authenticity in the emotion I’d voiced; I’d “gotten” it. 

By course’s end, I felt confident about the mark that I’d receive, which was an “A.” No “A” grade has meant more to me than that assigned by THE John Fraser, as I must insist on naming him. Simultaneously, feeling that I could trust his critiques of my poetry, I began to share with him, especially in 1989-1990, the poems that composed the manuscript for my second volume of poetry, Whylah Falls.  John—I’ll call him that now—read the manuscript in Mexico, and praised its “oneiric quality.” Shortly, I was thrilled to know that he was teaching my book, which was the highest praise possible. Indeed, he was still teaching Whylah Falls and recommending it to others when he retired from Dalhousie University in 1993 as the George Munro Professor of English.

Now we became long-distance, epistolary friends, as I picked up a doctorate from Queen’s University (1993), then began to teach at Duke University, and then the University of Toronto. Always did he offer me the most stringent critiques and also the most startling commendations, whenever either was deserved. However, as important as John was for my poetry—in sharpening and honing my chops, he was also vital to me critically, for I read Violence in the Arts, and I loved it—its catholicity of considerations: high brow, low brow, classical literature, thriller novels, horror movies, crime flicks, nude theatre, comic books, camp and cruelty, Shakespeare and Sade, Susan Sontag and JFK, the Beats and the Black Panther Party. His bottom line in that superb book? All things come back to a matter of judgment and critical thought. I own two copies; I keep it close to me; I consider it a masterpiece of critical prowess—as vital as anything Northrop Frye or Marshall McLuhan ever had to say. I’ve also mined its catalogues for must-see films, must-read books, and must-have experiences, all enriching my artistic spelunking spectacularly. Because it’s long out of print, I’ve even assigned photocopied versions to grad students. Still the five acts of my verse tragedy, Beatrice Chancy (1999), follow Fraser’s chapter titles.

(I also read and admired John’s essay collection, The Name of Action: Critical Essays [1984], and his tome on America and the Patterns of Chivalry [1982], both also from Cambridge University Press. In these works, too, there is a capacious intelligence at work, able to digest and synthesize disparate bodies of knowledge into new ways of understanding politics, history, art, literature, and even fashion. Still, I stand by Violence in the Arts as the acme of John’s comprehensive, cosmopolitan purview. Therein are debts to Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt, but also a zealous, British-American zest to arrive at a poetics of violence so as to determine what is gratuitous and what is essential, but also to arrive at judgments that can be usefully transferred to other aesthetic debates.)

Profoundly admirable was John’s ability to hold forth on everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Story of O; to compare the vitriolic conversations in Jane Austen’s novels with the violent showdowns in Alice in Wonderland. He was also wonderfully open-minded. When I told him about my interest in blues music, he purchased a complete set of records, canvassing everyone from Robert Johnson to Bessie Smith. He soon knew more about the blues than I ever will. Attracted to Hong Kong action films, he fast became a connoisseur, and this I was getting tips from him on what to watch. Quickly, I rented the recommended videos to savour the high-octane action featuring jaw-dropping, yet disciplined fight scenes and chop-chop-bloody, near-death experiences. John was the consummate amateur: His enthusiasm for any subject always escalated to mastery. In this regard, too, he was the model intellectual.

Post-retirement, John self-published a collection of his photographs, including that haunting, JFK snap, “Candidate.” He also helped to bring out a book of colour reproductions of Carol Fraser’s paintings, which was partly a homage—due to her too-early decease from cancer in 1991—but was really more of an education in contemporary Atlantic Canadian women’s art and her deservedly high place in its canon and pantheon. Partly to ensure the continued, positive, posthumous reception of Ms. Fraser’s art, John began an on-line journal, “Jottings.ca,” where he could explicate his late wife’s aesthetic, accomplishment, and importance, but also hold forth on his views on other topics. His writing style is at once succinct and witty, encyclopedic and slangy, confessional (John talks a lot about affect—feeling—long before it became fashionable to argue an intellectual point arising from one’s foundational emotions about a subject) and assertive. He prefers jokes to jargon—and clarity of opinion over obfuscations encouraged by a need to avoid offending anyone.  Indeed, one of John’s aphorisms that sticks in my mind is that “everyone’s life rubs up against everyone else’s”; i.e., our different ways of living are bound to disturb others. (I think about that when I am navigating Toronto traffic, wherein I amend Sartre’s bons mots: “Hell is other drivers.”) So, one needs clarity of thought to preserve moral and ethical integrity, as well as compassion and empathy.

After ensuring that Carol Hoorn Fraser’s art was ensconced in institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Dalhousie University Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution among others, John began to champion the work of Haligonian artist Bernice Purdy, buying some of her work, and lauding it to anyone who came within earshot. He knew good art when he saw it, and always tried to commend it to others.

Nor did he cease his scholarly endeavours, publishing, for instance, an essay on horror films, plus teaching, now and then, courses on this and that for Dalhousie. He shared with me a sheaf of his photocopied comments on reading literature critically, and they became my pedagogical go-to pieces for my own teaching. 

Once John moved from his splendid art gallery, library, and music store, which was his home, into the retirement residence at The Berkeley in South End Halifax, I’m ashamed to say that I fell out of touch. I only saw him there once, and he did seem to have assembled a rough approximation of his former Oakland Road digs, with an excellent stereo, DVD player, cable TV service, plus, once again, art books picked up, leafed through, and set down, to become islands or stepping stones across his floor. He seemed relaxed, happy, and at home, and that is how I will remember him.

Still, the news of his death—aged 95—in Halifax last September 11, 2023, jolted me. A star had fallen out of the cosmos, dimming somehow all the others. I wrote a poem for his memorial service; Astrid Brunner kindly recited it in my absence, and that Halifax-based publisher, poet, artist’s model, and intellectual-of-the-theatre wept when she reached the conclusion; she couldn’t finish the recitation. I thank Dr. Brunner for that affective presentation. I can’t think of John as being “finished,” as being “gone” either. Then again, though there are so many persons named John Fraser in this world, Doc Fraser is, for me, the irreplaceable one, the magisterially distinctive one. I began to refer to him as “THE John Fraser,” years ago, and he still is, and always will be, and no namesake will ever measure up.

George Elliott Clarke, OC, ONS, FRCGS, PhD, LLD (etc.), is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. He served as Canada’s 7^th Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2016 & 2017) and pioneered the study of African-Canadian Literature at Duke, McGill, UBC, Harvard, and the University of Toronto. Twice a graduate of Dalhousie University (MA, 1989, & LLD, 1999), Clarke has also been named a Dalhousie Original and received Dal’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. His latest books are an essay collection, Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (Véhicule Books, 2023), and the sixth and last volume of his verse epic, Canticles III (mmxxiii) (Guernica Editions, 2023).

A Portrait of THE John Fraser

His loud identity—brazen Effrontery—

resides in his indisputable critique.

He strides through Academe’s ivied groves—

glides into the Ivory Tower—

unstoppably capable,

abides in a bookish bower,

to exercise Thought like a muscle:

His tongue is chalk correcting the faulty formulae

even of pinpoint stars

polka-dotting any blackboard night;

or his tongue and lungs are those of a priest,

exorcising incisively the Poltergeist

of emphatically fatuous accidie.

Long before Susan Sontag validated goofy,

50%-proof alcoholic poets and drugged-out artists

as the vamps of Camp,

The John Fraser, even as a boy eyeing

the sky-high, cinematic theatre of the Blitz,

the Spitfires dogfighting with the lightning-fleet Messerschmitts,

in those death-defying loop-de-loops,

until one plane dipped, drooped, flying on smoke,

and a heroic pilot saw himself snuffed at a stroke,

our Johnny-Boy followed the newsreel battles on weekend screens,

and in the lurid cartoons inking yellow-paper magazines,

and thus he came to see Art as anything that tells us about

human beings fearlessly, without cliché,

and impervious to both Ideology and Theology.

So, he could throw down Hamlet or King Lear,

then plunk down pennies to read up on gangsters

frying in the grisly electric chair;

or he could leaf through Michelangelo’s storybook paintings,

compare masterpiece after masterpiece

with images of Superman, facing Kryptonite, forever fainting—

or view Jesus as a primitive extraterrestrial—

as homeless and as harassed as a terrorist—

driven short-lived into His short-lived Death’s exile.

The John Fraser eyed America as a circus of high-noon shootings—

six-guns, tommy-guns, machineguns, laser-beams—

a carnival of down-at-the-heel gumshoes

pursuing each glam killer’s disastrous intellect;

or loud-mouth moneybags

who ain’t marvels, but merely swindlers;

or epic, crummy, television serials

that are wall-to-wall blah-blah-blah—

with silken brawls in bedrooms

and a trickle of liquor flying

as a glass gets smashed,

or a belly dancer is splattered apart

by indiscriminate rat-a-tat-tat.

But his genius was his ability to tease out

the supreme Art of karate chop and spaghetti strap,

the stiletto heel and the stiletto stabbed in the eye,

the delicious farce of Chaplin

and the tawdry tragicomedy of Trump,

the glitzy dirty laundry of the Kennedys

and the meticulous weeping of Muddy Waters.

Was not The John Fraser an odd scholar,

to attend to low-brow, popular taste

as if he were a gourmet, Michelin 5-star chef

deigning to discover the secret

to the deathless pleasure of a toasted cheese sandwich?

He scorned no Art; he welcomed all—

because he was cosmopolitan, never provincial;

because he was broad-minded and catholic in his likes;

because he could ogle horror films

and say that none is as horrible as Homer’s Iliad,

with its torrent of bowels being tugged from bodies

or its cadavers hauled disrespectfully through dust, gore,

and horse manure.

The John Fraser loved painters;

his one-and-only wife, Carol Hoorn,

that estimable artist—

he met out at the University of Minnesota,

where he snapped the jaunty and grinning

(secretly sleazy) J.F.K. in campaign mode:

The smile is blurry, but caught—in an instant—

as Jack went sailing by,

to keep an appointment three years later

in Dallas, Texas,

with the uncovered limousine accepting

bolts of skull-disintegrating lightning.

The John Fraser told me that he courted Carol

by offering her a light for her cigarette.

That he had a match—

made them a match.

Later, a widower, he befriended Bernice Purdy,

assured that she was—

as a naïve, a primitive, a local colour Maritime artist—

also a worthy colourist of mermaids and Jack Tars,

and fishing hooks as good as guitar hooks.

I came to know The John Fraser

as a scarily formidable, no-bullshit prof.

When I registered in his course—

“Tradition and Experimentation in Modern Poetry,

1880-1920”—

which his course catalogue noted,

“would be very good for poets,”

I was baffled at first by his lack of teaching.

He would never venture his own opinion,

but only nod his head in appreciation of a point,

or grimace if one of us articulated something gauche.

I was alarmed—terrified—when he assigned me

the topic of Baudelaire,

to explain his pivotal, crucial intervention in French poetry,

to uproot it from Racine and plant it—soon enough—

in Césaire.

I protested the assignment, but he insisted that I do it.

After a weekend of Governor-General’s rum

and Tony’s Donairs,

and plunking away at an IBM Selectric typewriter

with an interchangeable ball head,

I produced my only grad student masterpiece.

But that tall, slender man was scarecrow-scary

in demanding that his students think and question,

rather than rely on quotations from theorists.

As soon as a student lisped, “Foucault,”

The John Fraser would frown and roll his eyes heavenward.

He wanted us to talk about authors, not authorities.

He wanted us to explain and prove Pound’s importance,

for instance,

by examining what Pound wrote.

Those Monday night conclaves in the enclave

of his living room,

with a cat tiptoeing among teacups,

intro’d a man of clairvoyant insight

among his wife’s oneiric art—

Dali—Warhol—Kahlo—

all present in the prism of her eye.

The John Fraser resembled Pound—

even as he disassembled Pound—

pointing out his appointment

to the ensemble of Laforgue—Eliot—Yeats—

and enabling us to table

the resemblances between autumn leaves

and The Waste Land

or Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

When I failed to produce a good, second paper

in that class,

The John Fraser advised me to Speak up—

to be outspoken—

and then he’d decide on the grade.

After that, I was irrepressible—

and almost always correct in my views—

but the best part,

besides seeing John nod his head in vigorous accord

with my readings—

was to witness him simultaneously laugh his head off

in reaction to one of my bons mots.

When The John Fraser read my Whylah Falls in manuscript,

and pronounced it great,

I knew that it was.

But of greater magnitude was his scrutinizing friendship.

I don’t have a way to end this poem.

I cannot bear to think of him gone.

The John Fraser cannot be as mortal

as all the other pretenders to his cognomen.