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Watson Kirkconnell | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1895-05-16)16 May 1895 |
| Died | 26 February 1977(1977-02-26) (aged 81) Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada |
| Awards | Order of Canada |
Watson KirkconnellOC FRSC (16 May 1895 – 26 February 1977) was a Canadian literary scholar, poet, playwright, linguist, satirist, and translator.
Kirkconnell was born inPort Hope, Ontario into a proudlyScottish-Canadian family descended fromUnited Empire Loyalists and more recent immigrants from theBritish Isles. After his university studies were interrupted by the outbreak ofWorld War I, Captain Watson Kirkconnell was extremely disappointed to be classified as medically unfit foractive service when he was only days away from being shipped to theWestern Front with theCanadian Corps. He instead spent the rest of the war guardingCentral Powers POWs atFort Henry andKapuskasing internment camps in rural Ontario.
Following the 1918 Armistice, he entered a university faculty career and became an internationally known poet, translator of poetry, and literary critic. After learning enormously from what he taught about world literature to his students, Kirkconnell made radical teaching innovations and also became an enormously influentialpublic intellectual, who publicized and denouncedhuman rights abuses underFascism,Nazism, andStalinism.[1]
For his many many translations of their national poetry and that by "New Canadian" poets who composed inimmigrant languages, Kirkconnell remains very well known inIceland,Poland,Hungary, the formerYugoslavia, andUkraine.[2][3] For his original poetry,verse dramas, andlight operas, Kirkconnell drew upon bothCanadian andworld history and while skillfully emulating poets and playwrights from throughoutWorld Literature. He was also a highly skilledsatirist, as seen in his verse parodies ofRobert Burns[4] and, in"Rain on the Waste Land", ofT.S. Eliot.[5]
Due to his arguments against what he came to see as the excessive Anglocentrism of his country and its culture[1][2] and his use of the tapestry and mosaic metaphors in favor of embracing amultiethnic andmultilingualCanadian culture, Kirkconnell was credited by his friend, collaborator in translatingUkrainian literature and poetry, and university colleague C.H. Andrusyshen with almost singlehandedly ending widespread discrimination against Canadians ofWhite ethnic (meaning non-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ancestry and cultural identity.[6] He has accordingly been dubbed the father ofmulticulturalism in Canada.[7]
He was also, paradoxically, very eccentric, a life-longconspiracy theorist, and believer in thepseudosciences ofeugenics andscientific racism. Even more paradoxically, Kirkconnell was an anti-Semite as a young man and again as an old man, when he embracedHolocaust denial under the influence ofconspiracy theoristWilliam Guy Carr; but in the intervening period he regularly made and published literary translations of verse he admired by Jewish poets.[8][9] Furthermore, while Kirkconnell was hesitant to condemn Nazism in May 1939,[10][11] he changed his mind and used his many literary contacts to help mobilize Canadian immigrant communities in favour of the Allied war effort.[1][2] Furthermore, in 1943 he eulogized the victims ofthe Holocaust in a poem entitled"Agony of Israel"[12] and in 1962 he mocked both Soviet andNazi ideology in aGreek tragedy-stylestage play aboutthe Exodus.[13]
At the same time, similarly to American and Canadian veterans of theInternational Brigades during theSpanish Civil War, who were often vilified for being "premature anti-Fascists" after returning home, Kirkconnell was similarly vilified, not only by Soviet journalists and politicians, but even by Canadian ones, for being a "premature anti-Stalinist". Even so, he continued to write and speak publicly aboutSoviet war crimes,religious persecution, theHolodomor, and otherhuman rights abuses, and what he saw as the domestic threat posed by both the pro-SovietCommunist Party of Canada and thecovert operations of theKGB andGRU on Canadian soil. During theSecond World War, Prime MinisterWilliam Lyon Mackenzie King seriously considered acting to protect Canada's military alliance with the USSR by silencing Kirkconnell with anorder in council. Only after the 1945defection of Sovietmilitary intelligence officerIgor Gouzenko did the Canadian government and it'scounterintelligence services begin taking Kirkconnell's claims seriously and decide to recruit him as a covert informant. Even so, Kirkconnell was also a very harsh critic ofU.S. SenatorJoseph McCarthy, whom he accused of having discreditedanti-communism by acting in, "an offensive and blundering fashion."[1][2]
Even though Kirkconnell's pioneering vision for multiculturalism was intended to make his country less Anglocentric and more accepting only of Canadians who spokeimmigrant languages and had ancestral roots in European nations other than Great Britain, the concept has been widened before and since his death to also acknowledge the cultural contributions of First Nation peoples and other non-Whites.
One of his most popular literary translations fromHungarian literature is ofJános Arany'sThe Bards of Wales, an 1864ballad criticizing theconquest of Wales by KingEdward Longshanks, but which was intended as a covert denunciation ofEmperor Franz Joseph over the defeat of theHungarian revolution of 1848, and which Kirkconnell translated into the same idiom as theChild ballads. Furthermore, Watson Kirkconnell's 1933 translation ofWorld War I soldier-poetGéza Gyóni's iconicanti-war poem,Csak egy éjszakára ("For Just One Night"), which was composed during theSiege of Przemyśl in 1915 and flown out of the besieged city byaeroplane for publication inBudapest,[14] which Kirkconnell rendered into the same idiom as Englishwar poetsSiegfried Sassoon,Wilfred Owen, andIsaac Rosenberg,[15] remains just as popular.[16][17]
Watson Kirkconnell's paternal ancestors derived their surname from the village and ruined monastery ofKirkconnel. They werePresbyterians, spokeGalwegian Gaelic, wore theClan Douglastartan, and farmed nearKirkcudbright, inDumfries and Galloway.[18] Due to what Kirkconnell later dubbed, "the almost universalholocaust of Scottish archives duringthe Reformation",[19] hisgenealogy could not be traced with complete accuracy or linked, as he strongly suspected was the case, to acadet branch of the Clan Douglas orClan Maxwell lairds of Kirkconnel.[19] Kirkconnell's own visit to his ancestral village inspired his original poem"Kirkconnell, Galloway, A.D. 600. Visited A.D. 1953". The poet pondered how much the culture of the region and the celebration ofChristmas Day had changed since Kirkconnell Abbey was founded by St.Conal, aCuldee monk and missionary of theCeltic Church. The landscape, he commented, remained largely unchanged and called upon his readers to embrace the awe that their ancestors had once felt before the incarnation and birth ofJesus Christ.[20]
In, "an almost imperceptible little ripple in the vast tide of Scottish immigration that flowed into Canada", Walter Kirkconnell (1795–1860), the poet's great-grandfather, sailed for theNew World in 1819 and settled as a pioneer in Chatham Township,Argenteuil County,Quebec. As a result of a 1953 search made at Kirkconnell's request by the Scottish Council, he learned that everyone named Kirkconnell had similarly joined theScottish diaspora and that no one with the same surname still lived inScotland.[21]
At the time, Chatham Township was largely being settled byGaelic-speakingevictees and voluntary immigrants fromPerthshire (Scottish Gaelic:Siorrachd Pheairt). Walter Kirkconnell accordingly married one of them; Mary McCallum, the daughter of John and Janet (née McDiarmid) McCallum, from the farmhouse known as "Carnban" in what is now a ruined and completely depopulated village inGlen Lyon (Scottish Gaelic:Gleann Lìomhann).[22]Reformed worship in Chatham Township continued the16th-century practice ofexclusive and unaccompaniedGaelic psalm singing in a form known asprecenting the line. In her old age, Mary (née McCallum) Kirkconnell, despite having gone blind, could still sing all 154Scottish GaelicMetrical Psalms from memory.[23]
Kirkconnell's maternal great-grandfather, Christopher Watson, emigrated fromAlston, Cumberland to Upper Canada in 1819 and became a schoolmaster in York, later renamedToronto. Christopher's youngest son, Thomas Watson, had adopted his father's profession and taught at the schools inAllanburg,Beachwood,Lundy's Lane,Stamford, andPort Hope, Ontario. In 1851, Thomas Watson had married Margaret Elma Green of Lundy's Lane, a woman descended fromWelsh-AmericanUnited Empire Loyalists, as well as more recent British immigrants to Canada with both German and Spanish roots.[24]
Kirkconnell's parents, Thomas Kirkconnell (1862–1934) and Bertha (née Watson) Kirkconnell (1867–1957), were living in Port Hope, Ontario when their earliest children were born.[25]
Watson Kirkconnell was born on 16 May 1895 inPort Hope, Ontario, where his father, Thomas Kirkconnell, washeadmaster ofPort Hope High School.[26] Kirkconnell was a sickly child and was accordingly delayed entry for two years into Port Hope Public School and only began taking classes at the age of seven.[27] Despite the delays, Kirkconnell proved to be very academically gifted pupil and was twice allowed to skip a grade.[28]
Kirkconnell later credited his love of poetry to the influence of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Watson, who he later described as a, "grey-bearded... pillar of the local Methodist church". Thomas Watson used to reward his grandson by giving him one cent for every stanza he memorized fromDivine and Moral Songs byIsaac Watts. Kirkconnell later recalled, "From an entire volume thus committed to memory, I gained considerable cash, indelible recollections of many edifying verses, and an indelible love ofprosody. Neither of us dreamt that back of several of Watts' poems lay the fineLatin hymns of thePolishJesuitKazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640)."[29]
Kirkconnell further recalled that his "first awareness of small townjournalism came" after his "second Christmas-time promotion". ThePort Hope Guide reported that "a local lawyer" had angrily protested during aschool board meeting that his son has not been similarly promoted and accused Watson Kirkconnell of having been "shoved", solely because his father was the headmaster ofPort Hope High School. For this reason, the Kirkconnell family felt both vindicated and overjoyed the following summer, after the same newspaper published the results of the Provincial "Entrance Examinations". These proved that the headmaster's controversial son had scored, "nearly fifty points higher than anyone else in town or county."[28]
At the age of twelve, Kirkconnell asked for and received bothbaptism and membership in the Port Hope Baptist Church. According to J.M.R. Beveridge, "Thus began his commitment toChristianity which, although subjected to periods of doubt, sometimes perhaps even approaching despair, survived and matured. Throughout his adult life he played an active and on many occasions leading role in the Baptist denomination."[30] Kirkconnell, however, seriously considered leaving the Baptist faith as a young man, and as an older man was far moreecumenical and critical in his approach to Evangical Christianity than many of his Baptist peers were comfortable with. For example, writing in his memoirs that Evangelicals who "ignorantly or deliberately disregardZoroastrian elements inearly Hebrew thinking... are noisy without knowledge" and expressing "more love for poetry than theology."[31]
Also as a child in Port Hope, Kirkconnell's interest ingeology was sparked by attending a lecture about local prehistory,Ice Ageglaciers, and theGlacial Lake Iroquois byArthur Philemon Coleman, who was visiting from theUniversity of Toronto. Afterwards, Kirkconnell recalls, "walking and cycling through the countryside now took on a new meaning", and after the family moved toLindsay, Ontario in 1908, Kirkconnell continued to research local prehistory and how it had shaped the landscape.[32]
By the time he graduated high school, Kirkconnell had learned Latin, French,German, andGreek, and had been exposed to works ofcomparative philology. He later wrote, "The labours of my lifetime have been more in the field of language study than in any other."[33]
In 1913, at the urging of his father, Kirkconnell began studies at his father'salma mater ofQueen's University at Kingston. Even thoughmathematics had been his best subject in high school, Kirkconnell proceeded to honours inClassics and graduated as adouble medallist in Latin and Greek. He received aMaster of Arts degree in 1916.[34]
On 4 August 1914, Kirkconnell was attendingQueen's University at the outbreak ofWorld War I. Although he enthusiastically hoped to see combat in France, Kirkconnell chose, similarly toJ.R.R. Tolkien, to delay enlistment until after his graduation.[35]
His brother, Walter Kirkconnell, enlisted in theRoyal Montreal Regiment on 5 August 1914. After training in the mud ofSalisbury Plain, Lt. Walter Kirkconnell waskilled in action during theBattle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, when theCanadian Corps platoon under his command ran into a Germanmachine gun nest in a grain field nearVillers-Bretonneux.[35]
In August 1916, Kirkconnell volunteered foractive service on theWestern Front. In November 1916, however, despite having been personally requested by Major P.G.C. Campbell and shortly before he was to be shipped overseas with the 253rd Battalion, Captain Kirkconnell was ruled unfit for combat duty by three successive Medical Boards.[36]
A deeply disappointed Captain Watson Kirkconnell spent the rest of the war guarding POWs and civilian internees atFort Henry and atKapuskasinginternment camp, both in ruralOntario. In his words, "The great majority of the prisoners were Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Poles. There were also a hundred Turks, a few Bulgars, a Magyar or two, and a handful of genuine Austrians. Ignorant, sullen, inert, the mass of these interns were the very incarnation of passive resistance ... there prevailed among all these hundreds of thick heads a strange belief that for every day of their captivity they would receive at the close of the war an indemnity of five dollars wrung from Canada by a victorious Austria ... guarding them was something of a sinecure."[37]
While serving as camp paymaster at Kapuskasing, Captain Watson Kirkconnell helped prevent a prisoner uprising and, on two occasions, he also discovered and foiled attempts to tunnel out of the camp.[38]
Despite his many later translations ofFrench Canadian literature and poetry, during the war years Kirkconnell was adamant that no “French Catholic curs” be allowed into Prime MinisterRobert Borden’s cabinet, adding “I used to think that Aunt Jane might be exaggerating in her denunciation of theFrench but we knowQuebec now. Colonel Date calls them ‘the cockroaches of Canada’ and he is not far out.” He also urged his mother and sister "to take advantage of theWartime Election Act to vote in the ... Union election 'against Frenchmen, Catholicism, and the abandonment of all national honour.'"[39]
During the fall of 1919, Captain Kirkconnell accompanied 445 POWs and internees from Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camp aboard theS.S. Pretorian, fromQuebec City toRotterdam, pending theirrepatriation to theWeimar Republic. Kirkconnell later recalled, after surrendering his prisoners to the neutralDutch armed forces, "That they bore me no ill will for my performance at Fort Henry and Kapuskasing seemed clear when on the wharf my former prisoners called for, 'Three cheers for Captain Kirkconnell', and gave them lustily."[40]
Despite years of grief over the combat death of his brother, Watson Kirkconnell later wrote, "Generally speaking, I could feel little animus against our German prisoners. Guarding them was simply a job. It was their duty to try to get away and our duty to prevent it. The ingenuity that they displayed in their attempts to escape was being duplicated byour men in German captivity."[41]
Kirkconnell was first sworn intoFreemasonry in Canada in December 1920 at the "Faithful Brethren" Lodge No. 77 inLindsay, Ontario.[42] He remained in "The Craft" for the rest of his life and even served asGrand Master of St. George's Lodge No. 20 of theYork Rite inWolfville, Nova Scotia,[43] Kirkconnell later experienced some doubt about the organization, as his subsequent research made him realize thatFreemasonry's legend of the murder ofHiram Abif is contradicted by theAntiquities of the Jews byJosephus. Kirkconnell later wrote, "I turned to books on the Craft itself, and found that most of its ritual lecture material was composed in England in the 18th century by Dr.James Anderson, Dr. J.T. Desaguliers,George Payne, andWilliam Preston. I had grave reasons for suspecting that the Free and Accepted Masons were not much more 'ancient' than the establishment ofGrand Lodge Masonry in London in 1717."[44]
However, Kirkconnell subsequently changed his mind about what he had formerly consideredpseudohistory and, "passed from my early skepticism into a growing sense of the profound age of the Craft... There are elements in Masonry that are nearly as much older thanSolomon as Solomon is older thanWinston Churchill."[45]
In 1922, Kirkconnell accepted the offer of a faculty position in the English Department atWesley College. Kirkconnell taught English there for the eleven years, before switching to the Department ofClassics for the next seven years. The experience for him proved life changing.[2]
Like many other English-speaking Canadians of his class and generation, Kirkconnell had been brought up to believe in the racial superiority ofWhite Anglo-Saxon Protestants[citation needed]. After he grew to adulthood, he accordingly opposed allowing any further non-British immigration into Canada. He also became passionately interested in the now discreditedpseudosciences ofscientific racism,Social Darwinism, andEugenics. Kirkconnell read widely in all three subjects, and composed his ownNordicist tract predicting the imminent demise of the "Nordic race" in Ontario due to the increasing immigration ofFrench-Canadians,Jews, andSlavic peoples. Although his racist writings remain largely unpublished, his eugenicist views were expounded inThe International Aspects of Unemployment (1923), which called for the internment inlabour camps and wholesalesterilization of disabled Canadians and all others deemed "unfit."[9]
Kirkconnell's experiences, however, as a professor in themultiethnic andmultilingualManitoba city ofWinnipeg exposed him toworld literature, which caused him to begin questioning his views and making radical teaching innovations. For example, Kirkconnell believed that, not only theIcelandic sagas and theElder Edda, but also theOld IrishTáin Bó Cúailnge and theOld Low GermanHeliand, "threw light onBeowulf, theBattle of Maldon, and theCaedmonianGenesis", and advocated teaching all of those texts together.[46]
While seeking background literature for teaching a course onGeoffrey Chaucer, Kirkconnell discovered and fell in love with theMiddle Welsh poetry instrict metre byDafydd ap Gwilym, whom he called, "a great contemporary of Chaucer, with a feeling for nature that was beyond the reach of the Londonvintner's son."[47] Kirkconnell felt similarly when he discovered the Medieval Latin poetry of theWandering Scholars and theMedieval Hebrew poetry ofSolomon ibn Gabirol andYehuda Halevi.[48]
As a result, Kirkconnell grew to believe that Prehistoricintermarriage among the ancestors ofEuropean peoples had not been detrimental, but positive. Therefore, Kirkconnell concluded, as all Europeans are of genetically mixed ancestry, furtherWhite ethnic immigration and intermarriage would actually strengthen the development of Canada as a nation.[8]
It was finally the 1925 death of his wife while giving birth to twin sons that brought Kirkconnell to a more tolerant position. As both a tribute and a memorial to his late wife, Kirkconnell decided to select and translate poetry from forty different languages. He worked in close collaboration with distinguished literary scholars, such asAlbert Verwey,Douglas Hyde, andPavle Popović.[49] He eventually published the volumeEuropean Elegies in1928. In the process, Kirkconnell came to believe that treating the languages, cultures, and literatures ofWhite ethnic immigrants to Canada with respect would instill in them a sense of loyalty and gratitude to their adopted country. In later years, he often used the metaphor of atapestry to express his vision for the nation's future.[2] For the rest of his life, Kirkconnell continued to fret about the decline of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority in Canada and always believed in lesser forms of scientific racism and theracial inferiority of non-Whites.[8]
Kirkconnell continued publicizing and making translations of thenational poetry of European immigrants for the rest of his life. For example, his collectionA Golden Treasury of Polish Lyrics was published by The Polish Press, Ltd, in Winnipeg in 1936. Kirkconnell dedicated the book, which included his translations in chronological order fromJan Kochanowski toMaria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, to the memory ofMarshalJózef Piłsudski, about whom Kirkconnell also composed a funeral ode. The title page describes Kirkconnell as having been made a knight of theOrder of Polonia Restituta by the government of theSecond Polish Republic.
Beginning with the poetry composed byManitobaIcelandic-Canadians such asStephan G. Stephansson andGuttormur J. Guttormsson, Kirkconnell also translated and publicized verse by recent immigrants to Canada and their descendants, whom he sometimes termed, "New Canadians", fromIcelandic,Italian,Polish,Ukrainian, andCanadian Gaelic.
By1916, disinterest in the poetry ofJohn Milton based on distaste for hisPuritanism had reached a new low.[dubious –discuss] Due in large part to the efforts ofEzra Pound andT.S. Eliot, the Puritan poet was even declared deposed, with little or no fanfare, in favor ofJohn Donne andAndrew Marvell, as theAnglosphere's greatest composer ofChristian poetry. In response, Kirkconnell sought during the interwar period to return John Milton to his pedestal by translating and publishing what had long been believed to been the poet's many sources of inspiration fromWorld literature in many other languages. Hisblank verse translations of the neo-Classical but Biblically centered plays of Dutchnational poetJoost van den Vondel, which Kirkconnell strongly believed to have been a major influence on Milton'sParadise Lost andSamson Agonistes date from this period.[50]
In 1936, Watson Kirkconnell was made a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Canada.
During theSecond World War, Kirkconnell used his many contacts among Canadians ofEastern European descent to mobilize them in favor of theAllied war effort againstNazi Germany,Fascist Italy, andImperial Japan. These same contacts, however, had made Kirkconnell well aware of the sufferings of the relatives of his immigrant friends under both Soviet rule and occupation and he accordingly continued to write articles and to give public lectures attacking bothhuman rights abuses underMarxist-Leninism andStalinism.[1][2]
In his memoirs, Kirkconnell recalled about the war years, "I even wrote aparody ofT.S. Eliot and his learned appendices, in which almost my entire poem was a patchwork, from my own library shelves, of some forty score high-sounding phrases from all literatures and all periods, includingChinese,Japanese,Ancient Egyptian,Hebrew,Hindi,Hungarian,Basque,Polish,Breton, andArabic, each with its appropriate footnote. E.K. Brown, to whom I showed it, warned me, with a grin, to keep my unholy hands offthe Ark."[51] Despite Brown's cautions, the same poem,"Rain onthe Waste Land. (With apologies to Mr. T.S. Eliot)", was eventually published anyway.[12]
After the 1944 publication ofSeven Pillars of Freedom, a book which, similarly toEugene Lyons's 1941 volumeThe Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, warned about dangers posed by the Pro-Soviet sympathies among many Canadian intellectuals, Kirkconnell was denounced by twoCommunist Party of Canada representatives in theCanadian House of Commons, as well as savaged by the Canadian communist press. One Canadian Communist publication called Kirkconnell a, "fascist, mad dog, and a traitor."[1]
Kirkconnell's poem"Agony of Israel", which compares the perpetrators ofthe Holocaust toHaman from theBook of Esther, was written, "out of life-long sympathy for theJewish people and keen distress over our Government's attitude towards the refugee situation", and first appeared in theCanadian Jewish Review on 11 June 1943.[5]
The Soviet newspaperTrud also attacked Kirkconnell for being both ananti-communist and aUkrainophile, and even dubbed him, "the Führer of CanadianFascism".[52] Meanwhile, so vocal were Kirkconnell's continuing criticisms ofStalinism and ofSoviet war crimes thatCanadian Prime MinisterMackenzie King seriously considered acting to protect the Soviet-Canadianmilitary alliance againstNazi Germany by silencing Kirkconnell with anOrder-in-Council.[2]
After the September 1945defection and revelations ofGRU Lt.Igor Gouzenko launched both theCold War in Canada and thePROFUNCcounterintelligence operation, Kirkconnell was recruited as a secret informant for theRoyal Canadian Mounted PoliceSecurity Service regarding politicians, fellow university professors, and students who were suspected of links toSoviet Blocforeign intelligence services or theCommunist Party of Canada. According to Gordon L. Heath, however, Kirkconnell's motivations were based, "on lofty ideas of democracy" and he accordingly never advocated, "a policy of suppression", but preferred instead to see the real loyalties of Soviet spies,crypto-communists, andfellow travellers laid bare before theCanadian people.[1]
Also at the beginning of theCold War, Kirkconnell went on the record as an extremely harsh critic of theWestern Allies' policy of forcedrepatriations of anti-communistrefugees to the USSR duringOperation Keelhaul,[53] ofWinston Churchill andFranklin Delano Roosevelt for handingEastern Europe over toJoseph Stalin at theYalta Conference, and of the pervasivetotalitarianism andhuman rights abuses in the newSoviet Bloc.
Under the influence of both theChild ballads and the balladsLepanto andThe Ballad of the White Horse byG.K. Chesterton, Kirkconnell also wrote a poem defendingDraža Mihailović, harshly denouncing the SerbianChetnik General'sshow trial byJosip Broz Tito's Soviet-backedYugoslav Partisans, and eulogizing the General'sexecution by firing squad on July 17, 1946. Kirkconnell wrote the poem, however, because he believed that General Mihailović was innocent of bothChetnik war crimes in World War II and of collaboration with the occupyingAxis forces, that Mihailović had fought both honorably and selflessly to save his country from Nazism andTitoism, and that his "trial" was nothing more or less than aStalinistwitch hunt. Kirkconnell ended the poem by predicting that one day all peoples under Communist rule, including theRussian people, would be set free, that on that day Mihailović would be revered, "while Tito rots inHell."[54]
Despite his vocalanti-communism, Kirkconnell was also extremely critical ofMcCarthyism and once wrote, "I have an uneasy feeling thatSenator McCarthy messed up an important job by handling it in an offensive and blundering fashion. It is tragic that the very exposure of the Communist infiltration in the United States fell into his hands."[1]
From 1948 to 1964, Kirkconnell served as the ninth President ofAcadia University inWolfville, Nova Scotia. He had originally expected to be, "a full time administrative officer", but instead found himself repeatedly drawn back into the classroom.[55] In his 1967 memoirs, Kirkconnell credited his academic colleague Dr. R. MacGregor Fraser with introducing him, after his 1948 move to the Province, toNova Scotia'smany immortal contributions toScottish Gaelic literature. Kirkconnell and MacGregor Fraser also collaborated upon aliterary translation of the iconic poemA' Choille Ghruamach byTiree-born Nova Scotia Gaelic poetIain mac Ailein,[56] which was published in the 1948-'49 theme issue ofDalhousie Review under the title, "John MacLean'sGloomy Forest".[57]
Following the 1950 rediscovery of afraternal jewel dating back to 1785 and from St. George's Masonic Lodge No. 20 in Wolfville, Kirkconnell wrote a poem celebrating the return to the Lodge of what is still called "The Relic."[58] In his 1967 memoirs, Kirkconnell had very high praise forRegular Freemasonry, but singled outContinental Freemasonry for very harsh criticism. Kirkconnell accused Continental Freemasonry of being "atheistic" and of having, "a zeal for political revolution in a spirit bothanti-Christian and conspiratorial". Kirkconnell accordingly expressed relief thatFreemasonry in the Anglosphere, "which today comprises over ninety per cent of the fraternity", refuses to recognize Continental Freemasonry, and considers itirregular.[59]
During the early 1960s, the fruits of Kirkconnell's decades long collaboration with C.H. Andrusyshen were finally published in two volumes by theUniversity of Toronto.
In the 1963 volumeThe Ukrainian Poets: 1189-1962, Kirkconnell had translated Dr. Andrusyshen's selection from the whole literary canon ofUkrainian poetry, from the 12th-centuryOld East Slavicnational epic,The Tale of Igor's Campaign, through the literary revival of the 19th century, theExecuted Renaissance of the 1920s, and the many Ukrainian language poets, likeThe New York Group of Poets, who had escapedcensorship in the Soviet Union by joining theUkrainian diaspora throughout theFree World.[60]
In 1964, Drs. Kirkconnell and Andrusyshen's joint literary translations of the selected verse of Ukrainiannational poetTaras Shevchenko were also published by the University of Toronto.[60]
In his memoirs, Kirkconnell recalled, "In 1963, public occasions evoked from me twoblank verse plays,The Primordial Church of Horton andLet My People Go, a tragedy in strictGreek form with itsmise en scène before the palace ofPharaoh on the night beforethe Exodus. The action may take place in the fifteenth century B.C., but the conflict of humanities is equally applicable to the world of our time. Pharaoh echoesKhrushchov in his indictment of theavante garde, whileMoses is a spiritual brother ofMadariaga in his insistence on liberty."[51] In his stage directions for the play, however, Kirkconnell took equal aim atFascism, by instructing that Pharaoh's soldiers were to greet their sovereign with arms raised in aRoman salute.[13]
WhenLet My People Go was published in his 1965 poetry collectionCentennial Tales and Selected Poems,[61] Kirkconnell summarized it as follows, "The guards of Pharaoh seek to arrest Moses on the night of thePassover but cannot find him. In his place they bring to Pharaoh Moses' sisterMiriam and certain otherHebrew women. As Pharaoh threatens them with torture, Moses appears and orders him to stop. Pharaoh indulgently permits Moses to engage in a lengthy argument on the importance of freedom - for body, mind, and for soul. The death of Pharaoh's first-born son turns the scales and the Hebrews are permitted to depart."[13]
As Kirkconnell aged, hisWhite Supremacist beliefs became increasingly overt. During the 1960s, he accordingly accused believers inracial equality of having views with no basis in modern science. This is why Kirkconnell's vision formulticulturalism in Canada was never able to widen enough to include the cultures, languages, or literatures ofIndigenous Canadians or those of other non-Whites.[2]
Due in large part to his involvement with prominentconspiracy theorist and formerCanadian Intelligence Service operativeWilliam Guy Carr,[62] Watson Kirkconnell also became, as he aged, a vocal conspiracy theorist. In 1959, he accusedwater fluoridation of being a Communistmind control plot and also became a vocal adherent of bothanti-Semitism andHolocaust revisionism.[2]
Similarly to AmericanFormalist poetsAnthony Hecht andRichard Wilbur, Kirkconnell, due to his preference for both writing and rendering his translations into both grammatically correct English and formal verse, had significant conflicts as he grew older againstSilent Generation andBaby Boomerfree verse poets, who preferred to emulate the work ofEzra Pound.[63]
In 1968, Kirkconnell was made an Officer of theOrder of Canada "for his services at home and abroad as an educator, scholar and writer".
He died atWolfville, Nova Scotia in 1977.[2]Hungarian Helicon, his last collection of verse translations ofHungarian literature was published posthumously in1986. Despite Kirkconnell's espousal of bothanti-Semitism andHolocaust denial in his later life, the posthumously publishedThe Hungarian Helicon included his translations of four poems byJewish poetMiklós Radnóti. Intriguingly, three of the Radnóti poems that Kirkconnell translated were written down in a notebook that the poet carried while on a death march at the end ofWorld War II, and were published only after Radnóti became, at the hands of theRoyal Hungarian Army, perhaps the most widely lamented victim of theHolocaust in Hungary.[64]
His private papers are preserved at the Acadia University Archives, through which Gordon L. Heath was able to document Kirkconnell's secret role as anRCMP Security Serviceinformant during the early Cold War, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.[1]
| Academic offices | ||
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| Preceded by | President ofAcadia University 1948-July 1964 | Succeeded by |
