McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2012
440 pp., illus., $24.95 paperback
This first biography of P.K. Page (1916– 2010) borrows its title from a famous quote by the celebrated Canadian poet and fine artist: “I am traveller. I have a destination but no maps. Others perhaps have reached that destination already, still others are on their way. But none has had to go from here before — nor will again. One’s route is one’s own. One’s journey unique.”
The quote comes from Page’s 1970 essay “Traveller, Conjuror, Journeyman,” in which she explores the creative process by tracing “correspondences” between her poetry and visual art. Ultimately, the artist suggests that her art involves a sort of “transportation,” a “conjuration” to which she apprentices herself. She writes, “At times I seem to be attempting to copy exactly something which exists in a dimension where worldly senses are inadequate. As if a thing only felt had to be extracted from invisibility and transposed into a seen thing, a heard thing.”
The book’s title also signals one of its greatest strengths — the care, sensitivity, and sympathy with which the biographer fuses the “main events” of Page’s life with her artistic development. The chapters in Journey With No Maps graph Page’s life simultaneously through her inner evolution and her literal travel: Moves took her from England to the Canadian West and the Maritimes in her childhood; to England, Montreal, and Ottawa in her late teens and early twenties; then abroad to Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and Guatemala as the young wife of diplomat Arthur Irwin; and finally back to her native Canadian soil, specifically British Columbia, where she lived the second half of her life.
As author Sandra Djwa, professor emerita of English at Simon Fraser University, notes, “Only when the main events had been charted was it possible to speculate on the curve of the artist’s creative life.”
In her poem “The Map,” Page expresses the intricacies and ambiguities evoked by an internal knowledge of the world. A part of the poem is quoted in the book; the poet describes a landscape occupied by two lovers who believe themselves to be in “a world away on Precambrian rock,” only to find, upon consulting a map, that they are much closer to civilization:
But we were wrong and the map was true
and had we stood and looked about
from our height of land, we’d have had a view
which, since, we have had to learn by heart.
Indeed, in illuminating and integrating this tension between inner and outer realms, Djwa honours — and generously shares with the reader — an intimate and integral aspect of Page’s life and work: her own deep commitment to the reality of a spiritual and creative journey, the “nonlinear and symbolic.” Throughout her life, Page sought out Jungian and other psychologies and became a follower of spiritual paths such as Sufism, in which “all time and events are simultaneous.”
In one chapter, Djwa writes, “As [Page] would sometimes remind me, speaking of the creative process and its reflection, ‘The process is not linear. And I can’t but feel you think it is. Everything we read and experience is, of course, part of the compost heap that produces the flowers, the weeds. But there is another — and much larger — source, the collective unconscious to use Jung’s term; or to quote myself, that there are other dimensions to the mind beyond those we already recognize.’”
Djwa’s writing is perceptive and supple, her research thorough, making the book a fascinating and pleasurable journey for the reader.
Having begun the project in the late 1990s, the biographer interviewed Page many times over the final decade of her life and culled primary materials from friends, colleagues, and Page’s myriad mentees. The collection includes materials and quotes from well-known artists and authors such as surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, Montreal artist Jori Smith, poet Anne Wilkinson, academic Constance Rooke, and writers Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Rosemary Sullivan. Djwa was invited by the poet herself to write this book; years earlier, Djwa authored the biography of poet F.R. Scott, with whom Page had a serious, long-term affair in her early life, and who remained an important and beloved figure for Page throughout her life.
Journey With No Maps is chock full of vivid, intriguing details of Page’s life and creative development. Significant space is dedicated to Page’s artwork and poetry, often linking the subject matter to Page’s inner and outer travails. In this, too, the biographer seems to tribute Page’s credo of art as a kind of inner mapping; as Page contended, “a poem should not mean but be…. The poem is a labyrinth of the self.”
— Mariianne Mays Wiebe (Read bio)
Mariianne Mays Wiebe is a poet and writer with an interest in creative processes across the disciplines.