Ted Pope 1924-1960

Ted Pope was killed almost instantly on August the 13th, 1960, when his TR3 spun out of control in the chicane at Harewood Acres.  In the afternoon sunlight the bright red car rolled three times, flinging the white-overalled figure to the limit of his safety belt, his arms upstretched in what seemed a gesture of dismay.

Born in Clark City, Quebec, in 1924, Ted Pope was educated at The Grove, Lakefield, and after three years' service in the Navy finished his B.A. at McGill in 1948.  After three years in the Montreal advertising agency of Young and Rubicam, he joined a partnership to investigate the application of geodesic construction to various kinds of buildings, reinforcing what architectural training he had had with his characteristic inventive zest.  When the research project was finished, he joined the CBC in August 1952 as a radio talks producer, and in the spring of 1956 became a television producer.  When he transferred in the spring of 1960 to drama and feature production, he had been producing Tabloid five days a week for three years with few intervals – a total of more than 700 single broadcasts – and had won radio and television awards in international competition.

His work as a television producer cannot have left him much energy or time for sustained writing; but he always seemed to have some writing in progress.  As early as 1948 he had written a play for undergraduate production.  When he died he left a few prose sketches, two or three television scripts, at least two film scripts (one of them of ambitious length and scope), and a number of poems.  His reasons for writing verse were personal, often private.  Through successive drafts he would bring his verses to the condition of stability, allowing them to find a life he did not always himself understand.  Sometimes he would show a poem to a person who he knew would immediately recognize or understand the context.  He didn't show me any of his poems.  He didn't show all his poems to anybody.

After his death the shock of unexpected disaster brought together people who were strangers to each other except for their friendship or acquaintance with Ted: perhaps that was the first time it was at all possible to piece together the various dark moons of his person.  If he had nothing to say, he said nothing; and so sometimes gave the air of taut apathy, of some self-enclosure, or of a certain revulsion from life.  This was misleading, though never deliberately so.  Reticent, he showed to few people more than a small part of his nature and lacked altogether (as he despised) those graces of aggressive understatement upon which artistic reputations are sometimes founded.  He was radically gay, sometimes ribald, sometimes alarmingly candid, keeping intact as a glance an innocent capacity for astonishment.  His mind inquired widely and would not happily stop short of the desired and symbolic detail.  For him, the grotesque or the pitiful had a compelling attraction almost obsessive.

Judging from some of the ramshackle uncertainties of his personal life, he may not have known himself very well.  But he had (as most of his writing shows) an uncanny sympathetic insight into the feelings and motives of others: this was the strength and subtlety of his producing.  For his prolonged and self-effacing scrutiny of a script or of an idea was the artistic counterpart of his fascination with the difficult or the impossible.  In the most exacting tests of his skill and strength he discovered the pure elation that haunts – above all – mountaineers and rock-climbers; and if a task seemed to demand that degree of exhilaration, he would absent-mindedly invent the obstacles needed to induce it.  There were times when, because he failed to insist upon the military virtue of tidiness-at-all-costs, his television studio lacked order, but there were also times (not always the tidiest either) when work would catch fire under his production and everybody in the studio shared a rare moment of imaginative clarity and exaltation. 

His talent as producer, though largely improvised, was lyrical: it was like the way he skied and climbed mountains.  First-class in downhill, slalom, and jumping, he was also a reliable and fearless rock-climber equally capable of leading ropes up very tricky pitches or of acting as an anchor man at the other end of the rope.  He had superlative co-ordination, fine timing, a nice sense of the possible limits of physical endurance, and a desire to press himself up to or even a little beyond the known limits of endurance.  In his skiing and climbing, and when he took to driving racing cars, fine technique was for him an aesthetic grace; he was determined to excel, but his determination made him quiet rather than aggressive in the same way that his irony made him compassionate.  Perfection when achieved was not for him something gained or possessed, but an experience, luminous and lyrical, which – to his desolation – he could seldom share.  His climbing companions on the Icefields Trip of 1954 did not know that he was writing poems.

This small group of poems may stand as a memorial of a man too gifted to die so young and too vivid to forget.

Ted Pope

Six Poems

THE CLIMBER

Cold in the cloud-grey sky

Morning clinks, and fire

In the lichen lee,

Chocolate, rope, and cheese;

Ice my Lorelei,

Rock the territory,

Sun of milk and

Air of little knives.

Oh he said and his axe fell

A little wind brought down a dust of snow

And he turned out; then

Mama my hand has frozen

Salt of anger.

At the horizon,

A wink of noon light from

The crescent of ice

On the high cirque

Of an unnamed peak, oh

A hundred miles away;

Eyelid of God.

SCOTT GLACIER - THE FIRST DAY

It was cold suddenly after a warm morning coming up the moraine

And the wind brought a sharp dust of snow down from the ice.

I remember it was hard climbing with the snow and the cold

And our heavy skies awkward on our packs in that wind.

And I remember she was laughing under her parka

When we lunched; her back

Hunched to the weather.

We were stopped finally: one rope at a high couloir

The other where the leader fell suddenly,

One crampon caught grotesquely; belayed.

It was a bitter time; cold and late on the Scott Glacier.

We started down exhausted and discouraged,

But she was smiling when our rope moved.

Do you wonder when I remember her

Blue with the cold and smiling?  And, another for you,

She was humming some tune about lily-of-the-valley.

BESTIERE

Heart's a lion thing

And eye

See tomorrow's love
Is passing by.

Heart's a traitor sloth

And eye

Yawn at last night's love

And let her cry.

Heart's a jackal thing

Withdrawn

Eye's for the love I had

Now she is gone.

[UNTITLED]

Then there was one I met

Turned all my mind

And all in a moment

Captured.  A sudden meeting

Of eyes: a startling, confining

Time it was.  Then time

Ran out.  Now there is

A lifetime of remembering

And two lifetimes

To forget.

BRAVE OLD WORLD

The aged

Lady of Lancaster

Scratched at the bannister,

Shrieked for a footman

In a thin gin whistle.

Damn my cracked claws

Biting at the bannister,

Swore the lady of Lancaster.

Damn me where I sleep tonight

In room thirty-eight,

Prayed the aged lady of Lancaster;

And the heel of a slipper

Staggered in the carpeting

Of the third floor landing.

Light from the window falls

Just where it's patched.

SUMMER MORNING AND WAITING

A woman walks

in the sun in a small place

at the first warm time of the morning

               the quiet time

               of summer mornings in mountain towns

               that cheers cold visitors waiting by cars

               and cats in butchers' windows

Flaxen skirt hides golden thighs

golden arm hides shaded eyes

small red slippers

hesitate

cross to meet me

captivate.