Brewster, Elizabeth Winifred

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1982
ELIZABETH WINIFRED BREWSTER
to be Doctor of Letters

Elizabeth Brewster's poems are, in many ways, the record of the people and the places she has known, and the portraits which she paints are not always genial ones. It is, therefore, with misgiving that an orator must contemplate an eulogy on Miss Brewster, for she who has turned her wit, in verse, against a peer of the realm will not hesitate to pin a humble orator wriggling on the pages of a future book of her poetry. Indeed her treatment of the speakers at a high school graduation in the small New Brunswick town of Lilloet a long time ago does not augur well for the speakers at this graduation. But one can take comfort that in Lilloet the main speaker was "a man well-known in the nation, / The Provincial Minister of Education."

At this point, I am tempted to cry, like old Adam in Shakespeare's As You Like It, "Dear master, I can go no further ... Here lie I down and measure out my grave." But further we must go.

Elizabeth Brewster was born in Chipman, New Brunswick and her early education was at Hammtown School, Chipman School and Sussex High School. It is now over forty years since she graduated from the University of New Brunswick with first class honours in English and Greek. At U.N.B. with her English teachers, Edward McCourt and then Desmond Pacey, with Alfred Bailey and members of the Bliss Carman Poetry Society, she found a milieu in which her literary talents could develop, and by 1945 certain characteristic styles in poetry and prose had been formed.

A mere rehearsal of academic and literary achievements, of course, cannot tell us of the obstacles -- mental, physical, and financial -- which she overcame to reach U.N.B. in the first place.

Even before that, in the words of a fellow-student, poet and friend, Fred Cogswell, "Elizabeth Brewster -- then a small, thin, near-sighted girl, painfully shy, and fearful of human relations -- escaped into a world of order, opulence, and ideas in books and poems and determined to make learning her passport to a similar world in real life."

With scholarships, assistantships and prizes, all the time helping to support her family with fierce loyalty, she went on to a master's degree at Havard, a Beaverbrook Scholarship at King's College London, a Bachelor of Library Science at Toronto, and a Ph.D. in English at Indiana in 1962. For many years she worked in libraries, surrounded by books but not having nearly enough time to read them. Poetry came from her pen -- beginning with East Coast in 1951, through Passage of Summer (1969) to her eighth book of poems, The Way Home, which appeared only a few weeks ago. ln recent years she has turned more and more to prose, with short stories, a novel, The Sisters, in 1974, and another novel, The Junction, which will appear shortly. She has been called "a potential Jane Austen."

So Betty Brewster did not find her passport to the world merely in the books of others; she created her own world and objectified her own struggles. Recognition -- at least wide-spread recognition of her poetry -- did not come quickly and easily, and one might even suggest that she is on this platform a few years too late. There was a moment in her life, however, when popular acclaim seemed to have arrived at last -- when she stepped off a plane with another New Brunswick writer at an airport in Saskatchewan to find a large welcoming crowd, many of whom dashed up to embrace her. The moment of triumph vanished when she and her companion discovered that they had been mistaken for members of a curling rink

Elizabeth Brewster, now a senior and valued member of the Department of English at the University Saskatchewan, is an enthusiastic traveller. She has travelled far, and her work reflects her travels -- Eastern Canada, Western Canada, and the Prairies, the streets of London, the plains, mountains and hot springs of New Zealand.

It would be nice to think that she had come home today, but it would be dangerous to assume that she would share such a simplistic sentiment. Wherever home is -- East, West, or the Prairies, in Massachusetts where landed her ancestor, the separatist William Brewster, from the Mayflower in 1620, or, further back in time, in the flats and fens of the county of Lincolnshire in England -- wherever home is, it has led to the present.

As Betty Brewster has written in a poem in her latest book,

... I would not change
these forty years
would not omit depressions, wars, conflict,
death, pain,
or this solitude in which I drink coffee.

Ten years from now
I may write my great book.
My lover may marry me
for my old-age pension.

Insignissime Praeses, tota Universitas, praesento vobis Elizabetham Winifredam Brewster ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Litteris in hac Universitate.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 2