1 Unpublished Paper Delivered at a Conference Entitled the Canadian Modernists Meet, University of Ottawa, 9-11 May, 2003. WHO M

1 Unpublished paper delivered at a conference entitled The Canadian Modernists Meet, University of Ottawa, 9-11 May, 2003. WHO MEETS? NOTES ON SELECTIVE ACCEPTANCE OF THE AVANT- GARDE IN CANADIAN MODERNISM I expect that something we will be doing over and over this weekend is trying to decide who the modernists are, how they defined themselves, and how they have been defined by others; how they met in person, in magazines or in anthologies. I once felt quite secure in some basic distinctions I made between French and English-speaking modernist writers and artists, arguing that avant-garde experimentation was much more prevalent, and earlier, in Montreal than in Toronto. These assumptions are now being questioned by new research, such as the work of a couple of York graduate students who have started to look beyond the canon as I saw it, or to look more clearly at some of the solidly canonized figures, and show me things I'd ignored. One of these students, Gregory Betts, has been bringing me up to speed on Bertram Brooker, who, influenced by Lorne Harris and inspired by Kandinsky, experimented with non-figurative painting, exhibiting "Sounds Assembling" and similar works which we saw on our tour of the National Gallery, in 1927. Lawren Harris, carrying with him the considerable prestige of his association with the Group of Seven, was the main force in bringing to the Art 2 Gallery of Toronto, also in 1927, the "International Exhibition of Modern Art, Assembled by the Société Anonyme" consisting of works of artists collected by Katherine Dryer, including Mondrian, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Schwitters, Ernst, Klee, Braque, Picasso and others. This was a heady moment for the avant-garde in Toronto, and Gregory Betts argues that in the late twenties and early thirties "there was an active and vibrant avant-garde modernist community that followed developments in Europe closely and that freely experimented with the new techniques, styles, and mediums. They gathered together weekly, some daily, at clubs throughout [the city] like the Arts and Letters Club or Hart House, and debated their thoughts fiercely. They wrote dozens of manifestoes, [produced] hundreds of poems and paintings, and shared them with each other. More importantly, however, they produced some astonishingly advanced art that has been almost completely forgotten and ignored by respected contemporary modernist scholars . "(Betts 4-5). No doubt Betts had in mind people such as Brooker's friend, Kathleen Munn, who was producing very interesting non-figurative work in the late twenties, to very little acclaim then (by critics other than Brooker himself) and with scant recognition even now (Zemans 16-26). At the same time, Brooker was energetically publishing literary and art criticism calling for more experimental work, while producing some adventurous prose and poetry of his own, as well as aggressively non-realist plays in collaboration with Herman Voaden. These experiments, although they attracted a fair amount of attention in newspapers and magazines, seem to have met with discouraging resistance, because both 3 Brooker and Kathleen Munn eventually ceased their researches into abstraction, Brooker turning (by 1930) to a kind of hyper-realism. Dennis Reid, in wondering why this might be, remarked that "There continued to be a considerable amount of criticism levelled at abstraction, and, even worse, a belief among people [Brooker] respected that abstraction was 'interesting' but somehow 'unnatural' in Canada, or at least 'untimely'" (14-15). Joyce Zemans and colleagues add: "In 1926, the dominant cultural aesthetic had no place for those whom Frederick Housser, author of A Canadian Art Movement, labelled 'putterers in the blind alley of abstraction.' Twenty years later, though there were many prepared to accept and even endorse non-objective art, the art establishment was still dominated by the Canadian Group of Painters and the belief that art must 'feel Canadian'" (8). Even in the 1940s, though Edna Taçon's abstract work was well received by critics, though she was an articulate spokesperson for abstraction, though she had ties with the Guggenheim Federation at the same time she was active in Toronto, she eventually moved permanently to New York in 1947 and, as a result, her lobbying for non-figurative art in English Canada, and eventually the history of her work here, has tended to be forgotten (Zemans 28-38). If the immediate critical reaction to experimental writing in English Canada was not quite so stifling as with the visual arts, there seems to have been some difficulty getting experimental work anthologized and recognized, and this has resulted in a comparative lack of knowledge about such work on the part of literary historians. Some modernisms were clearly more welcome at the party than others. 4 Consider W.W.E. Ross, whom Raymond Souster admired for his "cleanness of line and directness of statement" (Souster). Ralph Gustafson put it in another way in a letter to Ross: ". no one else quite captures that cool lucidity and the fresh wonder of Canada's northness as you do" (Whiteman, letter 21). But Ross had other strings to his bow. In correspondence with two of his anthologizers, A.J.M. Smith and Ralph Gustafson, we can see him waxing well-informed and eloquent about the avant-garde, particularly surrealism in Europe and America [see Darling 79-81 and 92-97; Whiteman, letters 15, 16, 17]. In 1943, he wrote to Ralph Gustafson about some of his own experiments in those directions, the texts he called "Distillates." Among them were the "hypnogogisms" which he described as "the brief visions and auditions between waking and sleeping which many people get" (Whiteman, letter 15). Later, in 1950, he wrote to Smith: "Because of my fundamental beliefs and experience spiritualism etc. are naturally prominent in all my work for many years and I have decided to stick by what is evidently my real trend though I realize it leads me away from rather than towards publication, popular opinion being at its present stage, which I look on as somewhat benighted. My experience and studies have been unusual and their product must naturally be looked at askance by the majority. For one thing, I carried the development of 'hypnogogisms' to a stage that at times I found slightly alarming, though I never had any real difficulty except on one occasion. I have many notes on them as well as on dreams" (Darling 95). 5 It is statements such as these that have caused another York student, Mark Debicki, to write about what he calls the "Clandestine Surrealism" of Ross. Until he began digging in the Ross archives and told me about his findings, I had no idea of the sheer quantity of material Ross produced involving dream recitations and other more-or- less automatic texts. Only a small sample of these "distillates" was published in New Directions in Prose and Poetry in 1937. Here is a taste: HYPNO III "You can be sixty, fifty. I was estimating that my interest grew so." "Jetzt vorwiegend." Two little colored figures on top of a small hill. Light from behind it. Prison walls closing in "and this finance committee slowly. Good, really." All that is required is that you don't occupy my room." A lot of people at telephone. Prohibition in U.S.A. "Look, America gambolizes." "With the idea of failing that first notch." Small wooden house figure trying to get in. "They ought to put down some of that wool. Perhaps it was that barrage. The ideal heroine is down on both those particularies at all." Ralph Gustafson published a few of these texts in Canadian Accent in 1944, having written to Ross in October, 1943, to say: "I think you succeed most beautifully in a most 6 beautiful realm. Where dream begins, where dream ends, of the nature of 'hypnogogisms', I know not. But you have subtly communicated" (Whiteman, letter 16). Did Ross sense insincerity there? His laconic response was, "Thank you for your letter about the 'Distillates' pieces which are by the way about the very last things I should until recently have ever expected to be chosen for a volume of popular circulation" (Whiteman, letter 17). His pessimism was well founded, it seems, because only a couple of those texts have been published since then, notably in the one volume of Ross's poetry now available: Shapes and Sounds (1968), where they are outnumbered by his translations of fanciful texts by Max Jacob. Perhaps not surprisingly, Gustafson and Smith stuck to Ross's more imagist work in other anthologies, as did Souster when, in 1956, his Contact press published Experiment 1923-29: Poems by W.W.E. Ross. It's true, this collection concentrates on texts written earlier than the "Distillates," and Souster did at least send out a call: "Let us hope there are others who will be interested enough to do something about making available the still remaining large body of unpublished work." But when Souster had a chance to make more "Distillates" available in Shapes and Sounds, he declined, who knows why? Just as Brooker and Munn lost confidence in their ability to interest an audience in non-figurative painting, Ross doubted the public appeal of his "Distillates." It would be almost twenty years before Toronto was really willing to accept such experimental visual and verbal work. Morley Callaghan hung prominently in his study a portrait of himself painted by Bertram Brooker, a fine painting, though not formally adventurous. And he 7 was a good friend of Eustace Ross. But I don't know of any commentary by Callaghan on Brooker's writing, or on Ross's Surrealist-oriented texts.

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