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Unpublished paper delivered at a conference entitled The Canadian Modernists Meet, University of Ottawa, 9-11 May, 2003.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 . 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 , exhibiting "Sounds Assembling" and similar works which we saw on our tour of the

National Gallery, in 1927. , 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 , 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 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. 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. Of course, we know what

Callaghan, looking back in That Summer in Paris, thought of the French avant-garde:

"The French literature we had so much admired from Mallarmé to the Surrealists was simply a rejection of this world and the stuff of daily life. The French writers stayed at home and exiled themselves in their own dreams" (180). He might very well have dismissed Ross's "hypnogogics" in the same way. Let's not forget that Earl Birney, though he later claimed he had been interested very early in Dada and Surrealism, and though he eventually became a convert to concrete, actually wrote an essay in 1946 entitled "Has Poetry a Future in Canada?" calling on the modern poet to do away with obscure, intellectual stuff and be "a clear and memorable and passionate interpreter of

Canadians themselves, in the language of Canada. . . " (Spreading Time, 69-77).

John Glassco, Callaghan's "bête noire" of the Paris period, was temperamentally and linguistically able to appreciate the French avant-garde, but his tone in Memoirs of

Montrparnasse (who knows how much it truly reflects his thinking in the twenties?) is characteristically arch and ironic. He presents himself as having grown out of Surrealism even before he got to Paris, though he thought Surrealist writing had "a certain idiotic grace" (8). Glassco, of course, was later responsible for introducing a generation of

English-speaking readers to poets from French Canada, translating some himself, and editing for publication translations by some of the major figures in the English-Canadian modernist canon: F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Louis Dudek, George Johnston, Ralph 8

Gustafson, A.M. Klein and others. Yet the poets and texts chosen for translation and publication reveal a lack of interest in certain kinds of modernist writing. For Glassco, as we can see from his introduction to The Poetry of French Canada in Translation (1968), there were a couple of bothersome tendencies in too many poets from Québec: ". . . they seem too often preoccupied by political and national ideas . . . and it is a truism that politics and nationalism have somehow never managed to make really good poetry." Tell it to Yeats, one might say, nonetheless Smith and Glassco certainly seem to include such work reluctantly in their anthologies. Smith doesn't even include Gaston Miron. But

Glassco goes on: "Also, the dead hand of surrealism -- an influence no less pernicious than any other worn-out poetic method -- is still hovering over them, with its obsession with the magic of dissociated images, its facile surprises, its meaningless sonorities"

(xix). Allow me a brief digression here, to put that comment in context.

We know that in the fifties and sixties there were formal and informal gatherings that included both French and English Canadian poets, but if any individual was early and successful in helping modernists of the meet, it was John Lyman, the independently wealthy, highly sophisticated artist who, having studied and painted in

Europe since the turn of the century, returning occasionally to exhibit his fauvist- influenced work, settled more permanently in Montreal in the thirties where he began writing newspaper polemics, inviting painters and writers to his home in the evenings, trying to organize the practitioners and lovers of "living art" against the highly conservative, academic art establishment of the city and the country. In January, 1939, 9

the Contemporary Arts Society was created at a meeting in his apartment, and the following month newspaper accouncements invited all artists interested in modern art to attend a meeting at which twenty-five artists and interested persons (including Frank and

Marian Scott) decided to join, electing Lyman as President and Paul-Émile Borduas as

Vice-President. Borduas' presence was a direct result of Lyman's far-sighted insistence that the association represent not only various artistic tendencies, but both official language groups. Lyman himself was strongly anti-romantic, anti-nineteenth century, anti-academic, but not interested in the iconoclastic tendencies within modernism. To make a long and complicated story short, the CAS was very active and indeed successful in promoting modern art, educating the public, organizing exhibitions and public lectures, but it nurtured within itself tensions that would eventually pull it apart. Between 1942 and 1948, the number of francophone members and especially young associates grew rapidly, and the younger members were more and more vocally impatient with what they saw as the Association's tepid defense of their ideals. Many of these younger painters were also moving rapidly in the direction of non-representational art, having been strongly influenced by Surrealist theories. This is in contrast to the cubist-inspired, still representational work of Marian Scott at the time, for example. She would eventually move to more gestural forms, but, as far as I know, was never so taken with Surrealism as

Borduas and his student friends were from about 1942 on.

As Christopher Varley explains: "The discontent of these young French artists with the Society is reflected in Claude Gauvreau's 'Révolution à la Société d'art 10

Contemporain', a review of the 1946 exhibition at the Dominion Gallery. An important poet and the most faithful of Borduas' allies, he haughtily denounced Pellan's followers,

De Tonnancour and Bellefleur, as a couple of latter-day academics, and dismissed the paintings of all the English artists except Lyman as so much rubbish" (29). For Claude

Gauvreau, most of the people in the CAS were equivalent to the tea-drinkers Frank Scott describes in his poem on the Canadian Writers' Association. Did he think the same of the poets writing in English in Montreal? I don't know. After almost ten years of existence, full of internal tensions, the CAS named Paul-Émile Borduas President in February,

1948, but he resigned from both the presidency and the Association the following day.

His polite letter to Marian Scott and his wounded letter to Lyman spoke of a "non- equivocal" action he was undertaking: this would be the publication in August, 1948, of

Refus global, certainly the most important modernist manifesto published in Canada, including texts and illustrations by the group of artists, writers, dancers, photographers and designers who were first dubbed the Montreal Surrealists and later the Automatists.

Their call was for social as well as artistic spontaneity and liberation. Ten years later,

John Lyman wrote in his journal: "A retrospective of Automatism in the Museum at present. Read today, Borduas' manifesto is absurd and childish [here he begins to write in French and what follows is my translation]. Far from being a prophet,, Borduas was a latter-day romantic, a romantic who showed all the characteristics of being a mix of

Rosacrucian, apostle-victim, byronic sadist (towards his family), etc. He naively studied

Du Bos, Lautréamont and de Sade with no idea of the total picture of the movement since

Jean-Jacques. For a long time I couldn't make up my mind about the value of recent 11

aesthetic tendencies, but more and more all the evidence suggests that they are very ephemeral, and that they've almost ceased to be a force. Thank God, in spite of many incitements, I didn't fall into that trap" (Inédits, 164). Regardless of how history may eventually judge Lyman's attitude, it seems to have been shared by many, if not all, of his

English-speaking modernist friends in Montreal. Borduas' manifesto interested writers in

Britain and Japan enough to merit translation shortly after its publication. Not so in

Canada, despite the translation work being done on different texts by Glassco, Scott,

Smith and others.

Three of Claude Gauvreau's "dramatic objects" later collected under the title

Entrailles were also published in the Refus global. It is inconceivable that Frank Scott and his entourage didn't at least know about them. They are, I believe, the most intransigeantly experimental texts published in Canada to that date. Here is brief passage

(my translation):

Abrdoum Pou King, the verdigris and the engerminating roof-beams, sincerely

stainted, bend and stain the Olme and the Prkadès of the seat and of the agrable

ombezères' celon, royal comedy, fameloid burlesquery, pioune and pitouzery,

who guard and fuss over the learned eliteries, who robe and flisk the cumus and

handsome holes of the pots and pans, of the cabiton's eagles, the opulent ruins the

corpulent detentions, and who underline on imperial days the zing and echo and

madrigal sol of the dishevelled circles who hash the fictionized space. 12

In later texts, Gauvreau made deeper incursions into non-figurative language, into what he called the "image explorienne". It wasn't until the 1970s that English-speaking writers in Canada began to recognize the importance of this work, tipped off by Quebec feminists such as France Théoret and Nicole Brossard who had seen the importance of

Gauvreau's experiments for their own assault on patriarchal language. Barbara Godard and Carolyn Bayard wrote about this in 1979 in a special number of Ellipse (23-24,

1979), but for the generation of modernists active before the fifties, Gauvreau seems to have been anathema. No selection from him appears in the anthology entitled Poetry 62, edited by Eli Mandel and Jean-Guy Pilon, which included poems by Anne Hébert, Pierre

Trottier, Jacques Godbout and others; not in A.J.M. Smith's Modern Canadian Verse in

English and French (1967); not in Glassco's Poetry of French Canada in Translation

(1968). Sandra Djwa's biography of Frank Scott makes no mention of Borduas or of

Claude Gauvreau. To be fair, Scott did translate Roland Giguère, whose artistic and poetic work has strong Surrealist connections, while Smith and Glassco included poets such as Gilles Hénault and Paul-Marie Lapointe, who were associated with the

Automatist group. But Claude Gauvreau, as well as others who might have received some attention, such as Rémi-Paul Forgues and Thérèse Renaud, were completely excluded, and the poems included by Giguère, Lapointe and Hénault tended to be their least lnguistically adventurous.

Was it Claude Gauvreau's polemic tendencies that put him outside the pale?

Granted, he and the automatiste gang made fun of some well-ensconced Canadian 13

modernists, Stanley Cosgrove and Goodrich Roberts among them. Granted, although he spoke English well, I have no evidence of Claude Gauvreau's commenting upon or contacting poets writing in English in Montreal. Still it's surprising that, in spite of recent efforts by Steve McCaffery to publish and publicize the work of Gauvreau in Canada and the United States, he remains almost completely ignored. Consider the fact that in the past ten years there have been three major productions in Montreal of Gauvreau's very difficult play, La charge de l'orignal épormyable, one of them an excellent version for television. There has been a stage play based on his "monist novel", Beauté baroque, a production of another play, La Reprise, a musical setting and production of his opera libretto, Le vampire et la nymphomane, and most recently a highly succesful run of his last play, Les Oranges sont vertes, not to mention the up-coming production of another major play never before seen, L'asile de la pureté. All of these have been by highly respected directors and actors. And yet it appears as if no English-Canadian theatre company will touch Gauvreau with a ten foot pole. Even the French-language Theatre in

Toronto avoids him. That fact is very puzzling, and seems quite symptomatic to me.

There was little resistance to non-figurative painting in English-speaking Canada following W.W. II, but there continued to be, among English-Canadian literary modernists, a certain resistance to anything poetic or theatrical that smacked too much of non-realist tendencies and linguistic innovation , what Glassco called "meaningless sonorities." That's why, on the pages edited by Glassco, Smith and others, you can't count on being introduced to all the Canadian modernists, or to the full variety of work 14

they produced. And that tendency has not died, as a reading of more recent canonical anthologies will show.

Ray Ellenwood

York University

WORKS CITED

Betts, Gregory. "I am Come Back Only to Destroy: The First Chapter in Canadian

Literary and visual Modernism 1921-1934." Unpublished typescript, 2003.

Callaghan, Morley. That Summer in Paris. Bristol: MacGibbon and Kee, 1963.

Darling, Michael, ed. "On Poetry and Poets: The Letters of W.W.E. Ross to A.J.M

Smith," Essays on Canadian Writing 16 (1979): 78-125.

Debicki, Mark. "'This source of secret sound:' The Clandestine Surrealism of W.W.E.

Ross." Unpublished typescript, 2003.

Glassco, John, ed. The Poetry of French Canada in Translation. Toronto: OxfordUP,

1970.

Reid, Dennis. Bertram Brooker. Ottawa: National Gallery Catalogue, 1973.

Souster, Raymond. "About the Author", afterword. Experiment 1923-24: Poems by

W.W.E. Ross. Toronto: Contact Press, 1956.

Varley, Christopher. "The Contemporary Arts Society," preface to exhibition catalogue.

Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery, 1980.

Whiteman, Bruce ed. A Literary Friendship: The Correspondence of Ralph Gustafson

and W.W. E. Ross. Toronto: ECW Press, 1984. 15

Zemans, Joyce, Elizabeth Burrell, and Elizabeth Hunter, New Perspectives on

Modernism in Canada: Kathleen Munn and Edna Taçon. Toronto: Art Gallery

of York University/Editions du Greff, 1988.