Defiant Spirits (32 page)

Earlier differences of opinion were set aside as Jackson regaled the new recruit about the difficulty of painting at the front and Varley expressed sincere admiration for his comrade's work. He wrote to Maud that Jackson was painting “impassive desolate scenes of the country which once was.” In doing so, he had become, Varley believed, “a great artist.” He was inspired but also daunted by the fact that he needed to accomplish similar things. “I realize more clearly what I must do,” he wrote to Maud on May 10, as he awaited his orders to cross the Channel and experience for himself the horrors of modern warfare.
65

*
These murals were overpainted in the 1940s and later destroyed when the restaurant burned down.

*
Jeremiah Suddaby had been for many years the principal of the Berlin Central School, renamed the Suddaby School after his death in 1910. Jackson received the commission thanks to a degree of nepotism: his grandfather, Alexander Young, was the Berlin Central School's first principal when its doors opened in 1857.

*
The necessity of the
CWRO
's efforts can be appreciated when one considers how two accounts of the Great War by British historians, Martin Gilbert's 640-page
The First World War: A Complete History
(1994) and John Keegan's 496-page
The First World War
(1998), make not a single mention of the Battle of Hill 70. As Beaverbrook realized, British and American military historians, eager to promote their own countrymen as protagonists, would inevitably downplay or disregard the Canadian contribution.

*
One of the more famous examples of this genre, Bruegel's
The Fall of Icarus,
entered the Musées royaux des beaux-arts only in 1912, after Varley left Belgium.

MORALE AT “Camp Horror” had improved since Lawren Harris arrived in time for the riot in the hot summer of 1916. There was now a
YMCA
canteen selling cigarettes, and a wooden shed, known as “The Strand,” that showed silent films. But the base was still, for many recruits, a place of “dirt, dust, and loneliness.”
1

Most recruits spent only three weeks before shipping overseas. Harris, though, stayed at Camp Borden for twice as long as the average recruit. He served as a musketry instructor, using his artistic talents to devise European cityscapes and realistic moving targets—“Fritzies that popped up and disappeared”—on which the recruits could practise their marksmanship.
2
By the end of 1916 he was transferred to Toronto, where he gave instruction at the District School of Musketry, a rifle range improvised on the campus of the University of Toronto. The university had taken on the appearance of a military encampment, with tents sprouting on the lawns, soldiers and cadets everywhere, and the Royal Flying School occupying parts of Convocation Hall and Wycliffe College. In the newly built Hart House, wounded and shell-shocked soldiers were treated with hydrotherapy and massage.

If Harris was unable to forget the war, his new posting at least allowed him to paint in the evenings and during his periods of leave. He even managed to exhibit a work at the
OSA
exhibition in 1917, a daringly vibrant canvas called (in an allusion to that favourite artistic
tarte à la crème
)
Decorative Landscape.
Another of his remarkable snow-and-fir compositions, it was the most adventurously decorative work he had ever produced. Painted around the same time that Thomson worked on
The Jack Pine,
it showed the blue silhouettes of pine trees in vivid relief against a sky painted with dabs of primrose yellow. In the foreground of this clangorous interplay of complementaries were swirls of blue and purple snow. Charlesworth dismissed it as a “garish poster.”
3

Although living in Toronto and able to paint, Harris was deeply troubled through much of 1917, owing partly to his despair over the war and the death of Tom Thomson. He was also suffering from a spiritual malaise that made him doubt his artistic direction as well as his purpose in life. In the midst of his crisis he wrote a letter to MacDonald, describing his ailment in curiously abstract terms. He claimed he “felt curiously shifty as if in an element that was making great sport of me.” He found himself torn between “alluring impermanencies” and “even-more-attractive-at-the-time permanent things and nothings,” and he told MacDonald he did not feel “soul-steadied” and that he had “built everything
. . .
on sand.”
4

One of the few other glimpses into his restless psychological condition can be found in some of the poems he began writing around this time. One of them, called “The Age,” expressed his gloomy attitude about society's obsession with the material and the immediate at the expense of the eternal: “This is the age of the soul's degradation, / Of tossing into the sun's light / The dross and slime of life.” The vulgar celebrations of the superficially beautiful material world—what his poem called “glorying in the miserable glitter”—was not enough to compensate for “the soul's great sadness.”
5

Harris was the most religious of the painters in the Studio Building. He had been raised a devout Baptist by a mother who had since converted to Christian Science, a religion of “healthy-mindedness” that saw patients treated by “mental practitioners” rather than medical doctors. Although Harris did not convert to Christian Science, he too became more heterodox in his religious views, sharing Christian Science's disillusionment with the materialism of the age and its desire for spiritual replenishment. The tension he felt between the material world's “alluring impermanencies” and the “permanent things and nothings” of the spiritual world was one with which artists and writers had been grappling for the previous few decades. Edward Carpenter and Wassily Kandinsky both opposed the material view of the world—what Kandinsky condemned in 1911 as the “nightmare of materialism”—and predicted the coming of a spiritual revolution.
6
But hopes for this new world of the spirit seemed to have died on the battlefields of the Great War.

Perhaps as a prescription for his malaise, Harris used a week's leave from the army in the first week of 1918 to visit New York. The city's art galleries at this time offered, according to the
New York Times,
“innumerable entertainments.”
7
Which galleries and museums Harris visited is not known, but at the Modern Gallery he could have seen an exhibition of etchings, drawings and lithographs by Cézanne, Matisse, Raoul Dufy and Vlaminck. New York's main attraction for him at this time, though, might have been the many works on show by members of The Eight (later known as the “Ashcan School”).
8
One member, George Luks, had a solo exhibition at the Kraushaar Galleries on Fifth Avenue, while the Macbeth Gallery (where The Eight first showed their work together in 1908) featured a retrospective of the paintings and drawings of Arthur B. Davies. Another large display of the group's work could be seen at the Bourgeois Galleries, where a benefit for American War Relief included work by both Luks as well as other members such as Robert Henri, William Glackens, John Sloan and Everett Shinn.

If his trip to New York was timed to coincide with these exhibitions by members of The Eight, Harris would have returned to Toronto with a renewed interest in scenes of modern urban life. He must also have noted how, through aggressive self-promotion, the
enfants terribles
of American art were steadily winning over both the public and the critics less than a decade after their first group exhibition attracted bitterly hostile reviews (“Bah! The whole thing creates a distinct feeling of nausea,” a critic had snorted at their 1908 show).
9
He would furthermore have been sympathetic to Robert Henri's avowed aim to take art to the masses (many of The Eight even published illustrations in a journal called
The Masses
) by democratizing a love of art and turning America into what he called “an art country.”
10

While Harris was in New York, the
New York Times
devoted a long and laudatory article to Arthur B. Davies, one of the masterminds of the 1913 Armory Show and the painter possibly of most interest to Harris at this point. Unlike other members of The Eight, Davies expressed not the speed and cacophony of the city but silence and tranquility. His specialty, as in
The Dweller on the Threshold,
was ethereal female nudes dancing beside reflective lakes in mountain landscapes. The reviewer for the
New York Times
praised these canvases for their “long, continuous, linear rhythms,” their “grace of movement,” and their “ceaseless flow of beauty.”
11
Another critic celebrated Davies as a “seer of visions” and a “poet who would penetrate this earthly envelope and surprise the secret fervors of the soul.”
12

These paintings of what Harris might have called “permanent things and nothings” were inspired by Davies's longstanding interest in mysticism and the occult. He was, along with Gauguin, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Nicholas Roerich and Gustaf Fjaestad, one of the many artistic followers of theosophy. Davies once met the Theosophical Society's founder, H.P. Blavatsky, a photograph of whom he afterwards carried as a charm in the case of his pocket watch.
13
Madame Blavatsky developed theosophy as a reaction against the stalemate reached by scientific materialism and orthodox religion, rejecting their dogmas and emphasizing the existence of a deeper spiritual reality beyond the world of matter. One of their objectives was “to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature
. . .
and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man.”
14
It was these deeper realities and hidden mysteries that artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky, abandoning representational art in favour of abstractions, sought to communicate through their paintings.

Harris might first have been exposed to this exotic philosophy—
what a Canadian minister called “that extravaganza of religion”
15
—during his studies in Germany. The German Theosophical Society was active under the leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who, beginning in 1904, gave a series of lectures in Berlin on spiritualism and the “destructiveness of materialist science in respect to the soul.”
16
Theosophists were a rarer breed in Canada, numbering under a thousand, though in 1891 the first Theosophical Society Lodge opened in Toronto and by 1918 two more had appeared. The painter and educator George A. Reid was an early member, hosting meetings in his studio in the Arcade building on Yonge Street.
17

Harris already had connections in Toronto's theosophical community. A friend from the Arts and Letters Club, the theatre director Roy Mitchell, was a prominent member who would found the Blavatsky Institute of Canada in 1924. Mitchell had moved to New York in 1916 to become technical director of the newly founded Greenwich Village Theatre. Harris's trip to New York might well have been timed to coincide with the theatre's maiden production, the Danish playwright Hjalmar Bergstrøm's
Karen Borneman,
which opened in the first week of January 1918.
18

Harris also had other theosophical connections. An older and even closer friend, Fred Housser, a schoolmate from St. Andrew's College and the financial editor of the
Toronto Daily Star,
was likewise a theosophist. Inspired and perhaps counselled by these friends, and in the midst of his spiritual crisis, Harris too began to turn to theosophy as a way of penetrating the alluring impermanencies of the material world.

HARRIS'S MENTAL DISTURBANCE worsened dramatically with the news in February 1918 of the death of his only brother, Howard, a captain in the Essex Regiment. A decorated veteran of the Somme and Passchendaele, thirty-one-year-old Captain Harris was killed during a reconnaissance mission near Bapaume.
19
This devastating loss, combined with the death of Thomson less than a year earlier, left Harris extremely anxious and depressed. He began suffering from a sleep disorder, what he later described as “troublous, somewhat terrified tossings and turnings and apprehensive opening of the eyes.”
20
By the spring he had suffered a complete nervous breakdown, and on the first of May he received a medical discharge from the army.

One of the first things Harris did following his discharge was to wander through Toronto's neighbourhoods with his sketchbook. As always, he had no interest in painting what Rupert Brooke called the “public-school-and-'varsity” aspect of Toronto—the parts of the city in which he himself was raised. He sought instead the picturesque squalor of more down-at-heel precincts. Since most of his old sketching ground, the Ward, was demolished in 1913 to make way for the Toronto General Hospital, he went north to the area around Dufferin and St. Clair. In this mushrooming neighbourhood he found a suitable bedragglement. The poor suburb had been settled a decade earlier by working-class English immigrants who christened it “Earl's Court” (soon condensed to Earlscourt) in an ironic reference to West London's upscale Victorian suburb. To more well-heeled and well-housed Torontonians it was “shacktown,” because it consisted of dozens of small, ramshackle houses—many similar in design to Tom Thomson's shack—built by their owners on narrow plots of land. Many had no water, sewer, gas, electricity or sidewalks, and the first paved roads arrived only in 1913.

Harris described Earlscourt as a “picturesque semi-slum.”
21
He might have known of it from a 1914
Saturday Night
article that described these squatters' dwellings as “toy houses
. . .
ludicrous in size and shape.”
22
But he could also have heard about Earlscourt from many of the young men who passed through Camp Borden or the District School of Musketry, because the area had one of the highest enlistment rates per capita in the British Empire: one English newspaper called it a “colony of soldiers.”
23
It had suffered, noted the paper, “very heavy casualties,” with many men returning home maimed both physically and psychologically. In 1917 a special Veterans' Burial Plot was opened in nearby Prospect Cemetery, and so famous was the area for its sacrifices that in 1919 the Prince of Wales would visit the cemetery to plant a silver maple in honour of Earlscourt's dead.

Harris made a number of oil sketches in the area, eventually producing a larger canvas in his studio,
Outskirts of Toronto.
The work shows a small clutch of houses at the foot of a hill, with another row of higgledy-piggledy shacks perched on the horizon. Like so many of the Algonquin Park School's paintings of the Shield country,
Outskirts of Toronto
shows a place of solitude. There are no lively crowds or dramatic perspectives, only the faintly downtrodden stillness of his downtown urban scenes. The duckboards placed across the churned-up yellow mud and the woman stooped beside a washing line in the treeless landscape testify to the poverty and grimness of this part of Toronto. They also allude to the ooze and slime of the trenches in places such as Passchendaele—whose “evilly yellow” mud Paul Nash had graphically described in a letter to his wife
24
—that claimed the lives of so many Earlscourt residents.

IF THE SHACKS of Earlscourt were alluring impermanencies, Harris also sought more enduring things. In this time of crisis he sought solace in what he would later call “the ample replenishing North,” which he regarded as a “source of spiritual flow” and “eternal values.”
25