Defiant Spirits (59 page)

9. Jackson,
A Painter's Country,
p. 70.

10. Quoted in Whiteman,
J.E.H. MacDonald,
p. 66.

11. Charles G.D. Roberts,
The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither
(Kentville:
Dominion Atlantic Railway, 1895), p. 2. The phrase “wonderland of artists” appears in
an advertisement for the Dominion Atlantic Railway on the book's inside cover.

12.
New York Times,
11 January 1920.

13. Jennifer J. Nelson,
Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 9–12. See also Donald H. Clairmont and Dennis William Magill,
Africville: The Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community
(Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1999).

14. Betts,
Lawren Harris in the Ward,
pp. 79, 70.

15. Mellen argues that these paintings offer no social commentary; rather they are simply formal experiments in which Harris concentrated on “deep, three-dimensional space. He uses space, form and colour to create a mood of timelessness and mystery” (
The Group of Seven,
p. 112). Jeremy Adamson likewise agrees that there is no political activism in the works: “While he was deeply moved by the material poverty he witnessed in Toronto and several Maritime cities, it was the idea rather than reality that attracted his attention. Harris was not committed to social change or to leftist political ideologies” (
Lawren S. Harris,
p. 106). Elsewhere in his study Adamson reassures us that “there are no overt Marxist overtones” in Harris's work (ibid., p. 25). Inexplicably, neither Mellen nor Adamson mentions Africville by name, despite the fact that their studies were completed within a decade of the neighbourhood's controversial destruction in the 1960s.

16. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.

17. For theosophy and social reform in Canada with reference to Phillips Thompson, see R. Cook,
The Regenerators,
pp. 167–68; and Richard Allen,
The View from the Murney Tower,
p. 191. For theosophy and feminism, see H. Murray,
Come, Bright Improvement!
p. 116; and Joy Dixon,
Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 123.

18. Quoted in Rohit Mehta,
Theosophical Socialism
(Ahmedabad: R. Mehta, 1937), p. 1.

19. Quoted in ibid., p. 19.

20. Rockwell Kent,
It's Me, O Lord
(New York: Dodd Mead & Co., 1955), p. 204.

21. See Anthony D. Smith,
Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 190–217.

22. Quoted in Hill,
The Group of Seven,
p. 134.

23. Gratton O'Leary, “The Right Honourable Arthur Meighen,”
Manitoba Historical Society Transactions
3 (1970–71), available online at
http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/transactions/3/meighen_a.shtml
; and Henry Ferns and Bernard Ostry,
The Age of Mackenzie King
(Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1976), p. 174.

24. Quoted in Davis, “The Wembley Controversy,” p. 65.

25.
The Rebel,
March 1918.

26. Douglas Cole and Maria Tippett, eds.,
Phillips in Print: The Selected Writings of Walter J. Phillips on Canadian Nature and Art
(Winnipeg: Manitoba Record Society, 1982), p. 66.

27.
Toronto Daily Star,
7 May 1921.

28.
Toronto Globe,
9 May 1921.

29. Quoted in Hill,
The Group of Seven,
p. 105.

CHAPTER 5: BY THE SHINING BIG-SEA-WATER

1. Merrill Denison, “That Inferiority Complex,”
The Empire Club of Canada Speeches,
1948–1949
(Toronto: Empire Club of Canada, 1949), p. 260.

2. Ibid., p. 256.

3. For histories of the Denisons and Bon Echo, see Lacombe, “Songs of the Open Road,”
pp. 152–67; Robert Stacey and Stan McMullin,
Massanoga: The Art of Bon Echo
(Ottawa: Penumbra Press, 1998); and John Campbell,
The Mazinaw Experience: Bon Echo and Beyond
(Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2000).

4. Flora MacDonald Denison, “A Dedication and a Death,” in Cyril Greenland and John Robert Colombo, eds.,
Walt Whitman's Canada
(Willowdale,
ON
: Hounslow, 1992), pp. 196–200.

5.
Canadian Bookman,
March 1923.

6. Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater,
Thought-Forms
(London: Theosophical Publishing Society 1905), p. 4.

7.
The Sunset of Bon Echo,
April 1920.

8.
The Sunset of Bon Echo,
Summer 1919.

9. Quoted in Stacey and McMullin,
Massanoga,
p. 58.

10. “An Artist's View of Whitman,” J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 3, File 28.
This is the (undated) draft copy of a paper read before the English Association at the
Toronto Central Reference Library. An incomplete version of a later draft (which does not include the “smutty old man” reference) is found in Container 3, File 29.

11.
Current Literature,
February 1909.

12. See R.M. Bucke,
Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind
(Philadelphia: Innes & Sons, 1905).

13. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill; Davis,
The Logic of Ecstasy,
p. 46.

14. “An Artist's View of Whitman,” J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 3, Files 28 and 29.

15. Quoted in Hole and Lynes,
Marsden Hartley and the West,
p. 44. For Whitman's influence on Hartley, see Ruth L. Bohan,
Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art,
1850–1920
(University Park,
PA
: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 143–64.

16. On Whitman and American modernism, see Bohan,
Looking into Walt Whitman,
p. 5; and Alan Trachtenberg,
Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), pp. 62–63. For Whitman's admiration of Millet, see Bohan, pp. 76–77. “I nourish active rebellion” is found at line 211 of “Song of the Open Road,” in Murphy,
The Complete Poems.
For his discussion of the absorption of Canada into the United States, see
Specimen Days
(Philadelphia: David McKay, 1882), p. 142.

17. Jackson,
A Painter's Country,
p. 57.

18. Scott L. Cameron,
The
Frances Smith:
Palace Steamer of the Upper Great Lakes, 1867–1896
(Toronto: National Heritage Books, 2005). For Lake Superior tourism at the end of the nineteenth century, see Jasen,
Wild Things,
pp. 80–104.

19. Quoted in Peter Morris,
Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema,
1895–1939
(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1978), p. 36.

20. Jackson,
A Painter's Country,
p. 57.

21. Harris, “The Group of Seven in Canadian History,” p. 34.

22. Jackson,
A Painter's Country,
p. 58.

23. Ibid.

24. Quoted in Constance Martin, “Rockwell Kent's Distant Shores: The Story of an Exhibition,”
Arctic
55 (March 2002), p. 104.

25. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill;
The Lamps,
October 1911.

26.
Canadian Theosophist,
15 July 1926.

27. On Roerich and the American dollar, see Robert Chadwell Williams,
Russian Art and American Money, 1900–1940
(Cambridge,
MA
: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 111.

28.
American Theosophist
(January, February, March 1913); Kandinsky,
Concerning the
Spiritual in Art,
pp. 6–9.

29. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill. Doris dated her poem 7 September 1922.

30. Comacchio,
The Infinite Bonds of Family,
p. 61.

31. Quoted in Michael Bliss,
Banting: A Biography
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 203.

32. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.

33. For a discussion of this latter work, see Atanassova,
F.H. Varley,
pp. 44–47.
For Varley's society portraits in the early 1920s, see ibid., pp. 49–59.

34. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.

35. Quoted in Tippett,
Stormy Weather,
pp. 146–47.

36. Quoted in ibid., p. 144.

37. Quoted in Hill,
The Group of Seven,
p. 154.

38.
Historical Bulletin
6 (May 1941), pp. 3–4.

CHAPTER 6: GYPSIES, LEPERS, AND FREAKS

1.
Muskegon Chronicle,
11 January and 14 January 1922.

2. See Judith Zilczer, “The Dissemination of Post-Impressionism in North America,”
in
The Advent of Modernism,
pp. 36–39.

3.
Saturday Night,
24 December 1921.

4. Frances Anne Hopkins, 95 Fitzjohns Ave., London, to David Ross McCord,
12 July 1910, File 5031, McCord Family Papers, McCord Museum, Montreal.

5.
Canadian Bookman,
September 1924.

6.
Toronto Daily Mail & Empire,
6 May 1922;
Saturday Night,
1 April 1922;
Toronto Telegram,
6 April 1922.

7. Quoted in Kelly,
J.E.H. MacDonald, Lewis Smith, Edith Smith,
p. 21.

8. Quoted in Paul Poplawski,
Encylopedia of Literary Modernism
(Westport,
CT
: Greenwood Press, 2003), p. 36.

9. For these critiques, as well as the attack on literary modernism in Canada in the 1920s, see Don Precosky, “‘Back to the Woods Ye Muse of Canada': Conservative Response to the Beginnings of Modernism,”
Canadian Poetry
12 (Spring/Summer 1983), pp. 40–45.

10.
Canadian Forum,
January 1923; and Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen, eds.,
After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery's Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916–1941
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 110.

11. Quoted in E. Holly Pike, “(Re)Producting Canadian Literature: L.M. Montgomery's Emily Novels,” in Gammel and Epperly,
L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture,
p. 66.

12.
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 2: 1910–1921,
ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 309.

13. Quoted in Ord,
The National Gallery,
pp. 102–3.

14.
Saturday Night,
1 April 1922.

15. Hill,
The Group of Seven,
p. 139.

16. “The Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King,” 11 January 1927, 14 April 1934,
LAC
, Ottawa, available online at
http://king.collectionscanada.ca/EN/default.asp
.

17. Ibid., 14 May 1935.

18. Madonna Ahrens, “Carl Ahrens: His Life and Work.”

19. “The Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King,” 21 November 1922, and 14 April 1926.

20. Ibid., 20 October 1922.

21.
Saturday Night,
9 December and 23 December 1922.

22. Quoted in McLeish,
September Gale,
pp. 79–80.

23.
Saturday Night,
30 December 1922.

24. Quoted in Judith M. Brown and William Roger Lewis,
The Oxford History of the British Empire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 214.

25. Quoted in Davis, “The Wembley Controversy,” p. 67.

26.
Saturday Night,
15 September 1923.

27. See E.A. Heaman,
The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society during the Nineteenth Century
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Stuart Murray, “Canadian Participation and National Representation at the 1851 London Great Exhibition and the 1855 Paris
Exposition Universelle,
”
Histoire sociale / Social History
32 (May 1999), pp. 1–22.

28. Quoted in Anne Clendinning, “Exhibiting a Nation: Canada at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–1925,”
Histoire sociale / Social History
39 (May 2006), p. 83

29.
The Times,
23 April 1924.

30. “Two Views of Canadian Art: Addresses by Mr. Wyly Grier,
RCA
,
OSA
, and
A.Y. Jackson,
RCA
,
OSA
, before the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, February 26, 1925,”
The Empire Club of Canada Speeches, 1925
(Toronto: Empire Club of Canada, 1926), p. 113.

31. Quoted in Davis, “A Study in Modernism,” p. 108.

32. E.F.B. Johnson, “Painting and Sculpture in Canada,” in
Canada and its Provinces,
vol. 11 (Toronto: Publishers' Association of Canada, 1913), p. 623.

33. Quoted in Ord,
The National Gallery,
p. 94.

34. Quoted in Tippett,
Stormy Weather,
p. 142.

35. Lorne Pierce and Albert Durrant Watson, eds.,
Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse
(Toronto: Ryerson, 1922), p. 124.

36. Quoted in Roza, “Towards a Modern Canadian Art,” p. 62.

37. Quoted in
E.J. Pratt: Selected Poems,
ed. Sandra Djwa, W.J. Keith, and Zailig Pollock
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. xii. For the influence of Imagism on Pratt,
see ibid., pp. xii and xiii.

38. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.

39. On Varley and the gypsy tradition, see Atanassova,
F.H. Varley,
pp. 43–45.

40. Quoted in Duval,
The Tangled Garden,
p. 148.