Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  Neither a gunshot nor a blow from a paddle would have been necessary for a death on Canoe Lake. Plenty of hazards and obstacles could be found: deadheads, submerged rocks, rogue sawlogs. Thomson could easily have come to grief on any of them, and he is known to have had spills in rivers such as the Mississagi. But such an accident would have cruelly put the lie to the myth of how, in Lismer’s glowing report, Thomson could find his way over open water “on a night as black as ink,” or how, as Eric Brown wrote, he was “the best guide, fisherman and canoe man in the district.” 66 Perils such as tree stumps and hidden rocks were too random and too mundane to satisfy either curiosity or legend.

  THE SCALE OF the nation’s loss in the waters of Algonquin Provincial Park, in a year when so many other young Canadians died overseas, was appreciated at first by only a select group of people. Arthur Lismer was in Halifax, at the Victoria School of Art and Design, when he learned of his friend’s death. He wrote immediately to Dr. MacCallum: “We’ve lost a big man—both as an artist and a fine character . . . When one recalls the few years that he had been painting, it is remarkable what he achieved.” 67

  Thomson’s achievement was indeed remarkable. He had been painting in the Studio Building for less than four years, but during that time he made such astonishing progress that Lismer, Jackson, MacDonald, Carmichael and Varley must all have recognized how he possessed an extraordinary talent that the rest of them could try to emulate but never match. One of the few indisputable facts about his mysterious death on Canoe Lake was that he died just as he was approaching the summit of his artistic powers. His sketches of the night sky suggest he was planning a large canvas of the aurora borealis—a lost masterpiece it is now almost unbearable to contemplate.

  At the end of September, Thomson was commemorated by a cairn at Hayhurst Point, on Canoe Lake. This was the age of these sad commemorations, as the traditional mementos of war—statues of generals and other heroes—gave way to monuments dedicated to sorrow and remembrance. Over the next few years, cenotaphs and plaques honouring the Canadian war dead would appear in virtually every Canadian city and town. A bronze plaque listing more than a hundred of Massey-Harris’s fallen employees would be fixed to the facade of the company’s head office on King Street West in Toronto; nearby stood a statue honouring eighteen employees of Borden’s Dairy.

  Thomson’s cairn was a similar tribute to a fallen hero.68 A truncated pyramid of rose-grey stones cemented into place, it was financed by Dr. MacCallum and featured a brass plaque designed by MacDonald. The cenotaph was placed against a background of spruce trees a short distance from rocks showing smears of paint made by Thomson as he cleaned his palette. The stones had to be lugged some sixty feet up a cliff, with the sand for the cement brought by boat and then likewise raised to the top. The work was overseen by Bill Beatty with help from Shannon Fraser, George Rowe and (as MacDonald told Thomson’s father) some “soft-handed city men, who had not known Tom, but were holidaying at the Lake and cheerfully offered their services.” 69 MacDonald arrived towards the end of their labours with a brass plate commemorating the “artist, woodsman and guide” (as Thomson was identified). The inscription continued: “He lived humbly but passionately with the wild. It made him brother to all untamed things of nature. It drew him apart and revealed itself wonderfully to him. It sent him out from the woods only to show these revelations through his art. And it took him to itself at last.” At the bottom of the plaque, MacDonald wrote that Thomson’s friends and fellow artists had joined in this tribute to his “character and genius.”

  The memorial on Hayhurst Point marked the second time MacDonald joined with a small group of artists to pay tribute to a fallen comrade, since in 1904 MacDonald was one of those who commemorated Neil McKechnie in the tiny cemetery near Mattagami Lake with a bronze plaque and what an article in Saturday Night described as an “axe-hewn cross.” 70 Thomson’s tragic death recalled to MacDonald his other drowned friend. A short time later he wrote a poem, “Below the Rapids,” originally dedicated to McKechnie but equally evocative of Thomson’s death:

  He’ll follow no more the sun

  Portage and rapid are one

  Night brings no need of camping place

  The end of the trail is run.71

  Although deeply grieved by everyone in the Studio Building, Thomson’s death affected MacDonald most, since he had known and worked with him for almost ten years. “I know how keenly you will feel his loss,” A.Y. Jackson wrote to him from England.72 The stress of Thomson’s death and continued financial hardships took a severe toll on MacDonald’s health. In November he and his family were forced to move from Four Elms to a smaller property—what his son Thoreau called “a small and rotten rickety house”—across from a gristmill in York Mills.73 The evening following the move, with their possessions still unpacked, MacDonald suffered a stroke. The Studio Building’s latest casualty would be left bedridden for many months, unable to work.

  7 THE VORTEX OF WAR

  FURTHER TRAGEDY AND death followed at the close of the annus horribilis that was 1917. On the morning of December 6, in Halifax Harbour, an explosives-laden French munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, collided with a Norwegian steamer carrying Belgian relief supplies and burst into flames. Twenty minutes later, as the French crew scrambled ashore and onlookers gathered to watch oily smoke pour from the decks, the fire ignited the Mont Blanc’s cargo of over two hundred tonnes of TNT and more than two thousand tonnes of explosive picric acid. What followed was the largest man-made explosion ever known. Nearly two thousand people were killed, thousands more injured, and twenty thousand left homeless. The blast was followed by an eighteen-metre-high tsunami and a white cloud that rose six kilometres into the sky.

  Arthur Lismer was fortunate to escape death or injury. Unable in 1916 to find accommodation in Halifax owing to the presence of so many naval personnel, he had taken lodgings in Bedford, fifteen kilometres northwest. Here, despite a frugality imposed by wartime restrictions and a modest salary, he and his family had been enjoying an idyllic year. Their house stood on an acre of sloping land at the mouth of the Sackville River, and Lismer’s leisure hours were spent gardening, picnicking, boating, sledding and swimming with his wife and young daughter. He had even taken up photography, developing his prints in the darkened family bathroom.1

  On a professional level, Lismer devoted much energy to the previously moribund artistic life of Halifax. He aggressively recruited students for the school. “I’ve gathered ’em in from the byways and hedges,” he wrote to MacDonald.2 Enrolment was raised to a respectable seventy-two, and twenty-five scholarships were established. He revived the inactive Nova Scotia Museum of Fine Arts, staging a year-long exhibition of Canadian landscapes on loan from the National Gallery. He also executed a series of twelve murals for the Green Lantern, a popular Keith Street restaurant that featured a soda fountain, fish pond, orchestra gallery and ice cream parlour.* In the midst of these efforts he even found time to paint landscapes, though he found his abilities to make plein-air sketches hampered by the war: early in 1917, while sketching near the Halifax waterfront, he was arrested as a spy and briefly detained. Haligonians were evidently unaccustomed to the sight of men bearing easels and paintbrushes. He did manage one canvas of the waterfront, Halifax Harbour, Time of War, which showed the kind of harbour traffic that would result in tragedy a few months later.

  On the morning of December 6, Lismer missed his usual train from Bedford to Halifax and “so escaped—some who took the train didn’t.” 3 He made it into Halifax later in the day, getting past a military cordon and, in a throwback to his days on the Sheffield Independent, executing on-the-spot pen-and-ink sketches. He discovered that most of the paintings in the museum had survived the blast, even though a retaining wall had collapsed and a selection of prints on loan from the National Gallery—including ones by Whistler and Henri Fantin-Latour—“were flung everywhere.” 4 The school, too, was miraculously intact,
though one of his students was killed. The building was soon requisitioned for sad and grisly duty as a morgue. The Green Lantern Restaurant, where Lismer’s murals were unveiled only a week earlier, became a distribution depot for clothing and footwear. The bloodstained survivors who climbed the stairs to collect shoes and overcoats did so beneath Lismer’s visions of clapboard fishing villages, bucolic farms and wide expanses of tranquil ocean.

  SOME OF LISMER’S pen-and-ink sketches of Halifax’s devastation were published later in the month in the Canadian Courier. A short time later, early in 1918, he wrote to Eric Brown asking for help getting permission to gather material to chronicle Halifax’s contribution to the Canadian war effort: “Halifax is of vital interest as a war city & there is a tremendous amount of activity that I’d like to record—the departure & arrival of troopships, convoys, hospital ships, troopships from Australia & New Zealand & the States—camouflaged men-of-war of different nationalities—it’s intensely interesting & graphic and no one is painting it.” 5

  Lismer was inspired by the fact that elsewhere painters and photographers were already active in documenting Canada’s role in the Great War. In December 1916 the Grafton Galleries in London—once the venue for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions—had staged a remarkable series of photographs showing Canadian soldiers fighting at the Somme. William Ivor Castle, Canada’s official war photographer, documented the Canadian Corps’ role in the offensive, then returned to London to mount his first exhibition of more than 200 pictures, many enlarged to three metres wide and mounted in heavy oak frames. The Daily Mirror pronounced it “one of the most remarkable exhibitions of photographs ever.” Six months later, in July 1917, the Grafton Galleries showed 188 more of Castle’s photographs, this time capturing the Canadian exploits at Vimy Ridge. One of them, a picture of no man’s land, was billed as “the largest photograph in the world.” 6

  These oak-framed pictures attracted eighty thousand people through the gallery doors in the summer of 1917. So successful was the exhibition that the head of the British Department of Information, John Buchan, a future governor general of Canada, found his own efforts at propaganda outclassed and overwhelmed. He peevishly lamented that it seemed “Canada is running the war.” 7 An English newspaper, accustomed to casting only the British in the roles of heroes, griped that it was “open doubt whether there was anybody but Canadians fighting in France.” 8

  That the Canadians, hitherto political and cultural wallflowers usually safely ridiculed or ignored, should have stolen a march on the British was thanks largely to one man. The exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries were part of the mission of the Canadian War Records Office. The CWRO had been established at the end of 1915 by the force of nature that was Sir Max Aitken, the expatriate Canadian newspaper baron ennobled in 1917 as Lord Beaverbrook. The British press routinely refused to distinguish between British and Dominion troops, which meant they failed to report the hugely significant Canadian contributions as Canadian contributions. British reports almost never mentioned the Canadian Corps, and the press’s imperious disregard for Canada was such that John McCrae, author of “In Flanders Fields,” was never identified in British newspapers as a Canadian.

  Efforts, Beaverbrook reasoned, needed to be made to document for posterity Canada’s contributions and sacrifices. The CWRO produced inspirational books such as Canada in Khaki and Beaverbrook’s own two-volume Canada in Flanders. The latter was written with help from Beaverbrook’s friend Rudyard Kipling, who nonetheless wrote witheringly to another friend—with exactly the sort of disdain that Beaverbrook was hoping to counter—that the Canadians “do not yet realize how small an item is their contingent.” 9

  Because photograph and film were believed to have a lifespan of only twenty-five years, and because he desired a more permanent visual record of Canadian heroics, Beaverbrook turned to painters. He founded a spin-off organization called the Canadian War Memorials Fund (CWMF) and commissioned the British society painter Richard Jack—known for his portraits of Edward VII and George V—to begin a grand panorama of Canadians at the Second Battle of Ypres. By 1917 the ranks of the CWMF numbered some of Britain’s most famous artists: Augustus John, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Paul Nash. They were charged with creating a record of Canadian achievements during the war in a series of paintings that would in the fullness of time be placed in a museum to be constructed on Sussex Drive in Ottawa.10

  Both Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker approved of Lord Beaverbrook’s efforts, but they wished to see the involvement of Canadian as well as British painters. Although happy enough to entertain the idea, Beaverbrook admitted that Canadian artists were a species about whom he knew nothing at all. Walker therefore cabled to London a list of candidates whom Beaverbrook ordered to report in person to his office. Included on the list was A.Y. Jackson, described by Walker’s telegram as “an able Impressionist.” 11

  The summons by Lord Beaverbrook was a timely one for Jackson. From Hastings he had been moved along the Sussex coast to Shoreham Camp to await reassignment after the disbanding of the 60th Battalion. Although he was reunited with his friend Randolph Hewton, conditions in this latest base, improvised over a golf course on Slonk Hill, were scarcely an improvement on “Mudsplosh Camp.” By 1917 the submarine blockade was causing food shortages in Britain. The dispirited soldiers turned mutinous, with many (including Jackson) arrested for “kicking about the poor grub we were getting,” as he explained to his mother.12 Morale among the troops plunged lower as more and more convalescents arrived at the camp, and as Old Shoreham churchyard filled with those who had died of their wounds.13 But Jackson himself claimed to be inoculated against tragedy. “I have seen so much of death over here,” he wrote to MacDonald, “that I hear without emotion of boys I marched with, slept beside and went through rainy and sunny days with being killed. It makes me almost callous.” 14

  The one death about which he could not feel indifferent was, of course, Thomson’s. “I could sit down and cry,” he wrote to MacDonald at the beginning of August, “to think that while in all this turmoil over here there is a ray of light and that the peace and quietness of the north country should be the scene of such a tragedy.” He and Thomson had worked together as partners, he believed, in the “new movement” in Canadian painting: while Jackson supplied the “school learning and practical methods of working,” Thomson offered the experience of “a new world, the north country, and a truer artist’s vision.” But now, with Thomson dead, the north country seemed, he wrote sorrowfully to MacDonald, “a desolation of bush and rocks.” 15

  He told MacDonald that he hoped to forget himself in painting “if only they give me freedom enough,” though the freedom was not yet forthcoming. His application for promotion to lieutenant had been turned down, and artistic opportunities were limited to making diagrams and enlargements from maps of the front (worse assignments existed: the English artist Stanley Spencer, serving with the 68th Field Ambulancemen in Salonika, was reduced to painting the lettering on latrines). In the summer of 1917, after a fourteen-month convalescence, he was passed fit to return to battle. He was therefore facing the prospect of joining the British offensive in Flanders when his summons to the Canadian War Records Office arrived in August.

  LORD BEAVERBROOK, thirty-eight years old in 1917, was a man of enormous energy and enterprise. Born to a Presbyterian clergyman in Maple, Ontario, north of Toronto, he was raised in Newcastle, New Brunswick. As a young man he sold insurance, flirted with legal studies and worked in a Calgary bowling alley. In 1900 he began selling bonds, and by twenty-five he was a millionaire. In 1910 “Maximillion” (as he called himself) moved to England, and within the year he had acquired a seat in Parliament, a knighthood, a country house in Surrey and friends such as Kipling and the future prime minister Andrew Bonar Law (a fellow New Brunswicker). By 1917, as owner of the Daily Express, he was a powerful press baron and an English milord: he grandly took ermine as 1st Baron Beaverbrook. Impi
sh-looking and asthmatic, he was well on his way to becoming the contumelious, sycophant-begirded megalomaniac that Evelyn Waugh would lampoon in his novels as Lord Monomark.

  Jackson and Beaverbrook met at the cwro’s offices in Tudor Street, a few blocks south of where Beaverbrook bestrode Fleet Street as proprietor of the Express. Jackson found his lordship “certainly very kind though very businesslike.” 16 “So you are an artist?” inquired Beaverbrook. “Are you a good artist?” To establish his credentials, Jackson produced a clipping from The Studio (“The Studio? What’s that?” demanded Beaverbrook) that lauded him as “a coming man” with a “largeness of vision” and “something worthwhile to say.” 17 Since Jackson neglected to mention that these flattering words were composed by his friend Harold Mortimer-Lamb, Beaverbrook was suitably impressed. On August 13 Jackson found himself promoted to the rank of “honorary lieutenant” and armed with a paintbrush instead of a gun.18

  Jackson received his first commission soon afterwards, a portrait of a Victoria Cross winner, Corporal John Kerr of the 49th Battalion. He wrote to MacDonald that he “would rather be excused” from the job, but this portrait, he realized, stood between him and a hasty return to the trenches.19 Unfortunately he possessed extremely limited experience as a portraitist. Leaving aside the portrait of his Aunt Geneva’s dog and the sketch of Rosa Breithaupt, he really had only a single one under his belt, a 1910 portrait of the Berlin headmaster Jeremiah Suddaby, done from a photograph.* This painting, commissioned by the Berlin School Board after Suddaby’s death, had been arranged by his Aunt Geneva and earned him $400.20