Defiant Spirits (43 page)

The northern shore of Lake Superior had been part of the tourist itinerary since the 1850s. Steamboat excursions across the lake and along the coast had received a boost by the tremendous popularity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem
The Song of Hiawatha,
which was set “By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water.” Tourists enjoyed ten-day excursions through the “Land of Hiawatha” on steamers like the
Algoma
or the
Frances Smith.
The latter, a “palace steamer” built in Owen Sound, was the largest and most luxurious vessel on the Great Lakes at the time of her launch in the 1860s.
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Painters also came through the area. William Armstrong, a civil engineer whose job it was to place landmarks and buoys along the route between Collingwood and Fort William for the Department of Public Works, painted Superior's northern coast numerous times in the 1860s; some of his watercolours found their way into the collection of Prince Edward. Frances Anne Hopkins canoed and sketched in the region a decade later, and in 1882 the indefatigable Lucius O'Brien created the most famous image of the region,
Kakabeka Falls, Kaministiquia River.
The area was even immortalized on film. The first dramatic film ever shot in Canada took this region as its location:
Hiawatha: The Messiah of the Ojibway
was shot near Sault Ste. Marie in 1903. The Canadian Bioscope Company extolled the location as one of “pine and cedar and balsam, and shelving rock and shimmering water.”
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By the beginning of the twentieth century, the shores of Gitche Gumee were in danger of being forgotten by tourists and artists alike. The development of resorts such as Muskoka and the tourist facilities in the Rockies meant the romance and popularity of the Shield country north of Superior—and its place in the popular imagination—began to fade. Jackson and Harris therefore encountered the terrain with a freshness and lack of expectation, and with all the evangelical enthusiasm of pioneers and explorers. The terrain astonished them. “I know of no more impressive scenery in Canada for the landscape painter,” Jackson later wrote of the North Shore. “There is a sublime order to it, the long curves of the beaches, the sweeping ranges of hills, and headlands that push out into the lake.”
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Harris was equally awed. The pristine skies over Lake Superior possessed a “singing expansiveness and sublimity” that he believed existed nowhere else in Canada.
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If Algoma was where MacDonald indulged his Edenic fantasies, for Harris the land north of Superior came to hold the deepest spiritual allure, its seemingly primeval purity the flipside of the degradation witnessed several months earlier in Africville.

If the scenery was transcendent, the accommodation, compared with the cozy Algoma excursions, was primitive. “It was a strenuous life,” Jackson boasted.
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That autumn they camped beside frigid lakes, digging a trench in the middle of their tent and filling it with hot embers for warmth. Weasels and whisky jacks invaded the campsites and stole their food. Fortified against the cold and wet by Harris's favourite breakfast cereal, Dr. Jackson's Roman Meal (a mixture of wheat, rye, flaxseed and bran), they plunged into Superior's famously cold waters. Harris remained relentlessly optimistic, even on the many days it rained. “It is clearing in the west” became his catchphrase.
23

They made numerous sketches, with Harris in particular inspired by the harsh northern landscape. Its stark majesty was imbued, in his eyes, with a numinous significance. Rockwell Kent once wrote that he craved “snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes and the cruel northern sea” because they revealed “wonders
. . .
a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands.”
24
Doris Mills, a friend to both Harris and Kent, later claimed the two men were “spiritual brothers,” and for Harris, too, the North was a place to be celebrated for what he called “mystery and bigness.”
25
By the early 1920s he was likewise beginning a quest to uncover the more spiritual dimensions of the snow-capped northern landscape.

Kent's journeys to the rugged continental margins—Newfoundland, an island off Alaska, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego—were voyages of artistic and personal discovery having little to do with any kind of nationalism. But for Harris the spiritual was never completely detached from national or at least geographical considerations. He believed that viewing a northern Canadian landscape of lakes and hills allowed an artist to glimpse the universal relations that were the proper business of the artist. The sight of the Precambrian Shield gave the Canadian artist “a different outlook from men in other lands.” The clear air, the soil and rocks, the rearing mountains and plummeting temperatures—these geographical and atmospheric features “move into a man's whole nature,” he wrote, “and evolve a growing, living response that melts his personal barriers, intensifies his awareness, and projects his vision through appearance to the underlying reality.”

Exactly how and why these unique artistic and spiritual insights about hidden realities should be vouchsafed to those who made their way into granite-capped latitudes or onto snowy elevations was not explained beyond vague references to the “top of the continent” as a “source of spiritual flow” that radiantly bathed Canadians (or, at least, the Canadian painter with a
cpr
ticket and a pair of hiking boots) at the expense of “the southern teeming of men.”
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HOW DID ONE paint a physical world that, no matter how alluring, was merely a surface to be X-rayed by the artist seeking an “underlying hidden reality”?

Back in Toronto, Harris began working in a simpler and more pared-down style in order to reintegrate form and spirit and discover the “eternal mysteries” behind the blue-sky-and-basalt natural world. Sometime in the autumn of 1921 he began work on
Above Lake Superior,
one of his most important paintings. The flowing lines and flaming colours that had been the hallmarks of the Hot Mush painters were replaced by glacial tones and stark forms suggesting—not the swirling agitation of the earlier canvases—but a magnificent and revelatory stillness. The expressive energy of his brushwork disappeared as the voluminous shapes of the landscape hardened into geometric abbreviations. A self-conscious rigour controlled the entire composition. A horizon line split the painting exactly in two, with the top half further sliced into strips of cirrus cloud. In the foreground, bare tree trunks, elongated and alien looking, stretched yearningly upward. Placed with symmetrical precision in the middle of the painting, and dominating the whole, was the mass of a distant hill, a brooding hummock shaped like a truncated pyramid.

Harris's geometrized hill in
Above Lake Superior
was intended as a piece of theosophical symbolism. The sonorous fancies of theosophy had already been translated to the picture plane by Kandinsky and Mondrian, and more recently by Nicholas Roerich, a one-time Ballets Russes set designer (and the man who in the 1930s would persuade Henry A. Wallace to put the pyramid and “all-seeing eye” onto the American one-dollar bill).
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Pyramids and triangles functioned as important theosophical symbols: the seal of the Theosophical Society featured two interlaced triangles. A series of articles on the “Symbolism of the Triangle” appeared in the
American Theosophist
in 1913, and the opening chapter of Kandinsky's
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
recounted how the triangle represented “the life of the spirit” (and triangles and acute angles are scattered through Kandinsky's compositions). The apex of the triangle marked, for Kandinsky, the “joyful vision” of a spiritual and artistic avant-garde, the base an uncomprehending multitude in need of elevation.
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Although not yet a member of the Toronto Theosophical Society, for several years Harris had been, as his friend Doris Mills put it, “studying the masters”—theosophists such as Blavatsky and Besant as well as Rabindranath Tagore and various other “eastern Johnnies.” He even stopped smoking and drinking alcohol. “He wanted to be so pure,” claimed Mills, “that the wings of God would sweep straight through him and find no obstruction at all.”

Theosophy was a source of solace to Harris. Although recovered from his breakdown, he was still deeply troubled. Mills sensed a “great sorrow” beneath his outward cheer. About this time she wrote a poem, “To
lsh
,” catechizing his “exquisite agony of sorrow” and the “pain of the world beating and pulsing” within him. Although the pain was partly his distress at the economic and spiritual deprivation of places like Earlscourt and Africville, an increasingly anguished personal life also darkened his mood. By the early 1920s he and Trixie had been married for more than a decade. During that time the “nice, gay little thing” (as Mills patronizingly called her) changed little in her outlook and priorities. While Harris went “deeper and deeper and deeper
. . .
Trixie just stayed where she was,” according to Mills. “She didn't grow. She was just a nice, nice woman but she didn't grow, and she couldn't possibly follow him. She couldn't follow what he was doing. She couldn't follow what he was thinking. She couldn't do it, and it meant that at home there was no one very close to him
. . .
not really close.”
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Harris found like-minded companionship with Mills and her husband, Gordon, an amateur writer and musician who was a member of the Arts and Letters Club. He also enjoyed the friendship of his old school friend Fred Housser and Housser's beautiful and talented wife, Bess, a painter and journalist. He painted Bess Housser's portrait early in 1920, when she was thirty, and later that year displayed it at the Group of Seven's first exhibition. It was probably as he worked on this portrait, if not earlier, that he fell in love with her. He never sold the portrait or showed it in public again, and his feelings for Bess likewise needed to be concealed from the public gaze: Fred Housser was his friend, after all, and divorce in Toronto in the 1920s was almost unthinkable. Although the divorce rate in Canada had risen slightly since the first three decades of Confederation witnessed fewer than ten cases a year, the number was still statistically minuscule.
30
Often it was necessary to prove adultery or immoral behaviour before a divorce could proceed. Such requirements involved private detectives and, inevitably, journalists. A decade later, these laws resulted in farcical scenes: private detectives wielding flashlights burst into the Toronto apartment of the man with whom Dr. Frederick Banting's wife was having an affair. As a friend of Dr. Banting observed, the unseemly divorce action sent the Nobel laureate, at the time the most famous man in Canada, tumbling from the pinnacle to the gutter.
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For Harris, divorce would have been socially awkward and embarrassing; not the least of the victims would have been his ten-year-old son. And so, as Mills (also a close friend of Bess) wrote in her poem, he carried on with his heart “bleeding within him.”

AFTER LEAVING THE Group of Seven, Frank Johnston put geographical as well as artistic distance between himself and his former colleagues. In the summer of 1921 he moved to Winnipeg to become principal of the Winnipeg School of Art, founded eight years earlier. The perceived apostasy of his departure rankled his former colleagues. According to Doris Mills, the other members “were very disgusted about him” because they believed his motives were financial. “It seemed not idealistic enough.”
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At times, though, it must have seemed that Fred Varley, not Johnston, was the absent member of the Group of Seven. Reviews of their shows sometimes failed to mention his name, and he in no obvious way shared the regnant nationalism of some of his colleagues.
Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay
was an anomaly: since returning from Europe he had been concentrating on portraits, not forests and lakes. Besides his portrait of Vincent Massey, he completed those of Massey's father, Chester, and father-in-law, Sir George Parkin; of Barker Fairley; of Fairley's wife, Margaret; of a woman named Ethel Ely, the wife of a Toronto haberdasher; and of a working-class Yorkshire immigrant named
Mrs. Goldthorpe, whom he outfitted in a red kerchief and open-necked red blouse so that she could masquerade as an Augustus John–style gypsy in a work called
Gypsy Blood.
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Regular commissions notwithstanding, Varley's domestic and professional life remained as precarious as ever. No sooner was
Stormy Weather
sold in 1921 than the painter faced turbulent weather of his own. Doris Mills claimed that whereas the rest of the Group of Seven were “angels, morally,” Varley “was much more of a libertine.”
34
Shortly after Maud Varley gave birth to their fourth child, his libertinism came to light: intercepting a letter from London, Maud discovered her husband's infidelity with Florence Fretton. She was deeply distressed but ultimately powerless (as Harris was discovering in the midst of his own marital unhappiness). Indeed, as a woman with little money, and as an immigrant with few family connections in Canada, she was far more powerless than Harris. Varley confessed his “follies & indulgence,” claiming that Florence was the first person with whom he had “besmirched” himself.
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The couple resolved to carry on as before. Within the year, using Maud's modest inheritance, they arranged a mortgage on a house on Colin Avenue, a few blocks north of Upper Canada College, on the fringes of Forest Hill. Calm did not descend on the household. Whatever money Varley earned—sometimes sizable amounts from his society portraits—quickly disappeared. Sheets were tacked to the windows for want of curtains, the children ran about “like wild things,” and “tremendous parties” at the house witnessed both Varley and Maud drinking heavily despite the fact that Maud was a Christian Scientist.
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