Flint and Feather Read online

  And yellow gold; I only claim

  The shadows and the dreaming.

  The Muskoka poems gave momentum to Pauline’s reputation. Her verses had been appearing in the Toronto magazine The Week since 1885; between 1888 and 1891 at least thirty-seven poems by Pauline (including both nature and love verse) appeared in Saturday Night, and other poems appeared in the Globe, the New York magazine Outing and a Montreal publication called Young Canadian. In addition, she began to write prose for a variety of publications. In the summer of 1890, the Brantford Courier carried three pieces that she wrote under the pseudonym Rollstone with the heading “Charming Word Pictures, Etchings by an Idler of Muskoka and the Beautiful North.” Pauline sold three jaunty articles about Muskoka to Saturday Night the same year, and two more in 1891. The Weekly Detroit Free Press took a piece from her on canoeing for its July 1891 issue. Mr. Worman, the editor of Outing magazine, was obviously quite taken with his “New Woman” contributor: he commissioned her to write a series of columns on “Outdoor Pastimes for Women.” (In a slangy and subversive private letter to “My dear Mohawk,” Outing’s deputy editor warned Pauline not to let herself be exploited: “Never forget that Worman is a Jew heart and soul, and don’t allow him to hold you too cheaply. Never be afraid to put a decent price on your articles—they’re worth at least $5 per page.”) Pauline wrote about canoeing, skating, tobogganing, snowshoeing and women’s hockey with breathless enthusiasm, suggesting that outdoor exercise bestowed sex appeal as well as good health on participants: “The girl who can weather the wintry gale…will slay more than bears, will bring to her feet rarer game than deer.”

  Like any neophyte writer, Pauline revelled in her successes. Each Saturday, she waited anxiously for copies of Saturday Night to arrive at the Brantford newsagents. She would quickly thumb through the twelve-page newspaper-style weekly. On her first read-through, she scarcely noticed the front page illustrations; the items about the Cawthra, Kirkpatrick, Mulock and Ross families in “Social Notes”; the sections entitled “Boudoir Notes” and “Varsity Chat”; the reviews of concerts, plays and art shows; the advertisements for Pears’ Soap, Carter’s Little Liver Pills and Health Brand Undervests. She went straight to the right-hand column on page 6, where each week four or five poems appeared, and ran her eye quickly down the bylines. Would they include the Saturday Night regulars, such as Ernest Leigh, Eugene Field, A. L. McNab or Pauline herself? Or had some newcomer caught the editor’s eye that week—some potential rival of whom she had never heard?

  The muse was working overtime in late-nineteenth-century Canada—a period in which poetry was considered the highest of the literary arts. There were many Canadians with poetic pretensions and names to match: Violet Roberts, Esther Talbot Kingsmill, Ella Maude, Emma Seabury, Jas. A. Tucker. As Pauline read, she kept her fingers crossed. If one of her verses appeared, she knew she could expect congratulations from friends like the Mackenzies—and a cheque for $5 in the mail.

  She couldn’t help cataloguing all her published work in a jubilant letter to Archie Kains. She knew she was boasting, but she added defensively, “If you could look into my life sometimes when a long ill wind has blown, and see how barren of encouragement are the days that often crowd with worry and work you would forgive my utter childishness when I take a step upward, and add a little space to my range of vision that sometimes sees but clouds.”

  The most significant step upward in Pauline’s career at this point was her appearance in a publication with a longer shelf life than newspapers and magazines. In August 1888, when she returned from her first trip to Muskoka, she found a letter waiting for her from William Lighthall, a Montreal lawyer and author. Lighthall had been asked by a British publisher to put together an anthology of Canadian poetry. It would appear as a volume in the Windsor Series, which was intended to encompass literature from all corners of the British Empire. A volume on Australian poetry had already been published, and all the proposed volumes would include in their frontispiece this drumbeat for Imperial unity:

  When men unto their noblest rise,

  Alike for ever see their eyes;

  Trust us, grand England, we are true,

  And, in your noblest, one with you.

  Lighthall had sent Pauline, along with several other leading poets, a circular requesting contributions to his proposed anthology, in which he intended to celebrate the young poets of a young nation. The tone, it was clear, would be furiously patriotic.

  Pauline was flattered and excited by Lighthall’s request. Inclusion in such an anthology vaulted her out of the ranks of Sunday poets and into the literary pantheon. At the same time, however, Lighthall’s letter alerted her to the importance of controlling where her verses appeared and of ensuring that she was always paid for them. She was happy to contribute, she told Lighthall, but she wanted to keep the copyright to anything she published. She was nursing the dream of every young writer: to see her own work between hard covers. “My intention,” she wrote, “is to publish a book sometime in the future for which I wish to procure and own the copyright myself.”

  By return of post, William Lighthall reassured her that she would keep the copyright to her verses. Pauline threw herself into the challenge of choosing her submissions. Lighthall had requested material that illustrated “Canada and its life”; he wanted descriptive rather than subjective poems. Pauline sent him four examples of her work. The first, “In the Shadows,” she described as “one of my best poems on canoeing, a sport I am fond of.” The second, “Cry from an Indian Wife,” was one of a handful that she had written that drew on her Indian background. The third, “At the Ferry,” described the creaky old ferry across the Grand River. The fourth, “Joe,” was about a young Irish boy on a summer’s day. “They are the poems,” she told Lighthall, “I consider my best and are most of them Canadian in tone and colour.” She knew he would give attention to “Cry from an Indian Wife,” on account, as she said, “of my nationality,” and she promised to send another Indian poem, “The Indian Death Cry,” if he wanted more. But she finished her letter, “I request you to particularly notice ‘In the Shadows.’”

  Lighthall’s anthology, entitled Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada, was published in London the following year, 1889. In his introduction, Lighthall promised readers that they would catch “something of great Niagara falling, of brown rivers rushing with foam, of the crack of the rifle in the haunts of the moose and caribou, the lament of vanishing races singing their death-song as they are swept on to the cataract of oblivion…” The anthology featured 67 poets, whose 164 poems were divided into 9 sections with titles like “The Imperial Spirit,” “The Spirit of Canadian History” and “The Voyageur and Habitant.” Two of Pauline’s poems were included: “In the Shadows” appeared in a section on “Sports and Free Life,” “At the Ferry” in the section headed “Places.” However, Lighthall did not use Pauline’s “Cry from an Indian Wife”; instead, most of the poems in the section called “The Indian” were doleful paeans to past native glories penned by British-born men. Pauline pored through Songs of the Great Dominion, puzzled by Lighthall’s principles of selection and intimidated by the erudition and skill of the other contributors.

  It was exciting to be an up-and-comer in literary circles, but it was also daunting. The more Pauline wrote and read, the more she realized that it was a highly competitive world—and that she, as an ill-educated woman, was at a distinct disadvantage.

  9

  THE HEIGHTS OF LITERATURE 1891–1892

  ON a chilly March morning in 1891, Pauline Johnson bent down and gathered up the mail from the doormat in the dark hallway of the Johnsons’ Brantford house. She felt wretched. A cold that she had caught at Christmas had lingered for weeks, migraines had laid her low on several occasions and her vision was blurry. A doctor in Hamilton told her she had strained her eyesight. Ill health had plunged her into what she called “unutterable gloom,” which threa
tened to “grow and become stronger and finally master one.” Moreover, as the winter months dragged on and spring seemed as elusive as ever, her mother had found plenty to complain about too: rheumatism, arthritis in her hands and, like Pauline, problems with her eyesight. Emily, Evelyn and Pauline all knew that more coal and modern gas lighting in their Napoleon Street home would alleviate some of these problems. But such luxuries were out of reach of Emily’s minuscule annuity and Eva’s modest salary. Beset by depression and financial pressures, Pauline was incapable of producing any literary work, in prose or verse.

  Instead, she spent the dark winter months brooding over various reverses she had suffered and over her inability to make a decent living as a writer. Although her work now appeared regularly in Canadian and minor American publications, she had been unable to break into the top end of the American magazine market. Eleven American magazines had turned down her poem “In the Shadows.” The editor of Harper’s, William Dean Howells, had scrawled in the margin, “It will never go. It has no backbone!” Since Howells was her mother’s first cousin, Pauline was doubly hurt by this brush-off. Even the poem’s inclusion in Lighthall’s anthology could not compensate for Howells’s rudeness. “No one would expect that a little watercolour of a sunset would have any backbone,” she complained. “With a big painting in oils it would be different. That poem was a little watercolour picture.”

  But on that March morning, Pauline examined an envelope which was addressed to her and carried the postmark of Danvers, Massachusetts. She opened it and pulled out the single sheet of paper inside. A smile spread slowly across her face as she deciphered the crabbed, forward-leaning script that covered it. “My dear Miss Johnson,” it read. “I have rec.d. with great pleasure thy poems so kindly sent me. They have strength as well as beauty, and study and patient brooding over thy work will enable thee to write still better.”

  Some weeks earlier, Pauline had decided to seek out a well-placed sponsor in the American market, who would (in the idiom of the day) “boom” her work. She had sent a selection of her poems and a photograph of herself to John Greenleaf Whittier, the eighty-four-year-old American poet famous for his pastoral evocations of New England farm life. She probably chose Whittier at her mother’s urging; like Emily’s own father, John Greenleaf Whittier was a Quaker who had fought tenaciously against slavery. It is possible that Henry Howells and John Whittier were known to each other. Now, in March 1891, Whittier had sent a gracious reply praising Pauline’s work and suggesting that “There is a splendid opportunity before thee.”

  Whittier was particularly impressed with a series of poems on Indian themes. The selection would have included some of the long narrative poems that are amongst Pauline’s finest work: “Ojistoh,” about a Mohawk wife who kills her Huron captor; “As Red Men Die,” about a Mohawk chief who dies a proud death on a bed of coals; and “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” about the sorrow of both Indian and European settler women as their menfolk fought each other in the 1885 Riel Rebellion on Canada’s prairies. The poems were clearly influenced by Longfellow’s Hiawatha, but the themes were original and the voice authentic. They were full of blood and thunder, rape and murder. “It is fitting,” remarked the American poet, “that one of their own race should sing the songs of the Mohawk and Iroquois in the English tongue.” He signed his note, “Thy aged friend, John G. Whittier.”

  Grinning broadly, Pauline read the letter again. A huge weight seemed to have lifted from her heart. She rushed into the parlour, where her mother was sitting, and read out Whittier’s comments to Emily. In a letter to Archibald Kains in New York City, Pauline described the effect on her of Whittier’s words. They came, she wrote, “like a wreath of bays to me…Ah Archie! You do not know how I love the dear old man now who has penned with his trembling aged hand those dear encouraging words to me. His is such a beautifully simple pure mind and he so loves all races in America that my heart goes out to him, as it did in my childhood to dear dead Longfellow.” Pauline treasured Whittier’s letter all her life. Years later, she told an interviewer that “I owe to Whittier all I have ever accomplished for he first gave me faith in myself.”

  Pauline needed such a lift in 1891. She had just passed her thirtieth birthday, and her life seemed stalled. Most of her girlfriends were married, and she knew that she risked being labelled “old maid.” Granted, her performances with the Brantford Players had earned her local celebrity, and her poems enjoyed a respectable readership in Saturday Night. No less a person than Arthur Hardy, the local Liberal MPP, had sent her a note of congratulation on her verses. Hardy, who would serve as Premier of Ontario between 1896 and 1899, employed Frank Yeigh, a school-friend of Pauline’s, as his personal secretary. Frank probably drafted the complimentary letter. The abject gratitude of Pauline’s reply to Hardy indicates how low her morale had sunk: “Your kind notice of my little poem I will always regard as an imperishable laurel leaf in my tiny wreath…I can scarcely tell you how often an author requires approbation or how dear is the handclasp of encouragement when it does come. Your praise and approval of my work will lighten many a hard road that I must needs tramp over before I reach the heights of Literature I mean to attain.”

  Some of Pauline’s low spirits were attributable to her dawning recognition that she was ill-equipped to attain those heights of literature. An education that consisted of a few years in the reserve’s one-room schoolhouse and two years at Brantford Central Collegiate had left her with a good knowledge of English Romantic verse and a respect for classical metre, but not much else. Most middle-class girls in this period received minimal education because they were destined for marriage, but Pauline’s schooling had been particularly hit-and-miss. She knew little of the world beyond southwest Ontario; she was too poor to travel or to buy many books; she was rarely able to rub shoulders with other writers. Friends and acquaintances in Brantford who shared her interests or had a wider world view, like Sara Jeannette Duncan, Michael Mackenzie and Archie Kains, had all moved on to larger cities and bigger challenges. And Pauline knew that “the heights of Literature” that she wished to scale were dominated by a small cadre of poets. She had much in common with these “Confederation Poets,” as critics dubbed them fifty years later. They were exactly the same age as she was; they also wrote about the Canadian landscape; they were all represented in William Lighthall’s anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion. But there were significant differences. The Confederation Poets were well-educated men who shared a cosy, but competitive, intimacy from which she felt excluded.

  The most important Confederation Poets were two New Brunswick cousins, Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, and two Ottawa civil servants, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott. Three of the four were sons of church ministers (Bliss Carman was the exception); all were steeped in the intellectual rigour common to sons of the manse. Sometimes two more names are included in the “Confederation Poets” galaxy: William Wilfred Campbell and Frederick George Scott, whose work is in a similar vein but not of such fine quality. Thanks to the kind of classical education that Pauline had not enjoyed, these earnest young men were able to articulate and argue about the challenges facing Canadian poets. In her own work, Pauline herself had wrestled with these issues, although she had neither the opportunity nor the vocabulary to express them. How could a Canadian poet steeped in British Romantic poetry, in which nature is used as a metaphor for both God and the human mind, reconcile this tradition with the vast, untamed landscape of the Great Dominion of the North? Could a former colony establish its own literary culture shaped by its own history and geography?

  The first of the Confederation Poets to see his work in print was Charles Roberts, a stocky, energetic man with a bristling moustache and a penchant for women and floppy felt hats. In 1880, at the astonishingly young age of twenty, he published a volume entitled Orion, and Other Poems. Orion appeared only thirteen years after Confederation, when the newborn nation of Canada still looked to London for its culture. As William L
ighthall had discovered while gathering material for his anthology, there were plenty of Sunday poets in the Great Dominion scribbling away about sun-fleck’d fields and babbling streams. But most of the verse finding its way into Saturday Night and other publications was ersatz Wordsworth: sentimental, superficial and strangely detached from the dramatic reality of Canadian vistas and seasons. Charles Roberts’s poetry, in Orion and subsequent publications, was a departure from all that. Although he wrote in classical metre, his verses mingled myth and landscape and were firmly rooted in the apple orchards, potato fields and salt flats of his native New Brunswick.

  Roberts’s achievement spurred on other aspiring poets. A copy of Orion fell into the hands of another twenty-year-old, a frail young man with a broad brow and haunted brown eyes who was enrolled at Toronto’s Trinity College (subsequently part of the University of Toronto). Archibald Lampman sat up all night reading and rereading Roberts’s vigorous and melodic poems. “Like most of the young fellows about me,” he wrote later, “I had been under the depressing conviction that we were situated hopelessly on the outskirts of civilization, where no art and no literature could be, and that it was useless to expect anything great could be done by any of our companions, still more useless to expect that we could do it ourselves. It was like a voice from some new paradise of art, calling to us to be up and doing.” He was sleepless with excitement when he finally closed Roberts’s slim volume. As the sun rose, he pulled on a sweater and went out into the meadows that surrounded the old Trinity building. He found himself looking at the world with new eyes: “The dew was thick upon the grass, all the birds of our Maytime seemed to be singing in the oaks, and there were even a few adder tongues and trilliums still blooming on the slope of the little ravine. But everything was transfigured for me beyond description, bathed in an old world radiance of beauty…I have never forgotten that morning, and its influence has always remained with me.”