Flint and Feather Read online

  Then as now, poetry did not put bread on the table. Both Roberts and Lampman had to earn their living. In 1883, Roberts spent a brief period as editor of The Week in Toronto, where he was able to encourage other young poets. In 1885, he returned to the Maritimes to teach English literature at King’s College in Windsor, Nova Scotia. Archibald Lampman turned his back on the church, and in 1883 entered the service of the federal Post Office in Ottawa, where he remained a humble, ill-paid clerk for the rest of his life. But both men continued to heed the “voice from some new paradise of art”; both were determined to persevere with the literary “up and doing.” And both attracted the friendship of others with similar interests.

  Charles Roberts was not the only writer in his family; his cousin Bliss Carman, one year younger, began writing verse while he was still at the University of New Brunswick. Carman had left New Brunswick, first to study in Edinburgh and at Harvard, and then to work in New York as a literary journalist. Carman and Roberts shared more than a common interest in poetry. Like Roberts, Carman liked to dress the part of the literary icon: he always looked slightly dishevelled, in the style common to New York’s bohemian set, and he wore his hair unfashionably long. Both men fancied themselves as lady-killers. But “home” remained the Maritimes for Carman; he made frequent visits to his family, and the two poet cousins seized every chance to discuss the literary world and read each other’s work. Although a more mystical poet than Roberts, Carman, like his cousin, used the east coast scenes of his childhood as the setting for much of his verse: “The running dikes, the brimming tide, / And the dark firs on Fundy side…” His most famous, and much-anthologized, poem was “Low Tide on Grand Pré,” a delicate, eerie seascape:

  The sun goes down, and over all

  These barren reaches by the tide

  Such unelusive glories fall,

  I almost dream they yet will bide

  Until the coming of the tide.

  …

  Was it a year or lives ago

  We took the grasses in our hands,

  And caught the summer flying low

  Over the waving meadow lands,

  And held it there between our hands?

  Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Archie Lampman had established the same kind of supportive relationship with a fellow clerk in the federal public service, Duncan Campbell Scott. As a young man, Scott, like Lampman, was as poor as a church mouse, and he had become a copying clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs when he was not quite eighteen. Painfully shy, since childhood he had poured his emotional and creative energies into music. Lampman opened a whole new world to him. “It never occurred to me to write a line of prose or poetry until after I had met Lampman,” he later admitted.

  The Lampman–Scott partnership was of incalculable benefit to each of them. Lampman himself wrote of his need for stimulating society: “The human mind is like a plant, it blossoms in order to be fertilised, and to bear seed must come into actual contact with the mental dispersion of others. Of this natural assistance the Canadian writer gets the least possible.” By the mid-1880s, Lampman and Scott were setting off together into Quebec on long canoeing expeditions that inspired them, as Muskoka inspired Pauline, to watch, dream and write. They immortalized the tranquillity of Canada’s natural beauties and the mesmeric rhythms of a canoe, just as Pauline did in her verse. Like Pauline’s “Shadow River,” Lampman’s limpid poem “Morning on the Lièvre” suspends the canoeist between water and sky:

  Softly as a cloud we go,

  Sky above and sky below,

  Down the river; and the dip

  Of the paddles scarcely breaks,

  With the little silvery drip

  Of the water as it shakes

  From the blades, the crystal deep

  Of the silence of the morn,

  Of the forest yet asleep.

  In Ottawa, Duncan Campbell Scott [front left) and Archie Lampman [seated behind him, wearing a hat) enjoyed the company of each other and a circle of admirers.

  On winter evenings, when the birchbark canoe had been put away, Lampman and Scott and a few friends would gather in front of a crackling fire in the front parlour of Scott’s home on Lisgar Street. They would discuss each other’s work, the latest Trollope novel from England or the capital’s most recent political scandal. A frequent visitor was William Wilfred Campbell, a former Anglican minister who now worked in the Department of Railways and Canals, whose first book of verse, Snowflakes and Sunbeams, had appeared in 1888. Sometimes Scott and Lampman would walk together across the Minto Bridges to the village of New Edinburgh, where another poet, Achille Fréchette, lived. Fréchette, who spent his days as a translator in the House of Commons, was the brother of Quebec’s Poet Laureate, Louis-Honoré Fréchette. His American-born wife, Annie Howells Fréchette, was related to Pauline: her father and Pauline’s mother were cousins. The Fréchettes ran an interesting little bilingual salon at which any literary figure who appeared in the capital was always welcome. And Scott and Lampman delighted each Christmas in sending out to friends and relatives a card containing a poem from each of them.

  The names of Roberts, Carman, Lampman, Scott and Campbell were all familiar to Pauline Johnson. On occasion, she had received the Scott–Lampman Christmas card (perhaps Scott had run across the young poet with Mohawk blood through his work at the Bureau of Indian Affairs). It was a rare month when Saturday Night did not include verses by at least two of them, and each was represented in Songs of the Great Dominion. (The editor, William Lighthall, conferred on Charles Roberts the title of “foremost name in Canadian song” and used thirteen of Roberts’s poems, including one of his most mawkish works, a verse entitled “Canada” which begins, “O Child of Nations, giant-limbed.”) Their names cropped up in surveys of young poets in both Canadian and American magazines. Critics vied with each other to promote them. Bliss Carman was tagged “the Canadian Tennyson,” while Charles G. D. Roberts was “the Longfellow of Canada.” Most galling to Pauline, when Archie Lampman published his first book, Among the Millet, in 1888, her mother’s cousin William Dean Howells (Annie Howells Fréchette’s brother) was sufficiently impressed to write that Lampman was as good as any American poet.

  Pauline recognized that these poets produced lyric verse to a standard she tried to emulate. But the success of her male contemporaries must have prompted her to ask herself the kind of questions that struggling outsiders always ask when they watch from the sidelines as others triumph. Could she ever aspire to the company of these poets? Was their poetry so much better than hers? Or was it simply that they moved in the right milieu and helped to “boom” each other? How much of Roberts’s success was due to the fact that his work had caught the attention of the famous British poet Matthew Arnold? Was Among the Millet reviewed so favourably in Harper’s because of the cosy links between Lampman, Louis Fréchette and Annie Howells Fréchette? Did Charles G. D. Roberts attract notice in New York because his cousin Bliss Carman, who moved in literary circles there, was prepared to show a relative more generosity than William Dean Howells had shown Pauline herself? Could a woman of her background ever reach Parnassus?

  There were, to be sure, a handful of women who had made their literary mark. Of the sixty-seven poets included in Songs of the Great Dominion, thirteen were women. The editor, William Lighthall, showed surprising discernment when he included seven poems by Isabella Valancy Crawford in the anthology. Crawford wrote in obscurity until she died in 1887 when she was only thirty-seven. Few of her contemporaries recognized the narrative strength of poems such as “Old Spookses’ Pass” and “Malcolm’s Katie”; their titles alone discouraged fastidious critics, and they contained too much raw passion. Many of the images and themes that occur in her verses also crop up in Pauline’s: respect for a living nature, the power of native culture, the canoe as an erotic symbol. With Crawford’s early death, however, her poetry vanished. Lighthall had also included in Songs of the Great Dominion verses by Agnes Maule Machar, Susanna Moodie and Rosanna
Leprohon. But in most cases, only a single poem represented the work of these women, whereas a poet such as Charles G. D. Roberts merited thirteen contributions.

  Alone in Brantford, Pauline was far from the world of literary salons and what Lampman had called “the mental dispersions of others.” Unlike Roberts and Carman, she had nobody on whom she could rely to publicize her poetry. Unlike Lampman and Scott in Ottawa, she had no kindred spirit with whom to discuss her work. Like Isabella Valancy Crawford, she lived in obscurity. She wrote wistfully to Archie Kains, “There are so few friends I write ‘shop’ to, so few who think enough of me to bear with my newspaper chatter and my hilarity when I have success.” She took what steps she could to promote herself. She commissioned a series of photographic cartes de visite in the same way that a musician today might produce a video. Some of these cards were for personal use, but Pauline also allowed them to be sold by newsagents and photographic studios to people who either admired the subject or enjoyed collecting such keepsakes. Pauline told Archie that she was ambivalent about such photos: “I confess it sadly crosses the grain of my own inclinations, to be sold on the street corners for five cents or bought in a shop for twenty. My mother does not mind it as she realises that the road to literary success in this age lies through ‘Booming’—and really, I have climbed such a hard hill that I am willing to consent to anything legitimate that will mean success in the end.”

  But Pauline knew that she had to extend both her intellectual range and her circle of acquaintances if she was going to attain those “heights of Literature.” That’s where, she realized, Archie Kains could be very useful.

  The seventeen letters that Pauline wrote to Archie Kains between 1889 and 1893, now lodged in the National Archives of Canada, trace the course of a relationship that moved, on Pauline’s part, from lighthearted flirtation to intimate trust. Since none of Archie’s replies to Pauline have survived, it is impossible to say what he expected from his correspondent. The two spent relatively little time together. Archie lived only a few months in Brantford in 1888, working at the Canadian Bank of Commerce. The following year, after his transfer to New York City, he returned for a brief visit. (He went on to a distinguished banking career, culminating in his appointment as Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.) A stilted correspondence between “Mr. Kains” and “Miss Johnson” was established in early 1889. Within a few weeks, Pauline admitted Archie to the circle of her admirers by sending him a handkerchief sachet embroidered with a Scottish emblem. “The thistle I selected as the fullest compliment I could offer you—your patriotism is so true and strong,” she wrote. Archie sent Pauline a photograph of himself, which she placed on her writing desk under the window of her second-floor bedroom. But Pauline was at pains to appear both demure and popular; Archie’s photo, she told him, was displayed alongside those of “one or two [others] whom I have known for years.”

  The formal relationship metamorphosed into a warm, platonic friendship in late 1889, when Pauline visited Archie in New York City. He may have casually suggested she call on him if she was ever in the city, or he may have urged her to find an excuse to visit the most important cultural centre on the North American continent. Pauline obviously wasted no time in arranging a visit with both personal and professional goals, although the train fare and other costs must have strained her resources. The professional goal was publicity. Pauline had already met the American anthropologist Harriet Maxwell Converse, who knew of the Johnson family from Chiefswood days and who lived at 155 West 46th Street. Mrs. Converse was happy to offer Pauline accommodation since she had followed the young Mohawk poet’s career with interest. While Pauline was staying on 46th Street, she and Mrs. Converse had several long conversations. They formed the basis of an article that Mrs. Converse later wrote for the Buffalo publication Twentieth Century Review.

  The personal goal, of course, was to improve her acquaintanceship with Archie Kains. She spent an inordinate amount of time on her wardrobe for the visit. A friend called at Napoleon Street while Pauline was carefully fitting on a dress form a beautiful gown of rose cashmere and wine velvet. The friend commented admiringly, “How nice you are able to sew; you can make your own dresses when you are married!” Pauline retorted, “When I am married I do not intend to make my own dresses.”

  Pauline’s trip to New York did not culminate in marriage. Perhaps Archie did not have enough time to show Pauline around; perhaps he suffered a bout of the dreadful “glooms,” which he mentions in a couple of letters; perhaps, like Michael Mackenzie, he found this intense woman, some years older than he was, too rich for his blood. Archie was a reserved man with deeply conventional views of male and female behaviour, and Pauline was a passionate woman who did not always hide her feelings. He was not as attentive to Pauline during her

  Pauline poured her heart out to Archibald Kains, an upand-coming banker, in letters that went far beyond “floating chit-chat.”

  visit as she had hoped. “I remained in both morning and afternoon,” reads a note from Pauline, “and need scarcely tell you, I was disappointed when you did not come…Tuesday evening I will be at home and shall expect you.”

  Archie did not entirely neglect Pauline while she was at Mrs. Converse’s. He took her to the most popular art show of the year, an exhibition at the New Jersey Academy of French paintings of the Barbizon School. He escorted her to a theatrical performance in Brooklyn, which starred Edwin Booth. Booth, said to be the best actor of his generation, was a member of the famous American acting family that included John Wilkes Booth, who had shot Abraham Lincoln. (Edwin Booth’s nickname was “the Prince of Players,” but he also had to suffer the ignominy of being known throughout his life as the brother of “the President-Killer.”) Pauline felt her intellectual horizons expand on these expeditions. Archie quietly explained to her where the village of Barbizon was, and why Jean-François Millet’s painting The Angelus was so important. The two of them discussed Booth’s performance in Hamlet, and whether the actor was overdramatic as he delivered the Prince of Denmark’s lines. Despite Archie’s deliberate disregard of Pauline’s sensual charms, he admired her quick intelligence. Each enjoyed the other’s company; they were soon on first-name terms. Not for the first time, Pauline skilfully turned an unsuccessful romance into a comfortable companionship.

  After Pauline returned to Brantford, she wrote a touching letter of thanks to Archie for the friendship of someone with “that almost divine gift of imparting instruction without permitting one to feel [one’s] ignorance…I never object in the least to let [you] see I have no education and comparatively no advantages…It is a happy gift and a rare one, and I often speak of it in connection with you and the generous kindness you showed me in New York.” She pinned a sepia reproduction of The Angelus, sent by Archie, to her bedroom wall. And she continued to cherish Archie’s letters for the education she gleaned from them. “I like a man,” she wrote to him in October 1890, “to write on business, commercial or labour topics as you sometimes do. It is one of the most delicate compliments…paid me to receive a letter from you and feel while reading it that you have written as to an equal in understanding and intellect.” She thanked him for not restricting his letter “to idle nothings or floating chit-chat that so many men think they ought to write and talk to a girl. I hate people to think they must lighten a subject before I have the brain capacity to follow it.”

  Pauline had other acquaintances besides Archie on whom she relied for new cultural experiences. She was particularly proud of her friendship with the members of Rosina Voke’s touring theatre company. Voke was a well-known American actress who had launched her career on the New York stage as a child actress alongside her two sisters in a comedy, Belles in the Kitchen, in 1872. She now had her own touring company, specializing in the kind of burlesques and melodramas that late-nineteenth-century audiences loved. Voke was always the star, and she had the critics eating out of her hand. The theatre critic for the New York Times enthused about her
acting, singing and dancing skills, as well as her “unquenchable vivacity” and “delightful drollery.” In 1889, he was euphoric about Voke’s performance in the farce The Circus Rider at Daly’s Theater, New York, which included on stage a “wonderful impromptu exhibition of skill as a bareback rider.” Voke’s leading man was usually Courtney Thorpe, an old ham of an actor who excelled at playing handsome suitors and English milords.

  Pauline’s first encounter with Rosina Voke’s company was probably in Hamilton in 1886, when her brothers Beverly and Allen regularly took her to whichever travelling shows were in town. Twice a year, the company also spent a week in Toronto and played the Grand Opera House on the corner of Yonge and Adelaide streets. Pauline made every effort to see Voke’s company when they were in Canada, and she was soon on friendly terms with Voke herself, as well as with Thorpe and an elderly English actor named Charles Bell. Bell was a minor player in Voke’s company, but he was appreciated for his impeccable British accent (his father was the Rector of Cheltenham). In November 1890, he and his Philadelphia-born wife invited the young Brantford poet to join them as their guest at Rossin House, a large hotel on Toronto’s York Street. Pauline was overjoyed. Rossin House, a magnificent five-storey building of freestone and white brick, was the height of Victorian luxury. It boasted 180 well-furnished bedrooms, 15 ground-floor stores, a ladies’ parlour and gentlemen’s baths. However, it was not Rossin House’s splendours that thrilled Pauline. It was the opportunity to acquire some stagecraft.

  During Pauline’s visit, the high point of each day was the evening’s entertainment in Toronto’s most up-to-date theatre. Rosina Voke’s company had brought five productions to the Grand Opera House, all of which had done well in New York: A Double Lesson, Wig and Gown, A Corsican Legacy, My Milliner’s Bill and A Game of Cards. Each night, a different play was performed to sellout crowds in the Grand’s 1,750-seat domed auditorium. “You would not have known me, I was so swell,” Pauline reported joyfully to Archie. “I had a box at the Grand every night and disported [myself] as a very great snob!” She was intrigued by Rosina Voke’s performances, particularly when the actress was portraying society ladies. She watched Voke glide across the stage, carriage erect; she saw how she responded to the audience’s laughter, applause or fidgets. Unkind critics sometimes suggested that Voke never acted from the heart; she was too busy parodying either the character she was playing or a more famous actress, such as Sarah Bernhardt. But her audiences didn’t care. They loved her beauty, her sense of timing, her coquettish manner and her wit. Pauline drank it all in.