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Moments in a Century
Twenty events that defined Canadian Culture

by Robert Fulford

My favourite (though by no means nonexclusive) definition is culture that reflects some of the qualities of Canada or of a Canadian region. This reflection can be intentional, as with the Group of Seven, whose explicit desire was to show Canadians their own country, or Gilles Vigneault, who set out to sum up in song the essence of Quebec. More often, though, it emerges unbidden, spontaneously, jumping out of a creator’s mind before he or she knows it is there.

You don’t need to read much of Northrop Frye’s magnificent prose before you discover that this world-famous scholar wrote in a language that was pure Canadian and reflected the essential qualities of his own special Canada, as embodied in the United Church. The more you know of Glenn Gould, the more you understand that his music-making was deeply influenced by what he called, in the title of a famous broadcast, "The Idea of North." And there’s another clue that can identify Canadian cultural works: you know you are approaching something specifically Canadian when the artist (whatever his or her origins) begins to focus on geography. It’s not necessary to be obsessed by geography in order to be a Canadian artist, but it’s a characteristic that crops up again and again.

What follow are the 20 works and events that, to my mind, have most influenced our culture over the last century – each shaped what came after or defined the reality of its time. The selection is arbitrary, of course; others might well make a different selection, and part of the pleasure for readers will no doubt be derived from disagreeing with my choices.

It was the miracle that hopeful authors in isolated corners of the world dream about. In her early thirties and previously known only for hack writing, Lucy Maud sat down in Prince Edward Island and wrote a book that has been thrilling children and adults ever since and still commands TV screens around the world. Today Anne of Greeen Gables, published in 1908, is almost the only old Canadian book that has never been out of print.

The theme was imagination, a perfect start to a century that would prize imagination more than any previous age in history. Anne Shirley defiantly insists on believing in bold thoughts and high spirits even when everyone around her is grimly determined to die of boredom. The author later married a clergyman, moved to Ontario, spent decades dealing with her husband’s depressions and produced many more books. The diary she left behind reveals someone much like Anne, a woman of intense originality who never admitted defeat and met life with wit as well as courage.

Emily Carr confronts West Coast native art

A mainly unknown 36-year-old artist, Emily Carr of Victoria, discovered in 1908 that the great subject of her life, and one of the greatest subjects in the world, lay waiting not far from her doorstep. She began searching out the breathtaking totem poles in Indian villages of British Columbia and Alaska. Painting them was a major step for Carr and for Canada. Over the next two decades she used her ability with postimpressionist art (which she had studied in France) to depict the art of the Haida and other coastal nations. Eventually, she awakened Canadians to the excitement of aboriginal art. Through her, native visual culture began its long trek towards the mainstream imagination of the country, which led to the success of Inuit prints and sculpture, woodland Indian paintings and West Coast art in many forms. Carr’s career was tragic, of course – no recognition from peers until she was in her midfifties, much isolation and depression, few sales in her lifetime. Tragic, but also triumphant.

They were unlikely rebels, half a dozen commercial artists and a millionaire. Their supporters were upper-class Toronto patrons who welcomed the first exhibit into the new temple of culture, the Art Gallery of Toronto (today the Art Gallery of Ontario). The group’s most passionate supporter was the director of the National Gallery of Canada, and one group member was Lawren Harris, heir to farm-machinery riches. Probably no radical artists in history have ever been more favoured by the Establishment of their day.

They won their rebel credentials by insisting on painting Canadian landscapes in their own rough way. They (Franklin Carmichael, A.Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and Fred Varley, as well as Harris) often worked together in the woods of Northern Ontario and developed a characteristic style: thick paint, bright colours, strong patterning. The artists went separate ways in 1933 but remained united in history as a single movement with a mission: to bring Canadians to a more conscious understanding of the natural world. They succeeded, placing their work permanently in the national imagination.

R.B. Bennett, the Conservative prime minister, having thought about it for years, finally established a national, government-sponsored radio network, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC). This was the beginning of government backing for the arts and mass culture, a controversy-strewn endeavour that has been central to Canadian life ever since.

The CRBC led to the birth of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1936 and the National Film Board (NFB) three years later. They both produced material in French and English, but over the next 60 or so years they were more effective in French, reaching a larger share of the French-speaking population than the English. In drama, Radio-Canada developed original characters based on Quebecers and (lacking U.S. competition) won good-sized audiences for everything from soap operas about life in Montreal to brilliantly original documentaries on Quebec society. In wartime, both the CBC and the NFB made themselves essential conduits for propaganda and information. In the postwar years, support grew for a larger government role in culture. The Massey-Lévesque royal commission in 1951 recommended the creation of the Canada Council. By 1958 the council was handing out grants to individual painters and writers. In the 1960s the government began to subsidize feature films and in the 1970s book publishing. Thus, government could be sure of only two things: it could never escape artistic controversies, and it would never be free of artists complaining that whatever it did was not enough.

A major Canadian novelist for several decades, Morley Callaghan had a favourite theme, the conflict between harsh official realities and the private spiritual life based on love and faith. Are these worlds incompatible? The problem appears throughout his fiction, often in the form of parable, at its clearest in Such Is My Beloved, published in 1934. In Depression-era Toronto, an idealistic young priest becomes a sympathetic friend to two prostitutes and runs afoul of parishioners and bishop. The story leads Callaghan’s readers into the ambiguities of love’s fate in a big modern city. Callaghan stood at the forefront of Canadian literature for roughly half a century and his highly professional independent career made him an exemplary figure for a later generation.

When the Second World War began, the NFB barely existed. By war’s end, it was among the world’s largest film studios, with a staff of 787 and 500 films to its credit. During the war years it was a clearing house for war films (including captured enemy footage) and a producer of films to be sent wherever the Allies were fighting. Churchill’s Island was a piece of well-aimed propaganda intended to persuade Americans to assist the Allied cause. It was a 22-minute visual hymn of praise to the success of the Royal Air Force in turning back the German Luftwaffe and to the Royal Navy in asserting its mastery at sea, etc.
The film’s victory in Hollywood was the first in a long series of triumphs there for the NFB; Norman McLaren won for a stop-action antiwar fable, Neighbours, in 1952. These awards encouraged Canadians to believe they could make important films, buttressed the NFB’s claim on the federal budget and helped give Canadian movie makers an inbuilt belief in film as a way of teaching.

For a fierce Canadian nationalist and a relentless explorer of Canadian identity, Hugh MacLennan was remarkably cosmopolitan. A Rhodes scholar who went from Oxford to Princeton for his Ph.D. in classics, he never ceased to think cosmic thoughts about the future of humankind. So it was not unnatural that he borrowed what eventually became Canada’s most famous book title (and part of the Canadian language) from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In the fulfilment of human love, wrote Rilke in 1907, "two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." MacLennan transferred that from the private to the social and imagined Quebec and English Canada striving towards mutual love. Two Solitudes, which appeared in 1945, concerns English-French tension and the effects of modern ways on Quebec. Its emblematic characters, including Athanase Tallard, who wants to bring industry to rural Quebec, are highly articulate about the historical drama they enact. Critics often found MacLennan’s work overly didactic, but he was the most honoured novelist in English Canada, the recipient of five Governor General’s Literary Awards (three for novels, two for books of essays). Today his Barometer Rising (1941) is still widely read, but Two Solitudes remains for ever the book linked with his name.

A 34-year-old English professor, already a legend within the University of Toronto, had news for the literary world in 1947. In Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, he announced that his hero was not merely a writer of some wonderful verses and much incoherent raving, but a profound thinker whose prophecies carried power and meaning for everyone. Frye permanently altered Blake’s status for ever; perhaps no other critic of recent times has changed so fundamentally the world’s view of a major romantic poet.

After that, Frye began taking his place among the world’s literary critics. Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a systematic view of literary mythology and patterns, vastly extended his reputation. At one point, a survey of international publications in the humanities established that Frye was the second most-quoted writer, Aristotle being the first. Within Canada his reputation as teacher and thinker moved out from Toronto in waves, so that to be taught by a student of Frye’s was in itself a distinction. His renown was such that a brilliant but dense and difficult book on the Bible in literature, The Great Code (1982), became a bestseller in Canada, with sales above 17,000. Frye’s influence on succeeding generations was profound and most obviously seen in the work of his most famous student, Margaret Atwood.

He was a working-class boy from Quebec City, mainly self-taught, who became not only a novelist but also a superb magazine writer, the publisher of a big newspaper (La Presse), a TV scriptwriter and an executive in food processing, advertising and lumbering. But his reputation rests in Quebec City’s Lower Town, in the home of a family by the name of Plouffe. Les Plouffe (in English, The Plouffe Family) became the most successful popular novel of its time in Quebec and the basis of our first bicultural TV drama, a series that ran on the CBC in both French and English in the 1950s; in 1981, Gilles Carle directed it as an equally successful feature film. It gives a comic, down-to-earth picture of some sharply observed nationalists, workers, priests and all-purpose romantic idealists caught in a constricted little world from which no obvious escape seems possible. Les Plouffe set the tone for many other Quebec novels and even more TV dramas.

Paul-Émile Borduas starts a revolution

Borduas set out to be a decorator of churches, like his first teacher, Ozias Leduc, but in the 1930s church work dried up. Borduas turned to teaching, began painting, fell under the influence of the surrealist André Breton and eventually found himself both an abstract artist and a passionate modernist who regarded Quebec society of the time as painfully narrow. He influenced many young artists in the 1940s, most famously Jean-Paul Riopelle, and led the Automatiste movement.

In 1948, he partly wrote and signed (along with 15 others) a historic manifesto called Refus global (total refusal), which denounced the power of the conservative church establishment, demanded freedom of expression and praised a cultural future of "resplendent anarchy." Only 400 cheap mimeographed copies were printed, but Refus global swiftly became notorious. Borduas, identified as leader of the group that produced it, lost his teaching position but acquired increasingly heroic status. He moved from Quebec in 1953, first living in New York and then in Paris, where he died in 1960. He left behind a series of magnificent paintings and a reputation as the man who fired the first shot in what became known as the Quiet Revolution.

At midcentury, dance and theatre in Canada took a sharp turn towards professionalism, symbolized first by the creation, in 1951, of the National Ballet of Canada under Celia Franca. Ballet had only tender roots in Canada, but under Franca’s firm and ambitious direction it grew into a sturdy plant. From the first, Franca emphasized classical training and the mastery of traditional ballets like Giselle, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, which have remained central to the company’s image ever since. The word "national" was no mere gesture; the company toured Canada as much as possible. The establishment of the National Ballet School in 1959 set a new Canadian standard in arts education. Over the years, major eminences in the ballet world, notably Rudolf Nureyev and Erik Bruhn, associated themselves with the company while it was developing stars of its own, such as Karen Kain, Frank Augustyn and Veronica Tennant. As an influence on the quality of dance performances, the National Ballet has reached into every corner of Canada.

In the annals of the performing arts in Canada, there’s no legend more lovingly told: A man named Tom Patterson, who grew up in Stratford, Ont., dreamed of producing Shakespeare’s plays in his home town. He recruited one of Britain’s great production directors, Tyrone Guthrie, who roped in his friend Alec Guinness. They decided to perform in a circus tent and somehow pulled together enough actors, most of them Canadian, to present highly creditable productions of Richard III and All’s Well That Ends Well for six weeks, launching what is now a vast institution that runs for more than six months a year, in three theatres.

What dazzled everyone, from the very first night in 1953, was the look of the productions. Guthrie brought in one of the great designers of her time, Tanya Moiseiwitsch. While working with Guthrie on designing the thrust stage, she founded a tradition of brilliantly flamboyant costumes, making that magic summer of 1953 a moment in the history of the visual as well as the performing arts.

When he was 22 years old, Gould was known to every musician in Canada as a pianist of spectacular talent, having often been heard on CBC Radio. But in 1955, the year he turned 23, he emerged into the world beyond Canada. He gave two American concerts and, more important, recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations. His performance – crisp, sharply detailed, powered by amazing energy and confidence – excited admiration all over the world. Giving the Goldbergs more prominence than they had ever had before, Gould seemed to possess them, as if they had been written for him.

Thus began one of the great recording careers, in which Gould set down his interpretations of nearly all Bach and Beethoven keyboard works and much of the repertoire of modern masters such as Schoenberg and Hindemith. In 1964, he surprised everyone by announcing he would give no more concerts but would instead devote his time to recording. Concerts, he said, were out of date; records were the future because they could be altered until perfect. In 1981, he rerecorded the Goldberg Variations, calling this his farewell to solo piano recordings. He was experimenting with orchestral works in 1982, when he suffered a stroke just after his 50th birthday and died.

His recordings keep being rereleased around the world, his many television appearances come out on videos, and he has been the subject of a feature film, a play and a small shelf of books. At the end of the century, his reputation is more vibrant than it was when he was living. To an extent that perhaps even he never imagined, the decision to bet everything on recording rather than performance turned out to be brilliant.

Isaacs: a framemaker opens an art gallery

Avrom Isaacs had a store in downtown Toronto where he sold art supplies and framed pictures. His customers included two ambitious students at the city’s Ontario College of Art, Michael Snow and Graham Coughtry. Eventually, the two talked the store owner into opening an art gallery to show their work and that of their friends’. Isaacs opened the Greenwich Gallery in 1955, changing the name to the Isaacs Gallery in 1957, and then moving to a better location in 1961. The first exhibition included Snow, Coughtry and William Ronald, all soon to become major Canadian artists. Later, Isaacs exhibited the work of Joyce Wieland, Gordon Rayner, William Kurelek, John Meredith and Robert Markle, a cluster of astonishing talents known collectively as "the Isaacs group." They created their own closely focused milieu, musically expressed themselves through the Artists’ Jazz Band and brought to the work they showed at the gallery a rage for excellence. For some years, Isaacs ran the most exciting art space in Canada.

It began as a commission from the NFB, which needed a song to accompany a documentary film, but "Mon Pays" turned into something far more – a sweetly melancholy tune, a touching work of French poetry and a sentimental anthem for the Quebec that lay beyond the big cities. It was a characteristic work of Gilles Vigneault, the summit of his career as a shy, hoarse-voiced chansonnier, the standard-bearer of Quebec culture.

There was something touching in everything Vigneault did, and audiences found that they could identify with him more easily than with many a more polished performer. "Mon Pays" says that the singer’s country, his true homeland, is winter. The lyric speaks of vast spaces, cold winds, snow and the sense of brotherhood that flourishes in this hard-to-conquer land. Wondrously, Vigneault’s poetry transformed snow from an annoyance into part of Quebec’s cultural heritage.

They were an odd couple, as different as any two Canadian university professors could be – Marshall McLuhan, the exuberant showman-professor with a quote for every reporter and a theory for every fact, and George Grant, the glum professor of philosophy who sometimes wondered whether western civilization was really such a good idea after all. But at the midpoint of the tempestuous sixties they were the two leading Canadian intellectuals, each with a following among the young.

McLuhan was a professor of English who more or less invented the study of mass communications with books such as The Mechanical Bride (1951), on the power of advertising, and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), on printing as a cause of cultural change. With Understanding Media (1964), a bestseller, he became an internationally recognized authority on the cultural effects of electronic media. He died in 1980, the same year that Ted Turner started CNN and began putting together the "global village" that McLuhan had always predicted. McLuhan’s reputation, rather dimmed before his death, revived in the 1990s when he was widely proclaimed (by Wired magazine, among others) as a prophet of the Internet.

In 1965, George Grant wrote a disarmingly slim little book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. It seemed eccentric and wilful to some, piercingly intelligent and prophetic to others. It was the work of a political and religious philosopher, then at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., who believed that Americanism was swamping Canadian life and that any hope for an independent Canada was dead. It became the bible of a whole generation that disagreed with its conclusion but quickened to the way Grant saw the world. Often obscure in parts, and sometimes downright incoherent, Lament for a Nation nevertheless started one of the most impassioned debates in Canadian history, a debate over U.S. power that still echoes through editorial pages, common rooms, government offices – and sometimes even Parliament.

Canada stumbled badly in the early stages of planning the world’s fair in Montreal to celebrate the Centennial of Confederation but suddenly pulled itself together and put on a show that everyone agreed was the finest world’s fair ever. A conference of educators and intellectuals at Montebello, Que., came up with a theme, "Man and His World," borrowed from the title of a book by the French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes.

Miraculously, everything came together, including the vast collection of designers and performers sent by the 120 nations taking part. Among the Canadians, Michael Snow stood out for the Walking Woman sculptures he cleverly integrated with the Ontario pavilion. Nearby, the architectural firm of Papineau, Gérin-Lajoie and LeBlanc, with Luc Durand, designed Quebec’s pavilion as an elegant blue cube in glass that beautifully mirrored the nearby buildings in daylight and looked at night like some precious jewel, its lights glittering from inside. The best Canadian filmmakers of their generation went to work, including Christopher Chapman, who did Ontario’s film, A Place to Stand, and Michel Brault, who made Settlement and Conflict for Canada. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome for the United States pavilion was a huge and truly elegant piece of work, stuffed with pop art and other examples of American talent. Moshe Safdie of Montreal designed the Habitat housing project, which made his reputation.

Expo 67 expected 26 million individual paid visits and received 50 million instead, making it history’s most popular world’s fair. It may have been the happiest summer ever experienced in Canada by masses of people. Claude Bissell, the president of the University of Toronto, declared that it was a wonderfully Canadian accomplishment, "a fusing of talents and ideas of the two cultures in such a way as to produce a new creation...." In the summer of 1967, Mayor Jean Drapeau wrote: "History and geography confer on Montreal – almost force upon her – the challenging mission of being a mirror of Canada; a link between cultures, religions and traditions; a witness of the past and a precursor of a more magnificent future still."

From his first poems in little magazines and his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), Leonard Cohen made it obvious that he was an exceptional talent. But no one knew how exceptional, even when he brought out two well-received novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). His particular genius wasn’t obvious until he decided to sing his poems as well as write them. That turned him into a poet-balladeer and made him an international star, a man who projected onto the world stage a combination of wry intelligence and solemn self-regard that seemed to fit perfectly the attitudes of his peers, whether they lived in New York, Berkeley, Saskatoon or Warsaw.

It was in 1968 that he made his identity clear. That year he brought out his first record, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, and that year he won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry with his Selected Poems (1956-1968). Astonishingly, he declined the award. Why? He said it was because he had consulted his poems and they had advised against it, but perhaps it was also because anything connected with a governor general was uncool – and Cohen was defining cool for his generation of Canadians and for admirers everywhere. He’s done that ever since.

At the beginning of 1970, Robertson Davies was a man of accomplishment – an expert journalist, the founding master of Massey College in Toronto, the author of three comic novels and a sheaf of produced plays. No one could call him a failure, but in literature he was not taken seriously. By the end of 1970, however, it was obvious that he was a changed man, transformed by a book that seized hold of him and demanded to be written. Fifth Business turned out to be the first in a trilogy about several characters from southwestern Ontario whose grotesque lives overlap during several decades. Funny and exciting and doom-laden, it set the pattern for the novels Davies wrote from 1970 until his death in 1995, a period that made him the magus of Canadian letters, the mythologer of our Establishment as well as its most acidulous critic. Fifth Business made him into a serious writer on a high level, and for the rest of his life he kept acquiring readers all over the world. At his death, he stood as high as any artist in Canada, a household word. His memorial service ran for an hour on the CBC, the first time an artist had received such recognition.

Every year a dozen or so poetic novels by serious writers appear across the English-speaking world. Of all those published in the last decade of the 20th century, The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje of Toronto, had the most resonance. It won a Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada, shared the Booker Prize in England and was praised around the world. In 1996, Anthony Minghella made it into a widely seen movie, with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes, which won an Academy Award for best direction and for best film, among others. Because of the popularity it achieved on its own, and because of the way the movie magnified its fame, The English Patient symbolized the two most striking phenomena to appear within our culture in that period: the international success and the cultural diversification of Canadian letters in the period 1980 to 2000. For the first time in our history, writers from neither the British nor the French population streams began producing many of the major books. Ondaatje, born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), was one among many, alongside Neil Bissoondath and Shani Mootoo from the Caribbean, Rohinton Mistry from India, Alberto Manguel from Argentina and Josef Skvorecky from Czechoslovakia.

At the same time that the world was entering Canadian literature through these authors, Canadian literature was moving out into the world. In the last quarter of the 20th century, writers as different as Timothy Findley and Anne Michaels, Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood constructed reputations in many countries. In distant corners of Tuscany and Norway, graduate students sat down to write their master’s theses on themes in Canadian literature. It was a whole new world for Canadian letters, something that even Anne Shirley, for all her wild fantasies, could never have imagined.

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