Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  By the time Milne was writing, Canadians had become familiar with the Group of Seven—particularly the work of Jackson and Harris—and most references to the Group included some mention of the darkly handsome young artist who took them north and who lost his life there before he himself could find the fame and success his friends were now enjoying. In the November 11, 1933, issue of the Toronto Daily Star, a comparison was made between Thomson and a play appearing at the Royal Theatre, The Late Christopher Bean. Bean had been a real-life New England artist who’d painted village scenes and became famous only after his demise, when his suddenly valuable paintings were found hanging in hen houses and barns.

  “An enterprising playwright who thinks Chris Bean is a great play,” suggested the Star critic, “might try his hand at Tom Thomson for a better one.”

  The newspaper account then went on to talk far more about Thomson than Bean, telling readers that Vincent Massey—long before he became Canada’s first Canadian-born governor general—owned Thomson’s famous West Wind. The story also included an account about the unidentified writer meeting with a “hotel-man” at Algonquin Park’s Mowat Lodge, who had “several of Thomson’s finest little pictures” in his possession and had things to say about the late artist.

  “They belong to me,” the hotel man told the newspaperman. “Tom used to board here. He never had any money, because he never had enough business brains to sell his own pictures. He paid his bills in pictures. Quite a few of his paintings could be dug up around here, owned by people who boarded him on his lonsome [sic] expeditions. None of us knew how fine they were. We only knew that he had a knack of making this country look mighty wonderful in a picture. Yeah—there ain’t a scene worth a brush around here that he didn’t do something with. He was a darn nice fella, sociable and friendly, but he was one of the most mysterious men I ever saw in these parts—and I’ve seen a few.”

  The “hotel man” is obviously Shannon Fraser, though Mowat Lodge no longer existed. The quotes seem more like bad movie dialogue from the 1930s than anything accurately recorded by the article writer. Fraser, in fact, was known for his careful articulation and for rarely being caught without jacket and tie. Still, the contrived dialogue between the “hotelman” and the newspaper reviewer communicated the notion of Thomson being romantic, rustic and, most of all, mysterious.

  “I can think of no other modern Canadian, in any field of endeavour, who has been as obsessively invented and re-invented as Tom Thomson,” says Sherrill Grace, author of Inventing Tom Thomson. “Louis Riel comes close as the hero of novels, poetry, films and an opera.” But Tom Thomson, she believes, stands alone in the collective imagination of this country.

  In Inventing Tom Thomson, Grace says the manufacturing of the icon began almost immediately after the artist’s death. MacCallum, of course, was first off the mark with his fawning remembrance of Thomson’s abilities in the art studio and the bush. But Grace dates the true launch of Tom Thomson’s iconic image to the work of Blodwen Davies. Davies’ first effort, a slim pamphlet called Paddle and Palette: The Story of Tom Thomson, described a possessed painter and bushman “who lived like a priest tending to the fire in his own soul.”

  In 1935 Davies’ self-published biography appeared, A Study of Tom Thomson: The Story of a Man Who Looked for Beauty and Truth in the Wilderness. Winnifred Trainor is not mentioned and either was never interviewed or refused any involvement. But Davies made plenty of suggestions about the possibility of foul play. Until his book was published, it had been generally accepted that Thomson had “drowned,” which suggests he’d died by accident. There were the rumours, spread mostly by Shannon Fraser, that he had committed suicide, but nothing much was made of such talk beyond the private outrage of the Thomson family and Tom Thomson’s artist friends. Davies asked questions and received answers from most of those directly involved, from Ranger Mark Robinson, who had led the search, to the doctor who’d examined the body and the coroner who’d held a short inquest without seeing the body—and she emerged from her research “with the conviction there had been foul play.”

  From this point on, Tom Thomson was always seen as both artist and mystery, each image feeding off the other. The mystery made the artist more compelling, more saleable; the artist made the mystery more intriguing, more romantic. Soon enough, the mystery side of Tom Thomson had become part of the art. The two essential elements of Thomson were inseparable.

  The influential Canadian Forum put its stamp of approval on the mystery in its March 1941 issue. “[I]n Canadian history,” the journal declared, “the sphinx of the unknown land takes its riddle from [Simon] Fraser and [Alexander] Mackenzie to Tom Thomson.” Thomson, in other words, stood with the great explorers when it came to knowing the country, even though he himself had seen so very little of it. “In several pictures,” the journal continued, “one has the feeling of something not quite emerging which is all the more sinister for its concealment … What is essential in Thomson is the imaginative instability, the emotional unrest and dissatisfaction one feels about a country which has not been lived in; the tension between the mind and a surrounding not integrated with it.” It would be years before literary scholar Northrop Frye would make his famous pronouncement that the fragile Canadian imagination held “a tone of deep terror in regard to nature”—a rather contentious issue, I would argue, but it may well have been that Frye was trying to envision what lay beyond the frames in some of Thomson’s works when he came up with his theories about the “garrison mentality.”

  When it came to Tom Thomson, Frye considered nature a demanding, devouring female, suggesting that “when she was through with him… [she] scattered his bones in the wilderness.” While the great biblical and literary scholar richly deserves the praise he gained in his lifetime, the experience of nature and the affectionate relationship most Canadians have with it was beyond Frye’s ken. City-born and city-bred, he suffered so badly from hay fever that he avoided the outdoors whenever possible. “The Lord’s work for me,” he once wrote in his diary, “is sitting still in a comfortable chair and thinking beautiful thoughts, and occasionally writing them down.” Frye’s notion that nature, the insatiable woman, destroyed Thomson, nature’s dedicated lover, might be an entertaining thought to pass through a head—but perhaps not one to be written down by a hand.

  The Tom Thomson we know today—dark, mysterious, brilliant, a lover of nature and romantically tragic—was largely born in the 1960s. It was a time of great awakening in the country. Canada acquired a new flag in 1965; 1967 was the year of the Centennial celebrations; 1968 brought a canoeing, buckskin-wearing prime minister who captured the imagination of youth and the attention of the world. It was a time of enormous romance in music and lifestyle. Thomson, with his bare-essentials pack, his love of the wilderness, his supposed pacifism and, of course, his attractiveness all led to instant interest in his art and the enduring mystery.

  “Which was the real Tom Thomson?” asked Jim Poling, Sr., in his short 2003 book, Tom Thomson: The Life and Mysterious Death of the Famous Canadian Painter. “A sunny new-century artist eating the best fare offered at the Arts & Letters Club in what was then the country’s second largest city? Or the brooding woodsman dressed in fishing clothes and boiling water on the portage to Tea Lake. He was probably both. Most of us have two different sides, and Thomson’s are exaggerated by the exasperation of people who want to know more about him but can’t because his time in the spotlight was so brief and so long ago.”

  The public did indeed want to know more about him. And it seemed that the more time passed, the more interest he held for Canadians. The National Film Board and the National Gallery had produced a film about Thomson in 1944: West Wind: The Story of Tom Thomson. But it was little more than war propaganda, dwelling on Tom the “good Canadian” and avoiding anything contentious. In 1969, however, the CBC produced its documentary Was Tom Thomson Murdered?, narrated by Thom Benson, which was based largely on research by Judge William Little, who wou
ld publish his book The Tom Thomson Mystery a year later. The CBC film, using re-enactment scenes, would leave no doubt that Thomson had been murdered. The only remaining question was: By whom? When Little’s book appeared, there was a flurry of publicity that served only to heighten interest, including an October 1970 appearance by the judge on the CBC’s popular Front Page Challenge. Little told panelists Pierre Berton, Gordon Sinclair and Betty Kennedy that the only way to solve the issue was to open the family plot at Leith and establish, once and for all, whether Thomson had indeed been buried there. Little said that he had finally convinced George Thomson, Tom’s older brother, that there were now “enough grounds to warrant an investigation”—but, Little added, George Thomson had unfortunately passed away before he could gain the permission of others in the family. (And the Thomson family today, it should be noted, is not convinced that George would ever have agreed to such a thing.)

  Little’s book did much more than Blodwen Davies’ work to convince the general public that there had indeed been foul play at Canoe Lake in the summer of 1917. His was a national bestseller; hers, a self-published book with limited sales.

  Little’s “circumstantial evidence” (as he himself called it on Front Page Challenge) pointed strongly, he believed, to Martin Blecher, Jr., as the main suspect, though the passing years have seen Blecher’s name move somewhat down the list of potential murderers. He firmly embraced nearly all that was said in Mark Robinson’s rambling 1953 interview, in which certain incidents and descriptions appear to contradict Robinson’s own journals of 1917. Little compiled his book in an unconventional manner—using letters, long appendices and even “simulations” to recreate such scenes as the dubious coroner’s inquest. And while his work was clearly popular, not everyone was impressed. Sherrill Grace eventually came to believe that “Little appears not to have solved the mystery, but to have further complicated it.”

  Little’s book had barely moved to paperback when Charles Plewman, the pallbearer, suggested in an interview with the Canadian Press that Tom might have committed suicide because he was under pressure to marry Winnie. Plewman said he already had “one foot in the grave—so I thought I should throw more light on the situation.” He was, in fact, throwing gasoline on the fire Little and the CBC had ignited earlier. Yet the various suggestions that came out of the TV documentary, Little’s book and Plewman’s interview had a far different impact in the late sixties and early seventies than such talk would have had around the time of Thomson’s death.

  In 1917 the artist’s reputation would have been deeply tarnished by the notion that Tom had jilted a woman he was to have married, or worse, had abandoned a pregnant girlfriend. But such talk now merely added a salacious dividend to a mystery that was growing larger and more intriguing as the years went by. Public interest in Tom Thomson’s life and death now matched public appreciation of his art. They were, from this point on, intrinsically connected.

  Not all members of the public found the new speculations fascinating. The insinuation of pregnancy, however carefully couched in vague words, threw Winnifred Trainor’s still-living friends into a fury and led to an outraged letter to the editor, published in both the Toronto Star and the Huntsville Forester and signed by scores of citizens who had known her. “Who’d have said that to her face when she’d be alive?” her longtime neighbour Minnie Carson asked in 1973. “There was never any thought of such a thing from any of the people around here then.”

  The letter did nothing, of course, to stop the speculation. If anything, the mystery merely took on a more romantic and tragic edge.

  In 1976 the first full-length movie on Thomson appeared. Called The Far Shore, it was the creation of well-known Canadian artist Joyce Wieland. Magnificently photographed by legendary cinematographer Richard Leiterman, it suffered from a weak script, poor acting and, in an odd way, the times. The 1970s in Canada were characterized by a desire for independence from the industrial powers of America, the rise of feminism and the continuing conflict between French and English—and all three of these themes were crowbarred into the story. Though the main character was called “Tom McLeod,” played by well-known Canadian actor Frank Moore, there was no doubt who it was supposed to be: McLeod was even filmed painting Thomson’s Jack Pine.

  In the most memorable scene from the movie, McLeod/Thomson and Eulalie/Winnie make languid love in the waters of Canoe Lake—a symbolism that would surely have delighted Northrop Frye. Yet for reasons that only she could know—Wieland died in 1998—the filmmaker chose to focus as much on the suppression of Quebec culture by an overbearing English Canada as on the simple love story. There had been no conflict between French and English at Canoe Lake, as the only French blood would have been in the genes of a few Métis guides, whose forefathers had lost their first language, and the odd bushworker and cook at the surrounding lumber camps. Wieland also insisted on putting a stunningly long chase scene into the movie—featuring canoes—and though she later said it was meant as a satirical tribute to the old-style silent movies of the time, complete with pounding piano, it came across only as ridiculous, especially when characters stopped to take quick energy slugs out of their whiskey flasks. It had no feeling for the Canoe Lake of Thomson’s time or, for that matter, of any time.

  Of far greater significance to the expanding world of Tom Thomson was the publication, in 1977, of Harold Town and David Silcox’s extravagant coffee-table book Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm. The then pricey book—$29.95 to the end of the year, $42.50 thereafter—held 177 full-colour reproductions of Thomson’s work, with art commentary by the flamboyant Town, himself a well-known Canadian painter, and a lengthy biographical treatment of the subject by Silcox.

  The book was to accompany a major upcoming exhibition of Thomson’s work, and the story of its production was itself worthy of a chapter. Publisher Jack McClelland was so concerned that his expensive coffee-table production might be usurped by another Thomson book by Joan Murray, who had already written extensively about the painter, that for years McClelland & Stewart kept the research, writing and periodic payments under a code name: “The Terry Thomas Cook Book.” Researcher Iris Nowell was sent out into the field to gather material somewhat covertly, while Town and Silcox spend a great amount of time working on the text at Town’s Peterborough-area farm. A close neighbour, Orm Mitchell, an English professor at Peterborough’s Trent University and the son of distinguished Canadian author W.O. Mitchell, often visited. The beloved author of Who Has Seen the Wind also came by once and saw a proof of the spectacular cover. Town proudly announced the subtitle would be The Silence and the Storm, and the elder Mitchell shook his head saying, “A little purple, isn’t it?” Purple or not, the book went on to become a major national bestseller and has been reprinted several times in the more than thirty years since it first appeared.

  The lasting legacy of the sumptuous work should have been the glorious reproduction of so many paintings and the addition of numerous found photographs taken by the painter—including one misidentified as “Winnie Trainor,” in which Town describes her as showing “the bony angularity of Katharine Hepburn.” But equally memorable was Town’s bizarre dismissal of Thomson as a “bore,” so far as personal life went, when he was interviewed on CBC radio during the book’s promotion. It was also suggested in the book that Thomson died while standing up in his canoe to relieve himself.

  Town and Silcox’s book once again increased the public’s appetite for Thomson’s work—and for the story of his life and death. On any day at Ottawa’s National Gallery, it is possible to see people standing in awe before Thomson’s well-known work The Jack Pine—almost as if they had just encountered a familiar celebrity. The gallery was quick to purchase the painting in 1918, when, through MacCallum, gallery director Eric Brown was able to arrange the purchase of more than two dozen Tom Thomson originals.

  Many of those works are but sketches, what some would see as the poet’s rough copy of the great verses to come. But to think this a
bout Thomson is to do him a disservice. His great works are his small ones, quickly dashed off while fighting everything from frostbite to mosquitoes, a moment captured that, in fact, cannot be improved upon by enlargement and time.

  Silcox believes Thomson’s sketches are “the only true indicators of his achievements as an artist.” He found Thomson’s large works “over-painted and ponderous.” His small, nearly instant works, on the other hand, held a promise that was sadly never fulfilled. “When he died,” writes Silcox, “his work only just begun, a definition of Canada that might have told us who we were died with him. Our coming of age as a country had to be rescheduled.”

  The Jack Pine and the sketches remain on permanent display at the National Gallery, but the Tom Thomson story seems in a near-constant state of change. Every few years, something new is added to the growing legacy. A 1986 New York Times article by Joanne Kates, who herself has deep Algonquin Park connections, quoted Arthur Lismer calling Thomson “a sort of Whitman, a more rugged Thoreau if you will, but he did the same things, sought the wilderness, never seeking to tame it but only to draw from it its magic of tangle and seasons.”

  A more rugged Thoreau? Who could resist? Given the increasing connection between Thomson’s lifestyle, his mysterious death and his lasting landscapes, “it was as if,” the critic Robert Fulford wrote, “he had disappeared into one of his own pictures.” Tom Thomson, artist, would soon become the stuff of stage productions, Sherrill Grace listing among the many productions Jonathan Welsh’s Letter to the West Wind (1980), Bryan Wade’s Breakthrough (1986), Geoff Kavanagh’s Canoe Lake (1997) and Jim Betts’s Colours in the Storm (2000). Betts’s play, which I saw in Muskoka one summer evening, made much of Winnifred Trainor’s role in the story, setting the scene in 1957, on the fortieth anniversary of Thomson’s death.

  Tom Thomson also began showing up in poetry, from bad long narratives to the works of such celebrated Canadian poets as Dennis Lee and Robert Kroetsch. Kroetsch’s “Meditation on Tom Thomson” opens with: