Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Pauline was equally overwhelmed when Alma-Tadema invited her up to what she described as his “paradise home” in St. John’s Wood to see some of his much-admired genre paintings of ancient Greek and Roman subjects. Alma-Tadema had just spent 70,000 pounds (over $3.5 million in today’s currency) remodelling a large, secluded house he had purchased in 1884 from the portraitist and caricaturist Jacques Joseph Tissot. The result was a sixty-six-room Pompeiian extrava-ganza that included a billiard room, three large studios (Alma-Tadema’s wife, Laura Epps, was also an accomplished painter), antique Dutch woodwork, Byzantine leaded windows and a wealth of works by contemporary artists. The vaulted ceiling of Alma-Tadema’s vast studio, which was modelled on an early Christian church, was coated in aluminum to maximize the northern light. Alma-Tadema himself, a squeaky little man dwarfed by his own ambitions, held regular afternoon gatherings, cloyingly described as “Twosday At Homes.” Visitors drifted through the studio, muttering “very par’ful” or “perfectly sweet” as they gazed at canvasses depicting Greek youths and maidens reclining on marble benches, with an azure sea visible through pink flowering almond trees. Pauline could barely suppress a smile as she watched her host “trotting about his studio in a very inartistic tweed suit, serving tea to his guests.” In an article she wrote four years later, she described his “effervescent manner that would seem schoolboyish in anyone else.”

  Alma-Tadema made a fuss over his Canadian guest. He led her to the grand piano and showed her the underside of its cover, which had been covered in parchment and bore the autographs of most of the great pianists and vocalists of the day. He was thrilled because the Polish pianist Ignace Paderewski had added his signature that morning. Pauline immediately felt that she too must make an offering on the Alma-Tadema altar; Alma-Tadema promptly suggested that she should write a poem for him. Ever mindful of the importance of Alma-Tadema’s patronage, Pauline composed a verse that would flatter the fifty-eight-year-old painter. The result, “The Art of Alma Tadema,” celebrates “the Master’s touch” which makes “the marbles leap to life”:

  There is no song his colours cannot sing,

  For all his art breathes melody and tunes

  The fine, keen beauty that his brushes bring

  To murmuring marbles and to golden Junes.

  Through all this coming and going, Pauline never lost sight of her first priority: to get her poetry published. She knew that this required her to build a public profile, and also to knock on publishers’ doors. Soon after she arrived in London, her exotic origins successfully snagged the attention of the press. On June 13, The Sketch, a chatty London weekly, carried an article entitled “Tekahionwake,” which began, “Do not be alarmed, gentle reader. This is no word puzzle. It is the name of a charming young Mohawk Indian lady who has come to England to sing the songs of the Iroquois in the English tongue, and to awaken us to a truer sense of the mental power and high qualities of the people who have the best claim to the title deeds of the vast continent of North America.” Tekahionwake (pronounced “dageh-eeon-wageh”) was Pauline’s grandfather’s name, and she had no legal claim to it. There is no evidence that she had ever used it before she crossed the Atlantic. But in London its use paid off: it gave her added cachet and underscored her novelty. From then on, she incorporated it into her public image.

  The writer from The Sketch went all out in his description of Pauline. Ignoring her true colouring and her gentle grace, the anonymous journalist extolled her “brilliant black eyes, high cheekbones and olive complexion…My eye chanced to fall upon the picture in which a Cherokee Indian, brandishing a scalping knife in a most murderous attitude, stands with foot upon the throat of a writhing Mohawk. ‘But you can’t say you like that sort of thing, Miss Johnson?’ [the writer asked]. ‘I love everything Indian,’” a defiant Pauline replied. Pauline knew instinctively how to play her hand; she both embraced and confronted the stereotype of Indians held by her listener. “I am a Red Indian,” she told the writer, who was thrilled by the young woman’s panache, “and feel very proud…You English, who owe so much to the Indian—where would your British America have been had he helped the French as he helped you long years ago? I daresay you, like the rest, think and write of [the Indian] as a poor degraded savage, walking around with a scalping knife in one hand and a tomahawk in the other, seeking whom he may devour…[But] put a pure-blooded Indian in a drawing-room, and he will shine with the rest of you.” Pauline then recited part of her bloodthirsty poem “The Avenger,” about a young Mohawk warrior who stabs to death his brother’s murderer.

  The Sketch writer was hooked: “Yes, I thought to myself, such a picture of Indian life, delivered in costume, with all the fire of an Indian’s nature, would form a striking contrast to the skirt-dance and tableaux-vivants of the London drawing-room.” The Sketch illustrated the article with two of Mr. Cochran’s photos of Pauline in her “Indian outfit.” In one, Pauline’s expression is as ferocious as a warrior’s, in the other, as heavy-lidded and passionate as a royal courtesan. Pauline, now an expert in manipulating her image, could not have paid for better advertising.

  A few days later, a writer from another London publication, The Gazette, interviewed Pauline. This time, the journalist was less impressed by the Indian paraphernalia draped around Pauline’s room and more interested in the status of native people in the Great Dominion of the North. Pauline met the challenge with a graceful, but firm, description of history from the Indian point of view. She spoke of the political sophistication of the 400-year-old Iroquois Confederacy, and quoted Henry David Thoreau, Francis Parkman and the anthropologist Horatio Hale. She described the welcome given by Canada’s natives to European settlers, and the arrogant assumption of successive British governments that they could take possession of the continent. She explained the art and science of wampum belts, and when asked if she had ever “eaten the Canadian national dish,” replied with a straight face, “No, you have killed off nearly all our beavers.”

  The writer from The Gazette was taken aback by this forthright young woman. He respectfully suggested to Pauline that “You yourself would hardly be leading your present life of culture had it not been for the white man’s invasion.”

  Pauline’s response hints that underneath her bold public face, she was finding it increasingly difficult to retain her self-possession. Here in the heart of the British Empire, the tension between her identities was starting to tell. “Perhaps not the same kind of life,” she replied. “But there are two of me. Sometimes I feel I must get away to the Highlands among a people who seem somehow akin to mine.”

  By the end of June, Pauline’s perseverance had borne fruit. The same Professor Clark in Toronto who had given her a letter of introduction to the Deputy Lord Chamberlain of London had also supplied one to Clement Scott, a respected reviewer whose flowing fur coat and well-filled white waistcoat were watched for with dread at every opening night in London. He had established a reputation for astringent criticism in the 1880s at Punch. Now he was the dean of the metropolis’s critics and wrote for the Daily Telegraph. Scott cultivated the image of an unfriendly curmudgeon, but he had a soft heart as far as husky-voiced young women were concerned. Lillie Langtry, for example, had completely seduced him through a combination of flattery and deference. While other reviewers dismissed her performances as wooden and vulgar, Scott wrote and translated plays for her and gave her warm reviews. Perhaps Pauline knew this, as she employed the same transparently manipulative tactics as Langtry when she bearded the old lion in his den. “He glanced up through an awful scowl,” she later recorded, “growling out, ‘Well?’ There is only one way to deal with a man—that is through his vanity—so I turned to the door again saying, ‘I’m afraid to come in!’” It is hard to imagine that the young woman who had travelled alone across the Atlantic and braved London Society on her own was really scared, but her girlish tactic worked. Scott summoned her back and was flattered when she explained that she was afraid of a man “who can make one o
r ruin one with a stroke of his pen.” Pauline showed him her poetry and said she was looking for a publisher. After glancing at her work, he scribbled a line of recommendation for the London publisher John Lane.

  Scott’s decision to send Pauline to John Lane at Bodley Head was astute. Lane was a self-educated farmer’s son from Devon who had persuaded an antiquarian bookseller in Exeter, Charles Elkin Mathews, to go into partnership with him on a publishing venture. In 1887, the two men had set up a bookstore and publishing company just off Bond Street, in the heart of London’s West End. Lane recognized that as literacy levels rose in industrial Britain, the market for attractive and provocative books was expanding fast. His partner, Mathews, was a cautious bibliophile whose main interest was producing poetry and essays for the literary elite. But Lane, a clever hustler with a genuine interest in new ideas, pushed their firm in more daring directions. He attracted a diverse group of new writers to Bodley Head: exponents of naturalist fiction, women’s rights and erotic decadence. He bought subsidiary rights to remaindered books; in 1892, Bodley Head issued a collection of poems by Oscar Wilde originally published in 1881. Bodley Head subsequently published other works by Wilde himself and by members of his circle: the comic author Ada Leverson, the poet John Gray, the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. By the early 1890s, Bodley Head was acknowledged to be a leading publishing house, with an interesting list of writers and the ability to produce beautifully designed limited editions.

  Lane was particularly interested in new talent—hungry young writers who challenged convention and accepted low fees. One of his greatest coups was the 1893 publication of Keynotes, a collection of short stories by Mary Chevalier Dunne, whose nom de plume was George Egerton. Dunne’s stories appealed to “New Woman,” who resented the limited roles available to her and the Victorian dismissal of her creative and erotic impulses. The phenomenal sales of Keynotes convinced Lane that women writers and women readers were untapped goldmines. Soon he had a stable of writers who looked at marriage with a jaundiced eye. One of his most provocative acquisitions was a manuscript with the racy title The Woman Who Did, about a Cambridge-educated heroine who did what no self-respecting Victorian woman would consider doing: she lived in sin and bore a child out of wedlock. (The author, Grant Allen, came from Kingston, Ontario.) “It is just possible, to say very likely,” gloated its Bodley Head editor, “that it might produce a wholesome and much-needed…controversy.” Scott had assumed, quite rightly, that a Canadian Indian who wrote erotic nature poems and stirring verses about murderous women would intrigue John Lane.

  John Lane’s racy tastes caused tension in the Lane–Mathews partnership and would lead to its breakup within a few months. But the tension did not dampen Lane’s appetite for new writers. He sent Pauline’s poems to a couple of readers to assess. One of them, Pauline later told Saturday Night’s Hector Charlesworth, was John Davidson, a clever and depressive Scotsman who wrote unproducible verse plays. Davidson advised Lane the poems should be published; Lane assigned to Davidson the task of editing them. At first, Pauline found her new editor terrifying; she described to Charlesworth how he would “damn emphatically” some of her lines in his rasping Scots accent. But he also praised others warmly. Steeped in the history and nationalism of his own native land, Davidson must have admired Pauline’s commitment to stand by her own “blood and race.” The Canadian Indian writer and the Scots editor had much in common—love of wild, open landscapes, respect for the complicated clan systems of their own peoples, resentment of the English takeover of their lands. Davidson would have been deeply familiar with the novels of Sir Walter Scott, who had captured Scots’ imaginations with his “twilight of the nobility” prose that struck many of the same nostalgic notes as did Pauline’s poems about long-dead Indian warriors. It may have been Pauline’s conversations with Davidson that inspired her wistful comment to The Gazette that she wished to go to the Highlands and be amongst a people “somehow akin to mine.”

  As a Bodley Head author, Pauline was welcomed at John Lane’s tea parties in his bachelor flat behind the Bodley Head premises. She met critics, authors and editors there, as well as the illustrator E. H. New, who had been commissioned to design her volume. Although only eight of the thirty-six poems selected by Davidson had Indian themes, John Lane mirrored Pauline’s own tactics as he shaped the promotion campaign for her book. Both “E. Pauline Johnson” and “Tekahionwake” were to appear as her bylines on the title page. The first section would consist entirely of the Indian ballads. E. H. New designed a tomahawk and wampum belt to adorn the fine leather cover. Finally, Lane encouraged Pauline to call her slim volume The White Wampum. Pauline’s dedication similarly played up to her image:

  As wampum to the Redman, so to the Poet are his songs; chiselled alike from that which is the purest of his possessions, woven alike with meaning into belt and book, fraught alike with the corresponding message of peace, the breathing of tradition, the value of more than coin, and the seal of fellowship with all men. So do I offer this belt of verse-wampum to those two who have taught me most of its spirit—my Mother, whose encouragement has been my mainstay in its weaving; my Father, whose feet have long since wandered to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

  By now, Pauline’s money was running out. Although she always made friends easily and she had the satisfaction of achieving her goal of publication, she was increasingly lonely. Nobody is more homesick than a Canadian accustomed to gloriously long, lazy summer days spent by lakes and rivers who finds him- or herself stuck in a crowded, stuffy, smoggy city. Pauline’s discomfort was aggravated by the fact that she spent her time crouched over her proofs, reading her own lush descriptions of amorous canoe expeditions, achingly beautiful Muskoka sunsets and the haunting cries of loons and owls. A hunger for Rosseau swept through her as her pencil lingered over her own words from the poem “Under Canvas, in Muskoka”:

  Across the lake the rugged islands lie,

  Fir-crowned and grim; and further in the view

  Some shadows seeming swung ‘twixt cloud and sky,

  Are countless shores, a symphony of blue.

  The scent of burning leaves, the camp-fire’s blaze,

  The great logs cracking in the brilliant flame,

  The groups grotesque, on which the firelight plays,

  Are pictures which Muskoka twilights frame.

  One day Sir Charles Tupper, the Canadian High Commissioner who had developed a very soft spot for the attractive young poet, escorted Pauline through Whiteley’s, the department store off Bayswater Road. As Pauline admired the echoing marble-floored atrium with its twinkling glass dome four floors above, Sir Charles explained to her that the founder, William Whiteley, claimed to be “the universal provider.” “Why,” Sir Charles laughed, “they will secure you guests for your dinner, if others fail. They will marry you here, sell you cradles for your babies, and finally make arrangements for your funeral.” He challenged her to ask an assistant for the item she thought the least likely to be in stock. It took Pauline only a few seconds to think of an item for which she yearned, and that she was confident Whiteley’s would not have: a Peterborough canoe.

  It turned out that Whiteley’s did stock canoes, on the fourth floor. Pauline was impressed. But the sight of her favourite vessel beached in a London store reminded her that it was now July, and at home the canoe meets had begun. When she heard that the American Canoe Association was competing in sailing-canoe races in England, she decided to go and cheer for the leading North American contender. “I hope he will win,” she wrote to Harry O’Brien, her fellow canoe enthusiast. “It would be horrible for a Britisher to beat us on our national sport. The course is a regular mud pond, so cramped and small.”

  Pauline had been in London nearly two months. She had achieved an astonishing amount within a remarkably short space of time: features about herself in national newspapers, publication of her verse, acclaim within both aristocratic and intellectual circles, important new patrons. She had been vindicated as
both a performer and a poet, and she had proven she could pursue her career on her own. Her London success would add immeasurably to her reputation back home.

  And it was time to go home. She had had enough of London’s smogs, strikes and snobbery. She would not wait for The White Wampum to appear in print, although John Lane assured her publication was imminent. She took the train to Liverpool, and on July 9 she stepped aboard a steamship for the return voyage to New York. In a few weeks’ time she would think back nostalgically to England’s “warm hearts, its applause, its possible laurel wreaths.” She confided to Harry O’Brien “the real heartache I had at leaving it just when I had made dear friendships there.” Right now, however, she was glad to be going home—but not as glad as was a large, talkative American woman next to her at dinner one night. Pauline’s neighbour was busy grumbling about the discourtesy of British waiters. “When I asked for ice water,” she complained, “they looked at me as if I were a North American savage.” Pauline stared at the woman through hooded eyes, then replied, “Do you know, that’s just the way they looked at me.” The American, remembering Pauline’s history, enquired, “Was your father a real wild red Indian?” When Pauline said “Yes,” her neighbour continued with a blithe lack of concern: “Excuse me! You don’t look a bit like that!” “Oh?” replied Pauline. “Was your father a real white man?” “Why, sure,” replied the puzzled American lady. “Excuse me, but I’m equally surprised,” snapped Pauline, who rose from the table and stalked off to her cabin. Tekahionwake was more determined than ever to combat thoughtless stereotypes.

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  ACROSS CANADA BY TRAIN 1894