by Ross King
The course of these events was followed closely by A.Y. Jackson. A few months earlier he had been in no hurry to enlist, but by the spring of 1915 he was beginning to change his mind. Since returning to Montreal several months earlier he had taught an art class at the Art Association of Montreal and then gone to Émileville for some plein-air sketching. After the excitement of the “young school” developing in Toronto, however, Montreal was a disappointment. A letter to Arthur Lismer proclaimed him to be “out of sympathy with the art world here. Their whole outlook is so puny and narrow.” Events in Europe, furthermore, had left him increasingly unsettled. “The war is not giving me much inspiration to paint,” he lamented.5
Not only had Jackson’s friend Randolph Hewton volunteered, but so too had his brother as well as Arthur Nantel, his former boss at the lithography firm where he had begun his career. Besides the radio reports and the newspapers, there were posters on every street corner urging people to purchase war bonds, donate to the Patriotic Fund, increase productivity, support the Canadian Red Cross (the wife of whose founder perished on the Lusitania) and, of course, enlist. At first Jackson disparaged such patriotic appeals. “The Canadian spirit which one hears so much about won’t stand very close inspection,” he predicted to Lismer at the beginning of February. He found it inconsistent and richly ironic that in peacetime, newspapers force-fed Canadians a constant diet of American news and entertainment—“divorce scandals, stock comic pages”—but now suddenly they began urging Canadians to “be British” and fight for their heritage.6 But news of the Canadian heroism at Kitchener’s Wood and St. Julien forced him to reconsider. Nantel, who had joined the 14th Royal Montreal Battalion at the age of forty-one, was captured by the Germans at the Second Battle of Ypres. Jackson learned of the battle, and of the poison gas attacks, one morning in late April. “I knew then that all the wishful thinking about the war being of short duration was over.” 7 By the middle of June he had enlisted in the 60th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Victoria Rifles of Canada). He was not alone: 35,000 other Canadians joined up in the weeks after the Second Battle of Ypres, virtually doubling the number of Canadians under arms.8
Jackson’s height was recorded as five foot six inches, and he was given the regimental number 457316. Lawren Harris, in a characteristic gesture of generosity, urged Jackson to apply for an officer’s commission, offering to defray all expenses. “But I knew nothing about soldiering,” Jackson later wrote, “and decided to start at the bottom as a private in the infantry.” 9
Jackson went with the thousand other men of the “Silent Sixtieth,” as the battalion was known, to Camp Valcartier, twenty kilometres northwest of Quebec City. Here, on a twelve-thousand-acre site, he and his fellow recruits began learning the art of handling guns.
ALTHOUGH TWO-THIRDS of those who enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the first months of the war were British immigrants, the three English-born members of the “young school”—MacDonald, Lismer and Varley, all with wives and young children to support—remained in or near Toronto. In the spring of 1913 MacDonald had moved with his wife and twelve-year-old son, Thoreau, to Thornhill, twenty kilometres north of downtown Toronto. For the best part of a year they rented a red-brick house before moving in the spring of 1914 to a clapboard farmhouse with a stable and four acres of land. MacDonald paid $6,500 for the property, promptly christened Four Elms. From here he commuted down Yonge Street, on the Toronto and York Radial Railway, to work at the Studio Building.
There was increasingly little commercial work for MacDonald. One of his few sources of income was the $500 first prize in a contest to design a colour poster for the Patriotic Fund, which offered financial support to the wives and families of Canadian soldiers overseas. For Canada and the Call, he depicted a white-robed figure of Britannia holding a Union flag and resting her hand on the shoulder of a
coverall-clad ploughboy as the pair gazed at a troop of Canadian soldiers marching determinedly past. Behind them, in a delicate spray reminiscent of A.Y. Jackson’s The Red Maple, were the crimson leaves of a maple sapling.
Even with the prize money, MacDonald, forced to meet hefty mortgage payments on Four Elms, was suffering financially. “The hard times are hitting Jimmie pretty badly,” Frank Carmichael wrote to Ada Went, “perhaps worse than any of the rest of us.” (Carmichael too was having financial woes: on the eve of his marriage, he was preparing to move to Bolton and take work decorating hearses for the local undertaker.) Compounding MacDonald’s problem was the fact that his wife, Joan, suffered health problems: she was, according to Carmichael, “invalided most of the time.” 10 Her parents soon moved into the farmhouse to help MacDonald care for her.11
Although the National Gallery made a timely purchase of Snow-Bound, MacDonald’s earnings nonetheless dropped so drastically in 1915 (he would earn only $624 for the entire year)12 that in the spring he and Joan took in lodgers: Arthur Lismer and his wife and daughter. The Lismers were likewise in dire financial straits. Lismer had even abandoned his space in the Studio Building and—much to the dismay of Thomson, who hated to see his private sanctum invaded—moved his painting gear temporarily into the shack.13 He moved his family into Four Elms and, with the help of MacDonald and his son, tried to ease their mutual plight by growing vegetables both for their own dinner plates and for ready cash.
The asperities of the war had forced MacDonald into the kind of self-sufficiency practised by the man after whom he named his son. MacDonald had always admired Henry David Thoreau. According to his old boss at Grip Limited, Albert H. Robson, his favourite authors were Thoreau and Walt Whitman.14 What he admired in Walden, first published in 1854, seems to have been the same thing that Lismer esteemed in one of his own idols, Edward Carpenter: a critique of a society in which wealth and material possessions caused a deterioration of the human spirit. Thoreau was distressed by such “improvements” to nineteenth-century life as the telegraph, the railroad and the “quack vials” of modern medicine. He wished human beings to become a harmonious part of nature rather than, as many believed themselves to be by the middle of the nineteenth century, a distinct and domineering force. It was an appealing philosophy for many of the Algonquin Park painters and one that might have provided some consolation for the frail MacDonald as he leaned on his hoe in the garden at Four Elms.
Four Elms included on its west side a garden planted with sunflowers, asters and chrysanthemums, beyond which lay an apple orchard and an old stable. MacDonald’s first winter in the house had seen him painting the view of his snow-laden spruce trees; in the summer of 1915 he made sketches of his new garden. Reaching for the brightest pigments in his paintbox, he depicted large sunflowers drooping amid the dazzling colour of the purple asters and blood-red chrysanthemums. Lack of funds meant he worked on pieces of fibreboard—used by bookbinders—rather than wooden panels or canvas.
Around the same time, MacDonald painted a work of a different sort, a poster designed for the war effort but apparently never printed. Already he had done a stark image of warfare for the December issue of the Canadian Magazine, the original of which he exhibited at the 1915 OSA exhibition. Satirically entitled Forward with God, it portrayed a sword-wielding Kaiser Wilhelm astride a white horse being led by a skeleton across a field sewn with corpses and skulls. His poster Belgium was equally graphic: a menacing-looking black bird perched on a bare tree above a hooded woman with her head sorrowfully bowed. If these figures were inspired by Symbolist images such as those in Carlos Schwabe’s classic The Gravedigger’s Death, in the background MacDonald offered a vivid portrayal of no man’s land: pools of stagnant water, the spectral silhouettes of trees, a ruinous purple sky. Both it and Forward with God were what a friend of MacDonald, the painter Estelle Kerr, called his “suggestive war-paintings.” 15 Although MacDonald might have done these works on commission, there is no mistaking his revulsion at the abominations of modern warfare that had plunged the world into destruction.
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p; TOM THOMSON WAS likewise troubled by the Great War in the summer of 1915. He was deeply distressed to learn in July that Jackson had enlisted. “I can’t get used to the idea of Jackson being in the machine,” he wrote to MacDonald the week after Jackson was sent to Valcartier, “and it is rotten that in this so-called civilized age such things can exist.” 16
Thomson’s comments reveal a horror at the war consistent with his reading of Norman Angell. But two rangers working in Algonquin Park in 1915 claimed that he tried to volunteer for service. Bud Callighen, with whom Thomson transported tourists by canoe from Joe Lake Station to Smoke Lake, told a visitor that in the spring of 1915 Thomson “was lamenting the fact that he could not enlist in the Army” and vowing to “get over yet” despite the fact that, as Callighen put it, “certain persons interested in Tom objected to his abandoning his art career to go overseas.” 17 The truth of this story, related three decades after the fact, is impossible to confirm. It is plausible that Dr. MacCallum—who clearly regarded Thomson as the most adept and promising of the Canadian School—should have tried to talk his protege out of enlistment. Less plausible is the fact that a thirty-eight-year-old man who wished to serve overseas would have bowed to such pressure.
A different version was provided by the park ranger Mark Robinson. He later claimed that Thomson did attempt to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at a station in Kearney but “was turned down and felt very keenly about it.” He then apparently tried again in Toronto, with the same result, and finally “went to some outside point in the country” (possibly Owen Sound, where the 147th Grey Overseas Battalion was recruiting in 1915) only to be rejected for a third time.18 One of his sisters, visiting from Saskatchewan, likewise believed he had made at least one unsuccessful attempt to enlist.19
It is possible that, despite his abhorrence of the “machine” of war, Thomson volunteered for service in 1915 only to be rejected, possibly because of “a foot not properly arched” or the broken toe from that long-ago football game (the reason he was supposedly turned down for service in the Boer War). Certainly fit and able men were sometimes declined for no apparent reason. Frank Carmichael was declined on minor medical grounds, and a future Victoria Cross winner, G.B. McKean of the Royal Montreal Regiment, was rejected for service three times before he was able to enlist in January 1915. At most recruiting offices, the failure rate for medical reasons was as high as 70 per cent. Potential recruits could be turned away because of bad teeth, poor eyesight, a lack of height or a chest of inadequate circumference.20
With heavy casualties sustained in the spring of 1915, with recruitment dwindling after the initial euphoria and with Prime Minister Borden preparing to commit Canada to raising a force of 500,000 troops, the authorities could ill afford to be so selective with their exemptions and rejections. In the summer of 1915 some of the physical requirements were relaxed, making eligible for service those previously turned down because of bad teeth or short stature. In such times an able-bodied outdoorsman, even one nearing his fortieth birthday, would not have been spurned without good reason. In any case, rejection by the military authorities seems unlikely given how Thomson impressed almost everyone with his physical prowess. A doctor whom he met in 1915 was astounded at how he could hoist a heavily laden canoe to his shoulder “without help, and seemingly without effort.” 21
Another of the park rangers claimed that he and Thomson discussed the war many times and that Thomson did “not think that Canada should be involved.” He was adamant that Thomson would never have offered himself for service.22 It seems more likely that Thomson was kept out of uniform by his pacifist beliefs, not by either Dr. MacCallum or fallen arches.
AS IN 1914, Thomson spent the whole of the summer in Algonquin Provincial Park. The park had changed dramatically since the previous year. The war was good for the lumber industry, because the curtailment of Britain’s supply of pulp and paper from the Baltic meant Ontario’s mills were working around the clock and timber cutting continued, as the Toronto Daily Star reported, on a more “vigorous scale than ever.” 23 But the Grand Trunk’s full-page advertisements had disappeared from British newspapers, and the hotels and campsites were depleted of tourists.
Despite these adverse conditions, Thomson lent $250—half of what he received for Northern River—to Shannon Fraser. Undaunted by the dwindling tourist traffic, the Mowat Lodge proprietor was expanding his enterprise and to that end was hoping to purchase a fleet of new canoes to rent to fishermen and other visitors. Turned down by a bank in Huntsville, he appealed to Thomson, who, ever open-hearted and generous, if sorely lacking in financial acumen, handed over the money.24
Thomson had cause to regret his generosity, because finding work as a fishing guide proved difficult. As he wrote to J.E.H. MacDonald, “there are more guides than jobs.” 25 These jobs were potentially lucrative, with wealthy Americans willing to pay handsomely for the best angling guides. The most renowned guide in Algonquin was a man known as “Nipper.” The prestige of securing Nipper’s services was deemed worthy of inclusion in the society columns of the Toronto Daily Star as an indication of social standing (Thomson’s name failed to appear in these pages: evidence that his reputation as a woodsman was not as lofty as Lismer and others suggested).26 In the lean summer of 1915 the presence of a Toronto artist, a latecomer to the bush, was not endearing to the seasoned regular guides. They resented Thomson’s presence because he provided unwanted competition for the few existing jobs: one of the guides, according to Mark Robinson, “made a kind of a slighting remark about Thomson.” 27
Feeling unwelcome in the park, Thomson began contemplating a trip to the Prairies for the annual harvest excursion; two of his sisters lived in Saskatchewan. But in the end he decided against the expedition and remained in the park, painting as best he could. Even the weather conspired against him. “We have had an awful lot of rain this summer,” he complained to Dr. MacCallum, “and it has been to some extent disagreeable in the tent, even with a new one, the very best, you get your blankets wet and if you spread them out to dry it is sure to rain again.” 28 He managed to keep active, hiking as well as canoeing. His sister Louise recalled that he was a “great lad to walk”: on one occasion, she claimed, he had walked ten miles through a blizzard.29 One day in the summer of 1915—as if to dispel any doubts about fallen arches or broken toes—he hiked fourteen miles through the bush carrying a sketchbox and a rifle. He returned to his campsite with a fox, seven partridges and a brace of sketches.30
At the beginning of September Thomson arrived in South River, a small town of dirt streets and wooden sidewalks midway between Huntsville and North Bay. It had a sawmill, a gristmill, a hydroelectric power station and a hotel, the New Queen’s, where he took a room. He visited one of his friends from the park, a ranger named Tom Wattie, for whom he made a partridge and dumpling stew. He was planning another long voyage back into the park, but by this point the solitude of the bush was becoming too much even for a loner like Thomson. “If Lismer or any of the boys can come,” he wrote to Dr. MacCallum, “get them to write me at South River. I should like awfully well to have some company.” 31
But Thomson was unable to tempt his friends in the Studio Building to join him, so he paddled alone to North Tea Lake. He was aiming, he informed Dr. MacCallum, to make it to Mattawa, almost a hundred kilometres distant.32 Harris and MacDonald had visited Mattawa, a former fur-trading post at the junction of the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers, in the spring of 1913. They travelled via the CPR from North Bay and stayed in the comfort of the Mattawa House Hotel.
If Thomson reached Mattawa by canoe, his journey was more hazardous, comparable with the one he took in the summer of 1914. Alexander Henry, the eighteenth-century traveller, described “extremely difficult” portages and walls of rock on either side of the Mattawa River, with the corpses of drowned Indians placed on the narrow ledges of the chasm.33
THERE ARE INTRIGUING parallels, at this point in their c
areers, between Thomson and his exact contemporary, the English poet Edward Thomas. Both were late bloomers, both were dogged by self-doubt, both expressed themselves most powerfully and prolifically after war was declared in 1914. The onset of war caused Thomas to lose his paying job (penning literary reviews) and then to anguish over whether or not to enlist and become, at the advanced age of thirty-seven, “the oldest bald head in the battalion.” A remarkable burst of creative energy in the first year of the war—partly inspired by his friend and mentor, the American poet Robert Frost—saw him produce more than a hundred poems that would later win him (in the words of Lloyd George) “triumph and renown.” The Great War, according to Frost, turned Thomas into “some sort of a new man and a poet.” 34 It was as if he sensed the end was near, and indeed it was. In July 1915 he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles, and in April 1917 he was killed at the Battle of Arras.
Thomson, too, took powerful artistic strides through 1915, as if his fears, anguish and uncertainty, together with the inspiration of a fellow artist, unleashed imaginative intensities. He painted more than a hundred sketches during the summer and early autumn of 1915. Many he sent in a trunkful to MacDonald with instructions to “spread them around in the shack as I’m afraid they will stick together a good deal.” 35