Creating a Canadian Pantheon

In 1938, the feminist social reformer, novelist, devout Methodist and temperance crusader Nellie McClung was asked by Prime Minister Mackenzie King to represent Canada at a meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva. Her son, Mark, a Rhodes Scholar, came down from Oxford to meet her. The two went out to dine and at the end of the meal, Mark persuaded her to let him order a couple of mild after-dinner drinks.

When the drinks arrived, McClung, then 65, would not touch a drop. “I am too old to change,” she told him.

This anecdote, heavy with subtext, is told for the first time in Charlotte Gray’s compact biography Nellie McClung. It does not appear in Mary Hallett and Marilyn Davis’s Firing the Heather: The Life and Times of Nellie McClung (1993), the only full-dress biography. We glimpse through it the tensions between mother and son, youth and age, Europe and Canada, religion and secularism, and something more: the way in which the ideals that appear so clear and shining to one generation are incomprehensible if not laughable to the next.

Today McClung is chiefly remembered for her part in the enfranchisement of women in Manitoba in early 1916, before women could vote anywhere else in Canada, and well before they could vote in the United States and Great Britain. In addition, she was one of the “Famous Five” who, in 1929, petitioned the Privy Council in England to obtain clarification of whether women were persons under the British North America Act and therefore eligible to be appointed to the Canadian Senate. (She is on the $50 bill for that triumph.)

Yet when she died in 1951, her obituaries mentioned these things only in passing, while elaborating her achievements as a churchwoman, one-time member of the Alberta legislature, best-selling author of novels and non-fiction books (16 in all), newspaper columnist, wife, galvanizing and witty public speaker, mother of five and lifelong opponent of alcohol. Gray, who has a string of successful biographies of redoubtable women under her belt—Isabel Mackenzie King, Susanna Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill, Pauline Johnson—paints a lively and balanced portrait of McClung in all her roles, played out on the larger stage of Canadian history.

Above all, Gray presents her as a westerner, a product of a more egalitarian society closer to its pioneer origins than central or eastern Canada of her day. The Mooney family, into which Nellie was born in 1873 in Ontario’s Grey County, moved seven years later to a tract near Brandon, Manitoba, in search of more fertile land. This is where Nellie Mooney grew up, far from the amenities of town life such as schools. She was ten when she learned to read, and was herself a schoolteacher only six years later. A highly intelligent woman, she was conscious of her insufficient education all her life.

On the prairies, the hard work of breaking sod and surviving on the land was shared equally by both sexes, giving rise to a generation of women who felt fully entitled to equal rights. It is no accident that the three prairie provinces were the first to grant women the vote or that the Famous Five came out of Edmonton.

Gray quotes from a sarcastic letter to McClung written by Judge Emily Murphy, who organized the petition (originally to the Canadian Supreme Court) challenging the exclusion of women from the Senate. It perfectly illustrates the East–West divide.

“I hear that it has been a terrible shock to the Eastern women,” Murphy wrote her friend, “that five coal heavers and plough pushers from Alberta went over their heads to the Supreme Court without even saying ‘Please ma’am, can we do it?’”

Emily Carr, that eminent Victorian, was another strong-willed western woman of the same generation and, like Nellie Mooney, the beloved youngest child in her family. The South African–born Toronto-based novelist and artist Lewis DeSoto is the author of a short biography that is less successful than Gray’s Nellie McClung, in part because there is really nothing new left to say about Carr. Her life has been raked over by four biographers and each of the big retrospective exhibitions since her death has generated catalogues with detailed biographical essays. No other Canadian artist has undergone as much scrutiny.

Readers with any cultural interests know the broad outlines of her life: Born in Victoria into a conventional well-to-do family, orphaned in adolescence, studies art in San Francisco, visits Indian villages and discovers totem poles, goes to London to attend the Westminster School of Art, rejects an offer of marriage, falls ill. After five years in England, returns home and teaches art to children, embarks on sketching trips into the rainforest, goes to France with her sister Alice to learn modern painting techniques, returns to Victoria where her art is misunderstood and rejected. Stops painting and supports herself by running a boarding house, hooking rugs and making ceramics. Keeps a pet monkey named Woo and many dogs. In 1927, her work is exhibited at the National Gallery in Ottawa, and she meets members of the Group of Seven who praise her talent and affirm her vision. Lawren Harris suggests that she paint pure landscape instead of rotting totem poles. She continues to sketch alone around British Columbia and has a final creative burst until a heart attack saps her strength and she turns to writing, often working in bed. Her stories of her early life and of her encounters with Native people win her a Governor General’s Literary Award. Dies in 1945, aged 73, already a legend.

DeSoto calls her a “complex and contradictory individual who lived a varied existence of great originality” and in the process made the B.C. landscape “visible in all its beauty and mystery.” True enough, but not exactly a fresh view.

Whereas in Gray’s Nellie McClung the right information arrives at the right moment, DeSoto’s book has a frustrating roundabout structure. He tells us on page 28 that Carr spent time recuperating in a sanatorium in England but does not tell us why until page 57 (she had had a big toe amputated after a carriage accident and it did not heal; in addition, she had a nervous breakdown). He waits until nearly the end to tell us about Carr’s relationship with her father and a key episode in her childhood that may explain her rejection, much earlier in the book, of love and marriage. Richard Carr had told his young daughter the facts of life in a blunt, repellent manner that put her off sex for good. She referred to this as “the brutal telling.”

Neither biography has an index or footnotes, but a more glaring omission in the case of Emily Carr is the absence of any reproductions of her art so that readers can see what is being referred to in the text.

Charlotte Gray’s and Lewis De Soto’s books lead off the Extraordinary Canadians series, 17 compact biographies to be published by Penguin Canada over three years.

In addition to Carr and McClung, subjects include Glenn Gould, Tommy Douglas, Max Aitken, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mordecai Richler, Wilfrid Laurier, Stephen Leacock, René Lévesque, Pierre Trudeau, Norman Bethune, Lester Pearson, Marshall McLuhan, Big Bear and (in double biographies) Louis Riel paired with Gabriel Dumont and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine with Robert Baldwin.

Each personality is filtered through the lens of a celebrated contemporary author—writers such as Mark Kingwell, André Pratte, M.G. Vassanji and Jane Urquhart—so that we get a readable non-academic account of our martyrs and rebels, our artists, novelists, statesmen, reformers and musicians. Absent from the list are notable scientists, great educators, city builders or military leaders. One would like to see at least Sir William Osler, Frederick Grant Banting, Charles Best and Sir Sanford Fleming added.

Any doubt that the books are needed was dispelled for me by a young man next to me at the series launch in April of this year at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. After explaining that he was raised in the U.S., he asked: “Who is Norman Bethune?”

Penguin has invested $1 million and intends to keep the books in print for a long time (related half-hour television documentaries are being broadcast on Rogers OMNI and the Biography Channel). The series thus stands to become the leading source of knowledge of these figures for thousands of people in years to come.

While the project might appear to be, like the Heritage Minutes on television, yet another attempt to make Canadian history seem sexy, its general editor, John Ralston Saul, has another purpose: to trace the formation of national character via those larger-than-life individuals who, he believes, set the pattern for it.

Lewis DeSoto’s Emily Carr is sui generis, an eccentric genius with unique gifts that resist emulation. DeSoto spends a lot of time defending Carr against charges of expropriating First Nations material. Perhaps she embodies the complicated relationship we have with our First Nations heritage—admiration and affection mixed with exasperation, incomprehension and guilt.

Charlotte Gray writes that for her, McClung was the archetype of the forthright, self-assured Canadian women she encountered when she moved to this country, quite different from the women she knew in England, her birthplace.

I, too, was born abroad but had a different encounter with McClung’s legacy. As a refugee kid in the late 1950s, trying to grasp how Canadians thought and, in particular, what made them laugh, I became an avid reader of the rotogravure magazines that came with the Saturday papers. I was particularly puzzled by the folksy columns of Gregory Clark, who apparently was considered very funny. His columns were either about fishing or about hiding his bottle of rye from the disapproving eyes of the Missus. The lingering sense of shame about alcohol, and of alcohol as a battleground between men and women was new to me—a national trait that could also be traced back to the Nellie factor.

Temperance was the primary cause that McClung seized upon passionately as a young of suppressing the liquor trade, as well as bringing about other legislation to improve female lives. Indeed, prohibition followed hard on the heels of female enfranchisement. Yet Gray manages to rescue McClung from the image of the puritan scold with the undivided bosom by making the reader understand why prohibition seemed like a fine idea at the time. Whiskey was sold everywhere and was cheaper than milk. There was no such thing as moderate social drinking—a man was either a drunk and wife abuser or a teetotaller. (No woman drank, McClung believed—they were morally superior.)

McClung received “the shock of her life” when her home province Alberta, having ended its brief experiment with prohibition, opened government-owned liquor stores where booze was sold at a profit. It confirmed for her the essential corruption of politics. Later she was forced to admit that prohibition does not work, but as a member of the CBC’s board of governors in the 1940s, she still protested any time she heard a lighthearted reference to cocktails on the radio.

McClung’s firm religious faith and can-do optimism were sorely tested by the tragedies and ironies of her life. Her husband, Wesley, appears to have suffered at least two bouts of debilitating depression, which led to his wife becoming the chief breadwinner, and all four of her sons struggled with alcohol. Alcohol was likely a factor in the suicide of her eldest son, Jack, in 1944.

Gray makes the most of the few known facts about these events, but admits that the private Nellie is hard to locate. After McClung’s death, her daughter Florence burned her diaries and personal papers.