Another City

Toronto’s post-war cultural metamorphosis is a story told so often it has become a cliché. It is good to be reminded—as readers of Martin Hunter’s Young Hunting and Margaret McBurney’s The Great Adventure will be—that things were never quite so simple.

Hunter is best known as artistic director at the University of Toronto’s Hart House Theatre during the 1970s, and more recently as author of Romancing the Bard, a history of the Stratford Festival. Young Hunting is the story of his upbringing in Toronto from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s, a time when the city saw an influx of rural and small-town Canadians, including his own parents: “They were eager to absorb city ways as best they could—learning to drink cocktails and play bridge—but solid country values of thrift, hard work, and moderation underlay their newly acquired sophistication.” As with so many of these newcomers, it did not take long for them to settle into a prosperous existence.

Hunter’s life was indelibly marked by the theatrical bug he caught at age six, when captivated by the play Cinderella mounted by the Toronto Children Players. He lobbied his mother to arrange an audition with the company’s director, Dorothy Goulding, and managed to gain admittance to the company. Goulding was the daughter of Walter Massey, cousin of Raymond and Vincent, and a legend in her own right. She would also play a crucial role in Hunter’s early life. For years he served her company as actor and propman, and Goulding included him in her summer classes at her family’s farm, Dentonia, on the city’s eastern outskirts.

“We would walk up Dawes Road and into the park,” he recalls of those idyllic days, “skirting a rather stagnant pond with large golden carp.” Their teacher would be waiting for them on the farmhouse lawns, and the days would be spent on lessons in dramatic technique, musical appreciation and playwriting. The company was Goulding’s life’s work, and as one of many beneficiaries of her philanthropy Hunter does what he can to burnish her faded renown. “Dorothy Goulding was part of a generation of artists in Toronto who were highly cultivated and accomplished,” he notes, “but largely unconcerned with making money.” They also laid the foundations for the professional artists who followed them. Goulding had her eccentric side too. Hunter relates how she completely ignored his later theatrical successes after he had left her company, neither mentioning them when they met nor coming to see him perform.

Hunter’s vignettes frequently reveal the under-lying tensions and contradictions of this era. He possesses an incisive narratorial eye, as well as a gossip’s love for the foibles of friend and foe alike. In much of his memoir, he casts himself as a relatively passive observer drawn by exceptional talent in others. “I was used to having friends more gifted than I,” he admits. “I think I hoped that some of it would rub off on me, and it probably did.”

A boyhood friend named Dick Williams was one of these gifted individuals, a budding visual artist and skilled clown. He would grow up to become one of Hollywood’s most famous animators, with production credits including the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the titles to the Pink Panther series. In Young Hunting, he plays the role of a plain-spoken troublemaker who loves to poke fun at Toronto’s middle-class blandness. It was a view Williams encapsulated later in life, long after he had left Canada, in a remark that Hunter quotes with relish. “Living in Toronto is like being in an attic above an apartment where a wonderful party is going on. You hear the music and the noise, and open the door, and somebody staggers halfway up the stairs and pukes on your shoes.”

Hunter’s other close friend was from a well-heeled family and destined for the same career as his Presbyterian minister father. Jimmy Armour was endowed with good looks and aristocratic charm—an unwitting Gatsby to Hunter’s Nick Carraway. The description of this long-lasting friendship makes it clear that the young Hunter was a complex character, especially in the realm of sexuality. There was also a long line of passing female acquaintances, then several girlfriends, as he went on to undergraduate life at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, where he gained recognition as a skilled actor and an honorary member of Toronto’s old money set—a role he had been training for ever since his boyhood association with Dorothy Goulding.

Along the way, he spent a summer in the Canadian navy’s officer training program, endured stints working in a Yukon goldmine and in small-town Quebec, and undertook a grand tour of Britain and the continent. After university he served for a while as a minion at the Department of External Affairs. As this relatively unhappy time came to a close, he decided to propose to his longtime girlfriend, though as usual he had difficulty overcoming his ambivalence, as he mulled over the offer, from an erotically forthright superior at External Affairs, of a joint foreign posting. Here Young Hunting ends. It is a rather jarring in medias res conclusion, especially for readers who have enjoyed their immersion in Hunter’s historical world and profited from his informal but highly informative who’s who of midcentury Toronto’s cultured class. We must await Young Hunting’s planned sequel.

Margaret McBurney’s The Great Adventure serves a more conventional function as the centenary history of one of the city’s longest running clubs, Arts and Letters, established in 1908. Like all men’s clubs of its day, its major if unspoken aim was to provide its members a place, as an age-old British aphorism put it, “to escape their wives, their mistresses, and their creditors.” But unlike its upholstered local rivals, its main appeal lay in its ambitions to be a meeting place for “those who work in and those who encourage the arts of literature, architecture, music, painting, and sculpture.” It was from this list that the club’s longtime acronym, LAMPS, was formed, though with some creative adaptations in ensuing decades: painting got extended to include all of the visual arts, while sculpture was dropped as a separate category to be replaced by staging—a shift necessitated by the growth of an active theatrical contingent who gradually overcame the prevailing prejudice against actors as “not clubable.”

Women, of course, were excluded, except at monthly events billed as Saturday Vesper Musicales, which featured “plain teas and simple, good programs.” But at times women were the centre of attention. McBurney cites a 1915 production, organized by the founding president Augustus Bridle, of a member-penned playlet Love and the Arts, which examined “different phases of the marriage question and women in general.” Not all events had such lighthearted purpose. Visits by touring celebrities were common. In 1913, for example, English poet Rupert Brooke made a brief appearance during his North American travels, and was impressed enough to write to a friend, “they’re really quite an up-to-date lot and very cheery and pleasant.”

As in most such settings, exclusivity was considered essential. After a year spent in temporary digs on King Street East, the club settled into the upper floor of the Courthouse on Adelaide Street, just east of Toronto’s main commercial district, and directly above the County of York prison. Writes McBurney, “there was no doorplate to identify the club’s presence. This desire for anonymity would continue for years and even the club’s phone number was kept private for a long time. To enter the building, members walked along a dingy lane between a manure pile and a stack of firewood … and, once inside, passed by a lockup where they would often hear prisoners yelling or singing.”

Yet it was a much-loved setting. Here, in the club’s early years up to the end of the First World War, the painters who would go on to form the Group of Seven first met. It was the Courthouse, too, that hosted the first exhibits of its work. Also a club member was the group’s most stalwart critic, Saturday Night’s Hector Charlesworth, whose famous comment that J.E.H. MacDonald’s The Elements and Rock and Maple “might just as well have been called Hungarian Goulash and Drunkard’s Stomach” led the two men to avoid one another, especially when choosing mealtime seats.

In 1920, the club moved to its current Elm Street location, with a Tudor-themed Great Hall that was tailor-made for double-duty as a theatrical space. It says something for the convivial spirit of the club during the 1920s that even a member as dour as Vincent Massey could make a name as a Great Hall wit, known for his inspired doggerel verses. The 1930s inaugurated a genteel decline in the club’s reputation, which lasted until the post-war period. Even after the war, Arts and Letters was never again the cultural mover and shaker it had once been. As McBurney observes, “the action had moved elsewhere.”

The club’s membership rolls were still full of famous names such as musician Healey Willan, Robertson Davies, even Marshall McLuhan, but increasingly it was seen as an “old man’s cough of a club,” as Mordecai Richler put it in the New Statesman, or, more scathingly, as “a lot of over-weight Babbitts,” quoting from Northrop Frye’s private journal. What was needed was a wrenching crisis to save it from a slide into obscurity. The pivotal point came in the mid 1980s, when a president was appointed who had the strategic foresight and tactical acumen to push through major changes. Besides helping deal with the club’s long-standing financial woes by initiating a purchase of the Elm Street building, Ken Jarvis was instrumental in vanquishing those who were opposed to admitting women.

The reform was passed in 1985 at a packed members’ meeting that included written submissions from those unable to attend. The comments of one member in absentia, John Sanderson, give a sense of the passions aroused. “Men who hanker after such a change … are always a minority, are always insecure, are always henpecked, and are always soppily nostalgic about their nannies,” Sanderson intoned. “For men who have spent many years of their lives at the blunt end of war, succumbing to feminism is inexcusably gutless.”

Women began joining later that same year, and in just over a decade the club would have its first woman president, McBurney herself. Although still occasionally denigrated for its supposed stodginess—“a relic of old Toronto” in the words of former Globe columnist Ray Conlogue—Arts and Letters continues to serve a crucial role in the lives of many of its members. And even if the place has something of an antiquarian feel about it, is that such a problem? In a city that seems intent on razing every remnant of its history, there is much to be said for a small pocket of continuity that has managed to evade the modernizing onslaught.

Arts and Letters is that priceless rarity: a place where, thanks to meticulous care within a still flourishing setting, Toronto’s past and present magically connect. One can only hope that there will be a need for a sequel volume to McBurney’s highly readable account one hundred years hence.