Inflection Points

During that first disorienting year of the pandemic, when there was pressure everywhere and no relief valve, all sorts of organizations sought to capture something of the brittle zeitgeist by commissioning, collecting, or curating COVID‑19 art, for lack of a better term. Hastily compiled short story anthologies soon surfaced, and eventually some retrospectives appeared of works done by artists in — shall we say — captivity. Some people pulled out their old university copies of The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century classic about a group of young nobles hiding from the plague ravaging Europe’s medieval cities, and wondered when an updated version would come out. Others reminded us that the 1918–20 flu pandemic, which killed upwards of 50 million people, left virtually no cultural fingerprints, except a few works like Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a thinly veiled memoir of hallucinatory illness that she wrote twenty years after the fact.

Implicit in all the summoning of the muses was the notion that an event as terrible and all-encompassing as a pandemic must become both the subject of artistic work and a source of inspiration. After all, an enveloping crisis always produces art, somehow, although it wasn’t clear during COVID‑19 whether artists could or would set out to create merely to satisfy those who felt that calamity should leave a few brush strokes on our collective consciousness.

The artistic imagination also thrives in other malign but less acute conditions, such as the grind of political oppression, crushing poverty, or social collapse. Consider the samizdat literature that snuck out of Cold War Czechoslovakia or the fierce punk that served as the soundtrack to Thatcherite capitalism. The near collapse of New York in the 1970s and then the AIDS crisis in the 1980s supercharged the visual and performing arts worlds of Lower Manhattan, transforming first the city and then American culture writ large.

A period that has long intrigued me is postwar England, which struggled for years to rebuild its shattered economy. Even as prospering boomer families remade North America, the British were dealing with rations, cold-water flats, and the spiritual malaise that accompanied the loss of empire. The working classes fought Adolf Hitler but came back to a social order every bit as ossified as it was before September 1, 1939. Yet this thin and seemingly nutrient-free soil yielded literature, theatre, and music that changed everything. What did John Lennon and Paul McCartney absorb as lower-middle-class teens in a place as grim as Liverpool in the 1950s? Just a case of the cosmic roulette wheel of genius casting off sparks at random? What exactly was it about Penny Lane or all the lonely people?

Perhaps the question answers itself — if you’re an artist.

Canadian history, forged as it was out of settlement and immigration, doesn’t really include such culturally galvanizing moments, although the Depression and prairie harshness did inspire writers like Hugh Garner, Sinclair Ross, and Margaret Laurence. The one notable exception might be Quebec in the two decades following the Second World War. A linguistically fissured society, thoroughly dominated by the Catholic Church and the anglophone business elite, would topple the long reign of Maurice Duplessis’s autocratic Union Nationale government in 1960 and shake off its serfdom during the Quiet Revolution.

Three almost contemporaneous novelists — Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Gabrielle Roy — unpacked the underlying divisions and the oppressiveness, stealing glimpses of one another’s tribes in postwar Montreal. In The Street, his 1969 collection of vignettes of growing up on St. Urbain Street, the Jewish ghetto, with its kvetching merchants, long-suffering bubbes, and mouthy teens, Richler wrote:

If the Main was a poor man’s street, it was also a dividing line. Below, the French Canadians. Above, some distance above, the dreaded WASPs. On the Main itself there were some Italians, Yugoslavs and Ukrainians, but they did not count as true Gentiles. Even the French Canadians, who were our enemies, were not entirely unloved. Like us, they were poor and coarse with large families and spoke English badly.

As a working émigré in hippie London, Richler reflected on that time. “Looking back,” he continued, “it’s easy to see that the real trouble was there was no dialogue between us and the French Canadians, each elbowing the other, striving for WASP acceptance.”

WASP standoffishness, as Gallant knew from her own experience, often concealed genteel dysfunction: marriages dissolving in liquor, peculiar infidelities, a miasma of psychic repression. Her stories about an aspiring young writer, Linnet Muir, a stand‑in for Gallant herself, are soaked in a longing for escape from this world. What’s more, Linnet doesn’t accept the conventional wisdom about the city’s two solitudes: “It did not enter the mind of any English speaker that the French were at a constant disadvantage, like a team obliged to play all their matches away from home.” Rather, she had a deep emotional understanding of the crushing isolation that Montreal’s Anglos brought upon themselves.

Other artists increasingly expressed this longing to shake free, a thread of emotion that extended to a forceful narrative poem about Québécois rage, Michèle Lalonde’s “Speak White,” and finally the nationalist movement of the late 1960s.

One of the progenitors, the avant-garde painter Paul-Émile Borduas, co-founder of the Automatiste school, had expressed early versions of these sentiments in the late 1940s, in both his art and a widely read manifesto, Refus global, to which Jean-Paul Riopelle contributed cover art: 

We are a small people huddling under the shelter of the clergy, who are the only remaining repository of faith, knowledge, truth, and national wealth; we were excluded from the universal progress of thought with all its pitfalls and perils, and raised, when it became impossible to keep us in complete ignorance, on well-meaning but uncontrolled and grossly distorted accounts of the great historical facts.

As the art historian François-Marc Gagnon has observed of the 3,300-word essay, “Borduas launched a frontal attack on the parochialism (esprit de clocher, as it was called) in Quebec, the stifling dominance of Catholicism, and the narrow nationalism of the provincial government under Premier Maurice Duplessis.” For his outspokenness, Borduas immediately lost his job.

At these cultural headwaters sat Roy and her groundbreaking 1945 epic about working-class Montreal, Bonheur d’occasion, published in English in 1947 as The Tin Flute. The novel follows the Lacasse clan, a large and profoundly impoverished family bouncing from dingy rental to dingy rental in Saint-Henri, a slum shoehorned between the freight corridors into the port of Montreal and the wharves along the Lachine Canal. It is 1940, and all the Lacasses want out: the mother, Rose-Anna, from unending penury and pregnancy; Azarius, her witless husband, from self-inflicted unemployment; and Florentine, their slim nineteen-year-old daughter, from a life without so much as a moment of the glamour she reads about in fashion magazines.

Despite Quebec’s political opposition to the war, Saint-Henri’s young men, including one of the Lacasse sons, hustle to enlist, which is their ticket out. Florentine, meanwhile, meets two guys at the diner where she works. One, Emmanuel Létourneau, eagerly signs up to fight, while his friend, Jean Lévesque, is driven by an ambition to make good money. They are foils, of course. Lévesque is the quintessential bad boy: handsome, brooding, and emotionally manipulative with Florentine, who falls hard for him; he eventually impregnates her before fleeing. (Their sexual encounter isn’t exactly rape, but it hardly seems consensual.) Faced with social scandal and the prospect of being disowned by Azarius, she marries Emmanuel, to his delight. Yet Florentine, one suspects, can look forward only to living out her mother’s destiny, which was to produce as many children as her body could endure. At the end of the book, Rose-Anna gives birth to the Lacasses’ twelfth child, even as one of their youngest succumbs to disease. Their sense of entrapment is overwhelming.

Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion triggered an immediate sensation in Canada and abroad, offering both an unsparingly intimate glimpse of the lives of Quebec’s most destitute and an exploration of deeply taboo subjects: furtive sex between two young people and the all too common despair facing women like Rose-Anna, who were expected to produce huge broods and then somehow make the math work. The fitful street scenes of Saint-Henri — with the tempting nightclubs on the St. Catherine Street strip, just beyond the north edge of the slum — read as if they could have accompanied a journalistic photo essay, winning Roy critical acclaim.

But unlike Richler and Gallant, Roy did not come from the world of her fiction. Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, she grew up in a large but not poor family. Her parents provided schooling and gave her access to Winnipeg’s cultural life, which informed her decision to become a writer. Roy eventually moved to London to pursue her dream. But when the war broke out, she returned to Canada, to Montreal, where she fell in with a community of budding writers. Roy made her living freelancing and teaching. Then, as literary fate would have it, she rented a small apartment in a lower Westmount neighbourhood not far from Saint-Henri and frequently went for walks down there, watching and listening and sublimating, as writers do.

The positionality of artists like Roy and Borduas, by virtue of either their embeddedness or their ability to soak up and then give expression to the hardship around them, offers an obvious explanation of what happens when an inflection point sets off cultural and social explosions. One need only glimpse at the interwar Berlin paintings of the expressionist George Grosz, with their hallucinatory decadence and rapaciousness, to understand that here was an observer who knew something was afoot. But what else was — is — going on in these fraught places?

Grosz emerged during the Weimar Republic, which precariously governed Germany from 1919 to 1933 — the year of the Nazi electoral coup. In many important ways, Weimar was not at all like the oppressive milieu of mid-century Quebec, though both places were crucibles. Rather, Germany was in a state of chaos — infected by political intrigue and a shattered economy and transformed by rapid urbanization and technological advancements. This was the society that produced Hitler, the filmmaker Fritz Lang, and the Bauhaus school of architecture and design.

In his 2022 social and cultural history of Weimar, Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany (published in English last year), the journalist and editor Harald Jähner sets out to take a measure of “the feelings, moods and sensations produced by the political attitudes and conflicts of the age; emotional manifestations such as unease, confidence, anxiety, ennui, self-reliance, a desire to consume, a desire to dance, hunger for experience, pride and hatred.” He details how “very few moments in German history have prompted such intense emotions as these. Born out of the torment of war, the enthusiasm of revolution was overshadowed by the humiliations of defeat and a sense of intellectual homelessness, along with the risks of unfamiliar freedom.”

Besides the tenuous grip the Social Democrats had on power (assassinations were commonplace), Germany’s economy was a disaster even before the Depression. But runaway inflation — banknotes came in denominations of billions of marks and were often printed single-sided — didn’t just send prices skyrocketing, Jähner explains. The fiscal mayhem indiscriminately wiped out old fortunes and scant savings alike, forcing people from all walks of life into a state of weirdly levelling instability. Everyone had to hustle, and many people found themselves in unfamiliar vocations. Meanwhile, masses of young single women streamed into the big cities to find clerical work in the quickly emerging office culture, an administrative outgrowth of leapfrogging advances in manufacturing technology and the production of consumer goods. Their ubiquitous urban presence attracted workplace scandal, a roiling nightlife, and cultural curiosities, such as cabarets with dancers arrayed on stage in the form of keys on human typewriters.

Experimental enthusiasms coursed through society — think dance fads like the Charleston, women driving fast sports cars, gender ambiguity — as did a desire by many artists to make a clean break with the past’s perceived corruptions. Teachers and students at the Bauhaus — in Weimar and then in sleepy Dessau, between Leipzig and Berlin — invented a geometric, democratizing aesthetic stripped of all adornment. Over little more than a frenetic decade of experimentation, they produced a radical legacy of graphic art, interior decor, furniture, and architecture that continues to influence contemporary design a century later.

As the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius put it in his 1919 manifesto, “Let us want, dream, create together the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting, which will rise towards the heavens from millions of hands of craftsmen, the crystalline symbol of a new coming faith.” Nazi officials shuttered the school in 1933, and many of its iconoclastic faculty, among them the architect Mies van der Rohe, decamped to North America.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Weimar burned itself out, yielding to Hitler’s thuggery. Jähner identifies the end with the story behind Evening over Potsdam, a 1930 painting by a German Jewish artist, Lotte Laserstein, that depicts the denouement of a dinner party with five exhausted friends. The canvas came to symbolize the weary end of Weimar’s exuberant run. By then, Jähner adds, German society had fractured into countless social cliques with their own echo chambers and not much in the way of connection. The one demographic that had no foothold at all was the shapeless mass of apathetic unemployed men, who proved to be easy pickings for a demagogue with an agenda to pursue. “The construction of ‘aliens’ to be ruthlessly excluded and persecuted,” Jähner writes, “would lead to a campaign of extermination that left few spots on earth untouched.” It’s a chillingly familiar scenario.

I have searched without result for just such a popular social and cultural history of postwar England. There also seems to be nothing like Vertigo, at least in English, about the run‑up to the Quiet Revolution. In both places and epochs, there’s a story worth revisiting today.

That’s because we’re living through precisely such a moment: a time of amplifying surround-sound confrontation, when long-held assumptions and norms are being wantonly abandoned. This is true in Donald Trump’s United States but also here in Canada, as we find ourselves adrift in a dangerous, economically uncertain, and overheating world. Like all these other periods of ambient stress, this era — the 2020s have yet to acquire a sticky name — will leave some kind of sense-making cultural footprint, perhaps enduring, like that of the Bauhaus, or more transient, like the COVID‑19 art.

The truth is that we’ll have to make it to the other side in order to take in that work, so we can sort out what we’ve been through.