The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939: Volume 1 9781442681057

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye VOLUME 1

The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions.

Editorial Committee General Editor Alvin A. Lee General Editor (1992-1995) J.M. Robson Assistant Editor Jean O'Grady Editors Robert Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton Alvin A. Lee Jean O'Grady David Staines Robert Brandeis Eleanor Cook Mary Jane Edwards Bill Harnum J.R. de J. Jackson Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Roseann Runte Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp 1932-1939 VOLUME 1 1932-1935

Edited by Robert D. Denham

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © Estate of Northrop Frye (correspondence) and Robert D. Denham (preface, introduction, annotation) 1996 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted 1998 ISBN 0-8020-0772-4 (Volume i) ISBN 0-8020-0773-2 (Volume 2)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 The correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939 (Collected works of Northrop Frye; v. 1-2) Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-0772-4 (v. i) ISBN 0-8020-0773-2 (v. 2) i. Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 - Correspondence. 2. Frye, Helen Kemp, 1910-1986 - Correspondence. 3. Critics - Canada - Correspondence. I. Frye, Helen Kemp, 1910-1986. II. Denham, Robert D. III. Title. PN75.F7A441996

8oi'.95'o92

096-930390-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

In memory of John M. Robson

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Contents

Preface ix Introduction XV

Abbreviations xxvii Correspondence VOLUME i Summer of 1932 3 Summer of 1933 93 Summer of 1934 185 1934-1935 329 VOLUME 2 1936-1937 507

1938-1939

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Contents Appendix: Directory of People Mentioned in the Correspondence 903 Index 941 Illustrations following pages xxix, 61, 183,439,609 and 822

Preface

The correspondence collected here contains 266 letters, cards, and telegrams that passed between Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp from the winter of 1931-32 until 17 June 1939. John Ayre, Frye's biographer, knew of the existence of Kemp's letters to Frye, but after Frye's death Jane Widdicombe, the executrix of the Frye Estate, had not been able to locate them among the papers at the Fryes' Clifton Road home. During the summer of 1992 I called Frye's second wife, Elizabeth, to see if she would permit me to examine the papers in the attic. She graciously consented, but when shortly after that I learned that she was not well, I decided instead to contact Ian Morrison, her son-in-law, who agreed to look through the papers in the attic. Within several days he delivered to me an attache case and several dusty shopping bags filled with files, photographs, sketch books, postcards, newspaper clippings, and other miscellaneous documents. Rummaging through this material, I was almost ready to conclude that Kemp's letters to Frye had not been preserved, but at the bottom of the last shopping bag I finally uncovered them. The letters are now a part of the Northrop Frye Papers at the Victoria University Library. The division of the letters into six sections follows the six occasions during the course of the correspondence when Frye and Kemp were separated for extended periods. Even though several letters are missing, the present volumes contain all that I have been able to find, and reproduce all of the letters in their entirety. This means that the occasional uncomplimentary references to classmates, friends, and acquaintances who are still living have not been deleted. Kemp, realizing the importance of Frye's letters to her, had carefully preserved them, and she had held on to her own letters for almost fifty years. Before

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handing over Frye's letters to John Ayre, she had clipped the envelopes to them and attached brief notes, describing the contents and occasionally noting sensitive material. Not wanting to hurt or embarrass anyone still alive, she was clearly concerned that Ayre use good judgment in quoting from the letters. But that was more than a dozen years ago (Helen Frye died in 1986), and her effort to safeguard the letters suggests that she knew they would eventually be published. My decision not to expurgate passages here and there has been guided also by the fact that the letters, which are in the Special Collections of the Victoria University Library, are unrestricted and may be examined by anyone. In one of her letters from England in 1935, Kemp reports on a visit to Carlyle's house, where she saw, among other memorabilia, "endless letters, in a beautiful hand, all set out for the curious to read." "Among them," she says, "were three notes he had written to his wife with Christmas and birthday gifts, such tender intimate notes they were. I felt ashamed to be reading them, for they were never meant to be read by idle passers-by. And even if I did forget who I was for the moment and imagined that I was Jane Carlyle—I looked at her picture on the wall and I was indignant. What right had I to intrude, no matter how sympathetically, into a relationship which was theirs alone? No matter if she herself did write impulsively to half her friends when she was annoyed, and berate him soundly. She was a clever, proud woman, and her portrait was as mute and unperturbed as most of the English I have not met lately. At least all these people could come, but she looked over their heads." The question Kemp asks of Thomas and Jane Carlyle we need to ask about her own relationship with Frye: what right have we to intrude, no matter how sympathetically, into a relationship that was theirs alone? Frye gave Michael Dolzani and me permission to publish his correspondence, and that permission contained no restrictions or exclusions; however, as the permission was not granted until 1990, four years after Helen Frye had died, I have no way of knowing for certain what disposition she would have wanted for her own letters, which she was reluctant to turn over to John Ayre. She was, of course, keenly aware that Frye was a worldrenowned figure, and I rather suspect that that awareness guided her decision not to destroy or restrict her letters. Although I found her half of the correspondence dumped in the bottom of a shopping bag, it was clear that she had at one time gone through her letters, arranging

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them in chronological sequence and, where there were envelopes, clipping these to the letters. She did this, I believe, in the interest of preservation and with the knowledge that what began in privacy would someday become public. If I am wrong about this, then Helen Frye, like the unperturbed portrait of Jane Carlyle, will doubtless look over our heads. In any case, the letters are published not for "the idle passers-by" but for those who are interested in the early years of a relationship between two extraordinary people. Kemp had some training as a calligrapher, and her letters are generally, like those of the Carlyles, "in a beautiful hand." Frye's scrawl, in contrast, is difficult to read. "You idiot," complains Kemp in a letter from 1934, "your writing has put my eyes out of gear for the time being": trying to decipher Frye's hieroglyphics does breed that kind of reaction. There are, however, sixteen letters Frye wrote to Kemp during the 1934-35 academic year that are typed, as are portions of two of her letters (22 October and 21 November 1938). My aim has been to provide an accessible text, so I have silently emended the manuscript in a few places where the sense requires it, and have corrected misspellings, most of which are names of people. I have not, however, regularized the differences between British/Canadian and American spellings; thus the text includes both "colour" and "color," "centre" and "center," and so on. I have not supplied missing diacritical marks, regularized compounds such as "to-day" and "today," or, when hyphens are missing from compound modifiers, added them in accordance with current practice. Both correspondents are inconsistent in their placement of commas and periods in conjunction with quotation marks: I have regularized this by following the usual North American practice. I have also standardized the use of the apostrophe with possessives, except when such forms appear in addresses and headings, which have been reproduced as they appear in the letters and on the envelopes. Otherwise, I have not tried to make the punctuation agree with current conventions, except to add an occasional mark to prevent misreading. All editorial additions are enclosed within square brackets. These include surnames where clarity of reference is called for, and, in the case of persons with the same surname, given names have been added. Generally this practice has been followed only for the first appearance of names in a given letter. Also within brackets are occasional explanations of manuscript blots or other irregularities and of doubtful

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readings. Both Frye and Kemp frequently give the date and return address for their letters, and when they do not, this information is often available from postmarks or envelope addresses. All of this information is reproduced in roman script at the beginning of the letters and in the headnotes as it appears in the letters themselves or on the envelopes. When such information is missing, I have in most cases been able to infer the missing date and return address from internal evidence; these inferences are italicized in square brackets. Uncertain inferences are followed by a question mark. When the correspondents occasionally use square brackets, I have replaced these with braces: { }. Underlined words and phrases in the text of the letters have been italicized. For some readers a great deal of the information contained in the notes to the letters will be commonplace; others, no doubt, will find the notes too bulky. But the annotations have been prepared with the widest possible readership in mind, and those who prefer to read the letters as a more or less continuous narrative can, of course, simply ignore the notes. More than thirteen hundred people, including writers, musicians, artists, and political figures, are mentioned in the letters. These people are not identified in the notes, but the appendix, which contains brief biographies of almost eight hundred of Frye and Kemp's contemporaries, some of whom appear scores of times, is intended to help readers keep track of the cast of characters. References to material in the Northrop Frye Papers, including both the Northrop Frye and the Helen Frye Fonds, give the year of accession, followed by the box and file number, as in "1991, box 3, file 2." The letters themselves are in the Helen Frye Fonds (HFF), 1991. Acknowledgments I owe a large debt of gratitude to Jane Widdicombe and Roger Ball, executors of the Northrop Frye estate, as well as to the Victoria University Library, for permitting me to edit and publish the Frye-Kemp correspondence; to Dr. Eva Kushner, President of Victoria and Director of the Northrop Frye Centre, who was instrumental in initiating the edition of which these letters are a part and who provided funds for a research assistant; to the members of the editorial committee of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, who recommended that the

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Frye-Kemp correspondence be the first two volumes published in the series; to Dr. Roseann Runte, Dr. Kushner's successor, for her energetic support of the project; to Dr. Robert Brandeis, Head Librarian at Victoria University, and to his staff, especially Ann Black, for the courtesies they extended throughout my work in the Frye archives; to Ron Schoeffel, Editor-in-Chief at the University of Toronto Press, for his faith in the project, and to Anne Forte, Managing Editor of the Press, who efficiently steered the book through the production process; to the librarians at the Emmanuel College and United Church Archives and the Trinity College Archives; to Larry Pfaff and his staff in the Edward P. Taylor Research Library of the Art Gallery of Ontario; and to Ian Morrison, Elizabeth Frye's son-in-law, for searching the attic of the Fryes' Clifton Road home during the summer of 1992, discovering there Helen Kemp Frye's letters, and delivering them to me. I am deeply indebted to the late John M. Robson, for his leadership as General Editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye and for the particular guidance he and Jean O'Grady, the Assistant Editor of the Collected Works, have given me. Jack Robson developed the editorial principles for the correspondence, and in addition to all the other tasks required of general editors, he gave generously of his time in writing the headnotes for individual letters, which he completed only a week before his untimely death. Dr. O'Grady provided invaluable help in the late stages of annotating the letters. The dedication page records, however imperfectly, my personal debt to Jack Robson. I owe special thanks to Margaret Burgess, who, through a grant from the Frye Centre, devoted several months to helping me annotate the correspondence; her work on the project continued after Jack Robson appointed her Assistant Editor for the Frye-Kemp correspondence. In addition to scouring the libraries in Toronto, she interviewed a number of people, including several members of the class of 1933 °f Victoria College: Jean Elder, Laure Riese, Carolyn Temple, Gordon Romans, and Mary Carman Breckenridge. Because of her thorough knowledge of the correspondence and her meticulous detective work, Margaret was able to track down many elusive details. Throughout our work together she provided me with good advice, and her copy-editing of the text prevented a number of blunders. She was, in short, an ideal research associate. I am obliged also to those who answered my queries or provided other kinds of assistance: George Altmeyer, Hugh Anson-Cartwright,

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Magda Arnold, Mary Ash, John Ayre, Rodney Baine, Munro Beattie, Charles Bell, Carol Birtch, Dorothy Bishop, Ann Black, Annette Burr, Mary Carman Breckenridge, Mitzi Brunsdale, Ella Carayiannis, Cindy Campbell, Gerald Chapman, Linda Cobon, R.G. Colgrove, Ida Clare Conklin, Florence Clare Cragg, Laurence H. Cragg, Alan Davies, Sandra Djwa, Katherine Dowdy, Morris Eaves, Leon Edel, Jean Elder, Margaret Ferre, Peter Foden, John Glover, John E. Grant, J.W. Grant, Margaret C. Grisdale, John Grube, Anne Hancock, Ruth Dingman Hebb, Barbara G. Hoeft, Robin Jackson, Kingsley Joblin, Alexandra Johnston, Charles F. Johnston, George Johnston, C.M. Kauffmann, Sharon P. Larade, Wendy Lawson, Douglas LePan, Marjorie Linden, Christopher C. Love, Jane McMillan, Don Moggridge, George Morrison, Ian Morrison, Henry and Gertrude Noyes, Jack G. Oughton, Doris Wagstaff Patterson, Marc Plamondon, Alice Rathe, Lorna Raymer, E.H.H. Relyea, Laure Riese, Gordon Romans, Grace Workman Scott, Janik M. Sezeur, Dolores Signori, David Silcox, Ernest Sirluck, Randall Speller, Michael Squires, Carolyn Temple, Ken Thompson, Maija Vilcins, Robert Vipond, Alan Weinstein, Ruth Dyck Wilson, and Michael Womack. Margaret Neely deserves special mention, because of the extensive information she provided about the families living in and around Stone, Saskatchewan, during the summer of 1933. I also owe a special debt to Pat Scott of the Roanoke College Library and to Susan Sydenham, the Fryes' niece, Jean Elder, and Ellen E. Cullen for permission to reproduce photographs in their possession. Quotations from the letters of Roy Daniells, which Sandra Djwa kindly provided, are reproduced through the permission of his wife, Laurenda Daniells. Permission to reproduce the illustration by Elizabeth Fraser has been granted by Oxford University Press. I express my thanks finally to the Northrop Frye Centre, Roanoke College, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for providing funds to support my work in the library at Victoria University, and, again, to Dr. Kushner for making her office in the E.J. Pratt Library available to me during my various sojourns in Toronto. A selection of the letters written during the summer of 1932 was published in the Northrop Frye Newsletter, 6 (Fall 1994), 3-26, and a smaller selection, along with some passages from Frye's notebooks, in Shenandoah, 44 (Fall 1994), 26-53.

Introduction

The letters between Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp in the 19305 are a remarkable body of correspondence. The narrative of their early relationship is itself a compelling one, reading much like an epistolary novel. The story they tell is a romance: two people fall in love, want to get married, and are confronted with obstacles blocking their path, including lack of money and the education they both need to advance their careers. The latter is most often what keeps them apart. The primary obstacle to be overcome—their separation from each other— is, of course, the very ground for letter-writing in the first place. We follow them for seven years through the twists and turns of their early life, and what emerges, in Frye's case, is a portrait of a critic as a young man. But Kemp, about whom we have known less, is a compelling figure in her own right, and the letters bring her portrait as a young woman into much sharper focus. The story clearly has two centres of interest, and what we learn about both are the conventions of love stories: dreams and nightmares, desires and anxieties, triumphs and tragedies. But the story, as one might expect, is much more than a love story. The letters disclose, for one thing, the seeds of Frye's talent as a writer, illustrating that both the matter and the manner of his large body of work had begun to take shape when he was only nineteen. Frye was a prodigy, but Kemp had a very keen mind as well, along with a gift for expressing herself, and the correspondence would clearly have much less appeal were it not for the substantial amount of space they devote to exploring ideas—discussions of books, music, religion, politics, education, and a host of other topics.

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But the Frye-Kemp narrative is much larger than the story of two individuals. As the register of names in the index reveals, it has a very large supporting cast. Some play central roles, while others make only cameo appearances, but altogether more than eight hundred friends, colleagues, relatives, and acquaintances figure in the story. The letters, therefore, always move out into other communities. There is the community of Victoria College, and within it members of the class of 1933, an extraordinarily tight-knit group in the 19305, and it remains so, for those who are still alive. With only the evidence of these letters, one could write a fairly full account of Victoria and Emmanuel Colleges in the 19305. There are the art and music communities of Toronto, in which both correspondents move quite freely. There is the community in and around Stone, a farming village in southwestern Saskatchewan, and Frye's reports from that desolate area contain as good a social history of the summer of 1934 as we are likely to get. There is the community of Frye's home town, Moncton, New Brunswick; the community of Kemp's neighbourhood on Fulton Avenue in Toronto; and the summer community of Gordon Bay on Lake Joseph, Ontario. The worlds of Helen Kemp and Northrop Frye continually expand, and after seven years we have travelled with them to Chicago and Ottawa, to Montreal and New York, to London and Oxford, to Paris and Brussels, to Rome and Florence. And we have seen through their eyes the early years of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the struggles of the United Church of Canada, the activities of the Student Christian Movement, the appeal of Communism, the rise of Fascism, and the beginnings of art education in the galleries of Canada. The centre of this expanding universe—the place Kemp and Frye always come home to—is Victoria College. The Frye-Kemp relationship begins at a Victoria College Music Club performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers in February 1931, when they were second-year students at Victoria. Kemp was the accompanist for this production, and Frye assisted with the lighting. They perhaps saw each other during the summer of 1931, when Frye had a job at the Central Reference Library in Toronto, but it was not until the following year that their romance began in earnest. In one of her letters from 1937, written when Frye was in Rome after his first year at Oxford, Kemp reminisces about his first visit to her home: "I kept

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counting back to see how long ago it was that you first came to see us and I gave you a raw carrot to eat. It is six years ago, and I'm always a little amazed at how strong-minded I was, my poor dear, you hadn't much chance, did you? I remember being sorry for you being so far from home, then scared to ask you to come to tea, then amazed that I had been so bold, and pleased when you were evidently shy and glad to come, and I was vaguely irritated and embarrassed (how many r's) when you made fun of me for playing Goossens, and perplexed at having asked George [her former boyfriend] when I was obviously more interested in what you would do next. Six years. I love you very much and I'd like to tell you so here, to-night, now." The first letters between Kemp and Frye that we have come from the winter of their third year at Victoria, and during the summer of 1932—before they both returned to Victoria for their final year—they began an extensive correspondence that lasted until June 1939, writing to each other whenever they were apart. There were five other separations: during the summer of 1933, when Kemp was in Toronto again and Frye was visiting his sister Vera in Chicago and taking in the World's Fair; during the summer of 1934, when Frye was a student minister in Saskatchewan, riding the circuit among three small parishes in the parched wheat fields of the plains, and Kemp was in Ottawa on a scholarship at the National Gallery; during the school year 1934-35, when Kemp was studying art history at the Courtauld Institute in London and Frye was at Emmanuel College; and for the academic years 1936-37 and 1938-39, when Frye was at Merton College, Oxford, and Kemp was in Toronto, serving as a don at Victoria and working at the Art Gallery of Toronto. They were married during the course of this correspondence, on 24 August 1937. John Ayre, Frye's biographer, had access to Frye's letters to Kemp, and he quotes from more than half of them.1 Ayre knew of the existence of Kemp's own letters to Frye, but she withheld them from him, and they did not come to light until 1992. Of the correspondence that passed between Kemp and Frye from 1932 to 1939, 255 letters, 7 telegrams, and 4 postcards are extant. Of these, 138 are from Frye and 128 from Kemp. Ayre's Northrop Frye: A Biography devotes ninety pages to the story of Frye's life from 1932 to 1939. Less is known about Kemp during these years, but much of what we now know emerges from the letters collected here. Ayre's biography naturally

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covers those gaps in the letters when Frye and Kemp are together in Toronto, and during these periods only an occasional letter passes between them. Kemp was born on 6 October 1910, on Montrose Avenue in Toronto, the daughter of Stanley H.F. Kemp, a Victoria College alumnus and a commercial artist, and Gertrude Maidement Kemp. Helen was the oldest of four children. Her brother Roy graduated from Victoria College with a degree in history in 1938, and spent most of his adult life as a photographer in New York City. Marion, the third child, left Toronto for South Africa when she was twenty to marry another Torontonian, Ernie Harrison, who had found work there. Harold, Kemp's younger brother, also attended Victoria, but he left college after one year to enlist in the RCAF and was killed in a bombing raid over Germany in 1944. Before she enrolled at Victoria College, Kemp had attended the Normal Model School in Toronto, the Earl Kitchener Public School, and Riverdale Collegiate Institute. During her first year at Riverdale, where she received the highest standing in the first eight forms, she took part in the Saturday morning classes at the Ontario College of Art. She then studied at the Danard and Hambourg Conservatories of Music, graduating with honours and receiving the AHCM in 1929. Uncertain as to whether she should pursue specialized study in music, Kemp enrolled in the three-year pass course at Victoria in the fall of 1929, the same year Frye entered. After repeating a year's work (she failed her course in 1931), she graduated in 1933 with secondclass honours in the general pass course, along with Frye, who was in the four-year honour course. The letters collected here open a window on the formative years of a young man who became one of the outstanding critical and creative minds of the twentieth century, and they reveal an articulate young woman whose self-awareness, idealism, and pragmatic good sense enabled her to establish her own place in the often turbulent 19305. The introductory headnotes to each of the six sections outline many of the key episodes in their life together and provide a sample of the issues that engaged them. One of these issues is letter-writing itself. "Wandering is the secret of successful letter-writing," Frye says in one of his first letters. "By all means, however, let me have all of your wanderings, logical and illogical." And Kemp says in a letter from August 1933, "My letters to you will look like a diary very probably,

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for I want you to know what is happening to me—it is one way of amusing myself, telling you what is happening to me. I may make good natured fun of your straw hat, or the way you plant your feet, or some of your small-boy tricks that make me gasp when I recall that you are the age of my brother's friends—but underneath all that is the fundamental trust in you. You know that." "You'll get a flood of letters from me," Frye writes from the mission field, "some passionate, some bored and bothered, some mere calf-bawling and selfpity, some purely sexual—I can feel the need for you as a general Slough of Despond fairly obviously. Take them all, but not seriously. I don't want to distress you." Both correspondents occasionally reprove each other about the letters they have received. "Your letter smells of the cloister a bit too much," writes Kemp, "and it rather set me off." And Frye now and then chides Kemp, saying that her letters are "too selfish" or "a little hard on the nerves." Paragraph after paragraph is filled with talk about letters. At one point Kemp speaks of the difference between writing letters and keeping a diary: "A nurse from Montreal who is going as companion to a sick friend just poked her head in and wants to know what I am doing. Writing letters? Oh yes, she had a lot to do too. Didn't I just hate writing letters? I said no, I really didn't dislike writing letters. {Not to you.} She said a friend gave her a diary and wants a faithful account of her travels written from day to day. I was reminded of Mark Twain and of Jack Oughton asking me if I were keeping a diary. I said no, that writing letters would have to serve. Writing a diary would be quite interesting to read, I suppose, later on. But I have a feeling that for me it would be like going behind a barn and talking to myself. I like to talk to you, because then I feel that I am sharing something with you as I want to do always. But if it is just for myself—there is nothing to that." Frye also understands letter-writing as a form of dialogue: it is not just a record of what has transpired but a conversation. As Kemp and Frye attempt to overcome the space of separation, their dialogue is motivated by a number of final causes. But the reasons for writing often become formal causes as well: correspondence as a subject is repeatedly foregrounded, so that the letters are frequently self-reflexive. Both Kemp and Frye speak of the anxieties caused by delayed correspondence. Both are apologetic when they go for more than a week or so without writing. Both are jubilant when letters do arrive. Both

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express regrets when their letters are especially dismal or carping or brief. Both are impatient with the postal service: letters from Oxford to Toronto sometimes take as long as twenty days, and keeping track of when mail is received and posted in southwestern Saskatchewan, where the farmers are part of the delivery service, is a regular chore during Frye's circuit-riding summer: "I am beginning to get a bit more cheerful now, sweetheart, particularly since your last letter came. I got over to Stone last Thursday, and found letters from mother and from Ida [Clare]. Next day the letter from you should have come, but it didn't: I picked it up at [Walter] Meyer's on Saturday, just after I had dashed off the beginnings of a note to you, which you will have long before this letter gets [to] you. I'm over at Stonepile again, and this letter will probably go out on Saturday again: I managed to get last week's letter off by Wednesday, as the George Mackintoshes were going into town. I got a letter from Jean along with yours, so it appears that the outside world is taking a bit of interest in me after all. It doesn't take long for a letter to get here, but it takes a while for me to get my hands on it." The tracking down of letters becomes a minor preoccupation for both Frye and Kemp throughout the course of the correspondence. Both writers reread the letters they have received. "If I had read my Bible as often in the last two days as I had read your letter," Frye says in May of 1934, "I'd have Isaiah finished at least. It was a good deal of a life-saver, as you may have guessed from the tone of my preceding letters." Two weeks later he remarks, "I love your letters so. I suppose I have read them each a dozen times." And Kemp: "Of course I read all your letters, over and over again. Especially when I can't just imagine what you are like." Sometimes the letters fail to summon Frye's image: "I was as homesick as the dickens last week for some four days, for no very good reason, but that passed too. I read your letters to see whether I could feel that I knew you, and I didn't, and I dissolved in total gloom. Things get pretty bad when I can't even imagine you." Kemp even exhumes letters written four years before: "I just pulled out one of your letters written in July 1932. It rather gave me a start, the working in and out of your very logical brain in response to my affectionate advances. Poor Norrie! I wish you were here to let me bewilder you again. Oh hell, I can't write to you to-night. I'm so tired I can hardly hold a pen. I had better leave off." Wish-fulfilments appear everywhere in the letters. Frye writes in

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*939/ "Any one of your letters can give me a choking feeling that interferes with a Cinzano, but this one seemed to live and breathe you so much that the bottom just dropped out of Paris, and there was I, homesick and miserable. I can't let myself get that way, though, and I don't as a rule. You're so sweet you must be all a dream. Often you are." Kemp even reports a frightening dream in which one of Frye's letters is momentarily exposed: "I woke up with a start lately with a nightmare in which I thought I had given one of your last letters to an utter stranger to read, and how I snatched it back when I remembered what you had said in it." Both Kemp and Frye are always, quite naturally, eager to hear from each other, yet at the same time they realize what an imperfect tool letter-writing is. In a letter from May 1934 Kemp says, "I am sorry to have written in jerks but it seems so hard to write fast enough. I find letters more unsatisfactory than I ever could have imagined— by way of trying to talk to you. It all seems so hanged one-sided—all this deferred reply, long-distance sort of thing. And I can't tell you tonight how I love you because I want to show you and have you read me a story and put me to bed. And there it is." Or again: "This having to write everything is an awful nuisance." Or still again: "It is quite a good idea not to write to me every other day as Art [Cragg] does to Florence [Clare]. Because letter-writing is often a dissipation of energy." Frye similarly laments the limitations of correspondence, seeing it as a form of transference and sublimation: "I am quite well aware of the fact—was as soon as the summer began—that I write extraordinarily bad letters to you and very infrequent ones. The reason is, I think, that the man who can pour out reams of love letters is far more in love with himself than with his correspondent. He devotes his energy to utterance, or self-expression, and transfers his affection from the lady to the paper. Denied the supreme satisfaction of bed-sheets, he sublimates himself in letter-sheets. I carried on this literary flirtation with you some years ago, in the first summer I was home and we corresponded. But since I have grown to love you so immeasurably more than I did then, or could then, the ideal lady at the other end of the postal service has become a part of myself, and when I write I am painfully conscious only of your absence. Hence these awkward, stammering, whining, almost illiterate letters." Frye gives fairly extensive accounts of his sightseeing travels: "Your letters," Kemp tells him, "sound like an intelligently conducted travel

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tour." She responds to his accounts of the Chicago World's Fair by saying, "I am enjoying things by proxy." But Kemp worries that her own travelogues are less replete with details. "I'm afraid I don't tell you much in my letters," she writes from Rome. "I might just as well be at home for all the travel descriptions I produce, but I hope you don't mind. I can't get down to describing sunset from the Ponte Vecchio, somehow. I seem to be getting more tongue-tied than ever, and I can't chatter brightly about the spirit of Florence. A spirit or a mood is something one lives through, but how can I explain it afterwards?" The most common refrain throughout is "I love you," but the more extended declarations of love, though conventional, are seldom trite, and the variety of ways Kemp and Frye discover to express their affection without degenerating into cheap sentiment is uncommon, especially for people as young as they. Still, they sometimes fail. Two weeks after he has turned twenty, Frye writes, "Don't you see, darling? I can't write you a sustained love letter, because when I try— and I have tried—the result sounds like a Chopin nocturne scored for brass." The reaction to letters is sometimes a source of bafflement: "I have still to understand," says Frye, "what it could have been about my letter that drove you forth into the night like the hero of a Strindberg play, unless it was a purely physical reaction from a long and exasperating period of concentration." More than once Frye tells Kemp not to worry if she cannot decipher his scrawl, for he has said nothing of importance. In a letter from January 1935, he says, "I could kick myself for writing you such infernal rubbish. Please excuse it, and remember next time that you have to allow for the fact that my state of feelings would be described far more fully and emphatically to you than to anyone else, so that my making so much fuss doesn't mean what it would to an outsider." The correspondence is certainly ample (as Kemp says, "I never seem to be able to stop with a note when it comes to talking to you"), but it is still only part of a much larger network of letter-writing: both Kemp and Frye frequently refer to letters to and from other correspondents—family, colleagues, employers, friends, classmates, and relatives. In a letter of January 1935 Kemp reveals that she has "fifteen letters to write to-day." "I love to get letters," she adds, "but the pleasure brings also the need of answering them, and I have not learned to spare myself—I can't just dash off a note and call it a letter. But I shall try this time—unfortunately I started off with one to the family,

Introduction

xxiii

and now here you are, and I can never be brief about either one of you." Although Kemp chides Frye for not writing to his Victoria College superiors, he nevertheless maintains a substantial correspondence with others. Sometimes he includes information he wants to reach Kemp in his letters to others. After he has completed his first exams at Oxford, he tells her that he has rilled one of his letters to her friend Barbara Sturgis "with the sort of Oxford gossip that doesn't get into my letters to you, on the principle that she'll come around and read it to you." Both correspondents, moreover, serve as intermediaries, delivering messages to others. During the year she is in England, Kemp carries on an extensive correspondence with her father, S.H.F. Kemp, who writes her almost every week. Although her letters to him have not been preserved, in his very extensive letters to her he himself occasionally comments on the art of letter-writing. Responding to her early messages from London, he says, "You write a splendid letter, Kemp. You have the knack, seeming to know just what we want to hear. Keep that up girl, it is a fine start"; and six months later he repeats the compliment: "You write just the kind of human documents I want." He recognizes something uncommon in Frye's letters and urges her to save them, even though he is clearly not persuaded that Frye is the right person for her. "Apart from the illegible character of his handwriting, [Frye's] letters are so away and beyond the ordinary that they are worthy of keeping for the rest of your life. The fact that they are so hard to read in the longhand in which they were written would be far effectual enough against perusal by the ordinary busybody."2 Then there are those occasions in the letters that focus on the published correspondence of others. Laurence Housman's edition of War Letters of Fallen Englishmen moves Kemp to meditate on hope and friendship, and she wonders whether the current generation "would write with the same faith and sincerity—when the youngsters with brains are busy debunking and writing flashy criticisms of the work of others. A generation is growing now which must feel that there is no place for it in the world. To the serious-minded this is ruinous. To the frivolous, equally so, but in a different way." She is attracted to Marcia Davenport's biography of Mozart because it is through letters, especially Mozart's own "voluminous correspondence," that the characters speak for themselves. And she observes that Julia Cartwright's biography of Beatrice d'Este gives a good picture of the state of affairs

xxiv

Introduction

in fifteenth-century Italy because Cartwright has dug into the Sforza correspondence. For his part, Frye says to Kemp, "Your letters are beautifully written and a treat to read, and would be if I were a third party instead of the addressee. Women seem to be able to achieve an absolute command of self-expression denied to the more abstract male. Some women, that is, like Katherine Mansfield and Ellen Terry and Helen Kemp." In her letter of 13 May 1935, Kemp, writing from London, says, "My dear, I've forgotten when I last wrote to you—it may be a few days or it may be a month ago, but I've just had a letter to-day, and one last week and it does feel so luxurious that I've spent the last half hour reading eight pages of your last one and laughing more than I've done for some months! You sound quite your usual self,—and while I'm not gurgling at your seriousness,—some of your similes were a little too much for the chaste purity of the Adam room at the Courtauld Institute. Some of its ghosts must have scuttled into corners if they were looking over my shoulder. Serves them right anyway, proper old girls, they should keep their noses out of things. Though why they should, I don't quite know, for I'm curious enough about them, and would feel no misgivings whatever in poking into their affairs, if I thought I was the only one doing it, I suppose. I remember telling you how indecent I thought it was to look at Carlyle's love notes to his wife." The similes Kemp refers to are from Frye's letter of 3 May 1935, where he says, "I stand more or less paralyzed, wanting badly to commit myself to something, communism, Catholicism, pedantry in any line, and realizing that I can't; that the only thing I can commit myself to is my religion and my wife, one being in the clouds and the other in Europe. So I rush around squealing, like a pig in a fire, or sit around with large ideas and not doing anything about them, like a eunuch with an erection." Kemp worries that Frye's language might be too indecorous for the moral propriety of the other women students at the Courtauld. But her reference to Carlyle's love letters brings us back to the issue raised in the preface to the present volume: should anyone lay eyes on what Frye wrote to her—or she to him? If so, would Helen Frye have thought differently sixty years later? The publication of these letters is, of course, an implicit answer to these questions. But even Kemp, at age twenty-four, is not altogether certain why she thinks the "proper old girls" at the Courtauld should "keep their noses

Introduction

xxv

out of things." The cause of her uncertainty is curiosity, and I believe she would have granted that our own curiosity is sufficient reason for permitting others to share this seven-year period of the lives of two uncommon people.

1 John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989). Hereafter cited as Ayre. 2 S.H.F. Kemp to HK, 17 October 1934,9 April 1935, and 25 September 1934. HFF, 1992, box 2, file 3.

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Abbreviations

AGO ACT AHCM ATCM Ayre BBC BM Bob CCF CGIT CNE CNR CPR E EC HCM HFF HGK HK HKF HNF illus. IODE

Art Gallery of Ontario Art Gallery of Toronto Associate diploma, Hambourg Conservatory of Music Associate diploma, Toronto Conservatory of Music John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989) British Broadcasting Corporation British Museum the annual skit put on for the first-year students at Victoria College, named after Cobourg campus custodian Robert Beare Co-operative Commonwealth Federation Canadian Girls in Training Canadian National Exhibition Canadian National Railway Canadian Pacific Railway The letter E between two numbers represents the year of graduation from Emmanuel College (e.g., JEJ). Emmanuel College Hambourg Conservatory of Music Helen Frye Fonds, Northrop Frye Papers, Victoria University Library, Toronto Helen Gertrude Kemp Helen Kemp Helen Kemp Frye Herman Northrop Frye Illustration Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire

xxviii JCR LCC LSR MPP NF NFF NGC NGCA

NRA OCA OCE OEA OSA OUDS OUP PLS PLT PT RAF RCA RCM ROD RDF ROM SCM SCR SPS T TCM TPL TSO UBC

Abbreviations Junior Common Room London County Council League of Social Reconstruction Member of Provincial Parliament Northrop Frye Northrop Frye Fonds, Northrop Frye Papers, Victoria University Library, Toronto National Gallery of Canada National Gallery of Canada Archives, Ottawa; File 7.40, Outside Organizations, Carnegie Corporation, Individuals: Kemp, Helen G. National Recovery Administration Ontario College of Art Ontario College of Education Ontario Education Association Ontario Society of Artists Oxford University Drama Society Oxford University Press Picture Loan Society Postal Telegram Physical Training Royal Air Force Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Royal Conservatory of Music Robert D. Denham Roy Daniells Fonds, Special Collections and Archives, University of British Columbia Royal Ontario Museum Student Christian Movement Senior Common Room School of Practical Science, University of Toronto; later, the Faculty of Engineering The letter T between two numbers represents the year of graduation from the University of Toronto (e.g., 3x2). Toronto Conservatory of Music Toronto Public Library Toronto Symphony Orchestra University of British Columbia

Abbreviations

xxix

UC University College, University of Toronto UCC/VUA United Church of Canada / Victoria University Archives, Toronto UNB University of New Brunswick U of T University of Toronto V &A Victoria and Albert Museum VC Victoria College VU Victoria University VUA Victoria University Archives WMS Women's Missionary Society Frye and Kemp often use periods with abbreviations, which are reproduced in the text of the letters as they have written them.

i. Kemp, ca. 1934 (courtesy of the Victoria University Library)

, Sample of Kemp's handwriting from Letter m, 31 March1935(courtesy of the Victoria University Library)

3. Frye, 1933 (courtesy of the Victoria University Library)

4. Sample of Frye's handwriting from Letter 13, July 1932 (courtesy of the Victoria University Library)

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The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp VOLUME 1

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Summer of 1932

The first of the Frye-Kemp letters that has been preserved appears to have been written during the winter of 1931-32 when Frye was spending the Christmas holidays at the home of a classmate, Del Martin. Several other letters were exchanged when they were both in Toronto. But the majority of the 1932 correspondence was written between the time that Frye left college on 27 May for his home in Moncton, New Brunswick, and his return to Toronto in midSeptember. During this time Kemp was in Toronto at her parents' home on Fulton Avenue, except for a three-week interlude on Georgian Bay at the summer cottage of a classmate and life-long friend, Jean Elder, and for a visit to the home of her paternal aunt and uncle in Forest, Ontario. Frye spent the summer holiday working at the public library in Moncton, and Kemp also had a library job—at Victoria College. In late August and early September she worked at the Canadian National Exhibition on Toronto's lakefront, serving soup and hot beans to the fair-goers. Her parents were at their Gordon Bay cottage for much of the summer, so in addition to her library and CNE jobs she kept house at their Fulton Avenue home as well. As a conservatory student, Kemp showed considerable promise as a musician. One reviewer said of her first public recital, performed in February 1929, that she "played with fire and conviction."1 The next month she was featured with the cellist Marcus Adeney in Kitchener, Ontario, sharing the stage with the Kitchener-Waterloo Philharmonic Choir.2 But, as her letters to Frye make quite clear, she did not forsake her interest in music after enrolling in Victoria the next fall. Frye was also a pianist, and the early letters especially are filled with references to the music they are listening to and practising: Bach, Mozart,

4

Summer of 1932

Beethoven, Glinka, Schubert, Gluck, and Brahms. "Thank God for Bach and Mozart, anyway," says Frye. "They are a sort of common denominator in music,—the two you can't argue about." We find them both working their way through Czerny's piano studies, and Kemp is fond of practising quintets and trios with her brother Roy and her fellow musicians from the Danard Conservatory. There is a great deal of discussion of music as well, and the musical tastes of each come through quite clearly. We also learn what they are reading—from Cervantes to D.H. Lawrence. By this time Frye was already deeply into Blake and zealous in his enthusiasm for Spengler. The Decline of the West, he says to Kemp, is "a book that I am hoping against hope that you will read this summer." Before enrolling at Victoria, Kemp had also entertained the idea of specializing in art. This was an interest fostered by her father, who, early in his career, had been an associate of Arthur Lismer and Tom Thomson. Her letters to Frye contain a number of whimsical linedrawings, but even the best of these hardly suggest the genuine talent she had as an illustrator, which is revealed in the sketch-books that have been preserved and in the map she drew of the University of Toronto campus.3 Although Kemp never pursued drawing as a career, art, especially practical art, remained a central interest throughout her life. When she was a young woman, this interest developed in the direction of art education, and in the letters from the mid-i93os we see the role played by Lismer in launching her career in adult education at the Art Gallery of Toronto. The correspondence of 1932 reveals that the two young students had developed a genuine affection for each other during the first fifteen months of their relationship, and they are seldom diffident in expressing their sentiments. At the same time it is clear that neither wants to be taken for granted: one of the first things Frye reports when he is back in Moncton is that he has seen his ex-girlfriend, Evelyn Rogers, and Kemp shortly reciprocates, revealing that she has been out with George Clarke, her ex-boyfriend. The former girlfriend and boyfriend, in fact, make rather frequent appearances throughout the correspondence. Frye's letters from the first summer reveal a young man who feels imprisoned by the provincialism of Moncton, and he is ill and depressed for much of the summer. The focus of his interests, in addition to Kemp, is the social and intellectual life of Victoria College. "I should rather starve in Toronto," he tells her, "than feed

Introduction

5

in luxury here." To maintain contact from his remote outpost he corresponds throughout the summer with his friends—the "chain-gang," so called because of the round robin "chain" letters they circulate. He is rejuvenated when classmates visit him in Moncton, and he is eager to receive news from Victoria about his course standing. Kemp has her own melancholic spells, but in contrast to Frye she is caught up in a swirl of activity, rubbing elbows with the artists and architects and musicians of Toronto (Marcus Adeney, Harold Chapman, Joyce Hornyansky, Evlyn Howard-Jones, Geoffrey Waddington, Ruby Dennison, Charles Comfort, Reg and Mary Thornhill), playing trios with her brother Roy and his friends, sketching a campus map, hitchhiking to Lake Joseph, spending the weekend with a friend in Stouffville, ambling through the Todmorden slums at night, serving soup at the Canadian National Exhibition, and trekking to the Art Gallery of Toronto. Frye is only nineteen when the letters begin, but already at this age he shows a penchant for the clever phrase and the ironic mode, as in his letter of 5 July, where he lampoons a bit of dramatic doggerel he had turned up in the Moncton Public Library. The child is father of the man in other areas as well. In a 1990 notebook, Frye remarked, "Any biography would say that I dropped preaching for academic life: that's the opposite of what my spiritual biography would say, that I fled into academia for refuge and have ever since tried to peek out into the congregation and make a preacher of myself."4 The choice between preacher and teacher, a choice which Frye never really resolved, is one he wavers back and forth between, even as a teenager. In the early letters he can assume both roles, as when he lectures Kemp on, say, music or humour or Sinclair Lewis, or when he sermonizes on the nature of love or religion. Frye's future vocation is one of the more extended topics of conversation in the 1932 letters, and Kemp is no less urbane than Frye in her reflections on the issue. These are the depression years, and the lack of family resources makes both Kemp and Frye wonder whether or not they will be able to return to college for their final year. Kemp's father, for twentyfive years the chief graphic designer for the Crown Cork & Seal Company, had little work during these years, and Frye's father, a hardware salesman, was continually trying to keep one step ahead of the creditors. But return to the university they do. As Frye says to Kemp, "There is only one refuge in Toronto for an ambitious adolescent,

6

Summer of 1932

and that is the University. This applies equally to both of us." The letters from the summer conclude with Frye itching to get back to Toronto and to write on his "definite heroisms in literature—Donne, Milton, Bunyan, Swift, Blake, Dickens, Browning, and Shaw." He announces that Browning is, in fact, his "favourite poet," and he proposes to write a paper on Browning for Pelham Edgar and one on Romanticism for G.S. Brett, both of which projects he carries out during his final year at Victoria. Three letters are written after Frye and Kemp return to campus, and by the end of the first chapter of their relationship fairly round portraits begin to emerge from what they reveal about their intellectual and emotional lives, from the parries and poses of their early romance, from the vignettes they draw of daily life in Moncton and Toronto, from their complaints about the shortcomings of their religious upbringing, and even from the stories they tell. 1 "Recital Is Given: Young Pianist Charms Large Audience with Varied Program," Toronto Daily Star, 12 February 1929, 19. The Toronto Globe called Kemp's performance of works by Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Goossens, and Liszt "successful" (9 February 1929, 19). The recital also included a Brahms trio, which Kemp performed with violinist Ruby Dennison, her instructor at the Danard Conservatory, and cellist Marcus Adeney. 2 See "Philharmonic Choir Scores Again before Music Loving Populace of the City," Kitchener Daily Record, 6 March 1929, i, 13. The reviewer remarks that "while the choral work was of a high order, the evening's enjoyment would have been greatly lessened by the non-appearance of the assisting artists, Marcus Adeney, cellist, and Miss Helen Kemp, pianiste." 3 For Kemp's early sketches and the drawings she did when studying at the Courtauld Institute and travelling on the continent, see HFF, 1993, box i, file 3, and box 4, file 2. For two of the former, see illus. 6 and 7, this volume; for examples of the latter, see illus. 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21, this volume. 4 Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 39, file 8.

i. HK to NF

[Toronto?] [Winter, 1931-32?]

This letter was written to NF when he was on Christmas holidays, apparently preparing to visit the home of a classmate, James Delmer (Del) Martin, who lived in Honeywood, Ontario. It seems to have been written while NF was still in Toronto, but it may have been addressed to him at Martin's home. The date is a conjecture, based upon the assumption that the letter was written early in their relationship, which had begun in February 1931— about ten months before the Christmas holidays of the following academic year. Dear Norrie Little mice have ways of snuggling into corners somehow—and if you see one in the haymow when you are turning handsprings— watch out! I might be there! I hope you have a perfectly beautiful holiday—with snow and ice and wind and a chicken supper and a concert and an appreciative audience and fun with the Martins—and don't grow a beard and don't freeze—be sure to wear your rubbers! and take care of your profile— it's worth a lot! (For if you ever give up philo-so-phiz-ing you might start posing for wing collar ads—in which feet don't show— Whoa there Polonius! Give my best regards to Del—and watch out for mice. (skip of pen: mouse should look very happy— this one is being coy)

8 2. NF to HK

Summer of 1932 [Toronto?] Saturday night. [Spring, 1932?]

While this letter cannot be dated with certainty, it appears to have been written early in the Frye-Kemp relationship, and references to the publication of Acta Victoriana, the literary magazine of VC, and to NF's walking home from HK's house mean that it was written during the academic year. NF's anxieties about the appearance of Acta may be evidence for a date toward the end of the spring term of 1932; he began writing for the magazine in October 1931, and his first major article appeared in the April 1932 issue. The statement of his editorial policy for the following year, when he was editor, appeared in the May issue. While he could have addressed the letter to HK's Fulton Avenue home, it seems more likely that HK was already visiting her aunt and uncle in Forest, Ontario, where her first letter of the summer originates. Red Squirrel: I've got all kinds of work I simply must get done, it's getting late and I must catch up on my sleep. Consequently I am in bed writing to you. I guess I will never learn sense. No, you have to be born with sense, and I wasn't. What a week I've spent! (This, I warn you, is going to be a very egotistical note) I don't remember ever having been as thoroughly at loose ends before. Whenever I thought of you—which I did very often—I shivered, and whenever I thought of Acta—which I did the rest of the time—I felt malarial. Do you know, sweetheart, what I wanted to do? I would have given anything to have come to you. I wanted to spend about a day lying on the floor in front of you, with my arms around your ankles and my head on your feet, and to see if I really had forgotten how to cry. What an immense relief it would have been if I could have remembered! But, of course, I didn't do anything so silly, or even try to. I had my institutional dignity to think of, and my duty to my public. What would English and History1 say if they saw their Norrie Frye making a fool of himself in front of a female? So I tried to think of something else. But that didn't work. A picture of you kept floating in and smashing things up. I kept trying to fight it down, but it recurred, and I finally discovered why. It was all

Spring, 1932?

9

that I worshipped in you and delighted in that I was fighting down and that kept recurring. I could hypnotize and fascinate you like a snake, I could crush your will under mine, I could do all sorts of strong-arm things with you, but there was something left, the something that makes you Helen, not my corporeal Helen that I like and am tickled by, but the inward esoteric Helen that I love and am swayed by. And I knew that this something was beginning to despise me. It was a hideous idea to face, but it was there. In my darker moments, of course, I began to see that if you did not, then I should end by despising you. I had lost touch with you, of course, because the more wretched I felt the more inferior I felt, and I was working out my inferiority complex by trying to force you into the status of the ex-girl friend2 and slipping myself into the same treadmill. Then I suddenly felt very small and very lonely and utterly miserable. Then Acta came out, but, relieved as I was, I wasn't able quite to realize the relief. But when I got talking to you Friday, though a bit frightened at first, I saw what had happened. There you were, the same Helen, there was I, the same Norrie. You had been waiting patiently and resignedly for me to come back, and I had come. And you showed very plainly that you knew that. "You're still mine," I said. I walked home with that ringing in my head. And now Helen is a pedal-point3 again. And all my thoughts go in the right direction, all my words say what they are meant to say, my gestures fall into their right places, and my whole nervous system goes humming and spinning along, easily and fluently, having found its essential harmonic base again. Tonight I feel strangely at peace,— rested, for the first time in six weeks. Or maybe I'm just sleepy. It's one o'clock. You are sleeping now. And my lips have brushed your forehead, and my hand has smoothed down your hair. But you don't know that,—you're asleep. Norrie 1 NF was enrolled in the honour course in philosophy (English or history option). There was also an honour course in English and history. NF is referring to students in this latter course. 2 Evelyn Rogers. 3 In music, a tone that is sustained while other harmonies are introduced.

10 3. NF to HK

Summer of 1932 Moncton, N.B. Tuesday. [31 May 1932]

Postmarked i June 1932, this is the first letter from NF's family home in Moncton written to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto, Ontario. NF had to borrow money for the trip from W.J. Little, the bursar ofVU (Ayre, 75). In her letter of early June (Letter 5), HK says that she received NF's letter immediately before she "started off with Jean's [Jean Elder's] people" for Georgian Bay. My dear Helen: Well, as I haven't got the typewriter yet, you are reduced to deciphering the original hieratic. As you have probably guessed, I am home. Wednesday morning I went over to Little and touched him, quite successfully. For some inexplicable reason, however, I did not get the cheque cashed that day. There are two trains leaving Toronto for Moncton a day, but one of them leaves late at night, takes two nights on the trip, and stops at about every backdoor; the other in the early morning. So it was Friday morning before I actually left. I didn't communicate with you in the meantime because, as I explained, I detest an anticlimax. Ken Cash was down with his car, and I went around town in it while his relatives shopped—an unfortunate venture from my point of view. This was on Thursday. My trip was completely devoid of interest—Montreal was bitterly cold and I stayed in the station during the four hours I had to wait there and read. I got in Saturday afternoon, looking the picture of beauty in distress, and have been sleeping most of the time ever since. You remember Charlie Krug, who was Don of Gate House1 last year and is now head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology down here at Mount Allison.2 He was up yesterday. He is getting married this fall. Worse, he told me that Joe Binning had died of an operation for appendicitis in Moose Jaw last Friday.3 The news knocked me cold, for it was not only so utterly unexpected, but Joe was one of the finest men I have ever met. He wanted to be Prime Minister, and I think he would have been—or should have been at any rate. He was the only 3Ti4 man I really missed this year. I pity poor old Gordie [Romans] deeply, as it will really be harder on him than losing his father. Joe was everything to him—you know how affectionate he is, and Joe has been his best friend nearly all his life. I am writing to him tonight, but I don't know what to say. It is best, of course

31 May 1932

11

to say nothing, but a sympathetic silence is a hard thing to communicate by letter. Prospects of a job here depend of course on the Public Library— Dad found one or two stenographic vacancies but they naturally want them permanently filled, and when I am no longer under the aegis of the Business College I can do no public stenography.5 The hitch at the Library is a female on the Library Board with a voice, a lot of influence, and about five enormous and unmarried daughters. Dad himself is getting rather fed up—he sells builder's supplies and not a building has gone into the air since the well-known depression entered into the Maritime stream of consciousness. He is angling for one or two agencies, although of course I am interested only in those likely to result in his getting a car. It is barely possible that later on I may be doing what [Artl Cragg is with men's ties, calling however at offices and not house to house. That contingency is as yet sitting comfortably in Jehovah's lap. Soon after arriving I discovered to my amazement and horror that the family had possessed themselves of a radio. Not only that, but mother is taking a positively insane delight in the kind of thing she hears over it and is now considerably more familiar than I with contemporary music as conceived by the oracles of that infernal instrument. However, the resurrection of the piano is providing the house with enough noise to permit of a considerable diminution of the ethereal kind, and after hearing Gertrude Huntley Sunday night I am gradually getting reconciled. I was up to see the ex-girl friend last night. She is looking very well and has fallen hard for somebody else, praise be to Allah—a graduate in Forestry from the University of New Brunswick. She says she would marry him if it weren't for the depression—his work is unsettled and her father is in the C.N.R., an institution which, as no doubt you know, is headed in the general direction of the ashcan,—or Limbo of Vanities,6 if you prefer. Moncton, of course, is largely dependent on that railway, which is why the town is at present as dead as a reconstruction of Stonehenge. I shall probably stay away from the kid this year, as the influence I have over her seems to be well-nigh hypnotic—at least always has been. So another problem has solved itself. Work on Bach has not yet started. I was looking over some of Howard's (my brother's) music and discovered Czerny's op. 740—the book you have.7 The discovery is little short of providential, as it is exactly what I need at present. Czerny I always thought a unique character.

12

Summer of 1932

He had no more creative originality or inspiration than a manure spreader, but he is immortal simply because he came along when the pianoforte was developing and realized so clearly what fun it is to play one. I have not quite decided what to do first in Bach—probably the Prelude & Fugue in B flat from the second book of what must be by now a decidedly ill-tempered clavichord. Well, I have already sprained a couple of convolutions trying to produce a poem and the damned Muse is still too stuck-up to come. I keep kidding myself I have too strong a sense of humor to write poetry. Which is true in a way—it certainly is too strong for my kind of poetry. {Remark to the effect that I should shut up to follow here.} Norrie. 24 Pine St. Moncton, N.B. 1 One of the four houses of the main residence at VC; NF had a private room in Gate House from his second year until he graduated. 2 Mount Allison University, originally the Mount Allison Wesleyan Academy, founded in 1843 in Sackville, N.B., by Charles Frederick Allison. 3 For an announcement of Binning's death see the Victoria College Bulletin, no. 26 (1932-33), 46. Moose Jaw is a city in Saskatchewan, located 160 kilometres north of the U.S. border. 4 Classes are referred to in this way at the U of T, the notation indicating the scheduled year of graduation. 5 After graduating from high school, NF attended Success Business College in Moncton, N.B., for six months. 6 The first place Satan encounters after he alights on the world's outermost orb in book 3 of Milton's Paradise Lost (see lines 444-96). 7 Eratus Howard Frye, NF's older brother, was killed in World War I. Op. 740 is Czerny's The Art of Finger Dexterity. Among his brother's music, NF also discovered Mendelssohn's Rondo Capriccioso and Raffs Am Loreley-Fels. See NFF, 1993, box i, notebook i, par. 660.

4. HK to NF

Box 186 Forest Ontario Thursday night [2? June 1932]

HK was spending part of her summer holiday in Forest with her paternal aunt and uncle, Clara and W.W. (Well) Kemp, who was the town clerk. The graduation exercises at the University of Western Ontario she mentions were held on 27 May, and HK did not yet know whether she passed her economics course, so the letter probably dates from the early part of June, the first Thursday being 2 June. As NF arrived in Moncton on 28 May, it seems

2? June 1932

13

likely that HK addressed the letter to him there. The letter she mentions receiving in the second paragraph is missing.

My dear Norrie,— I am writing in a somewhat difficult position. I have adopted your custom and am propped up in bed. It is nearly midnight and there was a fly buzzing noisily around the electric light. I turned it off, and Mr Fly has retired into a corner somewhere. If he comes near the bedlamp, I shall have to pull the covers over my ears like a youngster and squall. I had a feeling on Tuesday morning that something was going to happen,—I mean, I was going to get a letter from you,—and I did! Of course I can well understand how difficult it would be to stir up enough energy to be an anguished lover swinging in your deck-chair— I wonder that such a well-fed poodle could even demonstrate affection—that is, for anything except the menu for the next meal. There there dear—I didn't mean it. I've just finished getting my face all stuck up with grease from a half-pound chicken drum-stick. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I turned out quite fat—I believe I might have it in me. I actually think I'm developing hips, shoulders, and everything. But maybe it's just a fond delusion. I was weighed to-day, (with the aid of George Case who is seventeen, and lives here, and goes to highschool, plays a clarinet, takes me to shows, and is a nice boy etc etc) Weight 94 pounds + 14 ounces. Wouldn't bring much in the hog market, but it's the best I can do. I'm afraid this letter won't be very long. (The fly is overhead and sounds more like a wasp. It's quiet now, having retired behind my pillow, but I am being brave.) I spent some time last night writing Harold [Kempl a letter with illustrations—since he wrote me one in which he drew quite a recognizable portrait of Rasputin, and one of H.G.K. as she will look in cap and gown. He gave quite an account of the day at the same time, and deserved a little attention from me. I'm glad you have a piano. I am doing my best with Aunt Clara's [Clara Kemp's]. You probably know what I would be doing—Scarlatti, Schumann, Czerny, a couple of Chopin Etudes. I haven't played for more than two hours any day, for when I get started George comes in and plays radio, or Aunt Clara starts talking to me. I think that fully three hours a day, not including meals, are taken up with talk—

14

Summer of 1932

plain gossip about people and relations (the distinction is valid in many cases: I've got the craziest lot of relatives I ever hope to see, in a family that regards itself as ineligible for an asylum.) And I have not been crawling out of bed very early. Aunt Clara has quite definite views on love, life, marriage, funerals, illegitimate babies, preachers, the United Church of Canada, Roman Catholics, the younger generation (lazy & not like when we were young) etc. Uncle Well and Aunt Clara are the best relatives I've got, I think, and I'm having a very good time. When I find we disagree on the illegitimate child business—and she talks about the young mother and her "shame," I soft-pedal, and let it go at that. The prize talker around these parts is the sister of the wife of another uncle. We drove to London, to see my cousin Alma [Brown] graduate1 (nurse) from Western University,2 and Mrs Hay was in the car. She talked as regularly as the engine moved, and her rhythm was about the same as the way the car ran over the gravel road, with a greater stress here and there whenever a deeper bump or hollow appeared. She's noted for her command of language—not the quality—but oh, the quantity! I soon found that no answers were expected, so I kept looking in her general direction whenever I had to, and kept on thinking of pleasant topics. You are fortunate to be able to get away with amusing yourself, and going into retirement. I have been talked at quite a bit. Besides what I mentioned above, Aunt Clara spent yesterday afternoon talking about their troubles when they had to care for my grandparents,3— grandma especially who grew terribly intolerant, jealous and insanely spiteful before she died. Oh dear, oh dear! However, I fumigated my soul by lying out in the sun for the rest of the afternoon—the garden is lovely—lilacs and peonies and tulips and forget-me-nots and iris are in bloom. There is a hill across the driveway which serves as a vegetable and flower garden, and the tender young lettuce and potatoes are growing in rows that curve gently with the line of the hilltop. Uncle Well stands outlined against the sky as he digs, and Aunt Clara bends with a hoe in her hand and a huge hat on her head, and works for ten minutes, then comes and talks to me, as we sit on the grass. Then George comes from school (fifth form)4 and stretches out full length and we gossip some more. Darn it all, I could tell you a lot of things about this place but I'm too lazy. The more I stay here, the more I'm glad about you. Everything is so much fun—you know about that. I like you so much, and so

Early June 1932

15

many thrilling things happen because of liking you, that I should tell you all about it. But the fly is buzzing in a very determined fashion, and you are a sympathetic soul anyway, and probably know what I mean. Since I am getting sleepier and just had to brush the fly off my nose, I'll say good-night my dear,—and I've had a hunch that I may have passed in economics after all.5 Helen. 1 Alma Ruth Brown, from Parkhill, Ont, graduated from the University of Western Ontario in London on 27 May 1932. 2 The University of Western Ontario had been called Western University from 1908 until 1923. 3 HK's paternal grandparents were Daniel Kemp (b. 1835) and Rebecca Sarah Cronin Kemp (1842-1929). 4 Later called Grade 13 in Ontario. 5 HK did pass her economics course, which she had failed the previous year.

5. HK to NF

c/o Mr & Mrs A.B. Elder Honey Harbour. Georgian Bay Ontario. [Early June 1932]

HK was continuing her vacation at the summer home of her friend and classmate, Jean Elder. The letter that HK mentions in the first paragraph is NF's letter of 31 May (Letter 3); and when NF writes HK on 11 June (Letter 6), it is clear that he has received this letter, which must have been written sometime during the first week of June.

Dear Norrie Starting off according to summer camp formula,—please excuse note-paper as it is very scarce here etc,—just to show you that I do read Eaton, Crane & Pike's1 ads and to get over that ground for the rest of the summer, ave Caesar! Your letter arrived very opportunely fifteen minutes before I started off with Jean's people for three weeks of swimming, and black flies and tall trees and sun-sets and rowing and general all-round heaven. If you were here I would certainly push you off the dock, my dear Illustrious Student.

16

Summer of 1932

Jean's father decamped yesterday for he couldn't stand the flies and mosquitoes. There is something about the Elder epidermis which is peculiarly sensitive to sunburn and fly bites. Jean is swollen up in odd places—her ankles and feet now enable her to wear a pair of shoes which are usually two sizes too large. My hide, resembling the younger rhinoceros, is not so sensitive. I can sit still and let the durn flies do their flitting, but I am not so keen on finding a clot of blood on my hands every time I touch the back of my neck. Still, I know that my circulatory system seems in Ai condition by the regularity of the spurts. After all my talk of preferring plain guts to quietistic principles, I am beginning to feel like the Hindu who sat so long in his contemplation of Brahman that the birds nested in his hair. The number of black beggars I have sent on into their next incarnation is getting rather alarming, especially when my thatch is developing into their grave-yard. Jean and I have been swimming twice—before breakfast. It is a matter of principle. As the moths have found a nest and haven in Jean's bathing suit and as I have none with me, we are glad of the excuse to take 'nature's way' and streak in before we have time to think. It is so cold that we gasp and sputter and insist that it is quite warm. But this morning I had a regular bath and came out feeling buxom and pleased with myself for staying in so long—but had to duck rather hurriedly into a raincoat because of a boatload of Sunday worshippers coming up the channel. We are sleeping and reading and doing nothing. I am so delighted with it all—I feel like the greenest, healthiest, most juicy and complacent cabbage you ever saw—and I glory in the fact. We are both knitting sweaters, for no particular reason. We also chew gum. To knit a sweater is a great experience—another test of moral stamina in my case for I have never finished one in my life, but I can almost beat Jean at it. Mine is a bright green colour, with yellow needles—three inches done so far—enough to come over the H.G.K. hip-bones. You may laugh all you like at 'back-to-nature cranks/ I don't care at all. Besides I think that if I should ever go so far as Marie Antoinette I should insist on cleaning out the cow's stable also.2 And as I have a memory of a certain barnyard on my uncle's farm before he built a barn that shamed the house in point of modern appliances and comfort—a memory of a yard full of black straw where if you walked you left an ankle-print which slowly filled up with a beer-coloured

Early June 1932

17

liquid—Well I can't see even the estimable Rousseau being quite so practical. It was your slur on the imagination of my dear old Czerny which started me on the manure-spreading line of thought anyway. If you wish to keep my mind in chaste contemplation of the beauty that is a joy forever3 etc you had better be very circumspect, grandfather. I am so sorry to hear about your friend Joe Binning. Of course I did not know him, but merely gazed from afar at one of the great minds who then seemed so far removed from such a foolish little wretch as myself. Do write to Gord Romans, and send him my deepest sympathy. Poor old Gord has had a bad time of it—I am beginning to like him very much. We also have acquired a radio. A wretched contrivance, especially as I have not yet heard anything except 'In a Persian Market' and 'Naughty Marietta'4 issue forth between announcements. My dear man,—and this time I am the grandmother,—if your influence over 'the ex-girl friend' is as you say 'well-nigh hypnotic' you certainly had better 'stay away from the kid' or your problem will not have solved itself by any manner of means. Ask grandma, she knows—from the ex-girl friend's standpoint. Incidentally, as a matter of interest, grandma might add that she has refused to wear a beautiful opal-studded fraternity pin, mainly for the simple reason that there is nobody to appreciate the gravity of such an ornament here in the wild woods.5 I certainly hope you are duly impressed. Having decided that I will not improve my mind or do anything in the least uplifting or educational, I have spent the day reading Jean parts of WJ. Turner, and listening to the absurd notions of that uplifting female in 'Main Street.'6 I shall be very interested in seeing how your muse develops. I have a hunch that at present you would probably produce something more on the flavour of Pope than Keats or Blake—but as I have told you, I know nothing about poetry, and while I am gradually becoming interested, I am not yet intelligent on the subject, and probably would wrong you, Feathertop. I am becoming irrational—especially as it is dark—Jean now lights the lamp. I spent the Friday afternoon that you left town with Miss [Margaret] Ray. She has had a very hard time and looks very weak. We had a long long talk about this and that—the Frye being mentioned, whereupon I achieved one of the reddest and most prolonged blushes

i8

Summer of 1932

of my career while she sat and laughed and watched me suffer and suffer. I am certainly going to get over that habit. Say—I'm going to stop right here. Three pages is enough to write to anybody—I suppose you head the course again, Illustrious Student—I shan't know until Thursday7 so I send my very best wishes, condolences or congratulations. Helen. P.S. Jean was about to send you a beautiful pressed mosquito, but decided it would not be appreciated by such an aesthetic soul as yourself. You are not being billed by the S.C.M.8 This is the only envelope to fit. HGK 1 A brand of stationery. 2 The reference is to the park adjoining the Petit Trianon near Versailles, where Marie Antoinette engaged in a back-to-nature fantasy, establishing there eight small farms, complete with peasants, cows, and dung heaps. 3 The allusion is to the first line of Keats's Endymion, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." 4 In a Persian Market was a light orchestral piece composed in 1920 by Albert W. Ketelbey (1875-1959); Naughty Marietta was the title song of a 1910 operetta by Victor Herbert (1859-1924). Both songs became quite popular. 5 Probably a fraternity pin given her by George Clarke, who was a member of Psi Omega, a professional dental fraternity. 6 A 1920 novel by Sinclair Lewis that examines life in a rural mid western town, especially the efforts of its heroine to stimulate the town culturally and intellectually. The "uplifting female" referred to is the reform-minded crusader Carol Kennicott. 7 HK is awaiting the annual report on course grades and class standings. Overall class standings were published in the Toronto Globe (Thursday, 9 June 1932, 5), and individual transcripts mailed later. 8 HK has apparently mailed her letter in an envelope of the Student Christian Movement.

6. NF to HK

Moncton, N.B. Saturday. [11 June 1932]

Postmarked 14 June 1932; addressed to HK at Honey Harbour, Georgian Bay, Ontario, c/o Mr. & Mrs. A.B. Elder. My dear Helen: Well, the Bach has stopped due to the arrival of a visitor (to be presently explained) and (prospectively) of a baby to the lady down-

ii June 1932

19

stairs,1 so I am taking this opportunity afforded by enforced leisure and unemployment to catch up on my not very heavy correspondence. No one except yourself has written me yet—presumably they are all waiting for the results to come out2—I know [Art] Cragg is anyway. Monday morning I spent forcing my surprised and indignant fingers into the C major scale. Monday afternoon—I might have known it—R.G. Colgrove arrived,3 looking as though he had made himself up for a vaudeville act. I said little, but pointed to the bathroom, whence he emerged about ninety minutes later fairly respectable, except for a collar that looked like a Toronto movie censor's mind, and told me that he had boarded the Ocean Limited at Levis4 opposite Quebec and ridden to Moncton in the tool-chest back of the tender, wearing a pair of overalls over his suit. He wants me to go back with him in the fall in the same way, but as the parental hair would be torn out in large gobs should such a contingency arise there seems little chance of it. And I haven't got a pair of overalls anyway. I think we should run pictures of me parked on engine tender in overalls and you swimming in the nude under some caption like "Intimate Glimpses of the Great" for the edification of Acta readers. (Incidentally, I think you should have at least a bathing suit wrapped around your small skeleton as you haven't much else. I remember that once at the tender age of twelve I decided I was going to acquire the cool nerves and steady resolution characteristic of Sir Walter Scott's heroes, so I poured myself out a tub of the coldest water and sat in it for half an hour, keeping warm by a glow of self-righteousness. I got myself thoroughly chilled, but acquired nothing of a Scott hero beyond a propensity to impress adolescents and bore adults.) Well, anyway, Pete [Colgrovel stayed until Wednesday noon, after spending most of his time here trying to find out whether I was going to write him up in Acta next year or not and unburdening his soul on the subject of Florence Clare. As I always regarded Florence as a very decent sort of youngster with her head in a luminous fog it gave me a start to hear her described as a combination of Diana and St. Teresa, and I did my best to disillusion the boy, because I am afraid that things are written in the stars about Art and her.5 The Muse is still stubborn. I have a good idea but no technique. I have a conception for a really good poem, I am pretty sure, but what I put down is as flat and dry as the Great Sahara. I guess I'm essentially prosaic. I can work myself up into a state of maudlin sentimentality, put down about ten lines of the most villainous doggerel imaginable,

2O

Summer of 1932

and then kick myself and tear the filthy stuff up. However, I got out a book of twentieth-century American poetry6 of the library and that cheered me up. There are bigger fools in the world. I think your experiment in literary criticism a rather unfortunate one in some ways. You say I should produce something more of the flavor of Pope than of Blake or Keats. But knowing me as you do, do you think I should be more likely to produce this sort of thing from Pope's Messiah: The Saviour comes! by ancient bards foretold: Hear him, ye deaf, and all ye blind, behold! He from thick films shall purge the visual ray And on its sightless eyeball pour the day. Tis He th' obstructed paths of sound shall clear, And bid new music charm th' unfolding ear. The dumb shall sing, the lame his crutch forego And leap exulting like the bounding roe.7 —or this sort of thing, from Blake's Ideas of Good and Evil: I asked a thief to steal me a peach. He turned up his eyes. I asked a lithe lady to lie her down, Holy and meek, she cries. As soon as I went An angel came. He winked at the thief And smiled at the dame. And without one word spoke Had a peach from the tree, And 'twixt earnest and joke Enjoyed the lady.8 Of course Pope would have made a better poet than either Blake or Keats if his soul had not been as small as a weasel's. But then, as Gord Romans would say, who gives a damn? Yes, I think you should cure yourself of blushing. Mother tells me of a sister of hers9 who was entertaining a young man in the parlor when another sister entered and made one of those innuendoes com-

ii June 1932

21

mon in late Victorian humor. My aunt blushed furiously, kept on blushing; the young man cast an alarmed glance at her and did not call again. The said aunt died two years ago an old maid of 56—in the very bed, incidentally, on which I am now reclining. Moncton is at present shrieking with laughter over the predicament of one of its least popular citizens, a man by the name of Steeves. The name is common enough here, but this worthy is notorious as a tight-fisted and grasping old miser. A man owed him some money, left town, died, and was shipped back here to be buried. Now if a debt is of long standing, the debtor may be arrested under a writ called capias, which is addressed to any constable in the county and says—I have typed dozens of them—"You are required to take the body of So-and-so and him safely keep," etc. This says nothing about whether the body is dead or alive, so Steeves ordered the corpse seized at the station, and then informed the widow triumphantly that she would have to pay the bill before the late lamented's remains would be forthcoming. Whereupon the widow developed an unexpectedly stubborn streak and told him he was welcome to them. So now Steeves doesn't know what to do, but will obviously have to bury the creature in the end at his own expense. The coffin is in Steeves' warehouse, and veracious witnesses assert that they have distinctly heard the corpse laughing inside it, though I have not had time to check up on this as yet. Monday Well, here comes a most tantalising and exasperating missive in the mail from Ruth [Dingman]. It begins: "All hail to the victor once more!", which is a sufficiently energetic start, and then continues, "Naturally, my mood ranges from disgust to horror when I think of my brilliant standing. However I at least didn't get a supp.10 Of course, you can imagine my opinion regarding that. As I've often said before, these people who care only ... well, I won't say any more,"—and, damn her, she doesn't, but passes serenely on to other matters leaving me gasping like a fish out of water. She remarks later "It's too bad about Art [Cragg] not getting a first." It certainly is too bad. But I should like to have my information more didactic and less rhapsodic, more categorical and less esoteric, that is, if you get what I mean. It sounds as though I had led my course, presumably with a first or at least

22

Summer of 1932

a second, with my thoroughly-deserved and confidently-expected sup. in R.K." But I don't know how you made out, and I think Art might have let me know more definitely,—that is, if he's in town,—I haven't heard a word from him. Possibly he's out chasing Ida12 in beach pyjamas and a bicycle. So I guess I had better let it rest at that. My regards to Jean. I haven't seen or heard one mosquito since I came home, much less been mangled by one. Norrie. 1 The MacWilliams family lived beneath the Fryes. 2 See Letter 5, n. 7, above. 3 Pete Colgrove earned his way through college by selling books in the Maritimes during the summer. On this particular visit he was somewhat surprised by the contrast between NF's intelligence and expansive vocabulary and the ordinary talk and behaviour of NF's parents (R.G. Colgrove to ROD, 22 February 1994). 4 Levis is a town situated on the rocky cliffs of the St. Lawrence River opposite Quebec City. 5 NF's intuition proved to be correct: Florence Clare and Art Cragg married in 1938. 6 This is apparently the Louis Untermeyer anthology that NF later referred to in other contexts, American Poetry Since 1900 (New York: Holt, 1923). See, e.g., Northrop Frye in Conversation, ed. David Cayley (Concord, Ont: Anansi, 1992), 109. 7 Alexander Pope, "Messiah," lines 37-44. 8 NF is quoting from W.B. Yeats's creative rewriting of a lyric from Blake's Notebook 14. See Yeats's edition of Poems of William Blake (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1905), 121. 9 Mary Howard, the second youngest sister of NF's mother—and the only sister who did not marry. 10 To "get a supp." was to fail in one of the "pass option" subjects that honour course students took each year and to be required to write a supplemental examination the next fall. Failure in such a course was not calculated in the student's standing overall, but the subject had to be made up before graduation. 11 As NF indicates in Letter 9, he "got a supp." in Religious Knowledge because he had not taken the term test at Christmas. See also Ayre, 76. 12 NF apparently means Florence Clare, not her sister Ida.

7. HK to NF

Honey Harbour Georgian Bay Monday. [13 June 1932]

Dear Norrie— This is a very warm and enthusiastic note of congratulation. I was so pleased to see you come out at the top once again—the point is,

13 June 1932

23

are you becoming infallible and inevitable? If you are not careful you may become a prophet singing in the wilderness—especially if you follow Blake a great deal—however, if it does come to pass, I'll send you a crate or a cage full of carefully trained locusts and a jar or so of wild honey like a bubbling old Martha—* Such nonsense. Swimming again this morning. And I did the crawl farther than I've ever done before, which to be sure, is not yet a half mile by any means but is quite far enough to make me feel very healthy. We have been sleeping twelve hours a night. This may look like a nurse's report of sick patient but it is quite important news. You are getting ahead of me by leaps and bounds, I can see that, you lucky beggar, with a piano and the fugues. Reading so far has been John Brown's Body,2 Main Street, three short stories of D.H. Lawrence, ending up this morning with a bit of sentimentalizing with J.M. Barrie over the Little Minister3—women sent to smooth the ragged ignoble brow of mankind to peace and a sense of their own utter depravity, angels of God pointing the way to celestial realms etc etc. One of those saccharine fictions one would love to be ass enough to believe— Well anyhow, I meant this to be, as I said before, a note of congratulation. And if I seem to meander, you know that I am tremendously glad for you. As an institution you are exhibiting that very admirable quality of stability. As a person—I'm not going to eulogize, even if it should seem the proper thing to do along with the rest of my enthusiasm. Yours—on the crest of the wave Helen

i The Biblical reference here is to Isa. 40:3 ('The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness"). All four gospels take the Isaiah prophecy as referring to John the Baptist, whose "meat was locusts and wild honey" (Matt. 3:4). The reference to Martha, apparently, is to the woman in Luke 10:38-42, who came to represent the life of action, as opposed to Mary, who came to stand for the life of contemplation.

24

Summer of 1932

2 A poetic narrative about the American Civil War by Stephen Vincent Benet, published in 1928; it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. 3 Barrie's sentimental novel, published in 1891; the success of Barrie's dramatization of the book six years later helped persuade him to devote his talents to the theatre.

8. NF to HK

Moncton, N.B. Sunday. [19 June 1932]

Postmarked 23 June 1932; addressed to HK at Honey Harbor, Georgian Bay, Ontario, c/o Mr. & Mrs. A.B. Elder. My dear Helen: Thanks for your congratulations. (This letter may cross with one of yours, but it doesn't matter; this is polite, isn't it?) I am not particularly elated, as a matter of fact I am rather sick about Art's not getting a first. I should like to have seen him lead the course this year. I know how that sounds, but it's true. As long as I get my standing in first class I don't care where I come in the list. I don't compete for things, except incidentally; all competition is fundamentally a scramble, which is undignified. But Art can't see things that way. Of course, there's that Cragg pedigree, but it's in his blood anyway. He imagines that being beaten really assumes his inferiority, and if there's one man who hates to feel inferior it's Art Cragg. Last summer he was so pathetically cheerful about losing that it wrung even my vulcanized gizzard. I wish he'd grow up, but losing won't help him to do so. And of course that second-class standing means $75 vanishing in thin air. I'd like to see the results. I am worried about two people—Gord Romans and Jean Cameron. It would be nothing short of monstrous if anything were to happen to Gordie. And Jean, you remember, asked me if Muir1 would be enough for her history and I said yes, not daring to tell her the unvarnished truth and have her go up in a cloud of smoke like an infant Elijah. I told the boys on the chain2 that the moral to be deduced from my standing was, "Go to the grasshopper, thou slugger, consider his ways and be worldly wise."3 I don't know if they'll appreciate it or not but let's hope for indulgence. Your talk about cabbages and twelve hours' sleep makes me think that you are getting fat. I warn you that if I come back and find you looking like the corner-stone of Stonehenge I will pinch you all colors of the rainbow. Reading J.M. Barrie too, just like any buxom matron.

19 June 1932

25 Wednesday

Charlie Holmes and Izzy Halperin have come and gone, leaving me completely disorganized. They are on their way to Halifax, and it is pouring rain. Mother took quite a fancy to them—more so than to Pete [Colgrove], I think. They told me a little more about the results, though very little. It looks as though they are tightening the standards a bit. Our year will have to get another Vice-President as I understand Rudy got his.4 So poor old Gandier is dead. That fills up six feet of ground and three pages of Acta.5 It's an ill wind . . . .6 Read Babbitt and Arrowsmith7 as well as Main Street. Lewis is a diabolically clever writer and does the cleverest things so easily that he is too often underrated. His execrable style, which clanks along like a surveyor's chain, is annoying but necessary to the kind of thing he is doing. However, he is a pure technician and was consequently spoiled by recognition. Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth,8 his later works, are far too self-conscious. Bach is still in the air. Damn neighbors, especially pregnant ones. Oh well, give my regards to Jean [Elder] again, and write whenever you happen to be awake. Thanks again for them kind words. Norrie. 1 Ramsay Muir's A Short History of the British Commonwealth, a book that was on the reading list for the honour course in British and Colonial History, 1485-1783. 2 NF's circle of friends at VC; he refers to them as the "chain-gang" because of the practice of writing round robin or "chain" letters that circulated among members of the group. 3 NF is parodying Prov. 6:6: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." 4 That is, Rudy Eberhard failed his exams. See Letter 13, below. 5 Alfred Gandier, the principal of Emmanuel College, died on 13 June 1932. Gandier's last talk, "An Address to the Graduating Class," which he presented on 19 April 1932, was published, along with a brief obituary, in Acta Victoriana, 57 (Fall 1932), 12-17. 6 "Except wind stands as it never stood, / It is an ill wind turns none to good" (Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry [1574], chap. 13). 7 Satirical novels by Sinclair Lewis, the first (1922) on successful suburban life and the second (1925) on the medical profession. 8 Novels by Sinclair Lewis, the first (1927) a satire on religious shams and hypocrisy, and the second (1929) a story about a retired automobile manufacturer who seeks new interests in European travel.

26 9. NF to HK

Summer of 1932 Moncton, N.B. Tuesday. [5 July 1932]

Postmarked 6 July 1932; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto, Ontario. References herein indicate that HK had written a letter (now missing) to NF sometime between her previous letter (13 June) and his writing of this one (5 July). Dear Helen: Well, you've been a pretty good girl—I was very glad to see you get through so well. Sorry you didn't get an A, but, in spite of my exhortations, I hardly expected it. I don't imagine they give A's to repeaters,1— if they did they would get all tangled up with scholarships and so forth. As it is, I think you can consider yourself well out of reach of my avuncular hairbrush. Convey my sincerest congratulations to Jean [Elder] on her standing. To be right next to Beattie and beside Berna [Langford] and Isabel Jordan is to do something, in her course. I am sorry about poor little Helen Sadlier. By the way (this should have come earlier, of course) thanks a lot for sending the clipping. It relieved me considerably, though they (the results, I mean.—I don't know where my brains have gone to) are rather depressing. Nearly every Junior in Gate House has a sup. The official confirmation of mine came the other day.2 I discovered to my vast disgust that the weak-kneed sons of indiscretion had let me through the exam and plucked me because I didn't write their silly term test. They gave me 50 on the paper and oo for my term mark, and called the aforementioned marks "approximate," though I fail to see anything approximate about that double goose-egg. I have no intention of writing it this fall, of course. And yet I don't know—the prof, is retiring this year, which means that the subject will go to some misguided young enthusiast who will insist on our working at it, so perhaps,— oh, to hell with it. No, we don't get any Toronto papers. The library takes papers from Halifax, Montreal, Saint John, Boston, New York and London. The soul absorbed all it could of what you said about it and has been sulking ever since. By the way, I have discovered a precedent. Up to this time I was not aware that Moncton was richly productive of poetry, but today, grubbing around in the library, I chanced on a little book with the following inscription: "Because Moncton is my birthplace I am presenting this book to its library." Signed, Mrs. Martha M. Seavey.3 It proved to be a dramatic poem in three acts and 120

5 July 1932

27

pages entitled "Judith of Tyre" written in verse as blank as Bacon's tabula rasa4 (what? . . . oh, well, go and ask Ruth [Dingman]); scene, Tyre, time not given, but as it's B.C. I suppose it doesn't matter much. The big climax comes in Act 2, Sc. 3, when Melities, the hero, is drugged by Cleo, the villainelle (or whatever the feminine is) and left snoring in a dye factory (Tyrian purple, you know) to which she then sets fire. Enter, at the critical time, Thasia, who loves the hero. To continue: (Better read it first without my flippancies). The slaves revolted have! {I know, but Milton did it}. The slaves! The slaves! Our Tyre is ravished by their wantonness! {note the compression} Thasia: The house in flames! The wealth of Tyrian silks Is doomed, is doomed! Ye gods! Melities, up! {Now I should have made her say: "Caramba!"} Melities: Cleo, my love, I dream, I dream of thee. Th.: Awake, my lord, the dye house is on fire. M: Art thou my Cleo? Th: {Excusably tactless} No; awake, awake! Crowd: The slaves! The slaves! They slay their masters, slay! Tyre burns! Fire, fire! The slaves are in revolt! {note the assonance} Arise and flee the wrath of slaves. Fire, fire! {now you scan for a while} M: I feel so strange. Am I awake, or sleep {sic}? I feel the desert's breath; 'tis hot, 'tis hot. Th: My lord, awake! We burn! {I think this is figurative} M: I cannot wake {obviously} My eyes, my eyes! {A lesser genius would have said: "My eye!"} They're burned! I cannot see! I cannot open them. I nothing see. {Hush, dear—it's called inversion} Th: O, try to come. Crowd:

Crowd:

O Melkart, save us! Save! {Explanatory note in front says Melkart is the sun-god—a rather superfluous deity in case of fire}

28

M: Th:

M:

Crowd: Th:

M:

Th: M: Th: M: Th: Crowd:

Summer of 1932 I must awake! I must exert myself. {Exquisite!} There seems a strange, shrill singing in my ears. It is the sound of fire. It rageth round. If thou haste not we'll both be burned to death. Thou art my Judith's friend. I will save thee. I cannot see, but now I feel the fire. I am awake, I am awake at last. What is this? Fire? Where am I? 'Tis so strange. {It is. I thought you said you were awake.) Fire, Fire! Our golden Tyre is doomed, is doomed! I tell thee thou art in the drying room Of Solon's dye house, and 'tis being burned. And Tyre is burning, and we will be burned If thou haste not. Come, get upon thy feet. Asleep and in the dye works. What is wrong? {What a powerful drug that was!} Have I been working on the tapestries And fallen asleep? How came I here, my maid? {Oh, you damned fool! If I were Thasia, I'd give you up} O haste, O haste! Come rise upon thy feet. I cannot stand. I do not own my feet. {That Shakespearean touch!} {always resourceful} Then canst thou crawl? Come on thy hands and knees. I cannot see to walk. What shall I do? {Exasperated but not beaten} I'll drag thee forth. I'll care for thee, my lord. O Melkart, Ashtoreth, save golden Tyre! To th' ships! To th' ships! The slaves! {I doubt if even Hamlet would scan that last line, but at least it proves that Martha [Seavey] did count every verse on her fingers} Curtain

By a curious touch of irony the best line in the play is a stage direction: Zither player passes slowly playing as he walks.5

5 July 1932

29

I am not the first Monctonian to woo the muse, you see. (I imagine Martha would call writing poetry wooing the muse) Vera (my sister) has her salary at last, but can't come home this summer as she has an apartment lease to keep up. Mother is disappointed, but she doesn't want to come home anyway and I don't blame her. She doesn't like Moncton—neither do I, though for a different reason. One of my professors told me last year that although he liked Handel he could never endure the Messiah and similarly he could never read the Bible because he had been brought up on both compulsorily and grew to dislike them. That's the way I feel about Moncton. Why? Well, everyone who ever amounts to anything has to get out of his system an enormous heap of painfully silly trash in his adolescence—stuff he would regard going back to like a dog's returning6 (but I mustn't get scriptural) and the decade I spent in this town, as regards living, was just as tentative and experimental. At least, however, it's a focal point for me. But Vera never lived here, and coming "home" would bore her stiff. She has only been home once since she went to Chicago eight years ago and on that occasion she met the ex-girl friend, took a violent dislike to her, invited her up for tea and made her into soup, figuratively speaking. But she wouldn't even have that pleasure now. Her last letter talks of an uprising in Chicago as possible. She writes: 'There has been a panic this last week. About twenty more banks suddenly closed, including two of the oldest and strongest on the South Side. ... La Salle St. (Chicago's Wall St.) was almost impassable for days, and there were riots in many places. . . . The newspapers suppressed all mention of the disturbances. . . . Many insurance companies have gone under. . . . The other day I passed one of the big banks which had just closed. There was a crowd standing in front of it—not talking, scarcely moving,—just standing. It was awful." I have got letters from four of the chain-gang7—Ross Crosby, Art Cragg, Bob Bates and Doug Gordon. They are all happy but Art, although Ross is a little disappointed about coming last and Bob is annoyed because he likes to sleep alone and in his bed he is only one of thousands. Art is in Toronto with his father, writing his Lincoln Hutton8—subject, primitivism. It means pre-romanticism—Rousseau back-to-acorns stuff, but, as you know, it means a movement in modern art as well—a thing he won't believe. (Incidentally, after observing in your sketch the rigorous way in which you removed all the voluptuous Cleopatra-like curves from Jean's anatomy, I think primi-

3Q

Summer of 1932

tivism a thing you might well take up.) He is very rueful about his second—I hadn't realized how far down in the course he was. He says it was because he didn't work harder, but I have more materialistic views. I know from experience that laziness is a very slight hindrance on exams, and that hysteria, general physical debility, eyestrain, nervousness, constipation, panic and lassitude (all of which he had, more or less) are determining factors. It is too bad that I am the main obstacle in the way of Cragg's ambitions when I happen to be the only one who can help him win and almost the only one who wants to. It gives me a pain to hear the way apparently normal people talk about Cragg and me watching each other like hawks, waiting to take the fullest advantage of any let-downs. I don't get where I do by tramping on people's necks. Which is a thing you may as well remember when you come to talk over post-mortems and alibis with Florence [Clare], Ida [Clarel or Bill [Conklin]. He has resigned his position opposite you on Acta9 and I may offer it to Ernie Gould if he won't reconsider. You won't like Ernie, but that's not my affair. WHAT kind of hell-hole did you land in anyway? What a crew. Arsonies (coined for the occasion), harlots, potential murderers, knifethrowing maniacs, and millionaires! No wonder Jean can defend herself so promptly when she gets assaulted by ragamuffins on Toronto's streets! If I ever get invited to an innocent-sounding Ontario summer resort like "Honey Harbor, Georgian Bay," I'll remember to pack a couple of sandbags and a flit gun. Have you really got this far? I'm sorry—but remember this. I have glared at the foregoing for ten minutes trying to decide whether or not to tear it all up and start afresh. By all means, however, let me have all of your wanderings, logical and illogical. Wandering is the secret of successful letter-writing—an10 (sorry; this ink drips like the quality of mercy11 if I don't watch it) and by successful I mean, of course, readable. Business letters don't wander; they are compressed and terse. As a result they sound like this: "We are in receipt of your favor of the 15th inst, and contents noted. We enclose herewith sample cotton print as per your esteemed request. Hoping to hear from you again, we are," etc. Well, this morning the baby came.12 The place has been shut up like a tomb all day and we don't even know the sex of the child yet. I haven't heard it cry, but I imagine it's alive from certain symbols I saw (or Mother saw—one thing I am not is observant) on the clothes-

5 July 1932

31

line. They have two children already—girls. The mother has nine brothers and thinks having a family of women a disgrace. If the baby is a boy, therefore, being one would be a distinctly tactful move on his part. The three kids are not far from the famous progression of Old Baby, Depression Baby, and Relief Baby, so that little newly-born is bad economics. Time and tide wait for no man—which is a platitude. Neither will any man wait for time and tide—which is a profundity.13 Well, there's no news. (Happy is the nation whose annals are brief!)14 Charlie [Holmes] and Izzy [Halperinl went to Halifax and walked over it, "all four blocks of it," Charlie said, and came back in the firm belief that they had seen Halifax. I didn't undeceive them. There is a faint flavor of the i8th century about Halifax—plainly the i8th century of Marlborough, Walpole and red coats, though an extraordinary sentimentalist might hook it up with the Rococo and sigh for the days when music was music and not philosophy, comedy comedy and not polemic, porcelain porcelain and not majolica, and so on. But there's a lot to Halifax, all the same. It's a port, consequently cosmopolitan. More metropolitan than that overgrown Thanatopsis club15 called Toronto. And the French haven't penetrated there—yet. I suppose I should gas away forever if something didn't stop me, according to Newton's laws of motion. So here goes. Norrie.

P.S. The library also takes the three Moncton papers.

HNF. P.P.S. It's a boy. 1 HK had failed her course in 1930-31 and had repeated it the following year; for the academic year just completed, she earned a B in English, Economics, and Botany, an A in Religious Knowledge, and a C in Greek and Roman History. NF assumes she could not have received an overall A. 2 That is, the notice that NF, having been given no credit for his "term mark," had not passed his Religious Knowledge course. In order to receive credit for the course, he would have to take a supplementary examination during September of 1932. He did take the exam and received a 68 (a B grade). 3 Martha M. Seavey, Judith of Tyre: A Drama in Three Acts (New York: James T. White, 1924). The lines from the play NF reproduces are from pp. 61-3. Melities is an artist from Carthage, Thasia is Judith's handmaid, and Judith is the daughter of Solon, the merchant prince of Tyre. 4 While Bacon believed in a strict method of empirical inference and was thus sceptical of "clear and distinct" ideas, the idea of the mind as a tabula rasa or blank

32

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

Summer of 1932 tablet is most often associated with John Locke's contention that there are no innate ideas; Locke used the phrase "white paper" in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. i. The Latin phrase itself originated with the scholastics (see, e.g., Aquinas, Summa Theologica la, 79, 2). This stage direction is from act i, sc. i, line 9. "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly" (Prov. 26:11). See also 2 Pet. 2:22. See Letter 8, n. 2, above. The reference is to Art Cragg's essay in the competition for the $100 Lincoln G. Hutton Scholarship. The reference is to Art Cragg's having resigned. Here there is an inkspot on the stationery. Portia's reply to Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: "The quality of mercy is not strain'd / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath" (4.1.184-6 [Riverside]). All subsequent citations from Shakespeare are to this edition. The MacWilliams's baby, whose imminent arrival was announced in Letter 6. The MacWilliams family lived beneath the Fryes at 24 Pine St. in Moncton. 'Time nor tide tarrieth no man" (Robert Greene, Disputations [1592]). A paraphrase of a line in Thomas Carlyle's Life of Frederick the Great, bk. 2, chap, i: "Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books." Carlyle identifies this as an aphorism from Montesquieu. NF borrows the name from a women's club in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920).

10. UK to NF

[Toronto] Sunday. [10 July 1932]

My dear Norrie— I am perhaps indulging in a most unhealthy fit of sentimentality and ill-temper—I am so damned lonesome just this minute. I have just heard one of those Hungarian Rhapsodies perpetrated by a drunken little orchestra from Jasper Park—the cellist groaned and grunted and the fiddler sounded like a prolific hen scratching around to impress the paternal rooster. And then a tenor (maybe a baritone—do I care?) did his bit with Schubert's Ave Maria—a tune that I like very much but may not in future—and now they are coming to the end of 'A Perfect Day/1 Heck, it's as full of slush—the way they play it—as a mid-March thaw in Toronto. Oh well, I am cheerful now—I've still got the supper dishes to do. Roy [Kemp] is here and Bill Pike and Fred Heather—his cronies. Daddy checked out yesterday for the north country,2 and we are alone. I like the idea very much, but life does seem a rush, getting meals and keeping the house and oneself clean—as a civilized being should, I suppose, since Anatole France's Paphnutius is not a pleasant ideal to follow.

10 July 1932

33

Have you read Thais?3 It is very like the American play 'Rain'4 (dramatized under title 'Sadie Thompson' with Gloria Swanson) in which a stern old evangelist with a cross between a stone wall and an Alpine glacier for a wife becomes interested in the immortal soul of Sadie—a San Francisco prostitute. Under the neurotic pressure of a six-day tropic storm the preacher 'saves' Sadie's soul, seduces her (no alliteration intended) and then shoots himself leaving Sadie to conclude all men are beasts etc and go on as before. The difference being, Thais manages to die as a saint I believe (I haven't finished yet, since I am still listening to the Stoics and Epicureans5 argue and courteously question the recluse who succeeds in looking like an ignorant country hick and an ardent Plymouth brother.)6 Why is it that so many sincerely earnest men manage to look ridiculous? Is it merely because the scoffers find it easier to ridicule than to weigh the truth in the evangelist's message? Or does an evangelist, to be successful, necessarily lack a sense of humour? Judging by some of the books that we are discarding, that is, consigning to the lower regions until a few die-hards finally do kick off—the latter is true. We find the queerest things—"An account of various phenomena of the soul and the spiritual life, containing discussions of death, the after life, the judgment, telepathy, and an account whereby man attains the perfect life." (Four damned females are rendering quartettes such as 'I walked in the garden alone'—ending with 'He walks with me & talks with me, and tells me I am His own' etc etc.7 I rise to shut it off.) Ida [Clarel and Pat Lipsett and I are in the library now. They are sorting books & cards which is about one of the worst jobs. I have been lettering, and sorting periodicals—the latter being a sort of glorified house-cleaning bee. I am growing so methodical that I very nearly file away the dishes when I wash them—I wonder what would happen if I used alphabet soup. I have been busy this week-end. Saturday afternoon Jean [Elder] & Ida and Margaret Clare (who is marking papers and is unfortunately becoming the weary very cut-and-dried high school teacher) and Marg Davison and I, went off camping. After getting kicked off the premises by two people (two separate places) we stayed at a picnic grounds at night, sleeping on sand. There were two boy scout camps right near, but they were scornful and disinterested and paid us very little attention—a Good Thing, for various reasons. I was home at ten this morning in time to get a watermelon which Roy had bought. So the

34

Summer of 1932

gang came in for watermelon. Then I dusted the house all through (in half an hour—I am telling you all this as being a part of daily existence with which you may be unfamiliar) and off we went to Marcus Adeney's for dinner. Marcus has turned musician temporarily—the novel is given a rest I suppose.8 He has some odd books—the most surprising being a translation of Ovid's Art of Love9 published by Liveright, with illustrations quite in keeping with the text—and sold by the Robert Simpson Company,10 no less, right here in this fair city. To be sure, he found it on an out-of-the-way shelf. He has a copy of James Joyce's 'Dubliners' and an early book of short stories which he will loan me—I am at present reading a book on [Jacob] Epstein (I haven't finished Bach, but never mind, there's no hurry.) I should like to review this one for Acta11—never having written a book review before, I suppose I am too amateurish to merely 'smell the paperknife' and thereby acquire a perfect insight into the author's honesty or sentimentality—I shall probably have to finish the book! Marcus and Jeanne spent the time instructing us in a sort of back-to-nature diet which we are adopting for a few months—it being merely cutting down on starch, using brown bread and retaining all the vegetable juices. It isn't terribly hare-brained. Last Sunday George Clarke and I went picnicking with Dot Darling and Jack12—very nice. Dot is coming to work at the library and wants to do what I did last year. Jack is slugging away in a law office. {Roy & Bill [Pike] & Fred [Heather] are fighting and making a noise like a pack of hyenas in a rugby scrimmage—very distracting} I was at Old Mill13 the other night with George—I talked like a blooming suffragette but we had a lot of fun. You should go there sometime. It is one of the most charming places in Toronto—the old-world atmosphere was the dream of Home Smith who was one of the big men behind the scheme for improving Toronto's downtown streets, a few years ago. The scheme fell through, partly through the efforts of the Telegram14 which appealed to the suburban penny-pinchers. Oh well, what if we do go through life surrounded by ugliness— I have several schemes afoot, but I'll tell you about them again. (Roy has turned that radio on again, at some dance stuff which is good,— why do I always melt like a dripping candle when I hear the stuff— I mean the wistful, haunting, softly played sort of thing that goes with low lights and flasks under the table—the answer, I suppose, is fairly obvious,—that I am responding in the natural way to the stim-

io July 1932

35

ulus produced by that type of rhythm and colour—what would I do under the influence of Stravinsky?) Gute Nacht. Tuesday. 11.30 P.M. As I hope to hear from the philosopher some time soon, I suppose I'll have to burn the oil a little late. (To be sure, all this would be avoided if I weren't so deuced long-winded) To-day was what Toronto newspapers call The Glorious Twelfth'15 when her Loyal Citizens go about and behave like so many schoolboys garbed as monkeys. When I suddenly had the fact brought to my attention I was already in the midst of a band of young men, on University Avenue—men dressed in purple and gold with tassels hanging from a sort of sword hilt, and foolish looking plumes standing straight up on top of their feat board hats. And they had fifes and drums, and spent the whole morning marching around the crescent at various places and playing good old Irish airs. I suppose the affair gave the same sort of satisfaction as the totem rites among certain tribes—oh, well they probably let off just as much steam as I did tonight on the piano, and probably gave just as much enjoyment to the audience. In the way of music I have been somewhat neglectful—for I find that an evening spent washing clothes and making a new hat leaves no time for Czerny, Bach, Chopin or Debussy. (That being the diet at present—scattered and eclectic as usual) Roy and I did have a go at a Brahms quintette with Lucy Cox, Hans Lincke (who wants me to talk German to him—and insisted on my remembering 'eins, zwei, drei, vier, fiinf/ etc) and Miss Dennison.16 Roy and I were playing our three Beethoven Sonatas to-night, and decided that we are both unsympathetic and mechanical. Miss Ray has suddenly decided to sail for England on the 2oth of July, in order to meet Pat (The Man) who will be able to spend ten days with her before he sails to parts unknown. He must be some man! (She may marry him.) She took me around the reference library the other day, and jolly near got me a job down there lettering in gold leaf on the backs of books. They need someone, and I am initiated into that now for I am to do it at Vic, giving titles to the books mend-

36

Summer of 1932

ed by the illustrious Miss Victoria Wright—ex-cataloguer in extraordinary. F Louis Barber arrived unexpectedly to-day—the man who takes two months' holidays—and in surprise asked me if I were there, and what was I doing. To which I replied "supplying Mr. Brady with inspiration." That was not strictly correct, for if I had been regarding myself as Brady's Guinivere, I should certainly give up in despair at the awful hash of a Launcelot I was turning out, and I should depart hot-foot to the nunnery. The man is priceless—such dignity! You should see the important air with which he transacts the most trivial business. But then he is a man, and can afford to be somewhat pompous in carrying out routine which we women would do as a matter of course. All of which reminds me that on Sunday Roy decided that we should clean up house, and scrubbed the kitchen floor—of his own accord. So we are getting along beautifully. Our vegetable meals have continued for two days—the method being this:—In one pot put two potatoes, four carrots, four beets, one cabbage, and beans if you like, and boil—then drink the juice instead of tea etc. When you have a meal down to a system like that eating doesn't become such a complicated thing, and Roy thinks it quite appetizing— By the way, I meant to mention this long ago. Of course I understand how you feel about R.K. but I advise you to be like Mr. Golightly for the simple reason that Miss Ray remarked that Prof Auger and the R.K. prof and even Edgar were somewhat annoyed because you didn't work at the subject. Because you were a church student, something to do with the Trick scholarship,17 I imagine. I don't know whether she told me thinking that I might pass on the idea to you— probably because I might enjoy saying 'how the mighty are falling'18 or something equally silly. But anyhow, you get the idea. You can't afford to pull their beards too much—in the form of Acta articles and so on. I say, old thing, my effusions are getting longer! See if you can outdo this one. I am playing tennis to-morrow night with a boy named Ernie something/9 a friend of Roy's—who looks like the typical Greek god—trite but fairly accurate. Roy says he is a very good scout—he went hiking to Gordon Bay with him. I think I have said about enough for this siege. The library continues to be dull as the devil—surpassed only by some of the school-

io July 1932

37

teachers tripping around earnestly doing B.A. work at the summer school. H.G.K. P.S. Do you think your friend downstairs ignorant of birth control? You might also stop associating with such stupid people as Martha20— I am sure she is the cause of your soul sulking and not I Helen. 1 A 1910 musical score by Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1862-1946), originally written for voice and piano but arranged for other ensembles as well. 2 HK's father had left for the family's summer cottage at Gordon Bay. 3 Paphnutius, a monk, is the central character in Anatole France's Thais (1890), first translated into English by A.D. Hall in 1891; he is never able to extinguish his desire for the beautiful actress Thai's. 4 Rain: A Play in Three Acts, by John Colton and Clemence Randolph (1925), based on Somerset Maugham's story "Miss Thompson." 5 In part 2 of Anatole France's Thais, Paphnutius accompanies Thai's to a banquet where they listen to advocates for various philosophies, including an old Stoic and an Epicurean. 6 The Plymouth Brethren were members of an evangelical religious movement under the leadership of John Nelson Darby, who travelled extensively in Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century; the group, which sought to re-establish certain primitive Christian emphases, separated from the Church of England in the 18205. 7 The two popular hymns are "In the Garden," words and music by C. Austin Miles (1912), and "He Lives," words and music by Alfred H. Ackley (1933). 8 In 1930 Marcus Adeney had written a novel, New Babylon, based on his boyhood in Paris, Ont. The novel was not published until 1991. HK seems to be referring to another novel he is working on. 9 New York: Liveright, 1931. This edition was published in the Black and Gold Library series. 10 A department store chain and mail order business headquartered in Toronto. II The book HK wants to review is L.B. Powell's Jacob Epstein (London: Chapman & Hall, 1932). If HK wrote the review, it was not published in Acta Victoriana. 12 Because HK later says "Jack Cumberland, Dorothy [Darling] and George Clarke were here" (26 July 1932), the Jack mentioned in the present letter is almost certainly Jack Cumberland. 13 The Old Mill Tea Room was opened on the Humber River just west of the city limits by land developer R. Home Smith on the day World War I was declared, and in conjunction with the boat-house built behind it became a favourite gathering spot for Torontonians. It is still in existence in greatly expanded form, and, with its English country atmosphere, it remains a popular setting for receptions. 14 The Toronto Evening Telegram was one of the three major newspapers in the city; it ceased publication in 1971, and was replaced that year by the Toronto Sun, Toronto Sun Publishing having bought the syndication operations of the Telegram and recruited many of its staff. 15 The annual Orangemen's parade, on 12 July, which was a celebration by Toronto's

38

16

17 18 19 20

Summer of 1932 Loyal Orange Lodges of the victory of William III, Prince of Orange, over the Jacobite forces led by the deposed James II in Ireland. The newspaper article HK refers to is "Orangemen Renew Vow to Defend Liberty," Toronto Daily Star, 12 July 1932. Some 8,200 people participated in the parade. On 8 February 1929 HK gave a piano recital, along with Ruby Dennison, violin, and Marcus Adeney, cello, at the Hambourg Conservatory; all three, however, were students at the Danard Conservatory. In her letter of 15 August 1932, HK says that she is "going to Miss Dennison's again to play a trio I fancy,—perhaps a piano quartette or a quintette if Hans and Lucy can come." Cox and Linke may well have been students at the Danard Conservatory as well; and after HK received her diploma from the Hambourg Conservatory (5 March 1930), she apparently took lessons from Caroline Danard, who had been a student of Michael Hambourg, and who ran the Danard Conservatory out of premises adjoining her residence at 798 Carlaw, near Danforth Ave., just a few blocks south of HK's home on Fulton Ave. The John Trick and Susan Treble Trick Scholarships were awarded to probationers for the United Church ministry to aid them in taking an Arts curriculum. The allusion is to 2 Sam. 1:19, 25. Ernie Harrison, who later married HK's sister, Marion. The reference is to Martha M. Seavey's Judith of Tyre, which NF had lampooned in Letter 9 (5 July 1932).

ii. NF to HK

Moncton, N.B. July 15 [1932]

Postmarked 19 July 1932; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto, Ontario. My dear Helen: I have recently completed another decade of my alleged career and feel quite old-fashioned. My birthday, which is the same as that of France, has been signalized by a pouring rain on the last sixteen occasions of its celebration, which is as far back as my memory—or at least the pre-Freudian part of it—goes. This time the day dawned clear as a mirror; no vestige of a cloud anywhere. It stayed that way until eight o'clock at night, when suddenly and without warning a horrible-looking black thundercloud leered up over the horizon, like the devil coming for the soul of Faust, and for an hour the world was a stringy mass of water. I got a present too—a tie, from an aunt. I shall keep it as a souvenir of that aunt, but as an adornment for the neck it would rank approximately with the Ancient Mariner's albatross, I should think.1 I have just received your letter. Yeah, I know they're sore about the

15 July 1932

39

R.K. They wrote me a letter telling me I could have a hundred dollars if I wanted it, so I think they're going to hang the Trick2 upon me. They practically promised one to Cragg, and if they give one to him and not to me it's deliberate discrimination against me, for which, however, I could hardly blame them. I hope they don't hold my article in Acta3 against me—it would be a piece of petty spite quite beneath them if they did. It will be interesting to see just what effect the R.K. sup. will have on the Trick awards, though. Yes, certainly you can review your book on Epstein for Acta,4 but who the devil is Epstein? The only Epstein I have ever heard of is a nineteenth-century pianist and teacher and all I know about him is that he edited my edition of Mozart—in Spanish, incidentally—and helped Brahms carry home a drunken sot from the gutter and had to dodge things thrown at him by the latter's irate wife, who mistook the musicians for her husband's cronies. Hardly seems important enough for a biography, but perhaps my information needs strengthening.5 Moncton is the eastern terminus of the C.N.R. and is very proud of it. If, however—or rather when—that institution appoints a receiver to help it take in money, Moncton will have one honor left—the Eastern terminus-ship of third year Philosophy correspondence. George's [George Birtch's] letter is here now. He holds three services on Sunday and six "Sunday" Schools throughout the week—covering an area of 120 square miles. Lives in a tent. No women. Got tossed off a horse— no, worse than that—the horse turned a somersault on him and cracked his knee. Plays on 3 men's softball teams and coaches 2 women's teams. Is getting up a play and directs it himself. After reading a letter like that I sometimes wonder just what right I have to exist anyway.6 Charlie Holmes and Izzy Halperin got home safely enough. Charlie wrote me from Toronto. He complains too about the Orange parade and says he's retiring to the farm for the summer and proposes to beat his sword into a hayfork. The first night he spent after leaving our place he (they, at least) slept with a bull-calf in a haystack, "fulfilling," says Charlie, "the old prophecy about 'the ox and the ass shall lie down together.'"7 Speaking of Biblical quotations, Mother, who teaches a Sunday School class of adult (legally) women and can generally be depended upon to mangle the sacred words beyond recognition when she attempts to recite them, had a shot at the ninth commandment the other Sunday and got it: "Thou shalt not bear false

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witness against thy neighbor, his ox, or his ass, or the stranger that is within thy gates." The other day I went down to the library and when I got back,—or when I was going back—I heard a voice floating serenely over the street at me: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is station CHEF, Summerside, P.E.I. We have with us this evening Mr.—uh— Pete—uh—Colgrove, who will be with you this evening for a halfhour program of popular and—uh—semi-popular music. Mr. Colgrove comes from Ontario and is at present—uh—making a tour of the Island. Mr. Colgrove is going to entertain you this evening for a halfhour program of piano music.8 Mr. Colgrove's first two numbers this evening are—uh—'Hello Beautiful'9—and—uh—" I walked on, hurriedly. Pete told me he was going to "astonish the natives," but I didn't know he was going to stupefy them. I'm so glad you're not going to get fat. I shall greatly prefer a Helen of Troy to a Helen of Avoirdupois. Launch a thousand ships and you're all right, but overbalance a single canoe and you're done for.10 It rains all the time, so about all I do is remain indoors and think very clogged thoughts about uninspiring subjects. I guess I'm going to be a professor after all. Which is a horrible thought. I seem to be anchored to my chair by my guts. A symptom of pedantry, probably. Or sedentry. (For which I apologize). This letter sounds a bit depressed, I guess. It's the affect of too much birthday cake. There's a layer of dates in the middle which falls straight as a plumb line into the lowest corner of my stomach with a hollow booming sound and stays there. I'm sorry, but I was writing too fast.11 This is better censored and I haven't time to rewrite it. You're still a lady if you are a friend of mine. Yes, I think you are right in ascribing the failure of so many earnest men to a lack of humour. Humour arises from the perception of incongruities and discrepancies in human nature. The reformer is impatient of these discrepancies; he calls them the result of cynicism and skepticism. His outlook is too exclusive and narrow for them, because he wants to apply a few formulas to the world which, universally accepted, would cure all of that world's evils. Now a man who has a panacea in any sphere is a quack. And a quack is always a nuisance, generally a menace. Whether he makes himself ridiculous or not depends on the amount of humour possessed by his portrayer

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or auditor, not on his own. (This is the sample of the workings of a mind with mould clinging to it, as aforesaid). If your aesthetic sense is worth anything, you will probably have noticed an atmosphere of heavy rain running all through this letter. I don't think there have been eight days of clear weather in the two months I've been here. I never saw such a country. I told the boys on the chain that the ministers were seriously inconvenienced by never knowing which burial service to read,12 and although that was an exaggeration, the fact remains that the consistent downpour is enough to unhinge one's mind. Besides, our roof leaks. I have shelved the Temperamental Clavichord for a week or so in favor of the Three-Part Inventions. I have owned them for years and never realized it. The ones I am going after now are those in E minor, A major, B-flat major and C minor—four of the loveliest little pieces I know. You should look at the B minor fugue in Book One of the W.T.C. too. It's the longest of them all and covers the whole nineteenth century.13 I am also quitting reading for a while. The last book I tackled was Joseph Collins' "Doctor Looks at Love and Life."14 It gave me a pain, although there is a chapter on adult infantilism which your friend Marcus [Adeney], by all your reports, might do well to peruse. It is, speaking broadly, a consideration of American contemporary life with special emphasis on sex questions. Now the United States is a big thing to criticize, but it has the advantage of having so many aspects that it is hardly possible to make a criticism of it which is not more or less true. But a statement which is more or less true, like "Germans are more intelligent than Frenchmen," or "women are more moral than men," is meaningless and a waste of wind, and of what is of considerably more value, time. That is the objection I have to Dreiser, and, on principle, to Lewis. No man has adequate cultural equipment to satirize the U.S. according to it, so that all he can do is imitate, or simply set the standardization of the Babbitts beside his own cultural standardization. There is too much eighteenth-century sentimentality and sloppy thinking in American culture anyway, and the path from Thomas Paine to Elmer Gantry runs straight and smooth. Here endeth the second lesson. I know I'm a damned fool to be boring you with all this priggishness and pedantry, but it's my nature. Besides, it's about all I'm doing now.

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A man with a bad case of phthisis Kept asking his family for phkhisses Until his wife said, "You can't see your head "So you don't know how rotten your phphiz is." I guess I must be getting lonesome for you, pet. There is a seventeenth-century ballad which begins I wish I were where Helen lies Night and day on me she cries.15 Does she? I doubt it, and if she did she wouldn't admit it, certainly. The Helen of this particular poem was dead, which factor made the couplet considerably more respectable than plausible. As for the first line, you being very much alive, there would probably be a scandal which would ruin both of us. But even with these reservations, the quotation expresses my state of mind in general. [July] 17 Well, I've covered two days in the course of writing this letter, and it's Sunday now. Mother has just dragged me out to church. Our church has gone in with a Baptist one for the summer and it's their choir and organist. The anguish I suffered listening to the latter is not easy to imagine. Four trebles, three altos, three tenors and eight basses. None of them mattered except a very fat and red-faced soprano who was about half the choir. The organist was nothing. They plunged into a fairly difficult durchkomponiert setting of "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind"16 and when they finished—or at least when they stopped—I was leaving grooves in the pew. I think it a well-grounded belief that anyone who goes to heaven will have to become a musician but if that mob ever gets past the pearly gates they will have to join the awkward squad for sure. The minister was apparently not a Baptist, as he made a reference to his University career. He told us that the Bible was historically quite accurate. I forget his text—so did he, for that matter. Towards the end he wanted to know indignantly if the world were played out. I anticipated a discussion of The Decline of the West thesis of Spengler17—a book that I am hoping against hope

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that you will read this summer—and came to life. But he remained as innocent as H.G.K. of the said volumes. He decided, however, that the world was not played out, as there was to be an Imperial Conference at Ottawa soon. He finished by imploring us not to be weaklings, or, to put it up to us in plain English, not to be yellow. Thank God for Bach and Mozart, anyway. They are a sort of common denominator in music,—the two you can't argue about. Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner—they give you an interpretation of music which you can accept or not as you like. But Bach and Mozart give you music, not an attitude toward it. If a man tells me that Beethoven or Brahms leaves him cold, I can still talk with him. But if he calls Bach dull and Mozart trivial I can't, not so much because I think he is a fool as because his idea of music is so remote from mine that we have nothing in common. This is the difference between oh God, shut up. I guess I'm going to be a professor after all. Damn it, I won't be a professor. Wanna be a minister and join the Rotary Club. I wouldn't mind writing these exegeses if they (a) edified you (b) didn't sound so damned pontifical. But I can't help talking down to people that feel down—can I, varlet? I guess when I go back I'll start going with Bessie Mountain or Florence Clare. Then I'll have to shut up, or else be rude. I rather sympathize with Mr. Brady in his pompousness. The most likely reason why a woman does an item of routine as a matter of course is that she fits into a routine so well. I should react very similarly to Mr. Brady, except that instead of being pompous I should invent all kinds of games and stories around the work I had to do. That, at any rate, was what I did when I was holding down that God awful job at the public library two years ago. I had an interesting conversation with the janitor of the library here. The librarian is on a vacation in England. "Lots to see," said he, "but just as much to see here. Been across twenty-six times myself and I know. Nothing to this travel business. Just as good a country here as anywhere." I said the usual thing about a change of scene. "Best scenery here in the world—go anywhere else and it's worse. As for the people, they're all alike anywhere." Then he told me he had followed the sea all his life, got thoroughly sick of it and retired. I asked him if there was any truth in the idea that once the sea got into your blood it was there for good. "Naw, don't you believe it. That's what you read in books. Well, I knew a guy once that wrote books about

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the sea. Passenger on our ship—first-class, of course. Out on deck the first morning asking a hell of a lot of questions. Then he went to his stateroom and stayed there until we docked. Those kinda guys that write about romance." Well, having nothing to say I think I did fairly well to stretch it out this far. My letters will brighten up a bit, perhaps, when I get at the library. Norrie. XXX— 1 The reference is to the inescapable weight of the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798). 2 See Letter 10, n. 17, above. 3 "The Case against Examinations," Acta Victoriana, 56 (April 1932), 27-30. 4 See Letter 10, n. n, above. 5 Richard Epstein (1869-1919) edited several of Mozart's piano sonatas, which were published in New York by Schirmer in 1918. The Spanish edition NF refers to is Fantasia y sonata. 6 George Birtch was spending the summer riding the circuit as a student minister in the Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan. 7 Charlie Holmes's joke comes from his conflation of the animals in the Tenth Commandment (Exod. 20:17) and those in Isa. 11:6 ("the leopard shall lie down with the kid"). His play upon sword and hayfork derives from Isa. 2:4: "and they shall beat their swords into plow shares, and their spears into pruninghooks." 8 Pete Colgrove and NF were piano-playing rivals at VC: NF played classical music and Colgrove jazz. Colgrove had taught NF ballroom dancing during the first term of their freshman year. 9 A 1931 song for voice and piano by Walter Donaldson (1893-1947). 10 In the Greek tradition following Homer, Helen, wife of Menelaus, had been stolen by Paris and taken to Troy; she was said to have launched a thousand ships because the theft had begun the Trojan War. In the troy system of weights, which is used to weigh precious metals and gems, one pound equals twelve ounces; in the avoir dupois system, one pound equals sixteen ounces; thus the double entendre in NF's preference for a "Helen of Troy." 11 NF has just cancelled a line. 12 That is, the service for a regular burial or the service for a burial at sea. 13 A joking reference to The Well-Tempered Clavier, which, like the other pieces NF refers to in this paragraph, is by J.S. Bach. 14 A Doctor Looks at Biography: Psychological Studies of Life and Letters (New York: Doran, 1925). 15 "Fair Helen of Kirkconnell," in English and Scottish Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1864), 2:207-12. NF quotes the first two lines of the opening stanza, which are repeated at the beginning of the final stanza. 16 A well-known hymn composed by Frederick C. Maker, with lyrics by John Greenleaf Whittier. Durchkomponiert describes a musical work, especially a song, which is composed in a continuous form and which does not repeat itself in successive stanzas; thus, the opposite of strophic.

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17 Frye had discovered Spengler's The Decline of the West in the Hart House library the previous year and had devoted some time to rereading it during the summer of 1931 while staying at the YMCA in Edmonton (Ayre, 65, 68).

12. HK to NF

205 Fulton Avenue Toronto 6. July 26. [1932]

My dear Norrie— I have been trying to write to you for several days and something turned up every time to prevent it. Last night I was so mad at people in general that a letter would not have been a very sanctimonious occupation—I can't seem to get away from people—young people, stupid people, people who come in and sit and talk about nothing and whose conversations are just a series of trivial questions. Lord! I never can be alone it seems. After your last letter I bought a copy of Mozart (edited by Epstein also, Schirmer edition1—is it the same?) and have been worshipping at the shrine of pure music—when I get the chance. Five years ago I would not have liked them for I remember I was an ardent admirer of the Liszt sort of thing and used to impress people with that Rigoletto Concerto paraphrase2 which I thought quite fine, and a sure way of showing how I had mastered Hanon and parts of Czerny. Now I play it sometimes when I feel skittish—when I should be swimming, for exercise—and would not insult an intelligent person by offering it in lieu of music. So you may imagine my annoyance last night when I had played two movements of the C major no. 3 and in walked Mrs Smith3 in a kindly mood, to cheer me in my loneliness etc. The trouble is, my time at home is so infinitely precious just now, when I must be at the library presumably helping on the world's work, and then keep house besides, and in the odd moment attend to my own little soul. I have not written to you these last few days for another reason. I will not send you another protracted groan and tooth-ache like my last missive. I am a varlet. I have discovered that my besetting sin is a morbid introspection and a periodic melancholy for which there is no particular excuse except that I have inherited it from my father. Diet and lack of exercise and so on are other factors, so I am waging war against melancholy. It is eleven-thirty now, and I have walked part of the way from Mr Thornhill's.4 I should have come all the way except

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for the fact that it is about three miles and dark and raining and you must go through back streets, and besides I wanted to write to you to-night. I am playing games these days—for when I am lonely I think of the things around me and how I shall tell you about them—but so often it is just a case of riding on a street-Tar and thinking about the woman across the aisle whose lower jaw is abnormally large. Which gives her a queer expression when she talks to her companion, and when she talks to her friend I can tell by her wrinkled brow that she is saying "It certainly is terrible these days, I've a friend who's been out of work for eight weeks, I don't know what we'll do."— Or I walk along the street and see a man in a blue shirt whose stomach bulges over his trouser-belt like a blown-up candy-bag. And I wonder how a man of any discernment could allow himself to be like that—but when I look at his face I see that it is all fat and moss-grown too, and he has never been wakened. But I must tell you the high-light of the last few days. Aside from interruptions in the direction of midnight visits from Ernie Harrison (the Greek god I mentioned) and George Clarke, who ought to know better, and Dick Smith and Harry Walker and Hans Lincke (most of whom come to see Roy, of course), there have been a few good turnips. For instance, Roy and I went to Chapmans again, and listened to Joyce Hornyansky and Mrs [Evlyn] Howard-Jones, Marcus Adeney, Miss Dennison, and Geoffrey Waddington (director of CKNC) play a Brahms Quintette and with the aid of Arthur Mulliner, play Schubert Sextette (op. 36). There were other people there too, but Joyce is beautiful—when she plays she seems like the prophetess in the grip of Apollo—She is so intense and so passionate. And then, between movements she turns to her husband and says, in a deep contralto with an accent English yet slightly blurred and French:— "Mickey, toss me a cigarette, will you?" It was a strenuous evening—the Brahms tired me out completely, so through the Schubert I gazed at the graceful line of throat and neck and ear of Joyce Hornyansky. I think, with you, that I have never seen such a beautiful woman. On Saturday night Jack Cumberland and Dorothy [Darling] and George Clarke were here, and at the last moment Hans Lincke came with his cello. We played some trios, and a little bit of the jazz Jack brought with him. Hans later said that he knew Dot was only being polite when she said she enjoyed it—I can not tell. Next day Hans

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came back and we spent a day as human beings should—we played the C minor Beethoven trio in the morning and then walked by the Don5 in the afternoon sunshine, and Hans and I sat on a log bent across the road while Roy feasted his photographer's soul on the surrounding scenery. Hans told me about his troubles (he has rather bad ones I know,—his father is ill, neurotic and so on,) and about Helen Reeves who has returned to the West after studying here with Gertrude Huntley Green. And he says he is in love, and he is happy and proud and doesn't care who knows it, and it is no one's business—if anybody teased him he would tell them to mind their own affairs. (This in answer to my telling him of the teasing I get at the library by that fool of a Robert6 who is growing excessively monotonous, and who is going to get his one of these days. To-morrow, to be exact, for I think he is due to mention platinum blondes, men at proms, and the way I 'roll them eyes,' according to his weekly schedule.) So then Hans asks me have I been, am I, in love. I try evasions of various sorts, that I used to think so and so on—well, I did mention you Norrie. Do you mind, very much? (My dear girl, where is your Victorian reticence?) Have you thought that my two extra (possibly fruitless) years make much difference—my hastily assumed Victorian reticence steps in so that I do not here go into detail—you probably get the idea since you've been reading "special emphasis on sex questions." And what if I don't read Spengler? As I say, I shall have one precious month before the exhibition and the usual jamboree—shall I spend it reading Spengler? You know, I shall not be able to follow you in many places— but then I am wandering by myself in others. By the way, Epstein is probably the greatest sculptor in England to-day (the author of the book grows fairly rash and says Epstein has the greatest sense of beauty of any man living) and was the creator of the Hudson Memorial in London which pictures Rima the bird-girl from 'Green Mansions.'7 The public filled three trunks with their press comments and some drunken students clothed Rima one night with a coat of green paint. However Epstein goes his own way. He has recently completed colossal figures of Day and Night on the building of the Underground Railway Station. I am improving my acquaintance with Mr Thornhill and his wife, two of the most intelligent and delightful people I know. We went sketching one afternoon—I was busy in the thick of deciding whether or not to come back to college next year—the question has been vexing

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me of late, but I suppose I shall return. I can't change my course by one iota unless I take on some more sups or something and the damn thing isn't worth all that—so I am developing an interest in eugenics and the economic system, and English poetry and the fall of Rome— I'm supposed to read Gibbon, too. However, Gibbon may not be too bad. I needn't follow Charles Lamb's distaste for him8—I went through a good deal of Mommsen9 last year, which is about as stiff a historian as you would wish for. I was at Bolton camp10 the other night with Jean [Elder] and Ida [Clare] and Georgie Green—I can't go into all that here. Earl Davison and Hap Hatton are busy putting about two hundred boys through their paces. I am working on a map of the university buildings11—it is the most interesting thing I have had to draw yet and I think it is good. I have had to park on street corners—to draw buildings of which I had no photographs—Mary Johns12 for one. You remember, you were there one night. I had Chinamen and paper boys looking over my shoulder. It is one o'clock. I must stop. Good-night. (Do you know yet that I think of you very much, and I am so glad to be alive that sometimes I could dance—or even sing if my opinion of singers in general were more favorable.) Norrie, you must not let the rain 'get you'—can there be a great deal else? Probably by now you are feeling much better—I hope so. I have had so many low moments—as I told you—that I don't want to see you catching the disease. And I am lonesome for you—but that must be fought off as best I can. As for your being a professor—do you think you need to be a stuffy pedant? My conception of that type of mind is of an antique soul who has lost contact with people and living beauty and with enthusiasm—distinctly not a social being. There is too much of the fighter or of the controversialist about you to remain passively letting the world go by—and I think you may develop a broad human sympathy—you have changed a good deal within the last year in that regard. By the way, it is rather amusing to discover some of the remarks you have made in your time regarding the deadly sex in general, and the dire fate awaiting the man who so far forgets his manhood as to fall for the spell of Eve and all her daughters. I am getting sleepy—I'll be making my towers all crooked13 tomorrow if I'm not careful. One word more. I would suggest that you

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do some walking—a lot of walking—if you will not swim. I will not enlarge upon the advantages but merely hope that you will not continue to regard me as a back-to-nature crank (as you have implied, before now) Fresh air being an excellent thing for cob-webs, and rainy atmosphere, and 'a mind with mould clinging to it.'14 Helen. 1 In his letter of 15 July (Letter 11), NF speaks of his edition of Mozart, edited by Epstein, saying that it is in Spanish—the edition cited in n. 5. Richard Epstein had edited several of Mozart's sonatas, all published by Schirmer, but only one in Spanish. In Letter 13 NF says that HK's Mozart is the same as his. How he could have known that hers was the Spanish edition is not clear. 2 HK had played the Verdi-Liszt Rigoletto, Concert Paraphrase at a piano recital on 8 February 1929 at the Hambourg Conservatory of Music. 3 The Smith family were neighbours of the Kemps living at 209 Fulton Ave. 4 The Thornhills lived at 336 Kingswood Rd., several miles to the east of the Kemps' home on Fulton Ave. 5 The Don River, which runs through a valley in the neighbourhood where the Kemps lived. 6 Robert was the custodian at the VC Library for many years. 7 In his book on Epstein, L.B. Powell actually draws back from applying standards of beauty to Epstein's work, but he does say that Epstein is "the profoundest and most acute sculptor among us to-day" and argues that his work is "among the rarest manifestations of purely creative genius of our time" (Jacob Epstein [London: Chapman & Hall, 1932], xvii, xix). Epstein's Rima (1925), a tribute to W.H. Hudson's novel Green Mansions (1904), stands in Hyde Park. 8 In a letter to Thomas Manning (i March 1880), Charles Lamb says that Burnet's History of His Own Times has "none of the cursed Gibbonian fine writing, so fine and composite!" (The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. Alfred Ainger, vol. 9 of the Elia Edition of The Works of Charles Lamb [New York: Lamb Publishing, n.d.], 175). 9 Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome (R. Scribner, 1868); later editions were published by Macmillan in London. 10 Located to the northeast of Bolton, Ont., the Bolton camp was established during the 19205 by the interdenominational Neighbourhood Workers' Association to provide the opportunity for disadvantaged children, including immigrants, to attend camp. Many students worked at the camp in a volunteer capacity. 11 See illus. 8, this volume. The original hangs in the Sissons Room of "Old Vic." Coloured copies are displayed in the office of George Altmeyer at the Faculty of Arts and Science, U of T, and in the Book Bureau in "Old Vic." 12 A restaurant opened in 1917 by the widow of a Great Lakes sea captain at the corner of Gerrard and Elizabeth Streets, which became a favourite meeting place for upcoming writers, artists, and scientists, among them Ernest Hemingway, the Group of Seven, and Sir Frederick Banting. The original building has been demolished, but the restaurant itself is still in existence. HK's drawing appears on the upper right-hand border of her map of the campus. 13 HK is referring to the university buildings in the campus map she is drawing. 14 The phrase HK quotes is from NF's letter of 15 July (Letter 11).

50 13. NF to HK

Summer of 1932 Moncton, N.B. July, [1932] (The nearest calendar is 2 rooms away)

Postmarked i August 1932; addressed to HKat 205 Fulton Avenue, Toronto 6, Ontario. My dear Helen: Well, it's still wet and my brains are still watersoaked. So should I do some walking, take some exercise, get some fresh air, hey? This, to one who has ground the length and breadth of Toronto under his heels! You are reasonable. How the hell can I walk when it's raining all the time? Fresh air! There ain't any fresh air. There isn't any oxygen even except what you can get by electrolysis. And if it does happen to be a "fine" day, it's so much hotter and stuffier than hell that that overworked simile can be left off duty for once. I can walk all over this infernal city in half an hour, and if I venture outside it, whiz comes a car that honks me into the ditch and disappears in a cloud of dust that is no sooner raised than it turns insidiously and maliciously toward me, fills up every available space in my teeth, spreads a film over my vocal cords that gives me a voice like the resurrected Lazarus, enters my throat, my hair, my eyes, my nose. And the natives stare at me, wherever I go, as though I really were the combination of owl and bird-of-paradise that I resemble. The only way you can get fresh air is to climb up on the roof and hang onto the chimney. At least I thought so, until I tried it. But I reckoned without the Canadian National Railways, to say nothing of the pigeons. I know who Epstein the sculptor is—Jacob Epstein, isn't it?—but you sandwiched him in between a couple of books on music and I got sidetracked. Your Mozart is the same as mine.1 The results have just come. They're not giving me a Trick, apparently, and they did give one to Cragg. I can't imagine who the other one is. I can't quite understand their attitude towards me altogether, but that isn't what's worrying me. I shall not know definitely for a month yet whether I am going back or not. I simply will not face my final year with inadequate financial backing, and if I can help it I am not going into debt. However, I rather think I shall be back,—I shall certainly make a desperate attempt, anyway. I've come to college before without any money, of course, but this is my senior year. Well,

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I shall leave it to God—or circumstances, I should say, being a church student. I'm still unrepentant about my R.K.,—it's a nuisance, but it does fit in so beautifully with what I said in Acta!2 Ernie Gould has just written. He's bitterly opposed to my going into the ministry and says it's a divine judgment on me. I thought the powers that are in Vic were too big to notice my Acta article—will I never get over my freshman verdancies? I have been disillusioned like that once before. I was at chapel in the beginning of my first year. Chancellor Bowles was speaking. He said that the truth would make us free.3 He said that we would find as we went along that many things we thought very fine would eventually appear as sham. He spoke of the way his literary, artistic, musical tastes had developed in separating the true from the free—I mean the trivial. Then he said, "Let us join in singing Hymn No. 403— 'Will Your Anchor Hold in the Storm of Life?'" Mme. Hornyansky is magnificent, isn't she? I shall never recover from the stupor into which she plunges me every time I see her, no matter how distantly. As you know, I have nothing of the painter or sculptor in me, and the sheer sensuous beauty of a purely physical stimulus leaves me cold. But there is something distilled and refulgent, almost mathematical, about her. She expresses what those grim celibates of the Middle Ages were trying to say when they painted their Madonnas. A woman to them was merely evil in herself and in her sexuality; she was of use only as a symbol of something higher. That is what is back of the "Virgin Birth" idea. It is also what is back of the remarks I have made about women that you find so amusing. I am not a misogynist, but I represent, in my twentieth-century, lateVictorian, decadent way, the same monastic-Puritan attitude. When I first saw Mme. Hornyansky I went rhapsodizing to Cragg, who was feeling rather sulky at the time and snubbed me. He was in his first throes just then and he quoted Florence [Clare] as an example of a shape. I told that to Norm Knight, who commented sardonically: "Cragg's idea of beauty must be more purely utilitarian than I ever imagined it to be." I am not going to church any more. The Baptist preacher is at our church now. He is a returned soldier with a cork leg, which makes a more endurable noise than the rest of his anatomy. Nature endowed him with a very hard and thick skull, with Nature's usual idiocy. Men have more sense, and with them, the more the money, the thicker the safe. I put both feet down and told Mother I wouldn't go and

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hear that man if he had been commissioned to open the Seventh Seal,4 a remark that scandalized the parent at first, but as she can't hear a word anyway, she gave in. The results have finally arrived. I notice Ewart Rutherford didn't make it. I knew he would have an awful struggle, but I thought he might get away all right. I am sorry, and yet—I find it hard to be really sorry. If ever a man was sacrificed to the Moloch of professionalism, it was Rutherford. He's got a perfectly good brain, but it isn't an academic one, and there's no point in being a fourth-rate preacher when you can be a first-rate mechanic. I am reading Don Quixote now. It's immensely long, brutal and at times nauseating, but, oh, boy, what a book! The translation I have is 18th-century, by a man who knew what concrete nouns were. He didn't say "insides" when he meant "guts" or "perspiration" when he meant "sweat," or "side" when he meant "belly." That is the one thing that proves our alleged "reaction" from "Midvictorianism" a fraud and a lie,—the way we steer around realities with polysyllables and elliptical statements. No, I don't want to be a professor. Theoretically. In practice I should like it well enough. But there is something about such an eminently cultured occupation that would make me feel as though I were shirking something. A professor is, as I think I have said before, an orchid,— highly cultivated, but no roots in the ground. He deals with a crowd of half-tamed little savages who get no good out of him except intellectual training and, in some cases, the radiation of his personality. He is not a vital and essential force in a community of live people. He is not a worker in the elemental sense of that word. Most professors, to gain a reputation, specialize so intensely in their work that they are cut off even from the undergraduate. These are the pedants. The rest are not so cut off from reality, but they are cut off from life. Oh, well, you get the idea. The ministry is my "vocation," etymologically. I have been "called" to it just as much as any blaspheming fool of an evangelist that ever bragged about what a sinner he was before he was converted. But that doesn't mean that I am fitted for it, necessarily. It doesn't mean that I am not deadly afraid of it and would rather do a hundred other things. Above all, it certainly doesn't mean that my friends ever imagine I'll be a minister. "Ministry?" says Ernie Gould. "Do you think your friends are going to stand by and see you waste your life and talents in that?" "Minister!" snorts the

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janitor at Gate House. "You'd make a damn' good hypocrite, that's what you'd make!" "My dear boy, you can't be a minister," says Norm Knight, "you've got brains." And so they go. They're absolutely and devastatingly right, of course. I wonder what those writers who talk about relentless and inexorable Fate would say to a man who had two Fates, pulling in opposite directions. The trouble is that I can't quite figure out which one is God. I am still contemplating those results. They are bad this year,—the most dismal set I have seen by long odds. Fred Skitch failed—the only other man in Burwash Hall5 from a musical point of view. The Public Enema got a second. Life is like that. Blair Laing failed. John Stinson failed. Rudy Eberhard failed. Jack Boland failed. Ege Armstrong failed. Oh, what the hell! Well, I can't keep pouring out undiluted genius much longer when I am living the life of a misanthropic clam. I wish I wasn't quite so DAMNED lazy. That's another argument against the ministry—with my temperament I shall probably drift into writing or professoring or pugilism or some lazy man's profession instead. No, you aren't a back-to-nature crank. You aren't artificial enough. I never said you were, anyway. I have judiciously weighed the question of whether or not I should "mind very much" your saying that you love me and have decided that I do not. I find the statement even agreeable. But you frighten me a little, you sweet child. "Love" may mean anything from a quiet friendship to an overwhelming passion. It may be anything from a purely sexual impulse to a declaration of honorable intentions based on a close survey of the economic field. In the sense that I like you better than anyone else of your sex, I love you. I love you in the sense that I would do anything for you. In the sense that no revelation of weakness in your character would diminish my respect for you. In the sense that I think of you a great deal, and always affectionately. And so on. But if I were to go into poetic ramifications of the subject, and tell you that you filled my days with sunshine and my nights with longing, I should be merely a liar, and you would be well-advised to regard me as an insidious and designing villain. Don't you see, darling? I can't write you a sustained love letter, because when I try— and I have tried—the result sounds like a Chopin nocturne scored for brass. It acts like a tonic on me to hear you say that you love me, certainly. But it does make me rather nervous to be carrying such

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a warm and pulsating little heart around in my pockets. I'm afraid it might drop out and break. Your two years make no difference to me, whatever they make to you. I have always associated with women older than myself—and besides, if I patronize you, what would I do to a sixteen-year-old? Dose her with castor-oil, probably. Well, having got this far, I find my mind an absolute blank at this point. Whenever I get jolted out of my customary shell of reserve and shyness, I feel very uncomfortable and naked, and so the sooner I shut up the better. Norrie. \ See Letter 12, n. i, above. 2 NF is referring to his article, 'The Case against Examinations." See Letter n, n. 3, above. 3 The motto of VC, carved in the stone lintel over the main entrance to "Old Vic"; from the words of Jesus to the Jews who believed his preaching, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). Students later quipped, 'The truth will make you Frye." 4 The final seal of the book of God which is broken by Christ in Rev. 8. 5 Burwash Hall was the dining hall at VC, though the name was used to refer to the adjoining men's residences as well. In Letter 21, for example, NF refers to the common room at "Gate House, Burwash Hall."

14. HK to NF

[Toronto] Wednesday. 12.15 \3 August 1932]

My dear Norrie— I have just sent off a letter to you but here I am again. I have been at Dorothy Darling's with Jean [Elderl and Ida [Clare] and Georgie Green, and while they talked of doughnuts and sweaters, I listened to Glinka's overture to something, and Gluck's 'Melodic' from Orpheus and Eurydice.1 Oh Norrie, it was so beautiful, I thought I would burst. I must tell someone and it must be you. That is all. Good-night. Friday August 5. Your letter came a couple of days ago. I have been thinking about you a great deal since then. I have told you before this that I could

3 August 1932

55

not see you performing with satisfaction to yourself the duties of a minister. The average church congregation seems to me to be a community of bustling Marthas held together by a weekly sewing meeting and another meeting devoted to purging one's soul by communion with the unknown, expressing one's soul by singing third-rate tunes, and edifying one's consciousness in general by listening to a few ethical principles half hidden by quotations from the Hebrews, followed by a plea for more substantial collections. The women gossip, the men quarrel, the soprano soloist with an eye to matrimony ogles and attempts to seduce the young minister. The young minister himself is inevitably (if he is intelligent) assailed by grave doubts about the infallibility of his doctrine, and the right of the Christian church to attempt to evangelize the world. If he comes through all this struggle he will have attained a deeper spirituality and a broader sympathy with toiling sweating humanity. If he never arrives at a solution, and still remains in the ministry, he is forced to pour forth his weekly platitudes as usual, to live a life at which his inner being revolts. He is forced to live a lie, stunting his own growth, still blindly hoping that he must be doing some good. How can a man at war with himself be a leader of other men? No work of art—and a spiritual life is a work of art—is attained without a certain amount of purification, and forgetfulness of individual pettiness. Possibly I am picturing an ideal unattainable to most, and reached by a few men of genius—a sort of nirvana. But what is a man of genius if not one who has struggled and tapped the hidden spring of beauty and truth and has imprisoned a little of it for thirsty men? If you have anything of value to preach to humanity, it will come in spite of yourself—and at a much later date than now. This sounds hopelessly conservative I know, but it arises from my suspicion of the child prodigy. It is a good thing that croakers like myself did not dam up the enthusiasm of a Keats or a Mozart. To any great extent, that is. You told me once that you thought some biting satire would be a good thing for the church, or for religion, I forget which. But, tell me, can you get a child to feel the awe of the idea of infinity by bullying him into learning every dot, comma and fly-speck on two dusty pages of an old algebra disclosing the binomial theorem? Can you make him enjoy the Aeneid by bewildering him with the ablative absolute and all the legions of participles which join together in one scraggy skel-

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eton? Can you drive men to the love of God or the love of the good life by writing a Tale of a Tub or The Christian or Elmer Gantry? I mean, has satire ever any positive value other than laughing to shame certain follies? Iconoclasm seems to be one of the chief sports of this age—and the best paid, for that matter. I can not say anything about the church in general—I have not thought much about religion. As I told you before, church services bore me (and I am accustomed to the Church of England service which is fairly active) and I never go to hear people who amount to a great deal—so far. So I can not say that I am a Christian particularly—or even an intelligent pagan. The first church I went to was Westminster, when John Neil,2 a kindly venerable old gentleman was alive. But we moved to this district shortly afterwards, and Roy and I were sent to an Anglican church where the minister was six feet tall, gave marks for bringing more collection than the other children, announced in Sunday School that the most prominent part about him was his teeth, when anyone with half an eye could see that it was his paunch! The same gentleman gave interminable sermons on the evils of putting big nickels on the collection plate3 and bawled most ferociously at people who stayed away from church to wash the family automobile. He took great pride in the number of children he had prepared semiannually for confirmation by the bishop. Of the catechism I remember several useful things such as Q: "What is your name?" Ans. "M or N." Q. "Who gave you this name?" Ans. "My godfathers and my godmothers at my baptism wherein I was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven." And so on. He never asked the forty-odd children anything about all this. I was supposed to have learned all my theological doctrine from a typist Sunday School teacher named Miss Freak—a blond, simple, wellmeaning soul. One day the Sunday School superintendent came in to address the class. (He was the foreman of a lumber-yard, and the rector said he was deriving much benefit from his Sunday activities.) Mr Findlay said "Now boys and girls, as you go through life you'll find that it isn't reputation you want, it's character, (karactur) George Young had reputation, but he didn't have character. That's why he didn't win the big swim. Now remember."4 And so on for fifteen minutes, after which the meeting adjourned. There was also a story going the rounds, helped on by the highly moral and indignant Ladies Aiders, about the rector's philanderings with a widow of the congregation—quite a nasty story.

3 August 1932

57 Later

Hans Lincke has been here again—he drops in almost every other evening it seems. I was going to tell you about our trip last weekend—Hans and I hitch-hiked one hundred and forty miles to Lake Joseph.5 Roy was to have come but at the last moment he had too much work to do, so we started adventuring on our own—leaving the north end of Yonge Street at 7.30. I enjoyed every minute of it— even the mile and a half through the black bush at ten at night, with snakes shivering in the grass and fireflies lighting the way. We rode with two truck drivers driving a government load of beer, who fed us chocolate bars and talked about the war and communism and the 36 hour shifts they worked on when the Gerrard Street bridge was under construction. They told me to stick to library work. There was another truck driver with a load of pop, who offered us some of his wares. There was a baker who drove three miles out of his way after a twelve-hour day of driving his little truck, in order to set us on the right path, and then presented us with a loaf of bread. There were two wealthy men from London who gave us advice as to the approved hiking methods. And so on—ten different lifts in all. We came home on Tuesday morning with Cronins6 (cousins)—starting at 4 in the morning. I had been thinking seriously of hitch-hiking to Quebec, and this was by way of preparation—the only trouble is that I am not sure of Ruth Pike's temperament in general—whether we would get along well together on such a long jaunt. I haven't got the map done as yet. It is a big undertaking—Thorny [Reg Thornhilll wishes he were doing it. August 11. My dear Norrie Did I say I wouldn't write you another indigo effusion? Well, I won't, but I certainly could at this moment. I had to write and tell Ruth [Pikel that our Quebec venture was all off—after she had written such an enthusiastic letter and had braved the storm of ridicule from her fond relations. I went to get Thorny's advice last night and I find that I have to change the map around—do all the buildings over again from a bird's eye view instead of straight front view.7 Like this:—

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instead of this:—

So I'll be parked here for another two weeks, I suppose. Of course, it is fun making the thing, but a wee bit discouraging to undo what has taken quite a lot of time to get this far with. Oh well, cheerio. Yesterday a Frenchman named Armand Chevalier from Paris—came to the door asking for work. He would work for two hours for five cents. Can you imagine anything so low as that. He says he has not slept in a bed for six months. So I asked him whether he was hungry, but he had already eaten. He did a very good job cutting the grass and trimming up, and scrubbing the kitchen floor. (I varnished said floor last night at one o'clock) I left off in the middle of weighing the pros and cons of a minister's career. For one thing I am too deeply impressed with Elmer Gantry to be unbiassed. {I had gotten so far in my thinking when I came upon Frank Shallard's8 difficulties and find that Lewis anticipates H.G.K} I can't agree with you entirely about your orchid professor. How are you going to tame your little savages if you don't hold their interest in some line or other—I mean awaken an interest. And is not the enthusiastic teacher going to have a tremendous influence in that way? To be sure an unawakened dictaphone with the faculty of retaining facts and strutting them forth like your Miss Smith9 (poor woman) is not going to spell life to the little savages who have probably really felt and experienced more than she has. The function of a teacher seems to me essentially the same as that of a minister—to bring colour into a drab life. But have you noticed very many inspired teachers? Can you blame children altogether for being the savages which you so unsympathetically dub them? Most people don't know how to enjoy life—why blame their children for not being divinely inspired? I had forgotten how some people live until I went to Stouffville last week end with Lorna Raymer.10 A beautiful village with large pros-

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perous homes and well-kept gardens—no unemployment—and a library kept by an unmarried woman—a consumptive who is paid $300 a year. A horrible library with dirty worn-out books—the children's books being sets like 'What Katy Did' and even a shelf of Elsie books. Then the "Classics'—bound in mid-Victorian ugliness, musty and faded. Shelves of Christian doctrine—bought I suppose by the Methodist minister who is inevitably the most influential person on a village library board. They did have Upton Sinclair and Lewis, and a volume of Rupert Brooke's letters in which he remarks that Toronto is a small town in feeling—it will expand but never get over being small town—or words to that effect.11 {I see that I have grabbed the wrong piece of paper12—my letters seem to be a bit scatter-brained. I have just written to the family yesterday so the tail-piece at the bottom here is more or less cancelled.} You are precious, Norrie—you never embarrass me by being sentimental. Sentimentalism is one thing that makes me ill—from the sobbing saxaphone-player to that female who sang yesterday "Luv made a Buh-a-aby of Muh-ee" Still, I have my moments—you know about that. I must get back to work and start on Emmanuel13—see how skittish I can make it. Helen. 1 Gluck's opera by that title was composed in 1762; the Glinka overture was probably from his second opera, Ruslan and Ludmila (1842). 2 John Neil was minister of Westminster Presbyterian, located at 49 Bloor St. E., when the Kemp family lived at 92 Wellesley St. E., before they moved to the house on Fulton Ave. in 1919. After Church Union in 1925 the church became Westminster-Central United. 3 The five-cent coins were originally silver; a larger five-cent piece was first coined in nickel in 1922, so there were actually two sizes of nickels in circulation until the 19303; putting a big one in the plate gave the appearance of giving twenty-five cents. 4 Young became a hero in Toronto in the 19203 because, at age seventeen, he was the first person to swim California's twenty-two-mile Catalina Channel. The public subsequently expected him to win the twenty-one-mile marathon in Toronto, organized by the CNE in 1927, but when he failed to win the race and when several of his business deals fell through, he became known as a loser and as someone lacking heart. Thus, when he did win the CNE marathon in 1931, his achievement was largely ignored. 5 One of the Muskoka Lakes, east of Georgian Bay. The Kemps' cottage at Gordon Bay was at the north end of Lake Joseph. 6 The Cronins, HK's cousins on her father's side, also had a cottage at Gordon Bay. 7 HK did change the perspective for her map. See illus. 8, this volume. 8 A sympathetic character in Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry whose goodness only serves to illustrate the malice of Gantry's power.

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9 A reference, probably, to Florence Smith, lecturer in the English department in 1931-32. 10 Lorna Raymer remembers HK playing Debussy, which received the approval of the leader of the local church choir. Many years later, she was present on the occasion of the arrival of the Fryes' new grand piano at their Toronto home (Lorna Raymer to ROD, 13 September 1994). Stouffville is a small town about forty-five kilometres northeast of Toronto. 11 Rupert Brooke, Letters from America, with a Preface by Henry James (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1931). The passage HK has in mind comes from the last paragraph of Brooke's chapter on Ontario: "What must one say about Toronto? What can one? What has anybody ever said? It is impossible to give it anything but commendation. It is not squalid like Birmingham, or cramped like Canton, or scattered like Edmonton, or sham like Berlin, or hellish like New York, or tiresome like Nice. It is all right. The only depressing thing is that it will always be what it is, only larger, and that no Canadian city can ever be anything better or different. If they are good they may become Toronto" (83-4). 12 HK had begun a letter to her mother on this sheet. 13 Her drawing of Emmanuel College for her campus map. See illus. 8, this volume.

15. HK to NF

205 Fulton Avenue., Toronto 6 Ont. Monday - [15 August 1932]

Norrie my dear— What are you doing? I have been watching the postman like a hawk, for days, and there is no word from you. Are you dead, or sick, or disgusted, or lazy, or worried or blue or frightened or bored stiff, or immersed in books? Are you coming back, or do you know yet? As to that, I have been thinking that Victoria College will not likely allow one of its most brilliant students (and incidentally a show-piece in every publication like The Victoria College Bulletin1—see how bright our students are, etc) to stay away for lack of money. You see, I heard [C.E.] Auger talking about "our showing in scholarship," and at another time about "young Frye who seems to be cleaning up on everything." I still am on the fence about coming back myself—money, this time. But Daddy says "yes, why not?" In spite of the fact that he has been making a weekly amount of money equivalent to the earnings of a Toronto scavenger, all summer. I start in at the Exhibition2 in a few days now. Cooking beans this time, I gather. I am working like fury trying to finish the map, which is a work of art, to my way of thinking. I can draw, boy.

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I have met some more people—two charming men, to be exact— and have heard an interesting piece of gossip about Marcus [Adeney] and [Joyce] Hornyansky—Jeanne [Adeney] tells it herself from the vantage point of an amused bystander. Since I don't deal in insinuations I shall boil it down to this:— Mdme Hornyansky, who as you might imagine, is a headstrong determined woman, and who drove her husband to painting because she didn't approve of his fiddle-playing, has taken a fancy to Marcus. Jeanne always goes with him when they are invited to her home,—I mean Joyce is very friendly to her. But the only cause for talk is amongst the symphony players who observe Joyce hold Marcus familiarly by the arm and what not at practices. What a silly lot of chatter—I met Jeanne on the boat yesterday going to Niagara (with George, of whom I approve once again3—there being gradations of approval as of some other things) so the idea is fresh still in my sensation seeking little soul. We are going to Miss Dennison's again to play a trio I fancy,—perhaps a piano quartette or a quintette if Hans [Lincke] and Lucy [Cox] can come. So I am on the way out. But I should like to know something about you—you are rather far away, you know. I've still got the habit of taking an extra long look at every male platinum blond—and then I remember, of course, you are several provinces away. I must go Love Helen— 1 NF's name appears in successive Bulletins as the recipient of the Gordon Crow Memorial Scholarship (1930-31), the Class of 1902 Prize (1930-31), the Hamilton Fisk Bigger Scholarship (1931-32), and the Lincoln Hutton Scholarship (1932-33). 2 The Canadian National Exhibition, familiarly known as "the Ex"; during the 19303 it was the world's largest annual exhibition, held on Toronto's lake front for two weeks in late August and early September; many students worked at the CNE to earn money for the coming academic year. 3 George Clarke, HK's former boyfriend.

5. Frye and his sister Vera in the yard of their home at 24 Pine Street in Moncton, New Brunswick (courtesy of Ellen E. Cullen)

6. Marion Kemp. Drawing by Helen Kemp, 1927 (courtesy of the Victoria University Library) 7. Harold Kemp. Drawing by Helen Kemp, 1931 (courtesy of the Victoria University Library)

8. Detail from Helen Kemp's 1932 map of the University of Toronto campus (courtesy of Victoria University)

9. The Kemp cottage at Gordon Bay (courtesy of Susan Sydenham)

10. Scene at Lake Joseph. Drawing by Helen Kemp, 1936 (courtesy of the Victoria University Library)

62 16. NF to HK

Summer of 1932 Moncton, N.B.

Postmarked 25 August 1932; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave, Toronto, Ontario. My dear little girl (or does that sound sentimental?): Respected Madam (a euphemism for Respectable Female): I have just received your letter with its polemic re the priesthood. It is very clever, sincere and well expressed, but as I read Elmer Gantry about five years ago and went over the ground you survey quite thoroughly at that time it misses the difficulty I am in at present. As your criticism has obviously been strongly influenced by that book, I may as well tell you what I think of it. Sinclair Lewis, as I remarked before, was spoiled by success—if you ever attack 'The Man Who Knew Coolidge"1 you will realize that—while in "Dodsworth" he drops all his claims to distinction and returns to the rank and file of scribblers. The era of post-war tolerance and disillusionment made the production inevitable of a kind of satire for which a trick of imitation and a technical gift—which Lewis certainly has—even Elmer Gantry is a technical triumph—would suffice. But Lewis obviously has a commonplace mind and one as thoroughly Philistine as Babbitt himself, and when he was hailed as a prophet and genius lost his head. Imagine what a farce Main Street would have been had Lewis taken sides with Carol!— yet he does that in Elmer Gantry. Again, America being ruled by professionalism, you must go to headquarters for your attack. The most conspicuous of such attacks—Moliere on doctors—does just that.2 And if Moliere had confined himself to satirizing the wretched quacks and fakers who sold patent medicines from town to town he would have been forgotten long ago—another thing done in Elmer Gantry. And think how Arrowsmith would have collapsed had Lewis known as little of science as he does theology! or misunderstood so many of the really subtle problems confronting a scientist. Lewis' critical faculties seem to have been suspended when he wrote the book—partly because, no doubt, of the grim associations of religion with his childhood, but partly too because he has no adequate weapons except the bludgeons of an antiquated materialism with which to meet contemporary religion. So Elmer Gantry fails both as a satire and as a polemic. Again, while Main Street, etc., were inevitable to the 1920's, Elmer Gantry is obviously an out-of-date product the proper place for which

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belongs midway between Uncle Tom's Cabin and the beginning of pragmatism. As it is, I am faced with the United Church of Canada, anno domini 1936 or thereabouts—surely a very different matter. As you say, I think some biting satire is essential to the church, but the satire must bite, not bark. I do not quite understand your identification of satire with dusty pedantry. Surely the one is the best cure for the other. Lewis passed up an opportunity to write a great novel here. Think of what he overlooked!—Protestant individualism clashing with Protestant bigotry, Catholic anti-intellectualism cloaked by Catholic urbanity, mysticism in its last ditch, the clergy slowly retreating from their hell-fire vindictiveness to a vague and emasculated ethical sentiment, the slight but apparent rise of superstition and occultism, to mention the barest outlines of some of the themes. Narrowing the scope, if he had wanted degeneration, the Scarlet Letter would have indicated the proper line of attack. My difficulty is not that of Frank Shallard, who was a weak-kneed prig, but that of an Ancient Mariner hounded on by a force at least as strange as himself to deliver his message to bored and uneasy Wedding Guests. For I have got a definite message to give, right now, which will develop but not essentially change as I grow older, and I am not an infant prodigy. Nor am I worried about the infallibility of my doctrines—there is no common-sense doctrine in existence that cannot be harmonized into a consistent interpretation of Christianity. What I am worried about is my own personal cowardice. I am easily disheartened by failure, badly upset by slights, retiring and sensitive— a sissy, in short. Sissies are very harmless and usually agreeable people, but they are not leaders or fighters. I would make a very graceful shadow boxer, but little more. I haven't the grit to look the Wedding Guest in the eye.3 "Put on the armour of God,"4 said a minister unctuously to me when I told him this. Good advice, but without wishing to seem flippant, I don't want armour, divine or otherwise—snails and mud-turtles are encased in armour—what I want is a thick skin. You don't need to worry over me. I am not a deep or interesting problem, except perhaps to an entomologist. At present I am merely a poltroon on the outskirts of a battle, armed with one or two powerful weapons I may or may not get a chance to use, and trying to make my teeth stop chattering long enough to decide whether to go forward or crawl back to where the generals are and accept a position with them of great dignity and opulence. If I do the latter, you can cut

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my acquaintance any time, if you like, though of course I hope you won't. The only thing is, "None but the brave," etc.5 Your description of the local Anglican church is accurate enough, as a topographical survey. All churches are more or less like that. Yet everybody has a soul, however shabby, cheap and fly-specked a one it may be. Incidentally, I hate to seem intolerant, but I do not approve of Anglicanism. There are two possible approaches to Christianity, or any religion—the Protestant or individual approach, and the Catholic or collective one. Anglicanism never made up its mind which it was going to be, and did not much want to, as it was based on the useful but muddle-headed English idea of pleasing everybody. If you look at the first article of the Elizabethan Six,6 you will see that it supports transubstantiation. The second denies it. Not that that matters, but it shows the Anglican point of view—religion itself is in bad taste—it is only the observance of it that is in good taste. I think that in England now it is beginning to break up into its two constituents under pressure of the necessity of defining its religious attitude now that the support of The Crown, The Nobility, The Nation, The Army, The Fleet, and a lot more "The's," including the Oxford and Cambridge Accents and Poses, genuine or aped, which has bolstered it up heretofore, is beginning to weaken. Here, of course, it is a fish out of water—the Established—that is, the Representative Church is the United Church of Canada. This is an inevitable product of Canadianism—its counterpart would be inconceivable in the U.S.A.—and it is representative of all that Canada means in history—in its good-nature, in its tolerance, in its conscientiousness, in its vague and sentimental combination of Socialism, Imperialism and Nationalism all at once—a very appealing mixture, unpalatable though each individual constituent may be— above all in its determination to apply old traditions to new surroundings which makes Canada sturdier than England and more coherent in its perspective than the United States. Whew! What a harangue to make to a harmless child, who hasn't done anything even to deserve being spanked, or shut up in a closet with her conscience, let alone having to spend an hour or two trying to get interested in the workings of mine. Can't you see me as a flabby and pompous old walrus of sixty-five, with my crock of gold transmuted to an awe-inspiring silver, rising to address a flock of kids at a Sunday School picnic: "My juvenile friends, I do not wish to cast a gloom over this auspicious occasion by too protracted an exegesis

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(laughter, perhaps) but it may be useful to indicate the salient features of the larger and deeper question of the general relationship of recreation to the—well, the what I might call higher things of life, in order that we may not, in the midst of our frolicsome gaiety, lose sight altogether of those more fundamental matters which influence all our lives. For purpose of convenience, I will deal first of all with the eighteen principal aspects of the value of recreation in general..."? I have been studying astrology recently and found that I was born under the sign of Cancer, the Crab. This interested me at once, of course, as I saw there must be something in the science after all, so I read on and learned quite a bit about it. It appears that a long time ago all persons born under Cancer had to walk backwards, being Crabs, you understand, and it caused them a good deal of inconvenience. And everyone born under Capricorn, being a Goat, had to walk (or run) forward with his head down so that he couldn't see his way either. Now both Cancer and Capricorn, being very polite, used to apologize at great length to everybody they bumped—and always in the same terms, so that people got awfully tired of the "Topics of Cancer and Capricorn," as they called them, only some ass, for no particular reason, started saying "Tropics." Whenever, therefore, anyone saw a Cancer or a Capricorn coming, he would get out of the way, and so they got to navigating pretty well, except, of course, for being tripped up by the odd curbstone or falling over the occasional tricycle. And as walking backward imparts to one a great deal of dignity and stateliness (try it yourself, sometime) the Cancers began to be much respected in the community. But one day a Cancer was just nicely getting around a corner when a Capricorn came running up, hit him a terrific whack, and both of them went down. "Why the hell don't you look where you're going?" snarled Cancer, rubbing the injured place. "But, I say—" began Capricorn. "You have already butted enough buts," interrupted Cancer. "This is an outrage, and I shall complain to the Astrologer Royal." Which he did. The Astrologer looked very grave, and said: "From now on all Cancers may walk forward, providing they wear their collars backside to show their descent." "But where do I come in?" asked Capricorn. "You don't come in at all," said the Astrologer, "you're the goat." And that is the origin of the ministerial dog-collar—for all ministers, you must know, are born under Cancer. At least United Church ministers—all the rest are born under Taurus, the Bull, and so are not really ministers at all.

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My sweet child, who ever told you you could hitch-hike? Don't ever do it without a man along. (The man, incidentally, won't be me, whoever else he may be, as a hitch-hiking trip is not my idea of a date.) I don't know who Ruth Pike is, but if she is any smaller than Suzanne you are a couple of little fools who will thoroughly deserve whatever is coming to you. No decent man likes to pick two girls up on a highway—you may be all right, but you may be a couple of kids running away from home or school, and if he gave you a ride where would he be when inquiries were made? And if he isn't decent—well, you will have a very unpleasant experience anyway, whether you can take care of yourself or not. Well, I'm hideously sick at my stomach today. I'm not going to eat any more of whatever it was I ate. I was working in the library today from twelve to six and at about four I left ten taxpayers in the lurch who wanted to find Ethel M. Dell and Edgar Wallace and went outside, and gave up the ghosts of the last ten meals I had eaten. When I got home I promptly took a chill and swallowed about three quarts of lemonade, hot. I'm still a sick gazelle, to express it poetically, but convalescent. I dreamed about you last night, sweetheart. I dreamed I was back at Toronto seeing you again for the first time in four months. And I held you very close to me, to be exact, at a pressure of 20.3786 recurring pounds to the square inch. But you were afraid of being strangled, and bit a large piece out of my neck, so I let you go, and kissed the tip of your nose, the dimples on your knees, and a small pink toe projecting from your shoe (which was rude of you, my dear,—you should have been better dressed for the occasion)—and woke up quite happy. Which is the silliest trash, and quite unworthy of my dignity. That damned library of yours is making me send back Windelband's History of Philosophy7 before I had finished it. I didn't figure there was much point in reading it too long before the term opened. Maybe Ruth [Dingman] had something to do with its recall, or Art [Cragg]. They're getting alarmed. Ernie [Gould] says if I don't get some competition next year I'll never get out of bed. I don't expect much. From a purely academic point of view, I shall have things pretty well my own way, I should imagine. I rather like working in this library. It's such an interesting psychological study. The number of ways a taxpayer can think up to bully

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me are practically infinite. There's one charming old gentleman who comes in about three times a week, tosses disgustedly a couple of detective stories in front of me and says: "Trash, absolute trash! Got any more of that author?" Then he explains shamefacedly that he uses them as soporifics. Then there are French youngsters who suddenly become most hopelessly ignorant of English whenever they have a fine due on their books. Oh, for God's sake, good-night. Continued tomorrow, perhaps. Later Tomorrow has come, and with it your last letter. I'm frightfully sorry, lotus-blossom—I didn't realize what an unconscionable time had elapsed between the first two sentences of this letter. I usually head my letters as a gentle reminder sometime before the actual writing of them, but for some reason the days have pulled a fast one on me. My hours in this infernal library are very irregular and I hardly notice how the time is passing. Not that I am offering an excuse, of course. I'm an ill-mannered cur and I shall not attempt to gloss the fact. I am better now—my stomach's jig which it danced all yesterday has subsided to a saraband. Your [Joyce] Hornyansky-Marcus [Adeney] gossip amuses me. As I say, I worship the Hornyansky wonder from a distance and am thankful for that distance. The idea of such a drivelling incompetent as your friend the Bach-depreciator, who seems to be in the clutches of such a siren, is irresistibly funny. He wouldn't even dare to squirm. Of course any man would be helpless. Her fancy for him is probably "Nature's provision for maintaining the balance of the species." Your letter is comforting as regards my going back, but Victoria College does not seem to my mind so much interested in my welfare. I was of all the church students the most eligible for the Trick scholarships—I cannot forget that.8 I think I shall attempt the return. I should rather starve in Toronto than feed in luxury here. I think I shall go in for a less erratic source of income than scholarships, in any case. And the prospect of a winter in this town, ghastly as that in itself is, has been still further henna'd by having the ex-girl friend at my heels, she having tossed my answer overboard. Norm Knight has written. He's got in with the Trotskyite section of the Canadian Communist Party and is Secretary of it. His antics

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are beginning to worry me a little. I sometimes wonder if he is ever going to grow up. I am afraid his three S.P.S. years have retarded his development to a dangerous extent. His sense of humor may redeem him, or he may fall in love. Humor and virility are not allies of Communism. I hope I shall be able to see your map sometime. I feel grateful to it if it has stopped your picaresque propensities, if for no other reason. Your statement that "you can draw" is an agreeable surprise to me, as, not having seen much of your work and not being able to judge of it if I had, I had accepted your former statements to the effect that you couldn't. I trust this new nightmare about your not going back to college will prove to be as completely rooted in indigestion as the former ones. It is a nightmare, and a horrible one—though at least the financial reason is more acceptable than your asinine impulse to pack your brain and soul in ice and go to Art School, of all places. Not that Art School is a bad place for a college graduate or an ignoramus. You being neither, I object. But surely you should be able to manage college all right, living in town. And your father ought to know whether you can go or not, though of course fathers occasionally err on the side of optimism. I am certainly not relying on the confidence of my own Wilkins Micawber of a progenitor.9 If you cannot actually afford to go back next year, and I figure I can, I should not lose interest in you, however, as I might do if you had deliberately thrown up your college course. In the little reading I did for my Aesthetics last year I saw where Edmund Burke made a remark to the general effect that beauty in distress was more enticing than beauty in a smock.10 You see, to me you are essentially an amateur, a developing amateur, in the literal sense of a lover. You are just beginning to love music, you are just touching the outskirts of literature, you are beginning to love art, and you are beginning to love me. To take all this amateurishness,—that is, loveliness—away from you and immerse you in an atmosphere of professionalism would spoil you. In that guise you would go well with me as a disgruntled pensioner of the college. But we would at least be more attractive as a pair of busted Babes in the Woods.11 Well, ducklet, I hate to stop talking to you, but this is the eleventh page, and there is a limit to everything, as economists have been vainly trying to prove for three years. Star Cloud, Brown Mouse,

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Wind Ripple, Little Grace-Note, Wren Nest, and Sweetest of all Sweets, Good Night. Norrie. After trying to decide whether to include the dismal monologue to you at the beginning or not I have resolved to let it go. The letter opens like one of Miss Addison's conversations. Beans! Oh, God! N. 1 A 1928 novel by Sinclair Lewis about a mediocre businessman. 2 Moliere attacks the medical profession especially in L'Amour Medecin (1665) and Le Medecin Malgre Lui (1666). 3 In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Wedding Guest is spellbound by the "glittering eye" of the Ancient Mariner and so "cannot choose but hear" the latter's story (lines 1-19). 4 Paul's injunction to the Ephesians: "Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil" (6:11). 5 The phrase is from line 15 of John Dryden's "Alexander's Feast." NF may have known the line from the trio's "platitude song" ("If you go in") in act 2 of Gilbert and Sullivan's lolanthe. A variation on the line—"Only brave deserve the fair"—is in the duet of Little Buttercup and the Captain in act 2 of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. (One of NF's nicknames was Buttercup, although, according to Kingsley Joblin, the nickname has gotten too much coverage: NF squelched it very quickly.) See The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York: Random House, n.d.), 280, 123. 6 It is not clear why NF uses the phrase "Elizabethan Six" in this context. He almost certainly has in mind the Act of Six Articles issued in 1539 during the reign of Henry VIII. The first of the six articles affirmed a belief in transubstantiation; the second declared that salvation did not depend on one's taking both bread and wine ("as well apart, as though they were both together"). NF has apparently confused the Six Articles with the Thirty-Nine Articles authorized in 1571 during the reign of Elizabeth—frequently referred to as the "Elizabethan Articles." 7 A standard work in the history of philosophy during NF's student days, Windelband's book was translated into English in 1893, the year following its appearance in German; NF no doubt was using the second, revised English edition, published in 1901. 8 NF was awarded the Susan Treble Trick Scholarship for 1932-33. 9 Micawber is the improvident but prolific clerk who plays a large part in David Copperfield's fortunes. 10 NF has in mind the following passage from part 3, section 9, of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful: "Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty. Blushing has little less power; and modesty in general, which is a tacit allowance of imperfection, is itself considered as an amiable quality, and certainly heightens every other that is so. I know it is in everybody's mouth that we ought to love perfection. This to me is sufficient proof, that it is

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not the proper object of love. Who ever said that we ought to love a fine woman, or even any of these beautiful animals which please us? Here to be effected, there is no need of the concurrence of our will" (The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 7th ed., vol. i [Boston: Little, Brown, 1881], 188). 11 The allusion is to Michael Arlen, Babes in the Wood: A Relaxation Intended for Those Who Are Always Travelling but Never Reaching a Destination (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929). HK later read the book while sailing to England. See Letter 91.

17. HK to NF

205 Fulton Avenue Toronto 6 Ontario Tuesday. [23 August 1932]

My dear Norrie,— Another day has gone past—I was thinking of you to-night, and so I write to you for a little while, because I should like to be talking to you. I have been working very hard all day long—practicing a little, but mostly accomplishing wonders on the masterpiece.1 I gave up at nine o'clock finally, almost in a state of exhaustion—and got out Bach again. And the F major Mozart sonata, and good Czerny who is such fun. Especially since I have him almost under control here and there. This morning I started off the day religiously by playing the record of Bach's D minor Toccata and Fugue played by the Philadelphia Symphony—and a later Brahms F minor sonata, played by Percy Grainger. Brahms, as yet, does not overwhelm me with awe, for I am growing accustomed to a nice neat well-rounded little tune, served up and embellished with artistry and in the conventional mode. Consequently when I strike a classical romanticist slightly under the influence of "the tender passion" (programme notes by Grainger) I seem fairly unconscious of any sublimity. But naturally I did not appreciate him, listening as I did with my eyes and my mind drawing the windows and doors of Burwash, with a passing thought about the inhabitants of Gate House. I feel somewhat serious to-night. I have been reading a book "War Letters of Fallen Englishmen"2—actual letters of young men for the most part under the age of twenty-five. Well-educated Englishmen— some school-boys straight from the classroom, some school-masters, some doctors, some fellows of Cambridge, a passing student of economic questions. The prevailing note is one of reverence for a God,

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of loving and democratic fellowship, of hatred of the stupid bungles of politicians who were, they felt, the cause of the mess, and a constantly recurring belief that only by fighting it out to the finish will they be able to establish peace and the ideals of the pacifists. In the midst of it all they felt they must go on to the finish. One man hoped to be there on the last day, when men of either side would rush together in friendship, exchanging souvenirs, and now no longer feigning a hatred which neither actually felt. I have lately been wondering what makes human beings cling together so—parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers, brothers and sisters, strangers—overlooking the sex attraction, is it merely a matter of habit, a lack of initiative in seeking distant fields? And then, in the matter of religion, surely a God is not entirely a figment of the imagination—'man's hopes and desires projected on the world about him.' Throughout these letters, of the war generation there flowed a faith in God, and a sincere hope of ultimately achieving peace and friendship. I wonder whether this generation would write with the same faith and sincerity—when the youngsters with brains are busy debunking and writing flashy criticisms of the work of others. A generation is growing now which must feel that there is no place for it in the world. To the serious-minded this is ruinous. To the frivolous, equally so, but in a different way. Oh well, one must not worry. I have looked up a very nice copy of Don Quixote—translated by Motteux (also i8th century, with delightful etchings by Lalauze).3 You are not reading Smollett's translation are you? I gather that it is slightly coarser than need be—I have just reached the middle of the second volume (there are four in this edition) and have not had my Puritan modesty startled terribly yet. It is a delightful book, isn't it? Good-night, dear. Helen. 1 Her campus map. See illus. 8, this volume. 2 Laurence Housman, ed., War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (London: Gollancz, 1930). 3 The Motteux translation of Don Quixote, illustrated by Adolphe Lalauze, which was published in 1879 (Edinburgh: W. Patterson), subsequently appeared in numerous editions.

72 18. HK to NF

Summer of 1932 205 Fulton Avenue Toronto 6 Ont. Sunday. [28 August 1932]

Dear Man— What do you mean by sending a poor little soup girl into such a whirl that she reads your letter, then flings out of the house and goes off like a very minor comet flying through a dark night? Would a house contain a comet? This one went up into Todmorden1—past a new collegiate, built a few streets north of here, to educate the children of the clapboard-house dwellers, past dark streets and the Todmorden slums where boys were playing "Chessit" in front of a house whose door showed a great deal of dinginess in a somewhat theatrical glare. On and on—a dog barked, crickets made their usual cackle, while the katydids put up a competition like that between Campbells and Aylmers2 in foisting the inoffensive tomato on a docile Canadian public, at a great profit. At intervals, on the lamp-posts were tacked signs announcing the opening of the new school—I wondered what they would teach there, and whether good teachers would come—could any of them, educated as most are, bring colour into the Todmorden lives of those youngsters? At the turn in the road there is a narrow foot-path, half-arched by a monstrous hedge. It is dark and lonely, and beautiful. Cars came along, slowed up, and kept on, slowly. I stopped to look at the genial glow of an old colonial house,3 set back about three hundred yards from this road, and hidden behind the hedge. I should like to live there, perhaps, with a piano, and only occasionally descend upon the city, like a minor prophet, shake my head sadly and go back to my hollyhocks, who would be much more noble, dignified and friendly than the middle-class business men. But then, I know very well that I wouldn't be a recluse, because I'm too much interested in the middle-class business men and their businessgirl wives (metamorphosed) who buy a little house and buy someone else's idea of furniture and listen to the raucous noise of the average radio, who go places in a car, and have charming little babies. Have you ever noticed the beauty of a small child? I suppose flower-buds and kittens, and puppies and piglets and little babies all come in for the same admiration. Well, anyhow, I kept on going, very slowly this time,—still with your letter, my dear carrot, and crossed the tall grass to look over

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the edge of the valley (I fell into a hole, incidentally) where trains were shunting and clanging and filling the air with din. I heard someone following behind, so I made for the side-walk. Going up a blind street, I had to turn about, to meet a young man sauntering across the street. "Are you lost?" "No." Going on, he followed. "Whoa there baby, what's your hurry?" No answer and bright street lights were fairly discouraging. Farther on, three very young boys. "Where are you going sister? Here's your chance to grow up." Having discovered that 'growing up' comes in another way, I didn't stop for his formula—but two girls walking a few yards behind with another girl and a baby carriage seemed interested and hailed them energetically. When I came home yesterday night your letter was here. Roy was also here. Poor child, he had gone to a wedding in the afternoon, posing as a press photographer. The people were highly intrigued and asked him many questions—the men took him down cellar, giving the women the same old alibi, "we are going to tend the furnace," and gave him two glasses of beer and a drink of some concoction which he thought was straight whiskey. When I got home he was quite silly. His head wobbled. He spilled what he was eating on both sides of the plate and the table and the floor. When I made black coffee, he got quite obstreperous—so I acted as if I knew what to do for such cases and assumed the air of a competent nurse. Rather funny. He bicycled out to camp with Fred Heather, after midnight. By that time he was sensible enough to tell me about it. Before I had come home he had been telephoning women to go out with him (on twelve cents). As he is reticent about the women, I am not certain who they are—but I think he was trying to pick up a fairly voluptuous dame. (I don't know where he would meet any for he hasn't been going to summer resorts or dance halls or necking parties. No money, and there's a girl at Glen Bernard Camp.)4 But he sat down then and wrote a letter to Estelle,5—a terrible scrawl—and I hope it was more lucid than his conversation. So I have been, and am now alone. I have no idea what I shall do to-day—I am quite content. If it had not been for your letter I should have had to do something about my loneliness—but not now. You are different—you stimulate me to more or less positive action along lines of which my little conscience approves. Other people wanted me to fit into their scheme of things, and be myself, yet at the same time dance around being the sort of girl they wanted. My self was incidental.

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And so, unsuccessful as a sport model and Typical Girl, after a somewhat lonely summer, I feel very peaceful. Monday afternoon. On looking over this last idea in the cold light of reason, I see that there is a faint tinge of the "love me, I have never been understood" attitude which often degenerates into a puling sentiment. The person who complains about being misunderstood is usually a twisted ingrown specimen lacking social development. . . . Here follows a line of thought with which I'll not bother you. To-day is children's day at the Exhibition—hordes, mobs—O Lord! I have the afternoon off—I fancy I'll go to sleep for my eyes are nearly shut now and I have a heavy evening's work ahead. Wilf Auger has a job with the Hovis Bread people for two months, and he is working on their booth. It is just two jumps around the corner from ours, so he brought me home today. We just discovered each other to be there. The man has matured considerably since I saw him last for any length of time—and has therefore improved. I went to Jean's [Jean Elder's] yesterday. They had people—relations, for tea. One woman, the wife of Duckie who is a sort of fostercousin of Jean's, has a voice like a hailstorm backstage—and when she entered upon a long discussion of scrubbing various sized verandah floors—Jean and I looked at each other and I found it necessary to carry a plate into the kitchen where I could explode more decorously in the company of pots and kettles. We got away later and had a great old talk—Jean is working at the booth too, you know. It is soup and hot beans, as I told you before. Soup is easier to serve and brings in greater dividends for the company—Tamah6 Soup. Ugh! I was extremely edified by your lecture—no I'll not tease you, you're not boring me. And do you not think I am interested? You may talk down to me all you like—because I am extremely tolerant where you are concerned. But I should like you to overcome your habit of squelching people who haven't interested themselves in Scott at the tender age you did, or people who aren't interested in Bach (I went up to Georgie Green's lately and played Bach to her until she begged me to stop—and I didn't mangle it either) But mainly my reason is this. I am growing suspicious of people who try to hold the floor entirely (don't be annoyed, I am speaking generally. This only applies to you

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somewhat—for you do enjoy 'bringing up young ladies in the way they should go/) For while I like Marcus [Adeney] quite a good deal, I am far from accepting his opinion on many things. I find him still plunging radically into ideas and conclusions and spouting as dogmatically about subjects with which he is relatively unacquainted as would a college sophomore who has just discovered communism or women's suffrage or birth control or (a few years ago) evolution. Charles Comfort, who is a very clever and much talked of artist in town, does the same thing—although his life since thirteen has been spent for the most part in engraving houses. He is a clever artist. Hans Lincke, who is a fair musician, knows nothing else except making fiddles (he does that well) and something of mechanics. Of anything else he is extremely ignorant. Yet in a group of people he talks louder than anyone else, of his experiences with musicians, of music that he has heard, boasts of how he tells people exactly what he thinks (and he frequently goes out of his way to express disapproval) and in short, acts with extreme boorishness. But he has an extremely kind and generous heart. {I finally put a stop to his arguments about university— he insists that I am wasting my time. Now, I can't argue my particular fate with everyone who wants to tug me this way or that, for I've been told I should go to art school, and I should study music, and what good was this doing me anyhow, for so long that the subject grows tedious.} But you need not—oh, stop lecturing! What I mean is—people like you. I don't think that should be detrimental, should it? That is, not in the way that Arthur Lismer mockingly remarked about the Group of Seven—"They were beginning to outlive their usefulness, for people were beginning to like them!"7 I'm afraid I can't think much about the university any more—I'm busy with dirty faced kids. All I can say is, that if I ever come to see you grown such a bore as you portray—at sixty-five—I at sixty-seven will consider it my duty to seduce you right thoroughly and disgracefully—or better perhaps send a sweet youngster to beguile you for I admit, a woman of sixty-seven is not overly seductive— I am so sorry to hear that you have been sick—you must be careful. I can sympathize a little more, since I had what seems to be the same thing last Wednesday and Thursday, myself. I thought I should pass out of the picture quite gracefully—nothing happened much except a graceful little exhibition such as Sancho Panza might have

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wondered at. So I stayed in bed and wept and groaned and wished I were—somewhere else. But you make me slightly curious. You say you dreamed about me "last night/' and then you are "hideously sick today." You make me nervous, man. If I have such an effect, you'd better devote yourself to the ex-girl friend and continue to write brilliant essays on Blake. Other slight errors:— I am not afraid of being strangled, and my knees resemble those of a knotty, tree-climbing little urchin, more than any pink-toed, soft-fleshed, soft-eyed damoiselle. Too bad, isn't it. Still, my general physique is quite serviceable though it would never inspire ten thousand ships.8 I have the making of a bright idea curling around in my brain. I don't know whether to tell you now or not. Oh well—if it doesn't turn out you can forget it. I want to have a houseparty at Lake Joseph, early in October, some week-end,—about the first after we go back. And have you and Bill [Conklin] and Art [Cragg] and Ida [Clare] and Jean [Elder] and Florence [Clare] and Dot [Darling] and Jack [Cumberland] (why didn't I use commas!). And if the girls bring food and the men supply gas—for somebody's car (I've got to figure that out yet)—and Mother and Daddy will still be up there I think. The leaves will be faded, and the weather will be hazy. We have an old rowboat and a little put-put (acquired this year when Daddy made a huge table for Cronins who gave us the boat in return) and four bed-rooms with another bed on the verandah. We could swim and hike and cook meals—we'd have to do that in shifts! And I'd borrow some really good records so you would not be bored with The Whistler and His Dog'9—and you would be sweet and amicable. We could have a bonfire and wiener roast at night. What do you think about that? Good Lord! I've got to get some sleep.

11.10 P.M. My Dearest Uncle! I have seen the map of Quebec that was exhibited last year at the gallery, and is now at the Ex—for five minutes before the building closed. Beautiful, beautiful things there—I shall spend much time looking—I am fairly breathless, I am so excited. I am sure I can do something good—I am going to work, dear man, and show you! Am I writing too much, am I bothering you? Darling I'm head over heels to-night—so happy that I should be capering over the moon—

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you know? Percy Grainger plays the A minor fugue—Garbo says "As You Desire Me/'10 Hornyansky plays Haydn, the D minor Toccata and Fugue, a bit of glorious paint, and you are there, near or far, it doesn't matter. A thousand delights rolled into one. I kiss you goodnight. Helen. P.S. The kids were there in hordes to-night—Berna Langford was horribly sick and had to be sent home in a taxi this afternoon, leaving Dot Darling and Jean [Elder] the brunt of the attack. The kids nearly knocked in the counter to-night. It wobbles, feebly. HGK 1 A village called Todmorden grew up around the Todmorden Mills in the Don Valley directly west of Fulton Ave. where HK lived. Because of recurring floods it was eventually forced to move to higher ground. HK is apparently referring to this later location. Her house at 205 Fulton Ave. was located on the southwest corner of Fulton and Carlaw, a few blocks north of Danforth Ave. and one block west of Pape. The route HK charts here seems to have taken her up Carlaw past the Hartman Jones Memorial School at Carlaw and Westwood (now Westwood Junior High School), which was built in 1931—what she refers to as "a new collegiate." The "clapboard houses" are no longer standing. 2 Competing canned soup companies. 3 This may have been Bellhaven, a house belonging to one of the mill owners, located at the corner of Broadview Ave. and Pottery Rd. 4 A camp founded in 1922 by Mary Edgar on Lake Bernard near Sundridge, 170 miles north of Toronto. 5 Estelle McKinley, a friend of Roy's. 6 A pronunciation of "tomato" often heard at that time in Toronto (cf. "Tranna" for Toronto). 7 An important Canadian art movement that drew its main inspiration from northern Ontario landscapes; the seven original members, who established themselves as a school in 1920, were Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank H. Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and F.H. Varley. In 1933 the Group disbanded, and its members realigned themselves with the larger Canadian Group of Painters. 8 HK's reference to the legendary beauty of Menelaus's wife Helen, whose theft by Paris caused the Greeks to launch their ships in the battle against Troy, is a response to NF's double entendre regarding his preference for a Helen of Troy to a Helen of Avoirdupois in Letter 11. 9 A popular piano tune by Arthur Pryor (1870-1942). 10 Music from the 1932 MGM film of the same name; later made into a vocal recording by Sarah Vaughan, Jo Stafford, and others.

78 19. NF to HK

Summer of 1932 Moncton, N.B.

Postmarked 2 September 1932; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto, Ontario. My dear Helen: I have just received your last letter. Thanks for the clipping. I knew that Earl1 was to be married soon, of course, but I didn't know it would be this fall, especially when he has been appointed Gate House Don. If we get another lemon for a Don like we got last year God help the house. I have been sick again—had a relapse or something. Went to bed Sunday night feeling rotten—curl went out of my hair and into my guts. Choked a headache with aspirin—backache and a sore throat still left. Got to sleep at six. Out of bed Monday morning—pitched over the first piece of furniture I came to and then stayed in bed. Also Tuesday. Went to work Wednesday. Awfully sorry to hear of your seizure. I hope it happened before you started your work of the diffusion of predigested soup among the masses, though it is easier to imagine it coming afterward. No, there is nothing terribly shocking about Don Quixote. Why I said "brutal and disgusting" was because of the relish Cervantes seems to take in physical violence. It is so funny when, about every third page, somebody breaks the Don's head, knocks out his teeth, whales Sancho half to death and tramples on his guts. And as for disgusting, I still do not think the spectacle of the Don and Sancho puking into each others faces after the sheep encounter a particularly edifying one. I have Motteux' translation. Smollett's is not really a translation at all, as Smollett did not know any Spanish, but simply a plagiarism.2 I assure you that I am not trying to direct your career. I merely have a certain kind of interest in you—quite apart from friendship in general—and I consider that your one duty to God and man is to grow up. People like myself were determined and determined ourselves to be adults, and not all the clangor of brazen-throated folly can stop me from civilising myself. Others prefer to remain infants. Still others have the right idea, but need help from friends—and I think you belong here.

2 September 1932

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Our fine arts training in Canada is so childish, and the general background of culture provided by our schooling so negligible, that it is rare to find a professional in one of them of broad outlook and culture. And when I see the beautiful and good things of life entrusted to a crowd of chattering jackals I see red. I don't care whether they have good hearts or not—a great artist is necessarily sans peur et sans reproche.3 As a custodian of beauty he has a great tradition to sustain—if he ignores that tradition he is a nuisance. Of course, a city with cheap and smug culture will harbor cheap and smug purveyors of it. Now don't impute my motives in saying this. I have no desire to hold the centre of any stage except on my own merits. But I am determined to do all I can to "squelch" ignorance and blatherskiting no matter where I find it. My love for Bach is not a personal idiosyncrasy, for God's sake. There is only one refuge in Toronto for an ambitious adolescent, and that is the University. This applies equally to both of us. I am sorry about the unfortunate association of ideas concerning the dream and the resulting sickness. I noticed the break, but decided to let it go. The dream did not actually take place, of course,—it was merely a passing fantasy, what I wrote. I am sorry too that you should have taken my innocent nonsense about your knees in the spirit of Shakespeare's 128th sonnet.4 I am quite familiar with your personal appearance. But may I not pay you the compliment of blinding my eyes to your ugliness occasionally? No, little Chinese Lady, you are not writing too much nor are you bothering me. Your script is a joy to read and you don't gush. I have still to understand what it could have been about my letter that drove you forth into the night like the hero of a Strindberg play, unless it was a purely physical reaction from a long and exasperating period of concentration. I really don't quite know what to say this time. A very fine girl here—one of the best going—was in the library last night looking for a Greek grammar. She had to do something, she said—she tried training for a nurse, came back with T.B. and goes to bed shortly until spring. Her name ought to be Ursula in view of her hibernation.5 Poor kid. The same night a girl came up to me with two books— one a concoction of Ethel M. Dell's, the other "Early Autumn" by Louis Bromfield,6 and asked my opinion about them. I gave it,

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watching her closely and praying hard for her soul. She looked doubtfully at Bromfield, wistfully at Dell,—but she took Bromfield. Your last letter sounded tired—I hope you are not letting yourself in for anything unpleasant, what with pouring a villainous hellbrew down the gullets of the great unwashed, going into ecstasies over great music, alternately burning and freezing with regard to me, and doing a lot more contradictory things. I am sure that you can "do something good" too, dear. I shall, for your own good, continue to sneer for a while, however. As for the "love me, I have never been understood" business, I am quite willing to love you and to believe that you have never been understood until I came along with my tender and sympathetic razor strap, with its two thongs of Bach and Mozart. If you can get a bastinado for those awkward and shambling feet of mine next year I shall be grateful. Only remember that I am quite sincere when I say I want to help you—I don't want to pose, show off, lay down the law or make fun of you, though I shall probably do all four unconsciously. We have a tough hill to climb, and the worst of it is that we don't know its name—it's probably not Olympus, and it doesn't seem to be Parnassus or even the Mount of Olives. But it's there, and we've got to climb it. There are so surprisingly few things that really matter. Music matters, and babies matter—so do poetry, sunsets over marshes, plain food, and people's flea-bitten souls. But that's about all. So why bother about anything else? People who laugh at dreamers and star-gazers merely can't distinguish what's necessary from what's important. A wash-basin is necessary, but it isn't important and should be minimized. These practical-minded people are also necessary but not important, which is why they hate to feel slighted. Well, two weeks more and I'll be out of this infernal place and back to civilization. Norrie. 1 HK's note attached to this letter says, "marriage of Earl Lautenslager." He and Elizabeth Forbes were married on 3 September 1932. 2 Tobias Smolletf s "translation" of Don Quixote was published in 1755 (Dublin: T. Henshall; London: C. Cooke) and subsequently appeared in numerous editions. 3 "Without fear and without reproach," a title given to the French paragon of chivalry, the Chevalier de Bayard.

7 September 1932

81

4 In this sonnet the poet implores his lover to give her fingers to the spinet she is playing but to give him her lips to kiss. 5 The name Ursula is a form of the Latin ursa, she-bear. 6 A novel by Louis Bromfield (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1926).

20. HK to NF

205 Fulton Avenue Toronto Ontario Wednesday [7 September 1932]

My dear Norrie Do try to be more careful—I shall be alarmed about you soon. Your letter came yesterday. I don't want to see you having a nervous breakdown or anything of the sort, and while you may assure me that you are a tough mortal, you will leave me still unconvinced—for you are no rugby moron (I have been observing the man in the booth next to ours who was a rugby star in collegiate, and nonchalantly lifts fivegallon water jars over the counter, and sings modern American love songs, until they told him to stop, this morning.) Still, I suppose, as you once remarked to Florence Clare—"Speaking of pots and kettles—" For I am so very tired. My eyes burn, and I don't see things as I walk past—but then I am entertained by my own thoughts, and I am so fed up with smells and cackling fat women—God in heaven, how I'll be glad to finish this place! Cheer up, child, all you need is sleep. For the jaundiced, all the world is yellow. But I have just come from the art gallery—I shall go again I think, just for the purpose of hearing people's reaction to John Russell's beautiful nude—a girl of fifteen, surrounded by small puppets and Dresden dolls, little women silk-clad, and an Indian prince sitting cross-legged. Such a lovely chaste and graceful thing. But the cacklers come and drive me away. There was another nude woman—a warm-blooded, yellowskinned passionate woman from the south, with the face of a sophisticated, but not a great, soul. And a painting of an old man with the eyes of a mystic—blue-shadowed, white-beard with amber light bringing out the silkiness of it. Violet, jade and indigo colours for his robe, and the background. His hands were long and nervous, and his eyes gazed beyond the world, yet followed after one.1 I am a little disappointed in Will Ogilvie's work, showing there. He

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is one of the men I mentioned before—comes from South Africa, paints negroes, and plays Bach on the Orthophonic Victrola. Charlie Comfort I suspect of playing to the gallery. I came home with Wilf Auger the other night, and went in for doughnuts and coffee with his father and mother who were making the grand tour that evening. I had quite a chat—about music, about Suzanne [Currellyl, and Professor Currelly's disgust with the university life—thinks students never talk about their work, are crammers for the most part—especially Vic women—students in general are not intellectual ("High-brow" being Auger's word for it) and so on. I had to agree for the most part, in fact I did quite a bit of talking on the subject. I needn't go into that here, for it doesn't matter much yet what I think—to anyone but myself. But Norrie dear, you mustn't be vexed if I am prickly and prudish sometimes—for I loved your 'innocent nonsense'—and if I withdraw into my shell as I usually do it is from pure shyness, or wonder that anything so lovely could be happening to me. For the shell, which is not a real shell, is rapidly dissolving in the sun. And then what else shall I do? But please remember to wield the razor strap, right lustily—for Miss Ray told me I needed discipline, therefore I applied myself to that dull library with such a zest for routine and with so little imagination that I thought I was dead. If your discipline is Bach and Mozart—Why, Lazarus revives! I came home last night and worked on the map. Hans [Lincke] and Bill Pike and Ernie [Harrison] came in, each telling me some trouble—one has a busted love affair, and the other had a quarrel with the woman who is his boss, and Ernie devoted himself to Marion [Kemp]. Marion is home again, thank God. She cleaned the house, and washed the dishes, and is taking full charge. Home is now home again somehow. I do seem to be a hopeless incompetent—when it comes to housework—I can do it, and do it well, but Lord! I can't get interested enough to keep it up. Did you say a woman naturally fitted into routine? Helen. i The artist referred to is Canadian-born John Wentworth Russell, and the first painting described is his Souvenirs of the Past (Paris, 1930), for which the asking price was $1500. The three paintings were part of a large exhibition of Canadian and British art mounted in the art gallery at the CNE.

ii September 1932 21. NF to HK

83 Moncton, N.B. Sunday. [11 September 1932]

Postmarked 12 September 1932; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto, Ontario. My dear Helen: This is the last letter that I shall write to you, and you need not answer this one, as I shall be leaving sometime next week. Freshman Day should be around the 23rd, I think, and I want to get there for that. Charlie Krug down in Sackville got married last Tuesday and has asked me to come down and see him when he gets back from a motor trip he is taking for his honeymoon. The reports I hear of Mrs. Krug are not so hot, but I haven't seen her myself yet. She is a portrait painter and has exhibited in the Royal Academy—Kay Hammond was her maiden name. I shall probably spend the weekend with him. No, I do not anticipate a break-down. My health is all right,—there is a sort of distemper going around here. My family makes me eat too much. I want to get back to my normal routine of a chocolate bar at 10:30 a.m., a plate of soup at 12:30, whatever the dessert is at 6, and two cups of coffee at 11 p.m. Only I get so disgracefully fat on that diet. And, of course, I am not taking any exercise, but then, why should one's body have to be jerked and mauled and thrashed around to keep it in running order? However, I'm lonesome for Toronto. I have hardly touched a piano this last month. I read music quite a bit, but I am afraid my touch and technique are beyond hope—at least for what I want to play—and when I get an irresistible urge to regular practice I think of the common room at Gate House, Burwash Hall. Our piano is in a ghastly shape, anyway, and delicacy of touch is wasted on it. Henceforth I shall listen only to you. Your apology was very pretty and of course acceptable. You may have noticed that I belong to the mollusca myself. I am through working at the library. I hope you will soon be through with that ghastly devil's kitchen-work. To think of you at a job like that makes me shudder. Not that there is anything repulsive about serving soup, but it must be frightfully hard on you. You weren't born feet first, if you get what I mean.

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Summer of 1932

I want Romanticism as my topic for Philosophy thesis and Browning1 for Edgar, and I want to get to headquarters and make sure of getting them. I have already done quite a bit of work on Browning—I suppose, take him all in all, he's my favorite poet. I have very definite heroisms in literature—Donne, Milton, Bunyan, Swift, Blake, Dickens, Browning, and Shaw—and I like writing about them. So you see that the war-horse already sniffs battle. It will give me a sort of grim satisfaction to work on Cragg's neck this year, not because of Cragg, but because the powers that are had the bad taste to prefer him to me. I sincerely hoped that Cragg would lead the course last year—I sincerely hope I shall next year. Have you done anything about taking Honour English yet? I shall be glad if you will—though Pass English will give you most of it.2 There is very little to write this time. But then, I usually say that, and turn out a screed a couple of quires long. But I'm worn out and tired of summer. I get more and more tired all the time I stay here. The change back to Toronto will get me up again. I came here to rest, of course, only to find that four months of it was a little too much of a good thing. I am fairly itching to get back to work, and back to a city where nobody cares what color your hair is. I don't know of another city that deserves being cursed and kicked more than Toronto, nor of any city that is so well worth it. And I'm in a hurry to grow up. My mind develops in jumps, corresponding to the college terms. Well, this sort of handwriting3 gets on one's nerves after a while, so we'd better change over. I am worried about Acta—if that ass Cragg insists on resigning I don't know whom I'll get in his place. Ernie [Gould], whom I suggested, is, I am afraid, a little too pliable—he has so outrageously high an opinion of my capabilities. Well, I told you you needn't answer this letter, but if you get an answer off in time by all means send it. Norrie. Only a week or so now, SWeetheart,

sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet, sweet, sweet,

ii September 1932

85

I keep forgetting to mention this. Your outing suggested for our friends is an excellent idea. You will have to coach me, as I shall have no idea how to behave, and I hope I shall not be required to swim. N. 1 In 1933 NF wrote a lengthy paper (more than 31,000 words) entitled "Romanticism" for Professor G.S. Brett. See NFF, 1991, box 37, file 8. For his paper on Browning, "Robert Browning: An Abstract Study," see 1991, box 37, file 9. 2 NF seems to be trying to convince HK to transfer from the three-year pass course to the four-year honour course. 3 Here NF changes to a much larger script.

86 22. HK to NF

Summer of 1932 205 Fulton Avenue Toronto 6, Ont. October 10 '32

This and the following letter were written after HK and NF returned to campus for their final undergraduate year at VC. My Dear Norrie Sunday:—

io October 1932

8?

The gist of all this is that I am trying not to be such an ass—I can see that what I am heading for is a liver-complex—if you see me doing so much again (I will be often, because my judgment is a mere infant!) will you please paddle me well! For I should die if I became one of these dames "Oh be sorry for me, it's my nerves, you know!" Ugh! I've got to cut down on something, I can see that. Shall it be you, or the library or Acta or Sigma Phi,1 or college or music or drawing pictures? In this state I am certainly not much use to Acta, and you won't find me very interesting either pretty soon. College, music, you, and the library are necessary—I need not pick out which ones are most necessary to me. But I'll have to have you in smaller doses. I'm getting back to the signs—solving such problems as this

I think perhaps I'll desert Mr Thornhill this afternoon. Yours, with a bigger sense of humour Cabbagehead.

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Summer of 1932

P.S. This is still later. I did desert Thorny [Reg Thornhill] and I'm not going around with my head in a tub. Jean [Evans] is about to arrive any minute now for that practice I told you about. My lettering is doing nicely, thank you, such fine curves on the "O's," and as for the "S's"! They look like nicely corseted mid-Victorian chorus girls, although more chaste perhaps in their general character.

ii October 1932

89

Spirits are up again!! Oh h

Norrie, my dearish man!

Turnip. i HK was a member of this women's honorary professional and journalistic fraternity.

23. NF to HK

Tuesday [11 October 1932]

Brown Mouse: Even if I was born an old hen, why did I have to have such a brood of temperamental young ducks? Barely have I got Jean [Cameron] quieted down and Romans more or less reconciled to existence when another pitiful little wail strikes up in Fulton Ave. Never you mind, honey, mamma's coming! And don't sniffle, darling; here's a handkerchief. I wonder if the direct methods employed by the old woman who lived in a shoe really were effective. But in any case, I can understand her feelings. I think I should join the pan-Hellenists. Little Chin-Rest: But what an exquisite little letter! It is one of my permanent possessions. I never saw anything quite like it. What an attractive child you are, Pierrette! Sentiments resembling the above was what I was trying to get through me over a phone. Now it is true that you on a phone are literally a dea ex machina. But a phone is so damnably diluted a way of communicating. Oh well— "I'll have to have you in smaller doses." "You are something far too precious ever to lose—" Saturday. "See if you can restore my morale by going home and letting me sleep—" Sunday. Those last two are easy to harmonize. But now you want me in small doses. Oh, very well, Miss Kemp. Go soak your head. Go suck a turnip. Go to hell. Sweet, sweet, Little pomegranate. But just where do I stand anyway. Am I an angel of light or do I belong to the rapture and roses of vice?1

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Summer of 1932

You see, I'm a bit foozled. I haven't yet made out my chart tabulating the periodicity of your risings and fallings, ups and downs. If I thought the roller coaster effect you present was entirely physiological I might get myself a marked calendar, like Lome Campbell used to have. But I don't know. . . . According to the Dow-Jones theory in economics, when certain business factors correlate, business is on the upgrade; when they disintegrate, depression sets in. So I suppose that when you find octaves and so on slipping —Oh, you're only a cracked little hazelnut. Why should I bother about you? But where do I come in? You say I am necessary to your existence. Does that mean: (a.) That I am 135 pounds of mashed turnip; something necessary in the way of companionship—somebody to tell one's troubles to— somebody who will pet you and spoil you and cuddle up when things go wrong? (b.) That I am a condiment, bringing a sharp tang and new zest to existence—reminding you of the world, the flesh and the devil and so humanizing you?2 (c.) That I am a stimulant, helping to correlate your activities, encouraging your talents and spanking you for your weaknesses? (d.) Or, that I am a narcotic, a drug, very powerful, to be taken, as you say, in small doses, temporarily relieving you, like a headache powder, from your ethereal worries by plunging you into an orgy of physical excitement which leaves you exhausted and silenced? (e.) Or that I am an insufferable bore who stays too late? (f.) Or a combination of the above? You see, being a man, I'm so densely stupid. I haven't any sort of intuitive tact. I am your typical male—whenever you get depressed I don't know anything except what I personally want to do—that is, take you in my arms and strike solicitous and protective attitudes. If there's any crying to be done, I want it done on my shoulder. I want to be present and look helpful whenever you are in difficulties. Little white-throated sparrow: But, of course, that won't do (always, at any rate). There will be times when to the callous and cataracted eye of Madame Kemp Norrie would look very attractive decorating a South Sea Island or the Great Desert of Arabia.

Autumn 1932?

91

Still, this will have to be explained. I won't get it otherwise. You're such a volatile youngster, you know. In other words, if all is not going well in the soul supposed to be captained by you I want to have a fairly good idea of what it's all about, and what I'm supposed to do. And in telling me don't spare either my feelings or your blushes. Silly as it sounds, it is quite simply and literally true that I would rather die than deliberately hurt you. So while you may find me insensitive and stupid, you will not find me brutal. Having got that off my chest, I feel so exalted and noble that I really think I had better close on that note. Good night, little hedgehog, Paris. 1 The allusion is to Swinburne's Dolores: "Change in a trice / The lillies and languours of virtue / For the raptures and roses of vice" (st. 9). 2 "Deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil." From the "Litany" of The Book of Common Prayer.

24. HK to NF

Monday night. [Autumn 1932?]

This letter provides few clues as to its date, and the argument for placing it here is fairly slim, though one can infer that both HK and NF were in Toronto at the time. Norm Knight, a fellow student, has told HK that NF was ill. This, along with HK's reference to having witnessed fellow student Hank Rowland crank his car, indicates that the letter was written during the academic year. There is also a reference to Roy Kemp's illness in "the summer" suggesting a time immediately past.

My dear Norrie I am so sorry to think of you sick to-night. I don't know whether to lecture you or merely pat you on the head. Norm Knight told me that you spent the day in bed. And you told me that I might as well realize that 7 was not an iron-jawed female! And I am the guy what fed you yesterday! Do you suppose I should study dietetics? I know every woman should—that's what I meant

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when I said I was struggling between Martha and Mary.1 I have felt rather awful when I considered that Roy's sickness was due in part to his improper meals during the summer—at least they were irregular and not well planned, and according to custom I am to blame. To be sure, reason steps in and tells me that his ailment is chronic, and may have been merely helped on by the meals. He'd have had much worse meals if left to himself. But if you keep on with fits of nervous indigestion, and overtax your nervous system in general, you are heading for a lot of trouble. You know you are not a husky tackier—you are one of the most finely adjusted mechanisms I could imagine. I spent the evening reading poetry again—primitivism, no less. And I was fortunate enough to continue the subject a little further and apply it to modern mechanics—as I watched Hank Rowland crank that machine of his. But I am a little afraid when I see you getting cracked up like this Norrie, my dear, for you seem to live always at such a high tension. I might be less concerned if I were not too much that way myself— when I think of you I think that I should know something about looking after people, and I don't. I don't know very much I'm afraid. But then, you may be all better to-morrow, then you will bring forward, with tongue in cheek and well-known bristle bristling, that horrible argument against "these women with mother complexes." Ah well, the maiden sighed, and wept softly into her cambric handkerchief. (Handkerchief of fine imported cambric loaned through courtesy of T. Eaton Company,2 in cooperation with Tamblyn's, manufacturer's agents for high-grade smelling salts guaranteed to cure coughs, colds, inferiority complex, jitters, periodical 'unwellnesses' and (if coyly applied) coldness on the part of the sterner sex) Mr Herman Northrup3 Frye,—behave yourself! Helen. 1 See Letter 7, n. i, and Letter 14, above. 2 Canada's largest department store chain, familiarly Eaton's, established in 1869 by Timothy Eaton; the T. Eaton Co. revolutionized the mail order business. 3 An apparently playful spelling.

Summer of 1933

The letters from 1933—twenty-five in all—were, like those of the preceding year, written during the summer. Following his graduation from Victoria,1 Frye visits the home of another classmate, this time Graham Millar in Hamilton, Ontario. Toward the middle of June, he travels to Chicago for a six-week visit with his sister Vera2 on Chicago's South Side, the site of the World's Fair. Initially he stays in a rooming house across the street from his sister's apartment but is driven out by the bedbugs and moves into a University of Chicago boarding house. Frye makes a number of sallies to the Midway and provides detailed accounts of the various national exhibitions. More interesting, however, are his reactions to the fair-goers and to American culture generally: "there is something epic and transcendent," he says, "about American vulgarity." In spite of the suffocating heat, Frye manages to see some of Chicago's main attractions, making several trips to the Art Institute, visiting the aquarium and a Marshall Fields exhibit of the treasures of the Russian royal family, and attending a musical; he even witnesses the planes of General Balbo roaring over the city. The bedbugs and the Chicago heat are not the only problems. Vera, who teaches at Evergreen Park, a suburban school, is not being paid by the school board, and in late July, not counting the money for Frye's ticket home, she is down to her last two dollars. Frye ends up typing a thesis to earn an extra ten dollars. His boarding house has a piano, but he practises very little during the summer, though he is called on to play for the graduation exercises at Vera's school. After some uncertainty about his destination after he leaves Chicago, in early August he heads north for the Kemp cottage at Gordon Bay on Lake Joseph, where he stays

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Summer of 1993

for several weeks before returning home to Moncton by way of Toronto: thus there is a gap in the letters for most of August. The financial problems of his parents have worsened. His father is trying to sell building materials in the Maritimes during a period when there is practically no construction under way, and the family is behind in its rent. As a consequence, Frye announces, "I cannot come back this fall, sweetheart. Don't worry—I've canvassed the possibilities ... there isn't anything I can do, just now, that will remedy the situation immediately." Except for a few weeks at Camp Onawaw,3 where Kemp works as a counsellor, she spends the summer with her family at their Fulton Avenue home in Toronto and at their cottage on Gordon Bay. Toward the end of the summer she serves soup again at the Canadian National Exhibition and attends a church conference at Couchiching.4 In October she exuberantly announces that she has landed a job at the Art Gallery of Toronto under a new program of grants for art education. Arthur Lismer, whose agenda was to strengthen the art education program of the gallery, had tapped her for the position, which was in effect a training program for museum and gallery workers. While Frye is reporting on the sights and sounds of Chicago, Kemp keeps him posted on family news, the local gossip, and her reading and music, and throughout the summer she fusses over the endpaper illustrations she is drawing for a volume in Perkins Bull's historical series on Peel County. Among the half-dozen books on her summer list, she is particularly taken by Marcia Davenport's biography of Mozart, writing a rather extended reaction to the book and concluding with a brief dissertation on marriage. Frye is less clear about his own reading, though we learn from the first letter in this section, when Frye is at the Millars' home in Hamilton, that he is reading Shaw's plays—or rather rereading, for, as he tells Kemp, "I read all of Shaw at fifteen." In this same letter we find the earliest record of Frye's interest in Clementi, who "really is a tremendous genius—something of Mozart's polish and Scarlatti's vigour held in solution." Kemp announces in June that she is attending a meeting of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the democratic socialist party that had been organized by farm and labour groups in Calgary in 1932, and Frye replies that the CCF "should be the typical party of Canada and the political expression of the same movement of which the United Church is the religious expression." More than a month later, writing

Introduction

95

from Moncton, Frye is less sanguine about the CCF, but he does inquire about the local organization and eventually ends up making a speech to the group on "The Historical Background of Socialist Thought." Kemp, who fears that such a topic is not going to hold his audience, gives a talk herself to the Riverdale CCF club on the duty of women in politics. The protestations of love continue to flow freely from both sides, though in his letter of 12 September Frye takes a more indirect route with his "Parable of the Agate." The letters from 1933 conclude with two that were written after Frye had returned from Moncton, one a letter of apology to Kemp over some unnamed incident, and the other written during December, after Frye had finished his first term at Emmanuel. This second letter was posted from Honeywood, Ontario, where Frye had gone once again to spend the holidays at the home of his classmate Del Martin. He has taken his copy of Blake—one Kemp has given him—along with him to Honeywood.5 "I've finished the Minor Prophecies and am halfway through the Four Zoas," he reports. "Your Blake looks like a blizzard had hit it—pencilled notes by the dozen on every page. I'll have to get you to give me another copy sometime, and I won't mark it up."

1 For an account of Frye's senior year see Ayre, 78-81, which focuses on the editorials he wrote for Ada Victoriana and his papers on Romanticism and on Browning, written respectively for G.S. Brett and Pelham Edgar. 2 Vera Victoria Frye was born in Lowell, Mass., on Christmas day of 1900. She grew up in New England and then in Sherbrooke, Que., where Frye himself was born twelve years later. After attending Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., she left for Chicago, where she got a job at the School of Osteopathy on Ellis Ave., eventually becoming registrar, librarian, instructor in physics, and secretary to the dean. She was then hired to teach at Central School in Evergreen Park, a Chicago suburb, and during this time continued her education, first in English and then in psychology, in graduate school at the University of Chicago. She taught third through eighth grades at Central School for thirty-four years, retiring in 1962. She died in Los Angeles on Good Friday of 1966. 3 A summer camp for girls on Lake Vernon in the Muskoka lake district near Huntsville, Ont.; HK worked at the camp during the summers of 1933 and 1934, teaching art classes and helping with musical and dramatic activities. 4 The Central Area Conference of the SCM, held at YMCA Park on Lake

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Summer of 1933

Couchiching, near Orillia, Ont., 13-22 September 1933 and subsequently; in previous years the conference had been held at Elgin House. 5 In a letter sent to Pelham Edgar in 1948, NF writes: "In my fourth year I could hardly talk about anything but Blake, and Helen gave me the onevolume Keynes Poetry and Prose for my graduation present." NF to Pelham Edgar, 9 August 1948, Pelham Edgar Collection, VU Library.

25- NF to HK

Hamilton, Ontario May 28. [1933]

Postmarked 29 May 1933; addressed to HK at Box # 186, Forest, Ontario, c/o W.W. Kemp. HK was at her Uncle Well and Aunt Clara's home. NF was visiting Graham Millar and his family. My darling Helen: That salutation was intended at first as the cry of an anguished lover, but it didn't come off so well as I had expected, so we shall have to let it go as a demonstration of affection. You see, I am writing this letter gently swinging in one of these lawn chairs. It's a beautiful day, with the sun discreetly and modestly retiring behind a cloud and not trying to look over my shoulder and ruin my eyesight. It's Sunday morning and everything is quiet. Birds are singing, including a canary—and everything is fresh and green after the rain. Everybody has gone to church except the grandmother and the dog without even asking me if I wanted to go, I having dropped a very strong negative hint to the two youngsters last night. The grandmother usually pollutes the air with a radio sermon, but she can't find anything except Judge Rutherford's exposition of Gog and Magog,1 and so that quarter is quiet. As for the dog, she is nine years old and being now a fairly stolid and somewhat over-fed matron has too keen a sense of her dignity to pollute the air with anything. And there's a chicken cooking in the oven for dinner. The only fly in the ointment you have already guessed. The cottage plan is off—all off, I understand, though I haven't ventured to inquire much about it. This ass Graham [Millar] is selling magazines this summer and is leaving for Toronto tonight to start in. We were going up one day to open up the cottage—Friday to be exact—but it rained. I have never had a summer cottage and only had a car for a year and I have never yet been able to comprehend why these things are always called off for rain, but there are no doubt more things in heaven or earth than are dreamt of in even honor philosophy.2 But seriously, why should we mind the rain? The rain doesn't mind us (I'm swinging vigorously as I write, with dubious success). So I read, eat, sleep and play the piano. They have Mozart here among other things—no Bach. I have been investigating Clementi—

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Summer of 1933

he really is a tremendous genius—something of Mozart's polish and Scarlatti's vigour held in solution. (The grandmother has extracted some intoning moron from the ether. She's a funny old lady—a Methodist of the old—that is, the mummified—school. Her mother invented the practice of using grape juice for communion. She is tickled to find me a church student and deplores the dancing in a church college and deplores the existence of Hart House3 Theatre. She was a little self-conscious at first, but since I have adopted the family convention of not listening to her she prattles away quite amiably.) The family here has all of Shaw's plays in one volume and I have read six since Wednesday. I read all of Shaw at fifteen and he turned me from a precocious child into an adolescent fool. Therefore he has had far more influence on me than any other writer. Re-read in the light of Spengler he is more illuminating, of course. For the rest, life goes on. The young brother—Owen, still at high school—is perhaps the most attractive one of the lot. Helen is a nice kid, although a hick university and a Baptist one at that, hasn't improved her as a college should. McMaster is only half the size of Victoria. Imagine Victoria's gossiping doubly intensified! She dragged in a slut of a sophette one night who gassed away for an hour and a half, thumbing over Torontonensis4 the while, and deliberately crushing a corner of every page in her fingers as she turned it over. A woman who would do that would do anything. I tried to make her realize (by a look) that that was tantamount to spitting on the floor, but the look was lost on her and went roaming disconsolately until it rested upon Helen, who sat up in alarm and wanted to know if I'd like some more tea. It is curious to watch the rhythms of this family. Mrs. Millar snaps out everything she says like a drill sergeant and is disconcertingly impatient—her whole manner would be something like mine after teaching a week at an idiot school. She talks as fast as I do, but, her voice being higher by its regulation octave, gets away with it better, informing me in no uncertain terms that I have picked up a mumbling Jewish jargon at the university and have forgotten my mother tongue. Well, the whole family in reaction have adopted a pose of almost exaggerated deliberation and slowness both of speech and motion. The ensemble is something like a model T Ford—a spitting engine galvanizing a languid pile of tin into action. There's nothing ill-natured about it, of course, and it's quite amusing.

28 May 1933

99

Sorry to be so dull, but I'm overfed, like all the domestic pets in this place. I can sympathize with the canary, who sits and stuffs himself all day long, and lets out a solitary chirp about once every ten minutes or so, just to open the sluices, I suppose. The creature might as well be a sparrow. I also read Winnie-the-Pooh, which was all kinds of fun and just what I needed after exams (A.A. Milne—one of the Christopher Robin stories). You see, the point is that my own tempo comes halfway between Mrs. Millar and the rest of the family (Graham is the slowest) and I'm in danger of being squashed in between them. That's why I keep as much to myself as possible, at the risk of being unsociable. They understand that I came to a home to rest up, however, and that part's all right. My regards to the turnips and their owners. I don't think I've met any of the latter—you show a modesty and reserve about exhibiting your relatives which is in the last degree refreshing. No one is more uninteresting than other people's relatives. Cragg is perpetually being dragged out to Clare relatives—and the man actually purrs about it. Of course, I'm biassed—sometime I'll tell you about the X-girl-friend and her relatives. She exposed her whole family tree with a zest that I thought had something shameless and indecent about it. Now what the hell am I talking about? Oh, shut up. Anyway, sweetheart, be good and take care of yourself. Norrie.

24 Stinson St., Hamilton, Ontario c/o Mr. (or Mrs., whichever is polite) F.G. Millar 1 Judge Rutherford, a Jehovah's Witness, was apparently preaching a fire-and-brimstone sermon. See Rev. 20:7-8. 2 The allusion is to Hamlet, 1.5.166-7. 3 A large neo-Gothic complex, located in the centre of the U of T campus just west of Queen's Park Crescent (then Queen's Park Drive), which served as a Student Union; it was a gift of the Massey Foundation, built in memory of Hart Massey; it contains a library, gymnasia, a theatre, a chapel, a Great Hall (dining room), and a number of club rooms for student activities, including debate, sketching, reading, and photography. 4 The student yearbook of the U of T.

ioo 26. NF to HK

Summer of 1933 c/o V.V. Frye, 6104 Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, 111.

Postmarked 17 June 1933; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This is the first of seven letters NF sends from his sixweek stay in Chicago, where he is visiting his sister Vera. Sweet: Well, I hope you don't feel funny inside anymore. Not having seen anything of you more tangible than a snapshot for forty-eight hours, I am beginning to feel like an ascetic. However, I thought I'd better hurry and write before the novelty of being here wore off and I really started in to miss you. When your palpitating little orange sweater had been lost to view— I like you to wear orange sweaters because anything so close to your heart should be of a warm color—I stumbled into a railway carriage half full of smoke and nearly strangled during most of the night. This is all very well in season: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote1 but the middle of June is another matter. I pulled in here at nine and after waiting till ten for a Canadian bank to open boarded a bus for Vera's domicile. The bus was full of frightened, noisy, curious and perplexed tourists, and I seemed to be the only one present who had any idea where I was going. The others had to be nursed by the conductor like so many children. There don't seem to be any native Chicagoans left. I suppose that's because they kicked all the gangsters out of the city for the Fair. I haven't seen the Fair yet, but expectations run high. What buildings I have seen are magnificent. Peggy [Craig] showed me one, restored from the 1893 Fair and erected at a cost of two billion dollars. When I gasped that the Panama canal had been dug at half the cost, Peggy said: "Well, do you imagine that the Panama canal is as pretty as this?" When you consider that Jesus Christ was on earth a billion minutes ago, that looks like some figure. But when I am in the United States I do not propose giving the Americans the satisfaction of gawking at their figures. It is the mark of a gentleman to be unimpressed

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by statistical elephantiasis. I once read an article by a music critic who said that if we felt like falling on our knees in reverence at the thought that the nearest star was God knows how many billion miles away we were emotional enough to go into music. The same music critic idolized Grieg and thought all modern composers were fools. So are some antiquated cities. Chicago is an ideal place to hold a World's Fair. It has washed its face so hard. There is a poem on Chicago by Sandburg in that book of Untermeyer's.2 To a casual visitor who does not see the dreary side of things Chicago looks far more na'ive than Sandburg presents it. It is such a cheerful, hospitable, adolescent city. They tell me that the clothing advertisers urge Chicagoans to get a metropolitan cut to their clothes to impress the hick visitors. That is typical Chicago. The silly city is far too young to have any of the traditions of a real metropolis, like London, Paris or New York—everybody has grown up with Chicago from a small town or come into it from smaller towns. Everybody looks at you as if they wanted to speak to you, but then you might be a gangster or pickpocket or cut-throat or something, so they don't, but merely look shy. Like all youngsters, Chicago makes far too much noise; like all youngsters, it spends far too much money on pretty and expensive toys; like all youngsters, it can look disarmingly clean when it cleans up; like all youngsters, it is impulsively generous and hospitable, but with the main eye to its own advantage; like all youngsters, it grows appallingly fast but keeps well-proportioned. No other city in the world is half so perfectly adapted to a World's Fair. Well, I haven't done much yet. Vera's school doesn't close till next week and for the present I'm suspending operations. Vera says that if she gets the rest of her salary she's gonna buy a car and we'll go places, starting with Toronto and ending at Moncton. Marvellous girl, this sister of mine. I shall be at Chicago longer than I expected,—six weeks, Vera said. I'm staying here until a room opens for me opposite Vera's apartment. They have a piano in the hallway—locked. Musical people somehow always manage to lose the keys of their pianos. Now don't get funny,—you know what keys I mean. Well, darling, I'll write again when I have something to write about. Good night. This letter is harder to read than usual, but it says nothing of importance.

1O2

Summer of 1933

Six weeks! God! But it's not four months. XXXXX. Norrie. 1 The first line of the General Prologue to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. 2 Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," originally published in Chicago Poems (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1916), was reprinted in the Louis Untermeyer anthology, American Poetry Since 1900 (New York: Holt, 1923), where NF seems to have first read it.

27. NF to HK

Chicago, 111. Sunday. [18 June 1933]

Postmarked 20 June 1933; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada. NF did not sign this letter, which was written on Acta Victoriana stationery. Rather, he circled "Editor-in-Chief/H.N. FRYE" on the letterhead and drew an arrow from it to the space between "harassed ears" and "XXXXX and so on." Two unaddressed and unstamped postcards were enclosed with one of the letters, perhaps this one, NF sent to HKfrom Chicago. One has a picture of the Federal Building at the World's Fair; the other, a picture of the Electrical Building. On the back of thefirst card, NF has written: "The Federal Government exhibits are in the centre—the four wings don't mean anything— they're only plaster. The court out behind contains the 48 state exhibits. The big sky-ride tower on the right is 628 feet high. It's on an island across a lagoon. There's another on the mainland, and rocket cars go across with passengers. Six-foot man drawn to same scale... [here NF drew a small line, approximately one-eighth inch high]." On the second card, NF wrote: "This building is red and yellow. The big towers on the left edge are beautiful—look almost Egyptian." Helen dear: Well, you see, the point is that now I've seen the World's Fair, I'd better write again as I have something more to write about. Yes, I've seen it. It's a World's Fair all right, and very like the world—huge, pretentious, artificial, mostly vulgar, partly beautiful, and, in spite of everything, magnificent. It isn't noble, or sublime, or awe-inspiring, and, what's far better, it doesn't, unlike the '93 Fair, try to be. Whoever got it ready had, certainly, vast executive powers and almost infinite ingenuity. But they must have known that people at a Fair aim primarily at irresponsible enjoyment. The whole show is put on with

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an exuberant and boisterous, and yet a curiously subtle humor, and although its motto is "A Century of Progress" it isn't bombastic about it. As I say, it isn't grandiose, but it's all kinds of fun. I'm glad it came in a depression period. The thing is breath-takingly huge—seven or eight square miles of grounds—and the important buildings are all in vivid colors. The Electrical Building is red and yellow, the Hall of Science blue and white, Social Science purple, white and black, another is a vivid green, another a yellow. The colors are very intense, but they have a dull finish and as each building has only one or at most two colors, it doesn't seem loud, and, as nothing glitters in the daytime, it doesn't seem vulgar. The only thing that does seem vulgar is the Midway, which is chiefly a magnification of Toronto's. Yet even there, you can find something amusing—the barkers announcing the cheap side shows are entertaining. One was proclaiming the virtues of some alleged "Oriental dancing," watching his audience narrowly and adjusting to it the right degree of naughtiness. (He looked very much like Prof. [Chester] Martin of the Department of History). "This show has passed all the censors, ladies and gentlemen—there is nothing objectionable about it—nothing filthy. Of course, there is that voluptuous—er— something" (he waved his hips in illustration) "which has always affected people of susceptible—er—visibilities. But everyone is agreed that this show is quite clean, if, perhaps, a little—uh—risque." The Oriental merchants are the worst. We pass an Egyptian booth with some carpets. A native holds one up. "Carpets—carpets? See? 'S a lofly one." There is a complete Moroccan village, full of brownskinned vagabonds trying to sell something. There is the famous Chinese Temple of Jehol—brought over here bodily, so I understand. The whole building is clearly lighted and it is a marvel of intricacy. Some of the patterns in your father's Grammar of Ornament1 I can see worked out. The temple is a gorgeous thing which completely defies description. The roof, outside and inside, is gold. If in another forty years they have another World's Fair here, they will probably bring over the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx and set those up, for an Egyptian exhibit. There is a horticultural exhibit—twenty-odd varieties of gardens— rose-gardens, rock-gardens, formal gardens, Italian Renaissance gardens, Versailles gardens—perhaps altogether the Horticultural exhibit is the most beautiful thing in the Fair. All these gardens are outdoors,

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of course. The only trouble is that, what with forced growth and constant lighting, some of the flowers—notably the roses—have been deprived of their scent. Indoors, there are exhibits of all kinds of trees and flowers—mostly from California. Outside there are all the stinking food stands with their noisy brassthroated women and steamy and unsavory-looking kitchens. People gorge hot-dogs and fish and chips and smile happily, then turn yellow and green with dismay and misery, and hike for the nearest place labelled "Gentlemen" or "Ladies." (They tell me that in the '93 Fair there were no benches, as it was considered unladylike to sit down in public, and that many women fainted in consequence. That may account for the fact that all Mrs. Graham2 in Hamilton could remember of the Fair was dragging her youngsters around on broiling afternoons and looking for a place to eat. Considering the possibility which the current fashion of the bustle gave to the buttock, such a prohibition seems unreasonable, but there it was. How anybody could sit down on one of these rumble seats either in public or in private is beyond me.) I don't like the general run of the people at this place. They all seem to be tired, hot, and stupid. Endless processions of petty bourgeoisie with fat bums and their wives with fatter ones. The remarks one overhears almost never have any relation to what they are supposed to be looking at except an occasional aggrieved—"Here I've been all day and haven't seen a third of it yet!" Hysterical transient visitors trying to cover the whole Fair in a day, dragging along protesting youngsters who want to stop and look at something with "Come on, dear, we've got so much to see!" The youngsters I have seen are a more attractive lot than the older ones. The young women are tastelessly over-painted and their long and bright red fingernails make them look like harpies. All this sounds as though I were crabbing, but I'm not. I can't tell you much about what I've seen and liked—things such as the Jehol temple can't be described—I've seen them, I wish you were here to see them, so do you, and that's all. But what is really communicable are the oddities, the foibles and weaknesses. The policemen are dressed in Canadian Mounted Police tunics, but as they combine them with wide white pith helmets, like the Zanzibar police force, it looks as though they had their outposts of Empire a bit mixed. The effect is heightened by the fact that Canadian police-

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men run to a long, stringy, close-knit, powerful Scotch type, while American policemen are inclined to be short, fat, pompous and Irish. The Czecho-Slovakian exhibit is the only foreign one I have been in yet—a very lovely one it is, too, mostly glass and chinaware. Precious stones, too—garnets that have haunted me ever since. I shall bring you something nice from this Fair. A huge thermometer—the largest in the world, of course,—standing up like a tower to record the temperature. It is only 92 today. Vera said that one Saturday it dropped from 100° to 60° in an hour. Vera's exams (her kids' exams) start this week and will keep her busy. Friday her year stops, whereupon she will proceed to go places and do things. The World Economic Conference3 is falling through and Roosevelt is getting applauded for making sonorous pronouncements that mean nothing at all but sound as deep as a page from a Kant Critique. However, if, or when, this conference falls through, surely to God the politicians won't ask the taxpayers to pay for another one. U.S.A. right now is playing the role of courteous and business-like creditor with a histrionic relish that comes easily to this nation of children. I've been getting some idea of the school-teacher racket from Vera. She doesn't teach directly in the city, but just outside. Normal School here is four years, and free. Once hired, the Normal Association has to find a place for you. You're in for life—if you quit teaching for ten years and then go back to it they still have to find you a job. You can't be dismissed without a deliberate court-martial and jury trial— in practice it is impossible to fire a teacher. Ninety per cent, of women city teachers are married. Until recently they didn't have to pay a substitute if they missed—now they have to pay one-sixth and there was nearly a riot over that. One year in seven is a sabbatical leave year with half pay, to be spent in study or foreign travel—one teacher Vera knows did her foreign travel around the home town in southern Illinois. My sympathy for Chicago school teachers is cooling slightly, though they certainly are having a pretty rotten deal, even if they don't earn their unpaid salaries. I haven't much leisure to make this a coherent epistle—you'll understand—the situation, I mean, not the letter. Good night, sweet. And I shall bring you something very nice from the Fair. The heat is fearful, but I have got rid of the mockery of clothing. The only trouble is Vera's radio. Peggy [Craig] unfortunately likes radios. In this city—

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Summer of 19^

she works in the downtown section—I guess you have to have an opiate for harassed ears. XXXXX and so on The Temple of Jehol wasn't brought over bodily—but a replica was made in China and that was brought over.. 20,000 pieces, I think—if it matters. 1 A manual of ornamental styles by Owen Jones (London: B. Quaritch, 1868). 2 Graham Millar's grandmother. 3 The World Monetary and Economic Conference, with representatives from fifty countries, was held in London during June and July of 1933.

28. HK to NF

205 Fulton Avenue, Toronto 6 Ontario Thursday night. [22 June 1933]

This letter is undated and without a postmark, but it was written between the time NF left for Chicago in mid-June and HK's next letter (26 June); 15 June was a Thursday, but as HK says she has "waited all this while to write" to NF, "Thursday" at the heading of the present letter must be 22 June.

My dear Norrie, I am so sorry that I have waited all this while to write to you—I feel a little strange. I shall have to look at the Acta picture1 and read your last two letters first. I am just a bit lonely of course, I know I shouldn't be writing to you at this hour—it is after one o'clock. But if I don't, perhaps the mail will not be delivered until Monday, and you might begin to wonder if I had lost all sense of courtesy at least. Well, I haven't. (Signs of life revive in the old girl. It is a point that bothers me every now and again. Should you say "wonder whether" or "wonder if"? I think "whether." I can't find out in this dictionary.) To-night Jean Evans had a party for the library crowd. Dot Dar ng, and Miss Ray, Miss Hand and Miss Glaves, Isabelle Sinclair, and Doris Livingston etc. They were all on hand. Phyllis Foreman is working for an insurance company and is writing examinations, on the way to learning the business. Doris Livingston is a cold woman. Working on Dora Russell's theory2 that the children reflect the love-

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life of their parents, I should say that the Livingston-senior alliance was purely and stiffly platonic, and a dyspeptic stork must have deposited the disgruntled infant among the cabbages. Oh well, she can't help it. I am afraid however, that when Doris grows older she is going to be a very virtuous woman. We played a lot of crazy games, and had a splendid time. Dot Darling is priceless, the way she says things—and does things. Georgie Green was there too. She is thinking of buying out the business of the Pink Tea Room, a place near Mary Johns Coffee Shop. She was very much excited about it. Miss Ray suggested that she ask Robert to come down once a week to tell fortunes, but Georgie hesitated, and coloured. "You see, it would be rather embarrassing—we can't have any male help at all" she said, "because if we did, we'd have to install a different plumbing system." And Georgie actually blushed! Isabelle Sinclair says that Ernie Gould is back home spending his time in the library all day long. It sounds a bit pathetic—yet he will be enjoying himself, and it is about the only way, I imagine, when one goes back to a small town. I don't know what I should do in Forest, if I had to spend the holidays there, if I didn't read or practice. I've got Johnson's address3 from Doris Livingston but I have not written to Norm Knight yet. Miss Ray leaves for England next Tuesday. Ruth Dingman is going to Europe very soon, to join Frank [Dingman], so Dot Darling says. (I am just giving you this evening's news as I think of it.) There is no use trying to tell you everything that has happened since you left—most of it would be dull by now. I have fairly well decided upon a piano—$50—a Hardman, very old, good action, good innards etc. Miss Ray is giving me enough for the initial payment. The worst thing that has happened is that Miss Ray has been too rushed to work out the wording of the signs she wanted me to make. Consequently I shall have very little of her work to do, and will have to do it in the Fall. Of course I shall have the piano, and I am working away—Bach Preludes and Fugues, Schumann and Czerny are the diet at present. I stopped work at the library after last Monday, as Miss Ray was just inventing jobs for me to do. Last Friday, no, Thursday, night, after Mother and I returned from negotiating about the piano we heard from Uncle Well. (The one I visited.) Ken Kemp, my cousin, the son of the Aunt who complained so much, was killed in a motor accident, when he was driving Jean Turnbull to apply for a position in a new school. A student from De-

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Summer of 1933

troit hit him fair and square in the middle of the car, and his brain was fractured and he died next day after an operation. You remember him—the tall one who was in love with Greta Garbo. So Roy and Daddy and Mother drove up with a boy along the street—to the funeral, I mean,—and the inquest was held a few days ago. The whole thing was quite a shock. Marion and Harold and I were alone last week-end. I forget what we did. I went to Thornhill's on Sunday night and listened to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which was quite a consolation. Kay Coburn was coming with me, but she lost her way. However, I had lunch with her next day—Maisie Roger was with us too. I am beginning to understand what you mean by the Oxford affectations—Kay is interesting, and I like being with her—but she is a snob. She talks about Canadian low standards and systems and preachers with the same fearful smugness with which Margaret Cronin delivers her profound judgments. It is really what you would call the sophomore stage, as far as I can see. Because once one has realized limitations, why in heaven's name do you need to go on complaining about them? I mean, why keep on lamenting the fact that one had to study Botany, for instance, in college? Why go on lamenting about the deficiencies in our whole system? Why not get out and pitch manure, and help clean up! I suppose I am a bit touchy about snobbishness in other people, because I am a snob myself. And in some cases I suppose it is a form of self-protection. But I don't have much fun being a snob, that's why I don't think it is such a good idea. As I was saying. About funerals. When the family returned, there was news that an old friend of Mother's, Mrs Bailey, had died after an operation—growth on bladder, or some such thing—quite serious and quite horrible. So she and I went to the funeral yesterday afternoon. It was a hideous funeral—in an undertaking parlour, with fat relatives, and faded flowers, and electric fans blowing, and undertakers in grey dead gloves the colour of the rags that mummies are wrapped in. Mrs Bailey was a young looking woman—she was only mother's age. But in the coffin, the body looked like an old woman of seventy—hair nearly white, black shroud with a white thing like a nun's around her neck, and her fragile hands were folded. Her mouth seemed set in a grim dark line, and there was no colour in her face. It seemed chiselled and refined and worn by the suffering she had undergone. And it looked like an old, old woman. Not the young woman whom we knew so well. I hated it. And at the grave they

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screwed her in, and sank the box below the surface—down, away down, and threw dirt on the coffin. Both the preacher—High Churchman he was, and the undertakers did their duties promptly and efficiently, and that was that. The most touching part of it was just as the pall-bearers were carrying the coffin to the hearse. Two little urchins were standing on the street—two little girls they were. One was a skinny, stringy young kid with an audacious look about her, obviously the ringleader in any mischief going. The other was a little younger—perhaps seven years old. The stringy kid shrieked "Here she comes! Here she comes now! They're bringing her out!" and to the little kid—"Do you care?—I don't!" Then suddenly as the coffin passed in front, the little one screwed up her plump fist and jabbed it into her eyes, and her shoulders shook. The tough kid put her arm around her, and led her down the street, and said "Aw never mind, don't you care!" All this was Wednesday. Wednesday night was Roy's recital. He played very well—a good boy is Roy. He played the Beethoven sonata that you have done with him, the first movement of the Mendelssohn concerto, several small pieces, and they played a Mozart string quartet. Ruth Hodgins took my place quite ably—she played John Ireland's 'Island Spell,' Henselt's 'If I Were a Bird,' one of her old chestnuts, and 'Golliwog's Cakewalk.'4 Marcus Adeney wanted me to go off with him to see Winifred Dowell, pianist, and her husband, since Jeanne [Adeney] was feeling a bit woozy, but I thought I should stick by the family. Marcus has written quite a good article in the Saturday Night— perhaps you have seen it before now—on music in Kitchener.5 I have had all sorts of hare-brained schemes lately, but I am settling down to practice the piano, and enjoy life. I think I can do it—except that I do get up in the air when I wonder what is to happen next year, and when I haven't got the hairbrush to keep the silly youngster in order. But really, I am being quite good on the whole. Dr Edgar suggested that I try illustrating some of the more dramatic Canadian poems. I thought, and thought. Then I decided that his idea was to do the purely obvious thing. And I don't think I am ready yet. If I tried to get a book ready for next Christmas (which was his suggestion) I would need to stay around town for most of the summer for material. Because, I don't know much about the things I would need to know. So I have just about decided to be a quiet citizen with a purpose that will come out later. I am too damned anxious to have the horns tooting

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all the time. Graham Millar was in the library one day. He was quite hopeful about his sketching racket, and had sold two pictures that week, although he had not worked for very long. He plans some work in meteorology for next fall. Following his example, I went off one afternoon, and drew a picture of a bridge, all by myself, and had a lovely time. But I sat in the blazing sun too long, and discovered that that is not a wise thing to do. Especially when you want to climb a hill afterward, and walk home. However, I sat down on the grass, and just sat. It was just about the place where you and I walked the night before you went to Hamilton. I had a letter from Connie [Griggs]. Mary's [Mary Carman's] condition is still critical—they think she is being helped by Mac [Mackay Hewer] being with her, but he must leave soon. She may visit Connie if she is well enough. 'She has been in bed four weeks and has a continual headache.' Dan [Chittenden] is going to try to see Connie this summer in Scranton. I am to say Cheerio to you for Connie. Cheerio! Oh yes—I applied for the Alumni scholarship. But they are attaching strings. They want the woman to live in residence which would mean that an extra hundred would have to be spent on residence fees, plus your own expenses beside that. I haven't heard from Lismer yet. I saw Ronona last night. She is a bit down in the mouth. Keeping house all the time, and Relyea6 can't come back from San Salvador for another year, and he doesn't want to put off the marriage any longer, yet he loses his job if he breaks the contract. And Ronona feels that she doesn't know him any more. Oh Lord! Ah yes—I meant to tell you. Your last letter came just after I had been to the funeral, and I blessed you. I never needed one more. You do things at the right time sometimes. And it was awfully good of you to tell me so much of the great parade. Most people would be too busy running round about to write anything longer than a tenword telegram or a postcard. And of course I should love to be there with you. But I am enjoying things by proxy anyhow. If you are driving through here—do you think you could manage to come to Gordon Bay? You and Vera? I should like it very much. We may be leaving here by July ist. I don't know. I am looking forward to getting north. I am sorry, my dear, this is a doleful letter to send you. If I had another sheet of paper I'd fill it up with cheerful things. But it is three

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in

o'clock, and I like you very much, and (my goodness, I tell you that every time!) Well, anyway, Good-night Helen. But I mean it, just the same. 1 HK apparently is referring to the picture of the Ada Victoriana board in the U of T yearbook, Torontonensis, 1933, 227. 2 HK is referring to Russell's The Right to Be Happy (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City, 1927), especially to the chapters on "The Rights of Human Beings." 3 HK has written "Johnson," but apparently she is referring to Kenneth Johnstone. She had gotten his address in order to invite Norm Knight to visit at the Kemp cottage. In HK's letter of 5 July (Letter 32), we learn that Knight has replied to her invitation, saying that he cannot come because "Ken is financing him." John Ayre notes that Norm Knight, as a result of his Trotskyite sentiments, had fallen in with "brother and sister Kenneth and Sylvia Johnstone" of Weston, Ont. (71); and in Letter 96 NF remarks that "Norm Knight is still living with the Johnstones." 4 The three piano pieces are, respectively, a score by John Ireland (1879-1962), composed in 1915; an etude (op. 2, no. 6) by Adolf von Henselt (1814-89), composed in 1861; and a composition from The Children's Corner Suite by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). 5 Marcus Adeney, "Kitchener—City of Song," Saturday Night, 17 (June 1933), 6. Saturday Night is a Canadian weekly news magazine. 6 A first cousin of E.H. Relyea, VC 3x5. The cousin had gone to El Salvador to open up a branch of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, married an El Salvadoran, and remained in the country for the rest of his life.

29. NF to HK

6104 Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, Illinois. Apt. 208 Wednesday-Thursday. [21-22 June 1933]

Postmarked 22 June 1933; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Jenny Wren: The reason for the hybrid date is that dawn is just breaking. My sister got me a room over here just across the street from her. The landlady was a rather nice-looking little woman, there was a piano in the hallway, and two nights I spent here were O.K. But earlier

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this evening I was peacefully writing when I saw a sinister brick-red insect climbing over my pillow. After he had suffered a comminated fracture in every part of his anatomy, I went on writing, and saw another one at the foot of the bed. Well, said I, I guess I'm in for it. And I was. I turned in and slept about an hour, waking up to ask myself why I should be feeling so fearfully hot and uncomfortable on an otherwise normal night. I turned on the light and found a couple more. Then I examined myself and counted eighteen bites. So I said, Friend, possession is nine points of the law—ten in this case—and I got up and dressed. I was feeling a bit sore, and I am sorry to relate that when I went to the bathroom to wash my face I wantonly killed two perfectly innocent cockroaches I found sitting on the window sill. I know now what that musty smell was I had put down to bad ventilation. That is the second night like that in my experience. In my seventh summer Mother took a cottage beside a lake in Quebec and found it littered with the brutes. I don't know what Mother did, and the chances are the bugs never found out either, but they didn't like it, and my score remains at two nights. So now you will understand why I have come to be writing you letters at such hours. I have seen some more of the Fair. The Italian exhibit is typical of a Fascist government. You go into a big round hall with nothing in it but posters around the walls, commemorating various aspects of modern Italian industrialism. One has a complete speech of Mussolini's disfiguring the slate-blue background. Below the posters are some enormous snapshots of the Forum and similar views in Rome. Back of this hall is a novelty shop full of cheap jewelry and pestiferous salesmen. Some of the work—mosaics and such—is finely done, or appeared so before I retreated from importunate idiots behind the counters, but a trip through any of the big department stores in the Loop would be infinitely more rewarding. I am told they have a good scientific exhibit in the Hall of Science. But Italy! Roma Caput Mundi,1 as one of their own posters said! And cheap brooches! God! The Swedish exhibit is tolerable—the best thing is some woodwork. The Danish is good too—some very fine lace and beautifully carved silver. But easily the best foreign exhibit is the Irish Free State one. The walls are covered with paintings by Irish artists—many of them very fine. There's a fairly full exhibit of a Society of Arts in Dublin— leatherwork, pottery, and so forth—all of it beautiful. The most gorgeous things are Roman Catholic vestments and altar vessels—chas-

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ubles embroidered in gold, chalices set with amethysts in gold, and so on. There are one or two medieval uncial MSS. you would have pored over. Everything was beautiful and artistic. Even stockings and towels from the linen factories had an artistic dignity about them. Apart from the inconvenience caused by getting my rear end pushed all over the block by impatient transients who took one uncomprehending gawk and hurried on, I felt as though there were some hope for the world. It restores one's sense of values to realize that in such a bog-hole as Ireland (I speak of things unseen) there are still such gentlemen left as the arrangers of-that exhibit. The Italian building is arranged roughly in the shape of an aeroplane, because II Duce is sending his air fleet over later in the summer to show Chicago how strong it is. One of the better class of things sold in the novelty shops was some umber pipe stems—very wellmade. The salesman was busy explaining away the Czechoslovakian label on it to an inquiring lady: "Oh, yes it was made in Czechoslovakia, but the material came from Italy." I think I mentioned the Czechoslovakian exhibit before, with its glorious glass. The Canadian exhibit, in the Travel and Transport building, is disappointing. I could have arranged a better one myself. All the other countries, even Italy, concentrate on the beautiful workmanship done in the country. But ours is apparently paid for by the C.P.R., and is merely the usual tripe about hotels and parks and opportunities for American investors. The exhibit consists of a few stuffed animals, a few pickled apples, specimens of wheat, chunks of ore-bearing rocks (as the prospector said: "Speaking of ores, how's your wife?"), and the largest map in the world on the walls, whose size did not impress me. It would not be difficult to make a bigger one. Taking a hint from the Irish, the odd Lawren Harris or A.Y. Jackson would be a good idea, and what with all the wonder of carved totem poles, the hooked rugs of Labrador, the spinning-wheels and window blinds of old Quebec, the wonderful work done in the Blind Institute at Brantford, Ukrainian costumes, Indian moccasins and baskets, examples of minerals instead of pieces of rock, exhibits from Art Schools, pictures of Norma Shearer, Mary Pickford and Marie Dressier to amuse the natives, miniature models, such as Alaska had, of picturesque spots along the railways—I think even I could do better than to stuff a wildcat and label it "Canada Lynx." There was one Mountie there, bored and hot.

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So you can see that I am more or less getting down to business about this Fair, now that the surge of general impressions has subsided. The first time I was there my head was in too much of a whirl to see much beyond generalities:— dee-lish-us hot pop-corn

—and the like. I still feel a bit bewildered in the presence of machinery and things I don't understand. I like the look of the Fair more and more all the time. You get accustomed to tuning out the howling wilderness of cheap side shows down four miles of Midway. I like the blazing buildings and like even more their straight, cool, slim lines. It gave me a shock to read on one of their own circulars the frank statement that when they started it was intended to overdecorate the buildings, load them down with detail, and achieve the loudest color combinations, but that the lack of finances cooled their enthusiasm. They simply couldn't afford to be tasteless. When I said I was glad it came in a depression all I meant was that a period of overstuffed prosperity would mean solemn blasphemies about progress and the benignance of God and this wonderful America of ours. The depression, by drawing away the reality from the ideal, brought out the incongruity between them which makes for humor. But this is another reason for thankfulness. (The landlady {it is now eight o'clock and I have been reading in the interim} just came in to make the bed, seeing that I was up. "Madam, I was nearly devoured by bed-bugs last night. I hope you can see your way clear to their eradication before I sleep in that bed again." Her lower jaw sagged against her knees. "But—why—you— you—couldn't have!" "I assure you I was, madam,—do you think I don't know when I've been eaten by a regiment of confounded beetles?" "But—I sprayed the bed and the walls with gasoline!" "I have been smelling that gasoline for three nights now, madam,—it asphyxiated me, but not the bed bugs. Please see to it at once." "Well" {doubtfully} "I'll—I'll see what I can do." She retired without the honors of war and without making the bed). But as I was saying, there is something epic and transcendent about

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American vulgarity. It scorns to paint a lily, but it delights to whitewash an iceberg. And yet the vulgarity does not go much deeper than the pockets. It is the over-stuffed belly and the lethargic brain of a Sybarite that engenders it. Put an American on a more ascetic diet, and there emerges, not the pompous, heavy portentousness of the '93 imitation Parthenons, but a light, easy, colorful, shapely miniature skyscraper, full of sunshine and humor. I'll tell you about the Royal Scot some other time. I have to write so many accounts of the World's Fair that they overlap—home, the chain-gang, Mrs. Millar, and others—and I may have missed something from my previous letters. But I have said quite enough for one instalment. Norrie. \ Rome is the capital, literally the head, of the world. 2 Italian for "all horns" and Latin for "almost spoken."

30. HK to NF

205 Fulton Avenue Toronto 6 Ont., Monday. [26 June 1933]

My dear Norrie Since life goes on much as usual I suppose there is nothing to tell you. On the other hand, being a female, I can gabble along quite well under those circumstances. I must be hungry—it is just suppertime and I can't think what it was I had to say in the first place. It is hot, terribly hot. We have been expecting a thunderstorm all day. The house is in a turmoil since we are gathering our clothes together to pack them for Muskoka.1 We are leaving sometime this week, probably motoring with Cronins. Tuesday. 9 P.M. Let's begin again. My dear Norrie, It is still terribly hot. (I may have to keep this up for a week, starting and stopping and remarking feebly about the weather. I'll try to do better.)

n6

Summer of 1933

I am trying your experiment—that is, in regards to the mockery of clothing. Miss Ray's step-ins (the pink ones) are quite a comfort just now, since even a chorus girl could hardly boast less clothing. Harold [Kemp] just wandered in after his bath and started a long conversation, still in the nude, as if he were paying a formal call. There is certainly something thick and enveloping about the atmosphere. As I said before, some of us expect to get out of here on Thursday or Friday, and the rest on Monday. I sometimes have my doubts about it though, judging from the amount of fuss there is about getting off the piano. That man Wilks is the most talkative old goat I've seen for some time—distressingly monotonous. His mind works in circles and he repeats, just like a phonograph record that turns itself automatically and begins all over again from the beginning. I have been playing Bach quite faithfully—his new preludes and fugues are on the way, five and six in the first volume—D major and D minor. Since most of the music is packed up and sent away, I had to play the last half of Hanon studies this afternoon. I ground out the octave studies—and the good old tremolo study at the end,—until my muscles groaned and my brow and the rest of me dripped, and I went out to listen to the worthy troll-king. Did I ever hear you mention a pendulous gut? Well, I've seen one—he has it. And it merely drove me goofy—I mean, fat men in hot weather are a trying thing to watch. Especially when you have to, and for such a long time. To-morrow I go to see the great Perkins Bull. True Davidson suggested that he get me to design the end-papers for the celebrated opus—in the form of an animated map of each township.2 Something may turn out, but I am not cherishing sanguine hopes until I see it in print, and perhaps not even then. For my experience with animated maps has not left me as verdantly exuberant as I used to be, and reports of Mr Bull—well you know. He got Dr Pratt to recommend several girls lately, promising them fifteen dollars a week. So Pratt sent over some—including Olive Smith. When he discovered later that they were given only five dollars each week, you can imagine what he would say! I am also seeing Dr. Locke at eleven-thirty, about that job for one of the branch libraries. That is my news up to date. (Except this,— I have a new red bathing-suit which was cheap because I bought it in the kids section, hence it hasn't all the civilized refinements such as no back, and holes under the arms, and a shoe-string around the

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neck. But I expect it will swim quite well under my supervision, and it will stay on, unless I decide otherwise. Just imagine swimming in cool water just now! I would be one cool pale streak—in a few days now I shall try that out.) Last week Jean Elder was at Honey Harbour with her family and Marg Davison. They went to see the Clares at Orillia, who are moving to another church this week.3 In the new place, the girls are all plump and virtuous and sew all the time. Ida [Clare] feels that she has been lazy all her life because she hasn't a thing for her hope chest and all these girls started to trunk years ago. So she is beginning by making a dress. (Although one usually starts on sheets and towels and pillowcases with embroidered monograms, so I'm told. By the way, have you heard of the venerable custom of trunking? I remember in fourth form High School, a girl asked me if I were trunking. I remember that I was somewhat stupefied, and glanced down at my skirt in great consternation to be sure that all was well. I hadn't the slightest idea what she meant, and associated the word with the class of the lewd, lascivious, obscene, etc etc. Imagine the comparison—for if there is anything more maidenly and sober and the incarnation of all the less interesting virtues, it is a maiden sitting all afternoon hemming and stitching and cutting and binding and embroidering. It is hardly necessary to observe that not much of that sort of thing is done these days. Although Dot Darling has ten dollars that she thinks she will spend on a table cloth for the beginning of a hope chest. It's beyond me!) As I was about to remark, have you heard the latest example of the perfect optimist? Of course you haven't. I am just speaking in a very conversational tone, and I should be disappointed if you knew all about this beforehand. Florence Clare is crocheting an Afghan (I think I have spelt it correctly). She works at it every day for 21A. hours, and in that time she can get six squares done. She says it will be so nice when she goes to Europe. She can use it on a deck-chair, and just think how lovely it will look thrown over her evening gown as she walks back and forth in the moonlight on deck! An Afghan is about the size of a horse-blanket I think, when it is done, and it will be some achievement. So I shouldn't poke fun at Florence for achieving a thing of beauty that is a joy forever,4 without the aid of Beethoven—and Bach! but her foresight about Europe is refreshing. On Sunday we had a picnic at Centre Island. Quite a family affair.

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Summer of 1933

Jack Cumberland and Dot [Darling], Georgie [Green] and Bill,5 Jean Elder and Ed Brady and Roy [Kemp] and I were the society present. Together with the other half of Toronto's Jewish population. But we left the crowd behind and ate supper on a pile of rocks overlooking the lake, then walked over to Ward's Island.6 Some of us went home with Dot Darling later, and Jack and I had a big discussion about university life and if the college were functioning and why not and so on. I think you would have liked it too. The island was lovely, especially the cottage gardens. Georgie and I went in to see Anna Fretz at the Waffle Shoppe (Centre Island). She is dietitian there for the summer, with one day off a week. And that day she has to spend studying because she missed her year and must write the whole business off in the Fall. I don't see how she can do it, for the work is quite heavy. With her are two Wymilwood7 Sophs—Agnes Bruce and her room-mate. Marg Davison is doing the same thing—I mean, writing exams in September. You know, she got sick in February and had to give up everything and live on a maple sugar farm in Quebec. She has borrowed my notes—I could not find the Jane Austen essay,8 so presume that you still have it. It doesn't matter however, except that I rather enjoyed that essay myself. I have been waiting for your next letter to see whether there is anything to answer or not. I needn't bother I suppose, because your letters sound like an intelligently conducted travel tour, and I have no come-back. You must be kept busy writing to everybody about Chicago—why don't you put me on the end of the chain-gang and save effort? Then of course if you did how I should howl! Just like an illogical female. I am reading Le Morte Darthur. It is a lovely thing, and yet, every so often Mark Twain and Cervantes poke up their heads and grin ludicrously. So that I find it difficult to really get the spirit of the thing and feel the glory of all this jousting and saving fair ladies, and waiting for men to come along a road so that you may fight with them on some trivial pretext. The book I have, which you saw, has no introduction. And since I have not looked elsewhere, I am a little at sea about some aspects of it. I shall stop writing to you now for a while and go back to fifteenth century ideas of dwarfs and wizards and ladies fair and noble knights.

26 June 1933

119 Wednesday afternoon

What a disjointed affair this is getting to be! Weather broadcast: "Is Hell like this?' I don't see how you will survive for another month of this in Chicago. I think you should come north with me. I'll leave the arranging to you and Vera. Just let me know when you will be there and I'll do the rest. There is a rumour that the Sampsons are coming sometime during the first two weeks of August—not for two weeks, just for a week-end. But I must take care that the steam-whistle is not there when you are. The other day she jabbed me in the ribs suddenly and shrieked at me for some reason, and I jumped so far that I nearly landed in the gutter. Then Harold is having two boys up for two weeks—the last two weeks in July. Their mother wants them out of the city and they won't go to a boys' camp, so Marion [Kemp] is looking after them and collecting some miscellaneous tin for her services. But if they are too much bother they are to be sent home, so they should not hinder you from coming. You could stay a week, couldn't you? Mother says she is still expecting you to pay the long put-off visit. I am somewhat bothered just now and if I should tell you what about, I might feel better, on the confession principle. To-day I saw Dr Locke and his job is all right. He is a good old scout. (Miss Ray said he is most like God of anyone she knows.) Then I saw Perkins Bull in his horrid old house, dark and full of carved antiques and florid decoration, with effigies of bulls strewn about. He has a bull on the door-mat. Something like the decoration found in Pompeii with a snarling dog and the words "Cave Canem" done in mosaic in the front porch of one of the houses. And the old man himself—fat and huge, with a great stomach and fleshy lips, and a rough iron-grey beard, small ill-natured eyes, and high blood pressure. He is a eunuch, too, after an adventure with Chicago gangsters. His sons have a great deal of money to spend, and one of them got away with one thousand dollars one month this year,—in parties and such like. I didn't like the man, and I did not want his job, especially after he asked whether I would work for nothing. I couldn't tell how much work there would be to do, so promised to phone True Davidson to-night. She suggested ten dollars for each map. I thought that that would be a fair price, but Daddy blew up and said twenty was more like it. He says he doesn't want me to take it on anyhow and his attitude toward Perkins Bull is

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Summer of 1933

with thumb on nose. And since I finally quoted 20 dollars as the price to True Davidson, I can't think why I'm still stewing about it. Except that I keep remembering Bert MacLean saying 'Tell that woman of yours that she charges too much!" She said that Mr Bull would not pay that, she was quite sure. She mentioned this job to Miss Ray earlier in the winter, and Miss Ray mentioned it last thing before she left. Consequently, I thought I shouldn't go high-hat. But of course it isn't a personal affair, and I owe nothing to that man. Lord, why was I born a worrier? And what am I worrying about? There, now that it looks so silly, and I know that I shan't starve in the streets because I may not make some extra money, and will save myself a great deal of worry, I feel a little more comfortable. Just a little whining and sniffing seems to cheer some humans at times. And goodness knows, you have seen me do enough sniffing in your time! It must have been very comical at times,—and I am so glad you don't laugh at me until it's all over. Like this. I am reading Mr. Housser's book on the Group of Seven.9 Daddy had it here a year or so ago, and I should have read it then. It is well done, a nicely made book, and beautifully written. The man is so enthusiastic, and seems so thrilled with the work of the men of whom he writes. Naturally Canadians, and especially Torontonians are interested acutely in a book that deals with a young movement, with men whom many know personally.10 When you read the book you feel that Canada has a definite art tradition, and has established herself as a cultured nation. Of course, when you consider that there are some five or seven men who gave the original impetus to the movement, your words about Victoria College being a seat of a Canadian culture—or the United Church of Canada being its mainstay—(I may have your theory a little twisted) at any rate do not seem terribly farfetched. So that you and I and some of the rest of us may be more important than I, at least, had thought. That is one reason why I get so annoyed with myself when I allow such things as the Perkins Bull episode to disturb me from my own path. For I haven't practiced at all to-day. We did have a thunder shower tonight, but the air is little cooler. What a climate! I shall go off to bed—I'm on the bed now but you know what I mean. Especially since my pen has run dry and I'm too lazy to fill it.

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121

And this letter is hardly worth reading. Thanks so much for listening to my confession. Poor dear, I buttonholed you, and you had no choice, did you? I wonder how your bed-bugs are now. What a terrible thing to have happen! Good-night. Thursday night. The girl is developing into a writer of memoirs! To-day I went to a meeting of the eastend women's branch of the C.C.F.11 There were excellent speakers and an enthusiastic crowd of women there. I think that I shall have to take a definite share of this, next Fall. But are you all right? You haven't had a sun stroke have you? Because you should be careful in this heat. However, I suppose you are busy, and that is why I haven't heard from you. It is quite a good idea not to write to me every other day as Art [Cragg] does to Florence [Clare]. Because letter-writing is often a dissipation of energy. Still I do begin to wonder mildly whether you have been overwhelmed by the heat, the fair, gangsters, automobiles, bed-bugs, or just general inertia. We leave tomorrow morning at seven for Lake Joseph, so I must get the rest of my things ready. The next address is Gordon Bay, Lake Joseph, Ontario. I shall send this off at last. Helen. P.S. If you were a Ph.D. marking first-year papers, could you pass me on the composition of this letter? You needn't answer! H.G.K. 1 That is, the Muskoka Lakes region, an Ontario vacation spot east of Georgian Bay, about 160 kilometres north of Toronto. The Kemps' cottage was on the northernmost of the three largest lakes in the region, Lake Joseph, the other two being Lake Rosseau and Lake Muskoka itself. 2 This was a map that Perkins Bull had asked HK to draw for one of the volumes in his historical series about Peel County. 3 Florence and Ida Clare's father, Rev. D.R. Clare, was a United Church minister. 4 See Letter 5, n. 3, above. 5 Georgie Green's brother was named Bill, and he may be the person referred to here. The other possibility is Bill Pike.

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6 The islands of the Toronto Island archipelago, about two kilometres south of downtown Toronto, were interconnected by small foot bridges. 7 The Women's Student Union and residence of VC, located in the former home of Edward Rogers Wood at 84 Queen's Park Crescent, directly across from Emmanuel College; the building was named after Wood's two children, William (Wy) and Mildred, and was presented as a gift to the university by Mrs. Wood and Lady Flavelle in 1926; today the building is called Falconer Hall and is part of the Faculty of Law at the U of T. In October of 1951 construction of a new Wymilwood Student Union on Charles St. was begun. 8 'The Novels of Jane Austen (With Special Reference to Pride and Prejudice)," a paper HK wrote for her pass course in English, 20 March 1933 (HFF, 1992, box 3, file 3). 9 Frederick B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Macmillan, 1926). 10 HK's father had worked at Grip Limited with three members of the Group of Seven—Frank Carmichael, Frank Johnston, and Arthur Lismer—and he had been a personal friend of Tom Thomson, a painter often associated with the Group but whose early death antedated the Group's founding. See S.H.F. Kemp's memoir of Tom Thomson in HFF, 1993, box 5, file 2. 11 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a democratic socialist party, organized by farm and labour groups in Calgary in 1932, which sought "a commonwealth in which the basic principle regulating production, distribution, and exchange [would] be the supplying of human needs instead of the making of profits." Forerunner of the New Democratic Party (NDP).

31. NF to HK

Chicago, III July i. [1933]

Postmarked 4 July 1933; addressed to HK at Gordon Bay, Lake Joseph, Ontario. My dear Helen: I should think that, to put it mildly, it's about time I was writing again. The inordinate delay is due to several causes. One is the overpowering, stifling, enervating heat, which makes me feel so damn listless and lethargic I don't care whether you live or die, to say nothing of myself. Then this last week the cleaners have come. They are cheerful souls who paint the woodwork and re-paper the walls. Every stitch of furniture has to be moved out into the centre of the floor and all covered with a canvas cloth. You can imagine how disarranged one's arrangements would get arranged, or rather disarranged, with such an arrangement. (If you don't quite understand that last sentence, it means that things generally were in a hell of a mess during the four days they were here.) And one man living, or, strictly, tagging around

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after, four women gets some idea of the enormous resources of waiting, delaying, shuffling, hanging fire, dilly-dallying and general a—ing around of which womankind is capable. (I was about to say, in reference to the temperature, that since I wrote you last it has never dropped below ninety and usually hangs around a hundred. And of course I'm rather heat sensitive, being a heliophobic blond. You once asked me what I would do in Chicago. So now you ought to have some idea.) The routine is simple. Up at nine, over here at half-past, breakfast at ten-thirty, dishes washed up at eleven-thirty, Frye washed up at twelve-thirty, lunch at two-thirty, the womankind finally stopped with fussing and more or less quiet and recumbent at five-thirty, dinner anywhere from six to eight, go somewhere at nine-thirty, back around twelve too tired to get the key in the door straight. I suppose I should explain the four women. Peggy's mother1 and baby sister drooled around and live here half the time. Mother a fine and dignified woman—splendid nineteenth-century type. Also remembers the '93 Fair. Baby sister nineteen. Eleanor. Shy, awkward duckling, all elbows and knees and shins—no curves. Looks about fifteen. Pernicious Ohio accent, the worst feature of which is a tendency to say "haow" and "araound" and "sla-yah-aow" (the third word, which is "slow," she applies to Canadians). Just out of Business College. Gives an impression of being out of the shell but not quite dry. Very sweet girl. I think it must be about two weeks since I wrote last—the first week Vera was all snarled up over her kids' exams and didn't go out at all. I spent a bit of time waiting for a friend of Vera's to take me to the Fair—Harry Wedell—two engagements cancelled because of illness. Very peculiar mixture—haven't seen him yet, but met him four years ago. Disarmingly open-hearted and generous, the noisiest person I ever heard in my life. Damned fool. Drinks himself under the table all the time and, of course, cracks up in hot weather. Vera's school had a picnic Saturday. Went. Hot as hell, but not a bad picnic. Nice youngsters—devoted to Vera. All solid peasant types— Dutch, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Scandinavian, Italian. Vera tells me that Edna Ferber's "So Big,"2 which you may have read, treats of the type. The boy who headed Vera's class got an enormous toy truck from Marshall Field's—I helped buy it but regretted it afterwards as I had to lug it about fifteen miles—street car, of course. They (teachers) told me that I was to play at the school graduation, and thought my protestations that I hadn't done anything to a piano except tickle it

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for over a month were merely baits held out for further coaxing, and they swallowed them. Asked, as a matter of form, what I liked best. I said Bach and Mozart and they said: "Well, you'll have to come down a bit." The final programme was Menuet (Paderewski), Humoresque (—uh—Dvorak, you know), and Country Gardens.3 So I told them all about Humoresque being a counterpoint to "Old Folks at Home" and why. The graduation ceremony was unpretentious but quite nice. Played all right. Moved. No more bedbugs or cockroaches. (The slightly disjointed tone of the letter is due to the fact that I am alone with Vera and a guy is fixing the radio and various vulgar programmes roar forth continuously with disconcerting loudness.) The new place is full of nice people, I'm told, which I haven't met yet. Two white women, one from Toronto, the other from Western.4 Rest Yankees—it's a University of Chicago boarding house. Piano. Got early Italian Piano Music, Bach Chorales arranged, two books by Scriabine, Cuntry (the typewriter did that) Gardens and the MacDowell Keltic Sonata,5 out of the Library. Haven't played much yet. Been down twice seeing the Walstroms, the family I lived with when I was here the summer of 192/.6 Mrs. Walstrom is a superb woman— an osteopath, still in her thirties, I think, beautiful and exquisitely poised. Mr. Walstrom also an osteopath—very nice chap, likeable and one of the most entertaining and plausible liars I have ever met. Ruby Lyall, sister of Mrs. Walstrom, a pale, beautiful blonde slightly younger than Vera. Did have arthritis for a while, but got over it. Used to be— I think still is—a nurse. Marvellous grand piano, acquired from a patient. The Art Institute has a special exhibit which I have visited twice, once with Vera, once with Eleanor [Craigl. Renaissance painting— Tintoretto, Titian, two Leonardos—one called the "Madonna of the Yarn Spinners,"7 a magnificent Italian Madonna, with the same inscrutable Mona Lisa smile, and the freshest and rosiest youngster I have ever seen. Some of the representations of the Christ-Child are almost blasphemous—he looks sometimes like a mannikin of forty, sometimes like a wizened old priest. One Raphael—very simple but breath-taking—a man dressed in black. Two Botticellis—one I could have sworn was modern French. Our old friend Lippo Lippi, and one of his incubi, Fra Angelico. (Try your hand at Fra Lippo Lippi sometime, contrasting the medieval type with Early Renaissance in initial

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letters or marginal designs). The Renaissance pictures were all very soft and quiet in color. But the medieval ones were different. Nearly all of them had gold backgrounds, and the figures were splashes of brilliant reds and greens. The haloes were bewilderingly ornamented. Poses stiff and architectural, often notably Byzantine. But a sort of quaint childlike humor all through. One picture of the Last Supper shows a little spaniel in the foreground gnawing a bone. One Madonna and Child shows the latter with His fist stuck in a dish of candy. A weird one of John the Baptist's head brought to Salome has a moving picture effect. The head appears twice, and so do three attendants, at different stages in the procession. I liked these medieval pictures best of all, I think. Then the Dutch school. Some rare humor here too. One a young group of smokers trying to blow rings. A beautiful Rembrandt—"Girl at Half-open Door" and a portrait of his father. Several Franz Hals—all the "Laughing Cavalier" type. And an exquisite picture of a "Woman Weighing Gold." And so on. The Dutch primitives disappointed me a bit. There is an English room—several graceful Gainsboroughs, a Romney, Reynolds, Raeburn, Zoffany, and Hogarth. American colonial painting, including the two famous Gilbert Stuart portraits of Washington. Whistler—the great portrait of his mother—one of the biggest attractions—a superb picture in gray and black. And the Thames "nocturne"—the one that started the row with Ruskin.8 Sargent—a lovely study of an Egyptian nude girl—surprisingly slim for the Orient. Modern French too—a room full of Matisse and Picasso. That man Matisse knew how to handle color. A picture of Picasso's of a youngster eating out of a bowl called "Le Gourmet" is very popular—Eleanor said it was her favorite. (Eleanor draws some herself—showed me some average schoolgirl sketches. Copies. Too shy to draw from life, much to the disgust of her family, who want to make a genius out of her talent.) Manet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh—oh, shut up. I just got your second letter. This epic has been hanging fire for so long—on one occasion I came home to finish it and ran out of ink— that I have almost dreaded to look at the mail box for fear of getting a reproachful letter. You poor child—you must be having rather an awful time. As for the Bull9—charging too much is an undergraduate complaint, and in any case it is quite all right to charge twenty dollars. But stick to the price you agreed to do it for—don't raise it all by yourself afterwards. That's the only thing. It's hardly necessary to

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add that you don't need to worry because you're afraid of overcharging Perkins. I shan't laugh at you, but I should be inclined to think that anyone who had ever worked for him would. Worry still less about Cervantes and Mark Twain. Cervantes didn't say that all the medieval romances were rubbish—he went out of his way to prove that they were not. And Mark Twain was a damned fool anyway. I know I must sound like a travel tour. But what would you do in my place? I'm going to send this letter off without further preamble and start it again in a day or so. I haven't said anything about the Fair yet, but it's time I quit for now. Norrie. 1 Mrs. Craig. 2 A novel by Edna Ferber about a schoolteacher who settles in a Dutch farming community and who, in spite of her poverty, finds serenity and satisfaction in a life of hard work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1924). 3 The three pieces are, respectively, Paderewski's 1890 piano score (op. 14, no. i); Dvorak's score for the piano (op. 101, no. 7); and an English Morris dance tune arranged by Percy Grainger (1882-1961). 4 The University of Western Ontario, located in London. 5 The fourth sonata for the piano (op. 59) by the American composer Edward MacDowell (1860-1908). 6 NF spent several months in Chicago after he had completed grade ten in 1927. His sister Vera had sent him a ticket so that he could spend time practising the piano. See Ayre, 47-8. 7 This is a copy of the Leonardo painting, also called Madonna with the Yarn Winder (1501), which was never finished and survives only in copies; the other Leonardo on exhibit was San Donato of Arezzo and the Tax Collector. The four paintings by Tintoretto that NF saw were Alessandro Farnese, Christ on the Lake of Galilee, Madonna and Child, and Venus and Mars with Three Graces in a Landscape; and the three by Titian, Adoration of the Magi, Danae, and Venus and the Lute Player. Most of the paintings NF goes on to describe or to mention are reproduced in A Catalogue of A Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture Lent from American Collections, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1933). 8 In July of 1877 Ruskin, in his magazine Fors Clavigera, had criticized Whistler's Nocturne in Black and White, saying that Whistler had flung "a pot of paint in the public's face" and that the price of the painting was exorbitant. Whistler filed suit for libel, asking for £1000 in damages; he won the case, the jury awarding him a farthing, but was driven into bankruptcy by the legal costs. 9 The reference is to Perkins Bull, with whom HK had had a disagreement about the price of her drawings.

5 July 1933 32. HK to NF

127 Gordon Bay, Lake Joseph, Ontario July 5, 1933.

Dear Nome, I have just had a short letter from Norm Knight in reply to my invitation to stay with Roy [Kemp] during August. He is still in a state of insolvency, but as he says, hope springs eternal, and he may yet get a job. Except for the fact that he is unable to live anywhere else because Ken [Johnstone] is financing him, he would like to stay with Roy. That is not the final word of course, but I suppose he is quite comfortable there and there is no need of my worrying, for as he says, to all intents and purposes he is their son. Indeed they seem to be adopting him quite thoroughly, even to the point of scrutinizing his mail. For when my letter arrived the two Johnstone women pounced on the handwriting of this unknown female, scenting romance immediately, as women will. Sylvia [Johnstone], he says, is supposed to be concentrating furiously upon Upper School examinations, but takes a keen interest in everything that goes on around her just the same, and 'is as restless as an insomniac on a spike mattress/ He is trying to qualify for a pass degree by taking an extra subject and writing off his Philosophy supp next fall. He thinks that since Vic authorities gave him a bursary, they may do what they can to help him, and that the history profs may give him a boost just over the line. Sounds interesting. It is just a chance anyway. As I mentioned some of your Chicago experiences when I wrote him, he says that he would risk his eyesight in order to get some of your reactions to the century of progress. So would we all. You are probably risking your own eyesight at the present time, if you are still devoting yourself as wholeheartedly to the Fair as when you started out. Vera will be through her teaching by now of course, and you will be quite active, judging from your description of her energy. This is a feeble attempt on my part to guess where you are and what you are doing now. For life in large cities and amongst a howling mob is far remote from anything I can think of here. It is twilight, and I am sitting at a desk planted firmly between three pine trees that lean over the lake. Everything is quiet. Only the faint call of a whip-poor-will, and the gentle movement of the satin water moves the stillness. A caterpillar just crawled across my page, and I moved the green thing gently to the

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ground. He was a queer little creature—he moved by gathering up his behind with determination and thrusting the rest of him forward in a heap. Something like playing leap frog. Even the mosquitoes are quiet, and hover in swarms above the water. That orbed maiden with white fire laden1 has been gazing down fondly upon a purple-green island and a lake of mauve and rose colour. These things are my confreres. How could I have stayed away so long? And how can I think of life in a city—just now? The piano is here. I have been playing Bach and Scarlatti still. I have just finished memorizing the Pastorale,2 and the Schumann Papillons. —I should be having a look at two Preludes to-night because I haven't done much to-day except mix paint at six o'clock, write a letter to Florence [Clare] and Ida [Clare], and to Mr Perkins Bull who is coming 'round right courteously (ten dollars after all, and not twenty) and swim, and talk to the two girls next cottage, and lie in the sun. But there is lots of time (There now! should you say there are lots, or there is a great deal of, time, or should you say it some other way?? A little elementary course in the English language wouldn't do you any harm, my girl.) And of course I must let you know how I am progressing and how much I enjoy being a big girl now. That's what you said, you know. But as I was about to remark, the piano has a somewhat brilliant tone, but mellow enough. The keys offer about as much resistance as an ordinary grand piano, very good for practice. It is tuned about half a tone lower than usual pitch, but that doesn't matter a great deal here. All in all, I am very pleased with it. I think I have told you a few things about the Davis family, the wealthy people next door. ('Next door' means a distance equal to one and a half city blocks.) Ken, the oldest boy (22) has been at college for some six years now. I'm afraid he failed again this year, although I'm not sure. Which means that he is out, for he missed the boat the year before. He was at S.P.S. So this summer he is north in some goldmines, doing something or other. But Laura his fiancee is here during July. She is an art teacher in some city in New York State (geography very hazy) is my age, and quite a charming girl. She is an American, Laura Van Vetchen is her name, and she graduated from Pratt College and thinks Canadian institutions are all far too conservative. She talks about their school system and I listen since I desire information, not an argument. She even propounded dogmatically the principles of the Mendelian ratio3 to me this afternoon, and did it so fast and so vigor-

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ously that I had no time to argue about the mistakes she was making. But she knew she was right, so why bother? I can tell more about her soon when we go sketching. Whether she knows her stuff or is just another girl, as Lismer says. And besides, I'm not sure whether she has a great deal of energy and initiative—she is such a charmingly pretty creature. And being engaged to Ken Davis means that she has led quite a gay sort of existence. Then there is a fat girl, Muriel Bain, somewhere about twenty-four as to age—who hasn't found an available man yet that she likes, and bewails her age and the fact that there is no one to take her to dances. She supposed that I was very lonely up here. It hadn't occurred to me. The Da vises spend no end of money every year on cheap thrillers as they come off the press, and cheap dance music as it comes off the tin pans, and the kids ask Harold [Kempl why I practice so much. Oh well! Incidentally I am making Harold play the piano for ten minutes every day. Miss Dennison says that he should know something about a piano, so he is working away. I hope to get him to work a little harder as he grows more interested, for he is a smart kid, although he thinks the piano stool is a merrygo-round. Camp news for to-day: I saw five young partridge this afternoon at the back of the cottage. They ran along the ground clumsily as I approached. Daddy killed a long yellow snake, two feet or more long and an inch through the middle. He crawled into the stones of a rock garden beside the house wall, and Daddy got him with a pointed stick, just as he poked his flat head through one of the crevices to reconnoitre the ground. Mamma has just returned from fishing. Sad story—when they were pulling in a fish—whose length varies considerably—it got away because they lost the trolling line. Mamma is the most enthusiastic fisherman. Ernie Harrison caught seven salmon trout when he was here. He hitch-hiked back to Toronto on Sunday, only to find that he has lost his Eaton's4 job. He might have stayed here, just as well as not, for we were having a good time with him, and he didn't want to leave. Fred Smith is here just now, painting the house and playing around in general. The mosquitoes are getting busy here. (I have moved to the verandah.) And they call me to play bridge. Anyhow, I have given you the news, and can't think of anything else of importance. I hope you are still having fun. Helen.

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1 The phrase is from Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'The Cloud," line 45. 2 Both Bach and Scarlatti wrote pastorales. 3 The principles of heredity worked out by Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-84), founder of the science of genetics. 4 Eaton's, now the largest privately owned department store in Canada, was founded by Timothy Eaton in the i86os; Eaton helped convert customers from the practices of credit and bargaining to cash and fixed prices. During the 19305 there were two Eaton's stores in Toronto, one at Yonge and Queen Streets and the other at College and Yonge.

33. HK to NF

Gordon Bay, Lake Joseph, Ont. July 13, 1933. 10 P.M.

My dear Norrie. Since to-day is your birthday,1 I have been wondering whether you were having any sort of celebration or not, or whether you were still more or less overcome with heat. I hope you have had a nice time. Your last letter came after I had almost given up hope of seeing a Chicago postmark unless I sent a self-addressed envelope to the postmaster for a couple of stamps or something. If you see me sending you a self-addressed envelope, I hope you will feel quite subdued. Never mind—it is your birthday. I mustn't scold. Besides I write to you when I feel like it, myself. If I kept a diary there might be too many sniffles scattered here and there. That last remark just means that I've had a spasm again—the day before yesterday—which was a kick below the belt in good style, and I had to stumble off toward the tall rocks and sniffle to myself and one squirrel and one rabbit, and wonder dismally why I was born, and review the ghosts of all my misdeeds and everything that had worried me since my conception came past in a gibbering procession. But after that was over I remembered you, who would be sure to say "get it out of your system and by my marked calendar, I suspect ." So you were right and I have spent to-day being quite miserable but happy in the knowledge that I'm a normal female—if that's anything to brag about. But it is terribly annoying to go half insane for an afternoon once every month. I burst forth in front of Daddy, who was quite bewildered as to the cause of all the fireworks, but said later he supposed it was just the moon in its course. Trouble is, I never remember these things at the time and lose control altogether. I used to think that women who acted that way were disgusting—and now I'm taking to

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emotional sprees myself! I really don't know what to do about it. But Mamma says she has done so herself. Incidentally, it was awfully funny to-day when Laura Van Vetchen and Muriel Bain came over here this morning to see me, and we discovered that all three were on the rocks. So the three of us sat around feeling sorry for ourselves. I played them some music anyhow—Scarlatti and Schumann. Laura then told me about some friend of hers from New Amsterdam who gave up everything for music—even the girl-friend, says she,—and now conducts a symphony orchestra over a radio station and plays modern music at a fabulous number of notes per second. There seems to be something silly about measuring notes per second—like a jockey trying his horse's paces. Imagine Gieseking giving out daily broadcasts to the tabloids—"This morning my form was improved—went up three notes above former record!" Of course, I rejoice when I raise my speed on the metronome—but I don't call that music. Marion [Kemp] was talking to the postmaster's daughter, Mrs. Weston, the other day. She is a blonde, good looking, very animated and cheerful person who married and went to Toronto leaving her stern old Plymouth Brethren parents at home. She was saying, "Marion your sister is a lot less noisy than you are, isn't she—er, I mean she is quieter. She's very studious isn't she? Doesn't like sports ." I seem to be described as an awful stick-in-the-mud. Mrs. Bain discovered that I had taken a conservatory degree as well as a B.A. degree, and was astounded. For a moment or so I was thinking that Ernie Gould and I should get together, since we are probably having the same effect upon the natives. But that's their tough luck. (Attitude strengthened by courtesy of Frye.) Incidentally, I didn't thank you for the silk handkerchief you sent. It is very pretty. I had a little difficulty growing accustomed to pink being combined with rust colour, but the general effect is quite charming. And you are rather nice to think of it. I may as well get everything off my chest at once—since as I told you before, I am using you as father confessor. I told you before that the Perkins Bull job was going through at ten bucks. Daddy wrote a letter which I copied & sent to Perkins—letter couched in polite language, was quite explicit as to what I would do. Perhaps it was a bit more businesslike than one would expect from my humble self, but so it went. To-day along came two letters. One from Perkins with directions about the work, quite satisfied evidently, for this letter was

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quite courteous. But one came also from True Davidson, who said that at the risk of being misunderstood, she didn't like my attitude in the matter, and went on to talk about people who fuss about details before the time comes. And that if the letter had been addressed to her she would have gone on no further with the matter. Together with advice about having an attitude in the business world, that demanded beforehand to know about holidays and salaries. One should do one's best and give such satisfaction that recognition would come of itself. Well, she made me feel rather ill, and pretty mad. She evidently thought I was being another greenling out to get a big job for nothing—she thinks all college graduates are like that in their attitude toward business. Of course that is all very well—but didn't I break my neck making a map that took some four months of my time (to say nothing of three weeks of Daddy's) and netted me thirty-five dollars, ten of which I haven't received yet. Recognition, rats!—and that goes for Snooks' ads on the back of the Canadian Forum2 too! So I have to cool off and write her a polite letter now. She wrote to me no doubt feeling annoyed at the tone of my letter (which wasted no words, but was not impertinent or silly) since she was wangling the job for me, and thinking to give advice to another conceited little fledgling. But she succeeded in producing an insolent tone and a very bad effect, and darn near ruined my afternoon. Even if she is one of Miss Ray's best friends, she hasn't much tact. Daddy says she must be just another of those women who have helped to raise men's antagonism to the woman in an executive position. I forget now whether I told you about Mrs Turkington's invitation to go to camp or not. Jean Evans and Dorothy Bishop are there, and she wanted me to go for the summer—20 bucks a month. But I turned it down because I thought I should be in the hole rather than any the richer, financially. Besides how could I get away from camp to wave a flag at a man passing through on a train from Chicago? Or teach him how to dive off a raft in Lake Joseph? (perhaps) But it was a very tempting offer, because Onawaw is a good camp, one of the best— and if I had known sooner I am sure that I would have gone. Still, I am quite peaceful lying in a hammock reading Mozart. I have at last got hold of a copy of Marcia Davenport's book.3 The writer upon musical subjects is usually either so pedantic that no one save a trained musician can understand him, or else so high-flown and fanciful in his interpretation of compositions that no musician has

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the patience to listen to him. Or else he may be like Sacheverell Sitwell who knows a little bit about architecture and a little about painting and about history, and has listened to some concerts and phonograph records—and so writes a book about Mozart4 which as you know, I think is almost worthless. But Marcia Davenport has written a book that deserves the praise it has been given. She has steeped herself in the spirit of the time and has a great love for Mozart, and more than a dilettante's appreciation of his music. She allows characters to speak for themselves more than many biographers do. Partly because of the voluminous correspondence of Mozart is she able to do this, and partly through old Leopold's letters, and the reminiscences of Michael Kelly, Lorenzo Da Ponte, and even the wizened up old profligate, Casanova. At any rate I am enjoying the book very much. Jean Evans has at last received the analysis of our handwriting but will send it only after I have asked for it nicely—which I did—tonight. I forgot to tell you that among some of the numerous people who graced the newly-wed page of the Star, were our friend Howe Martyn and Marj Horewood.5 He had a ridiculous grin, no mustache, and wore a morning coat. Alice Strong married a clever man named Rourke6 (who played the tin horn symphony at the concert put on at the Arts and Letters Club.)7 The two of them were working at the Taylor Statten's camp,8 and went on a trip for two days before they started in to work. Then Mr Mazzoleni and Winifred MacMillan9 were married a week after their concert in Eaton's Auditorium. Goodness! if I don't stop telling you the list—there are several more—you will suspect darkly that I am proposing to you. I am really just getting to be a gossipy old reader of the society page. But really Howe Martyn was worth looking at. He did look silly! When I had got to the point, last night, in Marcia Davenport's book, where she talks about Mozart's marriage to Constanze Weber, I was led off into a long train of thought on the subject of marriage. I thought I should have to sit right down and talk it over with you— since I felt that I could tell you what was stirring up a commotion without you sending back an answer like our seventeen-year-old "Perhaps I am reading too much between the lines, but if it is true I return it all, to infinity"—etc etc. Lord! However, I forget what it was all about now. Largely my physical condition I suppose. Something about love being largely a matter of people being seen often, and what was love any way. And could one have a romantic

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view of married life and still not be indulging in sentimental deception. Whether one should reduce things to a largely physical basis— as Dora Russell10 likes to write about—in a glorified sense of course. I'm not quite sure whether I think she is a very sensible woman. And if one does go about having these glorified friendships with men,—which, in her latest book, she thinks will enhance one's social and emotional life so much—will one have any emotional energy left to devote to more ideal pursuits? And I, poor child, haven't time, or nerve enough to spend my life like Isadora Duncan, finding out. Or inclination. What a humdrum world it would be if everyone sat in a hammock, like me, and wondered. Like Miniver Cheevy11—He thought, and thought and thought, and thought about it. So you see, all I did was get into a muddle, and decide that until I got a better idea, I would be gently romantic. What else can I do being the product of numerous novels, the American movie, and reflecting the English ideal of the glorification of womanhood (very comfortable idea too, so long as one isn't the domineering Davidson sort) But on the other hand the mixture of Sir Thomas Malory's men who ask— "Will you have her as your paramour, or do you want her as your wife?" with the eighteenth century freedom gets me somewhat confused. The court of Louis with his poor queen stowed off in a corner with her plain but kindly daughters, while Pompadour occupies a sumptuous suite downstairs, and filthy backstairways allow transient maids-for-the-night access to the royal bed chamber must have been an interesting household. Mozart himself loved to have his fun while Constanze enjoyed a flirtation, too. One night he crawled into bed beside her at four in the morning, after being goodness knows where. And Constanze only teased him and said "Ach Wolfi, you have a very very guilty conscience!" I must stop at this point for Ghent Davis is taking the mail off (it being morning of the next day). Helen. 1 NF's birthday was actually 14 July, as he reminds HK in Letter 37. 2 Founded in 1920, the Canadian Forum called itself "an independent journal of opinion and the arts"; both HK and NF later worked for the magazine, HK as art editor and NF first as book review editor and then as managing editor. HK is referring to the advertisement for her map on the back cover of the Canadian Forum, 13 (February 1933). The ad reproduces a detail from the map, and the copy reads in part: 'The artist who is responsible for this amazing production is Miss Helen

i4 July 1933

3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11

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Kemp, almost a graduate in Arts from Victoria, a musician of note, and obviously a very clever designer." Marcia Davenport, Mozart (New York: Scribner's, 1932). Mozart (London: P. Da vies, 1932). Martyn and Horewood were married on 24 June 1932, in the VC chapel. For the account of the wedding HK refers to see the Toronto Daily Star, 26 June 1933, 22. Strong, a well-known singer and soloist for Deer Park United Church, and Rourke were married on 29 June 1933. The Arts and Letters Club, formed in 1908, became a lively meeting place for many distinguished practitioners of literature and the arts. Rourke's "tin horn symphony" is not on record in the club archives, but this type of performance would have been typical of it. Taylor Statten and his wife, Ethel, were the directors of two camps in Algonquin Park, a boys' camp named Ahmek, established in 1921, and a girls' camp named Wapomeo, established on a nearby island in 1924. Ettore Mazzoleni and Winifred MacMillan, Toronto musicians, were married on 27 June 1933. For the account of the wedding HK mentions see the Toronto Daily Star, 27 June 1933, 24. Their concert at Eaton Auditorium, with Winifred MacMillan, who was the sister of Sir Ernest MacMillan, as soloist, was performed on 16 June 1933. See Letter 28, above. See Edward Arlington Robinson's poem of that title.

34- NF to HK

Chicago, 111.

Postmarked 14 July 1933; addressed to HK at Gordon Bay, Lake Joseph, Ontario. A photo of NF (see illus. 3, this volume) and a yellow lace handkerchief are enclosed with this letter.

My dear: In case you're beginning to wonder what the hell, I'm still alive. I got another letter from you, written apparently before you had received mine. Oh, sweet! I'm homesick enough to compose a set of variations on Rule Britannia. It's not the heat. It's hotter than I like it, but remarkably cool for here, with no rain except the odd furious tropical thunderstorm—one developed into a hailstorm and broke windows all over the city. But Vera and Peggy [Craig] have a radio, which goes all the time Peggy is in. She gets unexpectedly stubborn and sulky about it, too—which I couldn't understand until Vera told me that she has a bit of a neurosis because she was rather gypped out of going to college, and is apt to resent any slur on her present condition of culture. She won't let Vera read poetry to her, for instance. I have in my off moments been trying to read, and trying to write—I

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have one or two rather good ideas up my sleeve—but I shan't be able to do either until I get back to Canada. Not that I haven't a good time, especially when I'm with Vera. Went to the aquarium today and came away with a profound sense of the beauty and dignity of trout and the ugliness of salamanders. There was a seal with a face like a puppy. There were mud puppies with no face at all. Alas! nothing is real in the world! The tropical fish were gorgeous. Went to a show the night before. 'The Gold Diggers of 1933." Not bad—another 42nd Street.1 Their last number called "forgotten men" was rather fine. For once, jazz singing was put to its right use. It was about soldiers returned from the war, standing in breadlines, widows, and so on. The solo singing was a long wail, and when the chorus came in it swelled to almost an animal howl. I don't know whether they altogether intended the effect or not,—it seemed to come out in spite of them. Took a chance and bought half of Haydn's sonatas—Peters edition.2 Played for a while in the landlady's parlor. Several people (different ones) usually drift in to listen. I don't mind—they're not critical. The most frequent remark is, "My, it's a relief to get that instead of the radio!" Then why in hell—Oh, well. Eleanor [Craig] can't see why I don't find jazz (any jazz) a refreshing relaxation from the "other stuff." I've seen quite a bit of the Fair, though not so much, after all. I've been down more often to the Art Institute. This Harry Wedell apparition materialized and took us down to the Fair. We had some carbonated wine that wasn't bad and some beer that was. That was about all we did, as far as I could see. Harry is an awfully good scout— good-hearted and generous to a fault—but he does make too much noise. He brought a friend along who wasn't a bad guy at all—a law student from Chicago. Harry is supposed to be Peggy's boy friend, and Peggy seems to like him, but I am inclined to think that an excuse to keep in with Vera. He has probably proposed to her—Good God! Brother-in-law! But I'm safe, and Vera. Eleanor and Mrs. Craig are going home tomorrow, which relieves the pressure a bit. They were nice, but I think they were a bit of a strain on Peggy. I have seen part of Marshall Field's exhibit of the various accessories of the Russian Royal Family—ikons, vanity cases, objects d'art, dishes,

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jewellery, carpets, and so forth. There was an 18th-century snuff box with a little bird inside who would come out and sing a song. There were Easter eggs—rather significant, that Russian emphasis on Easter!—in gold and precious stones.3 Everything was bewilderingly ornate—barbarically so, but gorgeous none the less. And so on. The Japanese Pavilion at the Fair was splendid. Really, a nation that can make such beautiful things can't be all bad. I sent you a handkerchief I got there, didn't I? Their exhibition left nothing out, but was always in the best of taste—screens of some dark wood inlaid with ivory, jade carvings, and so forth. I liked too the Ukrainian Pavilion, where I got the little lace handkerchief I am sending. There were beautiful boxes there, made out of some preparation of rye bread, inlaid with straw and glass by Ruthenian prisoners in Polish Camps. There were singers of Ukrainian folk songs and dancers at their restaurant, where I think I located a popular song called "Too Many Tears"—popular a year ago and a suspiciously good tune.4 Speaking of restaurants, the Japs served a "ceremonial" iced tea and lemonade, with rice biscuits that was just as fine a work of art as the jade or ivory. And then there was an A & P carnival (chain grocery store) with a marionette show—Tony Sarg's, and splendidly handled. Kate Smith pulling the moon over the mountain was one thing.5 The last act introduced George Bernard Shaw. He encountered the master of ceremonies and was told he had no manners and was kicked in the pants to prove it. Shaw protested he fought with words, not physically, and so the master of ceremonies introduced the great American knocker, Babe Ruth, who terrified Shaw into silence with his bat. Comment of female beside me: "Gawsh! am I ever gonna applaud this!" (She did, incidentally) "I think it's just terrible the way he makes fun of everybody—'specially Americans!" Curiously enough, the rhymed dialogue was clever and very adroitly handled, but I am afraid that whatever truth lies in Shaw's remark that the 100% American is 99% idiot6 is more confirmed than otherwise by the introduction of Babe Ruth. Most of the States have an exhibit in the Hall of States. Florida is the best I have seen so far—the thing I looked longest at was a collection of tree snail shells—the most delicately beautiful little things one could imagine. I haven't seen so many. Arkansas had some fair pottery—but I saw some far finer work by Louisiana art students in a New Orleans store—a dreamy, elusive, delicate blue, green, or fawn

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shades with the suggestion of plant and flower designs. There is quite a bit of Louisiana work here, because the waterway establishing connection with New Orleans has just been established. (Oh, well, let it go). That was the cause of the Chicago water steal.7 A squadron of Italian flyers is coming here for the Fair. They have just landed at Shediac, a little village about 15 miles from Moncton, and when I am asked where Moncton is, I say "near Shediac" instead of "near Halifax." It's more exact, but more humiliating too. This Balbo, who is leading them, is the gorilla who thought up the castor oil treatment for Socialists.8 I guess if I'm to write at all readably, I should write more often and in shorter dimensions. This is the first letter I have written to you that 1 haven't enjoyed writing, the reason being that I have been spending so much time gawking at things that I'm full of news and still haven't anything to say. I really haven't the slightest idea when we're going home. Out to dinner with a woman who is very charming and intelligent, given a good musical education and can't play now & doesn't own a piano. Reason? Always used to luxury. Started work at an excellent salary—doctor's secretary. Can't afford a Grand piano and won't play on anything else. How's that? Sweets to the sweet, farewell, as Gertrude said to Ophelia's unresponsive tombstone.9 Norrie. \ The two films were both 1933 productions by Warner Brothers; the first starred Warren William, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, and Dick Powell; the large cast of the second included Warner Baxter, Dick Powell, Ginger Rogers, and Bebe Daniels. 2 C.F. Peters published a number of editions, several in four volumes, of Haydn's sonatas, both in Leipzig and in New York. The "half" that NF bought may have been the two-volume Sonaten (Leipzig: C.F. Peters, 1932). 3 The tsar's collection contained a number of the famous Faberge eggs. 4 A popular song composed by Harry Warren; the score was published in 1932 in New York by M. Witmark & Sons. 5 Kate Smith was best known for her signature song, "When the Moon Comes over the Mountain," which she regularly sang on radio. 6 A remark Shaw used on more than one occasion to bait patriotic Americans. See Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: Volume III: 1918-1950 (New York: Random House, 1991), 302; and Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1932), 764. 7 This refers to a canal project that reversed the flow of the Chicago River away from Lake Michigan. There were protests from Canada about the lower water level of the Great Lakes caused by the diversion of the water.

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8 With great fanfare Italo Balbo, Mussolini's minister of aviation, landed in Chicago on 15 July, having led his squadron of airplanes on a spectacular flight across the Atlantic. In the early 19205 Mussolini's terrorist squads had administered castor oil by the litre to their victims, often mixing it with gasoline; this form of violence, which often resulted in the death of the socialist victims, was a common tactic of Mussolini's reign of terror and was practised by the Fascists even before Balbo became one of Mussolini's ruthless hatchet-men. 9 Shakespeare's Hamlet, 5.1.266.

35. NF to HK

Chicago, 111. July 15. [1933]

Postmarked 20 July 1933; addressed to HK at Gordon Bay, Lake Joseph, Ontario, Canada. Forwarded on 25 July to Camp Onawaw, via Huntsville, Ont., where she had gone for a few weeks as a counsellor. NF enclosed with this letter a postcard of George Seurat's Un Dimanche d'ete a la Grande-Jatte, a painting from the Art Institute of Chicago, and he wrote on the card, "This is damned clever—a very popular picture. The technique is impressionistic—little dots and flecks of color." The birthday card NF received from HK, mentioned in the second paragraph, is missing. Dearest: This whole city has gone wild over the arrival of General Balbo and his air fleet of 24.* They came roaring over the city this afternoon. Tremendous reception broadcasted. Balbo spoke. English not a Balbo accomplishment. Understood only the end of it: "Viva Italia! Viva Chicago!" A diabolically clever move, this. Feeling between United States and France is pretty strongly strained, and just at the psychological moment up rolls Italy from across the Atlantic!2 The American speakers decided that Italy's contribution to American culture (e.g., Al Capone) was a valued treasure and that the bonds of union so closely knit between the two nations—blah, blah. When Italy attacks France in 1935, according to her programme, a friendly U.S.A. is going to help the situation. Thank you for your card, sweet. It was lovely, and exactly the right thing to send. Vera took Ruby Lyall (a mutual friend), Peggy [Craig] and me to dinner at a Swedish restaurant called "A Little Bit of Sweden." The food there—well, the meals are like dramatic poems, a scene in each course. One helps oneself to an enormous plate of appetizers—smorgasborg they call it—and then goes for the meal

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itself. It rained pitchforks, of course, from five o'clock till nine—a squall overturning several boats on the lake. However, the weird purple sunset and the smoke of the city and a strange eerie sort of light all over,— Well, I had a very happy birthday. Two initialled handkerchiefs from Ruby and a chocolate eclair from Peggy and a birthday card I shall show you later. So you are joining C.C.F. in the fall. I should have thought Canadian politics even more of a cul de sac than basketball, but of course you know best. At Confederation the Conservative and Liberal parties represented opposed urban and rural interests, but the Conservatives were in power so long that the Laurier Liberals adopted practically their platform. So that since 1906 or 1911 or whenever it was—or, for practical purposes, since 1867—there has been no real opposition in Canada, but only occasional shiftings of government due to scandals, slogans, bribery, disgust at the long-continued graft of one party, and so on.3 The C.C.F. means a genuine labor-agricultural opposition. Again, it should be the typical party of Canada and the political expression of the same movement of which the United Church is the religious expression. The connection between the two is brought out by the New Outlook.4 That is why it is socialistic. Government control of industry is essential if we are not to become a mere dumping ground for England and the U.S.A., just as a distinctive religious organization is necessary for the reasons I have gone over so often with you. The pink and rust didn't impress me—perhaps red and yellow, a more conservative combination, may serve better.5 (My pen ran dry unexpectedly at this point, so I went down to the landlady's to fill it. I told her I had a letter I wanted to get away before to-morrow, and she said: "O.K., if you mail it tonight, she'll get it Friday." But, as it's after twelve, I have my doubts). Another hot spell. If you could see me now, you'd probably be hotter. I wish to hell you'd stop bawling. That is—I mean to say—er—oh, well, let it go. Bert MacLean's kicking about your methods applies, in respect of price, to college posters. Around a college prices matter, and if Perkins Bull was satisfied, why worry? The other kick was about your not sticking to the price agreed upon, and that, apparently, you are doing here. I can't imagine what True Davidson's nose is doing in the affair, but I should feel very much inclined to take a poke at it. If this letter does not arrive too late, I'd advise complete silence, however. If I were there, we might get our heads together and concoct

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your polite missive from a recipe calling for caustic soda as a minor ingredient, but in your present condition—and mine—I do not recommend a compromise with your dignity. Your physical condition I do not worry about—I should hate to be in it in hot weather, but a little bundle of twisted nerves, and especially a young woman who is developing intellectually at the inevitable cost of her social poise, is bound to suffer a good deal. Poor child, I wish I were there, just the same. You're wrong—I don't mark your calendar—it isn't necessary. You can do that quite explicitly yourself. Besides, you aren't that regular. Marriage, darling, is a physical contact, and any touch of the spiritual defiles it. Any sane philosopher knows that desires are to be gratified, but not dwelt upon. "Get it out of your system," is what I say to you when I want you to look some emotional problem in the face and grapple with it. Everyone must eat frequently and choose food carefully, but anyone who has a spiritual kinship with food, that is, a glutton, epicure or gourmet, who spends hours in anticipation or reflection of eating, is of no use in the world. Similarly, the relations between men and women ought to be as much as possible those of men with men, or women with women—that is, social relations. When a man finds the right woman he has found his right social companion. But these vaguely sexual alliances are little more than sublimations of overt acts—they are to normal association as the glutton or epicure or gourmet to the eater—i.e.—ordinary. "Platonic love," as Plato conceived it, was a rare spiritual kinship between men in which physical contact was disgusting. This is the precise reverse of heterosexual alliances, as Plato never imagined a woman capable of a "Platonic friendship." And Dora Russell is an ass. See? The pen is dry again. Damn. Norrie.

There is just enough ink left to say that if you take your name of Helen too seriously you are going to be difficult to handle. 1 See Letter 34, n. 8, above. 2 In Chicago the Italian consul general said that "General Balbo does not come to test the faith of America and its people. He wants only to perpetuate the friendliness we know the American people feel toward his country. He silently asks that the cooperation between these great nations be everlasting" (New York Times, 16 July 1933, sec. i, 3). On Balbo's last day in Chicago—19 July—more than one million people turned out for a parade to honour him and his flyers.

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3 The Conservatives had been in power from 1878 until Sir Wilfrid Laurier was elected prime minister in 1896, a position he held until 1911. Between that time and 1933 the party in control had been about evenly distributed among Conservatives, Liberals, and Unionists. 4 NF's comment is primarily a personal assessment of the similarity of philosophy between the United Church and the CCF. One article, an editorial comment on the CCF convention in Regina, was published in New Outlook, the official monthly magazine of the United Church of Canada, but appeared after NF's letter was written. 5 A reference to the silk handkerchief NF had sent HK. See Letter 33.

36. HK to NF

[Gordon Bay, Lake Joseph, Ontario] Saturday afternoon [22 July 1933]

Dearest— I do seem to be having some difficulty with my mail (or male) lately. Here I have been chasing your letters one after another for weeks! And I suppose the same thing is happening this time again. At any rate, since I can't tell when you may visit Ontario, and since you don't know either, I have decided to go to Mrs Turkington's camp for two weeks starting next Monday and finishing on the seventh or eighth of August. And if you and Vera decide to come this way (meaning in my direction vaguely somewhere) before that time, I suppose there will be nothing left for Elaine the fair to do but climb into her barge and wander downstream to something akin to Ophelia's unresponsive tomb.1 Anyhow, you put the idea into my head! I don't know exactly what I am to do at camp;—something in the way of talks on music and art, I gather. Jean [Evans] and Robin [Govan] and Dot Bishop seem to have a lot of plans, and Mrs Turkington is paying my expenses. Her invitation this time was so urgent that I could not have turned it down even if I didn't want to go. When her letter came, the dope from Perkins Bull arrived also, so I have had to work steadily at that this week. Pencil sketch is just about ready. I did not go to Toronto for copy as I thought I should do—for I found the things I needed in the oddest places. For instance I had been looking for a Jersey Cow—and there it was on a baking soda box, and when the newspaper came, 'Believe it or not' had a large drawing of the cow who entered herself in a competition and won first prize!2 But work on the piano has had to be postponed, this week.

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You'd laugh if you could see the garb I'm half in at present. I am getting a sunburn—bathing suit is half off, and the sunglasses are quite an aid to beauty. Like this:— Fred Smith is in the same state. We have to observe which boats are passing to be sure our friends the Hamers don't come along. For there are limits to what they approve of. They are the natives, the Plymouth brethren—very nice people. Last Sunday I went to their meeting and listened to a threequarters of an hour sermon—it was supposed to be a study and discussion group—from a mealy-mouthed Plym who insisted that man must live by faith—quoting the same text from Paul about seventeen times, totally ignoring Paul's interest in works also.3 Saturday night. I stopped just there because Fred [Smithl wanted to go swimming. So finally he rowed across the bay and I swam. We rested on a rock across there and then I swam back, which brings my distance up to a half-a-mile. I have met several new people lately—since the other night at Davises. I was there for dinner—aside from the Davis family there was Laura [Van Vetchen], of course—whom I like very much. I believe I did not correct the impression of her that I may have given you before. Then there was Carol Davis, who used to be Carol Langstaff and married a cousin of our Davises just last year and went to Spain on her wedding trip. She is very lovely—teaches in the St. George school for child study.4 Husband is a young lawyer, her father and mother are both doctors. Laura brought a young kid over the other night—that is, she is two of me, is sixteen, name = Kay Dawson, and has just passed her A.T.C.M. exam this summer, and is consequently at that stage—you understand what I mean. Oh yes, I was forgetting Johnny Argue, medical student from McGill. He and Laura and I came home the other night and all three sat in a huddle on top of our dining room table, over the oil lamps, and talked about stained glass windows, and fraternities and art galleries. Barbara Broadfoot was in

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medicine (repeating first year) last year. She and her mother live across the bay. Missionaries in China. Knows Mildred Oldfield well—went to school with her. Father comes home next month for the first time in at least four years. She was at Limberlost Lodge last year with Harold and Bessie Ayres—very nice girl. Her older sister Alexia is coming next month. I am almost sorry to leave here, because I am enjoying it all so much. And, good gracious! I'm feeling so HEALTHY! —Pause again while we go down to the dock to talk to Barbara and her mother who have just paddled over, to tell me that our date was all off. (A matter of going to Parry Sound5 with the Hamers to get a haircut.) I have found out a few more things about Ken Davis—gossip again! That is, he missed his year for the second time all right, Laura blamed it on the apartment and the friends who drifted in at midnight to fool around until three in the morning. I expect he did have trouble studying. A rich man's son, especially a son of a family like the Davises, is handicapped from the start. He is fed too highly, and he is trained to be a playboy, and has not the incentive to be anything else because the friends of the family are all nice people but without much intellectual interest. For instance, Laura mentioned the way the authorities received Einstein's resignation—"without regret"—and Mrs Bain said: "Oh yes, he's the man who said we came from monkeys, isn't he!"6 Barbara Broadfoot missed her year again. She should have been in some other course—medicine is not her line. She is no fool, just not in her proper place. And she has been telling me about Jennie Cantwell, a girl whom I knew at high school, who was developing nerves then, and has nourished the complaint ever since. There is no need to go further into detail since you didn't know her. But the more tales of this sort I hear, the more miraculous it seems that people can get along without losing their sanity altogether. It seems almost inhumanly cruel to allow a girl to go along for six years with a kink in her system, the way Jen has—and there are so many others whose troubles one doesn't hear about. Doctor Gordon has had Jen in her charge for about three years now—making her sleep every day and so on, and when Jen forgot to keep her promise once and go home on a Saturday afternoon to sleep, Dr Gordon told her she must be losing her mind if she can't keep her word of honor. So Jen went to a lecture and thought she was going insane (and that fancy is no fun!) and cried all through the lecture. Barbara was a close friend

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of hers. You see Jen went through Arts and then entered Medicine this fall, in a fit of hero-worship I imagine. You know what I'm leading up to—Miss Ray's tutor system idea, and a competent psychiatrist to advise students, not only about studies—but especially about their heart affairs and their sex adjustments and so on. Well, my dear, I didn't intend to talk in this strain, but I do get so heated when I think of some of the cruelty that is still permitted in the name of education. I see that the C.C.F. is having a grand pow-wow in Regina7—the Star is giving it a lot of space. Ex-judge Stubbs8 is joining forces too. They are drawing up a formal programme, and debating quite hotly over some things. Agnes Macphail threatened to withdraw if they retained the plank in regard to confiscation of property without compensation. As a result, of course, they agreed to some compensation— thus displeasing the supporters of revolutionary methods. The people in the West seem to be ardently C.C.F., and one man from Quebec said that the Jesuit priests were just waiting for the results of this conference to proclaim their opinion—he implied that it was decidedly favorable. The other two parties will have to snap into it and dope out a definite policy or they will be left at the post. For there is the element of youthful enthusiasm, and of hope in the C.C.F. organization that is altogether lacking in the hardened machinery of the others. And of all things, people need hope and enthusiasm, or they die. Your Ukrainian lace handkerchief9 was lovely. Sweet of you to send it to me. Did you see how it was made, or did they show you the processes? Do you know that I think you and I could have quite a bit of fun looking over an exhibition! I don't usually like poking about waiting for people—either shopping or at the C.N.E. (which last is of course the only big affair I have seen) But you seem to be an agreeable sort of person—poor man! What a lot of practice you must have had lately with your four women. You will let me know what you are going to do, won't you? I don't want to bother you of course, but you would like it here, especially after Chicago's heat. And if you can come, why do so—come when you can and wait till I get here. But if you can't come at all—oh well, time goes on, doesn't it? But I should like to see you—so much! I suppose I shan't have much time when I am at camp. I have had to work on the drawing lately, and so have not prepared my 'cultah'

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talk—or whatever pill I'm supposed to administer. But we shall see. The address is simply 'Camp Onawaw, via Huntsville, Ontario.' Good-night Helen. P.S. I am sorry that I miscalculated about the mail delivery—it seems to take three days for a letter to reach you. And you didn't get what was to arrive on the 13th10 until goodness knows when. It was a very humble effort—my first with that sort of pen but I sent it along to let you know I was trying hard anyway. Even if it did get smeared in a most untidy fashion in my haste to catch the mailbag. Daddy is attending to the lettering on Perkins Bull's job—as usual. H.G.K. 1 The allusions are to Tennyson's Idylls of the King, where Elaine, having died from grief, floats down to Camelot in a barge and is found by King Arthur and Lancelot; and to the drowning of Ophelia in act 4 of Shakespeare's Hamlet. 2 "Cow Brand" baking soda is still available under the joint logo of "Cow Brand" and "Arm & Hammer." The Ripley's "Believe It or Not" cow appeared in the Toronto Daily Star Thursday, 20 July 1933,36. HK's cow-inspired drawings were apparently never used. Instead, a line drawing of a virile bull drawn by an artist named Trevor appears on the endpapers of several of Perkins Bull's books. 3 The Plymouth Brother was probably repeating Paul's words in either Gal. 2:16 or Eph. 2:8-9. Paul's interest in works appears many times in his epistles: HK may have in mind such passages as i Cor. 3:13-14, Gal. 6:4-10, and i Thess. 5:13. 4 A school for the study of child development at the U of T, established in 1925; Dr. Clarence Hincks (1885-1964), a pioneer in the study of children's mental health, persuaded benefactors to help fund the school. 5 A town on the eastern side of Georgian Bay, about twenty kilometres northwest of the Kemps' Lake Joseph cottage. 6 Mrs. Bain has, of course, confused Einstein with Darwin. In 1933 Einstein left his post as the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin, accepting a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. 7 HK is referring to the meeting of the CCF on 19-21 July, a year after the party's founding. At this meeting the CCF chose J.S. Woodsworth as its first president and adopted the Regina Manifesto, which called for nationalizing key industries and establishing a welfare state. 8 Stubbs was brought into conflict with the higher judicial authorities and removed from the Manitoba bench while seeking to effect the reforms sought at the CCF convention. On 8 June 1933, less than ten days after his dismissal, he was invited by the Farmer-Labour party in Saskatchewan to represent its socialist platform in the next federal election. He is referred to as "ex-judge Stubbs" in an article on the convention in the Toronto Daily Star, 20 July 1933, which is apparently the issue of the Star that HK refers to.

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9 NF had enclosed a yellow handkerchief with his letter of 14 July (Letter 34). 10 A hand-drawn birthday card, which is missing.

37. NF to HK

Chicago, 111. Tuesday. [25 July 1933]

Postmarked 26 July 1933; addressed to HK at Camp Onawaw, via Huntsville, Ontario, Canada.

Pet: Your letter just came, but owing to the chaos in which the juxtaposition of Elaine's barge and Ophelia's tomb had plunged my feeble intellect—confound it all, you don't float into a tomb on a barge!— you might barge into a tomb or tomble into a barge, however, but the metamorphosis from Launcelot to Hamlet is too much for me on short notice—I can say with Prufrock "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,"1—has made it impossible for me to fathom your position. If I come down to Toronto, can you get to that city?—a question to be asked. You see, my visit here has more than an even chance of ending rather dismally. Just before I came, the President-elect of Evergreen Park School Board, accused by his opponent of not being able to get the teachers paid, said that the money to pay up the teachers in full was in the bank. "Then," said Vera, "can I plan my summer accordingly?" "Of course, my dear," said the President-elect unctuously. Well, Vera at present has two bucks, and no other resources except the money for my ticket home. The bank is arranging for a loan, and Vera is fairly sure of getting it soon, but how soon?—a question to be asked. If not soon, Norrie ambles off home by himself, feeling, foolishly but quite naturally, like a sponger and parasite. I should have left yesterday but for one thing. Vera didn't want to pinch me even if I did go without her, and of course wanted to wait. And Georgie Wall is a girl who graduated with Vera from Mt. A.2 in '24 and roomed with her in her first year. And Georgie Wall is on the Latin teaching staff at Mt. A. And Georgie Wall, for reasons of her own, is trying to persuade the University of Chicago to disgorge another M.A. (A.M. they call it here. There are only two degrees in the U.S.A., A.M. and P.M. A.M. means Annus Mirabilis, referring to

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the year when a student passes his first examination without being on the rugby team. P.M. is an honorary title conferred on very distinguished people after they die, and it stands for Post Mortem.) And Georgie Wall has written a very long and very dull thesis to justify the disgorgement—as a sort of uretic, you understand. (That was how it affected me, anyway). And she wants that thesis typed. You may be able to guess the rest. So from Saturday till Wednesday (tomorrow) we've worked steadily at that thesis. I do perhaps most of the typing and Vera checks the errors. I don't think it will get Georgie an M.A., but it may get us ten bucks. I don't think Georgie has any conception of the type of work required for graduate degrees. If the University of Chicago has no conception of it either, Georgie is safe; but the University of Chicago is not the University of Arkinsaw or Jawfish, not by a long sight. So if, we'll be coming God knows when, and if not, I'll probably be leaving within a few days—before the end of the week, most likely. And now what about you? Suppose I wire you or something, and then if you an't get down you can wire back or phone back or something else Burwash. Wiring is better—I might not get a phone call. You can't very well write out in the bush. That's if you can't come. I am not sure, of course, about the Gordon Bay visit, but wouldn't it perhaps be better if you came to Toronto anyway? Then we could arrange. Vera, of course, wants to come home soon, but due to this hitch we haven't seen much of the Fair & may want to wait a while if the salary leaks out. Your birthday card was quite O.K. and it got here on the 13th all right. My birthday is on the 14th—Quatorze Juillet—the National Holiday of France. Oh, darling, if I don't see you soon I'll choke or something. However, I rather like my present regimen—typing all day and reading a detective story—an excellent one—while Vera gets the meals or relieves me. I shouldn't care for it as a steady diet, but it isn't going to be a steady diet. 1 For the allusions to Elaine and Ophelia, see Letter 36, n. i, above. NF quotes from T.S. Eliof s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," line 111. 2 Mount Allison University. See Letter 3, n. 2, above.

4? August 1933 38. HK to NF

149 Camp Onawaw Huntsville Ontario Friday [4? August 1933]

Another version of this letter—apparently a first draft—accompanies it in the file. It contains essentially the same information, but in the last paragraph HK speaks of "Vera's money" and "the unctuous official," references to NF's letter of 25 July which help to date this letter.

My dear Norrie: Your last letter came yesterday night (the one before that only reached me the night before that) so the mail service is somewhat irregular. I have thought and thought, and I think now that if you come to Toronto at all—and I want to see you—it would be a better idea all round for you to go directly to Gordon Bay. Several reasons: 1. Cheaper—you spend something like 8.80 return to go there which would soon be swallowed up if you stayed in Toronto, for meals & Burwash etc. And I would not need to scoot down from ere—which would cost 9.10 return (which I haven't got!) 2. You can stay longer at Lake Joseph. It would be more fun than Toronto for as you know, Toronto isn't much fun in the summer. Etc. Etc. I have written to Roy and he will be phoning Burwash to get you. He is at Camp BYMCA, Hanlan's Point, Toronto Island, and his playground is, I think, on the corner of Spadina and Queen Street. He is there afternoons and evenings. You might phone Mrs Smith, too. Also, in case you would like to get in touch with him, Norm Knight is at 34 Brownville Ave., Mount Dennis, Toronto. There is a cheap fare to Gordon Bay sometime soon. Be sure to enquire. We are three miles from Gordon Bay. There is a farmhouse near the lake where the post office is also. People are Hatherleys—old man and wife, and his daughter Mrs Weston. Mrs Weston is an attractive young woman who is a great friend of Marion's [Marion Kemp's] and you might ask her how to get to our place which is next door to Davises in Hamer Bay. This is of course in case our folks don't meet you. You might phone to Hamers to get them to call for you, or you

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might find Davises coming for their mail—as they do every day—and Aubrey might take you along. He's a good scout, fat boy, not much brains on account of too much money. Somebody is certain to be there to meet the train or to get the mail. See Mrs Weston and you are all right. I do think this is a better idea. Mother said you were to come straight along—and she is expecting you. You are very welcome—you know that. (Incidentally, I hate to seem insistent on money matters—but the point is we're not as broke as we were—so you need not worry about the starving Kemps or something or something. Roosevelt beer you know. Poor daddy has been very busy all summer.) I'll stop now—breakfast. Helen. 39. HK to NF

205 Fulton Avenue, Toronto 6 Ontario Thursday. [31? August 1933]

NF left Chicago for Gordon Bay sometime after posting his letter of 25 July (Letter 37). He probably did not arrive in Gordon Bay until after 7 or 8 August, when HK was to return from camp. After about two weeks at the Kemp cottage, NF and HK took the train to Toronto, where he spent a long weekend before heading back to Moncton on 22 August. HK shortly began work at the Canadian National Exhibition. There is, of course, no correspondence between them during the time—approximately two weeks—they were together at Gordon Bay and in Toronto.

My dear, Since the Freshman1 is still here, if I ever want to see the completed version I should send part of the rough draft to you, shouldn't I? I was somewhat amused when I looked up the minutes of the final meeting of the editorial board, to find that the first item was "Every effort should be made to draw contributions from as wide an area as possible. ..." The magazine is to be in circulation by October ist, which means that it goes to print some two weeks before that. If you could dispose of the freshman within a week and send him to me, I should receive him gladly. I had a letter from Murray Brooks which was quite cheering. For they are paying all my expenses gladly, and

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seem full of enthusiasm about the conference.2 Murdock Keith drapes his length around the post above the steaming soup with great frequency, and tells me that there are some fifteen Toronto men and thirty Toronto women going to this affair. The leaders will be rather good, I believe. Jean Elder and Jean Cameron are going—I shall be rooming with them probably. Earl Davison has a good job, they say, at a school in Brockville. So for the first time in history the S.C.M. will get along without him. So much for the S.C.M. My letters to you will look like a diary very probably, for I want you to know what is happening to me—it is one way of amusing myself, telling you what is happening to me. I may make good-natured fun of your straw hat, or the way you plant your feet, or some of your small-boy tricks that make me gasp when I recall that you are the age of my brother's friends—but underneath all that is the fundamental trust in you. You know that. Yesterday one of the girls from the Kellogg booth came over and asked for Mildred. She had been crying, and she pulled her hat down over her eyes. 'Tell Mildred my husband died today—they just phoned me. Neil is dead. My husband is dead." That is all I heard when Mildred was called and talked to her at one end of the booth for two minutes. Mildred had told me about her before, for she had come to see us often, and always joked and laughed and came for soup, and invited us to get coffee from her. Mildred said she was always cheerful like that, even when she had so much trouble. And the trouble was caused by her husband, whose family had a streak of insanity running through it. Two of his brothers, I believe,—or maybe his uncles, were insane. He was a Roman Catholic, and in spite of the fact that her own father was a Mason, this girl had turned Catholic to marry him. They had one boy, a lovely child, twelve years old. But the father was subject to fits of extreme moodiness, and it was thought that in a fit of hypochondria, he had killed himself. Mildred said that the two had not lived as man and wife. Indeed, they quarreled because he said if they had more children, these fits would not come on. The woman, faced with the forbidden use of contraceptives, or bringing unbalanced kids into the world, took the course left to her. The course that middle-aged icicles and prudes fatuously recommend as "self control." The poor woman! She was on her way to Hamilton then. She didn't know any more than that the man was dead. I phoned Ronona tonight. She is feeling very depressed. And she

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has reason. She can't go anywhere without being obliged to get back in time to prepare the next meal. And her father is displeased and insists that she be home every night at 9.30. He is sore on her for something, but she doesn't know what. She can't stand it much longer, being housekeeper for a family with an older sister whom she dislikes and a father who treats her like a kitchen drudge. But Relyea is waiting anxiously to get permission to leave San Salvador for a time.3 He is her only hope. I have asked her to stay with me on Saturday and Sunday, for I shall be all alone. Marion is going north with Cronins. But Ronona doesn't think her father will let her, being a man of violent temper, and particularly out of sorts just now. I can hardly imagine such a life. I had been told that her family was queer, but I didn't know it was that bad. Well, my dear, since you need the Freshman, I shall send this off and continue later, instead of saving things up for a week and forgetting to send the letter. The exhibition continues as usual. One grows very tired, but one sleeps a lot to make up for it. I am no longer attempting to do three things at once. I am going on the principle that you have reiterated so often. 'There is lots of time"—and I think that if I don't do everything that I think should be done, right now, by me,—someone else will, sometime soon, or maybe in the next civilization. And I won't know about it then perhaps. And so, it won't matter. I do hope that you are not too used up after being jolted about for a day and a night, or maybe two nights. Good-night. Helen. P.S. The article should run around thirteen hundred words, I think. H.G.K. 1 An article NF was writing. It was published as 'The Freshman and His Religion" in the Canadian Student, 16 (October 1933), 6-9. HK has a drawing, "Late Afternoon among the Sumacs," in the same issue. 2 HK is referring to the SCM conference at Lake Couchiching. Brooks, general secretary of the SCM at the time, seems to have had a hand in paying for HK's expenses to the Couchiching conference, perhaps because of her role in assisting him and Jessie Macpherson with the music by playing the piano. The theme of the conference, attended by more than two hundred people, was "The Relevance of Christianity for our Day." See "Central Area Conference—Lake Couchiching," Canadian Student, 16 (October 1933), 22-3. 3 See Letter 28, n. 6, above.

i September 1933 40. NF to HK

153 Moncton, N.B. Sometime toward the end of the week.

Postmarked i September 1933; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto 6, Ontario. Brown Agate: Excuse the pencil, but you know how it is. I'm propped in a bed at last, thank God! the first since Sunday night I've had of my own. I didn't sleep much Monday and didn't have the bed to myself except when Bob got up to cough and remained to spray (original joke). Trip uneventful but hellish. Got on the train feeling choked—thank the Lord my tears lie pretty deep—and decided to go to bed. So I simply turned the preceding seat over and shoved my feet across it. The connective tissue, from my ankles to my knees, decided that being hung upon nothing was too monstrous a miracle, and raised a howl. Finally I got a knee parked in each ear, my chin cushioned on my genitalia, my skull flattened against one board and my arches against another, and fell into a troubled sleep thinking how luxurious Goliath would have felt had he slept with Procrustes. Woke up in Quebec with enough pins and needles to stock a factory. Got off at Montreal and ate breakfast—roll and coffee—bad coffee. Walked over Montreal. Got on the Maritime express for the first and last time in my life. (The slow local train to the Maritimes. The other one is the Ocean Limited). Dozed till close to Levis, though at first the car was filled up with a choking dust, and a French slattern with a she-brat in front of me decided to open a window and add cinders to the festivity. Got off at midnight at Riviere du Loup1 and swallowed a sandwich and a glass of milk, served by a girl who shrugged her shoulders and tossed her palms at me when I mentioned coffee. Took my time, and the train just started as I put my foot on it. Whew! Riviere du Loup, a hideous little pigsty full of ignorance, superstition, dirt, the quaint charm of old Quebec and the devout unspoiled piety of the habitant, is not a black hole I should care to be stuck in with half a dollar. Repeated the compression process with variations to Campbellton.2 Got here at halfpast ten this (Thursday) morning. Since then have done nothing but take a bath. Will start on your article tomorrow. Conditions here are, of course, bad—we're away behind with rent

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and so on. I don't blame Dad—there isn't any conceivable way of getting money out of selling construction materials to three provinces who won't construct. Mother has had a sick spell, but is all right now. She took coal oil—a quart and a half of it—is still taking it. Dad says it's so if we blow out a fuse she can swallow a ball of yarn and then we'd have a light. He hasn't much sympathy with coal oil as a curative. Dad said he could have come to Toronto with the Toronto Land Co., but he doesn't like the company, which is Jewish, miserly and impecunious. Mother is rather broken up at present. There's Vera, still without her salary. However, one of her friends has promised to do his best to get her a job with reasonably honest employers. And a cousin of mine got married—daughter of the judge. Sent an invitation to aunt (Holy Roller) who accepted. They wrote her "date changed" and let it go at that. Aunt Dolly got the idea and wrote a heartbroken letter to Mother. Pretty raw deal, but the judge's family is like that.3 Of course, they never thought she'd accept the invitation. Well, I shall start to work immediately. For music perhaps an attack on the Inventions.4 And no end of correspondence. But I feel like what H.G. Wells calls a Gawdsaker—one who is perpetually saying, "For Gawd's sake, let's do something." Perhaps some day I shall be a rich man with money, flocks and herds.5 But just now all the assets I have are one little ewe lamb. But how I love her!—even if I have been taken up and set down fifteen hundred miles from her. Norrie. 1 A town located two hundred kilometres east of Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River. 2 A town in New Brunswick located on the Quebec border near the mouth of the Restigouche River. 3 The judge is NF's mother's older brother, Eratus Howard; it is not clear which of his four daughters was to be married. The "Holy Roller" is NF's Aunt Dolly, an older sister of NF's mother who married Rev. Rufus Garratt. 4 Bach's "three-part inventions," music he wrote for the harpischord, which he himself called "symphonies." 5 The allusion is to Job 42.

4 September 1933

41. NF to HK

155

Moncton, N.B.

Postmarked 4 September 1933; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto 6, Ontario. The letter has "THIS SPACE FOR ADDRESS ONLY" printed in caps in the left margin beside the salutation; "THIS SPACE FOR ALIBIS ONLY" beside the first paragraph; "THIS SPACE FOR ADDRESS ONLY" beside the second; "THIS SPACE FOR CORRESPONDENCE (ARE YOU GLAD?)" beside the third; "THIS SPACE FOR POSTSCRIPTS ONLY" beside the P.S/s at the end.

Hazelnut: I am sending your article.1 Or my article, if you like. It isn't a particularly good article. I had to rush it a bit, of course, and no one feels so inspired with the squalling of French brats in his ears, the thumping of an engine in his brain, and the odd lump of coal in his back teeth. Mark my words, the Maritime Express is going down in history as The Train Norrie Frye Didn't Like. Of course the opening of the article is on your desk, and I had to remember what I could of it. But I wouldn't get it now, at least, till Tuesday, and you should and, I think, will have the complete opus yourself by that time. I don't think you need to re-copy it, but suit yourself. I can't get a typewriter just now. The current issue of Maclean's (Sept. i) has a very interesting catechism in it on Canadian problems and so forth that is supposed, after being related to a score, to show whether you are of a Conservative, Liberal, or C.C.F. temperament.2 It's pretty ingenious, and interested me chiefly because it placed me, with perfect accuracy. On the fence between the Liberal and C.C.F. battalions, exactly where a follower of Spengler and Mantalini3 ought to be. I think, with the C.C.F., that capitalism is crashing around our ears, and that any attempt to build it up again will bring it down with a bigger crash. I think with the Liberals that Socialism, as it is bound to develop historically, is an impracticable remedy, not because it is impracticable—it is inevitable— but because it is not a remedy. I think with the C.C.F. that a cooperative state is necessary to preserve us from chaos. I think with Liberals that it is impossible to administer that state at present. I think with the C.C.F. that man is unable, in a laissez faire system, to avoid running after false gods and destroying himself. I think with Liberals

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that it is only by individual freedom and democratic development that any progress can be made. In short, any "way out" must of necessity be miraculous. We can save ourselves only through an established co-operative church, and if the church ever wakes up to that fact, that will constitute enough of a miracle to get us the rest of the way. I am getting up my shorthand again. It's a big help once you get on to it, and it comes back to me with very little difficulty. I'd have done it before, only I didn't know I still had the textbook, which I ran to earth in the attic. It saves a lot of time and energy when an idea comes to you. [Here there are some shorthand marksl—which is the last sentence. There isn't much news yet, of course, and as I have too many letters to write now, I'll quit here. Can you get me Munro Beattie's address? I suppose he's living at home. Just an idea—I may not write him at all. So long for a few days. Lovingly, Norrie. PS. X

P.P.S. Sometime when your father comes home ask him whom I should write for information about the C.C.F. Then he could put me in touch with the Maritime man to see. 1 See Letter 39, n. i, above. 2 Walter B. Herbert, "What Are You?" Maclean's, \ September 1933, 9, 36. 3 A selfish coxcomb in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby who continually quarrels with his wife and ultimately ruins her by his extravagance. NF is apparently being ironic; he may, however, have intended to write "Mazzini," thereby locating himself between the conservative politics of Spengler and ardent liberalism of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), the Italian revolutionary.

42. HK to NF

[Toronto] Wednesday night. [6? September 1933]

My dear— I am too tired to write a decent letter to-night—and I feel very small and sleepy and rolled up in a ball downstairs. Everybody has gone to bed. Ruth Elder is staying for a few days, and has just come in.

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Marion and Harold came home last night. Family seems fairly well busted—I have been listening to depression talk all day at the booth and feel a little jaundiced. Ted Avison called around to-night and we had quite a chat—he will be writing to you probably, about the Bob.1 Feels at a standstill since somebody failed and now Marsh Laverty will be put in charge as obviously the man with most pep and pushfulness. I would tell you the latest news about my two side-kicks at the soup counter, except that it would take too long, and is important only if one is really interested in the married troubles of the younger generation. Which I ain't at present. I came home part way to-night in Betty Gram's car, with Helen [Oram], and their cousin who alternates an art exhibit job with serving Coles sandwiches.2 They were asking for you. I wasn't alone this week-end after all. For Jack Oughton got back on Thursday night3 and I met him Saturday as I was coming home. He came along and drank coffee while I had supper. Then on Sunday he made dinner—tramping around on my newly varnished kitchen floor (2 o'clock Saturday night) in his bare feet, since he can't get used to wearing shoes again. Then, we went paddling at the island4 and read The Hunting of the Snark'5 and enjoyed moonlight and the willows and the water. Tuesday (last) night he and I went to the art gallery at the ex,6 and did other usual things—such as resting on a park bench and listening to the Highlanders make hideous noises, and another band play Ketelbey's 'Persian Market.'7 So, as a playmate, Jack is very agreeable. He has a great desire to travel,—to get the edges knocked off,—especially since he never went in for social life at college. Can't understand people enjoying music. Regards me as the girl down-the-street-that-he-knew-when-she-was-just-so-high. I miss you, Norrie, but not so much yet. The exhibition is such a hellish grind. But one doesn't mope. Besides, I'm getting so tired of people asking me what I am going to do, that I must find out soon. Anything might happen! And I'm ready to work, too! Your pen was brought back here, but the note-book is still north. I shall send the pen, and try to get the other off soon. I phoned the C.C.F. people here. Their address in Toronto is "Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, 3 Charles Street West, Toronto." The man told me that there isn't8 any headquarters (?) in Moncton (addlepate me) just now, but that the man who is organizing the Mar-

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itime provinces is Mr. A.B. McDonald, Antigonish, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Also, latest reports are A.M. Beattie is still headed for annihilation, and his address is 254 Evelyn Avenue, Toronto. And thanks so much for writing soon—please don't leave me too long in between. Whoa! Cheer up my girl! (I almost slipped that time. I'm going to bed now just to keep smiling) Had a letter from Dot Drever again. Bill [Conklin] and Ida [Clare] called on her on their way to Conklins' cottage—both very happy. Bill going to Columbia. Oh my dear—everybody asks me if you are coming up here this year. Damnation! The way I am talking one would think this the downfall of Carthage even. I am almost through Salammbo9—really the diabolical way that man Flaubert describes gushing entrails and the last stages of leprosy and pits reeking with the rotting lower limbs of men not quite dead, is enough to endanger a stomach not already weakened by the stench of soup.10 Ugh! I mean, I shudder when I think of soup. The battlefield is almost inevitable after being surrounded by the sight of bloody tomatoes. Ah well. The article isn't here—you probably forgot to enclose it in your last letter. It's all right anyway. I am getting in touch with [Gertrude] Rutherford—she can do what she pleases about it. I think I'm through with that magazine. I'll probably rave on again to-morrow, but just now, good-night. Ah Norrie, Nome orrie—girl trails off Friday afternoon Here we are again for a couple of minutes. Afternoon off. Cold in the head coming on rapidly. Exhibition crowds thinning. Mildred told our nicest salesman to go to hell this morning when he said 'good afternoon' when she came in at 9.15 instead of 8.30. She's mad again— at poor old Bert. I didn't hang around to find out why. Your article came yesterday, and you are an angel. Except for a few heavy places where you talk of 'once grasping this fundamental principle,'11 etc, I enjoyed it very much. And that's saying something, just now. I leave for the conference on Wednesday. But before that I have to get work done for Miss Ray, and expect to be pretty busy. She is working hard reading the proof of Dr Edgar's book.12

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159

Murdock Keith came around again this morning. He's fed up with exhibition too. One more day! Marion [Kemp] is taking these things, i.e. your pen, this letter, and your essay (mailed to Gertrude Rutherford) to the post-office—so I shall stop now. I feel I am being dreadfully dull anyhow. It's probably just the soreness in the throat and the sneezly feeling in my nose and my eyes that want to drip heavily. Sneezles and wheezles. Helen. P.S. I love you very much. 1 An annual satiric and musical review at VC, the oldest in Canada, formally baptizing the freshmen into the life of the college. It was begun in 1872—when VC was in Cobourg—as a "Bob party" for the benefit of the college janitor, Robert Beare, from whom the show took its name. See NF's comment on the 1931 Bob in Acta Victoriana, 56 (October-November 1931), 30. 2 Coles, Ltd. was a Toronto caterer and confectioner, with a number of branch stores throughout the city. 3 Jack Oughton had returned from Lake Nipissing, where he had been doing fisheries research for the U of T (Jack Oughton to RDD, i December 1994). 4 Centre Island, the largest of the fifteen Toronto Islands. 5 A mock-heroic nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll (1876). 6 The Canadian National Exhibition. 7 See Letter 5, n. 4, above. 8 HK has written "aren't" above "isn't." 9 An exotic and violent novel (1862) by Gustave Flaubert about a priestess, Salammbo; the story is set in Carthage at a time when the city was besieged by mercenaries. 10 Salammbo is filled with torture and other forms of savagery; like HK, many critics objected to its excessive brutality. 11 HK is quoting a phrase from page 6 of NF's article "The Freshman and His Religion," Canadian Student, 16 (October 1933), 6-9. 12 Pelham Edgar's The Art of the Novel, which was published in 1933. NF reviewed the book in Acta Victoriana, 58 (Christmas 1933), 17-20.

43. NF to HK

Moncton, N.B.

Postmarked 12 September 1933; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto 6, Ontario; forwarded to Y.M.C.A. Park, Lake Couchiching, Ont. Chipmunk: Your letter came some time ago, and—what's the matter with me anyway?—it came this morning—and I wish I felt more like being

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cheerful. If your family's talking depression or feels busted, you should—hush, I'll tell you that when I feel more like that too. The exgirl friend dropped in Friday—came over from the shore, having heard that I was home from a local gossip. She's supposed to be practically engaged to a Forestry and Civil Engineering graduate of U.N.B., but I don't think she cares much about him. I've never seen him. Last summer she was going strong with him—as a matter of fact I had serious doubts of his existence until she gave me a letter to mail addressed to him. Poor little girl—you and your sanguinary surroundings. And Flaubert—of all men to read at such a time. You'll be tackling Zola in your childbed next. Thanks for all your information, though "Antigonish, Fredericton, New Brunswick" is a bit ambiguous, Antigonish being a town in the eastern part of Nova Scotia. Possibly the address symbolizes his ubiquitous organizing activity. Good God! its hailing outside! I never saw such weather—I've been frozen to death ever since I came here. However, I have to leave just now and type a letter for Dad at the Library. Dad's trying to get an agency from a Montreal firm on a salary. He says he thinks he'll stay here for the winter and move up to Montreal. There are a million people in Montreal and three-quarters of a million between the Maine border and St. John's, Nfld., so you can imagine the difference in travelling expenses. There being nothing in the way of news, I must tell you a story instead. Do you remember that I called you an agate in my first letter?1 This was why. Parable of the Agate When God made Adam out of the mud and clay, the precious stones were scornful, all but the moonstone, who was an art critic and thought the rest were Philistines. She said: "A brilliant technical tour de force, showing what can be done with the basest of materials, but it evinces an outlook essentially pedestrian." But when Eve was created, the precious stones began to whisper, and the bloodstone, a very old and wise stone, broke in upon the moonstone (who had got as far as "evincing a superior delicacy and sensitivity of outlook") to say: "I think we are re-appearing in the world." "So do I," said the sapphire. "But why?"

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"Do you not see/' said the bloodstone, "how she delights and tantalizes him with an elusive brilliance? Do you not see how he goes mad to possess her, and when he has possessed her, how baffled and disappointed he is? He will go mad to possess us in the same way, and will get as little from us. And from whence does she derive her power? By leaving her whole being exposed and absorbent to him, so that she reflects his own soul, and to nature, so that she reflects nature's beauty as a frame for it." "This is getting deep," said the amethyst. "Be quiet, you minx," said the sapphire. "How long do you think Eve will last? These animals are ingenious things, but they aren't built to stand weather." "She will last indefinitely," said the bloodstone. "She has all of our hardness." "I don't see that," protested the amethyst. (My fountain pen just came,2 and thanks a lot) "Adam's all squshy [sic] and gooey, and Eve's a lot softer than he is." "Adam and Eve cannot last long," said the bloodstone, "but there will be others like them, and Eve will produce them. We call ourselves eternal, but only this is true immortality, and that is why, beautiful as we are, the animals are greater than we. No, in Eve God has completed an idea He only started with us. We take our measurement of importance in the world from them." The amethyst said, "Oo!", the strident topaz yawned, the sapphire looked thoughtful, the carnelian started to raise a difficulty. But the diamond blazed with a great light, and said: "If this be true, then how great is the diamond! For I am hardest and most eternal of all. And I am of all stones the brightest and the purest. I reflect every angle of light in a splendor that shames the sun, but interpose nothing of my own. I am a symbol of supreme greatness in woman. I am the empress of stones. I am the most precious thing in the world." And the ruby glowed in splendid crimson, and said: "If this be true, how great is the ruby! For in me men will see the love of passion, ending in death. Women who worship me will conquer heroes and their names will resound eternally through the world. I am a queen of stones."

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And the sapphire gleamed in her intensity of blue, and said: "If this be true, how great is the sapphire! For in me is the strange remoteness which renders woman true to herself. Women who worship me will govern empires through the force of their mysticism and cause all men to stagger in blindness to their feet. I am a queen of stones." And the emerald kindled her green fire, and said: "If this be true, how great is the emerald! For I am the symbol of fruitfulness. Women who worship me will rear strong children and may have what they like as a reward. I am a queen of stones." And the opal burned every color of flame, and said: "If this be true, how much greater the opal! For I am all of you, and more. I am every woman by turns. Women who worship me can wring the last ounce of either anguish or delight from men. I shall be hated, looked on with dread, but respected none the less, as the queen of stones." And the pearl chuckled softly, and, diffusing a weird phosphorescence, said to herself: "Even the pearl will be the queen of stones. The women who worship me will really rule, and let these other noisy ones do their agonizing. Men will struggle for riches, and for young women, and above all else for young daughters of rich men. And they will bow down to me, who am likewise an irritant made lustrous by a good-natured oyster." Then the lesser stones declared their rank, and aligned themselves, but one. And the bloodstone looked keenly at the agate, and said: "Do you expect to be great too?" "How can she be?" broke in the turquoise. "She's dark brown. None of us are dark brown." "The soil is brown," observed the agate mildly. "Pah! That filthy stuff!" said the turquoise. "God made Adam from it," said the agate. "There is sanity and intelligence in brown, a sympathy and understanding in it, at least, which cannot be found in brilliance of your glittering variety. Above all, there is self-reliance in it. I belong to myself, not to the whim of the sun." "Gawd! Gimme a dicshnary, willya?" gibbered the topaz. "Where'dya learn all that stuff?" "It isn't your color but your cloudiness I object to," said the lapis lazuli. "I don't claim to be anybody great—I'm opaque, I admit it,—

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but at least I've got nothing to hide." "I dare say not," said the agate. "I prefer to keep my individuality and my soul to myself. You may have noticed that I alone have a pattern—I vary, but I am constant within myself." "Say it slow," said the topaz. "Whats's in-the-which-uality?" "It's a word she got from Adam," said the amethyst. "Bah!" said the topaz. "What's a soul?" "I think she got that from God," whispered the turquoise. "Yah!" said the topaz. "Your women will never rule the world," said the bloodstone. "They will never make anyone suffer," said the agate. "I like you," said the bloodstone. "I thought you would," said the agate. Little Phyllis MacWilliams and her small sister have come up with a basin of crabapples for mother. Phyllis just started school this fall, in Miss Stannard's room. Thirteen years ago Miss Stannard taught Grade Four, and I started school in her room. Oh, well. The MacWilliams live downstairs. The father works in a fox-bread bakery very close to us—too close. Tomato soup is the quintessential distillation of ambrosia compared to fox-bread. And he got his coat-sleeve caught in a machine that tore off half his hand before he stopped it. That was just a few months ago. He's working again, but it's a terrific strain on him. Three children—these two and the baby boy whose arrival I heralded last summer. I shall be glad to get the note-book,3 though I'm in no hurry for it. It has the opening of a Platonic dialogue on music in it which I may work on here, though probably not. I started it in Chicago, when Vera was at school. Keep cheerful, my dear, and remember I'm as close as I can be. I know that your love for me goes far deeper than the snivelling level. But you're in civilization at least. This Mildred friend of yours must be a rather ghastly harpy,—but if they start that way now they should get divorced before their lives are ruined. I suppose it won't be long before you go to the Conference of Coruscating Christians to defend my wretched article against the torrent of orthodox abuse, if printed. Speaking of playing hymns—oh, well, we almost were—the local organist gave a rendition of "Nearer, my God, to Thee"4 which certainly made me feel like edging nearer:

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—yesterday evening. At least it sounded like the foregoing—I may be unjust. I suppose you have heard this type of pounding, the left hand first. This creature may have been a supply. We met in the Baptist Church—a small building with the organ on the bum—the above improvisation was on the piano, which was why I noticed it. The preacher was an old man, and he recited his sermon as glibly and perfunctorily as a bribed witness—which I expect he is, in a sense. It sounded like a twentieth or thirtieth repetition of it. I have to go to church here—mother insists on going, although she doesn't hear, and I hate to see her go alone. Well, I guess I'd better tune out for this time. Goodnight. Me HGK/NF.

Send me a January Acta sometime. I forgot mine, or enclosed another one instead of it. Thanks for Beattie's address. I feel like talking to somebody sentient, and I think he'd like me to write him. I'll ask him what the hell "Waste Land" is all about.5 N. 1 NF is referring to Letter 40 (postmarked i September), his first letter to HK upon the resumption of the correspondence after their reunion in August, in which he had addressed her as "Brown Agate." 2 Here NF changed from blue to black ink. He had left his pen in Toronto. 3 The notebook that NF had left at Gordon Bay. See Letter 42, above. 4 A nineteenth-century hymn, words and music by Sarah F. Adams and Lowell Mason, respectively. 5 NF apparently is referring to Beattie's article on The Waste Land, "The Poetry of T.S. Eliot: Two Aspects," in Acta Victoriana, 57 (January 1933), 30-5.

iy September 1933 44. HK to NF

165 Y.M.C.A. Park Lake Couchiching, Ont. Sunday afternoon. [17 September 1933]

My dear Norrie, When I recalled that I hadn't written to you since the feverish caterwaul I sent over a week ago, I felt a little bit conscience-stricken. Since weeping and sniffling are horrible things to convey in a letter, especially since you have several things to worry you at home. I really did get a cold that time, though, together with a bilious head-ache (boy, now I know what a bilious green colour is) which kept me away from the last day of exhibition, in bed. However, there is a limit to all things, even the amount one can get off one's chest (or thereabouts) at any given time, so that everything comes back to normal again. Monday and Tuesday I spent running around after Miss Ray, Dr. Locke, Mr Lismer and so forth. Miss Ray has some work—enough to keep me going for a week or two. Mr Lismer's scheme is quite indefinite as yet, because he had not at that time seen his board of directors who squeal every time he mentions a new idea. But he has already bought an old house which is being decorated now and will be opened as a centre for children's work in art.1 He has great plans for it—something like The Children's Library on St George Street2—and wants me to be one of the bright young things on the staff. But it won't bring in much money, because at best it can only be for a few hours a week, for some time to come. However, he says that he thinks it is a good thing, that eventually the work will expand, and that it will grow into a paying proposition. (I told him my ideas about music in Victoria College, and he said that was very fine, but it might turn out to be a great deal of work with no particular remuneration.) But his plan, he hoped, would result in something tangible. All well and good. See him when I get back. He wants me because of musical training. Marjorie Lismer is up here at the conference. I had tea with Kay Coburn on Monday afternoon. She liked the pass course article3 very much, and was glad that the subject had been dealt with seriously, as it was a matter of some concern at present. She had been talking to Prof Sissons about it and he, too, liked it very much. She wasn't sure that your conclusion, the abolition of the pass course, would solve the problem, but you put across some

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good arguments. We had a nice chat, about England, and Mary Carman, and residence seniors, and a job for me, and music in the college. I am not going to tell you much about this conference, I think, because the atmosphere is, I suppose, something like the Chicago Fair, a little difficult to communicate except by superlatives. I am not rushing about from place to place in search of people's opinions, for oddly enough, I am beginning to get a vantage point of my own, and I don't feel the need of worrying over a point like a dog with a bone. You would like the conference, Norrie, I am sure you would. Last night Larry McKenzie and Bickersteth motored up, bringing Noel Baker, secretary of Lord Cecil, graduate of Cambridge, many years' experience on the inside of the League of Nations. He spoke on the League, of course. All is not lost, stay with the ship, the League while only half a league since the Manchurian situation,4 will function again effectively. Cited cases of wars averted, with details. Great man. Bishop Owen and FJ. Moore took the Sunday service to-day, with Jules LaPointe fiddling. Jules is a dark Frenchman in a commerce course, with a musical leaning. Not as good as Roy, but plays quite well. Jim Endicott plays sometimes too—since he learned by himself in China, he is anxious for practice here. There are some 28o-odd people here to-day. Dr [Walter T.] Brown and Dr Line, and Dr Langford are here. Etc etc. J.D. Robins is coming to-night to give the usual talk on folk-songs. Little Helen plays away and enjoys it all. Now this is perhaps a little news. Of course I have not heard from you since the week before last, and I don't know whether anything is happening to you or not. (My mail has not been forwarded here.) But Jean Elder, and Jean Cameron and Irwin Hilliard and I visited the Clares yesterday, and had a lovely time.5 We stayed for supper and saw their new house and talked and talked. Art [Cragg] has been given a $300 fellowship in Philosophy,—entailing they don't know what duties. And he is to be Dr. Brown's secretary until Dr. [Edward W.] Wallace gets back, sometime after Christmas, if not after that too. I think that Art has just recently heard of it. And it is rather splendid for him. I have wondered whether there might not be a little something in store for you, too. I remember last year you didn't know how you were to get back, and along came the Trick6 again. Florence [Clare] didn't know whether Art would be in Theology or go ahead with M.A. work. He evidently doesn't know yet himself. I haven't any suggestions to offer, except that you do a little writing around to Dr.

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Brown, or somebody else. Dr Edgar is still working with that book of his—Miss Ray is reading the proofs.7 I had breakfast with Dr Brown and Dr Line this morning, at the same table that is. When Dr Brown asked me what I was going to do next I couldn't tell him then and there that I should like a job at the library. Besides, when I think of the work that there is to be done there I am not keen about it. Very dull stuff on the Bell books.8 Jean Cameron has been lying out on a rug with me all afternoon while I wrote this. She sends you her best regards, and reminds you that you did not write to her once all summer. It is now almost time to off for the evening programme, so I shall mail this on the way. My dear, I hope there will be a letter from you to-morrow, and that some good things will have happened during the week. Vera may have landed a job, or your father sold some bricks or your mother recovered entirely, or you may have some new idea. At any rate, I think that surely the college cannot ignore one of their best men ([C.E.] Auger: "our best man") entirely. And keep cheerful! By the way, I should like to know how you are getting on about the C.C.F. article. Dr. Line told me that Mr. MacDonald is a college man, quite a good man for the movement.9 (I casually asked about the Maritime organizer.) Both Ida [Clare] and Florence [Clare] send you their best, and hope very much that you will be back. And as for me, you know that I am hoping and hoping. Helen.

P.S. Bill [Conklin] has gone to Columbia to do work on the banking system. Dr. Brown expects a very large registration, nearly 400. 1 Lismer's dream of establishing a children's art centre was realized in October of 1933 when the centre was opened in a building that had been vacated by the Art Students' League at 4 Grange Rd., on the southeast corner of Grange Park. 2 Also known as Boys' and Girls' House, the Children's Library was opened by Lillian H. Smith at 40 St. George Street in 1922. See also Letter 97, n. 6, above. 3 'The Pass Course: A Polemic," Ada Victoriana, 57 (Midsummer 1933), 5-10. NF argued that the three-year pass course should be unconditionally abolished and that all students should be required to take the four-year honour course. VC itself could not abolish the pass course, as its programs were under the jurisdiction of the Faculty of Arts at the U of T; in principle it could have refused admission to students wishing to register for the pass course. 4 The pun refers to the prestige lost by the League of Nations because of its inability to recover Manchuria for China after the Japanese invasion in 1931.

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5 The Clares, who had recently moved from Norham, Ont, to Orillia, were close by: Orillia is located at the narrows between Lake Couchiching and Lake Simcoe. 6 The Susan Treble Trick Scholarship, which NF received for 1932-33. 7 See Letter 42, n. 12, above. 8 In 1932 Professor A.J. Bell of the classics department at VC donated his library, the finest collection in Canada, to VC; Bell's books, which included an extensive Erasmus collection, became the nucleus of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at VC. 9 See Letter 45.

45- NF to HK

Moncton, N.B.

Postmarked 22 September 1933; addressed to HK at 205 Fulton Ave., Toronto 6, Ontario. The ex-girl friend's father is an ardent C.C.F. worker,—almost a fanatic, in fact—why in hell should I get entangled with daughters of paid agents of Moscow and consequent emissaries of the devil?—and called here one night to take me down to an executive meeting of the C.C.F. here, of which he is chairman. Small, but active enough, with old man Rogers supplying most of the energy. Mother said when I was gone: "If he gets a chance to get up and speak, he's away for the evening!"—and I got my chance. They asked me to give the big powwow at their opening meeting. So I wrote to 3 Charles St. West Toronto and said Please send me some My dear Helen:

2