James Reaney,

James Reaney, “the fire inside”, and Canadian Literary History


Canada has lost a special and hugely talented artist. “We shall not look upon his like again”. James Reaney was a much decorated poet, playwright, professor, and personality.  (Governor General’s Awards, Chalmer’s Award, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, etc.)  He is gone, but his work isn’t.  The person dies, but the art lives on – we read him today and tomorrow.  “Reaney says this or that” today, and tomorrow. And so only in a way – and eccentric Reaney would like this – is he deserving of what we call “an obituary”. He was a very real eccentric – someone who did sensible things even though they weren’t “acceptable”.  There were always, I remember, little stories – one being about him riding his bike to work at “Cadillac College”, otherwise known as the University of Western Ontario. (Bicycles are “regional”, “neighbourhood”. Greg Curnoe, one of the “London School of painters”, painted bicycles, and was killed on a bicycle outing.)

From the 1940s through time, into the present century, Reaney was a presence and a talent both producing work and influencing the state of letters in Canada.  He was one of those who possessed “the fire inside”. One imagines him writing plays and putting them on (alone) on a desert island without an audience.  But he didn’t have to do that.

Sandra Martin (Globe and Mail, June 12 08 S13) remarks that, like Alice Munro, he “rarely strayed from his physical roots in South-western Ontario, the source of his inspiration”. But Alice Munro was by no means the only other of the kind.  Reaney lived through a time when the local and the regional were celebrated and focused upon (as a form, sometimes, of Canadian nationalism). The London School of painters used the local and matched with novelists and poets in the region (both the acclaimed and the less well-known) of whom Reaney was only one among many.
But he was, all agree, a special one among many.  He began early. He was good.  He was early accepted by the very powerful. He was completely independent of time-serving or toadying of any kind – but he fitted seamlessly the political agenda of “the Canadian Ruling Class” through most of his active life.  (I suspect, nonetheless, he voted CCF and NDP always.) He was “political” in a way he could not have imagined, being used to legitimate a political position with which he probably didn’t agree and certainly didn’t endorse.

To explain that is difficult.  I’ll try.

Young artists in Canada “launch” – even unconsciously.  If they are acceptable to the Establishment in Canada, they are praised and given room to experiment, fail, and build to excellence.  If they are unacceptable to the Establishment, they are erased.  (We aren’t dealing with quality here but acceptability to the Establishment.) As proof of that, if we were to go through all of James Reaney’s creations, we would find many we thought were pretty shaky attempts, some even pretty awful.

That may be why when his play, The Killdeer, (1960) was produced, Nathan Cohen (devoted Canadian theatre critic) called it a “desperately bad play”, while Mavor Moore (equally committed) praised it as groundbreaking.  Mavor Moore was a wonderfully gifted, endlessly creative Establishment man.  Cohen was not really a creative writer at all.  He had a grand vision of a Canadian theatre from coast to coast, strong, well-attended, building a tradition, Canadian, and great.  You might say that Mavor Moore was willing to fit into the patchy, colonial thing called Canadian theatre, and Nathan Cohen definitely was not.  Cohen challenged the colonial structure of the Arts in Canada. In that he was a maverick. He wanted playwrights to write works that Canadian audiences would want and need.  He probably saw Reaney’s play as esoteric, limited to a small audience, the game of an intellectual. He may have been right, which doesn’t in any way discount the worth of Reaney’s play.

The presiding cultural figure of the day was Northrop Frye, critic.  He was a totally Establishment person who had savage contempt for the achievement of artists in Canada.  He is advertised as someone who believed in and fought for Canadian art.  He did not.  In 1965, in a key article, he declared that if Canadian literature was sifted for excellence it would be “a huge debunking process leaving Canadian literature a poor naked allouette plucked of every feather of decency and dignity”.  That’s a clear enough statement.  He resisted the move to hire excellent Canadians (fairly) to universities and colleges and to increase Canadian offerings to students.  And he pointed out that Mordecai Richler – who was introducing U.S. themes and character types into Canadian literature - was beginning to teach the nation’s writers desirable “cosmopolitanism”.

Some years after Frye’s summary judgement of the non-excellence of Canadian literature, the Canada Council became convinced that Canadian materials had, indeed, been neglected in the education system.  It proposed a twenty-five million dollar special catch-up fund to aid Canadian research and strengthen the availability of Canadian information.  Northrop Frye signed a petition of Establishment figures attempting to prevent the project from going forward.

James Reaney fitted into the reactionary agenda of those Establishment taste-makers because he was in love with the local, the regional, small history, and literary symbol. The Establishment taste-makers could say that nationalism - a deep caring for the whole country - was the sentiment of fascists. And to help quell a growing insistence by Canadians that their country deserved care, deserved fondness, deserved a vision for the future, and deserved real economic, cultural, and political independence, the Establishment could say “celebrate the local, the neighbourhood, the region.  That will be authentic, real, genuine, (and, incidentally, it will keep you away from the sell-out of the country and its increasing colonization).” Many did what the Establishment told them to do.  James Reaney would have done it if there had been no Establishment.

One can see that era as one in which the politics of art was fought long and hard.  People had to join sides.  Robert Fulford (critic) went “international” and Right, and is still pumping out material for the National Post and others of like belief.  Margaret Atwood wrote a piece in Maclean’s in the early 1970s saying, (yawn) the nationalist thing was over. (You care for the country once every ten years for six months?)  About this time, the Canada Council appointed a U.S. citizen (and self-proclaimed anarchist) to be a judge for the Governor General’s Awards.  That was too much even for the passive collaborators – and hell was raised. Mordecai Richler (from overseas and then from Canada) attacked the parochial and narrow-minded who wanted there to be strong, independent Canadian publishers using Canadian editors and publishing Canadian authors.  Northrop Frye wrote essays late in his life saying Canada has never existed as a country and never will.

James Reaney was mostly silent, working away at his creative tasks.  But he cared about Canada and its decent representation in our educational system.  And so he supported the idea that I (fighting for young Canadians in the system and fighting for Canadian curriculum and Canadian independence) should appear at the University of Western Ontario to speak to students in the Canadian program. 

I arrived and spoke to a fairly large audience about the legitimacy of Canadian studies and about the work of our own excellent thinkers, writers, and social ‘makers’.  Then we went to lunch at the Faculty Club – about five of us who were teachers and writers. James Reaney was one of the most distinguished people at the University of Western Ontario.  But we sat in a corner, spoke in low voices, tried not to attract attention, and talked together about the obstructions raised to prevent Canadian materials from being fairly represented and taught in Canadian universities.

I think of James Reaney as one of those golden tiger lily blossoms speckled with black that you run across sometimes, in surprise, when climbing a mountain. The tiger lily is there, is natural, is wonderful – a surprise.  But you don’t expect it to know that a U.S. Corporation has just bought the mountain, that all your friends have helped sell it, and it will be levelled very soon so the resources buried in it can be shipped out of Canada.

Nathan Cohen (who died too young) was no mountain tiger lily. He cared for the mountain, he saw its place in U.S. imperial designs, and did what he could to fight for it.  The times I spent with Nathan Cohen I think he knew he was very sick and knew he wouldn’t have time to see his dream of a national theatre become a reality. Little did he know that even another fifty years wouldn’t have given him enough time. Or perhaps he did know that.

Healthy countries have an equal number of James Reaneys and Nathan Cohens – they build and shape the culture together.  Canada, sadly, has few Nathan Cohens, and it kills them off as early as possible. The Reaneys flower and bear fruit, and that is good.  But it is, alas, a limited good.