Westmount Library Event - Art Now

On Tuesday October 4, I gave a presentation for Art Now at the Westmount Library. This is my talk.

I was the wife of Goodridge Roberts and lived with him for 22 years until his death in 1974. He was an artist, a painter, at an important juncture in the history of Canadian art. Modernism had begun and was reinforced by the arrival of John Lyman from France. In Quebec the issuing of the Refus Global manifesto and its passionate rejection of much of the past resulted in abstract  painting holding sway. In the rest of Canada, the Group of Seven had not yet developed into the iconic force it was to assume and to remain to this day. Goodridge’s own approach had resulted from his studies in New York in the twenties and his appreciation of the work of many French artists of the day, especially that of Cezanne.

        He had gained considerable recognition for his work by the time we met in 1952 and was selected by the National Gallery to represent Canada in the Venice Biennale of that year along with Emily Carr, David Milne and Alfred Pellan.In appearance Goodridge was tall and good looking. In manner he was gentle and courteous with a fine sense of humour and the soul of a poet. He found it hard to say no to anyone’s needs but had developed the ability and concentration to work hard at his chosen profession. We became deeply committed to each other that fateful 1952 summer on the rocky island shores of Georgian Bay. It was, however, necessary to get through a chaotic and painful two years before we could marry and settle down. I lost legal custody of my three year old daughter and experienced a distressing separation and divorce.

        I describe in my book the year we spent in Europe, mostly in France but also extended visits to Italy and Holland. It was an immersion in museums and their collections, as well as in the surroundings in which artists of other eras had flourished as well as suffered. Of quite a different order was the year when we lived in New Brunswick and Goodridge was resident artist at the University of New Brunswick. Following a large retrospective exhibition at the Beaverbrook Gallery he was awarded an honorary degree from the University. Later he would receive the Order of Canada from the Canadian government.

On our return to Montreal there were many summers in parts of Quebec and Ontario where almost every day was set aside for at least one more glorious landscape. If wet weather settled in a still life could be set up, or I might be asked to pose for a figure painting. Posing is surprisingly difficult and tiring, and for an active person, often boring. After a few years I made the rule that I must have a book and be able to read if I were to pose.

        In Montreal in the fifties life for artists was quite different from today. A site to exhibit one’s work was extremely important and very necessary for even meager economic survival. Private galleries were few and public museums often had specific criteria and juries for their exhibitions. But organizations for artists flourished and their annual exhibitions were a favoured place to show one’s work. With fewer artists than today, everyone tended to know each other even if their approaches to painting differed and so we socialized and exchanged art news and gossip.

I worked throughout our marriage as a social worker in a variety of settings.  Glynnis, my daughter was joined with the adoption of a baby boy, Timothy, in 1962  Then our good fortune evaporated in 1963 when Goodridge succumbed to a major depression which would haunt him until his death in 1974. Our life became dark and unhappy. Only in retrospect could I remain conscious of the rich and fulfilling life we had lived and feel grateful for our good fortune in finding one another. This is what I hoped to convey in my book.

On Becoming a Writer

At Metropolis Blue, 2010, the annual literary festival in Montreal started by Linda Leith, a round table was titled “On Becoming a Writer” and I was one of the panelists. This was my contribution to the question. Unfortunately I do not have a record of the three other who spoke, but it proved to be well attended with lots in interest and discussion:

I HAVE BEEN A WRITER MOST OF MY LIFE As I imagine most of you have also.  But that was writing to impart information, or to give directions or perhaps to elucidate some subject, as in a school essay, a report, a letter. Here today though we are considering creative fiction and non fiction writing. This kind of writing seems to imply the telling of a story I feel and this was certainly the case for me.

My book did not start out to be a book but began as the recording of events in my life while married to Goodridge Roberts. I did not want to lose the memory of particular times. I used to tell friends stories about things that had happened to us. They often said “you should write that story down.” As I describe in the preface to my book, the bones of at least  a couple of chapters began in that way rather a long time ago. We had spent many summers at our cottage in Georgian Bay and it was the custom for our friends and ourselves to write each year in a log book what had occurred and the feelings engendered by the beautiful setting, the company and the events. Thus the early pieces were a kind of extension of this custom.

The next influence for me was a couple of courses that I took in writing about my life. I found I enjoyed the actual process of writing on a computer perhaps because it was so easy to correct what was written.  My friend would say I typed my book.She found it impossible to believe I could produce a book without knowing how to “right click,cut and paste”. Be that as it may, as the years passed, I found that I was no longer fitting writing into my life but rather was fitting my life around my writing. A book was beginning to take shape. By the time I had reached my eighties I knew if I ever was going to leave the story of my life with that incredible artist, Goodridge Roberts, I had better not wait any longer. And I did not. The pace accelerated.

I was most fortunate in the friends who encouraged me and those who helped me to get it shaped into a book and then to deal with publishing matters. I was unclear whether it should be in print form or digital. Some were of the opinion that  book publishing was about to be superceded by digital presentations but I felt I wanted an actual book I could hold in my hands.

Two separate early efforts dealing with academic publishers came to nothing in the end . Although at least one of them was ready to go ahead, their conditions for doing so made me think they really wanted a different sort of book, a more academic effort, with an art history theoretical component. That was not what I had in mind , nor did I feel I had the competence to write that sort of book. Others had done that successfully. My emphasis was on the personal as our life unfolded.

My friends, Bob Tombs, painter and book designer from Ottawa and Peter Haynes, independent writer of film scripts in Montreal, came to my rescue. We decided to get together over a Sunday breakfast and brainstorm how to proceed in this unknown, murky world of publishing. The upshot was that we decided to start by each of us taking on a publishing firm where we already had some sort of contact. We would try to interest them in publishing with Bob as book designer. Both of them got results although the designer stipulation sadly did not work out because both of them said they had their own designer. The Toronto publisher was unnecessarily nasty I thought, saying “Who did I think I was, trying to exert this kind of control” or words to that effect. So I chose Vehicule Press.

I was glad to work with Vehicule especially since it was located in Montreal. I found my editor, Nancy Marelli, stimulating and helpful to work with. We got together once a week for several months and our interactions as we discussed the book were very helpful. They added to the solitary inspirations in the dead of night when often what seemed to be felicitous phrasing or germane explanations would pop into my head.

Because I had known a great many people over many years in both Toronto and Montreal we decided to launch it in both cities. Then my daughter, Glynnis, who had recently retired from her senior public service career in Ottawa offered to develop a sizable list of invitees for Ottawa and so we had a launch there as well. This wide net stimulated others who had been in my life at some time to surface and become a part of my life again which is an unexpected bonus. This is practically all I know about distribution because Vehicule contracts it out to a distributor. This has the drawback of putting another layer between the author and the reader . It is difficult to know what is happening in the wider world. What has really pleased me is learning from many different people who have contacted me how the book has touched them in a whole variety of ways depending on their own lives.

Last night we listened to an excellent panel on truth in non-fiction writing. There was much discussion on the importance of “getting the story right.” I hope I have succeeded in getting my story right.

China's First Emperor

When I started this blog I was taking courses  at the McGill Institute for Learning in Retirement and about to decide where to put my efforts for the coming semester.The MILR calendar in September said that Mimi Caouette’s study group on the Qin dynasty would prepare us for the extraordinary exhibition of artefacts and terra cotta warriors coming to the museum from China during the winter. I had no idea how prophetic that blurb would be.  I registered and chose for my presentation: the topic:” The Burning of the Books and the Killing of the Scholars”

Research done and writing completed, I felt the results were too bland and colourless.. I searched deeply in the bowels of cyberspace and found the beautiful reproduction of a painting or  tapestry from the Biblioteque National in Paris depicting the burning of the books and the killing of the scholars with little figures in strong reds, on an orange , yellow and green background. I put it as the cover page of my presentation and distributed it to the 22 members of the class. They seemed to be fascinaterd with it .Now I had signed up for an all day Qin colloquium at the Museum.Returning from a lunch break,  imagine my astonishment to find MY REPRODUCTION splashed across the whole projection screen. Where had they found my picture? Certainly MILR had prepared me well for the exhibition  but I do not know who had prepared the Museum. Here is the image.
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CHINA’S  FIRST EMPEROR:   THE BURNING OF THE BOOKS

The topic of book burning had struck a chord with me.  I think that we in the Western world find the destruction of books contemptible and associate it with Nazi Germany in the thirties. Heinrich Heine, the German poet and critic of the early nineteenth century is well-known for saying, “When books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.” Certainly the attempt to control people and their ideas through the banning or burning of books has a long and deplorable history. When I searched the subject on my computer I found the record of its practice revealing. Apart from the Vatican Index of prohibited books, at least 20 other instances of book banning were cited ranging from the Latin poet Ovid, to Robinson Crusoe, Les Miserables, Ernest Hemingway, Alice in Wonderland and even our own Quebec Padlock Law in 1937 which was in force until struck down in 1957. The earliest example mentioned occurred during the rule of the First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang Di, in the Qin Dynasty between 259-210 B.C., my subject today for this blog.

Although the Chinese did not invent paper until 105 A.D.,books nevertheless existed. Silk was used to write on but because it was scarce and too expensive, books were made out of bamboo strips. The wood was first dried of its sap and then cut into thin strips of standard length (about 25 centimeters). These were then bound with hemp which was passed through grooves designed to keep the proper order of the “pages”.  It was then rolled up like a rug for storage and transport.                    

   To  describe the context for the burning of the books in about 213 B.C., the Warring States (six) had been defeated by the armies of Qin and united into one state ending a period when poetry and philosophy thrived and what was called “A Hundred Schools of Thought” existed. The most significant for the future of China were those representing Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, Mohism, and the Yin-Yang School. Each was advocating its views on human nature and the consequent ethics and principles to make a better world.

           The state of Qin had started to dominate militarily and diplomatically over neighbouring states by adopting legalism and legalist philosophy even before the First Emperor took power. Shang Yang who was employed as prime minister of Qin in 356 B.C. ordered Qin officials to get rid of Confucian books and to standardize the state philosophy as legalism.

          After unification when Shi Huang Di had successfully unified China and Li Si had become chief Councillor, the Emperor decided to abolish feudalism and adopt instead a centralized system in which each region was governed by aristocrats appointed by the Emperor. The Emperor was a vengeful autocrat, a paranoid individual, and the state developed a culture of violence.  Severe punishments, such as cutting off the nose or the foot were meted out for small crimes. Criticism of the Emperor was not allowed. Deterrents ruled the state because there were no customary laws before the unification and the defeated states were reluctant to give up their sovereignty.  There was considerable uneasiness and discontentment in the realm over many of the reforms taking place in the new nation. Amongst the complaints was resentment over the geographical location of the capital, tucked away in the northwestern corner of the empire as well as regret expressed by many over the abolition of feudalism.

The shrewd Li Si warned the emperor about followers of Confucius saying that “there are those who condemn your orders, and as soon as they hear that a decree has been issued, they debate its merits according to their own school of thought, opposing it secretly in their hearts at court and disputing it openly in the streets. This lowers the prestige of the sovereign and leads to the formation of factions below. It must be stopped.”  Then Li Si stunned the court by offering a proposition that would one day be seen as the beginning of the end of the Qin dynasty, a proposition so startling that many historians for centuries vilified the emperor for agreeing to it. He proposed that “all the official histories of the contending states, except the annals of Qin should be burned. Anyone who possesses the (Confucian) Book of Odes and the Book of History or the philosophical discourses of the hundred schools must present them to the proper civil authorities for burning”. He suggested that anyone who dared to discuss the works in public would be executed and their bodies left exposed for all to see. Anyone who refused the edict would have his face tattooed and be sent to do forced labour on the Great Wall which might well be a sentence of death. The only exceptions to this burning, which amounted to the destruction of many centuries of Chinese thought, were books on medicine and pharmacy, divination, agriculture and forestry. These were technical and therefore needed by the society.  Qin Shi Huang agreed to Li Si’s proposal and put the decree into effect in 213 B.C. Private academies were closed and also institutions relating to poetry and writing.

It is not known how many books were actually burnt but there is evidence that the burning actually took place. Apart from archeological evidence of this, there is mention in later years from scholars. The book burning has always been linked in the literature and history with the killing of the scholars (said to number 460) but recent research on the topic states that there is no independent evidence that the killings actually occurred. It is suggested that what had been a legend was turned into a historical fact.

In her writing, Frances Wood says the legend likely grew up as a result of disagreement between two groups of Confucian scholars and points out that others have been as guilty in their destructive censorship. If the scholars were not killed, it becomes only one exception to Heine’s prophetic warning.