McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

The Story of a Local Literary Gem, Lost and Found

Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians was a hit in 1960. Then it vanished. Rescued last year, the biting novel still sheds light on our civic condition -

In an age when search engines and social networks give users everything they need to know – about the past, present and future – there is seemingly no such thing as a revelation any more.

But what of a forgotten novel, once an international bestseller, somehow missed by all the digital archives, about the very city in which you live, set more than a half century ago with vivid details about where we came from and the shape of things to come.

The Torontonians, set in the 1940s and `50s and originally published in 1960, is just such a discovery.

It was written by Phyllis Brett Young, a largely forgotten author who died in 1996, 11 years before her book was finally rescued and republished late last year.

It's difficult to decide what is more astonishing: The book's utter disappearance, along with the author, from the literary map; or its acute examination of subjects still central to the changes currently redefining Toronto some 50 years later.

The relevance to today is remarkable. Take, for example, the novel's disdain for the homogeneity of Toronto's nascent suburbs. Today, those same neighbourhoods – Rosedale, Forest Hill, Leaside – are wealthy, inner-city enclaves, and arguably just as homogeneous as the insular places Young skewered.

Five decades later, we see the same patterns Young uncovered in The Torontonians playing out in the Chinese enclaves of Markham and in the self-imposed isolation of South Asians in Brampton.

"I don't think my mother would have liked to see that," says Valerie Argue, Young's only child. "She wouldn't have wanted people to live with very little contact to others. My mother certainly was someone who appreciated a diversity of spirit."

That sentiment is supported by something Young told the Star in 1960, talking about the previous decade: "Toronto was basically British, with a lot of traditions – some good, some bad.

"Those who think they should all be kept, are simply lost in the pulsing metropolis of today. Those who want to throw out everything would sacrifice the flavour of a city which can retain graciousness and dignity in spite of the vitality of today's explosion."

That sort of acuity – neither reactionary nor radical – characterizes The Torontonians and probably saved it from permanent obscurity. When a McGill historian got her hands on a used copy last year, she saw the book's merit right away and was instrumental in its reissue. It's now making its way on to reading lists at a number of Canadian universities.

Given the decades of neglect, it's difficult to convey just what a literary star Young was in her time, but the evidence is in the archives.

For her effort in writing The Torontonians Young, who described herself as a housewife, was once compared to Robertson Davies and Hugh MacLennan. The Toronto Star's Robert Fulford, when the novel was just released, reported that local bookstores carrying it were experiencing "unusually large sales" and, based on its purchase by British publisher W.H. Allen, Fulford predicted a "much wider appeal."

The book was later published under the title Gift of Time in the U.S., prompting the The New York Times to proclaim: "In a growing catalogue of books that have been probing the sweet life of suburbia, Mrs. Young's stands out as both wise and witty."

In Europe, The Torontonians was also published as The Gift of Time. In Australia, where Young was described as "One of Canada's outstanding novelists," it was called The Commuters, a title that captured the physical and psychic dislocation of a growing "sub"-urban class.

Young began contemplating The Torontonians during a five-year stay in Geneva, where her husband worked for the United Nations. After returning to Ontario in the 1950s, the self-taught writer, first-generation Canadian daughter of English parents and wife of an international civil servant wanted desperately to rewrite her city's reputation as a dull colonial outpost.

In contrast with the "hogtown" jokes commonly told in North America, Young would treat Toronto as the "sophisticated, cosmopolitan city it is," complete with the struggles of any dynamic metropolis.

By 1960, the city was in the fever of a postwar boom and being stretched to new limits – geographically, economically, socially and architecturally (in that spirit, the book's original cover featured a sketch of Viljo Revell's winning design for a new city hall, five years before the building went up).

Canadians were beginning to define their own art and culture and the country's politicians began shaping a unique international identity as a soft power, one whose policies often played U.S. and European allies off of each other.

The Torontonians was the first internationally read novel that both chronicled and celebrated the city's demographic transition, a provincial British town opened by the arrival of Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, Polish and other Europeans.

Hung on a narrative that details the lives of "Rowanwood" housewives (Young's alias for Leaside, which in the 1950s was the northern edge of Toronto) who occupy the affluent suburb above the city during the day – after husbands empty out on their morning commute downtown – the book operates on two interconnected levels.

The banality of the women's tedious lives, spent anticipating the perfect Chinese carpet to complete the home, "thick and soft, the clear translucent green of a tropical sea...the outward and visible proof of success," or struggling over just the right dress for an upcoming dinner party is a critique of the city's provincial past.

But while detailing what's marked those inner lives, the novel also cautions against an equally tedious and inauthentic future, defined by hyper-consumerism and massive urban sprawl in pursuit of the ideal "sub"-urban setting – that magical place between the inner city and the countryside where a perfectly manicured lawn and translucent Chinese carpet can signal ones arrival.

American-style consumerism is welcomed skeptically, as a possible antidote to the ingrained class structure that had until then defined one's social standing. But the following passage highlights Young's cynicism toward the artifice of such consumption and where it could lead:

"Tempted by newer and shinier gadgets, enticed by advertisers who knew only too well how to do their job, you took on more and more and more. Finally, run ragged by all the easier work you had undertaken, you had little or no time left for anything other than tending your machines."

The place Karen Whitney, the novel's central character, strives for is the same place she hopes her city will reach, somewhere between the past it has moved from and the future that seems to be unfolding.

Because of a coincidence in the early 1990s, we can see today's Toronto – a city still defined by its growing pains and still trying to prove its sophistication to the world – in the novel that first put the city on the international map.

"A friend found a copy in a used bookstore in Wolfville, Nova Scotia," explains Suzanne Morton, a McGill University history professor who says she had never heard of Young, but was instrumental in getting The Torontonians re-published.

Argue hopes the reissue will resurrect The Torontonians and her mother's forgotten reputation as one of Canada's best author's.

Young's disappearance was so complete that upon her death in 1996, the only mention of the author was a short death notice placed by her daughter.

It read, in part: "Phyllis Brett Young was a well-known Canadian novelist whose books have been enjoyed by readers in many different countries."

- San Grewal, The Toronto Star, 26 January 2008

Coming Out of the Wilderness: Book Addresses the myths and realities of Canadian art

What could be the most innovative and important book of the decade on contemporary Canadian art will be launched by its editors today in Calgary at the Trepanier Baer Gallery.

Why so important? Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (McGill-Queen's University Press, 390 pages, $49.95) takes on a big subject, landscape art in Canada, that for decades was the bedrock of modernist culture in this country. In particular, the book addresses the most visible vehicle of the nation's mythology, the iconic Group of Seven landscape. examines how and for whom the myths of pure wilderness and true north, brave and free, were created. It challenges the mythology and the power structures behind it and considers its many implications.

As the book's editors, John O'Brian, a noted art historian at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Peter White, an independent curator and writer who lives in Montreal, have devised a multifaceted lens through which to examine this fascinating area of recent art history and cultural theory.

Their brilliantly structured book, which is revolutionary in its thinking and design, is a compilation of strongly linked art works and texts by 64 artists, curators and critical writers, which the editors have identified as key moments in an evolving discussion that has reinvented the idea, or rather, diverse ideas of the Canadian landscape.

One of the book's most innovative features is its presentation of art works and writings as equal partners in the construction of the discourse. Stand alone artists' pages are interleaved with writings related by themes. By compiling these diverse works, created over 30 years, for the first time, Beyond Wilderness not only presents the discourse, but gives it shape.

"It was an extremely dispersed discourse," says White, a former Glenbow Museum curator and former director of both the Dunlop and the Mendel art galleries.

"In the face of this powerful idea represented by the Group of Seven, a discussion had been taking place, but it was so dispersed that it hadn't been possible to recognize it. One of the things this book does is bring it together so that it can be seen in a way it's never been seen before."

The questions raised go to the roots of what it means to be Canadian. For as Beyond Wilderness points out repeatedly, it is important to remember that landscape is not the product of nature, but a construction of the mind, a product of culture.

Taking up where the Group left off, Beyond Wilderness leads into the country's social, technological, economic, political and geopolitical landscapes to present a clearer perspective on Canadian realities. Even as Tom Thomson, the Group's forerunner, was painting pristine Canadian wilderness in Algonquin Park, the North was the site of logging, mining and industrialization.

The point, however, is not to attack the Group, who believed their job was to create a national art for an emergent modern nation, but to examine the myths and rhetoric that grew out of interpretations of their vision and its place in the formation of the national identity. It was, after all, a populist rhetoric that in fact was exclusionary -- primarily that of establishment Protestant English Canada -- which erased the visibility of First Nations people, women, Quebecers, immigrants and visible minorities.

Moreover, it still exerts a powerful hold on the Canadian imagination. It was supported and institutionalized by powerful friends -- the National Gallery of Canada, the government, the school system, collectors and other agencies.

"Once these national images are formed in a world defined by nationhood they are very powerful."

"They circulate, and though they may be fomented by national institutions, they then are perpetuated through clubs, and organizations and advertising and all those kinds of things. They become part of popular culture and they are self-sustaining."

As a case in point, the mystical mountain peaks of Lawren Harris are now the backdrops for the slogan Absolut Seven in a famous Absolut vodka ad campaign.

"In my public school, there was a reproduction of Tom Thomson's Northern River in the main foyer," says White, now in his early 50s, who points out that institutions and markets are very slow to change. "But in the meantime, there is this paradox that Canadians remain very powerfully attached to it, and it was to try and unravel some of the reasons that we went about doing this book. And that unravelling, that questioning, that deconstruction really does begin in the 1960s."

Parallel investigations into the role of landscape in the formation of national identity, as well as the cultural role of landscape generally, have been taking place in Great Britain and the United States. Canada, however, has not been included in the several anthologies on landscape and ideology that have been published since the 1980s. An important incentive for Beyond Wilderness was to bring Canadians into the international discussion in which they have been largely invisible.

- Nancy Tousley, The Calgary Herald, January 12, 2008

The new Torontonians

We experience the city in the perpetual present. In Toronto we treat current controversies — architectural hubris, the costs of uncontained sprawl, the challenges of multiculturalism — as if they have never happened before. But a rediscovered novel grants us a rare opportunity to judge contemporary Toronto against its past, and reminds us that many of our most pressing issues have challenged the city for decades.

Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians, an international bestseller when first published in 1960 and recently reissued to intrigue a new generation of readers, exposes the conceits and preoccupations of a city believing itself to be perched at the very edge of modernity. Reportedly the first novel to feature Viljo Revell’s City Hall on its cover, The Torontonians depicts four populations dwelling (then as now) in uneasy coexistence: the staid Toryish urban establishment of the Annex and Forest Hill; the ambitiously modern movers and shakers of the city core; the voracious materialists of its sprawling suburbs; and, making room among themselves in the interstices of the city, the “New Canadians” beginning their own transformations of Toronto.

A study in contrasts and Canada’s first suburban satire, The Torontonians suggests that in 1960 Toronto was a far more complex and contested city than contemporary narratives recall. Commonly represented as a flat and featureless Anglo-Saxon landscape where you couldn’t watch a film or get a drink on Sunday, in reality Toronto seethed with race, class and gender divisions roiling just beneath the surface of a city whose cultural terrain was shifting as inexorably as the price of a cocktail at the Park Plaza. The novel’s principal tension is the cultural divide between the city core and its rapidly growing suburbs; its subtext is the question of whether they reflect two different, perhaps opposed, ways of life.

Although the city portrayed in The Torontonians is predominantly Anglo-Saxon, by 1960 a third of Toronto’s population consisted of foreign-born immigrants. Hungarians rented rooms in the once-gracious Annex homes where Karen (the novel’s protagonist) and her social set had grown up, and in the novel these newcomers are the perennial beneficiaries of charitable bridge tournaments held in the manicured salons of Rowanwood, a wealthy, insular suburb standing in approximately for Leaside. Rowanwood’s population consists mainly of wealthy businessmen and their wives who have migrated north (presumably in flight from the very immigrants they support through charity) in search of the Good Life where everybody, as one housewife puts it, “should live in ranch-style bungalows and be just like themselves.”

But if The Torontonians satirizes 1960-era Rowanwood for its homogeneity, it is worth noting that cultural commentators worry that many of Toronto’s contemporary suburbs — such as Markham with its large Chinese population, Brampton with its concentration of South Asians and the preponderance of Italian neighbourhoods in Woodbridge — are at risk of developing into ethnic enclaves as insular and homogenous as Rowanwood. But just as these contemporary suburbs are far more open than the census records might suggest, even Rowanwood is more diverse than it appears. A Rowanwood housewife takes as a lover a Polish count fallen upon hard times. The neighbourhood’s most powerful businessman conceals the secret of his slum upbringing. A single mother is quietly subsidized by a neighbour. It turns out that much of Rowanwood is busy concealing facets of difference in order to compete for the dubious rewards of middle-class consumption.

Perhaps this is why the novel’s protagonist finds herself drawn to the city spread out below Rowanwood, musing that “it was only below the Hill that you came into direct contact with the core of vitality that was the true essence of the city” and adding, “here you were acutely and excitingly aware of the steady heart-beat of a really great metropolis, fresh blood continuously pumped into it from the four corners of the globe.” Chafing at the banality of a materialist existence that has reduced her to a consumer of Cuisinarts, carpets and backyard cookouts, and desperate and bored while her husband commutes downtown to work in the city’s corporate canyons, Karen seeks to diagnose precisely what is wrong with suburbia, describing it as “an impossible compromise” between city and countryside. She concludes that suburbia is an “evolutionary cul-de-sac,” and adds:

A city with a future, like an individual with a future, could never remain static for long, could not afford to expand indefinitely along the lines of least resistance. The suburbs, as they now existed, were the city’s lines of least resistance. The towering buildings to the south were the real yardstick of its stature.

But rejecting suburbia requires confronting the harsh social and economic realities of life in the city below the Hill. Karen realizes that the “towering buildings” of the downtown core loom above the long-standing slums of the Ward and the city’s first Chinatown, even then being cleared for the construction of the new City Hall and an adjacent collection of commercial towers. She discovers that her best friend’s husband, now one of the city’s most powerful executives and a Rowanwood neighbour, had grown up in one of those slums. Stumbling out into the downtown sunlight after this belated revelation, Karen sees Toronto’s polyglot mix of cultures reflected in the city’s “uneven stratification of brick and granite record[ing] more than a hundred and fifty years of architectural trial and error.” Walking north along Yonge Street, she revels as if for the first time in the “vivid turbulence” of the city’s diversity unfolding all around her.

Reading The Torontonians after nearly half a century, one is of course struck by the city it omits: the CN tower not yet even a figment in the city’s imagination, the genuine cultural diversity that in 1960 has yet to appear, the astonishing sprawl that has turned Leaside from a suburb into midtown.

But one is struck even more by the similarities. Toronto remains divided between north and south — although current census reports indicate that immigrants (now nearly half the city’s population) are more likely to occupy the inner and outer suburbs (but not Leaside, which remains stolidly Anglo-Saxon) while the chattering classes have pushed their way back into the city beneath the Hill, retaking old territory in the Annex, Kensington Market and Parkdale. The Annex in particular has regained much of its ascendancy as a neighbourhood but retains an uneasy (some would say outright hostile) relationship with those living in rental accommodation at its spatial and social margins.

Affluent women are less likely to feel trapped in the “gilded labyrinth” of suburbia, having contracted out childcare and housework in exchange for the dubious reward of lengthy daily commutes along GTA highways. In the downtown core, land developers and ambitious politicians seek to remake the city in their own image. In short, read not simply as a novel but as social commentary, The Torontonians offers a fresh perspective on the conceits and preoccupations of a city that still believes itself to be perched at the very edge of modernity.

- Amy Lavender Harris, EYE Weekly, December 2007

Bordernotes - Border Crossings discusses Beyond Wilderness

PLAIN LANDSCAPE

by Meeka Walsh

A new Canadian art book has been published by McGill-Queen's University Press, Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art, edited by John O'Brian and Peter White. It's a fine book with new essays, as well as reprints of important commentary, essays and reviews published earlier. It struck me as something of a quietly brave book, quite Canadian actually, in the approach to its topic, having about it a certain doggedness. The impetus of the book was an exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Canada in 1995 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Group of Seven's first exhibition. Called "The Group of Seven, Art for a Nation," by title alone it made some sweeping assumptions that prompted questions from a Canadian audience accustomed, at the end of the 20th century, to issues raised by a postmodern reading of art.

One example only, of many cited by Lynda Jessup in her 1996 review of the exhibition. She pointed out that the introductory panel stated, "The Group's goals were nationalist and their prime audience was English Canadian." Nowhere in the exhibition, she said, were the implications of this addressed. Now, in 2007, an entire book is doing just that. I found evidence of what I called the book's quiet courage in the fact of its issue more than a decade after the event. Here was a topic worth sticking to, dealing with, and the issues provoked by the exhibition and its singular view are still present, although perhaps in altered and modified forms, in Canadian power structures and distribution, and in governing institutions. The exhibition was mounted by the largest gallery in the nation and travelled to other major institutions: the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts -- a pan-Canadian tour. That's a formidable line of endorsation to question. To counter what was presented as a national perspective, i.e., how Canada was seen as a nation through the agency of the Group of Seven -- a single, unifying view, the editors of Beyond Wilderness have selected a panoply of artists and a multiplicity of voices.

Thinking about landscape sent me, not for the first time, to Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory, which opens with a quote from Thoreau. Here are the first lines: "It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such." Schama too says, in thinking about the foreign landscape pictures of his own childhood imaginings, "If a child's vision of nature can already be loaded with complicating memories, myths and meanings, how much more elaborately wrought is the frame through which our adult eyes survey the landscape ... Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind." He quotes Rene Magritte, who, in explaining his 1933 painting La Condition humaine, where one painting has been superimposed over the view it is depicting, said, "What lies beyond the windowpane of our apprehension needs a design before we can properly discern its form ... And it is culture, convention and cognition that makes that design; that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty."

Painting in the style of the Post-Impressionists, the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson were championed as representing, in a unique and fitting manner, the true Canadian landscape, a ready and potent symbol of what Canada was. How more effectively to identify a country than by the way it looks? Here, in the first half of the 20th century, as John O'Brian and Peter White write in their book's introduction, was a wilderness painting movement that would produce the national art. The Group of Seven with their supporters -- private patrons and the National Gallery of Canada -- "Wished to develop an independent aesthetic -- homegrown, northern and free of foreign influence." They wrote, "National indentity was inseparable from the geography and climate of Canada's boreal landmass. For them, Canadianess was defined by way of northerness and wilderness."

A wild, windy, rugged, norther, craggy, rocky, cloud-tossed, bold, turbulent, pristine and uninhabited country. For whom, since the country appeared unpopulated, was this representation made? And since we are acknowledging that landscape is made, that the reading of it is constructed, that it's not an uninflected wild, whose noble but churlish landscape was that? It belonged to central Canada, which was white, male, Protestant and what is really referred to as establishment -- an independent country embracing progress and making its way, through the use of its abundant resources, in the 20th-century industrial world while holding itself, as an image, northern, apart and distinct.

This was the "brand" to be espoused by Canadians from the inside, and by others, elsewhere. A 1919 exhibition of the work of J.E.H. Macdonald, Lawren Harris, Frank H. Johnston and William Cruikshank was accompanied by a wall plaque that read, "The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our country." In the nation as depicted by the Group and in the exhibition and discussion that attended it ("The Group of Seven, Art for a Nation"), absent but not reported missing were First Nations people, women, Quebecers, racially visible immigrants and the masses of Canadians who lived in cities.

In the book of notes and essays by John Berger called And our faces my heart, brief as photos, which is as well thumbed in my library as some religious text ought to be but isn't, Berger is speaking about his favourite painter, Caravaggio. It was Berger's sense that the people he saw on the streets of Livorno after the war would have found themselves reflected in Caravaggio's canvases. In this poor city, Berger said he learned about the ingenuity of the dispossessed and about himself as well. "It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a lifelong aversion," he wrote.

I live on the prairies. It's not a landscape to which the Group of Seven and their patrons were drawn in seeking a visual representation of a nation. This is not a landscape to inspire an iconic narrative of a country. It's certainly not inhabited by visual evidence of power, nor is it a wilderness over which no one has cast an eye or vested with habitation. It's not wild and empty and therefore is not fair game for the taking.

I exit the city on level ground. I drive, for the most part, on an arrow-straight road heading north to a district called the Interlake, not for its stereotypically picturesque lake qualities but because it sits plain and resolute between two large, shallow lakes. Aeons ago, glaciers slid over the ground, raking and scouring it. They left behind, as they melted, endless flat fields covered in a thin layer of stubborn, unyielding soil, peppered throughout by small boulders and rocks that rise to the surface, heaved each spring by the annual thaw.  What had been the bed of the great lake Aggassiz is the Interlake, the lakes that remained: Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg. To write their names on a page is to hear seagulls, to see open wooden boats, lifted prows banging the waves, heading out to bring in nets filled with sweet bony fish and to count my great good luck in finding at the water's pebbled edges, occasional pieces of chipped, worked stone, fragments of arrowheads, drills and spearpoints, which, dated, go back to 4000 bc; to anticipate a thermometer of temperature changes registered at ankle height as the waters were tested with familiarity in every season but winter, daily as I was able, just to see how it was.

No one painted this landscape for reasons of national cohesion, this landscape so plain of flashy detail that every new fence is noted and which stand of poplars were knocked down to plant some canola, and which fields yielded hay twice a season, and where the palette -- except for a brief flaring in the summer -- is shades of brown, russet, grey and ochre.

This is a landscape that might resist habitation because it's not a comodious place in which to live -- not fertile, lush, or temperate. At the same time, it doesn't claim for itself rugged, pistine status. With its horizontal plane, it is the ideal candidate for the ideal reading of the perfect landscape painting, albiet not giving over to standard measures of beauty.

The American artist Robert Smithson described his projects, which were often located in the landscape where he worked with the natural materials of the site, as a dialectic between the site, which referred to the geographic location, and the non-site, which meant images, maps and other representations. The site and the non-site were never perfectly matched and the work of art, resided, then, in the dialectical relationship between what he identified as the two realms. He said, "Between the actual site ... and the non-site exists a space of metaphoric significance." If we're acknowledging that landscapes, as we see them in art, always represent mediated spaces, then we also recognize those spaces are metaphoric. Smithson insisted further, on the "primacy of the rectangle" as essential to the dialectical nature of an artwork. A contributor to the book Beyond Wilderness, Johanne Sloan, points out that Michael Snow, too, wrote about the "edifying dialogue between the rectangle and all its specifically human content." Landscape art, Johanne Sloan reminds us, because of its horizontal framing (and the acutal horizon line), is deeply rooted in conventions of Western art making.

Extending the rectangle and the horizontal picture frame to the medium of film, I think of the observations of noted Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin on the use of cinemascope in making a film that is set on the prairies. "When you think of it," he said, referring to Noam Gonick's film Hey, Happy!, "what could be better suited to it than the prairie? Cinemascope was invented for filming snakes, funerals and Winnipeg."

After returning home from a trip east, I always drive north. My eyes drink the horizontal flat prairie space with a real thirst and I'm happy to recognize that here, far from the seats of power, status and privilege, is the ideal landscape.

- Border Crossings, November 2007