A double review with Extraordinary Canadians: Nellie McClung
by Charlotte Gray.
No sooner had I finished Lewis DeSoto’s book than I wanted to run to the nearest exhibition of Emily Carr’s paintings and look at them anew. And as I completed Charlotte Gray’s book, I rushed to the computer to hear the one “live” recording of Nellie McClung (online at CBC Digital Archives). The two women were calling to me.
Only after reading Extraordinary Canadians series general editor John Ralston Saul’s introduction, which I had carefully left to the end so as not to be influenced by what he thought I should see, did I realize that that was exactly what was supposed to happen. Saul’s “didactic and nationalist” purpose — the phrase is DeSoto’s in reference to the National Gallery’s exhibition of 1927, where Carr’s paintings finally came to public attention — has been splendidly achieved.
So don’t be put off by the charming simplicity of format and language of these books. There’s a depth and passion to them that is compelling. Perhaps significantly, the authors are both “from away” and neither is an historian (painter/novelist DeSoto is from South Africa and writer Gray from Britain); their need to understand and portray their subjects is palpable.
In DeSoto’s case, his need is even prefaced with a mea culpa: He didn’t like Carr’s paintings when he first encountered them. But the British Columbia forest taught him otherwise, and he now places her work on a par with that of Van Gogh, Munch, and Cézanne. His book is an unusual blend of biography, art history, criticism, and feminist sensitivity. The approach does lend itself to a bit of repetition, something which does not happen in Gray’s more conventionally structured biography of McClung, but the result is a rich tapestry of Carr-revealing colours and threads.
In Gray’s case, she needed to understand the feminism she encountered in Canadians in the early 1980s. We are all, it would seem, inheritors of one or another of the characteristics that McClung combined in one person: determination, self-assurance, boundless energy, humour, organizational skills, public-speaking abilities, and an unshakable belief in equality and justice. She was also a best-selling author, wife, and mother of five.
With the exception of family, McClung and Carr had much in common. Only two years separated them in age; their lives covered the last third of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, years of change — to which they both contributed — that was far more profound than that of our “information age.”
Both women were westerners, rooted in a Prairie or Pacific landscape and rebellious against social norms. Each displayed an early ambition, Nellie to be a writer and Emily as an artist. They each had a sense of humour: Nellie’s catapulted her onto the public stage of political and social reform; Emily’s sustained her more isolated and often discouraging path of artistic invention.
Through it all, each woman guarded her private life scrupulously; indeed, each made use of her considerable literary skills to fashion her own story for public consumption. Authors Gray and DeSoto are well aware of this, and they use their own literary skills to peek speculatively but convincingly behind McClung’s and Carr’s versions.
There’s nothing speculative about the public lives of these women, however, nor about their contribution to the making of Canada. Here are two women, doggedly determined — and against all odds — to shape their environment as they see right. McClung knew what she wanted and she got most of it for us: votes for women; prohibition (for a while); legal reforms (women are persons!); the ordination of women; protections for and the welcoming of immigrants. Carr knew what she sought, and she eventually found it for herself and shaped it for us in glorious paintings. A country that can produce two such people isn’t doing badly.
But there’s more to come, another sixteen volumes in Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series. If these two books are any indication, the series promises to be remarkable. However, it ought not to be forgotten that without the range and depth of historical scholarship about Canada that has flourished in merely the last forty years, such a series would not be possible.
That scholarship also permits a few quibbles with these two books: Saul’s omission of any reference to the major biographical project of Canadian history — the Dictionary of Canadian Biography; DeSoto’s telescoping of context that takes some chronological liberties; Gray’s making J.S. Woodsworth (never identified as a minister) the founder of the Social Gospel. That being said, and while awaiting the other extraordinary Canadians, we might ensure that these two books be read by every Canadian, old or new, female or male.
— Susan Mann (Read bio)
Susan Mann is a Montreal historian and the author of Margaret Macdonald: Imperial Daughter.