WE ARE “A vast, half-frozen landscape in search of a country,” according to Harold Town. But although we see ourselves as a Northern people, few Canadians have ever ventured north of the tree line. As Farley Mowat noted, few had any real interest in getting their “fat butts” up there to see those vast half-frozen, open spaces for themselves. Maybe if more of us ventured north, we would show more resolve to save what was left of our Arctic for future generations.
Perhaps because Jack McClelland helped define what it was to be Canadian, M&S attracted a fair range of people with Arctic obsessions. I was surprised to discover that most of them were immigrants or refugees. Vienna-born George Swinton had travelled north for the first time in 1957 and had become obsessed with the region. A former intelligence officer in the Canadian Army, now an art teacher, George believed his mission was to bring Inuit art to a largely ignorant world. His Sculpture of the Eskimo, in preparation in 1970, was one of them. Swinton was a large, highly entertaining presence in our offices, opinionated about everything including book design, though as Frank Newfeld pointed out, his idea of design was to cram more reproductions on a page than any book could reasonably display. The irony of the fact that all three of us—George, Frank, and I—were Central Europeans was not lost either on us or on other M&S staffers.
George was a prolific artist himself, an excellent draftsman, an imaginative colourist who could relate the work of Inuit artists to artists working in Paris and New York. I believe a couple of George’s paintings are still in the National Gallery.
Herbert Schwarz, another immigrant from the lands the Hapsburgs once ruled, now lived in Tuktoyaktuk. He claimed to be the only doctor along the DEW Line (the US-Canadian line of defence stretching from Baffin Island to Alaska), which meant he had the longest medical practice in the world. He would tell me Arctic tales while sipping brandy from a hip flask he kept close. Even during our sweltering summer months, he usually wore a fur-trimmed parka. His Windigo and Other Tales of the Ojibways had been illustrated by Norval Morrisseau. He explained that these tales were first told him by Copper Thunderbird, a.k.a. Morrisseau, who had been born on the Sand Point Reserve in Northwestern Ontario and scooped up into a residential school. Drawing on the mythologies of his Anishinaabe people, Morrisseau created vibrant, colourful, mesmerizing paintings.I
Schwarz had enjoyed showing me Daphne Odjig’s risqué illustrations for the book that was eventually published as Tales from the Smokehouse. The pictures made him giggle enthusiastically. What did I think they did up there during those long winter months? he asked. Much later, at Key Porter, we published Odjig, the Art of Daphne Odjig 1985–2000 and in 1997 the retrospective Norval Morrisseau: Travels to the House of Invention, to coincide with an exhibition of his art.
In one of the Canada Council’s second-floor meeting rooms there were two paintings by Morrisseau. They fairly dominated the room. Sometimes I found it impossible to focus on the discussions around the tableII while facing them. They are not distracting; they are utterly absorbing.
Fred Bruemmer, whom I met for the first time in 1972, was born in Latvia and saw the Canadian Arctic for the first time while he was on assignment in Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit) for Weekend magazine. He wrote of its rugged beauty, its haunting loneliness, its infinite space. “It has the vastness of the sea, the grandeur of a Bach fugue.”III It was a love that stayed with him for the rest of his life. He spent at least six months of every year living with the Inuit.
His Seasons of the Eskimo was the first book we planned together. There would be five more before I left M&S, and another ten at Key Porter. I loved the times we spent together, Fred talking about the Arctic and coming up with new ideas to contain both his quiet enthusiasm for the place and his evocative photographs.
Apart from Farley Mowat, James Houston was Jack’s favourite Arctic adventurer. Their affinity for each other may have come from shared experiences during the Second World War. Jim had fought with the Toronto Scottish Regiment. After the war, he was a civil administrator among the Inuit in the Eastern Arctic for fourteen years, painting, writing, and working for the federal government. He told fascinating stories about sharing meals of raw fish and raw seal liver—a delicacy—hunting walrus, building igloos, using Inuit-made sunglasses. When he came south again, he brought along not only his own sketches but also sculpture and prints by the people he had come to know. James organized the first Inuit art show in Montreal and helped set up the first commercial Inuit art co-operative on Baffin Island. He introduced the highly original work of Kenojuak Ashevak (creator of “Enchanted Owl”), Pitseolak Ashoona, and Kiakshuk to the art world. On behalf of the artists, he offered Inuit pieces for auctions in Rome, London, Paris and of course Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.
Jim would go on to spend several years as a master designer for Steuben Glass in New York. His works are breathtakingly beautiful pieces of seemingly solid glass with figures inside that appear to move as you turn them in the light. Sometimes one comes up for auction but I have never found one I can afford. One of his most celebrated works is the seventy-foot Aurora Borealis sculpture for the Glenbow Museum.
He loved to tell a story about sitting in his Manhattan office one spring day as a huge flock of snow geese flew over the building. He left his urban comforts to follow them north, he claimed, not stopping until he reached the Arctic again. Manhattan may not be on the snow geese flight path, but it made for a great tale.
Despite his craggy features, his lantern jaw, I think James remained a kind of boy hero, keen to have new adventures. Seventeen of his children’s books are still available, including the one published by Key Porter: Whiteout, the coming-of-age story of a rebellious seventeen-year-old city boy who goes to live on Baffin Island. One Houston story, Spirit Wrestler, is about a boy who becomes a shaman, though I would be surprised if the writer’s presentation of Shoona and the white man who possesses truly magical powers would be acceptable today, when cultural appropriation is a sin.
I am still planning to go to the North, though so far I have only made it as far as Churchill, Manitoba, to see the polar bears.
I. I wish I had bought one of the illustrations, but I was broke then, and when I offered to buy one of his paintings from the Kinsman Robinson Galleries in the 1990s, the prices were much, much higher.
II. I served on the Board of the Canada Council for the Arts from 2008 till 2016.
III. From the introduction to Survival: A Refugee Life.