Inventing Tom Thomson: From Biographical Fictions to Fictional Autobiographies and Reproductions 9780773572126

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
How I Got Here from There: Preface and Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE: INVENTING TOM THOMSON
Invention as Fiction
Thomson as Legend, Myth, and Symbol
CHAPTER TWO: THE BIOGRAPHICAL STORIES
Setting the Life-Story Stage
The Art of Biography
CHAPTER THREE: ALTERIOGRAPHIC INVENTIONS
Thomson as Poetic Trope
Thomson as Fictional Character
Performing Tom Thomson
CHAPTER FOUR: INVENTIVE REPRODUCTIONS
Portraits of the Artist
Reproducing a National Icon
Pentimenti: Going Back There
Notes
Works Consulted
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W

Citation preview

Inventing Tom Thomson

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Plate i Tom Thomson, Self-Portrait After a Day in Tacoma, 1902. Watercolour, 22.9 x 15.2 cm. Collection of the Tom Thomson Memorial Gallery

Plate 2 Tom Thomson, The Jack Pine, (c 1919-1917). Oil on canvas, 127.9 x 139.8 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased, 1918

Inventing Tom Thomson From Biographical Fictions to Fictional Autobiographies and Reproductions

SHERRILL GRACE

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen's University Press 2004 ISBN 0-7735-2752-4 Legal deposit third quarter 2.004 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Grace, Sherrill E., 1944Inventing Tom Thomson : from biographical fictions to fictional autobiographies and reproductions / Sherrill Grace. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-2752-4

1. Thomson, Tom, 1877-1917—In literature. 2. Thomson, Tom, 1877-1917—Portraits. I. Title. ND249.T5G72 2OO4

759-H

C20O4-9O3037-X

For John, and for Elizabeth, Susan, and Malcolm

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Contents Illustrations / ix How I Got Here from There: Preface and Acknowledgments / xi

CHAPTER

ONE: I N V E N T I N G TOM T H O M S O N

/ 3

Invention as Fiction / 3 Thomson as Legend, Myth, and Symbol / 8 C H A P T E R TWO: THE B I O G R A P H I C A L

STORIES

/

14

Setting the Life-Story Stage / 14 The Art of Biography / 63 CHAPTER THREE: A L T E R I O G R A P H I C I N V E N T I O N S

/

85

Thomson as Poetic Trope 785 Thomson as Fictional Character / 103 Performing Tom Thomson / 119 CHAPTER

FOUR: INVENTIVE REPRODUCTIONS

Portraits of the Artist / 148 Reproducing a National Icon / 174 Pentimenti: Going Back There / 182

Notes / 197 Works Consulted / 215 Index / 227

/

148

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Illustrations

1 2 3 4

Colour plates: Tom Thomson, Self-Portrait After a Day in Tacoma I frontispiece Tom Thomson, The Jack Pine I frontispiece John Boyle, Midnight Oil: Ode to Tom Thomson Jack I after page 164 Panya Clark Espinal, First Snow I after page 164

Black and white images: Memorial cairn on Hayhurst Point, Canoe Lake / 4 Photograph of Tom Thomson / 17 Map of Canoe Lake / 26 Photograph of Canoe Lake Station / 30 Photograph of Mowat Lodge / 30 Photograph of Thomson's camp reflector oven / 31 Photograph of Winnifred Trainor / 32 Official "Return of Death" / 35 Tom Thomson, drawn by Thoreau MacDonald / 38 Photograph of Thomson fishing at Tea Lake Dam / 39 Report in Toronto Globe 13 July 1917 / 43 Report in Toronto Globe 18 July 1917 / 43 Front and left profile photographs of skull from Canoe Lake Cemetery / 49 14 Thomson's illustration of Kipling quotation / 70 15 Photograph of Thomson at Lake Scugog / 94 16 Photograph of Thomson tying a fishing fly / 113

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

iy 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 2.6 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Thomson's photograph of William Broadhead / 115 Still from Joyce Wieland's The Far Shore I 129 Still from Joyce Wieland's The Far Shore I 130 Joyce Wieland's drawing for The Far Shore I 133 Tom Thomson, Self-Portrait After a Day in Tacoma I 149 Tom Thomson, self-portrait sketch / 150 Photograph of Thomson / 156 Studio photograph of Thomson / 157 H.B. Jackson, Tom Thomson, Rainy Day in Camp I 158 Arthur Lismer, Dreaming of Hula-Hula I 160 Arthur Lismer, T.T. at the Grip / 160 Photograph of Thomson / 161 Algonquin Park Museum diorama / 163 Joyce Wieland, Tom Thomson and the Goddess I 164 Photograph of Jack Pine Equestrian Centre / 169 Photograph of Huntsville's Jack Pine / 169 Photograph of Canoe Lake / 192 Photograph of Bridge Lake/Canoe Lake / 196

X

ILLUSTRATIONS

How I Got Here from There: Preface and Acknowledgments

In one sense, this book began as long ago as I can remember. In another sense, it began quite recently and by accident. It was not planned; it just happened, and in happening it took me back from my west coast home in Vancouver to the scenes and places of childhood and youth and to landscapes I did not realize I was seeing as a child growing up in Ontario and Quebec. At some point during the mid-nineties when I was writing Canada and the Idea of North (2002.) or perhaps during the reading of Judith Thompson's play Sled (1997), I realized that I was going to have to deal with Tom Thomson. There was no doubt about it: Thomson was synonymous with the Canadian North, with Canada as the true North strong and free, but somehow he seemed too elusive or too big to be squeezed into a book on another subject, even one as closely related as a study of the idea of North. In one of those decisions I was not even aware I was making, I left Thomson out. Later, I hoped to make good on that omission by writing an article on Thomson as a symbol of the North, and I started out in the belief that an article would suffice. But it was soon apparent that the subject was too large for a mere article. By 2001 I had completed my research and the drafting of this book but, in anticipation of the 2002-03 retrospective exhibition of Thomson's work, I decided to delay the completion of chapter 4 until I could consider the exhibition, the catalogue, and their reception.

As time passed and as I read more about Tom Thomson, I became increasingly impressed by the popularity of his story. And as I read, I rediscovered his painting. More than anything else, the rediscovery of his art reminded me that those paintings convey a freshness and excitement in a natural world that I was privileged to know intimately. From the colour plates in art books - and today those plates are superb - it was only a short and inevitable step back ... to the east of my youth, to the galleries, to the landscapes, to the memories and joys - to my invention of Tom Thomson, which is this book. But I will save that story for the end - in "Pentimenti." It is not an original story, in any case, because everyone who becomes booked on Tom Thomson has a similar story. For the moment, it is enough to say that I agree with David Silcox, who reminds us that if it were not for those remarkable paintings we would not be interested in Tom Thomson. To walk through the rooms of the Ken Thomson Gallery in downtown Toronto or the McMichael Collection in Kleinburg, where one can see many Thomsons side by side with work by members of the Group of Seven, is to see just how good he was. His small boards and major canvases have a power, energy, and beauty that is unmistakable and deeply moving. He was a good painter all right, a great painter, and his development over a few short years is breathtaking. This is why Tom Thomson matters to me. More than any of the Group, he showed me how to see an important part of my country. To lose such talent in its prime and to have that loss remain a mystery, surrounded in speculation, adds to the symbolic weight of the man's story and his art. Many individuals and institutions have assisted me in the course of my research on Thomson, and it is a great pleasure to thank them here. Some have shared their advice and enthusiasm, some have granted me permission to quote from their work and have let me read their unpublished work, and many others have helped me find information and prepare the final manuscript: Kay Armatage, Margaret Atwood, Henry Beissel, Jim Betts, John Boyle, Marjorie Lismer Bridges, Richard Cavell, Mary Chapman, Erin Collins, Dennis Cooley, Brad Darch, Susanna Egan, Kathryn Elder, Panya Clark Espinal, Barry Fair, Chantal Gibson, Bryan Gooch, Ron Hatch, Gabriele Helms, David Huff, Andrew Hunter, Linda Hutcheon, Michael Hutcheon, Smaro Kamboureli, Yashmin

xii

PREFACE AND A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Kassam, Geoff Kavanagh, Robert Kroetsch, Susan MacDonald, Jill MacLachlan, Brian Meehan, Joan Murray, Shelley Newman, NeWest Publishing (for the Kiyooka estate), John O'Brian, Charles Pachter, Angela Rebeiro, Laurie Ricou, Judith Ruan, Bernard Shaw and General Store Publishing, Rick Stronks, Sophie Tellier, Margaret Tom-Wing, Charlotte Woodley, the Algonquin Park Visitors' Centre and Archives, the Cinematheque Quebecoise, the Ontario Archives, the Centre of Forensic Science, the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, the Robert MacLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, the Art Gallery of Peel, the London Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Archives of Canada, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound. For his constant support and sound advice, it is a pleasure to thank my editor, Aurele Parisien, who shares my love of certain trees! For the funding and release time to support my research I am especially grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and to Brenda and David McLean for their endowment of the Brenda and David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies at The University of British Columbia. For John, as always, I reserve my warmest thanks. In June 2000 Tom Thomson drew us both back to Ontario, where we discovered Owen Sound and Leith, and together we revisited sites of happy memories for us both in Algonquin Park and Lake of Bays. Much has changed in the park since we were young, but the spirit of Tom Thomson still lives there.

HOW I GOT F R O M H E R E TO T H E R E

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Inventing Tom Thomson

TOM THOMSON'S JACKPINE Bent but never broken by the brute winds and weathers of this northland the solitary jackpine towers over lichen-crusted rocks where a forest fire once gave life to its seed. Its gnarled hands now reach over the hills blueing deep into the citreous green twilight trailing the sun on its retreat over the horizon from where its fires can still touch the pine's slender fingers. The belted kingfisher has gone who dove from its branches with a rattle and a splash to catch the slippery fish. Darkness is rising from its roots and will soon grey the air to black that's already trembling with the hoot of the great horned owl perched out of sight to ambush some hapless nocturnal. And yet the light is at peace with the tree and the lake. Calmly it amplifies the beryline silence brooding on the waters where Tom's spirit rests forever alongside the sky stretched out in the shadow of the jackpine that holds heaven and earth together in an embrace encompassing the hills the lake, the seasons, and the void that fills the dark spaces between them and infinity. Henry Beissel

1

Inventing Tom Thomson Had he not existed, he would have had to be invented. In certain ways he was. R O B E R T S T A G E Y , OKanada, 63

I

INVENTION

AS

FICTION

his book is not a biography of Tom Thomson, although it is about bios and what others have done with Thomson's biography. Tom Thomson has become has been created as - the figure of a legendary woodsman, canoeist, and fisherman who is inseparable from Algonquin Park and, thus, from Canadian ideas of northern identity. The stories about his life have taken on the colours of myth, grand guignol fiction, and tragic drama, and in these stories his art is often forgotten or marginalized or abstracted beyond recognition. Perhaps because he was so little known in his lifetime and left so little behind him in personal markers of identity (few letters, no memoirs, no journals; no intimate friends, spouse, or children), it is easy for others to imagine the man and invent a life for him: his outline is there, full of suggestion, but it is empty, inviting others to fill in the gaps. In the pages that follow, I describe and analyse many of the responses to Tom Thomson that others have made over the more than eighty years since his death. These responses come in many forms, genres, and media, but they all participate in what I call the invention of Tom Thomson. Finding them and working with them has constituted a voyage of continual interest for me, and I realize that, in the process, I have invented my own Tom Thomson, who is not

T

i Memorial cairn on Hayhurst Point, Canoe Lake. nd. Photograph by Edward Addison. Reproduced from Addison (45).

a romantic hero, not a master canoeist or fisherman, and certainly not a congenial socializer. My Tom Thomson is first and last a very powerful artist, but he is also a complex, secretive, self-protective, volatile man who had, I have come to believe, a lonely and difficult childhood. His heavy drinking, his solitary ways, his documented swings in mood, and his inarticulacy all suggest layers of personality that would defy even the most intuitive biographer. Tom Thomson I cannot imagine liking; his paintings are another matter. But this book is not about his painting. As I have discovered, no one can write about Thomson without confronting the mysteries sur4

I N V E N T I N G TOM T H O M S O N

rounding his death and no one, it seems, can write about Thomson without taking a position on his significance as a national icon. Thomson and his story - or aspects of that story — have come to signify a myth of nation, and the man himself has been transformed into the symbol of a set of foundational Canadian values such as manliness, solitary independence, practical skill in the northern bush, sympathetic but unsentimental intimacy with nature, silence and humility, and the curiosity and courage of the explorer (on land and on canvas). The degree to which the actual man possessed any of these qualities or espoused any of these values is entirely beside the point. He has been invested with these values, made, by our imaginations, to carry their imprint. And other, additional aspects of his story intensify his significance. First of all, as a young, apparently handsome man of Scots background, his image was easily incorporated into the dominant narrative of Canadian development. To paraphrase the words of R.G. Haliburton, a founding member of the Canada First Movement in the i86os, Thomson fitted very well the ideal of a true man of the North who would take his place in history as an ideal Canadian. Second, he died in the prime of life, before he could seriously disappoint himself or anyone else, either as a man or as an artist. His potential and achievement were only just about to peak when he drowned in Canoe Lake in July 1917. Third, Tom Thomson left remarkably little behind him to explain who he was and, consequently, how he could have died as he did. Finally, he lived at one of those moments in history when great changes occur; and while he did not live to participate in the results, he was seen, after the fact, to have precipitated or adumbrated them. If he had lived, or so the story goes, he would have been a founding member of the Group of Seven, which formed in 1920, but dying as he did, during the war but not in the war, his loss seemed to represent the losses so many suffered. As A.Y. Jackson put it in his 4 August 1917 letter to J.E.H. MacDonald, after learning of Thomson's death: "I could sit down and cry to think that while in all this turmoil over here there is a ray of light and that the peace and quietness of the north country should be the scene of such a tragedy. It seems like the severing of another tie which bound me to Canada, because without Tom the north country seems a desolation of bush and rock."1 With World War I, the Great War, Canada came of age as a nation, and all nations need heroes. Tom Thomson quickly became just that. I N V E N T I N G TOM T H O M S O N

5

In Inventing Tom Thomson I consider how this man became a hero and examine those who have invented him - the biographers, playwrights, poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, art historians and curators - because that is what we have now: not Tom Thomson, who died mysteriously in 1917, but inventions of him by a fascinating group of artists and scholars who have imagined him in their own particular ways. These imaginings, or inventions, as I call them, began almost immediately upon his death. Jackson went on, in his August 4 letter to MacDonald, to say that Tom "was the guide, the interpreter, and we the guests partaking of his hospitality," and MacDonald created the testimonial for the memorial cairn, erected in the fall of 1917, that stands to this day at Hayhurst Point on Canoe Lake: "He lived humbly but passionately with the wild. It made him brother to all untamed things ... and it took him to itself at last" (Illus. i). Within weeks of his death, Thomson became the guide, the wilderness host, the spirit of the wild. Inventions continued through the twenties, as the Group of Seven gained its reputation, and in the thirties, with the first biography, then lapsed for a while. New impetus and, thus, new inventions appeared in the fifties and, since then, they have continued to become simultaneously more scholarly and more fantastic. What is more, these inventions show no signs of abating. I can think of no other modern Canadian, in any field of endeavour, who has been as obsessively invented and reinvented as Tom Thomson. Louis Kiel comes close as the hero of novels, poetry, films, and an opera; Glenn Gould may, in time, inspire a similar number of recreations; Emily Carr continues to fascinate biographers and artists; and Norman Bethune, Billy Bishop, and, increasingly, Pierre Elliott Trudeau have all inspired some of the same kind of attention; but Thomson seems to have a special, broader appeal. This book is about the inventors. It is as much, if not more, their story as it is a story about Tom Thomson, and my focus is on their contributions to the character we have come to recognize as Thomson. Throughout my discussion I stress the fictionality of this large body of work and highlight what I see as a complex variety of links with biography and autobiography. It is important to stress the fictional nature of these inventions because each one is to some degree its own creative act; it is a thing made and therefore fictive. Even the most apparently factual account is, after all, an account, a narrative or a representation put together through a process of 6

INVENTING

TOM T H O M S O N

selection and ordering and recombination. Even the most apparently complete documentation is an inventory that invites revision. Thus my subtitle - From Biographical Fictions to Fictional Autobiographies and Reproductions - signals what I believe to be the inevitable and necessary recognition that, from the most exhaustive and factual to the most speculative and fanciful, attempts to capture Tom Thomson are conditioned by the inventor's creativity, by his or her own interests and location in time and place. No one can claim to recuperate the real, original Tom Thomson. In this chapter, I explore the general terrain of why and how Thomson has been invented and outline the theoretical parameters of my own approach to the subject. Chapter 2, is devoted to an examination of biography and Thomson's biographers because all subsequent treatments of the man and his story draw upon biography to some degree, even when they fabricate or challenge the socalled factual record. Chapter 3, the longest section of the book, is devoted to the verbal inventions we have come to know as Tom Thomson through the poetry, fiction, songs, film, and plays that invoke, address, and re-animate him. In chapter 4 I return to Thomson himself and to the visual record by considering his selfportraits, others' portraits of him, and other forms of visual replication, including exhibitions; in each case, I am asking what this form of reproduction tries to tell or, indeed, to hide. My final chapter, "Pentimenti," is frankly (if selectively) autobiographical because I have come to believe that at some level, to some degree, on certain (if not all) scholarly occasions, scholars too are driven by the personal, the autobiographical. This autobiographical compulsion seems especially relevant, overt, important, even urgent today for some of the reasons touched upon by the theorist Leigh Gilmore who, in The Limits of Autobiography, insists that "the age of memoir and the age of trauma have coincided and stimulated the aesthetic forms and cultural practices of self-representation" that characterize the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (16). As will be clear, I do not always like the inventions I examine or the exclusions made by a particular play or film or story, and the artistic or scholarly quality of these works varies. Nevertheless, I believe that all the works I have gathered here for consideration are interesting; some are major contributions in their field. Together, they demonstrate how one artist, one man, could come to play such a powerful, resonant, and important role in the lives of so many INVENTING

TOM T H O M S O N

7

people. Partly because of his painting, to be sure, but also because of his inventions, Tom Thomson has come to occupy a unique position in the imagination of the nation.

II

THOMSON AS LEGEND,

MYTH, AND

SYMBOL

In one version of the story, on the afternoon of 8 July 1917 near Mowat Lodge on the western shore of Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park Canadian painter Tom Thomson (1877-1917) climbed into his canoe to go fishing and then disappeared (Davies, 1935, 12.1-2. and 1967, 94-5). On July 16, all the versions agree, his body was found floating in shallow water near the opposite shore; he had been dead for at least a week. Since his death, speculation about how and why he died has not ceased. Indeed, his life has been folded into and represented by his death. His dead body has come to represent a complex narrative web of meanings and associations that rivals, if not overshadows, the body of his work. Tom Thomson, the historical person, has been transformed into a corporeal (and pigmented) site of inscription, a spectral body on which Canadian biographers, autobiographers, art historians, visual artists, poets, playwrights, novelists, song writers, and filmmakers write their versions of (his) identity - private and public, individual and national. There are fairly obvious reasons for this obsessive re-scripting fascination with Thomson and with what he can be made to signify. The first is that, quite simply, he died suddenly, while relatively young, perhaps by accident, without fulfilling what his friends believed to be his artistic potential. The second is that his death was almost immediately described, by those on the scene, as improbable and, thus, as mysterious; mystery and the resulting intense curiosity and constant speculation have characterized discussions of Thomson's life from July 1917 to today. Did Thomson, repeatedly described as an expert canoeist and strong swimmer, drown? Did he kill himself? Was he murdered? And, if so, by whom and why? Such questions are always intriguing, and in Thomson's case they are immediately followed by questions about where his body is actually buried and whether or not he really intended to marry a Huntsville, Ontario woman called Winnifred Trainor. So potent are these questions about Thomson's physical body that the body of his work must compete for attention, but this corpus also elicits 8

I N V E N T I N G TOM T H O M S O N

on-going speculation (monetary and historiographic): How did Thomson learn to paint so well without formal training, or was he a natural genius (whatever that might be)? Would he have become Canada's first truly great painter, and was he poised to become the country's first abstract painter? Why would an oil sketch, estimated to sell for $200,000 at auction, fetch only $135,000, and do we need to turn up the heat on the historiographic speculation to boost prices? Perhaps the 2,002-03 retrospective has already begun to have this effect. How else explain the $170,000 sale price reached at the May 2003 Heffel auction of a minor Thomson panel called Boathouse, Go Home Bay (1914)? Tom Thomson, the man, the painter, and the stories, comprise what I might call a legend, a myth, or a symbol. The location of the historical person, like his corporeal remains, is very largely irrecoverable; we cannot know him because he passed into legend even before his death and left remarkably few traces of his intentions, motivations, influences, and personal identity. Trying to imagine, let alone reconstruct, him from the material traces is inevitably to create a legend of the born artist in tune with nature who needs no professional training or artistic influences, who paddles across our line of vision, leaving dramatic bursts of colour behind him, and then vanishes, suddenly, quietly, without explanation. The mythologizing of Thomson goes hand in hand with the legend, although the creation of Thomson as a mythic figure shifts some of the emphasis away from the biography as such and displaces corporeality onto his canvases and boards to make the body of his work the primary object of fascination (at times almost of worship). This Thomson incorporates and reproduces the idea of the artist, especially the modern artist, as the individual genius living on the margins of so-called normal society. This Thomson also recuperates and participates in a universalized, romantic idea of the solitary male artist as the embodiment of serious (genuine, authentic, true) creativity and originality. As a symbol, Thomson is at once more particular and more ambiguous than the legendary man or the mythic artist; a symbolic Thomson is certainly less stable or easy to grasp. His symbolic particularity derives from his Canadian-ness, or from what is repeatedly claimed as his Canadian-ness - his persistent association with "the North," his masculine intimacy with nature (a feminized "bush" or "wild") as measured by his virile command of canoe, fishing rod, back pack, and camp fire, and his perceived, uncanny I N V E N T I N G TOM T H O M S O N

9

ability to capture the essence of Canada in paint. Just as the Thomson legend overlaps with and informs the Thomson myth, so both legend and myth contribute, albeit at a level of greater abstraction, to his status as symbol. However, it is the ambiguity, or delicately nuanced irony, of a symbolic Thomson that accounts for the capacity of Thomson to be re-invented. His productive ambiguity as a symbol of Canada arises, on the one hand, from the very slipperiness of such constructions as North, masculinity, wilderness, and the notion of a pictorially re-presentable essence, and, on the other, from his various failures or - if failure sounds too pejorative and categorical - the lacunae and aporias that constitute his legendary and mythic presence and, thus, his symbolic (and cultural) capital. After all, he died young, unfulfilled, probably from accidental drowning on a calm summer's day (what could be more pointless?) and left remarkably little to show for his thirty-nine years of life. As a symbol of Canada or Canadian manhood or Canadian art, Thomson is a decidedly tricky trope: does he represent Canada's national failure to forge a unified identity? Is he a sign of our national emasculation by a lethal nature, and thus of the ontological impossibility of existence in such a place? Is he a symbol of an aborted maturity, an inability to articulate a modernist vision in art, or of the sheer recalcitrance of our geography, which devalues the arts in favour of logging, mining, and big business? Or is the story of his death, like that of his life, an originary story about what R.G. Haliburton first called The Men of the North and their Place in History (1869), with a tenacious and productive hold over something recognizable as the Canadian imagination? In the discussion that follows, I certainly allude to the Thomson legend, draw upon the Thomson myth, and critique Thomson as a symbolic figure and trope for Canadian identity. However, Tom Thomson, by which I mean the collective texts of his invention, includes legend, myth, and symbol within a much broader field of invention that has persisted for more than eight decades, shifted constantly through its continual reiterations, and shows no sign of diminishing. Central to this process of invention and reiteration is the idea of the person, that private subject or self that gives rise to auto/biography. While this is not the place to embark on a lengthy discussion of the rapidly developing field of auto/biography studies over the past thirty-five years, the sophisticated theories and analyses that constitute this field have greatly influenced my thinking 10

INVENTING TOM THOMSON

about Tom Thomson. If it is his life - the bios - that first captures others' attention, then it is the attempt to make sense of that life, to solve its mysteries, to come to terms with its seeming violence, to satisfy our own needs (for closure, for answers, for meaning, for validation) that fuels the drive to invent and re-invent him. Thomson's self-portraits, like the portraits of him created by others, comprise a fascinating "autobiographies" - the term Leigh Gilmore uses to describe a range of auto/biographical practices (Gilmore, Autobiographies, 42-3) that identify a variety of ways in which we struggle to communicate through life-writing, where life-writing must be understood to include much more than the verbal. But if I am correct in thinking that Tom Thomson has been more frequently invented than other Canadians, then there must be reasons; he must appeal to us more generally and profoundly than other major figures. He must speak to the autobiographical subject in others perhaps to this person's desire for the exemplary Canadian life or that person's need for a hero or another's longing for someone famous yet ordinary enough to identify with: the simple woodsman who created beautiful pictures naturally; a regular guy. But I suspect that something more subtle, harder to name, about Thomson and his story contributes to his constant appeal. Gilmore might attribute this appeal to trauma (in Thomson's case, the trauma of his sudden death) and she might describe the storytelling that erupted immediately after his death as a form of testimony, a bearing witness to how he mattered and why he is constantly mourned.2 To trace this process of invention, to probe its motivations, and, then, to examine its meanings, I must begin at the beginning with the bare bones of biographical facts (as we know them through the art of biography), and yet, almost immediately upon his death, those facts began to disperse across a proliferating corpus of texts, which are my proper subject and the object of my critical gaze. Throughout my discussion of the biography I stress the fundamental fictionality of the texts, not because they lack accurate facts, dates, and details about people and events but because they are narratives created by biographers and, thus, inevitably conditioned by the author's time, place, knowledge, and interpretive position. The line between fact (verifiable truth) and fiction (imagined truth) is often blurred, never more so than in the creative work of biography, and it is important to keep that blurring in mind. Moreover, if biography is an art that draws on fact, while appealing to the imagination and asking a reader INVENTING

TOM THOMSON

II

to believe what is said, then autobiography is an even more exacting practice of blurring fact and fiction - the facts of my life as lived and the fiction of my life as created in a life-story. Where biography asks us to accept as reliable and authentic the more or less objective story of a biographer, autobiography insists that the subjective claims of the person telling his or her own life story be accepted as true. And yet autobiography is as much a creative process as biography; when Thomson is the subject of autobiography, he is still being created. There is such a fine line between biography and autobiography that they often seem to exist in symbiosis. Thus, my Tom Thomson is also an invention within my life-story, a fact of scholarship that I address self-reflexively in my conclusion. Just as explanations for why Tom Thomson inspires so much attention abound, so a number of highly significant cultural tasks are performed by the cumulative text of his invention. In the effort to tease out and examine aspects of this cultural work I rely on a composite theoretical framework that enables me to identify Thomson's cultural (inevitably ideological) capital as a powerful unifying symbol for the nation, as an early example of Canadian modernism in painting (perhaps in any of the arts, which only increases his value), and as the embodied ideal of white masculinity - as a real man, a man's man, and a true son of the North. Although I consider these categories (nation, modernism, masculinity) separately as each is produced by the representations of the man and his work, all three work together; they are closely connected and interdependent. Thomson's masculinity, determined in and through obsessive inscriptions of his physical body, underpins the value of his role and his art for modernism in Canada, and this artistic role, reinforced by his prescribed manliness, legitimizes his value as a symbol of the nation state, of Canada-as-North. Arising from these uses of Thomson is his scripted subjectivity - his biography - as a manly, heterosexual male and as a man among men, who shuns, or does not need, women, but functions happily within the homosocial network that supports the male-dominated order we know as patriarchy. Underlying and grounding my approach to Thomson are a number of recent theories that I find helpful, even indispensable, but that I leave in the background (in occasional references, endnotes, and bibliography). Chief amongst these are the concept of homosociality articulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men, current

12.

I N V E N T I N G TOM T H O M S O N

analyses of modernism's strategic resistance to the biographical person and the sentimental in art, recent theorizations of the body and the nation, and, above all, current theories of life-writing, which have clarified the degree to which all such writing, be it biography or autobiography, is art, ruled by genre conventions and shaped by a more or less self-aware creator. I think of these Thomson texts as constituting a discursive formation, a term that invokes Foucault's methodology in The Archeology of Knowledge, not in its specificities and not in its denial of an authorial intention grounded in a body, but more generally to emphasize the textuality of what Canadians think of as Tom Thomson and the cultural work performed by that textuality. As Robert Stacey so aptly puts it in the quotation with which I began - we had to invent Tom Thomson. The historical, biological person has become the extensive body of his representations, of his invention in biography, poetry, fiction, drama, music, film, and the technology of visual art (photographs, colour reproductions, drawings, and exhibitions). The significance of Tom Thomson for Canadians exists in and is produced by this invention.

INVENTING TOM THOMSON

13

2 The Biographical Stories "He lived humbly but passionately with the wild - it made him brother to all untamed things of Nature. It drew him apart and revealed itself wonderfully to him. It sent him out from the woods only to show these revelations through his art - and it took him to itself at last." J.E.H. MACDONALD

I

S E T T I N G THE L I F E - S T O R Y STAGE

he above words are inscribed on the memorial cairn erected by Thomson's friends near his favorite campsite at Canoe Lake (Illus. i). I start with them (although they are not the first published, hence reproducible, words about his death and life) for several reasons: to emphasize that the scripting of Tom Thomson began with his death; to illustrate the degree to which, even before his death, he was perceived as one with "Nature," notably with the socially constructed North of Algonquin Park;1 and to demonstrate that his immediate painter colleagues were intent on celebrating and shaping his legacy. I did not, however, personally copy these words from the cairn during a private pilgrimage to Canoe Lake because the text (with or without photographs of the actual cairn) is readily available in the many books and articles about Thomson; the text, like the reproduction of the physical object itself, has passed into and become inseparable from the Thomson story. But there are more words on the cairn (and much more meaning in MacDonald's words than I have as yet noted), and these other words attempt to address and stabilize certain facts, right from the start so speak. Thus, we are told that Thomson was an "artist-woodsman and guide" and

T

that he "was drowned in Canoe Lake, July 8, 1917." Moreover, we are told that the cairn is a "tribute to his character and genius," and that his "body is buried in Owen Sound, Ontario." MacDonald and Thomson's "fellow artists and other friends" have tried to bring closure to aspects of the Thomson story (how he died and where he is buried), while stage-managing his memory as an "artist-woodsman" (a crucial hyphenization), as a "guide" and a "genius." A reader of the cairn, uninformed by the history of speculation and contradiction surrounding Thomson's death almost from the moment of his reported disappearance on July 8, might well accept the message inscribed on the cairn as fact; cairns carry authority as reliable markers of historical evidence. An uninformed reader's critical attention might not be snagged by the passive construction "was drowned" - or the romantic notion that mother "Nature" drowned the man in order to possess him utterly. But the facts of Thomson's death have never been clear. His death was, at the time and since, the central mystery around which swirls a seemingly endless, rich fabric of imagining and invention. What Roy MacGregor calls the "bare details" are familiar enough (at least to many Torontonians and southern Ontarians, if not to people across Canada). Thomson was born in 1877, came fairly late to serious landscape painting (about 1912., when he first visited Algonquin Park), was part of the cadre of male, Toronto-based painters who would later form the Group of Seven, and died suddenly at Canoe Lake in July 1917. In MacGregor's elicitation of this "mysterious death," as recently as February 2,000, we are invited to imagine "the bloated body surfacing with fishing line wrapped around an ankle and blood flowing from the temple, the drifting canoe, the paddle that was never found, the quick burial at Canoe Lake and then the hotly disputed exhumation for removal to the Thomson family plot at Leith, Ont." (National Post, 2,2 February zooo, A9). Tom Thomson has made it into the twenty-first century in a newspaper article, ostensibly about the sale at auction of an oil sketch, which privileges the bloated body, the blood, the suspicious fishing line, and the "hotly disputed exhumation" of this same body. The site/sight of Thomson's dead body upstages his painting, and the record of reiterated speculations about how and why Thomson died and where his body really lies dominates the article.2 As MacGregor goes on to remind us, there are at least three theories about how Thomson died. It is possible that he died by acciTHE BIOGRAPHICAL STORIES

15

dent, perhaps capsizing his canoe while taking a leak; apparently drowned fisherman are sometimes found with open flies. The trouble with this theory is that Thomson was supposed to be an expert canoeist and fisherman and, therefore, would have known better than to stand up in a canoe; moreover, no one (to my knowledge) has ever commented upon the state of his fly. Accident also leaves unexplained a gash on his temple (did he strike his head when he fell?) or the fishing line wound around his ankle (had he sprained the ankle?). At the time of his death, there were rumours of suicide associated with his impending marriage to Winnifred Trainor. The wife of one of the two Canoe Lake men most closely linked with his death is alleged to have claimed that she found a letter to Tom from Winnifred saying they would "have to get married" (as MacGregor puts it, although no such letter has ever been found). But there are problems, too, with this theory, not the least of which is the silence of Winnifred herself and the absence of a child. And that leaves murder, or the unpremeditated crime of manslaughter. This version of Thomson's death is a veritable whodunit with three possible "perps": Shannon Fraser, the man who ran Mowat Lodge (it was his wife who said she found the letter), who may well have quarrelled with Thomson over money, knocked him out in a drunken fight and then, in a panic, thinking he had killed Thomson, dumped his body in the lake and set his canoe adrift; or a young German-American cottager, Martin Blecher, Jr,3 whose family had a nearby cottage and who neither liked nor got along with Thomson; or some unidentified poachers whom a vigilant Tom caught in the act. The trouble with all three theories (accident, suicide, murder/ manslaughter) is not so much the air in Thomson's lungs, the blood in his ear, the length of time it took the body to surface in warm, shallow water, or the absence of a full autopsy, as it is the singular paucity of recoverable information about Thomson the man.4 The insistence on creating a biographical Thomson as an accomplished outdoors man, on the one hand, and as an ascetic, private, inarticulate single-minded artist, on the other, flattens his portrait, erasing complexities of character or personality that might provoke murder, precipitate accident, or motivate suicide. Thomson seems fixed by the 1915 photographic image that MacGregor chose to illustrate his article (a photograph that is reproduced in most re-creations of the man), showing a stern, broad-shouldered Thomson, dressed in checked shirt, outdoor pants, and heavy boots, squinting at the camI 6

I N V E N T I N G TOM T H O M S O N

z Tom Thomson, c 1912, or 1915. Photograph by Bud Callighan. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada (PA iZ54p6).

era with his pipe in the corner of his mouth. In this well-known photograph (Illus. 2), he stands alone, behind a post and wire fence on which hang seven trout; through its reproduction in various contexts, this photograph helps to produce the idea of Thomson as handsome, reserved, solitary - the embodiment of masculine competence and authority. Someone had to take this picture - the shadow of the photographer can be seen on the ground - but Thomson appears alone, self-sufficient. Between 1915, when this photograph was taken, or 1917, when MacDonald and others erected the cairn at Canoe Lake, and 2000, when Roy MacGregor wrote his article, five major biographical studies of Tom Thomson have been published, two of which have been reprinted; the most recent has been partially repeated in at least three other formats (Murray 1986, 1991, 1998). In addition, there have been several articles on aspects of his life, a CBC program about his death, and some discussion of the man in numerous art history treatments of the Group of Seven or of individual members of the Group.5 It is not necessary to examine each of these items (although THE B I O G R A P H I C A L S T O R I E S

17

I will return to the CBC documentary), but I do want to consider the five biographies in some detail and to gather a few examples of the discursive construction of Thomson from the shorter memoir-style pieces, such as Dr MacCallum's highly autobiographical testimonial of 1917, that comprise the biographical story. The unavoidable place to begin is with MacCallum's "Tom Thomson: Painter of the North." Unlike later biographers, MacCallum knew Thomson personally and was, therefore, able to adopt the autobiographer's first-person voice when describing his dead friend: "It was October, 1912, that I first met him" (375). This personal knowledge imparts both authenticity and authority to what MacCallum has to say; he enjoins us to believe him because he knows the truth about Tom - "the truth of that [the realistic accuracy of his palette] I know now from personal experience, for I have ... camped with Thomson" (376). The claims MacCallum goes on to make about the real Tom Thomson - that he was "enthralled" by the North, that he was our "greatest colourist," that he was shy, silent, unschooled, "a boy playing with paints" (380), "a mysterious hermit" (381) - are legitimized by MacCallum's emphatic "I" and by his recounting of shared experiences and his apparent quotation of Thomson's actual comments and conversation. Only in retrospect and with a critic's eye to the rhetoric and voice of this essay could later biographers challenge the nostalgic, romantic, idealized image of the man and the artist invented by MacCallum. Even today, the power of his first person "I" is hard to diminish or displace. And yet, it is Blodwen Davies, Thomson's first biographer, who is usually blamed (Town and Silcox, 204-5) f°r initiating both the romantic myth of a northern genius and the whodunit speculation. In my reading of her work, however, I find much balanced discussion of the art and a refreshing frankness (for 1935) about aspects of the life. Nevertheless, Davies was clearly not content to leave her story under the protective dust thrown up by Thomson's friends and family (on whom, after all, she had to depend). Her Thomson is not a simple Ontario farm boy (whatever that might be), who discovers a natural affinity for paints. Two distinct products emerge from Blodwen Davies's research: her thirty-six-page 1930 soft-cover pamphlet, Paddle and Palette: The Story of Tom Thomson, and the 1935 biography called A Study of Tom Thomson: The Story of a Man who Looked for Beauty and Truth in the Wilderness, which was privately printed in an edition l8

INVENTING TOM THOMSON

of 450 copies.6 This 1935 biography was reprinted in 1967 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Thomson's death, which was also Canada's centenary. The copyright page describes the book as "a revised memorial edition of the limited and privately printed first volume by the author, Blodwen Davies" (now deceased), and the title has been altered to: Tom Thomson: The Story of a Man who Looked for Beauty and Truth in the Wilderness. I will have more to say about this "revised memorial edition," but for the moment I want to focus on the original 1935 edition and its precursor, Paddle and Palette. Thomson emerges from Davies's preliminary sketch, and from the later biography, as a Canadian genius who appeared at a propitious moment in his country's history to paint "the north as it had never been painted before" (Paddle and Palette, 3). After a brief account of his parents, siblings, and early education, Davies focuses on what she calls "the north country" and Thomson's exceptional capacity to live and work there ("around Georgian Bay, Muskoka, and Algonquin Park, the old Indian land," 14). She asserts that "not every man ... can live alone in the north country," but Thomson could because he was "strong and confident," an "expert," and a "celebrated woodsman and fisherman" (15). However, Davies disputes the notion that Thomson "was an untrained artist, with the natural gift for painting, as has so often been said" (19). Instead, she describes the influence of professionally trained artists like MacDonald, Lismer, and, especially, A.Y. Jackson on Thomson. Jackson and Thomson were particularly close; they were, Davies insists, "fundamentally 'men's men'" (zi). Jackson shared his knowledge with Thomson who, in his turn, inspired Jackson with a passion for "the north" and for outdoor sketching in Algonquin Park. The dominant image of Thomson in Paddle and Palette (where the very title names the connection) is of a bushman "who lived like a priest tending the fire in his own soul" (31) by withdrawing to the northern wilds. It is a highly romantic image of the artist as an obsessed male genius who was spiritually in touch with an essentialized and gendered North that "told him her mysteries" (15). Two key, persistent ingredients for the invention of Thomson - his masculine subjectivity and his unique relationship with the North - were already, by 1930, clearly articulated and ready for recitation. Davies's initial description of Thomson in this preliminary pamphlet is of a solitary, super-sensitive, temperamental man, subject to THE B I O G R A P H I C A L STORIES

19

depressions and ecstasies. Her sketch of a "voyageur with the spirit of an Indian" (2.9) is expanded in the 1935 biography to create the portrait of a driven, troubled, complex man consumed with the need to express the North in the only language he knew. The philosophy informing Davies's theory of creativity - that creative genius is a faculty that can be trained - sounds like naive psychologizing today and needs no further attention here, except to note that it does ground Davies's sense of Thomson as a gifted individual who, for a few years, as a mature man, flourished under the double stimulus of nature and artistic influence. The biography includes more background on Thomson's early life and some useful information about Algonquin Park (the traditional lands of the Ojibway and the Algonquin nations, now subject to Canadian laws and open to logging and development for tourism).7 She devotes considerable space to Thomson's friendships with fellow painters and she describes a version of events leading up to his disappearance and death, but she skims over the women in Thomson's life (mentioning only a disappointment during his years in Seattle, 1901-05 and a visit to his shack behind the Toronto Studio Building by an unnamed woman painter). Winnifred Trainor is not mentioned at all. Without doubt, the most important contribution that A Study of Tom Thomson makes to the invention of Thomson is the treatment of his death. Here, for the first time in print, we get a version of events leading up to Sunday, "the fateful eighth of July" (12,1), and a seemingly careful account of the discovery of the body, a description of that body, and quotations from the doctor who examined it and from the coroner who arrived after the first burial. According to Davies, Thomson was full of energy during the spring and early summer of 1917; he had painted almost 100 sketches of spring arriving in his beloved North and, by July, he was relaxing and fishing. A friendly competition had arisen between Thomson and the park ranger, Mark Robinson, over who could catch a particularly wily old trout. On July 8, Thomson decided to trick Robinson by pulling a large specimen from another spot in the lake and passing it off as the trophy fish. However, as Thomson prepared his canoe, the day turned grey, and that night Thomson did not return from his fishing expedition. Instead, his canoe was found adrift and the search for him began - not on water, because no one believed he could have drowned, but on land. On July 16, in Davies's version of the discovery, Dr Goldwin Howland, a tourist out fishing with his 20

INVENTING

TOM THOMSON

daughter, found a body snagged on the child's line and reported the gruesome discovery. When two local men arrived on the scene, they pulled up the body of Tom Thomson (in this version the body is not bloated and floating). But Davies's most famous passage, often re-cited or alluded to, comes a few lines prior to this moment of recovery: Who met Tom Thomson on that stretch of grey lake, screened from all eyes, that July noon? Who was it struck him a blow across the right temple - and was it done with the thin edge of a paddle blade? - that sent the blood spurting from his ear? Who watched him crumple up and topple over the side of the canoe and sink slowly out of sight without a struggle? (1x3)

Of course, Davies cannot answer these questions, but that is not the point. The theatrical quality of her rhetoric provides its own answers. These four sharp questions set the stage for imagining Thomson as a murder victim and, thus, as a man who inspired enough rage in someone to provoke a (probably) premeditated attack. I suggest a premeditated attack and, therefore, murder, because of Davies's quite marvellous construction of the gaze - ours, as her readers - and of someone who lies in wait, "screened from all eyes" (except Davies's and ours as we fill in that blank and imagine bis [?] presence). Davies positions her self and us as potential authors/accomplices of the crime, and certainly as voyeurs, who watch the descending paddle strike such a violent blow to Tom's head that blood spurts from his ear, and who then stay on the scene long enough to see Tom "crumple up and topple" into the water, where we make sure, by watching, that he "sink[s] slowly out of sight without a struggle." The subtext here, which we are invited to imagine, goes on in the mind of the murderer and reads something like this: hah! he's not trying to swim! he's dead; there ... the bastard's gone! no one's gonna see him alive again! and now I'm outa here! No novelist or murder-mystery writer could do a neater job of manipulating narrative focalization. In a few short lines, Blodwen Davies has set the stage for the inventing of Tom Thomson by reading him in and through his death and his body. Immediately after this close-up scene, Davies returns to a more distanced long-shot and the objective tone of reportage. She describes THE B I O G R A P H I C A L STORIES

£1

Thomson's friends' lack of concern when he does not return that evening, their growing dismay when an overturned canoe found floating between two islands (Little Wapomeo and Big Wapomeo) in the lake is identified as Thomson's distinctively painted dove-grey canoe, and their puzzlement over what might have happened. "The idea of drowning," so Davies insists, "they did not entertain at all" (123); thus, a search on land was organized because the "only possible explanation" was that he had had an accident, perhaps broken a leg, and would be found in the bush (113-4). As the days passed, his friends became very worried "and daily grew more hopeless and more puzzled" (124). Then, suddenly, Davies shifts back to the dramatic murder scene already imagined to ask two more rhetorical questions, one set in italics: "Meantime, what had happened? Did Thomson's body take eight days to rise in a shallow lake in the middle of July? "(12.4) Cut to the lake at 9:00 A.M. on Monday, 16 July. Using dialogue set in quotation marks (and Davies provides no notes or sources or editorial explanations), a close-up of the discovery scene is shown. Toronto physician, Dr Goldwin Rowland, vacationing on little Wap, takes "his small daughter" fishing. She realizes something heavy is dragging on her line and exclaims; her father replies, "Let me see what it is," and takes the child's rod to haul in "the heavy burden on the line" (124). Close up on the straining line until, gazing over Rowland's shoulder, we see "slowly emerging from the shadowy depths, the figure of a man" (124). Hah! The return of the repressed! But no, this is not Robert Kroetsch's But We Are Exiles (I will get to Kroetsch later) or Margaret Atwood's "This is a photograph of me." This is biography, and Rowland, Davies assures us, remains calm, lets the line go, returns to his cabin, and reports his discovery. What the child said, or thought, we are not told. Instead, Davies wraps up the account of the recovery of the corpse, the burial, and the late arrival of the coroner in two pages. The body was examined by Rowland, who signed a statement describing a fourinch bruise on the temple, bleeding from the ear, and air issuing from Thomson's mouth, and ascribing the death to "accidental drowning" (125). Unwilling to utterly abandon her preceding murder scene, however, Davies points out that "no one remarked that only a living body could be bruised or could bleed, or that Thomson's lungs were filled with air, not with water" (125). She does not entertain the idea that the wound and blood might have resulted from an 2.Z

I N V E N T I N G TOM T H O M S O N

accident and preceded a drowning, but she does report on her own attempts to learn more by reproducing a May 1931 letter from the coroner, Dr A.E. Ranney, who insists that the cause of death was drowning and that the body was so badly decomposed that it had to be buried quickly, before he could get to Canoe Lake. Blodwen Davies concludes her 1935 biography by shifting attention away from Thomson's decomposing body and the "mystery" (126), as she calls it, of his death, to focus on the significance of his creative genius and the role of education in fostering such genius. However, it is not her psychologizing we remember but her story, especially her fictional account of his death. Her contribution to the invention of Tom Thomson is foundational in that she formulates the core set of qualities ascribed to and inscribed on Thomson. Davies's Thomson is a creative genius who flourished because of his exposure to professional artists and his capacity to understand, experience, and express the beauty and power of so-called unspoiled Canadian nature in its northern form. He was intensely masculine, manly, expert in bush life, and at ease with other males; human females were of little importance to him because he lived in nature for art. She constructs his death as a murder-mystery, and subsequent biographers have not been able to prove or disprove her construction. But some of them have tried, first by erasing Blodwen Davies's words and then by marginalizing the woman-as-biographer.8 In 1967, after her death, the "revised memorial edition" of her biography appeared in a fine hard-back publication with twelve quality colour plates, two Lismer sketches, and a "Foreword by A.Y. Jackson, R.C.A." (i).? In this Foreword, Jackson explains that "Shortly before she died, Blodwen Davies wrote and asked me to help her have the book republished and brought up to date, with colour plates added not so well known as the ones in the original edition"(i). What he does not explain, or in any way allude to, are other changes he made in preparing the new edition. As it turns out, his editorial hand made some crucial excisions, but before I comment on these, it is important to consider what Jackson says in his Foreword. Although it is well understood amongst Thomson biographers that Jackson played an important role in Thomson's life and in the shaping of his memory, his editorial role in preparing Davies's "revised" biography has never been discussed, yet it strikes me as significant in shaping our remembering of Thomson. He begins his THE B I O G R A P H I C A L STORIES

2.3

Foreword by reminding readers that, when Thomson "lost his life" fifty years ago, he was unknown and his death went "almost unrecorded" (i). Blodwen Davies's book, written in "the early thirties," is still, he informs us, "our most complete biography," although a few short art books had already appeared (see R.H. Hubbard and Robson). In 1967, however, Jackson exclaims, Thomson "has become an heroic figure in the story of Art in Canada," and he is considered "the founder of the Group of Seven and the instigator of the movement to the North Country" (i). Now Jackson knew that neither of these claims was accurate, and he does modify and correct them - earlier and much less successful artists had tried to paint the North, and it was J.E.H. MacDonald, who "first visualized a Canadian school" as early as 1910 (5), and Lawren Harris who was the "prime mover" - but his sketch of Thomson in the Foreword repeats the staples of the Thomson story: he had "a passion for the North" (2); in 1914 he introduced Jackson to Algonquin Park, after which he (Jackson) became "enthralled with the North" (2); he was a "master of his craft" (2), "a great artist," "a genius" who "sacrificed a sure living" in commercial art to become a "gallery" artist (3), with "a remarkable colour sense" (4); he was "an expert canoeist and camper," and he "was drowned in 1917" (5). Above all, Jackson creates an image of Thomson as synonymous with "the North" and as the inspiration to the other painters to go north. After his death, Jackson explains, "we had not the heart to go back to Algonquin Park, so moved to Algoma and Lake Superior, and then to the Arctic, Yukon, Labrador" (5). Brief though this foreword may be, in it Jackson situates Thomson as a heroic woodsman-artist of the North and endorses Davies's revised biography as an important story of a great Canadian painter. As if to fix Thomson's stature and image, Jackson does more than speak in his own voice. For example, his casual opening reference to Davies's request that he republish her biography and bring it "up to date" (i) does not explain the small but significant change in title from the somewhat awkward, but qualifying combination of the original, A Study of Tom Thomson: The Story of a Man Who Looked for Beauty and Truth in the Wilderness (1935), to the more emphatic Tom Thomson: The Story of a Man Who Looked for Beauty and Truth in the Wilderness (1967). Did Davies suggest this change; did Jackson; or did the publisher? Some of the words also appear in her conclusion, where she praises Thomson's "single24

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TOM THOMSON

pointed devotion to his search for beauty and for truth" (99). However the change came about, the subtle significance of the revised title lies in its implied equation of Thomson with wilderness story, whereas, in the first edition, the words "A Study of" imply that the Study is the story. Either way, of course, the subtitle foregrounds "wilderness" as the place to look for beauty and truth, and equates Thomson (or, at least, his story) with the beauty and truth of that place. Such a subtitle is loaded with unrecognized assumptions and ironic elisions: that "the wilderness" is a separate, natural, unspoiled place; that it is or contains beauty and truth in some objectifiable, quantifiable manner; and that the right man, a Tom Thomson, knows how to look for and find such valuable treasures there and is able to bring them back, in art, to the rest of us. But Algonquin Park was a man-made park, designated as a provincial game preserve in 1893 and carved out of previously occupied Indian lands that had already been colonized and, to some degree, tamed.10 These facts are conveniently elided by the term "wilderness," which by the turn of the century, not to mention the centennial year, had come to signify a complex ideology of sublimity, secular spirituality, masculine freedom, individuality, and authenticity for many southern Canadians who chose to see nature as other. As William Cronen reminds us in "The Trouble with Wilderness," the wild is not and never was "a pristine sanctuary [for] transcendent nature," but "a product of that civilization" (for Algonquin Park, civilization means Toronto) that projects upon certain landscapes its own "unexamined longings and desires" (69). Moreover, in the Canadian context, the othering of nature or "wilderness" is always fraught with crucial ambiguities inherited from older conceptions of wilderness as dangerous, deadly wasteland; this ambiguity is fundamental to the concept of "the North."11 With Tom Thomson, this ambiguity produces a paradox because the facts seem to suggest that the wilderness got her man. Thomson died in this wilderness filled with beauty and truth; he paid the ultimate price for looking. Jackson, at least in the Foreword, insists that he drowned, but he also knows that to insist on drowning, especially accidental drowning, is to contradict the construction of wilderness as full of truth and beauty and the image of Thomson as an expert outdoorsman. Decomposing bodies may represent a kind of irrefutable truth, but they can scarcely represent beauty, and experts THE B I O G R A P H I C A L

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2.5

3 Map of Canoe Lake. 1996. © Bernard Shaw. Reproduced from Shaw (iv), courtesy of General Store Publishing.

like Thomson should not have accidents. Jackson does not directly address these problems, but he does attempt to forestall them by intervening in Davies's text to silence her and by adding a brief note, over his initials, about Thomson's death. To read the 1967 edition of the biography is to pass smoothly from the description of Thomson paddling across Canoe Lake on Sunday, July 8, around the east side z6

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TOM THOMSON

of Little Wapomeo Island and out of sight (Illus. 3), to the statement that, when he did not return that night, no one was alarmed (95). The 1967 text contains no rhetorical questions, no dramatic murder scene, and no space for imagining or visualizing Thomson's demise. Jackson excised those few crucial lines without comment or explanation.11 By silencing Davies in this way, Jackson has rewritten her narrative to support his own, significantly more decorous version of events. When we come to Davies's next rhetorical questions - what had happened and had the body taken eight days to surface? - the story of Howland's daughter snagging the body on her trolling line seemingly provides sufficient answer. It is still not a pretty story, but the histrionics, dark speculations about violence, motivations, and Thomson's character are neatly side-stepped, and stimulating voyeuristic scenes are not invoked. Two further problems remained with Davies's original version of things: her closing references to the unsolved mystery of his death and to the legend that his body still lies at Canoe Lake (instead of having been removed to Leith). Jackson smoothes the second of these narrative wrinkles by inserting a Publisher's Note explaining the family's disinterment of the body and the reburial at Leith (98), but the first is more resistant to editorial sleight of hand. So, in his footnote, Jackson writes: The mystery surrounding Thomson's death will never be cleared up. Was he drowned in the quiet waters of a small lake? A man who had paddled all over the Park, generally alone, in all kinds of weather, run rapids, and carried his canoe over rough portages and made his camp in the bush in wolf-ridden country? There were theories - suicide, heart attack, foul play, but the verdict was "accidental Drowning" - not very convincing; but with no evidence of anything to the contrary, it stands, and must be accepted. A.Y.J. (98)

On the one hand, Jackson emphasizes Thomson's manly prowess in the "wolf-ridden" bush, while striving to present the wilderness as benign ("the quiet waters of a small lake"); on the other, he allows for theories other than "accidental drowning" by listing "suicide, heart attack, foul play" (emphasis mine, but this is surely a neutralizing abstraction for a violent confrontation like murder), but then disallows them all for lack of "evidence." Although Jackson has been described as saying that Thomson THE B I O G R A P H I C A L S T O R I E S

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was murdered, he is not about to tell us here what he thinks or what he heard about Thomson's death after returning from the war in i9i9. I 3 And why should he? His interests are in Thomson the artist, his contribution to Canadian art at a crucial moment in its history, and his reputation as a painter who had become closely associated with the famous Group of Seven. Tom Thomson had been his friend, the man who had inspired him and the others with his vision of the North. In his autobiography, A Painter's Country (1958), Jackson remembers his friend as "a silent man," who "left no records or letters," but who "took many chances, running rapids alone, paddling in stormy weather, carrying a canoe across rough portages" (40). He describes Thomson's death matter-of-factly: "he died on a quiet day with only a drizzle of rain, a few yards from shore in a small lake he knew intimately" (40). It was not until much later, Jackson says, after Thomson had been "acclaimed a genius" that "strange tales" about "foul play" began to circulate. For Jackson to say this in 1958, when he clearly knew Davies's 1935 book (A Painter's Country, 40), is surprising, but it is consistent with what he wanted (or believed) the story to be, and it is what he tried to make Blodwen Davies's revised biography say. The picture of Tom Thomson that emerges from the next biography reiterates and strengthens some key aspects of the story thus far, while strenuously avoiding others. Tom Thomson: The Algonquin Years (1969), written by Ottelyn Addison in collaboration with Elizabeth Harwood, is a short account (only ninety-eight pages) of Thomson's life with a particular focus on the period from 1912 to 1917, but it nevertheless makes a major contribution to the inventing of Thomson. By singling out "The Algonquin Years," Addison examines what she knows best. As the daughter of Mark Robinson, the park ranger and a friend of Thomson's, Addison can write with authority about a place and its people; she also had access to documents unavailable to Davies and members of the Group, such as Jackson. Her focus on the park is, therefore, understandable, but it also heightens the association between Thomson (as man, artist, and legend) and one special place. Although she does provide a very brief summary (pages 2. to 6 of the prologue) of Thomson's family and childhood, and his early training and acquaintance with other painters after he joined Grip Limited, a Toronto engraving company, in 1908, the remainder of her book deals with the years between 1912, when "Thomson first camped at Algonquin" (6), and his Z8

INVENTING TOM THOMSON

death. What is more, she provides a wealth of documentary evidence to ground her narrative: a detailed map of the park; many historical photographs (from her family) of Canoe Lake people and buildings; excerpts from her father's journal for the days of July 10 through 19, 1917; photographic reproductions of documents relating to Thomson's death; and a close-up of the cairn (Illus. i). All biographies of Thomson use documentary evidence, and I will examine photographs, sketches, and other visual representations of Thomson later, but Addison's visuals deserve special attention for several reasons: she is the first Thomson inventor to provide documentary evidence of the park in a map and in images of people and places that serve to ground her narrative, to make the place and, thus, the story real\ by providing these images, she simultaneously appeals to verifiable facts (the record) and asserts her legitimacy and authority as a biographer of this phase of her subject's life; and, finally, these images recreate aspects of a way of life that no longer survives and preserve, for memory and imagination, buildings and physical spaces that have vanished with time or become unrecognizable (Illus. 4 and 5). As we shall see with the work of Roy Kiyooka, Andrew Hunter, and the CBC program, this documentary record, once produced in her book, becomes an infinitely reproducible prop for the imaginings of others. By incorporating photographs of Thomson in the park - paddling a packed canoe, standing with his catch (Illus. z), portaging, or tying a fly (Illus. 16) - into her documentary record of park life, Addison visually underscores the seeming naturalness of Thomson's presence in the park and testifies to his competence in the bush. One photograph that, to my mind, secures the powerful iconography of Thomson as successful outdoorsman-as-artist is not of Thomson at all but of his camp reflector oven (Illus. 6). Here the oven, with its fat gleaming fish, operates as a metonym for Thomson; it was part of his life in the bush and a sign of his prowess at fishing, cooking, surviving. The accompanying text, which this image anchors and illustrates, provides a verbal account of his "skill at camp cooking" (2.2-3). There are, of course, other crucial contributions to the Thomson story in her biography. For example, to my knowledge, she is the first to identify Dr William Brodie, a "relative [and a] well-known naturalist" (4), as a man with whom Thomson spent considerable time; "occasionally," Addison explains, Thomson "helped Dr Brodie gather specimens for his extensive collection" (4). Although brief and THE B I O G R A P H I C A L S T O R I E S

2,9

4 Canoe Lake Station, c 1915, showing arrival of the Grand Trunk Railway passenger train #90. Photograph by Jack Wilkinson. Courtesy of the Algonquin Park Museum Archives (APMA 28-1-399).

5 Mowat Lodge, as it appeared in Thomson's time. Photograph by Mary Little. Courtesy of the Algonquin Park Museum Archives (APMA 186-1-413).

6 Thomson's camp reflector oven. nd. Photograph by Tom Thomson. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada (PA 945378).

undeveloped, this information would prove crucial for a later biographer, Joan Murray. Addison is also the first biographer to discuss Winnifred Trainor. She provides some family context for Winnifred, her dates (1884-1962), a 1908 photograph of the Trainor family's summer cottage at Canoe Lake, and an undated photograph, taken by Thomson, of Winnifred herself (Illus. 7). Because Winnie will play such an important role in the inventing of Tom Thomson, I want to examine her first significant appearance on the stage of Thomson's life with some care. The photograph, one of only three that I have seen reproduced, is the one most frequently commented upon by later authors (Town, in Town and Silcox, 2.18). Addison, however, confines herself to the facts as she knows them. On the page facing the photographs of Winnie and the family's summer cabin, she writes: "Winnifred, comely elder daughter of Hugh Trainor, took a great interest in Thomson and his work. Tom visited her at Huntsville and gave her some of his sketches" (59). The phrase, "comely elder daughter," may be borrowed from R.P. Little, who first described Winnifred as "comely" in 1955 (R.P. Little, 200), or it may simply reflect a common contemporary way of describing an attractive, even handsome unmarried woman of a certain age (Winnifred was 32 in 1912 and 37 when Thomson died). The photograph, scarcely a clear or flattering one, is little more than a conventional pose - afishermanwith catch - except that the fisherman is a woman in the high-necked blouse and long skirt of the period. Her eyes are closed against the sun, or possibly downcast, and her smile is faint. She is not a fashionable beauty but a practical

THE B I O G R A P H I C A L STORIES

31

7 Winnifred Trainor. c 1916. Photograph by Tom Thomson. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada (PA 193567).

woman at her ease in the outdoors. Addison provides some further information on Winnie in a footnote, where she explains that "it was rumoured around Mowat Lodge in 1916-17 (chiefly by Annie Eraser) that Tom Thomson and Winnifred Trainor were to be married. A letter left carelessly lying on a dresser gave some substance to this rumour" (93). But that is the full extent of her comment; she neither confirms nor disputes the rumour, and she does not say whether or not she ever asked Winnifred (or anyone else) about a 32

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TOM THOMSON

possible engagement. Instead, she continues her footnote by quoting Winnie's remark, many years later, to prospective renters of her Huntsville house: "It isn't everyone who can say, 'I used the room that was painted by Tom Thomson'" (94). As is already clear, a Tom Thomson biographer cannot avoid discussing his death and coming to some conclusion about what happened. Addison uses an interesting approach. She begins with a simple statement: "On Sunday July 8 Thomson was seen starting off about noon in his canoe with his usual fishing equipment and supplies" (68). Then she shifts immediately to the "events of the following week ... recorded ... in Mark Robinson's Journal" (68). What follows are excerpts from the journal that suggest another version of the story, but a version that carries the special first-person authority of the park ranger - Addison's father and Thomson's friend. Robinson's account begins on Tuesday, July 10 with the news that Thomson's canoe had been found "floating upside down in Canoe Lake," but that he still expects "to hear of Mr Thompson [sic] returning soon" (68). On Wednesday he reports searching "the shore of the lake and various portages without result," and on Thursday George Thomson (Tom's eldest brother) arrives (69). Robinson describes the searches over land conducted on Friday, but "no traces" are found (69). Saturday is uneventful; there is no news and George Thomson "left for his home this morning" (69); Robinson spends Sunday patrolling the "east and north shore of Canoe Lake," but he finds "no trace" (69). On Monday there is news: Monday, 16: Charles Scrim reported that Tom Thompson's [sic] body was found in Canoe Lake by Geo Rowe this morning about 9 A.M. I reported to Mr Bartlett over the phone and he wired for the coroner and County Crown Attorney. Body found by Dr G.W. Rowland, M.D.,M.R.C.P. of 538 Spadina Ave, Toronto, who directed Guides Geo Rowe and Lawrie Dixon to body. They took same and put it near shore. Later Martin Blecher Jr and Mr Hugh Trainor put blanket over body and it remained there all day (70).

In the entry for July 17, Robinson describes Dr Rowland's examination, at Robinson's request, of the body: "We found a bruise on left temple about four inches long. Evidently caused by falling on a rock. Otherwise no marks of violence on body" (70). Clearly, there is some urgency about burying the body, although Robinson does not say why; instead, he notes that the two undertakers arrived and THE BIOGRAPHICALSTORIES33

hhhhhklhglhhlohhhllhlhlhlhlhlhlhlhhhhlhlhlhlhlhlhlhlhlhlhlhhlhlhlh Thomson is buried that afternoon "at little cemetery at Canoe Lake" (70). The entry for July 17 closes with the arrival, at 8:00 P.M., of the coroner, Dr Ranney, and Robinson organizes the meeting that evening at which Ranney takes "evidence" from "Dr Howland, Mr and Miss Blecher [Martin Blecher and his sister Bessie], Hugh Trainor [Winnifred's father], Geo Rowe [the guide who brought the body to shore] and self" (70). The entry for July 18 records that Thomson is "to be exhumed and taken out by whose orders I am not at present aware" and that local residents are unhappy about the coroner's visit - "there is considerable adverse comment regarding the taking of evidence" (71). In the last entry, for July 19, Robinson says that a Huntsville coroner named Churchill arrived "last night" and that "the body went out on the evening train to Owen Sound" (71). By reproducing these journal entries and accompanying documents - two handwritten certifications of death, one signed by Howland (Illus. 8), the other by Robinson, Ranney's letter of transmittal for the official "Warrant to Bury," and a "Coroner's Warrant to Take Possession of the Body," Addison provides as much factual confirmation as possible of Thomson's death from "accidental drowning" and proof that the body was officially released for burial. However, she is obliged to admit that there were "troubling circumstances," "a host of rumours," and growing "speculation" (74). She describes her father as finding "it difficult to accept the simple explanation of 'accidental drowning' in the death of so skilled a woodsman" (74), and given Mark Robinson's skill, experience, and knowledge of Thomson, these doubts carry enough weight to cast considerable uncertainty over how Thomson really died and to reinforce the idea that Thomson was, indeed, very capable in the bush. Her last words on the subject of his death are terse and non-committal: "It is idle to examine the various theories advanced to explain his death. Many of them are far-fetched and misleading; facts to support any theory are almost impossible to obtain. It appears unlikely now that any completely satisfactory explanation of Thomson's death will be found" (74). Addison concludes her book by shifting attention away from "speculation" and "explanation" and "death" to Thomson's legacy. Once more she turns to voices and opinions other than her own. Jackson is quoted at length from his 4 August 1917 letter to 34

INVENTING

TOM THOMSON

8 Official "Return of Death," on verso of Medical Certificate of Death, stating cause of death as drowning but misspelling Thomson's name. Courtesy of the Archives of Ontario (RG 80-8-0-631).

MacDonald, and this letter, as I have already noted, is frequently cited by others: "Without Tom the north country seems a desolation of bush and rock. He was the guide, the interpreter, and we the guests ... my debt to him is almost that of a new world, the north country" (75). Strong talk this, and powerfully moving. For Jackson, in the intensity of grief for a dead friend, Tom acquires the symbolic force of a biblical Moses leading his chosen few into a promised land. From this testimonial, Addison moves to quotations from an obituary and various other sources - Eric Brown (the director of the National Gallery of Canada), a critic's review of the 1920 memorial exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and fellow artists such as Lismer and MacDonald. The notes struck over and over again are "genius," "northland," and "typically Canadian" (76-7). After a brief rundown of the attention paid to Thomson's work in exhibitions during the 19205, 305, and 405 (when the NFB released a two-reel colour film about Thomson called West Wind, which I discuss in chapter 3), she traces Thomson's reputation right up to the 6os: in 1961 a plaque was unveiled at Leith; in 1963 forgeries of his work were discovered; and in 1967 a centennial stamp was released using The Jack Pine, the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound (begun in 1956) was completed, and a tiny sketch (8.5"x 10.5'} sold at auction for $15,250. Thoreau MacDonald, J.E.H.'s son, gets the final word in Tom Thomson: The Algonquin Years through his four-page Appendix. Like Addison, he refuses to speculate about Thomson's fate and claims that his father "always maintained Tom was accidentally drowned" (87). MacDonald's closing words are also the final ones in the text (except for the notes and list of sources), and they sum up the entire book: "Thomson's work may be regarded as old stuff by many advanced artists and critics of the present [he is writing in 1958] but it maintains its steady place with those who still care for our Northern country, who like to see it nobly represented in painting and who still feel that those rivers, rocks and lakes are our home" (87). But Thoreau MacDonald's contribution to and legitimation of Addison's biography is not confined to the appendix. He prepared three small drawings for the book (39, 48, and 98), and the image on the back of the dust jacket is his sketch of "Tom Thomson in Algonquin Park" (Illus. 9) based on the frontispiece photograph (Illus. 10). Both verbally and visually, then, Thoreau MacDonald and Ottelyn Addison (children of the next generation) 36

INVENTING TOM THOMSON

have invented Tom Thomson in terms of an Algonquin Park fabled in life and in death and captured in paint by Thomson. With William Little's book, The Tom Thomson Mystery (1970), the practice of inventing a Tom Thomson character reached new heights. Where the story had thus far created Thomson as a real Canadian artist because he was expert with canoe, fishing rod, and northern bush life, and with the brushes, oils, and boards with which he captured that northern bush, from this point on it would intensify and complicate Thomson by foregrounding his death and focusing attention on his bodily remains at the expense of his life and his art. Little's book was written and published fourteen years after he participated in opening what was supposed to be Thomson's original grave at Canoe Lake and exhuming the human remains found there. How Little came by his fascination with Thomson and why he wanted to open the grave are, in a sense, as much his own story as Tom Thomson's, but that is partly my point: individuals invest so much in their versions of Tom Thomson that they will go to considerable lengths to tell a convincing story; biography becomes autobiography. Comparable degrees of such personal, auto/ biographical investment have been made by groups and, I would argue, by the nation. What I would call Little's tfwto/biography contains many strategic documents, including some photographs (to which I shall return), but no paintings are reproduced. Little, a lawyer and former Ontario juvenile and family court judge, knows very well how to marshal the evidence and he begins his case with the mystery of Thomson's death and the premise of foul play. He tells us that, "Understanding of the mystery that surrounds the passing of Tom Thomson on July 8, 1917, at Canoe Lake requires a look at Tom Thomson - the man and artist" (3). But we get very little about the man or the artist. Over the following forty pages (approximately 15 per cent of the book), Little summarizes what he knows about the biographical facts of Thomson's life: when and where he was born; his early childhood; his scanty education; and his appearance as a youth. This last item will prove important, so Little's description is worth quoting: "During Thomson's early years he developed into a well-built and muscularly coordinated man just under six feet tall with dark hair and expressive eyes and an Indian's deftness in the bush and on the water" (5). With these words, Little establishes the terms he will need: that Thomson was a virile masculine presence THE BIOGRAPHICAL STORIES

37

9 Tom Thomson, drawn by Thoreau MacDonald from a photo by L.S.H. [Lawren Harris] Reproduced with permission from Susan M. MacDonald, Four Elms Consulting. This sketch appears on the dust jacket of Addison's Tom Thomson: The Algonquin Years.

and that he was exceptionally capable (as deft as an Indian) in the bush. He mentions, in passing, a Seattle love affair (6), but asserts that there was "only one other woman in his life" (6). From Seattle, Little shifts to Toronto and Thomson's life at Grip and friendships with fellow artists. He quotes Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, and others to prove that Thomson was "tremendously athletic" (9), that he was totally at home in the North, and that his "great love" (13) was Algonquin Park. He allows Dr James MacCallum to re-present the authentic Thomson to us by quoting at length from MacCallum's first-person account; thus, the "I" is }8

INVENTING TOM THOMSON

io Tom Thomson fishing at Tea Lake Dam, Algonquin Park. 1916. Photograph by La wren Harris. Arthur Lismer Papers, gift of Marjorie Lismer Bridges. Courtesy of the Edward P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario.

MacCallum, wealthy patron-to-be, medical doctor, and self-styled lover of "the grim fascinating northland" (quoted in Little, n), and this "F'/eye sees in Thomson "a tall and slim clean cut, dark young chap ... quiet, chary of words [and] full of resolution and independence" (n, see also MacCallum). When MacCallum sees some of Thomson's sketches, he immediately realizes (as he tells us) "that the North had gripped Thomson as it had gripped me" (n). Using the narrative method of quotation followed by summary, Little works forward in time until 7 July 1917. He establishes a clear image of Thomson as a man devoted to his work, totally in control THE BIOGRAPHICAL STORIES

39

of his bush life, independent, self-reliant, sincere, generous, and neither "a violent man nor given to extreme behaviour" (13). To this basic picture, already familiar from Davies, Jackson, and Addison, Little adds only two crucial new bits of information. Here, for the first time, we learn more about Winnifred Trainor, to whom Thomson gave "more than a dozen paintings" and for whom he painted a set of dishes with northern scenes (28), through one of her friends, a Mrs Irene Ewing, with whom Winnie apparently stayed for six weeks after Thomson's death (29-30), and through Dr Robert Little. In her interview with "Judge Little," Irene has much to say about her admiration for Thomson but remarkably little to say, of a positive nature, about her close friend Winnie. According to Irene, "Winnie could never see beauty anywhere" (29), and this set her very much apart from the artist; for this reason, and because Winnie never "confided" in Irene about an "engagement" with Thomson, Irene concludes that while Winnie "was deeply affected" (30) by Tom's death and later "became embittered" (30), the relationship between the two "is all a mystery to me" (30).*4 Robert Little, who camped in Algonquin Park as a boy and knew both Thomson and Winnifred Trainor, seems to corroborate Irene Ewing's surprise that Winnie and Tom were close enough romantically to be engaged. Dr Little insists that Thomson's "bride was the wild mysterious beauty of the northern woods" (31) and he concludes that Thomson was so "wrapped up in his work - a jealous mistress" ( 3 5 ) - that he spent most of his time alone. To this still partial and ambiguous picture of Winnie, William Little adds new information (as far as the public/published record is concerned) about Thomson's activities on the night of July 7. According to Little, who is relying on local sources, Thomson was highly sensitive about the war and his rejection for service; he may also have been highly sensitive about Winnie. As Little recreates that Saturday night, local guides and cottagers had gathered at the cabin of George Rowe (the guide who found Thomson's body). It appears to have been one of the usual Saturday night all-male gatherings with heavy drinking, and two of the drinkers were Martin Blecher, Jr, (the young German-American cottager already mentioned by Davies and by Addison) and Tom Thomson. Blecher and Thomson did not get along and "open hostility" just short of blows ensued (40). According to Little, "On leaving the cabin before mid-

40

INVENTING TOM THOMSON

night, Bletcher, who had made himself unpopular because of his outbursts and action towards the quiet-spoken guide [Thomson], hurled some additional insults and a final threat of, 'Don't get in my way if you know what's good for you!'" (40). And so, we have a motive. Blecher and Thomson disliked each other intensely and Blecher had openly threatened Thomson - only hours before Thomson died. But Little does not stop there. In a narrative manoeuvre that recalls Davies and evokes popular criminal court strategy, Little speculates about Winnie's contribution to this hostility. First, Little asserts that "not until Miss Trainer's death in 1962. has it been known authoritatively that Thomson intended to marry her" (41) Little does not explain here how this became known after i