Yea, the Glaskie man hath got ahead of the Canadian, to the Canadian’s great disgust.

Charles G. D. Roberts to W. D. Whitehall, 30 September 1888

In 1888, Queen’s University took the bold step of advertising for a Chair in English —hitherto instruction in the discipline had been largely focused on language rather than literature and courses in English had been taught mainly by professors of History. Of the applications received, the strongest were from Charles G. D Roberts, a prominent Canadian poet and man of letters from the Maritimes, and James Cappon, a Glasgow-educated Scot specializing in contemporary European literature with a book on Victor Hugo and glowing letters of reference from John Caird, brother of leading philosopher Edward Caird.

In the end, Queen’s chose Cappon, whose background in the Philosophical Idealism then dominating the University must have had strong appeal. Still, the decision prompted Roberts to voice his frustration at the preference for British training to his friend W. D. Whitehall, “Yea, the Glaskie man hath got ahead of the Canadian, to the Canadian’s great disgust.”

Cappon transformed the study of English at the University, and in one of the ironies that abound in academic life, Cappon would make his reputation in part through his work on the poetry of his competitor. As the Tecumseh Press reprint of Cappon’s Roberts and the Influences of his Time (1905; 1975) notes, “James Cappon was the first serious critic to examine the work of Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman. He wrote with unusual insight and a rigorous sense of literary value.”

James Cappon also became an important figure in the administrative history of Queen’s: he was appointed the first Dean of Arts in 1906, serving in this role until his retirement in 1919, at which time Frederick Varley was commissioned to paint the portrait featured on the poster for this exhibit.

Description of Case 1
This retrospective begins with the story of James Cappon, a Scot who was rather controversially appointed as the first Chair of English over the leading Canadian candidate for the position, the writer and scholar Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Cappon would go on to become the first Dean of Arts and one of Robert Charles Wallace’s “Great Men of Queen’s”—an administrator who played a key role in the development of Extension Learning in the 1920s, and in championing the role of the Humanities as the foundation of a university education. He would also write the first important critical studies of Roberts and his contemporary, Bliss Carman, and teach the first course devoted entirely to Canadian literature at Queen’s in 1915.

It’s Complicated: Cappon, Pierce, and Queen’s
The relationship between Cappon as professor and Pierce as student was complicated: Pierce both admired the older man’s literary acumen (at least with regard to Old-World authors) and desired to gain his approval. The fact that he had failed his final exam in English in 1912 (too much time devoted to extracurricular activities) meant that he spent his next year as a junior Methodist minister studying to retake the paper in order to obtain his degree. Yet the experience strengthened him rather than souring him on either the man or the subject:

I cannot get time to study as I should. I do it on the run and I’m afraid that Cappy will run [ie fail] me in April. That Fin Eng [ie. examination] is a beast. I can do it, love it, even if it is a beast but it takes grinding … But our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall.

[Letter to Edith Chown, March 1913]

Despite the tensions, Pierce would later describe Cappon as one of the “Makers of Queen’s” in an article for the Queen’s Review in 1929, where he acknowledged his “intellectual and aesthetic integrity.” Given the importance of “Making” in Pierce’s lexicon, the designation is significant.

Description of Case 2
The second case of the exhibit explores the conflicted relationship between James Cappon and his student Lorne Pierce, a young Methodist minister-in-training who was passionately devoted both to Queen’s and to establishing the cultural identity of Canada as a modern nation. Chagrined by his professor’s avowed low opinion of Canadian literature in 1912, Pierce would later become a driving force in the publication of works by Canadian authors and their critical appraisal through his role as editor at Ryerson Press from 1920-1960. His collection of Canadiana, donated to coincide with the opening of the Douglas Library in 1924 and augmented throughout his lifetime, forms the core of the Edith and Lorne Pierce Collection. Among his lasting contributions to Canadian letters was his creation of the series Makers of Canadian Literature, slim volumes that combined critical analysis of early Canadian writers with a selection of their work. He solicited Cappon, his old antagonist regarding the calibre of Canadian Literature, to write the volume on Charles G.D. Roberts.

For all his influence as a man of letters, Cappon’s greatest contribution to Canadian literary studies may have come not through his body of critical work, but through his influence on one student: Lorne Pierce (1890-1961), who would become a leading force at Ryerson Press from 1920-1960. Pierce came to Queen’s as an undergraduate in 1908, and as recent biographer Sandra Campbell writes, “By the time he left Queen’s for the west in 1912, Queen’s had marked him for life” (Both Hands). In the case of his English professor, Campbell implies, those marks might well be scars, though she admits that Pierce “both exalted and deplored” the man known affectionately to his students as “Cappie.”

Pierce’s passion for Canadian literature developed from a nationalist pride that took the Eurocentric preferences of Cappon as a challenge. He dates his obsession to an end of term class in his final year, when he asked his professor whether he thought there was anything of merit in Canadian literature. Cappon’s response—the sardonic quoting of a bit of Robert Service doggerel—stung Pierce, who was unable to counter the criticism because, he remembered, “I knew nothing at all about Canadian writers, Canadian art or what might be called Canadian culture.” That day marked the beginning of what would be an extraordinary career in the collection, promotion, and shaping of literary culture in Canada.

Perhaps Lorne Pierce’s most lasting contribution to Canadian Literature and to Queen’s has been the remarkable array of print materials donated to the W.D. Jordan Library that form the Edith and Lorne Pierce Collection. As Pierce recalls, his career as a collector of Canadiana began with the purchase of an anthology, a morocco-bound edition of The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, bought the day James Cappon had spoken with such condescension about Canadian literature.

As an editor at Ryerson Press, Pierce sought out manuscripts, letters, and early editions of the works of Canadian writers, augmenting the collection he had begun in 1912. By late 1923 he had decided to “give back to Queen’s” by donating his assembled materials to his alma mater. In July 1924 he shipped the first 3000 volumes, timed to coincide with the opening of the Douglas Library: “Margery Fee has written that this vast collection of books and manuscripts, still a major resource for Canadian scholars, which Pierce augmented throughout his life and in his will, is one of Pierce’s greatest contributions to Canadian culture after his editorial work at Ryerson Press” (Campbell, Both Hands, 244)

Lorne Pierce’s commitment to Canadian literature, both as creative endeavor and as object of literary study, was affirmed in 1924 when he proposed to the Royal Society of Canada that a medal be awarded annually recognizing “an achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature written in either English or French.” Pierce provided the funds necessary to sustain the award, which the Society subsequently named in his honour. The first recipient of the medal in 1926 should come as no surprise in this narrative: Charles G.D. Roberts. In 1964 the Royal Society changed to awarding the medal every second year.

Maquettes for the Lorne Pierce medals on loan from a private collection.

A fortnight after my return I left for Kingston & Ottawa. C & K. I officially presented my Canadiana to Queen’s. The president sent me a very kind letter & I shall treasure it. At Ottawa I completed arrangements for the Royal Society Medal. I have for a long time felt that the R.S.of C. should usurp more of the function of the French Academy in fostering & directing Canadian lit. I offered a medal & this has been accepted. They have also insisted upon my name being associated with the award & so it will be known as the Lorne Pierce Medal of the R.S. of C. This is a real honor as it couples my name with the highest literary honor of Canada.

Lorne Perce, August 9, 1924 Queen’s University Archives

In 1953 Malcolm Ross (1911-2002) came to Queen’s as editor of the Queen’s Quarterly . That same year Lorne Pierce of Ryerson Press suggested that he might consider editing a book of essays on Canadian Literature. The following year Ross published Our Sense of Identity, a collection that enabled him to articulate his vision of a national literature informed by cultural diversity. But identifying a literature of diversity was only the first step—teaching it was the second. Two years earlier Ross had approached publisher Jack McClelland (who had studied with Ross in a summer course at the University of Toronto in 1946) with the idea of creating a series of paperback reprints of important works by Canadian writers. As Ross recalls,

I was teaching then at Queen’s University and was anxious to prepare a full course on Canadian literature. We were teaching some Canadian literature from anthologies at the tag-end of a course on American literature. But you cannot teach a novel with only a chapter in an anthology to go by. The older novels were out of print, and the recent ones too expensive for classroom use.

“Achievement of Stephen Leacock” 125-26.

Although at the time such a venture seemed financially risky, McClelland was persuaded, and the New Canadian Library (NCL) was created, a series that for several decades made available affordable editions of Canadian literary works for classroom use. Ross was the general editor of the series which published its first volumes in 1957.

Malcolm Ross would go on to become Head of the Department of English (1957-1960) and to be appointed to the newly created James Cappon Professorship recognizing scholarly excellence in the department (1960-62) before leaving Queen’s to become Dean of Arts at the University of Toronto (1962-68), and ultimately to complete his career as Thomas McCulloch Professor at Dalhousie University.

In recent years the ideological factors shaping the NCL have been the subject of considerable debate (see Laura Groening’s “Malcolm Ross: Making it Real or Making a Difference?” Studies in Canadian Literature 25.1 (2000) for a defence of Ross and a detailed account of the controversy), but what is uncontested is its role in establishing the “canon” of Canadian literature in a period when the nation was attempting to define its identity.

Now under the Random House imprint, the New Canadian Library continues, as the press puff expresses it, “[to be] synonymous with the best that has been thought, felt, and written in Canada, and it has ensured that major books have remained in print and readily accessible to the reading public. Spanning more than two hundred years of writing in 100 titles, the series publishes the country’s greatest writers, including Margaret Atwood, Morley Callaghan, Margaret Laurence, Stephen Leacock, Hugh MacLennan, Michael Ondaatje, and Gabrielle Roy.”

Other Editors

Among current faculty, Tracy Ware continues the tradition of scholarly editing of Canadian Literature with:

• Crowded out!: and other sketches by Susan Frances Harrison (Ottawa: Tecumseh Press, 2010)
• Jean Baptiste: a poetic olio, in II cantos by Levi Adams (London ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1996)
• A Northern Romanticism: Poets of the Confederation (Ottawa: Tecumseh Press, 2000)
• Uncollected short stories by Duncan Campbell Scott (London ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 2001)

As do Glenn Willmott

• Think of the earth (Toronto: Brown Bear Press, 2000)

and Robert May

• In the Village of Viger: A Critical Edition by Duncan Campbell Scott (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 2010)

For four days in July, 1955, a hundred or so writers, editors, critics and publishers met at Queen’s University for what soon became famous as “The Kingston Conference,” though its official title was “The Writer, His Media and the Public”.

 

The event took place at a decisive moment in Canadian cultural history. The report of the Massey Commission, which accurately predicted the great arts boom destined to last part-way through the 1970s, was still fresh in people’s minds. One of the Massey recommendations — creation of the Canada Council — was about to be implemented. CBC television had just begun. British influence in Canadian cultural life was fading quickly and the American influence that was to supplant it had not yet become threatening. To the delegates attending the Kingston Conference — people as far apart as the critic William Arthur Deacon, who was ancient even then, and Leonard Cohen, only 21 at the time — the future was of course unclear. But they appeared to sense that they were standing on a threshold. It must have seemed that anything was possible.

Douglas Fetherling, Kingston Whig Standard 9 Jan. 1988

George Whalley: Criticism and Creativity

The proceedings of “The Writer, His Media, and The Public” were published as The Canadian Writers’ Conference, 1955 and edited by George Whalley, a near legendary figure in the history of the Department of English. Born in Kingston July 25th 1915, Whalley pursued a life that reads like a bildungsroman pushing the limits of probability. A Rhodes scholar who studied at Oxford (1936-40) where he was also rowed as Oriel College Captain of Boats, Whalley declined an invitation to join an expedition to the Antarctic in 1940, instead enlisting in the Royal Navy. He was a crew member in the British fleet’s hunt to sink the German battleship “Bismark” and a member of Royal Navy Admiralty’s Intelligence Division helping to design and test equipment for Allied landings in Sicily and Normandy. After the war he completed his PhD (thesis on Samuel Taylor Coleridge) from King’s College, London, and joined the Department of English at Queen’s in 1950. A stellar academic (he was appointed Cappon Professor in 1962 in recognition of his scholarship), Whalley twice served as Head of the Department (1962-67 and 1977-80).

Whalley’s service to Canadian literature extends beyond his editing of the 1955 conference proceedings. A creative writer himself, he published Poems: 1939-1944 which was followed by a second volume of poetry No Man is an Island in 1948. He was also the author of a biography of the Arctic explorer John Hornby (1880-1927), a text that would later become central to Elizabeth Hay’s novel Late Nights on Air, winner of the 2007 Giller Prize.

He is also linked to one of the best-known writers to have graduated from the Department: Michael Ondaatje.

In 1965 Michael Ondaatje entered the MA program in the Department of English at Queen’s, and for the next two years George Whalley acted as supervisor of his thesis, “Mythology in the Poetry of Edwin Muir: A Study of the Making and Using of Mythology in Edwin Muir’s Poetry,” and as a mentor to his developing literary career. Whalley introduced Ondaatje to a number of key figures in the Kingston literary scene, including three men associated with the department who were at the centre of a thriving publishing venture: Tom Eadie (B.A 1968, M.A. 1971) was the editor of Quarry, an annual student literary magazine that was transformed under his editorship into a quarterly literary review that published work from writers across Canada. In 1965 Eadie, along with Tom Marshall and Colin Norman, also founded Quarry Press, its first imprint The Beast With Three Backs, a collection of poems by the three publishers. In succeeding decades Quarry would become a key imprint for a new generation of Canadian writers.

Until the mid-70’s Creative Writing was an extra- curricular activity at Queen’s; in response to sustained urging from students and creative faculty members like medievalist and women’s writing specialist Elizabeth Green, it has since become part of curriculum for a small group of promising writers whose portfolio submissions gain them a place in one of the five single-semester courses dedicated to the subject. Initial offerings were taught by Victor Coleman, then director of Queen’s National Film Theatre, who was succeeded by Bronwyn Wallace (B.A. 1967, M.A. 1969). Since 1989 the Department’s creative writing courses have been taught by Carolyn Smart, who also organizes both Lake Effect (a semi-annual anthology produced by her advanced writers’ workshop) and the on-going Writer-in-Residence program.