Homage to A.Y. Jackson

MR. POTTS:

"He taught Canadians to see the beauty of their own land."

What a marvelous tribute to any man in any country but in the case of A.Y. Jackson how appropriate and how richly deserved.

This quotation appears on the beautiful poster on display which features a reproduction of the Hilton Hassel oil painting of A.Y. Jackson sketching in the Canadian wilderness.

I know I speak for every member of The Empire Club in saying that we consider it a distinct privilege to pay homage to him today.

I would like to thank Mr. Burt Richardson, Chairman of the National Committee on Homage to A. Y. Jackson, the members of his Committee and in particular Mrs. Beth Slaney and the many others who have assisted in the arrangements for this happy occasion.

We are all disappointed that Dr. Jackson is not with us today.

Originally we had hoped that he would be present but recognized that this might not be possible. We felt, however, that it would be not only appropriate but highly desirable to convene this luncheon in his honour even though we might not have the pleasure of his company. I am sure that you share our feelings in this regard.

On Tuesday of this week, being Dr. Jackson's 90th birthday, I forwarded on behalf of the members of The Empire Club the following telegram:

"The members of the Empire Club of Canada are looking forward to honouring you at our luncheon on Thursday but regret that it will not be possible for you to be present. We wish you a very happy birthday and many more years of happiness. "

Mr. Fisher, I am delighted to welcome you back to The Empire Club. It is 25 years and 3 days since you first addressed us.

On Thursday, October 2, 1947 you spoke to us on the subject intriguingly called "Cobwebs".

We had the pleasure of hearing from you again on November 2, 1950 but we have not had the pleasure of having you with us since then.

Your return visit today is certainly long overdue.

Our guest speaker today is not an artist in the sense that A. Y. Jackson is an artist but he is indeed a distinguished artist in his own right. A. Y. Jackson portrayed Canada with his brush, John Fisher with his voice.

He has said "Canada is a maple leaf, crisp and clean in autumn; it's the beaver minding his own business and working hard; it's the smell of boiling sap, burning brush, sweet hay, ripe grapes and fresh sawdust."

Each, in his own way, has "taught Canadians to see the beauty of their own land".

Sir, we are all obliged to you for joining us today to give expression to our thoughts and feelings as we pay homage to A.Y. Jackson.

When perusing the evening paper two nights ago, I thought I had stumbled upon another distinction shared by these two gentlemen.

In a listing of forthcoming election meetings I noted that one meeting was to be held in the A.Y. Jackson Secondary School and another in John Fisher Public School.

I was previously aware of the fact that the A. Y. Jackson Secondary School was indeed named in honour of Dr. Jackson.

Susan Ford, in the Toronto Sun yesterday, stated categorically that John Fisher Public School was named after our illustrious guest speaker.

However, upon some investigation, I discovered that it was named in honour of one John Fisher, the Mayor of the Town of North Toronto in 1893.

Hopefully, in the fullness of time, we shall also have a John Fisher Collegiate in honour of the gentleman who has brought such distinction to that name in the 20th century.

Our guest speaker is a graduate in law from Dalhousie University, has been honoured by five Canadian universities and what is probably more important, by five Indian tribes, was the Executive Director of the Canadian Tourist Association, a special assistant to Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and Canada's Centennial Commissioner.

He is an adviser to the United States Bicentennial Committee, member of the Board of Directors of King's College, Halifax and Chairman of the Advisory Council of the Canadian Folk Arts Council.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to present to you a folk historian, lecturer, radio personality, spark of Canadian pride and the man behind our highly successful 100th birthday party-affectionately known as 'Mr. Canada', John W. Fisher.

MR. JOHN FISHER:

Thank you very much Mr. Potts, ladies and gentlemen, les invites d'honneur, Dr. Cameron, friends.

You just spoiled my luncheon by that reference to twentyfive years and three days. No wonder you invited me back because nobody could remember how bad I was except Mr. Harpham, he's the only man that I can remember who was here that day and I think he was responsible for bringing me.

When I spoke to you twenty-five years and three days ago, I was talking Canadianism and I really thought I was crying in the wilderness. And maybe that should be the theme of our talk today-cry in the wilderness. That's an old, old expression. How appropriate it is to the Group of Seven and to A. Y. Jackson because they portrayed the wilderness; and for a long time they cried in the wilderness and nobody paid any attention to them. And when they did pay attention they derided them. They were called idiots, ugly and about every opprobrious word that you can think of.

How the pendulum in this country has swung. You saw the Globe and Mail of yesterday, the day before, papers all across Canada. The face of A.Y. Jackson on our national television programs, both networks, on local CTV programs and CFTO and in Hamilton, all over the land. In fact, it has been so wholesome, the response to painting, to art that we might have passed other countries where art is an accepted tradition. I don't know. Mrs. Zacks says that "Oh, yes! The New York Times, etc. will talk about Picasso and some great writer." But I don't know of a nation that neglected art for so long that's gone so wholeheartedly in favour of one of its most competent and gifted artists. I think it's great. It shows a new Canada.

Also in the last few days we have seen another form of nationalism in Moscow. I can't say it's quite so healthy. I can't say that it reveals the Canadian identity in the same positive, talented way that A.Y. Jackson did. In fact we just squeaked through on the hockey and we certainly didn't win any international medals for conduct. In fact, to come back to that wilderness, what was wrong with us in hockey at the start? Was this kind of a phony concept of the wilderness that many Canadians have the presumption that because we are a nation who inherited voyageurs and fur traders and trappers and lumberjacks and prospectors that we're tough and we're tougher than these dilettantes in Europe with their art galleries and museums. Evidently they never read Russian history, these Canadians. So we went with the big lumberjack belief to Moscow and we learned differently.

If you want my opinion, I prefer the soft portrayal of the identity. And I think that's the most important thing about Mr. Jackson is that he did portray a part of Canada that what Joan Murray calls the sort of the common denominator in her magnificent book on Tom Thompson. You say, by some kind of alchemy, the Group of Seven have made the Precambrian Shield as if it were applied to all of Canada and I would like to have my comments on that in a moment. I think that we are all very thrilled at the way attitudes in this country have changed and now the support we are getting for the arts. Not many people in this province know the great works that you have done but I know you must realize now how much easier it is to get these things done. For instance, you came to Toronto and rescued the Ned Hanlan. But what you've done in Montreal with the Iles St. Helene Musee, the Fraser Highlanders and the rescue of the old Chateau de Ramezay in Montreal is magnificent. You know how hard it's been to get Canadians interested in their identity and heritage.

But perhaps I could put the tribute to A.Y. Jackson into focus this way. Now Miss Cathy Carroll is sitting down there, fashion consultant, and Mr. Robert Heneault, Vice-President of the Steel Company of Canada, and a year ago the Steel Company of Canada along with Algoma and Dofasco and Sidbec and the ones in Nova Scotia, etc. had a world conference of steel presidents in Canada, many European women and Japanese men and women and from Latin America. They took them to that magnificent McMichael Gallery. Now Robert and Signe, they were fascinated, the European women, by the setting and by the imaginative design of the log cabin motif and the hemlock logs. I think they were fascinated with the perch that you have for your museum-how it looks down into the valley-and even the trees seem to be coming up to take a peak at the treasures inside. The setting left them speechless. But when we asked the European and the Asian and the South American ladies what they thought of the art, we couldn't get the same response. Now why? Well, let's deal with the European. I suppose it's a different type of landscape painting than they are accustomed to. I suppose it is not impressionistic, it's not the modern touch. It didn't mean much to them en passant but if you took a Canadian through there it would mean a great deal. Why? Why should it mean so much to us when it's about a country that most of us have never seen except if we run up to Muskoka and back again? Most of us have never lived in the Shield. Most of us have never seen the country that A.Y. portrayed so beautifully and with such feeling and such vistas. But Joan Murray, in her book, explains that there is some kind of an alchemy. Well, I think I have the answer and I think that the contribution that Jackson made was in the two fields that are distinctively Canadian. The things that make this country different from the United States are basically geopolitical. There is the French fact of life, the fact that we are part French, that we are a bicultural heritage, bilingual, and your husband, Mrs. Pearson, did so much to further that concept, to enlarge our horizons. A bilingual, or the French fact, and the second thing that makes us different from the United States is purely geological. They do not have the Precambrian Shield. They don't have the muskeg; they don't have the wild, white water; they don't have the tundra, except Alaska; they don't have the sweeping Northern Lights and the kind of a country that A.Y. preferred. He was almost as if a magnet pulled him out of the sycophant society into that kind of an existence. Now A. Y. was born in Quebec but lots of people of the English language are born in Quebec but they seem to close their eyes to the culture all around them. Not A.Y.--he opened his eyes, he learned French and he discovered the depth of French civilization, French culture and he became familiar with the habitant, familiar with Quebec and with France. Just think what a pioneer he was. If more Canadians had followed the example of A.Y. Jackson and become bilingual, bicultural and therefore a larger human being, how much stronger the unity of this country would be today.

So we are saluting not only A.Y., painter, but A.Y., Canadian, citizen, bilingue, il parle bien la langue francaise, il a etudie la culture francaise, il connait bien les habitants, le paysage. He is probably the most outstanding portrait painter of the Christmas card aspect of Quebec that is now gone. Some of his colleagues, Carron, Gagnon and many of the other French Canadians have left us on canvas some reminders of that. But A.Y. was the pioneer from this part of the world.

Now A. Y. in the wilderness, in the Precambrian, it seemed to me that the things which fascinated him in this area of Canada that is so different from the States, maybe the Shield slips a little into Minnesota, perhaps into Northern Michigan, but they don't have the things that intrigued him-the break up, the freeze up-to the same extent. And the break up and the freeze up to A.Y. were fascinating spectacles or spectaculars of nature and he always painted them and there are many reminders of it around. And he knew, I guess, instinctively, how Canadian that is and what a problem it is because in that country when the freeze up comes you have a hiatus and nothing moves in the north unless your planes land on runways but if you are using float planes you can't move for several weeks. No Indian can travel for several weeks. And the reverse in the spring, in the break up, nothing moves; the great silence of the Shield country. And this fascinated, I think, Jackson as I interpret his paintings. In the fall the titanic struggle between the combine of fall and summer against the encroaching tentacles of winter. It is like a wrestling match at which winter, in the Japanese style, paralyzes fall and summer and then gradually spills over it in frosty delight imposing a great silence upon its victims. And then the converse--how often Jackson painted to get that light just at the other spectacular of nature, in the spring, when winter's wan and feeble and spring has the virility of youth and then when the classic struggle comes it's not paralysis as happens in the fall, it's seduction, and then spring with the delight of seduction gurgles and giggles and spreads its charms all over. The hope of life is renewed and you can see this so vividly in the great, lone land. Now that's a phrase that Pierre Berton uses frequently in his magnificent books, The Last Spike and the other one, and I think it is so apt to the country that Jackson and his colleagues favoured. The great, lone land.

Another thing which fascinated Jackson and his colleagues, of course, was the third spectacular of nature. The changing of the leaves in autumn when nature puts on different raiments and when the leaves noiselessly float and fall to earth. I think perhaps it fascinated him that a leaf gets dressed up in its finest raiments for its own funeral. Dressed up to die. A leaf, therefore, in my opinion, must be feminine. Now Jackson, whether he was fascinated by that aspect or just the colour of nature, and I guess any artist would be enthralled with the colours of our deciduous trees because they are every colour of the spectrum, and I think it would intrigue him that that one painting he had of the maple in the softwoods, in the evergreens, is a magnificent thing. What makes one maple go early? What makes one tree stronger than another? Why is one tree more glorious in its shedding than another one? Well I said feminine. Jackson, I hear, liked the company of women. There are so many experts here at the head table, I can't compete with you, Mr. McMichael, and others. I am told he is very happy in the company of women and a very chivalrous gentleman.

But there was another side to Jackson which was stronger than that and that was the explorer in him, the nomad in him and he could go far from the company of women for long spells just like Verendrye, Marquette, LaSalle, Joliet, des Groseilliers, Mackenzie, Fraser, Hudson, all these people, just like the prospectors, the bush pilots, the surveyors, the whackers could go. Now Jackson studied in Paris, and Mrs. Zacks, Dr. Zacks, will know far more about this than 1, but in Paris where he must have observed the traditional-life of Fartiste on the rive gauche with these boulevards and cafes, aperitif and femme fatale and Chablis and Mouton, that kind of a life on the left bank in garrets and intellectual discussions must have intrigued A. Y. but he gave that up to go where there are never any concierges. How can you have a concierge when you don't have a door, when you live in a tent? He gave up the starched sheets to sleep under the stars. He must have been tough, which brings up the question of the old newspaper questions, Mr. Richardson. Who, where, when, what, why-we can't say why Jackson did what he did because that's all part of 'who'. Well let's deal with the 'who'. I think he must have been incredibly strong. A gentle heart but a strong physique. He would have to be to paint outdoors. When he first went to Algonquin it was 45 below and you can't, as I understand it, paint with gloves on. Think of the drilling in the summer that man must have taken from the millions of acupunctures by the black flies and the mosquitoes. Think of the times he must have been numb with cold. Think of him washing always in cold water, shaving in cold water. Everything about him begins with the letter 'p'. The paddle he loved and the flash of the paddle in the sun. The pack sack was his companion. The pine, the portage and, of course, ending up with the palette. You can make a nice little alliteration about the p's in Jackson's life. His hide must have been tough and his insides must have been lined with iron because he had no cordon bleu chefs from Paris or rive gauche. No, he did his own cooking. That's flapjacks, bannoch, dried apricots, dried prunes, oatmeal, pork and sometimes bacon, as long as it lasted. For he lived off the land, just like voyageurs, fur traders, trappers, prospectors, bush pilots. And this is the fascinating thing-lie followed the tradition of the forefathers into the north but, to play on words, our forefathers battled against it but it's also still in the forefront of Canadian existence. It dominates our society and our future and even in this election, Mrs. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau talks of a six billion dollar highway north. Even Robert Stanfield gets involved and his predecessor, John Diefenbaker, talked of the vision of the north. And even David Lewis gets into it. He doesn't agree with the terms but he is emphasizing the north. I haven't heard M. Caouette but, naturally, he would be dealing with the fine financial aspects of it. So in the north, the forefathers and the forefront are still there, so vivid.

Now, Jackson operating in these two areas-Quebec, Christmas card country and in the vanishing wilderness--almost as if he were trying to alert us that it was going, going very rapidly. Well that 'who' was Jackson-tough but gentle man.

'Where'-where did he go? Incredible again where that man went. He wrote the Minister of Internal something or other, the Interior, I guess, in those days, Bert, wrote him and said I want to go to the loneliest outpost in the world at the roof of the world taking weeks to get up there. Jackson, as Bob McMichael told me the other day, never painted Niagara. He wasn't interested in peach blossoms. That's too refined, too pampered. He never went to Prince Edward Island-about the only place probably too pastoral for this fellow in love with the rocky spine of Canada. Wherehe went everywhere. Mr. McMichael said that no Canadian probably, including the explorers, ever set his feet on more Canadian soil than A. Y. Jackson from one end of Canada to the other and to the roof of the world and in places that have gone. Mr. McMichael said outside, some of the villages that A. Y. knew when he was enjoying Quebec have now disappeared from the map-fires and changes in the passing of time.

'When'-When is very interesting in Jackson. He had an innate sense of timing and he had luck and he's tough. When he was shot in the shoulder in the First World War and recuperated in England that's when he met The Beaver, Lord Beaverbrook, who commanded 'Make that man a Lieutenant', and he was made a Lieutenant and then he was able to paint at the expense of the taxpayer. His timing was right and if he had moved just another two or three inches the bullet would have probably have gone through his head and we wouldn't have this heritage today.

Time-when he came back from the First World War and started to think about art and he had an exhibition and he didn't sell anything, you know it took forty years for one of his great paintings to be moved to market; and he wasn't getting anywhere and he thought-Oh? I'll go to Chicago-then somebody said "Let's go down to Emileville, forty miles east of Montreal, and do some painting." And he wasn't sure how long he'd stay there. Now Emileville is very important in this Canadian story, for the timing. Jackson went down there arid a French-Canadian family by the name of Gaetan invited him to stay with them and didn't want to charge him anything. He didn't have much anyway. Didn't want to charge him anything because they had never seen an artist at work, so he stayed, but again he was thinking of Chicago. Must go the United States -nothing here for me-nobody wants to have anything to do with an artist. So that night it rained then in the morning the temperature dropped, he explained, dropped quickly and it turned the whole thing into a palace of ice, the birchwoods. And they rushed out and just then the sun came up and it was a fairyland. And he did that wonderful painting, what is it called?--Morning After Sleet. And they got so excited about Canadiana again that they lingered in Emileville just long enough for a letter to come from Toronto signed 'J.E.H. Macdonald' whom he'd never met but heard about and Macdonald said "Don't you think it's time we started turning our thoughts to our own country and started to be aware of our Canadian identity". This intrigued Mr. Jackson but if he had missed it by a day he'd have gone to Chicago and might never have received the letter-the postal services were probably as bad then as they are now. His timing was terrific. When he went to Algonquin-it was before we butchered it. When he went to Algoma it was still pristine, pure. When he went to the northwest it was still good and hadn't been ruined and the permafrost had not been raped. Jackson's timing has been great all the way through.

So that to me is kind of the story of A. Y. Jackson. He was a builder. He was an interpreter who wasn't scared to go into the toughest places. He had no time for the soft life. Had he been born a hundred years earlier, assuming that he had the same assortment of genes in his system, I think he would have been an explorer and probably a great one; because where he went he always wanted to go further, always that curiosity, and in his little book, A. K's Country, in his little book he explains "I always wanted to see what lay beyond", so he went to Yellowknife and he was curious then to go further, to Eldorado, to see what lay beyond. And finally he got up to the very Arctic, to the roof of the world itself. So now we have this wonderful parade of Canadian names which are very Canadian and in everyone of them he's painted. Just listen to the roll call and that will bring back Precambria, The Shield, the wilderness, the land of our forefathers and the land still in the forefront. Listen to the names-Labrador, Tadoussac, Saguenay, Baie St. Paul, Gatineau, Georgian Bay, Algonquin, and that lovely one Algoma, and tough ones Noranda, Abitibi, and then those beautiful strong names out west, Great Bear, Great Slave, Lesser Slave, Eldorado, Norman Wells, Radium and then the Whitehorse, the Yellowknife, the Valley of the Peace, Athabasca, the Yellowhead Pass, the Kicking Horse Pass, the Crow's Nest Pass, Okanagan and Skeena in the land of the totem poles. It's an incredible life. We're here to wish him a Happy Birthday. I'm not going to do that, Mrs. Pearson. I can't wish A. Y. Jackson a Happy Birthday because a birthday celebration connotes that you are going to give the celebrant a present and any gift that I could give him in words, in comparison to the gift that he has given Canada, would be so minuscule it would be ludicrous. Therefore, all I'm going to say about A.Y. is that I think a hundred years from now people will say-A.Y. you came too early, you didn't stay long enough. Birthday gift, he has given us the gift of the portrait of our country from the French side and the big, lone land side. He gave us a portrait in perpetuity. A. Y., or Jacqui, as they call him in French, or if you play that word carefully "j'acquis" also means to acquire and if anybody didn't acquire but gave it was A.Y. So to A.Y., Alex, Jackie, Dr. Jackson-a demain.

Mr. Fisher was thanked on behalf of The Empire Club by Mr. B.T. Richardson, Chairman, National Committee on Homage to A.Y. Jackson.

MR. RICHARDSON:

I am happy to extend the thanks of this meeting to John Fisher. I am glad that I have the opportunity to do so.

John Fisher is one of the foremost communicators in North America. He has what is known down in his native New Brunswick as a gift of the tongue or what is known in my own ancestral county of Ontario as a gift of the gab. In thirty years I have never head John Fisher in better form than he was today. And I remember when he was an articulate reporter of the C.B.C. at the great wartime Quebec Conferences and there was John Fisher, jacket off, belting it away into a microphone to the people of Canada telling them about what Churchill and Roosevelt and the others were doing in the secret rooms of the Chateau Frontenac and just to fill in one day I went on his program with him.

Well if we know something about our history as Canadians it's because of John Fisher's popular interpretations of it. If Canada has ten million friends in the United States, and we have far more than that in that country and elsewhere, it's because they have responded to John Fisher's warm commentaries on Canada. Not only was he, Mr. Chairman, the Centennial Commissioner but, as you mentioned, he was also special assistant to the Prime Minister of Canada and I was his successor in that job. So for brief times each of us was in charge of that citadel of unorganized confusion known as the Canadian Prime Minister's Office and what an education it was, John. What a survival! And what clues do we have to the news of the day.

Well art is a form of communication and so the grand old man of Canadian landscape painting whose 90th birthday has drawn us together today is also a communicator. And John Fisher has told us in spoken words what the message is. A.Y. Jackson's Canada. That's what the message is. All our ancestors came to a land of wild and unknown wilderness and it was A. Y. Jackson who came back from his canoe trips with the news that the landscape was alive and beautiful. His legacy will last us as long as Canada and it will endure like the hills that A. Y. Jackson has painted.

Alf Casson, A.J. Casson, a contemporary and an associate of A.Y. Jackson, said on T.V. this week that Jackson is half artist, half explorer and that is what John Fisher has been saying today. And that is a definition of all true Canadians and John Fisher has put it all into words for us today and enough said. On your behalf, I thank him for you.