Delegate Profile: Gregory Betts
Gregory Betts is finishing his Ph.D. at York University, with a defence date set for mid-August. He edited an edition of Raymond Knister's poetry, and worked as assistant editor for an edition of W.W.E. Ross' poetry, both with Exile Editions. He is currently working on an edition of the urban poetry and paintings of Lawren Harris. His first collection of poetry,
If Language, is scheduled to be published this summer.
"The Destroyer: Bertram Brooker and His Literary Works" |
As one of Canada's first practitioners of avant-garde modernism, Bertram Brooker was a vibrant, swirling bed of production. He was Canada's first abstract painter, one of our most radical early modernist poets, and one of our earliest practitioners of surrealistic, multi-media drama. His first novel,
Think of the Earth (1936), won Canada's first Governor General's Award for Literature. Brooker also produced two other novels, four plays, one posthumous volume of poetry, over one hundred articles in diverse newspapers, journals, and magazines, and two volumes of edited critical essays (1929 and 1936). Through his various arts, Brooker championed a spiritual revolution that sought to overthrow church and state, along with most of the ideological pillars of Western society, including individualism, materialism, and monotheism. Studies by critics like Dennis Reid, Joyce Zemans, and Sherrill Grace have all noted that Brooker consciously attempted to develop his polemic stance into an aesthetic movement, tentatively identified as 'Ultimatism.' Brooker used his position in early Canadian modernist communities, particularly through his close friendship with Toronto luminaries like Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, Morley Callaghan, Herman Voaden, and Merrill Denison, to advocate for a spiritual and aesthetic revolution.
His major influences traversed the distance between Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke's occultist writings, Friedrich Nietzsche's visionary philosophies, Wassily Kandinsky's modernist aesthetics, and Lawren Harris' spiritualised Canadian nationalism to create an impressive and unique blend of 19th and 20th Century Canadian and European aesthetic and theological thinking - though, of course, he was not alone in Canada in blending such diverse influences. Brooker's literary works made his ideology influences explicit through frequent, direct references to artists and writers listed above. His fiction, for instance, dramatizes the literary struggles of an isolated Canadian spiritualist-modernist with spiritual, religious, and aesthetic ambitions. Brooker's poems, on the other hand, focus on how language as a tool relates to and creates ideology. The linguistic disturbances, neologisms, fractured grammar, and avant-garde techniques in the poetry cumulatively resonate and develop into emotional peaks, philosophic dogma, or semiotic insights. He is perhaps the closest Canada ever approximated, before 1939, to the radical poetics of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, or to the religious imagination of W.B. Yeats and William Blake.
Brooker's influential role in the visual arts has received considerable attention by critics and other artists inspired by his abstractions. My dissertation project, however, focuses almost exclusively on Brooker's literary contributions to Canadian modernism. Through his novels, poems, short-fiction, dramas, essays, manifestoes, and anthologies, Brooker enthusiastically advocated for increased experimentation in Canadian literature. As the first book-length consideration of Brooker's achievements, my dissertation attempts to draw Brooker's eclectic production into ideological and aesthetic focus. Loosely following the artist-and-their-works model of Stephen Scobie's Sheila Watson and Her Works and Alias Bob Dylan, and Michael Ondaatje's Leonard Cohen, the thesis maintains a tight focus on the texts while documenting the changing ambitions, aesthetics, and mediums of Brooker's personal philosophy and religion. My study begins by identifying the specific episteme Brooker worked within as a way to reconstitute the historical framework of an interdisciplinary artist who has been consistently overlooked and misunderstood.
Works Cited
Brooker, Bertram. Tangled Miracle. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1936. Published under pseudonym Huxley Hearne.
---. The Robber: A Tale of the Time of the Herods. Toronto: Collins, 1949.
---. Think of the Earth. Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1936. Reprinted 2000. Toronto: Brown Bear Press. Editor and introduction Glenn Willmott.
---. Sounds Assembling: The Poetry of Bertram Brooker. Editor and introduction by Birk Sproxton. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1980.
---. Bertram Brooker: 1888-1955. Editor and introduction by Dennis Reid. Canadian Artists Series: 1. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1979.
Lacombe, Michele. "Theosophy and the Canadian Idealist Tradition: A Preliminary Exploration." Journal of Canadian Studies. 17.2 (Summer 1982). 100-118.
McKillop, A.B. Contours of Canadian Thought. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.
---. A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era. Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001.
Reid, Dennis. Atma Buddhi Manas: The Later Works of Lawren S. Harris. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1985.
Wilson, Richard Albert. The Miraculous Birth of Language. Previously titled The Birth of Language: Its Place in World Evolution and Its Structure in Relation to Space and Time. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1949.
My thesis connects a particular spiritual, national and aesthetic crisis in Canada to similar global experiences of the modern period by exploring one individual in a largely overlooked movement in Canadian art history. The interdisciplinary nature of the project builds connections between the disciplines while also addressing and challenging the formation of scholastic historicity. Brooker's emergence within a broader network of interwoven movements, and the subsequent scholastic erasure of this dynamic phase in the development of Canadian literature, brings to light the contradistinctive aspects of the production, study and teaching of Canadian literature. I am interested in the possibility of developing or working within a collaborative network investigating the various formations and manifestations of Canadian modernism; especially relating to the lingering legacies of the Idealist tradition, and the broken continuities of Canadian aesthetic communities.