The Canadian readers meet: the Canadian Literature Club of Toronto, Donald G. French, and the middlebrow modernist reader.(Report)

SOMMAIRE

Pendant de nombreuses decennies, le Canadian Literature Club of Toronto (1915-1973) s'assura une forte presence sur la scene culturelle torontoise. Il s'efforca d'encourager le developpement de la litterature canadienne-anglaise en faisant la promotion de livres canadiens, de monter une dramaturgie originale et d'apporter un soutien aux auteurs. Le club fut fonde par l'editeur et pigiste Donald French qui resta fidele aux principes et aux methodes qu'il avait proposes a l'origine. Cet article retrace l'historique du CLC en abordant les etapes de la carriere de Donald French et son role dans la creation d'une infrastructure litteraire et editoriale propre au Canada. Il examine egalement certains problemes actuels auxquels font face le CLC et son fondateur dans le domaine de l-histoire du livre et l'histoire litteraire canadienne. Ainsi comment devons-nous envisager plus concretement la relation entre les lecteurs et les ecrivains? Est-il possible de conceptualiser le role du lecteur autrement que comme consommateur culturel? En quoi consiste le role de l'editeur dans la production culturelle? Quel est le lien qui existe entre les organisations locales ou regionales et la culture dite nationale? ou encore entre une culture bourgeoise ou > et l'art noble ou serieux? L'article fait valoir rimportance d'inclure les organisations populaires tel que le Canadian Literature Club dans l'historiographie litteraire.

 
OUR CREED 
 
   We believe that there is an already existing body of Canadian 
   literature. 
 
   We believe that there are special messages for Canadian readers in 
   the writings of Canadian poets, novelists, historians, biographers, 
   essayists, journalists. 
 
   Therefore we desire to encourage Canadians to read more books 
   written by Canadian authors. (1) 

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The Canadian Literature Club of Toronto (1915-1973) was an active, advocating, convivial presence on Toronto's cultural scene for almost sixty years, and its influence extended further. The club had a clear sense of its purpose and practices, as initially envisaged by the founder and first president, the critic and editor Donald French, and it followed these with tenacity over decades--through an epidemic and a depression, two world wars, the aging and deaths of its core members--and through the challenges posed by success and by the expansion of its constituency. (Subscribing members at times numbered more than two hundred, with as many as eight hundred attendees at public events and productions.) While the Canadian Literature Club (CLC) arranged multiple series of authorial recitations and critical lectures, staged plays, and hosted literary competitions, it was self-defined as a society of readers; over the years, it was sometimes necessary to remind the public (and even its members) of that identity and mandate. The CLC's aim, as formulated in December 1914 at a first organizational meeting, was directly stated: "The object of the club is to encourage the study of Canadian Literature and thereby foster original production in this field." (2) However, what was plain to its convening committee and first membership presents an interesting puzzle for the later literary critic or book historian. The essay which follows is an attempt to understand the crucial hinge word of the CLC constitution: "thereby."

Its activity and longevity, evidenced in orderly and fulsome archival records, makes the CLC suitable for study from variety of angles. The English-Canadian literary historian would encounter a sustained effort to boost Canadian writers and literature, one commencing before the founding of such organizations as the Canadian Authors Association (1921) and the Association of Canadian Bookmen (1935). A critic interested in the formation of a Canadian canon will find a running record of the evolution of literary tastes, and support for the critical contention that the current Canadian canon--whether scholarly or pedagogic--is far from reflective of what was read by authors' contemporaries. (3) Theatre historians might wish to assess the role of the CLC in promoting Canadian drama through its stagings and dramatic readings of original material, and its connections to other Toronto theatrical bodies. A cultural analyst could turn to the CLC for an interesting window onto arts organization in the first half of the twentieth century, and for indications of the importance of local or civic groups in the development of a "national" culture. This essay will pursue a somewhat different line of inquiry primarily and will take the CLC at its word by viewing it as a society of readers. I will present the CLC as a case study of Canadian readers; will argue for the inclusion of readers, along with authors, publishers, and critics, as agents in the development of an English-Canadian literature; and will do so in large measure by letting the CLC speak for itself.

This essay's line of reasoning is grounded in an ongoing problematic in the field of book history studies. In his foundational essay "What is the History of Books?" (1982) Robert Darnton diagrams a print "communications circuit," which--despite the rival schematics since developed--is engraved on the heart of every book history scholar in North America and will doubtless be familiar to readers of this essay. (4) It takes the form of a clock face in a slightly flattened oval, with the author and publisher at the noon position. Around the face are arrayed printers and suppliers, shippers, and booksellers, with readers occurring at nine o'clock. Famously, the segment of the circumference from reader back to author, from nine to twelve, is a broken rather than a solid line: writing some twenty-five years ago, Darnton was unable to draw upon sufficient scholarship to envisage more concretely how the reader fed back to authorial activity, and completed the communications circuit. More recent scholars have begun to fill in the connection. (5) But this missing link is the postulate of the CLC constitution, the "thereby" clause: their reading, and study, would "foster original production." In the words of a later president of the club, the special role of the CLC was to be "a 'link' between the reader and the writer." (6) Club members envisaged readers as literary generators as well as recipients; not only as consumers, but as agents (if not authors) in the production of a national literature. They thought they knew how to connect the dots.