Syllables Recorded Tune Other books by Lyn Harrington: Manitoba Roundabout, Ryerson, 1951 Stormy Summer, Nelson, 1953 Ootook, Eskimo Girl, Nelson, 1956 Real Book about Canada, Doubleday, 1959 British Columbia in Pictures, Nelson, 1959 Encyclopedia of World Travel, Doubleday, 1961; Canada Section Rangers'Handbook, 1962 Greece and the Greeks, Nelson, 1962 How People Live in Canada, Benefic, 1964 China and the Chinese, Nelson, 1966 Grand Canal of China, Rand McNally, 1967; B&S, 1974 Luck of the La Verendryes, Nelson, 1967 How People Live in China, Benefic, 1968 Australia and New Zealand, Nelson, 1969 Polar Regions, Nelson, 1973 The Covered Bridges of Central and Eastern Canada, McGraw-Hill, 1976 The Shaman's Evil Eye, Highway, 1979 Syllables Recorded Time by Lyn Harrington Foreword by Harry J. Boyle THE STORY OF THE CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOCIATION 1921-1981 Simon & Pier re Published with the kind assistance of a Wintario grant and Alberta Culture. We would like to express our gratitude to The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their support. Marian M. Wilson, Publisher Copyright © 1981 by Canadian Authors Association. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote orief passages in a review. From A LIFE IN FOLKLORE by Dr. Helen Creighton Reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited MAPLE LEAF FOREVER © 1964 by Gordon V. Thompson Used by permission. A SLICE OF CANADA by Watson Kirkconnell, © University of Toronto Press for Acadia University Canadian Forum quotations © Canadian Forum Excerpts throughout text: Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in smaller type are taken from The Canadian Bookman later The Canadian Author & Bookman. © Canadian Authors Association ISBN 0-88924-112-0 12345*54321 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Harrington, Lyn, 1911- Syllables of recorded time Bibliography: Includes index. ISBN 0-88924-112-0 1. Canadian Authors Association - History I. Title PS8005.C363H37 C810'.6071 C81-094657-2 PR9180.C363H37 Editor: Marian M. Wilson Designer: Mario Carvajal Assistant Editor: K.A. Chittick Typesetting: Pickwick Type Printer: Les Editions Marquis Printed and Bound in Canada Simon & Pierre Publishing Company Limited Order Department P.O. Box 280 Adelaide Street Postal Station Toronto, Ontario Canada M5C 2J4 To commemorate the Diamond Anniversary of the Canadian Authors Association 1921-1981 Acknowledgements Material in this book has been drawn almost entirely from back issues of the Canadian Author & Bookman, published since 1919, and other Canadian Authors Association files. In addition, the author used as a resource Susan Sills' M.A. thesis, The Role of the Canadian Authors Association with Respect to the Licensing Clauses of Early Copyright Legislation and Canada's Adherence to the Berne Convention. Special thanks go to Dr. Helen Creighton, Bluebell Phillips, the late June Fritch, Cdr. C.H. Little, and Dr. Donald W. Thomson for their assistance and cooperation. Foreword To many Canadian writers and students whose development has taken place in the aftermath of the Massey report, it may come as a surprise to know that cultural self-consciousness did not spring up fully grown in the CanLit courses of the 1960s. Forty years earlier the Canadian Authors As- sociation had 700 members and was a proportionately larger organization by comparison to national population, than the Authors League of America, which numbered 2,000 members. In a time of powerful lobbies and vested interest groups, the Canadian Authors Association remains a dignified and important agency of Canadian cultural life. The Canadian Authors Association can take pride in what it has ac- complished. Its restrained pleading may even have had a greater cumula- tive effect than some of the more militant intercessions. Its influence hasn't been confined to membership. It has helped all writers in Canada. For sixty years it has persisted with the admirable notion that those who ardently desire to write are as important in their own way as those who write. This belief has extended to concern and help for many who over the years had contributed a great deal to the cultural life of Canada before there were formal grants and subsidies or even social security. Its inherent bellettrism has been rather out of fashion of late, but the unhappy effects of the succeeding trend to strict professionalism now seem likely to suggest the need for another tack again in our cultural life for the next sixty years. There is an increased recognition of creative work in Canada. It should be much greater. It must be a contagious celebration by Canadians that we have powerful and sensitive voices that are now recognized inter- nationally. How many countries can boast of having a Leacock, a McLuhan and a Frye in a scant span of sixty years? It's not only in the great univer- sities that their literary and philosophical talents are recognized, for in 7 those places where newspapers still regard culture as important these men are treated as natural celebrities, deserving serious coverage. There's another reason for recognition. We need their insights at this time when an obsession for technology threatens us with facts, raw infor- mation and mindlessness. Only the examined life can survive the smother- ing deluge. Communications technology broke the tyranny of space in Canada. Now it is rampant and it must be used in the cause of the human spirit and not allowed to impose its own imperatives. Our artists must remind us of thought, love, poetry, dreams, hopes, memory and the kindness that pro- tects human dignity. This was recognized by the artists who set up the Ca- nadian Bookman and the CAA. In 1919 they inveighed against: the merely sentimental, narcotic, idea-less books, miscalled books of the imagination, which have formed the literary food of too many of us who did not wish to be bothered with ideas. They saw the need for a Canadian periodical which would discuss books not as masses of paper and binding, nor as so many square inches of type, nor as speculative adventures in search for "best-sellers", but as the vessels for the containing and the imparting of ideas — and of ideas suited to the uses of Canadian readers. The key to these matters lies with artists. It is what they deal with all the time. They are the only true force that can restrain those who itch for the pushbutton of destruction in what they see myopically as self-defence. In a world where science has perfected the means of robbing individuals of their dignity and individual rights, we need the artists' concern for global fraternity. "The poet" — as writer Norman Cousins speaks of all who have re- spect for and speak to the human spirit — "can help to keep man from making himself over in the image of his electronic marvels. For the danger is not so much that man may be controlled by the computer as that he may imitate it." I do not suggest that Canadian writers alone will save our world. They are valuable however in reminding us of the power of better international understanding in the cause of fraternity rather than fratricide. One mad- man in this lifetime almost destroyed the world by suppressing individual thoughts and supplanting it with dogma; significantly today despots in many parts of the world are still attempting to do what he failed at. Where the rights of the state take priority, the first to be eliminated or silenced are the artists. Can it happen here? It can, and it will be a supreme irony if the voices of the artists are rendered powerless by indifference rather than brutal suppression. The danger is that we can be lulled into such indifference by a 8 deluge of soporific images and words in the mass of communications tech- nology. What shall it avail us if we have an enormous gross national pro- duct and lose our sense of value as individual human beings with a respon- sibility to all mankind? In future years the history of the CAA will undoubtedly be written in more detail, and the opening up of its archives to researchers will add to our knowledge of Canadian literary history. The valuable achievement of this account is that it is set down by someone who has participated in much of that history and that it can be published at a time when these events are still within the living memory of scholars and writers. Every decade brings its own analysis of literary history; in this sixtieth year of its existence, when comprehensive cultural review is an urgent part of Canadian life, the history of the CAA adds a significant perspective, that will help current writers to assess more fully our Canadian consciousness of a literary tradi- tion. Harry J. Boyle 9