The Flints and Feathers of Pauline Johnson

Few poets perform at poetry slams dangling real human scalps from their belt, but this Huron trophy was a gift from her grandfather.

Emily Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake was an unknown poet on a Brantford reserve one moment, and the next, after just one Toronto reading in 1892, a celebrity. Her first book of poetry, The White Wampum, was published in 1895. Books of more poems and stories followed, including Flint and Feather and Canadian Born.

Pauline Johnson was the daughter of a white Ohio Englishwoman and a Mohawk chief. She was a fierce, theatrical spirit with an offbeat sense of humour. A northern Pocahontas, but clearly Canadian, Pauline loved hamming up the savage naïf thing, parading around in full-on Indian-postcard regalia: buckskins, moccasins, dangling rabbit pelts, intricate Mohawk metal work, hunting knives, and yes, a scalp or two.

She was a great comic, and a charismatic orator, and her poems were dramatic and proud canoe and nature stories. Song my Paddle Sings is as quintessential to the Canadian grade school experience as Raffi: “August is laughing across the sky, Laughing while paddle, canoe and I, Drift, drift, Where the hills uplift, On either side of the current swift.”

Johnson was unique in that she somehow did belong to all of Canada, touring as she did in vaudeville style acts, circuiting the provinces at a demanding clip. She was as familiar a sight on stage in Halifax as Vancouver, but she launched her career in Toronto. Born in 1861, she was an unmarried spinster of nearly 30 when her work began. (There was love, possibly two different affairs both by the name of Charles, but it didn’t work out.) Her last years were spent in Vancouver, and she is the only person ever buried in Stanley Park, at her own request. Pauline did not want a marker or headstone, but a memorial monument was erected there nonetheless.

Her work received mixed reviews among critics, some calling her the best Canadian poet, and some expressing open disdain for her dramatics. It didn’t much matter- she was phenomenally popular, and a rare writer able to make a living at her art. This was indeed an achievement for any writer, but perhaps never duplicated at the time and seldom now for an aboriginal woman. And just as she had written incessantly before recognition, she wrote prolifically after. “My verses just sung themselves in my head until I had to write them. Then, of course, I wanted to read them to people. That is all there is to tell,” she told a newspaper.

Much inspiration and contemplation came from her parental inheritances: from her mother, Emily Susanna Howells, a deep love of reading, and as an English woman who married an Indian, a strong and unconventional spirit; and from her beloved father, George Johnson, her love of Mohawk history and legends. He died when she was 23, and to honour their bloodline, she wrote extensively about Indian lore. But Pauline was not a fool to turn down bread: she also tailored her work for white audiences and often sold pulpy, stereotypical adventure rhetoric to magazines.

Many dared condescend that such an act was ‘selling out’- these would do well to consider that today millionaire celebrities will peddle tawdry tinsel cosmetics for another cool mil. Smart writers accept pay cheques, especially in times when the general labour market for women, for aboriginals, and for artists and writers was even worse than it is today. Indeed, Pauline wrote and sold material throughout her short life, even after becoming ill with breast cancer. She was only 52 when she died in 1913.

A provocative book by Daniel Francis is The Imaginary Indian: the Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Pauline Johnson’s story is told here, focusing on the mixed-messages of her heritage, image and content of her work. While a very thoughtful piece in a truly brilliant and sweeping book, I’m uncertain that the author fully appreciated Johnson’s humour. She most certainly was aware of her image and of stereotypes, and of what whites wanted from an Indian Princess.

She played it up for all it was worth, but often spoke of her creative enslavement to the silly Victorian whims of early Canadian literary traditions. The way she played with- sometimes by playing into- social mores was caustic and tinged with something sarcastic and funny, faintly reminiscent of both Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman. But more importantly, her conflicting imagery was in fact utterly genuine.

She WAS halfway bred in flowery Victorian poetry and parlour-reading traditions, never formally educated but reared by polite if disgraced society (her mother’s family never approved of the interracial marriage) and voracious devouring of books. And she WAS the daughter of two generations of Indian chiefs. Her grandfather Chief John Smoke Johnson WAS a revered orator and a legendary warrior.

Joan Crate, an underappreciated Canadian poet, did a better job of portraying the complexities of Pauline’s duality, and recognizing her performance flair as a part of her creative gift. In Pale as Real Ladies, 1991, Crate’s writing persona fused on a Greyhound trip with the ghost of a writer who had walked before her, and the rest of the poems were creatively channeled through Pauline’s inspiration. The poems are very much Crate’s, however, exquisite and reverent tributes. Here she explores with a woman’s touch and a deep reverence the cultural issues along with intuitive projections of Pauline’s possible personal feelings.

“Tonight let me tell you of a world swallowed in one quick gulp,” Pauline’s ghost writes in Crate’s The Poetry Reading. “I speak of a history/ pieced from a jigsaw of flesh…Under my skin/ blood beats along roadways barred with DO NOT ENTER signs, /walls of small scars. I will not return to silence. Do you hear me?”

Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at thegirlcanwrite.net. A graduate of Ryerson’s School of Journalism, she has had an offbeat career with the written word and her mixed-media paintings. She writes a column called Fascinating Writers for Book Slut online, and is the resident Spice Girl columnist at Gremolata magazine, where she also writes features about food and a blog about gluten-free life.  You’ve seen her poetry, profiles, and stories in Adbusters, Geez, Fiddlehead, Grain, Kairos, Modern Poetry, Dog Fancy, Style Republic, I Love Cats, Ergocentric, X-tra: Toronto’s queer community paper, Blood and Aphorisms, Canadian Woman’s Studies Journal, Canadian Baptist,  off our backs, Writer’s Journal, and all over the web. She has also appeared in various anthologies, and is formerly the editor of Idea Factory: an exquisite whateverly.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

Erte- a century of fashion design, opera sets, art deco, magazine drawing, stage construction, decorative arts, and sculptures

Few can boast a 100-year career. Erte, as Romain de Tirtoff was known, lived from 1892-1990, and worked as an artist since early childhood. This eccentric fellow veered from his heritage of Russian military aristocracy to saturate the world with flamboyance, plumage, and endless other fabulousnesses, for nearly a century. The sheer energy of Erte’s phenomenal reign is insane. He made thousands upon thousands of drawings: he was the designer of just about every theatre set, costume, opera, textile, and stage show in the last century. Close your eyes and picture ‘art deco’ and you are likely summoning up Erte. But the 20s came and went, and they were very early in his life’s work. I fell in love with Erte’s dozens of bronze sculptures at a New Orleans gallery. These ornate masterpieces showed a vivid world where the female form reigned supreme. There was little I’d ever experienced that so beautiful as these bejeweled, stylistic mermaids and mythic heroines.

Not even Madonna rivals this effeminate, utterly elegant little character; in career longevity and creative output…she’s only going on silver! His autobiography showed him to be a fierce, fearless, live-and-let-live type, a man who loved nothing more than his work, cats and solitude. He loved intensely, polishing off a ‘til –death-do-us-part that lasted 20 years and still left him ‘widowed’ in his mid-30s. He told the world about his life, art, love, theatre, opera, and Hollywood: his autobiography, Things I Remember, astonishes with dry, spare humour and deep warmth. Erte was a man of great refinement and absolute manners, hobnobbing with fashion designers and actresses, opera divas and prominent personalities- yet there’s no indication anywhere that he was ever a snob. There’s a peculiar warmth that underlies the memoirs of this graphic maverick. Even when he is scathing, as high camp personalities are wont to be, he is polite and elegant. “I firmly believe, too, that every human being has a duty to make himself as attractive as possible,” he writes in his epilogue.

Though Erte stated famously that he couldn’t ever retire because his work is his life, he did write Things I Remember to make a sweeping summary of his career. He was 80 at the time, so how long he had was anybody’s guess. I was mildly upset that he didn’t write at all about his sculptures. I just assumed that for a man who produced thousands of elaborate projects, mentioning the bronze sculptures just didn’t come up. Then I found out Erte hadn’t even STARTED making his best art yet…the sculptures were all made in his 80s!

Erte worked fearlessly, and he was blessed with strength and confidence and intuition. While the theatre world was long a haven for the queer, the early 1900s weren’t exactly an ideal era to burst out of the closet in. Will and Grace had not yet brought camp into everybody’s normal social circle. Madonna had not yet rolled out the red carpet. Furthermore, Erte was the only son of a Russian Imperial Fleet admiral. Still, his gayness must have been obvious even to those who had never known or heard of such a thing. Even as a child, Erte looked effeminate. He wanted to be a ballerina! He hated war passionately, unlike all the men in his bloodline who lived for their military duties. Erte had beauty, not violence, in his heart. “When I was five years old, I designed an evening dress for my mother,” he writes. Indeed, his mother had the gown made up, and wore it to a ball. “Around her décolletage was a garland or real roses. I was absolutely enchanted.”
Surely the redder necked among us will point to such examples to say, see; it IS the mother’s fault! But most of us see that sublime moment for what it was – as Erte felt, the pivotal moment where his fate was realized. Every last piece of his work was a celebration of women’s exquisite beauty.

Romain de Tirtoff, his real name, enjoyed variety in his work, his social life, his world travels, and his love life. He was adventurous, though he mentioned that he was so spacey that he often forgot who or where he was. For this reason, his daring never led to opium, cocaine, or other drugs that may have been in vogue in his many circles. While he enjoyed meeting new lovers on trains and at parties, he did not care for a Hollywood orgy he attended, sensing that the pleasures felt forced, awkward, and pretentious. But despite the conservative, military bloodline he was born to, Erte never wasted a moment on foolish regrets. His first ‘rendezvous’ was at age 13. “I wasted very little emotional energy in trying to fight my own nature, even less in punishing myself with feelings of guilt. Rather, I looked forward to many more delightful adventures. I was not disappointed. Sex has always played an important role in my life, and still does,” Erte wrote in his geriatric years. “But my greatest love has been my art. Other desires and relationships have always taken second place to this ruling passion.”

Indeed, he attributes indulgence and its moderation as the force behind his longevity- including the two, and only two, cigarettes per day that he enjoyed for most of his life. He also enjoyed dressing up- back in the early days, he referred to ‘drag’ as ‘in costume.’ A petite, elegant harlequin of a man, no one knew. Sometimes it wasn’t drag, per se, but such over-the-top outlandishness that his presence was unforgettable. Erte liked to intrigue his dinner companions by modeling various Asian robes, wearing a different one for every course served! But even when he dressed fashionably male, he was often mistaken for a woman.

Regardless of his unorthodox adventures, Erte was still a deeply religious person, though he preferred to pray in private. “Throughout my adult life, (prayer) has been a source of great comfort and strength. But, since I feel that religion is a private matter, I am likely to do my praying in empty cathedrals,” he wrote. He also dabbled in some salon spiritualism in the days that ghost-raising séances were the fashion. But he felt too intensely a portal, and didn’t care to experience the spirits beyond that.

Though Erte loved festive soirees, operas, and gala celebrations with the rich, famous, and royal, hobnobbing with everyone from the deeply eccentric Marchesa de Casati to Barbra Streisand, he loved his cats most of all. “Being alone is vitally important for me and my work. I am a solitary person…The cat is a solitary animal, very independent, very quiet by nature. Like cats who hide themselves away when they are ill, I cannot stand people visiting me when I am indisposed. I want to be left alone.”

Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at thegirlcanwrite.net. Writer, artist, editor- her various art creations are everywhere. Visit her site for biography, client testimonials, links, or to hire her for your next writing project. Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html