Claude Bissell - The Young Vincent Massey

THE YOUNG VINCENT MASSEY

For Vincent Massey, youth was a period of protest and emerging public fame. He broke with his strong family traditions of Methodist piety and American ties. He became known as a patron of the arts, innovator, politician, and diplomat.

This volume begins with his prosperous Victorian childhood and carries through days as a student and wartime officer. He plans Hart House, which becomes a cultural centre. Promised a cabinet post, he runs for Parliament and is defeated. Instead, he is sent to Washington as Canadas first minister there, and achieves a brilliant success. He is prominent in educational circles; he helps to reorganize the Liberal party, presses for progressive policies, and flirts with the idea of replacing Mackenzie King. The book ends in 1935 as he sails to London as his countrys high commissioner. He considers it his first major job.

In between he writes poetry - usually light, sometimes venom-tipped. He acts, and directs plays. He sponsors a string quartet of international stature. He marries Alice Parkin, a handsome woman of strong convictions, and with her builds a country home near Port Hope, Ontario. He becomes a leading collector of modern Canadian art, and is involved with the painter David Milne.

The book is as well a history of the people and ideas which influenced the young Massey- family, teachers, friends, associates. One chapter is given to his relations with Mackenzie King - each of them convinced of his own rightness but separated by fundamental differences, loud in protestations of friendship but nourishing an inner contempt for one another.

Claude Bissell has built this complex and absorbing portrait from the unpublished papers of Vincent Massey and members of his circle, diaries of King and other politicians, memories of artists and musicians.

He writes with vigour and elegance, quoting extensively from private records and letters, coining epigrams of his own. His portrait is sympathetic but not uncritical, with plenty of scope for the reader to make his own judgments.

This is the first of two volumes about one of Canadas best known and least understood figures - statesman, cultural advocate, patron, family man, and first native governor-general.

CLAUDE BISSELL is University Professor in the University of Toronto. As president of that university 195871 and chairman of the Canada Council 19602, he knew Vincent Massey well.

CLAUDE BISSELL

University of Toronto Press 1981

Toronto Buffalo London

ISBN 0-8020-2398-3

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bissell, Claude T., 1916

The young Vincent Massey

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8020-2398-3

1. Massey, Vincent, 18871967. 2. Statesmen Canada Biography. I. Title.

FC 611. M 37 B 57 971.06330924 C 81-094651-3

F 1034.3. M 37 B 57

This book has been published with the assistance of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council under their block grant programs, and with the help of a generous gift to the University of Toronto Press from the Herbert Laurence Rous Estate.

The years from 1906, when Vincent Massey entered the University of Toronto, to 1935, when he left Canada to take up his appointment as high commissioner to the United Kingdom the years from age 19 to age 45 are, in terms of his whole career, the youthful ones. They are the years during which individual initiative was at its strongest, when he questioned received opinions and attitudes and set out on his own course. It was a period of youthful protest against his family inheritance. The element of protest during these years may seem slight to those who have lived through the sixties, but to the young Vincent Massey it was real and formidable. For a legalistic and pietistic religion he substituted a relaxed and Laodicean faith; from a tough, entrepreneurial tradition he moved towards an emphasis on social and cultural responsibilities; beginning with a cautious interest in the arts as an adjunct to religion, he put them at the centre of his life; in the place of the political conservatism of his family he adopted a new liberalism shaped by progressive thought in the United States and Great Britain.

To the Canadian public, Vincent Massey in his early forties still seemed like a young man. The slight, boyish figure reinforced the impression of youthfulness, and the features, which tended in subsequent years to settle into a solemn mask, could support a cheerful vivacity. He seemed youthful, too, by contrast with many of his associates. Mackenzie King, R.B. Bennett, Joseph Flavelle, and Howard Ferguson to mention some of the principal ones were all at least a decade older; Vincent Massey had a contemporary flavour, whereas they seemed to be Victorians or Edwardians propelled by an innate vigour into a later age.

The book follows a chronological scheme. But I have at the same time tried to be selective and analytical. This has often required a thematic organization of material with, from time to time, a departure from a simple linear chronology and a re-examination of periods already given a general treatment. This kind of organization is particularly necessary in the early chapters when Masseys ideas and attitudes are in the process of formulation and he has not yet fixed upon his formal role. To ease the way, a brief chronology is appended to the preface.

The book is based largely on manuscript material, but I have benefited also from conversations with a number of people. The following have given me impressions and information that were helpful in writing this volume: Mr and Mrs Geoffrey Andrew, Mr Hunter Bishop, Professor Michael Bliss, Mrs F.H. Cundhill, Dr Robertson Davies, Dr James S. Duncan, Professor Robert Finch, Senator Eugene Forsey, President Goldwin French, Mrs Lee Gossage, Professor George Glazebrook, Miss Charity Grant, Professor George Grant, Dr and Mrs George Ignatieff, Professor Douglas LePan, Mrs L.C.V. Massey, Mr Hart Massey, the Hon. Paul Martin, Mr Andrew S. Mathers, Professor Charles Stacey. I am grateful to the Dominion Archivist, Dr W.I. Smith, and his associates for their prompt and generous assistance during my various visits to the Public Archives of Canada. Mrs D.F. MacDermaid, the university archivist, and her associates greatly facilitated my examination of Massey material at Queens University. The manuscript was typed by Mrs Audrey Douglas, and I am grateful for her care and patience. Dr Desmond Neill, the librarian of Massey College, was responsible for the administration of the Massey Papers, and his informed advice greatly eased my task.

I am especially grateful to Hart Massey, who gave me permission to use the Massey papers in the Public Archives of Canada, and to Mrs C.H.A. Armstrong, a daughter of George Wrong, who gave me many insights into the young Vincent Massey and permitted me to quote from letters in her possession written by her brother, Hume, to his mother. A grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada was of great assistance. The grant enabled me to obtain the services of Mr Murray Barkley, a graduate student in history at the University of Toronto, who was helpful in many ways, in particular in dredging up the references to Vincent Massey from the vast sea of the Mackenzie King diary. Miss Kirsty Boyanoski, an art historian, prepared an architectural analysis of the Massey tomb which I found valuable. I am grateful also to the Rockefeller Foundation which invited me and my wife to be scholars-in-residence at the Study and Conference Centre, Bellagio, Italy, from 22 August to 28 September 1978. There, in that most beautiful of all academic retreats, I plotted this volume and wrote the first two chapters. My wife has lived patiently and philosophically with the Massey project, which became far more complex and demanding than I had ever imagined; she also transcribed and analysed the early Massey diaries. Dr Robertson Davies, master of Massey College from 1961 to 1981, invited me to write this biography, and he and the senior fellows of Massey College gave me sole access to the Vincent Massey papers that are deposited in the college. I regret that this book, which is only the first part of my task, was not published before Dr Davies retired as master.