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Article Excerpt
Toronto has no social classes--Only the Masseys and the masses.
B.K. Sandwell,
"On the Appointment of Governor-General Vincent Massey, 1952"
(Scott 75)
VINCENT MASSEY ON STAGE
The Right Honourable Vincent Massey was always in costume, even when he wasn't. His biographer, Claude Bissell, records the story of a group of Junior Fellows of Massey College who drove to Massey's home in Port Hope in his retirement to pay homage to the distinguished Founder of the College (and in this they replicated an earlier homage, when the young Vincent Massey paid a similar visit to the aged Goldwin Smith) (Bissell, Imperial 309). They were surprised to find Massey dressed casually, in a sports jacket and open-necked shirt. This too was a costume, the studied apparel appropriate to the moment that constructed a relationship of occasion, taste, and propriety with his audience.
Photographs of Massey invariably show him in costume, uniform, regalia, or official dress. A famous photograph, which Robertson Davies tells us Massey kept on his desk throughout his life, depicts the young Vincent in pontifical robes in the role of Pius VII in Claudel's L'Otage at Hart House Theatre (Davies, "Massey" 334). There is very little difference in his mien and attitude between that picture and one taken three decades later, in which he wears the somewhat more ornate ceremonial robe of Chancellor of the University of Toronto. And again, that same solemn theatricality is apparent when he appears in a later photo as Governor-General wearing the imperial uniform passed on to him by his predecessor. (Massey was not the last Governor-General to wear that archaic uniform, which resembles an admiral in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. That distinction goes to Roland Mitchener.) But Massey may have been the last to wear it with a sense of pomp, to wear it as if it--or the role--really belonged to him.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that despite his puritan family background and his fastidious adherence to propriety, Massey was something of a dandy who kept one eye on his own reflection. The range of costumes in which he was photographed is astonishing. In the three books that describe his early years, his own autobiography, his brother Raymond's memoir of their childhood, and the first volume of Bissell's magisterial biography, we find a succession of images in which Vincent Massey disappears into costume. These costumes mark the shape of his life and career. He is in a sailor suit at the age of five; in blackface as a minstrel for a family parade at seventeen; in the Highland dress of his cadet corps at St. Andrew's College around the same time; in the uniform of a Lieutenant Colonel in the Canadian Army during WW1; in the costume of a cockney burglar in a comedy at Hart House in 1923; in the robes of Pope Pius VII in 1924; in top hat and morning dress on the steps of the United States Capitol; in a tuxedo at a diplomatic function; in ambassadorial uniform as Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States; in a different but no less ceremonial uniform as High Commissioner to the United Kingdom; in academic regalia as Chancellor of the University of Toronto; in the state uniform of Governor-General; in an aboriginal feather head-dress and again in an Inuit coat while Governor-General. Perhaps the only major role which did not provide him with a uniform was Chairman of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, but even there, in a forum which many observers noted was highly theatricalized, Massey supervised a mise en scene in which he played a role that had been in rehearsal for many years.
The trait that connects these images is his unchanging attitude. The camera rarely finds him smiling. Instead, he assumes an expression of gravitas. He was not a large man, but in his photos he invariably commands attention, by position and by a bearing that he would probably have been pleased to hear described as "aristocratic."
I am fascinated by these images of Vincent Massey because they offer glimpses of his complexity. That Massey was a wannabe aristocrat who successfully transformed the performance of aristocracy into the real thing (or as real as it can actually be); that he was born into a world of privilege and noblesse oblige; that he was politically powerful but mistrusted by his political allies; that he had an evangelical sense of his own mission: these are all familiar elements of his story. The fascinating question for me is how a man born into the puritan industrial magnate class in late Victorian Toronto acquired that sense of aristocratic style and the theatricality--the love of theatre and the theatrical skill--that enabled him to so completely transform his class culture into an utterly convincing performance of the self. At the end of his life, all that separated Massey from the British peerage that he sought so ardently was the inconstant whim of John Diefenbaker. Had he achieved that ambition, Massey's transformation from industrial baron to noble lord would have been complete. He would have achieved the ultimate masquerade, obliterating the colonial subject in the role of imperial baronet.
Massey was a man of the theatre in two interconnecting ways: his life was a theatricalized performance of roles and manners, marked by his many uniforms and the ceremonies he loved; and at the same time, he was passionately engaged in the theatre as an actor, a theatre builder, a manager, an anthologist, a critic, an advocate, and, in the end, as the architect of the model of state patronage which established the conditions that professionalized an idea of Canadian theatre.
In his autobiography, Massey elides the origins of his theatricality. He does admit that his love of theatre, a love shared by his brother and cousins, may seem at odds with the family's rigid puritan Methodist background. In his memoir, Raymond Massey claims that their father saw only one play in his lifetime, Jerome K. Jerome's The Passing of the Third Floor Back (86). Vincent Massey mentions a few others, mostly in London on the fateful trip that ended with their mother's unexpected death when Vincent was sixteen. In his account, Vincent Massey recalls their father as austere but affectionate and humorous. Theatre was not part of the family's life, and Massey suggests that his father's "power of mimicry and love of charades" might explain his own theatrical bent (Massey, Memoirs 5). His own first exposure to live theatre, he claims, came when he was sixteen, when he saw Beerbohm Tree's Richard II in London.
There is something missing in this account, and his brother supplies the clue. In his memoir, Raymond Massey claims that he first saw a play at the age of nine (when Vincent would have been eighteen) at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York (18). Chautauqua occupies a legendary place in the shared history of the United State and Canada, because since its founding in 1874 as a Methodist summer educational assembly, it has become a de facto university of popularized high culture. For many North Americans in the early twentieth century, their first exposure to new ideas in the liberal arts and sciences, and, indeed, to Shakespeare, came via travelling Chautauqua tent shows. It is impossible to understand the Massey sense of theatre without considering the cultural training of Chautauqua, but, curiously, Vincent Massey makes no mention of it in his autobiography. That elision can not have been an accident, nor was the connection casual. The Chautauqua Institute had in fact been founded by Massey's uncle and namesake, John Vincent; Massey's father was a major patron of the Institute; the family owned a house on its grounds and spent a great deal of time there in the summers. It is probable that Vincent would have been exposed to theatricals at Chautauqua. But these theatricals were not "the theatre," and it is very possible that this distinction between the acceptable acting of moral plays and the unacceptable "theatre" was formative of Massey's later insistence that a national drama must arise from a professional theatre. It also may explain the curious phrasing of his statement in his autobiography that in his family "the theatre, as an institution, was on the proscribed list" (5).
If on the one hand Chautauqua introduced the young Vincent Massey to the pleasures of theatre, it also modeled theatre in a way he repudiated, indeed, expunged. This repudiation of Chautauqua's earnest moralizing was likely part of Massey's larger religious dissent, a life-long process that reversed the family tradition and returned him to the Anglican church. The puritanism of the Chautauqua Institute was not the solemn, suspicious puritanism of Presbyterian Toronto but something more robust. Chautauqua was an odd combination of summer camp, university campus, and tent meeting, and it embraced a religious humanism that allied itself with progressive movements in art and literature. That atmosphere was replicated in small scale, as Bissell observes, in the family farm estate, Dentonia, outside of Toronto (Young 22); Bissell also suggests that Hart House was built in the spirit of a secular Chautauqua (Young 62).
In his later writings on drama and theatre, Massey frequently iterated his belief that theatre must never preach. In his 1922 essay, "The Prospects of a Canadian Drama" (written at the time of his closest engagement with Hart House Theatre), he cautioned against the "peril of the didactic." He notes that Canadians seem to incline towards morally useful art:
plays to teach children the value of soap and freshair [sic]; plays to teach farmers the importance of consolidated schools and the evils of scrub bulls; and there are plays to aid home missions, or to stop cigarette smoking, to stimulate patriotism, and to do a number of things, in the interests of health or morals, for which the drama was not intended. (208)
This tendency he ascribes to "our double foundation of Puritanism--drawn from Scotland and New England, and a strength in most respects." But he is adamant that "A play must not point a moral." Eight years later, speaking to the Royal Society of Canada in his capacity as Minister to the United States and as a "simple-minded layman," he returned to this theme:
Propaganda is the death of art. The Anglo-Saxon with his inherited Puritanism and honest zeal for the reform of his neighbours, has too often misused and degraded the materials of the artists to make them the vehicle of a gospel. (Art LXIV)
Massey's rebellion against the family tradition took him towards a humanism that was encouraged at the University of Toronto and Oxford, but it was a humanism bounded by formalist structures of thought, class, and practice; these are the structures signified by his many uniforms. In effect, he rebelled not only against the Sunday School utilitarianism of Chautauqua, but also against the Methodist tradition of conservative dissent. In politics, this took him away from the family's Tory affiliations to the Liberal Party; in culture and religion, it took him to arch anglophilia. Nothing could be further from the shirt-sleeved democratic Methodist than the gold braid and epaulettes of the High Church statesman that Massey became; but the early formation in Chautauqua must have imbued him with an understanding of performance. And perhaps it is this awareness of performativity, and a lingering Methodist guilt, that led Massey to expunge any reference to Chautauqua from his autobiography.
DOING THE PLAY, DOING THE NATION
His formation in the Chautauqua tradition may also explain Massey's particular brand of liberal nationalism with its curious mixture of ethnocentric essentialism and cultural pluralism. As an...
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