LITERARY LARK AT LOUGHEED HOUSE
Event co-curator imagines Calgary-linked writers of early 20th century at dinner party with Mcclung
Back in 1923, author Winnifred Eaton Reeve signed a copy of her Alberta-set novel, Cattle, for Lady Lougheed.
The writer was living on a ranch near Morley at the time, which is also where the book took place. By 1923, she had been a literary star for years thanks to work published under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna.
That was the name she signed Lady Lougheed’s book with, suggesting she hadn’t completely abandoned her Japanese nom de plume. The book now resides in the University of Calgary’s Special Collections, a curious artifact from Calgary’s little-known literary history that represents one of the most famous authors of the day at a crossroads.
Calgary writer and historian Shaun Hunter saw a picture of the book’s inscription a few years back while taking in an exhibit at the historic house in Calgary’s Beltline.
Wheels began to turn and Hunter began thinking about the social circle that may have existed at the time. The house was built by James and Isabella Lougheed in 1891 but was still a vibrant cultural hub in 1923, one year before the second Turner Valley oil boom gave a much-needed jolt to the local economy.
“So I just started tugging on that thread,” Hunter says. “OK, what else is going on here? What other connections can I find?”
It was the start of a process that would eventually lead to Storied City: Early Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers, an exhibit at the Lougheed House based on a delicious what-if scenario.
Hunter, the co-curator, imagines a dinner party held at the stately Victorian mansion in 1923. Guests include Reeve, expressionist painter Maxwell Bates, poet Elaine Catley, satirist Bob Edwards, former Calgary Herald city-hall reporter Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, the Famous 5’s Nellie Mcclung, renowned poet and activist P.K. Page, political philosopher Isabel Paterson, author Laura Goodman Salverson, novelist Robert J.C. Stead, novelist Arthur Stringer and writer Flos Jewell Williams.
Hunter started charting out relationships between these writers and soon began connecting the literary dots. Mcclung, for instance, would have lived only a few blocks away in 1923, which is the year she arrived in Calgary. Arthur Stringer’s half-sister, Mary, was married to Norman A. Lougheed at the time, and he was known to frequent the city.
It was also the year Reeve became the head of the Calgary branch of the Canadian Authors Association.
Mcclung was on the executive and would hold meetings at her home, which led to her mentoring writers such as Flos Jewell Williams. Laura Goodman Salverson, a future Governor General Award winner, became a member after moving to Calgary’s Bankview neighbourhood in 1923, which was also the year her debut novel, The Viking Heart, became a literary sensation throughout the country.
“They were all sort of hanging out, making friendships with each other and then being mentored by people like Nellie Mcclung,” Hunter says. “I’m not sure how much of a mentor Winnifred Reeve was but she really was applying her celebrity muscle to the writing scene from Calgary and in Calgary.
She was reading Calgarians’ poems and novels and trying to shepherd that along.”
Storied City, which opens Jan. 30, features literary works, bios, photographs, videos and an annotated literary map of Calgary circa the 1920s. It will also include an “interactive soundscape” that will allow visitors to hear a number of modern Calgary writers — including Will Ferguson, Rosemary Griebel, Lori Hahnel, Aritha van Herk and Fred Stenson — reading excerpts from the work of various dinner guests.
Hunter admits getting these 12 writers into the same room circa 1923 occasionally required a bit of creativity. For one thing, Bob Edwards died in 1922. (“He’s the ghost,” Hunter explains.) P.K. Page was certainly alive and actually lived a block and a half away from Mcclung’s house at the time. But she was also only seven years old and perhaps yet to reach a point where she could have participated in an enlightened conversation about literature over dinner.
Maxwell Bates was 17 at the time. He was more than a few years away from becoming a renowned architect and expressionist painter, but did consider himself a bit of a poet as a teenager. Examples of his early adolescent verse will be on display as part of Storied City.
“If they weren’t in Calgary in 1923, I could get them here with a little poetic licence,” Hunter says.
The 12 writers themselves, on the other hand, are not really in need of embellishment. Isabel Paterson, for instance, had set a few of
her novels in Calgary but left the city in 1910. Still, she had a notable post-calgary career in journalism, eventually becoming an influential literary critic in New York City. As a conservative political philosopher, she also became an early mentor to Ayn Rand and is credited with helping launch the modern American libertarian movement.
By 1923, the man who called himself Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance already would have earned considerable notoriety. As a reporter for the Calgary Herald in 1922, the North Carolina-born writer, journalist and actor decided to spice up his beat by tossing a fake bomb into a meeting at City Hall. That resulted in him being promptly fired. The following year, he was asked by the Calgary Stampede to create a publicity stunt that had Blackfoot, Stoney and Sarcee warriors stage a fake kidnapping of the mayor.
Long Lance would find more controversy when his claims of Cherokee and Blood Indian heritage were debunked. He eventually moved to Los Angeles, where in 1932 he either committed suicide or was murdered, Hunter says. Calgary historian Donald B. Smith called Long Lance the “glorious imposter” in his 1999 biography.
Hunter is on familiar terrain here exploring the colourful writers of Calgary. She often hosts “literary walks” throughout the city and published Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers in 2018, a weighty tome that explored how the city has been depicted by writers over the years.
With Storied City, which will run until April 26, Hunter hopes visitors to the Lougheed House get both a general sense of Calgary’s rich literary history and also a more specific picture of the city in 1923, a time of both economic uncertainty and great culture.
“The framework had been laid before the First World War, which all those grand cosmopolitan dreams people had for Calgary,” Hunter says. “But what I think is a really cool resonance between now and then — we have 100 years to look back — and we said the city in the early ’20s and we’re having the same kind of moment. The city is catching its breath and had just come out of a boom.
“The economy in 1923 was pretty shaky. In 1924, that’s when gas was flaring in Turner Valley again. But not in 1923. Commodity prices were really low, there were huge vacancy rates. There are a lot of parallels.”