…And yet there is no surviving evidence to prove that Pauline Johnson heard Wilde’s lecture, much less that she met him. She was half Mohawk and she lived in a rather grand house near the Reserve, and would in fact have been the perfect presenter for Wilde’s momento. He was only seven years older than she. But no, as close as they came to meeting—and how evocative it is to think of such a meeting taking place—it does not seem to have happened.

Something of a Johnson industry has sprung up in recent years. Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag published a critical study in 2000 and a scholarly edition of her complete poems and selected prose in 2002. Joan Crate published a book of poems “for” Pauline Johnson in 1989, Daniel David Moses has been working with her texts, and even Margaret Atwood toyed briefly with the idea of writing an opera libretto based on her life. It is not hard to see why Johnson has become a subject of renewed interest. She was a highly successful performer at a time when that was a difficult thing for a Canadian to pull off; and she was, moreover, a woman and a halfblood Indian to boot. Furthermore, she had fallen into some disfavour during the period when Canadian Modernism held sway. A.J.M. Smith did not include her in his 1960 revision of the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, although Atwood reinstated her in 1982. Earle Birney publicly dismissed her as second-rate, and even the school anthologies, those bastions of fifty-year-old taste, where she had held on into the 1960s, gradually dropped “The Corn Husker” and “The Song My Paddle Sings,” two staples. A revival, if one believes in the necessity of such things, was overdue. Of course some overstatement was inevitable as the pendulum swung as far to the west as it had earlier swung to the east. Gerson and Strong-Boag, for example, following the critical intemperance of the American scholar Elaine Showalter, ludicrously included Pauline Johnson in the sorority of “Daughters of Decadence” and seemed to think it important that she had a boat and a machine-gun named after her. All the same, their edition is an important contribution to Canadian poetry scholarship and one is glad to have it.

Charlotte Gray’s Flint & Feather is part of the evidence of this new interest in Tekahionwake, to use Johnson’s Indian name. Ottawa-based Gray is a journalist, not a scholar, and her biography is aimed at a general audience. As such, she will state with assurance what a more meticulous scholarly biographer might surround with footnotes. She avers, for example, that Johnson’s first published poem, “My Little Jean,” appeared in Gems of Poetry, a New York magazine, in 1883. Gerson and Strong-Boag more cautiously note that reports of its appearance there “have not been verified.” The photographs used in the book are properly credited but are seldom dated. Gray sometimes fictionalizes for local colour’s sake (“Between carefully counting her cross-stitches and gazing out of the window, she was seldom bored,” p. 163), and she occasionally allows Johnson to get away with a naive or uninformed comment without pointing it up. (William Van Home, the driver of the last spike in the CPR, had her to lunch at his Montreal mansion, where Pauline was impressed by what many then as now would have described as a pretty drab bunch of paintings: “His pictures are glorious. Rousseau, Corot, Dore, Reynolds—all the great names,” p.220.) Gray’s notes might also have been a bit more generous. Where now, I wanted to know, is the portrait of Johnson by J.W.L. Forster (Gray clearly saw it), and where exactly were the five articles about Johnson by her young friend Jean Thompson published? A full bibliography of sources would have been welcome.

Flint & Feather is nevertheless an interesting read, and Gray has done a good job of bringing Johnson alive, this in spite of the fact that as literary lives go, Johnson’s was not the most compelling. She had relatively few literary friends, for example (acquaintances, yes, but friends, no), feuded with no one apart from her sister, had no fully documented love affairs with members of any sex, and certainly did not advance the art of poetry or fiction in any substantial way. (Gerson and Strong-Boag call her “one of Canada’s most significant writers,” but that is highly debatable and is, in any case, a slightly different claim.) Her life as an entertainer was unusual and fascinating, but it wears a bit thin eventually, for the reader even as it did for her. Johnson’s family life was intriguing, and Gray explores this deep influence on her character with skill. Her father was a Mohawk chief, and on her mother’s side she was related to the novelist William Dean Howells. Only one of the four Johnson children married (and he late), and all of them suffered from the ravages perpetrated by a repressed Victorian mother. (Johnson was engaged once, until her intended changed his mind. There was also a mystery man whose portrait she wore until death in a locket that hung around her neck, but she went to her grave without revealing the man’s identity.) Although Gerson and Strong-Boag, like Gray, are fond of emphasizing the erotic undercurrents of some of Johnson’s poems, her sex life, if she had one, remains mostly hidden. She made many cross-country tours with two men—Owen Smily first and later WaIter McRaye—but there is no evidence in Gray’s biography that either was her lover. (Indeed she suggests at one point that McRaye was gay. Perhaps he was, but that opinion is not documented here. She does note McRaye’s marriage in 1909 to Lucy Webling.)

There are many fascinating moments in Pauline Johnson’s life. Like Group of Seven painter J.E.H. MacDonald and his wife, she was deeply attracted to the Roycrofter community in East Aurora, New York (Charles Olson referred to it dismissively as Elberthubbardsville), though neither of them actually joined. Hubbard, its founder, was a William Morris acolyte and an early American communitarian, and it is easy to understand how Johnson might have fantasized a craft-oriented life rooted in one spot, given her frenetically peripatetic life. She was also, I believe, the only Canadian poet of the 1890s to publish with John Lane, another connection to Oscar Wilde, since Lane was the publisher of several of his books. Her first collection, White Wampum, appeared under his imprint; and although he may have thought of her as an unusually exotic animal for his literary zoo, he certainly gave her a handsome first book. It was, amazingly enough, edited by John Davidson, and must have been read by Wilde, Dowson, perhaps even Yeats and Aubrey Beardsley. Unfortunately her later work did not live up to the promise of this auspicious debut, and she was forced to write prose in order to pay her bills as she grew older. Gray is reassuringly critical of Canadian Born (1903), Johnson’s second book: no special pleading for her subject on this score.

Charlotte Gray has written a well-documented account of Pauline Johnson’s life. It is surely not the final word, but it is fit to stand beside Betty Keller’s 1981 biography as a good introduction to this Canadian writer.

⁰ Winner, Critic’s Desk Award for Feature Review 2004
Arc 51, Winter 2003