Syllables of Recorded Time: The Story of the Canadian Authors Association, 1921-1981

320 Pages·1981·15.365 MB·English

by  Lyn Harrington

Syllables
Recorded
Tune
Other books by Lyn Harrington:
Manitoba Roundabout, Ryerson, 1951
Stormy Summer, Nelson, 1953
Ootook, Eskimo Girl, Nelson, 1956
Real Book about Canada, Doubleday, 1959
British Columbia in Pictures, Nelson, 1959
Encyclopedia of World Travel, Doubleday, 1961; Canada Section
Rangers'Handbook, 1962
Greece and the Greeks, Nelson, 1962
How People Live in Canada, Benefic, 1964
China and the Chinese, Nelson, 1966
Grand Canal of China, Rand McNally, 1967; B&S, 1974
Luck of the La Verendryes, Nelson, 1967
How People Live in China, Benefic, 1968
Australia and New Zealand, Nelson, 1969
Polar Regions, Nelson, 1973
The Covered Bridges of Central and Eastern Canada, McGraw-Hill, 1976
The Shaman's Evil Eye, Highway, 1979
Syllables
Recorded
Time
by Lyn Harrington
Foreword by Harry J. Boyle
THE STORY OF THE CANADIAN
AUTHORS ASSOCIATION 1921-1981
Simon & Pier re
Published with the kind assistance of a Wintario grant and Alberta Culture.
We would like to express our gratitude to The Canada Council and the Ontario
Arts Council for their support.
Marian M. Wilson, Publisher
Copyright © 1981 by Canadian Authors Association.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording,
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from
the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote orief passages in a review.
From A LIFE IN FOLKLORE by Dr. Helen Creighton
Reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited
MAPLE LEAF FOREVER
© 1964 by Gordon V. Thompson
Used by permission.
A SLICE OF CANADA by Watson Kirkconnell, © University of Toronto Press
for Acadia University
Canadian Forum quotations © Canadian Forum
Excerpts throughout text:
Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in smaller type are taken from The
Canadian Bookman later The Canadian Author & Bookman. © Canadian Authors
Association
ISBN 0-88924-112-0
12345*54321
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Harrington, Lyn, 1911-
Syllables of recorded time
Bibliography:
Includes index.
ISBN 0-88924-112-0
1. Canadian Authors Association - History
I. Title
PS8005.C363H37 C810'.6071 C81-094657-2
PR9180.C363H37
Editor: Marian M. Wilson
Designer: Mario Carvajal
Assistant Editor: K.A. Chittick
Typesetting: Pickwick Type
Printer: Les Editions Marquis
Printed and Bound in Canada
Simon & Pierre Publishing Company Limited
Order Department
P.O. Box 280 Adelaide Street Postal Station
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5C 2J4
To commemorate the Diamond Anniversary
of the
Canadian Authors Association
1921-1981
Acknowledgements
Material in this book has been drawn almost
entirely from back issues of the Canadian Author &
Bookman, published since 1919, and other
Canadian Authors Association files.
In addition, the author used as a resource Susan
Sills' M.A. thesis, The Role of the Canadian Authors
Association with Respect to the Licensing Clauses of
Early Copyright Legislation and Canada's Adherence
to the Berne Convention.
Special thanks go to Dr. Helen Creighton,
Bluebell Phillips, the late June Fritch, Cdr. C.H.
Little, and Dr. Donald W. Thomson for their
assistance and cooperation.
Foreword
To many Canadian writers and students whose development has taken
place in the aftermath of the Massey report, it may come as a surprise to
know that cultural self-consciousness did not spring up fully grown in the
CanLit courses of the 1960s. Forty years earlier the Canadian Authors As-
sociation had 700 members and was a proportionately larger organization
by comparison to national population, than the Authors League of
America, which numbered 2,000 members. In a time of powerful lobbies
and vested interest groups, the Canadian Authors Association remains a
dignified and important agency of Canadian cultural life.
The Canadian Authors Association can take pride in what it has ac-
complished. Its restrained pleading may even have had a greater cumula-
tive effect than some of the more militant intercessions. Its influence hasn't
been confined to membership. It has helped all writers in Canada.
For sixty years it has persisted with the admirable notion that those
who ardently desire to write are as important in their own way as those
who write. This belief has extended to concern and help for many who
over the years had contributed a great deal to the cultural life of Canada
before there were formal grants and subsidies or even social security. Its
inherent bellettrism has been rather out of fashion of late, but the unhappy
effects of the succeeding trend to strict professionalism now seem likely to
suggest the need for another tack again in our cultural life for the next sixty
years.
There is an increased recognition of creative work in Canada. It
should be much greater. It must be a contagious celebration by Canadians
that we have powerful and sensitive voices that are now recognized inter-
nationally. How many countries can boast of having a Leacock, a McLuhan
and a Frye in a scant span of sixty years? It's not only in the great univer-
sities that their literary and philosophical talents are recognized, for in
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those places where newspapers still regard culture as important these men
are treated as natural celebrities, deserving serious coverage.
There's another reason for recognition. We need their insights at this
time when an obsession for technology threatens us with facts, raw infor-
mation and mindlessness. Only the examined life can survive the smother-
ing deluge.
Communications technology broke the tyranny of space in Canada.
Now it is rampant and it must be used in the cause of the human spirit and
not allowed to impose its own imperatives. Our artists must remind us of
thought, love, poetry, dreams, hopes, memory and the kindness that pro-
tects human dignity. This was recognized by the artists who set up the Ca-
nadian Bookman and the CAA. In 1919 they inveighed against:
the merely sentimental, narcotic, idea-less books, miscalled books of
the imagination, which have formed the literary food of too many of
us who did not wish to be bothered with ideas.
They saw the need for a Canadian periodical which would discuss books
not as masses of paper and binding, nor as so many square inches of
type, nor as speculative adventures in search for "best-sellers", but
as the vessels for the containing and the imparting of ideas — and of
ideas suited to the uses of Canadian readers.
The key to these matters lies with artists. It is what they deal with all
the time. They are the only true force that can restrain those who itch for
the pushbutton of destruction in what they see myopically as self-defence.
In a world where science has perfected the means of robbing individuals of
their dignity and individual rights, we need the artists' concern for global
fraternity.
"The poet" — as writer Norman Cousins speaks of all who have re-
spect for and speak to the human spirit — "can help to keep man from
making himself over in the image of his electronic marvels. For the danger
is not so much that man may be controlled by the computer as that he may
imitate it."
I do not suggest that Canadian writers alone will save our world. They
are valuable however in reminding us of the power of better international
understanding in the cause of fraternity rather than fratricide. One mad-
man in this lifetime almost destroyed the world by suppressing individual
thoughts and supplanting it with dogma; significantly today despots in
many parts of the world are still attempting to do what he failed at. Where
the rights of the state take priority, the first to be eliminated or silenced are
the artists.
Can it happen here? It can, and it will be a supreme irony if the voices
of the artists are rendered powerless by indifference rather than brutal
suppression. The danger is that we can be lulled into such indifference by a
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deluge of soporific images and words in the mass of communications tech-
nology. What shall it avail us if we have an enormous gross national pro-
duct and lose our sense of value as individual human beings with a respon-
sibility to all mankind?
In future years the history of the CAA will undoubtedly be written in
more detail, and the opening up of its archives to researchers will add to
our knowledge of Canadian literary history. The valuable achievement of
this account is that it is set down by someone who has participated in much
of that history and that it can be published at a time when these events are
still within the living memory of scholars and writers. Every decade brings
its own analysis of literary history; in this sixtieth year of its existence,
when comprehensive cultural review is an urgent part of Canadian life,
the history of the CAA adds a significant perspective, that will help current
writers to assess more fully our Canadian consciousness of a literary tradi-
tion.
Harry J. Boyle
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