Tennesee Williams and Me

Madeleine Sherwood in Sweet Bird of Youth

Yesterday, I watched Sweet Bird of Youth on Turner Classics, part of their Tennessee Williams festival.

It reminded me of 1982, when I worked as a copywriter at a radio station in Montreal. I guess Tennessee died in 1982, because one of the other copywriters came into the room and announced, “One of us has died.”

I turned to my friend, Nora, and smiled. One of us indeed. We wrote ads for Greeks restaurants, “Step into the Sunshine at la Casa Grecque,”

I just checked. He died in 83, so my memory serves.

You see, I was a big fan of the playwright. I had studied theatre at McGill, not for the acting bit, which  I simply hated, but for the plays. Tennessee was a favorite. Edward Albee and Pinter, too.

Now, I don’t recall reading Sweet Bird of Youth, although I likely did. I missed the movie, though for sure. In 1962, when the movie came out, Montreal children couldn’t  go to the movies. (My play Milk and Water explains.)

And besides, I was just 8. Anyway, this movie is still damn relevant, I think.

Now, Madeleine Sherwood is in the movie Sweet Bird of Youth, playing a distinctly different character than she played in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A mistress to a powerful man. She played the same role, Miss Lucy, on stage.

Madeleine Sherwood, as it happens, is the granddaughter of Paul Villard, who figures in my story Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold GIrl.

My ebook story is based on family letters from the 1910 era and in that era Edith Nicholson was working at French Methodiste Institute. Paul Villard, a medical doctor and doctor of divinity, was the Principal of the Missionary School on Greene Avenue.

He figures largely in the story, as he helps Edith through a number of crises and then she suddenly turns on him and quits. (I have somewhere a letter of recommendation he wrote, rather abrupt and hastily written.) Edith seems to have been friends with Yvonne Villard, his daughter. Yvonne visits Tighsolas in the summer of 1911.

I have spent a great deal of time trying to figure why. (I wondered at one time if it was because of the Church Union controversy going on. Edith was a Presbyterian.) But no, I realize that it had to do with Villard appointing another woman head of the teachers.

So I am writing that part right now. I have read Dr. Villard’s books on the school and its mission, so know all about it.

I see on the net that Nicole Kidman was set to start in a revival on stage, last year, but nothing more has come of it. Nichol does have a similar acting style to Geraldine Page, I think.

Ecole Methodiste teachers. I am pretty sure the man on the right is Paul Villard. One of the girls other than Edith, might be Yvonne Villard.

Canada’s Backward Suffrage Movement

With All Her Might: A book about Canadian Suffragette Gertrude Harding by Gretchen Wilson. Harding was born in New Brunswick but fought for suffrage in England.

I found an odd article about the Canadian Suffrage Movement (or the lack of same) in the Canadian Magazine 1913. The same year Edith Nicholson went to see Mrs. Ethel Snowden speak at the meeting of the Canadian Council of Women in Montreal.

This article, by an Isabel Skelton, summarizes the movement in the US, Britain and world, while claiming that Canada is ‘backword’ in this regard.

In the US, claims Skelton, they have a history of equal rights movements and that is the reason for their active suffrage movement. In Britain, there are only 88 men for every hundred women, so they have many more working women than in Canada, and that is the reason for the active movement there.

In Canada, well, we are single minded homesteaders, she says, ‘intensely on the make” so ‘political and civic responsiblity does not loom large’ in our minds. And Canadian Women already have many rights… For instance, female property owners can vote at the municiple level and at the school board level and that’s what women care about, their immediate community and education… Our marriage and divorce laws do not discriminate in favour of men, she says. (Not exactly true.) For all these reasons, the suffrage movement is stalled here. Is comparatively inert. (That’s how she put it.) It also doesn’t help that were a huge diverse country, so it is hard to start a movement here.

On top of that, to plead for women’s suffrage just hasn’t been fashionable in Canada. Quite the opposite. The earliest proponents of woman suffrage in Canada turned off the leisure classes, with their ‘freakish dress and mannish manners’.

Theoretically Canadian women believe they must ‘be alive to problems pressing on us from without’ and vaguely desire the suffrage to remedy things, but their practical needs are somehow not crying enough to make their demands imperative…

An interesting point of view: but tell that to Margaret Nicholson and her daughters, Marion, Edith and Flora (of my novel Flo in the City), who cut out pro suffrage articles from the Montreal Witness, a pro-suffrage newspaper.

It would make more sense if Ms. Skelton were explaining why there is ‘no militant’ movement in Canada, for that seems to be the case, but there is, without a doubt, a suffrage movement, of sorts, even if there are no marches and parades. (Oddly, in the US, the anti-suffragists are using the ‘no one cares’ argument in their editorials, but this woman appears to be pro-suffrage, or on the fence. She says in the future, when women enter the workplace in larger numbers and face the inevitable problems, the movement might get going in Canada.)

But I’ve found a lot of articles about the Restless Woman Issue in the Montreal Gazette of the 1910 era, many reports of men and women giving talks about suffrage, pro and con. (In Pierre Berton’s Book, Marching as to War, he claims the Canadians Suffrage movement peaked in 1910.)

So, I dunno. I find it odd that, in this article, Canadians are described as the self-sufficient pioneers and Americans the socially-conscious, since the stereotype is quite the opposite today.

I have to wonder if all the ‘cowboy’ movies over the century have created this perception of the rugged American individualist..

 

Like a Girl From De Bullion Street

Women at Camp Chapleau. The poor and their babies. 1910 Montreal

As much as she hated to admit it to herself, Flora did not feel proud of brother Herb, not lately.

And this despite the fact that she had been sheltered from all the unpleasantness, on one hand, while being left to imagine all kinds of things, on the other. Her mother’s moods blew hot and cold with each letter or lack of letter from her secretive son, and she bore the brunt of it, but it was Flora’s duty, as a good daughter, to ignore it all.

It was the same with Mrs. Montgomery’s recent illness. She was called on to bring Margaret’s soups and stews to the family, and when entering the Montgomery’s, she had felt the pall of quiet despair and had no idea what was the cause of this, except “her old problems.”

A few phrases overheard here and there led her to believe it had something to do with childbirth, but what?


And then Marion’s feud with Herb at Christmas, and all these whispers about de Bullion Street.

Then Edith told Marion a story, which brought everything into the sharp, ugly focus, and which, paradoxically, made Marion double up in laughter right there on the road. The three sisters were walking to church New Year’s Day morn, the two older sisters in front, and Edith was recounting how her young student, Alice, said “maudit” during a lesson. Alice’s mother, Maria, had overheard from the hall and exclaimed, in French of course, “You talk like a whore from de Bullion Street.”

“I turned beet red, I imagine,” Edith told Marion, who basically buckled over right there on the icy road, holding her sides and stopping everyone in their tracks. Edith had glanced back at Flora, sheepishly, no doubt regretting her remark.

And, of course, Flora was left out of the joke, which didn’t strike her as funny at all.

All things considered. She had known for a while that de Bullion Street was the cause of Herb’s falling out with Marion – and the reason his parents were worried about his ‘picking up bad habits.’

She and May had puzzled out, by piecing together bits of private conversations, that friends of Marion’s had seen Herb leaving an establishment on de Bullion Street in Montreal and that Marion had spoken to Herb and warned him to stop whatever he had been doing, but he had not, so she had broken the bad news to her parents.

But the young women had always assumed it was a saloon he had been caught leaving, or at worse a poker game.

But this?

Her brother, who had at one time had all the local farm girls in a frenzy of flirtatiousness, was now interested in fallen women!

She would pray for him at church. And pray that no one at church knew.