The cultural history connection

Remembering Maria Tippett
an essay by Ben Clinton-Baker

[Editor’s Note: Maria Tippet passed away on August 8, 2024. She was as an advisory board member of the Ormsby Literary Society, alongside Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn.]

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The unexpected passing of historian Maria Tippett in August of 2024 brought a premature close to the fruitful career of one of the preeminent writers of Canadian cultural history. As an author of 17 books including biographies of such towering figures as Emily Carr, Bill Reid, Yousuf Karsh and Frederick Varley, however, her accomplishments and dedication to her craft have ensured that her legacy will live on for many years to come. Tippett’s impressive oeuvre has been widely reviewed and it is not my intention to summarize the full scope of her work here. Instead, I would like to share some reflections on how my brief but memorable friendship with the author has continued to inspire my own work as an historian of British Columbia’s cultural history.

My first encounter with Tippett and her husband, British historian Peter Clarke, was a complete coincidence. In the summer of 2016 my partner, concert pianist Shoko Inoue, and I set out on a small concert tour of the southern Gulf Islands. We had booked venues on Saturna, Mayne, Galiano, Salt Spring, and Pender Islands where Shoko would perform a program of stirring Beethoven piano sonatas for whoever happened to show up. I would introduce each recital with some historical background on the program. On some of the islands there were good turnouts and we were warmly welcomed and embraced everywhere by the wonderful islanders we met. Enduring friendships were made and, perhaps most importantly, culture and community openly exchanged and enjoyed.

On Pender Island only five people showed up for the recital. Undaunted, Shoko performed the program with passion and determination as though she was playing for a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall (which, incidentally, she has also done). After the concert two of the attendees thanked us for coming to their island. In answer to their inquiring where we were going to stay that night, we told them that we were planning to pitch our tent on a small patch of grass behind the community hall. The woman scoffed amicably. “No you won’t. Come and stay with us. We have a comfortable guest room and you can have breakfast in the morning.” Grateful for the invitation, we followed their car through dark and forested roads, over the bridge connecting North and South Pender, eventually pulling in to a gravel driveway at the far southern end of the island.

Inside the beautiful and slightly rustic home – unpainted, fragrant of cedar, and enlivened with colourful highlights and tasteful artwork – we all sat in the comfortable living room and chatted. We shared stories about our tour and Shoko spoke more about the music that she had performed. It was clear that Peter and Maria (we still didn’t know their last names) were cultured people who were able to discuss such topics with ease and proficiency. Eventually Maria mentioned that she had touched on some subject or other in a biography that she had written about Emily Carr some years ago. The proverbial light bulb went off in my head. “So you must be Maria Tippett?” I ventured. I can still recall the look on her face – an attractive combination of pride, humility, and pleasant surprise – as she nodded in confirmation. “I’m an historian myself and a fan of your work,” I continued admiringly. She smiled and accepted the compliment gracefully.

No less impressive was learning of Peter Clarke’s career as an historian of modern British political and economic history. Most recently as master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge – one of the oldest constituent colleges of the university – his work had focused on the influential career of the English economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), as well as Winston Churchill and others. Encouraged by Maria, he eventually produced the guestbook from his time at Trinity Hall which included entries by Queen Elizabeth, Stephen Hawking, and numerous other distinguished academics. As they still resided and worked at Cambridge during the academic year, Maria floated the idea that we might one day visit them there with the possibility of Shoko giving a recital or two. Of course we both loved the idea.

Before retiring for the night Maria instructed us on protocol for the morning. They got up early to work, she said, but they would leave breakfast out for us. When we had eaten we were to go to the separate studio overlooking the garden to say goodbye. We went to bed that night humbled and touched by the kindness of our newly met friends and by the power of music and culture to bring people of similar interests and passions together.

Later that summer I invited Peter and Maria to attend a local history themed play that I had written and directed for the Victoria Fringe Festival. Borrowing from Shakespeare for the title, Tongues in Trees: The Reminiscences of Jack “Long Gun” Irvine was an adaptation of a colourful memoir written in the 1930s by one of the first children of European descent to be born on Vancouver Island. Maria responded enthusiastically to my invitation and we arranged to have dinner afterwards at the Union Club where she and Peter were members. They enjoyed the play and encouraged me to continue to work in the genre. I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment at being honoured in such a way for my first, and so far only, foray into the theatrical arts.

Only a few months later, Maria’s idea for Shoko to perform in Cambridge also came to fruition. We had a wonderful trip to England that winter in which Shoko gave two recitals to great acclaim in two different colleges at Cambridge. Peter and Maria went out of their way to help us find accommodation at the university during our stay. They also arranged a celebratory dinner for Shoko, and invited us to participate as guests at a candle lit “High Table” dinner for faculty and students at Trinity Hall where Peter had been master.

While in Cambridge I was also able to conduct some research into a subject of ongoing interest for me: the celebrated early pictorialist photographer Peter Henry Emerson. Viewing some of the rare and beautiful original folio editions of his work in the library’s Special Collections, as well as visiting a few of the sites that he photographed in nearby rural East Anglia, were influential and memorable experiences that helped to give flesh to a subject that I had only known abstractly until then. ¹ Maria also encouraged me in this research and Peter, as a faculty member, kindly facilitated my access to the library.

Social and private interactions with Peter and Maria continued to inform the ways that I perceived and conceived of my work as an aspiring cultural historian. I had also read Tippett’s biography of Emily Carr with interest and had referred to her book From Desolation to Splendour: Changing Perceptions of the British Columbia Landscape (1977) during my own investigations into BC cultural history as a graduate student at UVic from 2010-12. The latter book came to my attention through its connection with co-author (and Tippett’s first husband) historian Douglas Cole. ² But it is a lesser known work of Tippett’s which has come to have the most direct and profound influence upon me and my own work.

In one of our discussions, Maria Tippett mentioned a book of hers which she thought would be of interest to me considering my focus on the history of Victoria. Written in 1994, when Tippett was 50 years old, Becoming Myself: A Memoir is effectively an autobiographical bildungsroman recounting her childhood and early adulthood in Victoria, her education and travels to Europe in her early 20s, and the first years of her work as a professional historian and writer. The story culminates with the successful publishing of her seminal biography of Emily Carr in 1979. Although I was initially unable to locate a copy, since the author’s passing I was reminded of the work and was finally able to track it down. Reading it now, almost 10 years after my initial meeting with the author, has been a touching way to reconnect with her after her passing, and has inspired me to record this narrative of our friendship.  

Tippett begins the work with her earliest and faintest memories of growing up in Victoria in the late 1940s. But her lens is far from rose-tinted. Referring to Governor James Douglas’ oft-repeated description of the region in the mid-nineteenth century as a “garden of Eden” with its distinct landscape and sub-Mediterranean climate, she wryly notes that “any resemblance to that salubrious part of the world, let alone to the garden of Eden, had vanished by the middle of the next century.” ³ She is even less forgiving of the local institutions and residents: “Its pretentious, Ivy covered hotels, where tea and crumpets were served at four in the afternoon by Scottish accented waitresses who had never set foot off the island, had turned Canada‘s western outport into the most artificial city in the country. This pre-Disneyland version of a 19th century English town attracted American visitors who were too poor or too timid to cross the continent, then the Atlantic, to experience the real thing.” ⁴

Fortunately, not all of the author’s early memories are so caustic. Recalling idyllic walks through wildflower filled meadows above the Dallas Road cliffs, trips to popular beauty spots like Metchosin and Goldstream, and fun days with friends in the magnificent Crystal Garden swimming pool, a sense of nostalgia is never far from the surface. As a foster child with only fleeting awareness of a shadowy mother figure and an absentee War-veteran father, Tippett (her foster-family name) sought refuge from a strange and seemingly artificial world in her natural surroundings, as well as in the depths of her own inquisitive mind. “I’d spend the entire day in mid shoulder high grass in a vacant lot at the end of the street,” she writes. “I wasn’t frightened or lonely sitting in that field. There were buzzing insects to keep me company. And slamming spring doors, distant voices, and the whirr of a push-pull lawnmower to assure me that someone was near if anything went wrong.” ⁵

Tippett’s childhood was marked from a young age by a strong determination to become “somebody” beyond what the limitations of her own geographical and social situation might provide. Arising in part from an uncertain, if stable, sense of belonging within her large foster family, this yearning was most often expressed through a strong attraction to the fine arts. Piano lessons, tap dance, and ballet classes (the latter including regular performances at Butchart Gardens, the Empress Hotel, and at the Wilkinson Road psychiatric hospital) helped to develop her appreciation for music and her ability to perform for an audience. But more importantly they contributed to a growing sense of self-identity and individuality that were not being nurtured by a less than stellar academic performance. Recalling a play that she wrote, directed, and starred in at age eight, Tippett reflects how, “more than anything, it reinforced my belief that I was special, not stupid; different, not the same as everyone else.” ⁶ This high standard and drive to excel would be a mark of the author’s work throughout her life.

Along with ongoing dance and music practice, Tippett immersed herself in the small but flourishing local cultural scene in Victoria. In the 1950s the Provincial Museum was still located in the eastern wing of the parliament buildings and she recalls being strongly impressed by the natural history and First Nations exhibits there, as well as by the richly ornamented interiors of the buildings themselves. Significantly, she also recalls the positive impressions of contemporary First Nations art and culture that she received through her observations of Kwakwaka’wakw master carver Mungo Martin and others creating the monumental works that would become the centrepieces of Thunderbird Park. She also eventually found stimulation in great works of European art and literature. The writings of Aldous Huxley, William Hazlitt, T. E. Lawrence and others helped her to develop a sense of a “rhythmic cadence” in their prose, while attending screenings of films by trailblazing directors like Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut at the Oak Bay Theatre (“The only arty cinema in town”) introduced her to the revolutionary potential of that medium. ⁷

Victoria in the post-war period, like much of the western world, was undergoing a cultural and economic shift that saw the older colonial order of the town being thrown into disarray. New movements in art and architecture were transforming the cultural landscape as local practitioners in these fields explored creative and sometimes disruptive ways of blending with more or less success a modern sensibility with the established, largely anglo-centric, worldview. Although supportive of such work, for Tippett this did not equate to a dismissal of the importance of an older, pre-Canadian, historical context. Quite the contrary. Her own aspiring worldview found deep nourishment within the artistic traditions of Europe as she actively sought to find her place within its far-reaching scope. And it was precisely here that what could be said to be the central question of her life and work arose: What is her own culture? Or, as she later reflected in Becoming Myself, “How did a devotee of Europe’s fine and performing arts turn into a passionate student of Canada‘s culture? And how did a person with no family history of her own become a keen observer and narrator of other people’s lives?” ⁸ The resolution, as she soon learned, lay in the written word.

Since the sixth grade, Tippett had known that she wanted to be a writer. Her early experiments in the medium enabled her to escape the narrow cultural confines of her life in Victoria, as well as to imagine the biological father that she never knew. This creation of a fictionalized family “history” for herself was then able to provide her with a necessary stepping stone through which she was later able to access a broader and more genuine cultural heritage. This longing for a sense of cultural identity was also encouraged by her early explorations into world history. These were derived predominantly from two multi-volume book sets that were on the shelves of her family home – the Books of Knowledge and the American Encyclopedia. Beyond the historical information they contained, these investigations also provided her first exposure to the concept of historical subjectivity:

It was tantamount to being an explorer. Once I had found the facts and transformed them into my own words, it was as though I had discovered them in the first place. Recasting the information into my own schoolgirl prose gave me a great sense of power. I could change the meaning of a story by leaving things out or by emphasizing a particular event… And, depending on whether I consulted the Encyclopedia or the Books of Knowledge, I could end up with a different set of causes and conditions that accounted for an historical event. 

After high school graduation Tippett’s first job as a comptroller for a plumbing company in Victoria solidified her growing conviction that her future lay elsewhere. Her opportunity to do this came in the spring of 1964 with the invitation of a similarly inclined band-mate and friend to join her and another friend on a trip to Europe. Not only did this decision to de-camp from her steady job and life in Victoria take her employer and disapproving foster parents by surprise, but it also caused something of a sensation in Victorian society. The result was that on the eve of their departure the three young women and their plans were featured in the “society” section of the Victoria newspaper, photograph and all.

In Becoming Myself, Tippett reflects on her decision to make this trip as follows: “I was not just traveling to Europe in order to escape the blindness of Canada‘s society and culture. Or even to begin my apprenticeship as a writer. I was hoping to find my cultural roots. I had studied ballet under a British-trained dancer, played classical music composed by Europeans, read books, and seen films produced by other non-Canadians. My trip to Europe would somehow validate these experiences, make them seem more real, put them into some sort of context, perhaps even demythologize them.” ⁹

While in Germany Tippett developed a strong interest in the post-war reconstruction of the country and especially the situation in Berlin where she lived and worked for a time on an American military base. This interest, as well as her personal relationships with German friends and acquaintances, led her to submit an essay about her experiences to the editors of Victoria’s Daily Colonist newspaper for publication. Titled East Berlin: City of Bondage the article was featured in the paper’s weekend magazine, The Islander, and the author was paid the appealing sum of ten dollars (“one-third of my monthly German income”) for her efforts. Although she is critical of the article in Becoming Myself (“It reeks of the worst kind of sentimentality… And it resonates with self-righteousness” ¹⁰), it was nonetheless an encouraging start to her career as a writer.

This trip grew into a two-and-a-half-year voyage of self-discovery with extended stays in England and Germany. Perhaps the greatest outcome for Tippett was the way that it helped her to realize that she was more adept at observing culture than she was at producing it, at least in as far as those two things are mutually exclusive. It also brought home the fact that, if she was to proceed anywhere in the field of cultural studies, she needed to further her education. As she later wrote in an article for the Canadian Historical Review summarizing her career as an historian: “I was, in short, a cultural ingenue, and if I were to become more than that, I had to go back to school.” ¹¹ Incidentally (or not), the journey had also inspired a more concrete change in the author’s identity. Influenced by her time in Germany where she had been known as “Maria” instead of her birth name “Marie”, she eventually adopted the Germanic version in an act of more or less subconscious cultural diffusion. “At the end of the year I had become Maria,” she writes in Becoming Myself. “And when I returned to Canada, it never occurred to me to be anything else.” ¹²

Returning to Canada in September of 1966, Tippett dove headlong into her studies, first by completing some necessary correspondence courses through the BC Department of Education, then at Vancouver City College, and finally as a graduate student in the the Department of History at the newly established Simon Fraser University in Burnaby. Focusing her attention on the cultural history of post-Revolutionary Russia, she thrived in the lively and heady academic environment of SFU in the early 1970s. It was also there that she established her first serious romantic relationship. Douglas Cole was an American expatriate who had been teaching in the history department at SFU since 1966. His specific areas of interest were in German and Canadian cultural history and so, despite Tippett’s lingering skepticism towards the latter, they had plenty to talk about. They married in 1971, six months after their initial meeting in the university pub.

The romantic story of how Tippett and Cole worked together and inspired each other in their common goals of the study of local and international cultural history is one that is best read in Tippett’s own words in Becoming Myself. From their bases in Vancouver and a rustic cabin on Mayne Island, they collaborated and encouraged each other in ways that perhaps only two similarly inclined cultural historians can do. One outcome of the relationship for Tippett was that, through Cole’s work, she learned to appreciate the artistic output of her fellow Canadians more than ever. Through their efforts in collecting and studying the work of early BC painters, for example, she came to recognize the importance of artists such as Emily Carr in the establishment and development of a uniquely local and Canadian form of visual expression. Gradually the subject began to displace her previous focus on the art of post-Revolutionary Russia. In 1977 she and Cole published From Desolation to Splendour, their collaborative survey of European and Canadian artistic representations of British Columbia. Although her research for the book led her to the somewhat disappointing posthumous conclusion that “perhaps the only artists in British Columbia who had created an indigenous art form were the First Nations people,” she also felt nonetheless that her future path of study had finally opened up before her.

As a result of her newly found interest in and respect for Canadian art, Tippett had at last established a solid foundation upon which to construct her life’s work as a cultural historian. Now fully immersed in her subject she began to delve more deeply into what it was that she wanted to contribute to the field. During her research for From Desolation to Splendour she had felt herself becoming increasingly drawn to the life story of Emily Carr. The artist’s self-professed “struggle story” resonated deeply with Tippett’s own feelings of being an outsider but the apparent paradoxes of Carr’s personality, expressed in her simultaneous desire to be left alone and yet recognized and appreciated, led Tippett to formulate what she referred to as a generally accepted “rejection myth” surrounding the artist’s life and work. Carr had not simply been rejected in her early years by an unappreciative public, Tippet found. Rather, she had consciously and intentionally pushed any such recognition away in an attempt to isolate herself so that she could focus in a more unimpeded way upon her calling as an artist. The rejection, it turned out, was two-way. This was ground breaking research at the time and, to a degree, it accounts for the ensuing success of Tippett’s biography when it was ultimately published in 1979.

As well as the “struggle story,” it is also tempting to draw parallels between Tippett’s thesis regarding the “rejection myth” of Emily Carr and her own life and work as a developing writer and historian. Writing about how she had refused to be embraced by any of the organizations that were seeking to assist women in the redefinition of the societal roles in 1970s Vancouver, Tippett is unequivocal in her independence: “I did not join any group that might have reinforced my identity as a writer. I knew who I was, where I was headed, and wasn’t interested in confusing my identity and my goals with those of anyone else.” ¹³ The further that she became entrenched in her work, however, the more she began to experience her continued feelings of social isolation as a gift rather than a curse. These feelings are expressed in a particularly illuminating passage from Becoming Myself which deserves extensive reproduction here:

During the 17 months that it had taken me to revise my original draft [of the Emily Carr biography], I had experienced something so self fulfilling – not just fulfilling the creative urge, but the feeling of success, of wholeness, of being in touch with a part of the world, with putting the individual mark on that great vast sea of letters and books. Convinced that writing was the apotheosis of learning, of expression, of unveiling oneself unabashedly, I knew that “I must create… to give myself something.

Ultimately, she concludes, “It seemed as though I had not only discovered Emily Carr during the long process of researching and writing the biography but that I had also discovered myself.” ¹⁴

Tippett’s simultaneous discovery of herself and the “real” Emily Carr during the research and writing of her Governor-General’s Award winning biography is an inspiring story for other would-be writers who, like myself, have yet to take the headlong plunge into the wonderful world of composed letters. Indeed, her career as whole can be seen as an encouraging affirmation of the ability of a person, even one of less-than-optimal personal and social circumstances, to rise to and surpass the manifold challenges to be faced by those brave enough to make this commitment. Her late-in-life assessments of the ways in which the increasing “institutionalization of creativity” and “commercialization of writing,” along with the “politically correct policing of our cultural space,” have created a culture of “grant-dependent artists” and a “paucity of copy space” devoted to reviews of new books in magazines and newspapers while also promoting a “a few select authors” are less encouraging. ¹⁵ To face such emerging challenges head-on and with confidence, however, are clearly the only way forward. “Writing is just like speaking a foreign language,” Tippett reflects in Becoming Myself. “It requires heaps of chutzpah.” ¹⁶

It has been nine years since my first chance encounter with Maria Tippett in the almost empty community hall on Pender Island, and almost exactly one year since her passing on August 8th, 2024. Over that time my own work as an aspiring cultural historian has fluctuated through varying degrees of involvement. The necessities of employment have led me away, thankfully only temporarily, from the study and promotion of the history of the region and community that I call home. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, however, I have been fortunate to secure a fulfilling job working at a small architectural heritage museum in Victoria. This has allowed me to continue to focus once again on the study of the past and its enduring and ever evolving influence on the present and future.

In this work I often consider the many lessons I learned and continue to learn from Maria. Among the most important of these is a confirmation of the necessity of situating the study of local and regional history within a broader cultural context. History is about today as much as it is about the past. The stories that we choose to tell and the ways that we tell them are fundamental to the teachings that we can learn from them. But without rooting these stories within a more ancient past there is, it seems to me, no way to establish a solid foundation from which to assist in creating a more grounded and viable culture for the future. Another valuable lesson that I learned from Maria is even less tangible and more difficult to articulate. It is, in a word, the importance of intransigence. This word is often applied with a negative connotation implying a stubbornness or hard-headed unwillingness to compromise. But compromise itself can be dangerous. As Mahatma Gandhi said: “All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender.” Maria did not compromise on her fundamental belief in the importance of studying and sharing stories about the past. The result was a body of work that will continue to inform and inspire for many generations to come.

Recently I returned to Pender Island for a short holiday visit. I was aware of her passing last year and had of course thought of our time together on the island and beyond all those years ago. But on this occasion my mind was more occupied with more prosaic things such as hiking and camping. That is, until I made a visit to the small bookstore located in the central village of the island. There my attention was caught by a couple of shelves of used books which had a sign on them indicating that they had come from the “Personal Libraries of Peter Clarke and Maria Tippett, New and Used”. This “sign” inspired me, in turn, to drive by Peter and Maria’s house on South Pender where I wondered if I might find Peter. Instead, and somewhat unsurprisingly, I was met by a “for sale” sign in front of the house. This visit brought back a flood of nostalgic memories and emotions, sad but also joyful, which I have come to know as a promising if also at times challenging hallmark of a line of work that is based in the past. I relived pulling up the gravel driveway in the middle of night, the warmth of the home and our animated discussions together. I looked into the garden in which they had spent so many hours and of which they were so proud. I listened to the gentle breeze in the giant trees surrounding the property and I felt an inviolable and time-defying connection to something greater than any of us individually. And I gave thanks to Maria for her dedication to that feeling.

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Ben Clinton-Baker, M.A. is the curator of Wentworth Villa Architectural Heritage Museum.

Notes

1. A current exhibition at Wentworth Villa Museum about the work of early Victoria pictorialist photographer Harry Upperton Knight (1873-1973) was directly inspired by this research. ↩︎
2. My MA supervisor at UVic, Wendy Wickwire, had paid tribute to Cole’s productive but tragically short career in a BC Studies article entitled The Quite Impossible Task: Douglas Cole and the Ecumenical Challenge of British Columbia’s Cultural History. (BC Studies,125/6 Spring/Summer 2000.) Cole’s remarkable book Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts (1995) had also formed part of my reading for prof. Wickwire’s signature upper level undergraduate course, “Observer’s Observed: Anthropologists and First Nations in British Columbia, 1880-1940”. This book and course helped to spark my interest in the early history of anthropology in British Columbia as an interesting and revealing aspect of our cultural history in its own right. ↩︎
3. Becoming Myself: A Memoir, Stoddart, 1996, p. 8 ↩︎
4. p. 8 ↩︎
5. p. 9 ↩︎
6. p. 18 ↩︎
7. p. 71 ↩︎
8. pp. 2-3 ↩︎
9. p. 77 ↩︎
10. p. 124 ↩︎
11. From Making Culture to Making Cultural History, The Canadian Historical Review (Mar 2018) 99/1, [p. 98-113], p. 99. ↩︎
12. Becoming Myself, p. 101 ↩︎
13. p. 191 ↩︎
14. p. 213 ↩︎
15. From Making Culture to Making Cultural History, pp. 111-112 ↩︎
16. Becoming Myself, p. 211 ↩︎

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster