Montreal's Bohemian Beatnik Colony - a report on the new culture from 1959

Alfie Wade playing piano at his club

 Boyce Richardson tackled the task of describing Montreal's Beat Generation to readers of the Montreal Star on 18 April 1959. 

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Montreal at this moment has among its citizens some hundreds of young people who choose to live in dark, remote and sometimes grubby rooms, who dress rather sloppily, live rather wildly and believe they have rejected the values of conventional society.

 They are the city's bohemians. When they come down from their tattily-furnished rooms, scattered around the city, they gather in a few selected cafes where they sit for hours ove cups of coffee, arguing, shouting, planning cultural revolutions and showing off. 

 Their long hair, their beards, their untidy, shaggy coiffures of the girls, their leotards, corduroys and sloppy sweaters make them conspicuous, and they enjoy the disapproval they arouse among the more conventional. 

Example of Reform

 What sort of people are they?

 A good proportion of them are phonies who don beards and dirty jeans because it is the only way they can be distinctive. Many of them suffer from a continuing immaturity which forbids them facing the responsibilities of life - so they make a  cult of idleness, instability and pretended daring. They never produced anything, except talk, and even their talk isn't very good. Some of them are young and lost; others in their thirties are older, and still lost.

  Quite a number of them are from France or other European countries, and they try to deaden the boredom they find in Montreal by searching desperately for excitement. They take jobs occasionally; sometimes they work long enough to get unemployment insurance benefits then quit. Others have steady jobs and are only bohemians in the evenings. 

  Why do they find life boring? "I don't know," said one young Frenchman. "It's just that there's nothing to do here." He had drifted around in this way for a number of years but some months ago he got a job as a photographer. What did the future hold for him? "I don't know. For the first time I've got interested in my job," he said. So recently he had stopped gathering with the clan over coffee. His energies are going into his work. 

"Freedom Illusions" 

 But this young man was luckier than some. He never had any intellectual pretensions,any illusion that he could paint the great picture or write the great Canadian novel. Plenty of others "feed on illusions," as one of their girlfriends told me. They use books for propos; they drop avant-garde names like Beckett and Ionescu, without really understanding what it's about.

   They are the young men and women whose inquiries for Dr. Zhivago - in Russian - were so insistent that one Montreal bookseller decided to stock a copy.

 Since he got it in, he has had 15 people asking for it, "Do you have Dr. Zhivago?" - dramatic pause - "in Russian?" But he still hasn't sold it. Each person takes the book up in confusion, looks at it, stammers that he doesn't have the money with him but will be back tomorrow - and disappears. 

  The Russian copy is just a little too Russian for them. 

No Laughing Matter 

 What are these people protesting about? The answer is - nothing "Everytime I have to stop at a red light. I get mad," one of them said, and much of their protest against society is on this childish level. 

 Their lack of conventional morality is more pretended than real, and they conform unquestioningly to the habits of their friends. They allow themselves a certain sexual freedom and an occasinal wild party. A few years ago a group of young men was famous among the city's bohemians for a wildness carried almost to the point of self-destruction. I met one of them, a compulsively nervous boy in his early twenties, a veteran of the pill parties held some years ago, now trying earnestly to patch up and rebuild his young life. 

 "For some reason people now seem to think this drug thing was funny," he said.'' That's because they weren't there." He described a bout of drug-taking as "more or less two months of oblivion" with periodical arrests and nights in the cells. 

 He now has a job which he is beginning to like. 

No "Beatniks" here

 These are not the interesting bohemians, however. Many others are creative people whose bohemianism comes from a poetry they are willing to face as they pursue their work with intense seriousness and considerable courage. 

  Most of them are between 20 and 30. They are poets, painters, sculptors, musicians and writers, working in both the English and French languages. Their protest, simply stated, is against everything in modern society that crushes life and spontaneity. They assert their freedom to live their own life and express themselves in their own way. They have a surprising sense of proportion and plenty of confidence. They take regular jobs when they run out of money, but try hard not to dissipate their creative energies in conventional jobs. They change their mates almost as often as their jobs, and although they do not make a fuss about their opinions, most   appear to have no religious interests and to have vaguely leftist political beliefs. 

 Are these bohemians then, the Beat Generation of Montreal?

 As far as I could discover in a week of searching, there are no real Beatniks in this city, though many of the bohemians have some Beat Characteristics. 

  Jazz Is Their Music

  In fact this is one of the distinctions of the city's bohemia. It was active long before the Beat Generation was discovered and has been almost completely uninfluenced by the current American fashions. Most of the French-Canadian bohemians still take their fashions from the Left Bank in Paris. 

 Jack Kerouac, the spokesman for the American Beatniks, is a French-speaking American from Vermont. His work, however is little known among this city's bohemians. I found only one boy who claimed to be Beat, and he was earnestly trying to pass his law exams at Sir George Wlliams College.

 What the city's bohemians do have in common with the American Beats, however, is that jazz is their music. Only around the jazz musicians, for example, do the young English-speaking and French-speaking intellectuals find any common ground. Musicians like pianist Alfie Wade and trumpeter Herbie Spanier attract boh races. The jazz beat draws an equal response from both English-speaking and French-speaking North Americans. 

 A search for Montreal's Beat Generation, I soon found, led immediately to these two colorful young men. But both are far from being Beatniks. 

He's no Beatnik 

 Alfie Wade is a quietly-spoken, popular Montreal Negro of 26 who was educated in a home for boys and was thrust into a job as a messenger boy at the age of 14 when he failed to pass his exams. He had just started piano lessons, and every weekend he went to the tough clubs which were the only places open to jazz in Montreal at that time, to sit quietly in a corner with a bottle of pop and listen to the local jazzmen.

 A later job as a photographer gave him a steady trade, but he finally threw it over for the insecure life of a jazz pianist. Since then he has managed to earn a living with occasional help from a modeling job at the Ecole de Beaux Arts: and he has struggled with some success to make jazz a respectable and accepted part of Montreal life. 

 Now he is providing a lot of fun for the young bohemian crowd, six nights a week at Le Vieux Moulin on Sherbrooke street. But is he Beat? "Not me," says Alfie with a laugh. "We just want to give the kids something the same feeling of cohesion and teamwork we have ourselves when we are playing." 

  He says he attracts people of all sorts, including doctors, university lecturers and businessmen, all of whom like the opportunity to get up and dance. 

Best In Canada 

 The lean, energetic, convolute Herbie Spanier is the closest thing to a legendary figure in Montreal's bohemia.

  Everybody knows him, but nobody knows quite where to find him. He drifts in and out of the city, on to and off the scene, in a completely unpredictable way. He is reputed to be the best trumpeter in Canada. 

Herbie Spanier

 When I finally tracked him down he was just off the road after a spell playing in some of the leading night clubs of Los Angeles. A lean, sharp-faced young man in a purple jacket, he was living in a small three-bed room below Sherbrooke street, and was surrounded by a group of mysterious, slang-talking young men. 

 One of them seemed to be a leader. "We'll leave you with Herbie," he said. "But don't let him upset you. Herbie's got a peculiar way." At a nod from the leader they all disappeared. 

 Herbie then talked for three hours. No one can quite follow his conversation, which often sounds as though it is taking place independently both of him and of whoever he is talking to. 

Strangely Impressive 

 "You'll have to commune with me in some realization if we are to go on with this bit," he says, as he prepares to tell you that jukeboxes are seriously affecting the livelihood of the musicians. "That this aesthetic - no, a\esthetic isn't a good work. Trend is better. Take this trend towards the automization of the creative." This can go on for hours, can embrace any subject under the sun, and yet in total it is strangely impressive. 

  At one moment he may be talking about the art of synthesizing all the elements in cooking; at the next he will be saying: "Khrushchev is really playing with the dice. And take this Cuba bit, and all that jazz..." 

  Herbie is 30, and has been on the road since he started to play trumpet to soldiers in his home province of Saskatchewan when he was 5.

 One has the feeling that every experience is grist to his mill. He composes music. He is enthusiastic about creative advertising. He has invented a strange calligraphy that looks like a cross between Urdu and Japanese; the explanatory legend is also written calligraphy, and Herbie says it "says what it says." 

 His real gem is a composition called Precis in Blue, a music precis of the blues. He has a short piece for piano "which just goes on and on,." he has tried the state of marriage but has found that, like almost everything else, like cooking, newspapers, advertising, painting, and music, marriage is an art which requires full-time attention. Ask him and he tells you that he lives a "conventional-type" life.

Seed of Vitality

Pt 2- 20 April 1959 

Escape- the Obesesive Dream of Many Bearded Bohemians  

The Canada Council scholarship has become the pot of gold - the dream of every harassed young writer as he scribbles away in his little room, surrounded by peeling walls, faded army blankets and improvised cooking space.
 Most of these young people are in rebellion against parents who want them to enter the professions, a church which educated them to obedience and a society which refuses them the means of self-expression. The obsessive dream of their rebellion, however, is not improvement of their milieu, but escape.
 They all want to go to France, to the sunshine, peace and quiet of the south where they will have time to write what they want," one young poet told me.

Live on Hope
"They all live on the hope of getting a scholarship. A good sum can keep one alive in Spain for four years.' She admitted that a Canadian writer living in Spain would soon get out of touch with the society from which he takes the impulse that has made him a writer, but the contradiction didn't seem to worry her.
 These writers, painters, ceramist sculptors - the serious young section of Montreal's bohemia - undoubtedly have in them the seed of vitality of which musicians Herbie Spanier spoke.

Bourgeois Background 

Pierre Lapalme and woman from 
Boston

 They come, for the most part, from well-to-do, bourgeois (to use their word) families.  

 They do their best to scrape a living from their writing but every source of money that comes to hand, evena  scholarship, is a temporary expedient. Few of them have any long range prospects of an assured income. They are touchingly determined to guard their integrity, to retain all their energies for the writing task they feel themselves called to, and somewhat despise the slightly older writers who have had to compromise to the extent of taking a job in the CBC to feed their wives and families. 

 They take jobs haphazardly and as soon as they have enough money for a few months, then quit. They form liaisons, two three or four couples might take a house somewhere in the country around Montreal, and stick it out cooperatively through an entire summer, or just for as long as the money lasts.  

Gay but Subdued

These bohemians are gay but fairlysubdued. They no longer frequent the more obvious coffee shop hangouts because they despise the phony habitues. The girls apply pale makeup, wear no lipstick and make a lot of their eyes. They wear their black stockings (sometimes purple or green) and tend towards a careless, but fairly feminine profusion of sweaters and jackets. 

Long Hair, Beards

 The men have longish hair, and often beards. They laugh at the affected lack of conventional morality of the larger bohemian set, but have their own moral code which is not exactly that of police church-going society.  A good number of them have gathered in a loose group around an attractive 22-year-old mother of two children, Diane Spiecker, who, with her artist husband, has recently taken to publishing their poems. They meet most often at the frequent openings of exhibitions in the many small private art galleries around the city. 

Too Commercial

  "We don't have a good place to gather in," Mrs. Spiecker says. "There used to be good places, but they have become too commercial. Some of our friends think we should start a  coffee shop of our own. My husband and I seem to be the generous ones. Perhaps we'll have to do it."  (This complaint about the coffee shops is heard from everybody. Everybohemian has at some time or other changed his headquarters. When he moves in as a regular customer at a new coffee shop, he begins to denounce the old one as "too commercial." ) Mrs. Spiecker has set up her own company, Editions Quarts, which recently published two new books of poems. (Thetext of one of them begins on the front cover and runs through the back one).  Financial STruggle 

 The financial struggle involved in getting these poems into print give a rather chilling idea of the impossible world of the Canadian poet- and indeed, for the earnest young bohemian.   Publication was only possible because of $100 worth of two previous books published by Mrs. Spieker had been bought for the Provincial Government in Quebec. This money was put toward the two later books. Five Hundred copies of each have to be printed, and one of the authors, Michel Drouin, who also sells books as a saleswoman in a city bookshop, says it will probably take four years to sell all 500. In some conditions, poetry, and even independent prose writing, will never be a paying business in French Canada any more than it is in English Canada). The poet who doesn't want to take a steady job has to exist from day to day. He dare not think about the long-term future. 

Always a Shack

 The people are looking for a serenity and peace toward which North American life is almost inimical. Those who don't dream of an escape to Spain or the south of France dream of a shack in the Laurentians.   

 One long-haired bearded young man who I met in a cafe one evening took me to his attic room, where, over a bottle of Italian wine, I sat for two hours while he and his girlfriend talked about their hope that one day they would have the time to do some serious writing. 

Jean-Paul Mosseau

Touch of Innocence 

 Superficially, the young couple were the most daring of bohemians. In actual fact, they were both quiet, hopeful and very worried that her parents might discover that they were living together. One was impressed and touched by their innocence, rather than their daring. 

  I met only one person, Jacques Chapdelaine, a 27-year-old Monreal-born sculptor, who has achieved the peace that so many dream of.

 He is a remarkable person in many ways, a sensitive artist, an expert craftsman with jewelry, a businessman, and at the same time a genuine bohemian. He speaks with a softness, smiles with gentleness that is almost Oriental. Buthis serenity of outlook has been achieved through both hardship and study.

  If one searched for a symbol of the difference between the best of Montreal's bohemians and the American Beat Generation, Chapdelaine would serve well. He does not spout a lot of phony Buddhism, but he has studied in India; he does not make a cult of poverty, but he has slept under a bridge during the Montreal winter.

 He did this a few years ago when his sailing boat was caught in Lachine by the descending winter. He had nowhere else to go, not enough money for a bed, and when the unheated boat eventually became too cold to sleep in, he would crawl into a sheltered spot under the Lachine bridge and sleep there beneath a tarpaulin. 

 Two years ago he spent 12 months traveling around India by bicycle and in third and fourth class railway carriages. He went to the university at Pondicherry, where he was fed, sheltered and tutored in return for lessons in drawing and sculpting. He became a disciple of the philosopher Sri Aurbindo, and when he returned to Montreal he found it almost impossible to accept again the assumptions of Western society. 

 "Society here is absent," he says quietly. "I came back and found everyone living in his own little corner. No contact between people, just material bodies rubbing up against one another. When you have such a thing, how can you call it society?" 

 He said India, in contrast, was full of warm humanity. No one could be lonely. One's friends insisted on digging into the depths of one's soul to discover what was to be found there.

 Now Chapdelaine lives in Ste. Adele, where he keeps a roadside shop at which he sells the things he makes. In the summer he goes to Perce, in Gaspe, and lives "by the great sea."

 He opens a summer shop there and between two places earns the money , time and serenity which so many lesser men, crowded into small and grubby rooms, dream about.