There was a time when the Arts and Letters Club, on Elm just west of Yonge, was the beating heart of Toronto. But at its recent Doors Open tour, there were a few clues the once-flourishing club for the creative set has fallen on hard times.
Founded in 1908, Robertson Davies, Frederick Banting, composer Healey Willan, and even Ernest Hemingway (then a writer for the Toronto Star) were all members at one time. Vincent Massey used to spend hours here with the Group of Seven.
These days you won’t find major artists in the club’s ranks (Christopher Plummer is rumoured to be a member but no one’s seen him around recently). Most of the members serving as guides for Doors Open are retirees from the worlds of literature, architecture, music, painting or stage.
The club’s constitution states that 51 per cent of members must be professionals in a creative field, but these days the other 49 per cent is filled out by people like Michael Symonds. With little training in the arts and a background in business, he’s an amateur theatre enthusiast who’s helping keep the club alive by donating his time to stage plays at the club’s theatre. He admits that it’s difficult to keep the institution relevant.
“Nowadays the movers and shakers go to the Spoke Club,” Symonds said. “But it’s as shallow as a two inch pond. This place is steeped in history.”
The club won’t come out and say it directly, but participation in events like Doors Open are attempts to beef up their numbers by drawing in younger members of Toronto’s arts community. Rumour has it that the average age of members is somewhere in the low 80s. Though that estimate’s a little unbelievable, the club is doing everything but shouting from the rooftops in their search for new blood.
Wandering the magnificent building, which includes a library, bar, studio and a working theatre in the Great Hall, you can’t help but marvel at the relics of a once-great institution. In the first-floor lounge handwritten sheet music by Healey Willan hangs near the famous photograph of the Group of Seven taken in the club’s Great Hall, and in the library upstairs sits a narwhal tusk found by Frederick Banting, the man who discovered insulin. Somewhere in the archives is Ernest Hemingway’s handwritten membership application form (which, despite some gentle prodding, the club archivist declines to show me).
But these are all artifacts of the past, and today the most lively room in the building is the third floor studio where a handful of artists, mostly grey-haired women, paint in peaceful silence.
It’s tempting to blame the club’s slow fade on the dawn of the Internet age, which offers no end of forums for artists to collaborate, but its relevance was already falling off by the mid-40s. This might be explained by its decision to ban half the population from its ranks: women weren’t allowed in the club until 1985 when, according to lore, Ed Mirvish gave a speech at the club and his wife was barred from attending. She started a campaign and today women make up the majority of members, but only because they outlive their husbands.
Alas, these days we may not need places like the Arts and Letters Club. It’s not like the city’s lacking in venues for creative types to meet, and as long as we can drink our faces off at a Double Double Land ArtStars party or meet young writers at the Press Club on a Wednesday night, Toronto’s artistic community isn’t about to grind to a halt.
But if you and your friends would like to take possession of piece of Canadian history, walk into the big stone building on Elm Street with a book under your arm and optimistic look on your young face. Within a few years you could be running the place.[rssbreak]
