CHAPTER 2

“ON THE THRESHOLD, PASSING THROUGH THE FIRST DOOR”:
IN SEARCH OF THE WHITE KINGDOM (1927-1928)

 

Surveying the relatively modest contribution of playwrights to the emerging literary scene in Canada in his 1927 Outline of Canadian Literature, Lorne Pierce suggested that “the future of Canadian dramatic art must depend upon the Little Theatre movement.” “Our dramatists must aspire to produce plays that really play, and to do this a better understanding of the technique of the stage is required. These Little Theatres should become, not multiplied opportunities for imported plays, but rather laboratories in which experiments may be made in discovering a new technique suited to our needs, as well as an individual or national type of play.”¹

In his six months of work with the Drama Club of Sarnia and its successor, the Sarnia Drama League, from November 1927 to May of 1928, Herman Voaden began his half-century long contribution towards the Canadianization of theatre in Canada in an attempt to reverse what B. K. Sandwell, in 1911, had called the virtual U.S. “annexation of our stage.” By writing The White Kingdom in the winter of 1927, Voaden also attempted to fulfill Lorne Pierce’s call for the creation of an indigenous Canadian drama by playwrights intimately familiar with actual stage production. Fred Jacob’s 1914 appeal for Canadian dramatic “self-expression” and Harcourt Farmer’s 1919 call for “national interpretation in terms of individual expression through drama” began to be answered, from 1928 to 1945, by nearly twenty plays and dramatizations by Voaden alone. Five years after Lorne Pierce’s appeal for the creation of an original indigenous dramatic form through experiments “in discovering a new technique suited to our needs, as well as an individual or national type of play,” Voaden began to create such an original dramatic form and national type of play with his first symphonic expressionist dramas Rocks and Earth Song in 1932.

When he assumed his position as head of the English Department at the Sarnia Collegiate Institute in September of 1927, Voaden little suspected his life-long career as cultural activist, director, playwright and cultural nationalist was about to begin. Separated from Violet Kilpatrick who was still teaching public school in Sandwich, Ontario, his initial perceptions of Sarnia and his teaching work were not overly enthusiastic. A letter of October 6 to Kilpatrick reported “life is very busy--outwardly . . . school is vibrating with activity. Yet all is unreal--beside my inner life--aloof--restrained and mystic with the crying beauty of the world and the loveliness of you.”² In a letter of February 15, 1928 he recounted a conversation with Gordon Alderson, a colleague in the English Department who followed him to the Central High School of Commerce in Toronto in 1929. “Alderson spoke of life in Sarnia--how spiritually depressing--of the threat of becoming absorbed in routine--in petty detail.”³

Yet Voaden was determined to combat this “spiritually depressing” environment through artistic activity. While still teaching at the Windsor-Walkerville Technical School in the spring of 1927, he had already publicly praised the ongoing Hart House Theatre summer “Art of the Theatre” course for teachers and students, the contribution of Hart House to the Canadian little theatre movement and the “new recognition of the importance of the drama in the social and artistic life of the community.” “The schools must mirror these new dramatic standards and this increased social consciousness of the theatre,” he declared in the June 1927 issue of The School.

Canada must not fall behind the United States and Europe in her drama. There is much to be done in the way of raising the ideals of those who select and present plays and the appreciation of those who listen to them. The plays that are being produced at the present time by the average church and community organizations, and indeed, by many of the schools, have little worth apart from their value as entertainment, and their presentation could be much improved by a more intimate knowledge of the stage and the principles of dramatic production.

Obviously the commercial stage cannot be expected to cherish a vision of the theatre either as an art or as a social agency. The renaissance in modern drama starting with Ibsen and Strindberg, and carried on by dramatists like Shaw, Synge, Barrie, Galsworthy, Masefield, and Yeats in the British Isles and by others such as Percy MacKaye, Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill in America, has been sustained largely by repertory groups and more significantly, by the Little Theatres which have sprung up in so many of the cities of this continent. Of these Hart House Theatre occupies a unique and influential position as the leading little theatre in Canada and one of the most beautiful in America. And it is indeed fortunate that the Syndics of the theatre have seen fit to throw open their doors in the summer to students from all parts of the province and dominion, that these may learn and then go out as missionaries to spread the tradition of a better and finer drama.⁴

To stimulate the creativity, independent thinking and free expression of his students, Voaden introduced debating and public speaking in the classroom, “got the Literary Society started along new lines (the first program--on the world today vs. 150 years ago)” and “started the process of stocking the Sarnia Public Library with a substantial section on Drama.”⁵ Among his students at the Sarnia Collegiate Institute in 1927-1928 were Pauline and Don McGibbon whom he taught in the fifth form. Nearly half-a-century later, the then Lieutenant Governor of Ontario recalled how Voaden had initiated their interest in theatre and drama.

He soon discovered that some students had a spare period every Wednesday afternoon. So he suggested that he would be interested in talking with students about various plays on Wednesday afternoons if we were interested. It was through Herman Voaden that I first learned about Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill. I shall never forget his reading of the lines of a play with background music coming from a record of the ‘Meditation from Thais’.

During the Christmas and Easter breaks Herman would disappear either to Detroit where he would spend his time in the Cass Theatre or to New York where he would revel in play after play. He would share these experiences with us as he would return each time with a great stack of plays--all to be discussed during those Wednesday afternoon sessions. I can remember the time he took a busload of us to see Macbeth, the first time I had ever seen a Shakespeare play on a real stage.⁶

Voaden’s initial reaction to the formation of the Drama Club of Sarnia, whose successor, the Sarnia Drama League, was to launch his career as producer and director, was almost one of detachment. A letter to Kilpatrick November 3, 1927 indicated that

Last night I was summoned to a meeting of the budding young intelligentsia of Sarnia--fiercely intent on ‘finer things’. Rather than plunge into actual little theatre production--they decided wisely to begin as a reading club--developing dramatic talent and the nucleus of an acting brigade.

They are going to meet every Wednesday night--Two or three one-acters, or a long play, each week--with one every month or so being especially selected and cast for an actual performance--no charge--but to stir wider interest in the city.

I am doing the casting and directing and choosing of the plays--I said for the first month only. I’m going to swing them into worthwhile things tout de suite. What say? Why should I confine the field of my activity to youngsters?⁷

The Drama Club of Sarnia, of which Voaden was the director for five months, was founded by (and met in the homes of) the leading wealthy and influential citizens of Sarnia. Among the most active executive members were R. K. Stratford, head of the research division of Imperial Oil in Sarnia, and Park Jamieson, a prominent lawyer. The Drama Club was formed “for the study and informal presentation of modern drama”⁸ with Voaden responsible for play selection, play analysis and rehearsals. In a letter of December 6, 1927, for example, he indicated that “the Drama Club last night was a big success--Yeats’ Land of Heart’s Desire done with a beauty and sincerity that were deeply satisfying. They were splendidly costumed--caught the subtle loveliness of the thing. We rehearsed Shaw’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets--casted Followers.”⁹ Voaden’s selection of plays for private production by the Drama Club of Sarnia, Zona Gales’ The Neighbours, Oliphant Down’s The Maker of Dreams, Yeats’ The Land of Heart’s Desire, Shaw’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Harold Brighouse’s Followers, Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook’s Suppressed Desires, 0’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid (with Voaden again playing the title role), Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Olive Conway’s Becky Sharp, reveal Voaden’s strong art theatre orientation. The spiritual nature of his aesthetic is also revealed by the motto he selected for the Drama Club and Sarnia Drama League: “to celebrate with gaiety, with pity and with truth, the divine pageant of the human soul.”¹⁰

On February 21 and 23, 1928, the Drama Club of Sarnia staged public performances of Followers, The Land of Heart’s Desire and Suppressed Desires, under Voaden’s direction, in the London Road School Auditorium. The aim of the public performances was to generate wider public support in Sarnia for a drama league operating its own theatre. As the program for the Drama Club productions explained, “The Drama Club was formed in October 1927 for the reading, appreciation and informal presentation of worthwhile drama. The members although interested primarily in the reading of drama decided to present a bill of three one-act plays chosen from among those studied during the season to indicate what might be accomplished by a little theatre in Sarnia and to create enthusiasm for such a movement. A Drama League and Little Theatre would, of necessity, have to represent the community as a whole and draw its support and talent from every available source.”¹¹

In an address following the productions, Voaden indicated that “tonight is only a beginning--but we are sowing the seeds from which a great impulse toward beauty and power shall spring in the future.”¹² And he expressed the two basic concepts of what the Toronto Globe theatre and music critic Lawrence Mason publicized in 1929 as “The Sarnia Idea”: the “need for more imagination--to depict life with greater ideality, reality, truth and beauty (a great drama resulting)” and the

need for the powerful linking up of the theatre with the people--the making of it a part of their social, artistic and spiritual aspirations. The commercial theatre can no longer be relied upon. It has ceased long since to serve the smaller centres like Sarnia. The theatre must be brought to life by a great new impulse from within the lives of the people--inspired and guided by a sense of its dignity--its great cultural traditions and possibilities, ritual and worship.

This movement has already advanced far--it is one of the significant movements of the time--an industrial civilization trying to redeem--to save itself by a devotion to something more permanent than money and material things--an immemorial beauty and an art that is informed with a spirit of lasting harmony, vision and power . . .

To create is to triumph over death! We too have triumphed here tonight in that we have striven to bring to life a beauty--incomplete perhaps, but quivering and sincere.¹³

The warm reception given to the Drama Club’s productions and Voaden’s organizational efforts quickly led to the formation of the Sarnia Drama League on March 6, 1928. The March 7 Sarnia Observer reported that “a good turnout of enthusiasts interested in bringing the better class of drama to the people of the city listened to an inspiring address by H. A. Voaden, who was largely instrumental in the formation of the Drama League following the success of the Drama Club, the pioneer in this movement here.”¹⁴ In his address, Voaden indicated he had observed “a great want here--some focussing centre for all the pulsing social and idealistic life in this community.”¹⁵ He again stressed that at a time of rampant materialism and spiritual inadequacy culture had to be extended from the few rich to “the universal heritage of mankind.” The most important factor was “that art may mate itself with this rising tide of social idealism and become resplendent and powerful as in the Elizabethan and Greek periods because of the kindling glow and enthusiasm of a movement within the life of the people. Art moving with all the sweep and fervor of the people in the march toward the betterment and enrichment of life.”¹⁶

In his directing of the Drama Club of Sarnia and the Sarnia Drama League, Voaden’s decade-long idealistic and spiritual development was finally finding self-expression in theatre work. In his March address, he noted “Arnold’s conception of an all-embracing culture rich with all the impulses toward social, artistic and spiritual development and perfection.”¹⁷ He stressed the importance of the “education of children in sensitiveness, beauty and intelligence to cultivate taste for self- expression” and that theatre was not an amusement place but the “temple of the people” and a “great and effective agency in the development of man into his larger associations.”¹⁸ The subjective basis of Voaden’s address is further suggested by his closing remarks that “dreams are the seedlings of realities. Dreamers are the saviours of the world. Courage-- the essential quality of life and manhood.”¹⁹

With Voaden as its director, the Sarnia Drama League’s aims and activities were largely shaped by his idealistic life philosophy, aesthetic and cultural nationalism. Its publication, The Community Playhouse News, indicated in its first issue that

The Sarnia Drama League has been formed in the interests of better drama in Sarnia. Its aims are to create an interest and appreciation for plays possessing literary and artistic merit; to present such plays with intelligence, simplicity and sincerity; to encourage and develop in the acting and staging of such plays all available talent in the community;

and to realize in the community that culture which is characterized by cultivated imagination and sympathy as well as information and knowledge . . . The league has been exceedingly fortunate in securing as its first director Mr. H. A. Voaden, head of the English Department of the Collegiate Institute, who has had considerable theatrical experience with the Detroit Repertory Theatre.²⁰

The first performance of the Sarnia Drama League took place in the 300-seat auditorium of the London Road School, renamed the Community Playhouse, on April 24 and 26, 1928. The three one-act plays, chosen for their wider public appeal and directed by Voaden, were Louise Saunders' fantasy The Knave of Hearts, Merrill Denison's popular farce Brothers in Arms and W. W. Jacob's dramatic The Monkey's Paw. Voaden had invited Denison to address the inaugural monthly meeting of the Drama League on March 27, describing the occasion to Violet Kilpatrick the following day as "a big crowd, and Merrill Denison very effective. Spoke on 'The Theatre in Canada' and read one of his plays--'The Weather Breeder.' This afternoon he read 'Brothers in Arms' to the Senior Lit Society."²¹

The frequently sardonic Denison was apparently impressed by Voaden and the enthusiasm his theatre work had aroused in Sarnia. He wrote him on April 5, "I want to tell you again how much I enjoyed my visit to Sarnia and particularly the reading of 'Brothers in Arms' at the High School. I don't think I ever got as much satisfaction as when reading it to that keen audience of youngsters . . . I think you have the beginnings of a very keen movement which should prove of real worth."²² Carroll Aikins, director of Hart House Theatre, had sent a similarly supportive telegram to the first meeting of the Sarnia Drama League March 27 on the “inauguration of your little theatre movement. I have personally the belief that very interesting and important work will be done by just such people as yourselves in places where it is possible to secure keen and adequate civic support.”²³

In June of 1928 Voaden left Sarnia for two months of theatre travels in Europe. His ten months in Sarnia had demonstrated to him that much of cultural significance could be achieved by working within the educational system and the amateur little theatre movement rather than by depending on the declining and primarily non-Canadian touring professional theatre. In his 1976 O.H.S.S. interview, he indicated that while in England in the summer of 1928 he “spent some time with Jeffrey Whitworth who was in charge of the British Drama League and of course they had their whole system of adjudicators and festivals and I studied that thoroughly and also the pattern of the British Drama League and the travelling library--anyone who wanted a good set of plays to do a show could get it from them.”²⁴ Upon his return to Canada, Voaden combined his study of the British Drama League organizational system with his Sarnia experience, transforming the local and regional artistic objectives of the Sarnia Drama League into the national objectives of “A Canadian Drama League” he would pursue for the next half-century. Writing in the October 1928 issue of The Community Playhouse News, he argued that

The success that has attended the Sarnia Drama League is only further proof that the time has come for the scattered dramatic organizations throughout the country to draw together and champion the cause of the theatre in Canada. The Sarnia Drama League is almost unique among drama groups in communities of similar size in this country in the successful appeal it has made to all classes of people for civic support and in the high standard it has maintained in the selection and production of plays. Why should not the same thing be accomplished in other Canadian cities? Apparently all that is lacking is leadership, guidance, and a stimulus to the better sort of theatre. There is enthusiasm and talent in abundance everywhere.

Such a united Drama League would do much to develop a Canadian theatre that would reflect a growing and healthy Canadianism. In connection with the British Drama League it would serve as a strong bond between Britain and Canada. It would aid recognition of Canadian drama throughout the world and would stimulate the writing of Canadian drama. With the resulting finer appreciation of plays and dramatic literature, with new little theatres springing up everywhere, the success of the Canadian plays of the future would be assured.

The many activities of such a league can only be outlined here. It would, of course, give assistance in the formation of dramatic groups throughout Canada. The inception of a drama league is always attended with difficulties; and the encouragement and counsel of league organizers would guide the groups over this early period. Another need of every little theatre group is that of sets of plays for reading, study and acting. Here a league library, modelled along the lines of the British Drama League library would be of great assistance. Another feature of a Canadian Drama League would be a monthly journal or magazine to voice the cause of the drama and to keep the theatre groups in touch with one another. Such a league would also send producers and technical experts to little theatre groups and would probably arrange competitions, conferences and lecture tours throughout Canada.

Only a brief outline of such a projected league has been given. Its importance in the development of Canadian national life can hardly be overemphasized. It is for the little theatre organizations all over Canada already established to assist the weaker groups and to help in the formation of new groups and so to bring about a new era for the theatre in Canada.²⁵

While in Sarnia in the spring of 1928, Voaden completed his first one-act play, the autobiographical The White Kingdom. His stimulus had been primarily a personal one rather than the Sarnia Drama League whose Community Playhouse News first indicated only in October of 1929 that “several plays have been written by our members, some of which we hope to see presented here in the near future. . . . Since Professor Fairley’s lecture on the drama last winter, discussion of play writing has greatly increased.”²⁶ In his same November 3, 1927 letter to Violet Kilpatrick reporting the formation of the Drama Club of Sarnia, Voaden had indicated that “Tuesday night--in addition to other things, I read some of your letters--wrote about the fall . . . Why should I write other stories--when I myself am living the strangest and deepest ever told? I am going to live for our love--It is the greatest thing in our lives. All tonight and next week I am going to write the story of the fall--make it complete.”²⁷

A very preliminary sketch of Voaden’s first complete one-act play appears in his diary “New York Christmas 1927-28. First Play—‘White Kingdom’ Material Sarnia 1928 (Spring).” A reference in this paginated diary to “The New Year’s party at Goderich Hotel” (page 19) suggests he began working on the play in late December 1927. A completed typed copy of The White Kingdom bearing the pseudonym “Henry Hull” was prepared for the 1928 I.O.D.E. One-Act Play Competition, suggesting the play was completed before the I.O.D.E.’s annual March 1 closing deadline. The subtitle of the drama, “a Fantasy in One Act,” hints at the subjective symbolic nature of The White Kingdom and presents a problem of critical interpretation inherent in all of Voaden’s dramatic works: to what extent can biographical information illuminate the thematic and formal analysis, and thereby affect the overall assessment of the artistic merit, of his plays?

A straightforward literary interpretation of The White Kingdom, followed by additional, more detailed, biographical criticism, will illustrate this question. From a literary point of view, the drama displays a mixture of realism and symbolism already indicated by its setting, conceptually suggestive in its simplicity and spaciousness of an Adolphe Appia design: “A lawn bordering on a road. The road is on the spectator’s left, and turns upstage. A large tree is in the center, with bench. The ground rises beside the road and from it a commanding view of the road may be had. Moonlight.”²⁸ Conventional reality is depicted as off-stage, a house in which a dance is taking place. “The sound of music is heard with the opening of a door in the extreme right, off stage, and Jean appears, followed by Seth” (p. 2).

The play is Voaden’s first quest drama in which a youthful, heroic male figure, Arthur, hears himself called to search for the “‘White Kingdom’--a land of truth and light” (p. 2). His close friends Jean and Seth are engaged to be married. Jean shares Arthur’s restlessness “among these quiet people.” Having been in love with Arthur, she is particularly drawn to his spiritual quest, telling Seth as the play opens “a night of enchantment. See how the road trails away under the moon. How I should like to follow it!” (p. 2). As in many of his subsequent symphonic expressionist plays, the pattern of the hero’s development begins with youthful self-doubt and a loss of faith in conventional beliefs. “I want cleanness and a new faith,” Arthur informs Seth who attempts to dissuade him from leaving his family and friends.

My books can give me nothing more, nor my teachers. Success means little. If only I believed! (He buries his face in his hands. Seth comes to him. Silence.) We are lost children, Seth. No gods to worship. Early this morning I went to the church, and pondered long the secret of the Christ and his suffering. There was such peace there, sorrow and peace, and I was lonely. Peace may be all right for you. But I want a God of courage, light and strength. A God of youth! There will come time for humility. Now I must be swept forward on the crest of the wave. Youth is my cry, exultant and proud. Youth! like a flame--worshipping its own God in the ultimate darkness. (p. 4)

And, “speaking like a visionary,” Arthur declares his credo which reflects Voaden’s own life philosophy as already traced in his diaries, correspondence and theatre essays.

I shall consecrate my life to the pursuit of that beauty, that spirit that breathes in my passion to live, to be strong, to be loved, the beauty of shade and gleam, the feeling of eager vividness, of glowing vitality--the consciousness of going toward experience, toward positive mastery of myself and poised perfection of character. Oh Seth! You can’t know the thrill of this. This is the true romance. (Laughing.) To tell the truth I’ve always been Prince with banners blowing, the sound of singing in my ears and a great light before me . . . There is strange music welling up in me, Seth, clear and triumphant--a restlessness that cannot be satisfied. Listen:

--‘The White Kingdom’--‘And their Prince shall come unto them, a youth and stranger from afar. And there shall be in his eyes the dream’. (p. 4)

Besides its obvious non-realistic, symbolical and mystical qualities, The White Kingdom contains several elements characteristic of Voaden’s symphonic expressionist plays of the 1930s: the hero’s striving for perfection resulting, in his dramas of the l930s, in “godhood”; the elemental power of love over man and the archetypal role of woman in man’s search for self-perfection and happiness. Arthur will not only strive for “positive mastery of myself and poised perfection of character” but will also, as he informs Jean, strive for much greater creative divinity. “I would be like the great musician on the organ. I would bring from life all its resources of power, mastery, and beauty. I cannot do that unless I dare greatly” (p. 5).

Like Arthur’s spiritual quest, love also “is a dream world, intensely sad, intensely strange.” When Jean declares her renewed love for Arthur and attempts to dissuade him from leaving her, they kiss and are briefly reunited by the overwhelming power of love. “Let us live for this moment! This is my immortality!”, Arthur declares. “We shall remember this when we are old. One shining moment of ecstasy, when your beauty and my dream flashed together. And then--autumnal dreams and memories, and the darkness of the quest” (p. 6). For Arthur, Jean represents both spiritual and earthly love. “You are my mother, my rest, my peace. How poignant and sweet this is! The shadows are closing in on us” (p. 6). She is his inspirational “Queen” but her earthly destiny is with Seth. “You have Seth. I have my dreams--my kingdom,” Arthur states as he departs, leaving Seth to comfort his desolate fiancée.

The second scene of The White Kingdom takes place in autumn several years later in the same suggestive symbolical setting. “The ground is scattered with leaves. The branches of the great tree above are bright with yellow and brown” (p. 8). Seth and Jean await Arthur’s return. She has continued to worship his dream and her marriage to Seth is unconsummated. When Arthur finally appears, “he has lost his proud, buoyant, carefree manner. His shoulders are slightly stooped. His face bears the marks of sorrow and disillusionment. Yet there is a silent strength apparent in him--a courage and self-mastery that we had missed before” (p. 8). After a fruitless lonely search for his “promised land,” he has discovered that “the White Kingdom” exists “only in the hearts of men--in their dreams . . . Tomorrow I shall tell the people of the wisdom, the peace, and the courage that come when dreams are forgotten” (p. 9).

Although The White Kingdom shows several similarities with Voaden’s symphonic expressionist plays, its differences from his dramas of the l930s are equally revealing. Unlike the pantheistic Canadian nature settings of his later plays, Arthur’s journey in The White Kingdom is primarily a spiritual one in a symbolic no-man’s land without specific localized national characteristics. “The road led over lonely uplands where the damp mist clung close. You have no idea--the wildness of it all. In the night the howling of a dog would break the eerie stillness . . . loneliness was closing in on me. I was a solitary, aloof from Nature, estranged from men and women,” he tells Jean (p. 9).

But the primary philosophic difference between The White Kingdom and his later dramas is exemplified by Arthur’s confrontation with a spiritual void and death that lacks any suggestion of redemption and renewal found in Voaden’s symphonic expressionist plays. Arthur’s realization of the non-existence of the “promised land” of his dreams occurs in a mystical experience at the end of his journey when “I was angry--filled with bitterness and grief. One evening the way led down to the shores of the great sea. I sat still while the sun flamed over the water and was gone, and darkness closed over the scene. A great quiet came to me. This was the end of my quest. Silent courage was born then, and a deeper faith” (p. 9).

Arthur’s disillusionment in his quest for “the White Kingdom” and realization of the finiteness of man’s existence lead him to abandon his heroic role of Prince and gently to reject Jean’s “queenly” inspirational love.

When I was young I never used to sleep. I was like the morning, full of light and strength--eager and untiring. (Quietly.) I shall have a great peace now. I shall have the courage, the faith, and the wisdom that are born of silence . . . So many things have died. Yet is not this austerity better than the glow of romance? I am lifted and strong tonight. This is the only royalty, this lonely exaltation. Yes, it is better that love should be austere. We will say good-bye now. When we meet again it shall be as if nothing had been. (p. 9)

Arthur departs a mere mortal without revealing the spiritual nature of “the courage, the faith, and the wisdom that are born of silence,” leaving the grief-stricken Jean finally to accept and realize her need for Seth’s earthly love.

To an extent, the autobiographical basis of The White Kingdom does not alter our basic understanding or appreciation of the play but does demonstrate the inseparable connection between Voaden’s life and world view and his dramatic works. Arthur (also Voaden’s middle name) clearly represents the views of the playwright, particularly his religious doubt, spiritual orientation and search for love during his 1920-1926 Queen’s University studies period. The mystical language of the play is frequently identical with the many exuberant lyrical passages in his diaries and correspondence. The autobiographical basis of the drama is most clearly established in his “First Play--‘White Kingdom’ Material Sarnia 1928 (Spring)” diary consisting of sixty-one pages of notes, plot scenarios and brief passages of dialogue and citations from previous diaries. The “several old flames” Arthur meets at Jean’s dance at the beginning of the play represent Voaden’s own romances before he met Violet Kilpatrick. Helen, “the ideal girl . . . if only she were not sick so much,” for example, was based on the daughter of one of his professors at the Ontario College of Education in 1923-1924. The character Seth in the play is based on Voaden’s friendship with Don McCrimmon. Two simple plot entries in his 1928 diary read “the student will leave his books, his friend, his girl” (p. 47) and “(1) love (2) church (3) books--to know more--‘the White Kingdom’” (p. 54).

A comparison between the dialogue and dramatic situation of The White Kingdom in the very preliminary diary version and the completed text reveals the earlier version to have been slightly more realistic while the finished text has heightened the mystical and symbolical elements of the drama. The greater realism in the preliminary draft can be explained in part by Voaden’s reading of J. M. Synge’s plays at the time. His diary makes several references to Synge: “read Synge’s words in blue plays” (p. 43), “Synge’s ideal” (p. 21) and “see Deirdre” (p. 57). Two lines of dialogue in both versions from the end of the first scene when Arthur tells Jean “and if I do not return, you will tell your children, and I shall grow old in fable” is followed in the earlier diary draft by “(like Deirdre I shall become a fable)” (p. 29).

The source of the greater abstraction in the final version of The White Kingdom is apparent from another literary influence on Voaden revealed by his correspondence with Violet Kilpatrick. “Since supper time I have been deep in the woes of Tristram and Isolt, as retold by one of the greatest living American poets--Edwin Arlington Robinson,” he wrote Kilpatrick from Chicago on July 9, 1927.²⁹ Referring to Robinson’s long 1920 poem “Lancelot,” he continued, “the more I study the Grail that your Lancelot sought, the more convinced I become of its deep significance. It is more than a romantic light quested by a visionary. There is tragedy in it--and the confusion of baffled weary desire."³⁰ On August 9, he sent Kilpatrick Robinson s 1927 Collected Poems with the inscription “this is not a happy book--but it is a great and wise one.”

The influence of Robinson’s “Lancelot” on Voaden and The White Kingdom is two-fold. Consciously or subconsciously Robinson may have provided the basic situation and characters of the drama: the conflict between earthly and divine love; the abandonment of a worldly Camelot for the “immortal Quest” of the holy Grail; and the basic situation of the three leading characters: Lancelot’s close friend Gawain and Guinevere who attempt to dissuade Lancelot from pursuing “God knows what accomplishment of exile” at the beginning of Robinson’s poem.³¹ Like Arthur in The White Kingdom, Lancelot finds, however, that “there is no place for me save where the Light/May lead me; and to that place I shall go.”³²

Of still greater significance is Voaden’s adaptation of the Lancelot story and imagery to his own love for Violet Kilpatrick. “As for the book itself--it will help us to think more deeply, to know more tenderly and humanly--to live wiselier and more greatly. I think the Merlin and Lancelot cycles are the best,” he wrote Kilpatrick the day after sending her Robinson’s Collected Poems. “The torch of you--the Grail-gleam of Galahad serene and high--these will light my life. And if I fail, like Lancelot, bewildered and hesitant in the baffling flames and shadows--why then--like Lancelot--my son shall be Galahad. And so we will carry on the great tradition--the strife onward and upward, till the Grail is found--and the kingdom of Heaven is come.”³³

From the beginning of their relationship, Voaden had perceived Violet Kilpatrick as a mystical and spiritual, as well as an earthly, being. Similar to Lancelot gazing “on the glimmering face and hair/Of Guinevere--the glory of white and gold/That had been his,”³⁴ he associated Kilpatrick with the purity of whiteness. His letters to her declare “your face would kindle with its strange glow and light;”³⁵ “again I see your face grow mystical, as on that night you turned to me and all the trembling world--and you--were white;”³⁶ and “you are my Queen of Light . . . Goodnight--White Queen.”³⁷ For Voaden in 1927, Robinson’s “Lancelot” was a signature poem encapsulating part of his own life philosophy and mythology just as Brooke’s “The Call” signified the endurance of his and Kilpatrick’s love relationship. Voaden not only identified himself with Lancelot but also saw Kilpatrick as both his earthly Guinevere and divine Grail. “You are my Queen tonight--all white and gold,” he wrote Kilpatrick July 9, 1927 using Robinson’s white and gold imagery. "For such as you have men given their lives, kingdoms have fallen in a night. And I will come to you, lovely and proud, and take you away from your sorrows and dreams, and from the world of other men, and ride with you to the high level plains where in the distance gleams the ultimate light. My Queen--lovely--in white and gold. My Queen.”³⁸

How does this kind of biographical criticism illuminate our understanding and appreciation of The White Kingdom as a work of art besides demonstrating the essentially autobiographical self-expression of its author? Understanding Voaden’s creative process clarifies two important elements of the play: the characterization of Jean and Arthur’s mystical encounter on the shore of the great sea at the conclusion of his quest.

The characterization of Jean in The White Kingdom appears at times contradictory. She and Arthur were once lovers but Arthur deserts her for his quest of “a land of truth and light” and “a queen--lovely and in need.” Yet in their passionate encounter at the end of the first scene, Arthur declares in fact that “I want you, Jean. You are my Queen . . . You are my mother, my rest, my peace.” This dual nature of Jean as the worldly love Arthur leaves behind and as the ideal love which is the object of his quest is clarified by the autobiographical nature of the play. Jean is both the embodiment of Voaden’s unsatisfactory past romances and his more spiritual and mystical relationship with Kilpatrick, his own “Grail vision.” As he confided to both his “New York Christmas 1927-28” diary and to Kilpatrick January 7, 1928 in a stock­taking for the new year, “I have health, strength, some measure of vision and intellect, and a great pride and life-rhythm in me. And I have a sense of humour and friends. I have helped to furnish a home--its sacred beginnings in song and glamour. And I have the Queen Princess mother--my Grail vision--the light of the love of her--forever and forever Amen.”³⁹

The failure of Arthur’s idealistic quest and the tone of disillusionment in The White Kingdom are also explained in part by the autobiographical nature of the play. Re-reading the text in 1982, Voaden noted the dream nature of the drama and the yearning for adventure in far places set against the theme of men and women who attempt to hold back the hero from his romantic quest. “You must die to one world before you are born to another.”⁴⁰ As in his interpretation of Robinson’s “Lancelot,” The White Kingdom also exemplifies “the confusion of baffled weary desire” of the central character. Robinson’s poem may in fact have suggested the play’s title to Voaden. When Lancelot decides to return Guinevere to Camelot in order to bring a halt to the endless war with Arthur and Gawain,

he gazed on the glimmering face and hair
Of Guinevere--the glory of white and gold
That had been his, and were, for taking of it,
Still his, to cloud, with an insidious gleam
Of earth, another that was not of earth,
And so to make of him a thing of night--
A moth between a window and a star,
Not wholly lured by one or led by the other.
The more he gazed upon her beauty there,
The longer was he living in two kingdoms,
Not owning in his heart the king of either,
And ruling not himself.⁴¹

The apparent obscurity of meaning of Arthur’s illumination at the end of his quest in The White Kingdom, “tomorrow I shall tell the people of the wisdom, the peace, and the courage that come when dreams are forgotten”⁴² and his spiritual encounter with death, “one evening the way led down to the shores of the great sea. I sat still while the sun flamed over the water and was gone, and darkness closed over the scene. A great quiet came to me. This was the end of my quest. Silent courage was born then, and a deeper faith,”⁴³ is again clarified by Voaden’s diaries and correspondence. Interestingly, the wording and imagery of his initial draft of the sea shore passage in his spring 1928 diary is much more positive and optimistic: “the road came down the hills to the shores of the great shining sea--and the sun was dropping in crimsoned majesty. While there are sunsets, beauty can never die. And as I would gaze--the peacefulness and quiet filled me--and brought a great calm.”⁴⁴

What brought about this change in imagery from the initial inspirational beauty of the crimsoned majestic sunset over the “great shining sea” to the more darkly symbolical final version whose imagery “great sea,” “sun flamed,” “gone” and “darkness closed over the scene” emphasizes man’s insignificance when confronted with an indifferent universe and spiritual void? Voaden’s diary contains the notations “crashing down the hill--death?”, “the spring--not die in the fall,” and “Death-- crashing down the hill.”⁴⁵ An explanation of these notations and the darker mystical symbolism of the sea shore passage in the completed text of The White Kingdom can again be found in his correspondence with Kilpatrick. In his letter of October 12, 1927, he described a possibly fatal car accident during an all-night drive from which he escaped almost miraculously unscathed. “Strange to awaken from sleep--and face death in one swift dissolving moment! The crash of glass, tin and steel . . . I jumped out--felt for blood on my face--nothing! . . . I came out--untouched-­deepened with the experience (for that is what I seek), and sure of myself from now on--because safer.” ⁴⁶

Yet his close encounter with death seems to have had a greater impact over the next several months as is evident in a description to Kilpatrick of a Christmas conversation with friends. When Arthur, in The White Kingdom, returns from his quest following his spiritual encounter with death on the sea shore, he informs Jean that “I shall have a great peace now. I shall have the courage, the faith, and the wisdom that are born of silence.”⁴⁷ In his December 25, 1927 letter to Kilpatrick, Voaden reports,

I told them of the accident--how all other horizons were vile when one had glimpsed the ‘broad estates of death’--and looked on the ultimate horizon ….

Helen: You have changed. I have not seen you for so long I feel a little fear in your presence. ‘I have grown a little old, that is all . . . Last Christmas I knew only the half of life. This year I see life whole. This year I know the strength, the calm, the silence from which life is given and taken’.

Silence is strength, silence is eternity. All greatness comes from meditative and immeasureable calm. I have lost none of my idealism, I have simply balanced it with wisdom--enriched it with spiritual quiet.⁴⁸

The White Kingdom thus permits a two-fold appreciation. From a literary point of view, the play appears as a symbolist drama whose central character arouses our sense of wonder and awe through his idealism, romantic quest and final illumination. That Arthur’s illumination on the sea shore and realization that “the White Kingdom” exists “only in the hearts of men--in their dreams”⁴⁹ is not completely clarified is partly characteristic of symbolist drama. As Voaden noted of Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande while acting in his Death of Tintagiles at Hart House Theatre in the summer of 1926, “the precise interpretation of the symbol does not matter; suffice that the reader catches the trend of the under meaning and is influenced by its vague suggestiveness.”⁵⁰

Totalling a mere nine pages of typescript, Voaden’s 1928 The White Kingdom already foreshadows the difficulty at arriving at a literary and dramatic evaluation of his works which was to characterize the critical reception of his dramas throughout the l930s. From a strictly literary point of view, The White Kingdom is the most successful of the small number of Canadian symbolist plays of the l920s and l930s.⁵¹ Within its succinct two-scene structure, the play’s setting, dramatic situation, characterization and character relationships are well drawn, initially on a basically realistic level. Yet this initial generally realistic dramatization is effectively raised to a greater romantic, symbolic and mystical level through the use of poetic language, imagery, metaphors, mood (enchanting moonlight), the symbolical setting of the open road and the great tree, and the metaphysical nature of Arthur’s quest for the “White Kingdom” itself, “a land of truth and light,” and “a queen--lovely and in need.”

Yet a full understanding and evaluation of The White Kingdom is impossible without an examination of the autobiographical nature of the play. Already this first of Voaden’s dramas raises the question to what degree any of his dramatic works can stand completely independent on their own literary and dramatic merit without reference to the autobiographical expression of their creator. Voaden himself has described his playwriting and directorial work as a “search for a new theatre language.”⁵² While his dramas reflect that formal search and experimentation, they also reflect, to an even greater extent, his own spiritual journey from the l920s to 1945. The formal and thematic content of his plays, as a result, is fully meaningful only from within an autobiographical as well as a literary context. Like a painter’s canvasses, Voaden’s dramatic opus, furthermore, achieves full significance only from an examination of his full range of works rather than from an analysis of only a single, or a small number of his plays.

Seen from within such a larger context, The White Kingdom marks a very specific state of Voaden’s spiritual development. Studying his own early diaries and plays while writing the autobiographical Ascend As the Sun from 1937 to 1939, he noted in his diary in July of 1939 that “the early plays were the slightest transcriptions.”⁵³ Examining his winter and spring 1926 Ottawa notebook, he elaborated on the cause for the introspective and mystical otherworldly nature of The White Kingdom. He observed his fascination with political life in Ottawa in 1926, “government fate in balance; passing Bourassa and Lapointe in hall; strong impulse to politics; hours watching the house,” but also noted his turning from the mundane existence of this “world of fact” to his own inner imaginative life.

Even then I was impregnated with Conrad--following the call of my ‘exalted egotism’. And these ‘statesmen’ were not noble enough for me, and the being was swinging toward the ‘rarer’ sphere of art. But this art was a calling remote from the ways of men; I had not yet made--was indeed far from its identification with social vision and a new faith. The north and the new Canada were scarcely of any meaning, as yet, and the new superman theme was vague and little related to personality and creative original thought. Was not the first play, to be written in Sarnia spring two years thence, concerned with romantic and nebulous mysticism? Long is the road before you. But here is the moment of deflection from politics toward an inner existence.⁵⁴

Voaden actually considered dramatizing his introspective mysticism as reflected in The White Kingdom in the beginning of his autobiographical Ascend As the Sun cycle of plays. Writing in his preparatory notes for the cycle in 1937, he suggested “call the first play ‘The White Flame’. Write it on the Rupert Brooke plane of exalted mysticism, abysmal despair.”⁵⁵ He also considered: “Quote excerpts from The White Kingdom, or have them played, just bits, then the voices close it off and say, no, the lad is just on the threshold, passing through the first door.”⁵⁶

In his 1937 notes on his diaries, he clarified the meaning of the autobiographical and spiritual “door” he was passing through a decade earlier: “the bitter Windsor year, ending with Vi, the Sarnia growth, trips north, and the new world philosophy appearing.”⁵⁷ Voaden’s rejection of conventional Christianity in 1917 had led him on a search to devise his own religious philosophy. By the winter of 1927, however, as he himself noted in an introduction to The White Kingdom written in 1982, he had discovered only one of the four central elements which were to constitute his “new religion” of the l930s: “an intense and idealized love of nature, a strong belief in the North and our challenging ‘wider margins’ and a passionate devotion to country. Only the fourth theme is here--a little clouded and confused--my love for Violet [Kilpatrick]--the love that webbed into these three so that the plays mirror ‘my daily response to life’s exultations.’”⁵⁸

In Violet Kilpatrick, he had finally found “the ideal woman,” his “living dream,” he had been searching for since the early 1920s. He had only known Kilpatrick for less than a year, however, and only saw her every other weekend as they were teaching in different cities. He was therefore only beginning to emerge from his decade-long mystical introspection which, in 1927, had made him susceptible to the dreamlike romanticism and mysticism of E. A. Robinson. In The White Kingdom Kilpatrick emerges as Arthur’s highly romanticized and idealized courtly “Queen” comparable to Queen Guinevere in Robinson’s “Merlin” and “Lancelot” cycles which Voaden had found the best works of Robinson’s 1927 Collected Poems.⁵⁹

By 1931 he had completely rejected Robinson’s introspective romanticism. Immersed in his study of modern poetry and beginning to revise Wilderness for what would become his first symphonic expressionist production, Rocks, Voaden noted in his 1931 diary that “the gloom of E. A. Robinson is the puritan poison--sapping the springs of life at their source (see Amy Lowell). The new freedom--the new religion--will come with the escape from this poison.”⁶⁰ In her 1917 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, Lowell stressed the influence of the ingrained strain of Puritanism in American society and its resulting “profound melancholy, tinged with cynicism.” “Self-analysis has sapped joy, and the impossibility of constructing an ethical system in accordance both with desire and with tradition has twisted the mental vision out of all true proportion.” Lowell suggested that “unless one understand this fact, one cannot comprehend the difficult and beautiful poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson.”⁶¹ Interestingly, her criticism of Robinson’s “Merlin” cycle could also be applied to the symbolism and mysticism of The White Kingdom. In “Merlin,” Lowell declared, “the feeling of unreality, of dream, persists to the end . . . it is all misty and unreal. The cryptic expression of much of his poetry can hardly be considered other than a flaw.”⁶²

The otherworldly, mystical tone of The White Kingdom can be explained in part by the fact that Voaden in 1927 and early 1928 had only just begun to take an active part in transforming “the world of fact” through cultural activity in order to create the kind of environment “where that ideal person we dream of may be more easily shaped.” The play is essentially a reflective look backwards to his life in the early and mid-l920s rather than to his exciting work with the Sarnia Drama League in early 1928. The play depicts his own search for belief and a “god to worship” and celebrates his exultation of youth “worshipping its own God in the ultimate darkness.” In Sarnia Voaden had not yet come under the critical and artistic influence of Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven or the cultural nationalistic fervour of F. B. Housser and Bertram Brooker. As a result he had not yet completely found his spiritual, artistic and nationalistic calling, something “to glorify my life with a supreme purpose outside myself” in order to transcend “the little emptiness of life” and “my deeply bitter recognition of life and its final values.” In the spring of 1928, as he noted in his diary a year earlier, Voaden was still on the threshold of the “great consecration--the consecration I know must come” in order for him “to link myself up with those things that defy time and its passing and exist forever and forever.”

Despite its backward autobiographical glance, The White Kingdom does anticipate several themes found in his subsequent dramas. Perhaps the most important of these is the encounter with death and non-being which permeates virtually all his dramatic works. The mystical tone of the play and Arthur’s spiritual disillusionment at its conclusion was shaped in part by Voaden’s near-fatal car accident in early October of 1927 which dramatically compounded his perception of existing in an unconscious, uncaring universe. In The White Kingdom Arthur finds “great peace” following his encounter with a spiritual void and declares he “shall have the courage, the faith, and the wisdom that are born of silence.”

In his subsequent dramas Voaden’s characters transcend death through oneness with nature and human love. Arthur and Jean in The White Kingdom are forerunners of Adam and Eve in Earth Song. They are “Prince” and “Queen” but deprived of a transcendent philosophy, in particular Shaw’s and Nietzsche’s belief in the human superman, they are not superheroes in search of “godhood.” The White Kingdom thus represents as he was to state in his 1935 A Book of Plays, Voaden’s own “turn from an unsatisfactory world to a non-real world of the imagination” in order to express “hopes and ideals in symbolism, poetry and romance” and to begin to “grope toward the new spiritual valuations upon which life will be based in the ‘almost perfect state.’”⁶³

Voaden symbolized this search for “new spiritual valuations” of his central characters and his own O’Neill and Conrad inspired thirst for travel and human experience through the form of the quest in The White Kingdom, the 1930 Symphony, the 1932 Earth Song and in part, in the 1942 Ascend As the Sun. As in Symphony and Earth Song, The White Kingdom already expresses the theme that the quest for spiritual illumination is a hazardous one. “Sometimes I am dazzled with the light and lose my way. Perhaps it is wrong to know too much. Those who dream too mightily seek and seek and never find,” Arthur informs Seth before he departs in search for his “White Kingdom” (p. 4).

One further important thematic link between The White Kingdom and Earth Song and his symphonic expressionist aesthetic of the l930s lies in the play’s depiction of the archetypal power of human love. Commenting in a 1924 notebook on Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Revelation,” Voaden had declared that only poets can fully perceive man’s spiritual dimension beyond mere physical existence and that “only love wakes men from their living sleep--and gives them glimpses of the gleaming heights and depths to which life can reach.”⁶⁴ When in 1937 he examined his 1926 notebook describing various love relationships (depicted as Arthur’s “old flames” in The White Kingdom), he realized that they constituted “the beginning of the ‘perfect moments’ philosophy and creed”⁶⁵ which was to become such an integral part of his symphonic expressionist aesthetic. Arthur expresses this theme of love as a form of heightened illumination, a “perfect moment” in which metaphysical perfection is glimpsed, before setting out on his quest. About to leave the disconsolate Jean, he reminds her of the “one shining moment of ecstasy, when your beauty and my dream flashed together . . . Let us live for this moment! This is my immortality” (p. 6).

When he developed his multi-media symphonic expressionist production style in 1932, Voaden would use music, sculptured groupings and particularly white lighting to emphasize for his audience such metaphysical “glimpses of perfection.” In The White Kingdom, however, love is still primarily “a dream world, intensely sad, intensely strange” as Arthur informs Seth at the beginning of the play. The drama is characterized by a dichotomy, rather than a fusion of, dream and reality, real and ideal, physical and metaphysical. “You have Seth. I have my dreams--my kingdom,” Arthur tells Jean as he sets out on his quest (p. 6). Arthur returns from his search for the “White Kingdom” having failed to find “the promised land” which, as he informs Jean, exists “only in the hearts of men--in their dreams” (p. 9).

The White Kingdom thus juxtaposes Voaden’s exuberant youthful idealism with his tragic perception of life in the early l920s, the “tyranny of outside forces” and the “tyranny of death” described in his early Queen’s University diaries. It is this very perception of life, already cited from his diary No. 2 “1921-2 or 1922-3 at Queen’s” in Chapter I, which is at the heart of Arthur’s illumination in The White Kingdom. Yet that same tragic, existential perception of man struggling for meaning and happiness within a chaotic, unconscious universe also led Voaden to begin to develop the concepts of his own “new religion” in the l920s. The same “1921-2 or 1922-3” Queen’s diary already reveals him finding freedom from the “world of fact” and the “tyranny of death” through creating “a temple for the worship of our own ideals . . . in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact.”⁶⁶

By 1927 Voaden had determined that the theatre could be that “temple for the worship of our own ideals.” His work with the Sarnia Drama League in 1928 allowed him to begin to realize his aim of “linking up of the theatre with the people--the making of it a part of their social, artistic and spiritual aspirations.”⁶⁷ Following his return from his European travels in the summer of 1928 and direct contact with the cultural nationalism of the Group of Seven and the philosophic thought of Lawren Harris, F. B. Housser and Bertram Brooker in 1929, he began to express his conviction, in his theatre work and dramatic writing as well as in his diaries, that the dream world of his ideals could have an actual physical existence, and that this “White Kingdom” was Canada.

When he began writing his highly autobiographical and idealized Ascend As the Sun cycle in 1937, he was well aware of his own spiritual transformation over the past decade. His life philosophy had evolved from the introspective mysticism reflected in The White Kingdom to “believing that there was nothing unattainable,” that the almost perfect state could be created on earth and that man could become his ideal self or “god-man.” “We shall all be builders of the temple--and not only in art and nature shall we build and adorn the temple and exalt ourselves, its worshippers,” Voaden wrote in his notes for his Ascend As the Sun cycle in Munich on April 23, 1937.

The world of fact, the making of the real, will become again creative, or pleasant, in the clean machine beauty of its setting, the careful human consideration of the worker.

Transform, refashion the external world. No longer the mystical revulsion from it--the passive, weakly submissiveness to it on a factual plane, while freedom is sought in the spirit world.

No longer the lament for the past, irrevocable. The future, gained in the present, overweights the balance. The splendid future. For each and every man-god.⁶⁸

The White Kingdom thus artistically reflects and embodies the beginning of Voaden’s own spiritual quest and search actually to attain the ideal world of his dreams. In August of 1927 he had written Violet Kilpatrick that “we will carry on the great tradition--the strife onward and upward, till the Grail is found--and the kingdom of Heaven is come.”⁶⁹ As will be seen from the examination of Northern Storm, Northern Song and particularly Symphony and Wilderness in subsequent chapters, that search to create heaven on earth led Voaden to the Canadian North and to Canadian nature as an embodiment of both actual and symbolical, metaphysical existence.

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NOTES

¹Lorne Pierce, An Outline of Canadian Literature (Toronto: Ryerson, 1927), p. 119.

²Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Sarnia, October 6, 1927, p. 2.

³Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Sarnia, February 15, 1928, p. 3.

⁴Herman Voaden, “School and Community Drama,” The School, Vol. 15, No. 10, June 1927, pp. 962-63.

⁵Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Sarnia, October 12, 1927, p. 2. For Voaden’s conception of the function of school literary societies see his “Oral Composition and Extra-Curricular Activities,” The School, Vol. 16, No. 4, December 1927.

⁶The Hon. Pauline McGibbon, “Tribute to Herman Voaden, Queen’s University--January 19, 1975,” pp. 1-2. In a conversation April 21, 1982, Voaden stated he had read aloud from the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet using the love theme from Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Overture as background music, rather than the “Meditation from Thais.”

⁷Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Sarnia, November 3, 1927, pp. 2-3.

⁸Drama Club of Sarnia. Constitution and Minutes. November 1927, p. 13.

⁹Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Sarnia, December 6, 1927, p. 1.

¹⁰Program for The Drama Club of Sarnia, February 21 and 23, 1928 and 1928-1929 Sarnia Drama League playbills. The entry in Voaden’s “Sarnia 1927-28” notebook reads “dedicated to the purpose that within these walls may be celebrated with gaiety, with pity and with truth the divine pageant of the human soul.”

¹¹“A Sarnia Drama League and Little Theatre.” Program for The Drama Club of Sarnia, February 21 and 23, 1928.

¹² “Diary--Autumn 1927 . . . Sarnia Little Theatre Speech 1928 Spring.”

^l3Ibid.

¹⁴ “Drama League Will Stage Productions of the Better Plays” (Sarnia Observer, March 7, 1928?). Unidentified clipping in the Voaden Papers.

¹⁵Address to the founding meeting of the Sarnia Drama League, March 6, 1928, p. 2.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 3.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 5.

¹⁸Idem.

¹⁹Idem.

²⁰“The Sarnia Drama League,” The Community Playhouse News, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1928, p. 3.

²¹Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Sarnia, March 28, 1928, p. 1. For a description of Denison’s address see “Gifted Playwright Outlines the Aims of Drama League” (Sarnia Observer, March 28, 1928?). Unidentified clipping in Voaden Archive.

²²Merrill Denison to Herman Voaden, Toronto, April 5, 1928.

²³Carroll Aikins, telegram to Herman Voaden, Toronto, March 26, 1928.

²⁴1976 O.H.S.S. interview, p. 23.

²⁵Herman Voaden, “A Canadian Drama League,” The Community Playhouse News, Vol. 1, No. 3, October 1928, pp. 2-3. The article is quoted in its entirety.

²⁶“With Our Playwrights,” The Community Playhouse News, Vol. 2, No. 6, October 1929, p. 6. Barker Fairley’s address on “Modern Drama,” April 18, 1929 was part of a series of lectures sponsored by the Pro Patria Chapter, I.O.D.E.

²⁷Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Sarnia, November 3, 1927, p. 1.

²⁸Herman Voaden. The White Kingdom. Typescript 1928, p. 2. Subsequent references to this text will be given parenthetically. The play is published in A Vision of Canada: Herman Voaden's Dramatic Works 1928-1945, Anton Wagner, ed. (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1993), pp. 61-74.

²⁹Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Chicago, July 9, 1927, p. 5.

³⁰Ibid., p. 8.

³¹Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Lancelot” in his Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 366. Annotated and inscribed copy in Voaden’s library.

³²Ibid., p. 39. The lines are marked in the margin by Voaden.

³³Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Chicago, August 9, 1927, pp. 11, 13.

³⁴E. A. Robinson, Collected Poems, p. 415.

³⁵Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, St. Thomas, December 25, 1927, p. 8.

³⁶Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Sarnia, November 2, 1927, p. 6.

³⁷Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Chicago, August 22, 1927.

³⁸Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Chicago, July 9, 1927, p. 14.

³⁹Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, January 7, 1928, p. 6 and diary “New York Christmas 1927-28.”

⁴⁰Conversation with Herman Voaden, April 12, 1982.

⁴¹E. A. Robinson, Collected Poems, p. 415.

⁴²The White Kingdom. Scene II, p. 2.

⁴³Idem.

⁴⁴Diary “New York Christmas 1927-28. First Play--‘White Kingdom’ Material Sarnia 1928 (Spring).”

⁴⁵Ibid., pp. 3, 56, 61.

⁴⁶Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, October 12, 1927, pp. 11, 12.

⁴⁷The White Kingdom. Scene II, p. 3.

⁴⁸Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, St. Thomas, December 25, 1927, pp. 13, 14, 15-16.

⁴⁹The White Kingdom. Scene II, p. 2.

⁵⁰Diary “Maeterlinck Summer 1926 Hart House Theatre Course Notes. Diary Vi--Cont’d. May 16, 1927 (Windsor).”

⁵¹Terence William Goldie, in his “Canadian Dramatic Literature in English 1919-39,” Diss. Queen’s University 1977, points to particularly Bliss Carman’s and Mary Perry King’s 1913 Daughters of the Dawn and 1914 Earth Deities and Other Rhythmic Masques, Marjorie Pickthall’s 1920 The Woodcarver’s Wife and Amy Roddick’s 1920 The Seekers: An Indian Mystery Play as constituting a small but distinct body of Canadian symbolist plays. See pp. 19-22, 37, 95-99.

⁵²Herman Voaden. "Search For a New Theatre Language." A paper presented at the Association for Canadian Theatre History conference, Montreal, May 28, 1980.

⁵³July 25, 1939 diary entry.

⁵⁴l937 notes in typescript based on Voaden’s diaries and scrapbooks for the Ascend As the Sun cycle.

⁵⁵1937 Ascend notes.

⁵⁶1937 notes in typescript based on his diaries and scrapbooks for the Ascend As the Sun cycle.

⁵⁷Ibid.

⁵⁸1982 introduction to The White Kingdom written for the anthology A Vision of Canada: Herman Voaden's Dramatic Works 1928-1945, p. 74.

⁵⁹Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Chicago, August 9, 1927, p. 11.

⁶⁰Diary “Yale--Spring 1931--Toronto 1931-2. (‘Rocks’ Revisions Chiefly).” In her Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 26, Amy Lowell states that “Mr. Robinson himself is a strong man, his weakness is his inheritance, that outworn Puritan inheritance, no longer a tonic, but a poison, sapping the springs of life at their source. His existence is one long battle between individual bravery and paralyzing atavism.”

⁶¹Amy Lowell, op. cit., p. 10.

⁶²Ibid., pp. 68, 69, 74.

⁶³Herman Voaden, A Book of Plays For Schools and Community Drama Groups in Canada, ed. Herman Voaden (Toronto: Macmillan, 1935), p. 305.

⁶⁴Scrapbook 9. “Spring 1924.”

⁶⁵1937 notes in typescript based on his diaries and scrapbooks for his Ascend As the Sun cycle. “15th notebook, 3. Jean 6.”

⁶⁶Diary No. 2. “1921-2 or 1922-3 at Queen’s.”

⁶⁷“Diary--Autumn 1927 . . . Sarnia Little Theatre Speech 1928 Spring.”

⁶⁸Munich, April 23, 1937 notes in typescript for Ascend As the Sun cycle.

⁶⁹Voaden to Violet Kilpatrick, Chicago, August 9, 1927, p. 13.