The Yellow Briar. Patrick Slater
what became known as a regional idyll of unusual popularity and the basis of Mitchell’s singular literary reputation and success.1
It is difficult to place The Yellow Briar in any clearly defined literary category or genre, although it has been seen as a kind of life writing. Mitchell’s personal story is so shrouded in privacy that an acquaintance writing in The Law Society Gazette said that Mitchell was remembered as an elusive and lonely figure, someone “I saw … often, and occasionally exchanged a few words with him, but I cannot say that I knew him, and indeed I do not think anyone knew him in other than a casual way.”The most detailed account we have of Mitchell’s life is the one written by Dorothy Bishop for the reissue of The Yellow Briar by the Macmillan Company of Canada in 1970. Rich in much unsourced information, it provides us with the most comprehensive account of a tragic and puzzling life laden with potential mystery and crying out for a psycho-critical examination.
In simple terms we know the following about John Wendell Mitchell’s life and background.2 Of North Irish ancestry, he was descended from farming folk who had settled in the Caledon Hills of Ontario. The little community of Mono, roughly fifty miles northwest of Toronto and a few miles east of Orangeville, would have been the focal point of the Mitchells’ existence. Like so many other immigrant settlers from the old country, they took up land, cleared it, worked hard, raised large families, and prospered within the bounds of what their circumstances made possible. Mitchell’s grandfather secured the land that was to become Yellow Briar Farm in 1834. John Mitchell was born on that farm, and although it passed out of the hands of his father, it is Yellow Briar Farm to which John Mitchell, reincarnated, as it were, as Patrick Slater returns to plant his story. It is his story only to a degree, for what Paddy Slater spins into his genial and folksy reminiscence is, in part, the private life of John Mitchell, in part the fiction of Paddy Slater, and in part the social commentary of a real man blessed with a lively and concerned sensibility. Mitchell chose to create an outlet for what were frequently forward-looking ideas through the utterances of a fictional character whose mantle of identity he would don, and into whose persona the flesh-and-blood John Mitchell would slip so effortlessly that, to all intents and purposes, the public face of John Mitchell would become Patrick Slater.
The persona of Paddy Slater was carefully conceived and crafted by John Mitchell, with psychological overtones and social concerns built into the makeup of a pseudonymous literary presence that was intended to serve as an alter ego for John Mitchell, the Toronto lawyer. What, one might ask, impelled John Mitchell — from what we can deduce a devout Methodist — to make Paddy Slater a Catholic orphan boy who is taken into a good and God-fearing Methodist family in which he is afforded every benefit of belonging (and yet not quite), and is left by the author to feel an “apartness” due to the religion of his birth? The raising of this Catholic boy — whose story The Yellow Briar holds — in the bosom of a Protestant family gives Mitchell the opportunity to address and condemn the religious bigotry and intolerance that he correctly identifies as having its source in the Mother Country whence, he observes disapprovingly, religious divisions have come to be a blight on the happiness of the new land. There is little of what is overtly intolerant in the story that Paddy Slater tells, but there is, nevertheless, an awareness, however gently it may be allowed to appear, of the stolid virtues of Methodism and the slightly “outsider” aura of Roman Catholicism. Inescapably, the powerful presence of John Wesley hovers over the genial and tolerant narrative of Paddy Slater, and one is left in no doubt of the holiness and the enthusiasms of “chapel.” But the true intention of this story is clearly signalled in its subtitle, which tells us that this is “A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside.”
The dust jacket of the reprint (1936) of the first edition of The Yellow Briar, showing the characteristic yellow rose motif.
The period that is so skilfully revisited by John Mitchell is, primarily, the 1840s, carrying into the later decades of the nineteenth century in what Mitchell made sure was geographically clearly identified as Canada West on the map that appears as a kind of endpaper in The Yellow Briar’s earliest printings. The Irish on the Canadian countryside were a highly visible and contentious presence in the early turbulent days of Canadian settlement. From the likes of the remarkable and noteworthy D’Arcy McGee to the notorious Donnellys, there was a strong public awareness of the Irish and their ways.
There is much evidence that the Irish were looked down upon and that the old prejudices had crossed the Atlantic in all their virulence. On a more subdued and domesticated, if literary, level, we are treated to the observations of Susannah Moodie (1803–1885), iconic recorder of pioneer life and herself an immigrant, who upon her arrival in Canada at the quarantine station in Quebec recoils from the noisy, vulgar, and ragtag mob of Irish fellow passengers swarming the shore of the river to bathe and wash their clothes after a long and cramped crossing. Twenty years later, writing in Life in the Clearings (1853), Moodie tells us that the Irish live in squalid shanties and that young Irishwomen are mostly servant girls. There is also here revealed not only an ingrained sense of class but a profoundly more meaningful belief in religious difference. The age-old Catholic/ Protestant antagonism looms large in Moodie’s mind. When Moodie first witnesses the brawling vulgarities of Irish behaviour on Grosse Île, she can’t resist comparing it to that of her Scottish fellow-travellers who are Protestant and who were orderly and well behaved onboard ship, but who quickly succumbed to the swearing, pushing, and shouting of the Catholic Irish. Later in Life in the Clearings, and much like Paddy Slater/John Mitchell, she condemns religious division and deplores the carrying over of Old World prejudices and antagonisms to the New World.
Supposedly a period photograph of Elizabeth Ann or Betty, as she is fondly referred to in Paddy Slater’s story. This picture appeared on the inside flap of the dust jacket of The Yellow Briar and reinforced the gentle hoax by giving it a face.
To be sure, the question of the Irish was clearly on people’s minds. And we note, for example, the solemn and well-intentioned efforts of the Reverend Henry Giles to “explain” the Irish in an essay entitled “Fragments and Illustrations of Irish Character.” This essay, which dwells on the cheerfulness, the courage, and the industry of the Irish, was published in 1851 in The Literary Garland, the premier cultural periodical of its time, and belongs to the same period as Susannah Moodie’s comments, as well as to the “times” of The Yellow Briar, although in the latter case, Patrick Slater portrays Irish settlement in a kinder and gentler light. John Mitchell, in the guise of Patrick (Paddy) Slater, has thrown the mantle of Catholicism over himself, but the faith of his Methodist forebears lies just beneath the surface.3 The sentiment of the narrative leans naturally toward the Protestant faith of his own family and the fictional family of the Marshalls who had adopted the orphaned Paddy.
While we recognize that the prime elements in the story told in The Yellow Briar are those of the life of Paddy seen through the prism of a generally happy reminiscence, we are also made aware of the subtextual intentions of John Mitchell, lawyer by profession, Canadian patriot by conviction, and would-be social reformer by inclination.4 There is a strong nationalist flavour to Mitchell’s thinking that becomes apparent in The Kingdom of America, which he published not long after his mother’s death. Mitchell, who remained a lifelong bachelor, had lived with his mother to whom he was deeply attached, and it is after her passing that his literary persona emerged to its full extent. Clearly, ideas that had been present for some time began to come to the fore, and even The Yellow Briar, which the influential reviewer and literary journalist William Arthur Deacon described as a “homespun yarn,” is richly flavoured with social comment and political “asides.”
Late in 1933,Thomas Allen, a principal with Thomas Allen Publishers with whom Mitchell had become acquainted, agreed to publish the manuscript that became The Yellow Briar, subject to a private subsidy. The story was offered ostensibly as a manuscript by one Paddy Slater who had passed away years ago leaving a personal reminiscence of pioneer life in Ontario. The truth, of course, is