Modernism, authenticity, and Indian identity: Frank "Toronto" Prewett (1893-1962)

Porter, Joy

Abstract

Due to his Indian ancestry, the Canadian poet Frank James Prewett was nicknamed "Toronto" by the illustrious literary friends he met while recovering in England following his service in World War I. Those friends included Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and the doyenne of the Bloomsbury set, the rich and generous Lady Ottoline Morrell. Each figure found Prewett's poetry important and his Indian identity both intriguing and meaningful. Woolf typeset Prewett's first book Poems (Hogarth Press), which appeared in 1921, and when the Times Literary Supplement favorably reviewed it, she remarked to Lytton Strachey in a letter, "The Literary Supplement, by the way, says that Prewett is a poet: perhaps a great one." 1 Graves was convinced of Prewett's literary importance. He edited Prewett's Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1964, and noted in the introduction, "Dedicated poets like Frank Prewett are few in any age; and lamentably so in this" (viii). Sassoon was sure Prewett was special from the moment he set eyes upon him. He told Graves, "Toronto is a great man, and will be a great writer,-greater than you or me, because of his simplicity of mind and freedom from intellectual prejudices" (quoted in Wilson 34). Like Lady Ottoline Morrell, Sassoon had a deep intellectual friendship with Prewett and supported him so that he might write creatively. He supplied him with travel money and cash for about five years while Morrell gave him gifts, hospitality and, eventually, an agricultural job on her country retreat, Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. Both for a time fell in love with "Toronto" or were, at the very least, strongly sexually attracted to him. They made sure he was introduced to and moved within circles that included Leonard Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, T. E. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, S. S. Koteliansky, and Dorothy Brett, the latter yet another Bloomsbury figure whose letters reveal some variety of romantic attachment with Prewett. Just after the war, Ottoline Morrell was so taken with Prewett that she wrote to Robert Graves determined to set up a "debating society and dining club with Frank Prewett, Masefield, Marsh, Lytton Strachey, [Karl] Liebknecht and Trotsky as honorary members" (quoted in O'Prey, 286). © 2010 State University of New York. All rights reserved.

Citation

Porter, J. (2010). Modernism, authenticity, and Indian identity: Frank "Toronto" Prewett (1893-1962). In D. L. Madsen (Ed.), Native authenticity: Transnational perspectives on Native American literary studies (103-122). State University of New York Press

• Publication Date: 2010-04
• Deposit Date: Jun 7, 2019
• Pages: 103-122
• Series Title: Native traces
• Series Number: 171
• Book Title: Native authenticity: Transnational perspectives on Native American literary studies
• Chapter Number: 5
• ISBN: 9781438431673; 9781438431680
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/417801
• Publisher URL: https://sunypress.edu/Books/N/Native-Authenticity
• Contract Date: Apr 1, 2010