The Canadian Historical Review

There might be no more unlikely a Communist than Frederick Bourchier Taylor, scion of an Ontario Loyalist family whose brewing and banking fortune was launched in the mid-nineteenth century. Taylor was also younger brother of Edward Plunket (E.P.) Taylor, who from the 1940s to the 1960s held prime place as Canada’s most flamboyant capitalist.

‘Younger brother’ is the key term here. E.P., born in 1901, was his parents’ darling. Fred arrived five years later and never measured up. Suffering in a family that showered adoration only on E.P., Fred Taylor remained a spoiled, emotionally scarred, and angry child until his death by suicide at age eighty. [End Page 573]

The fact that Fred Taylor would not just become a Communist but would remain one for almost two decades speaks not to the coldness and abuse he endured as a child but to the remarkable times in which Taylor came to intellectual maturity. Like other improbable Communists – for instance, Norman Bethune, whom Taylor knew – Taylor was propelled leftward by the extraordinary times that began in the 1930s.

The fact that he was a member of the Communist Party of Canada, however, doesn’t speak to what kind of Communist Taylor was. Cultural historian John Virtue portrays a man who, despite his two-decade-long adherence to the leftist party, was clearly a pretty bad Communist and a miserable human. If it ever attempted to reform him, the party was not successful in reshaping Taylor into ‘the new socialist man.’

Like a number of Canadians, Fred Taylor first came into contact with Communism in England, where he studied art during the early 1930s Depression. He was charmed by a party that was more than just politically engaging. It was also a thriving social scene that included, the awkward loner noted, a number of attractive young women. Returning to Canada in 1934, Taylor’s conversion to Communism was completed by his future bride, Miriam Kennedy.

But more than social contacts swung him leftward. Taylor joined the Communist Party at a time when the greed, the injustice and – as is so evident today – the damnable ineptitude of capitalists turned many people to the political left.

Before and after the two decades he remained in the cpc – and in many respects outside of his political life in the party – Taylor was thoroughly bourgeois in social attitudes. He was dismayed, for instance, by the quick arrival, after his first marriage, of his two sons. With the birth of his second he asked doctors to sterilize Miriam, which, astonishingly, was done without her knowledge. Following his divorce from Miriam, he had relationships with a series of female artists, expecting in each case that they would sacrifice their careers in order to nurture his own. And his temper – a ‘raging fiend within him’ in the words of an associate (224) – never calmed. In 1969 he fired a shotgun at and wounded Leonard Brooks, a fellow Canadian expatriate in Mexico, after Brooks joked that Taylor seemed to pay more attention to quail hunting than to painting (224).

And although he envied and resented the success of his brother, Taylor was not above using E.P.’s name to try to obtain painting commissions from government, politicians, and socialites. [End Page 574]

Virtue points out the irony that came with the decline of the brothers in old age. By the 1980s, E.P. had suffered a series of strokes that affected his business acumen, and his fortune almost evaporated. He ceased to be the darling of the sycophants who extol the ‘rags to riches’ trend line of capitalism but seldom mention the downward slide. Brother Fred’s reputation did not collapse in his old age, and as Montreal art gallery owner Walter Klinkhoff observed, ‘E.P., the great business tycoon, may one day only be remembered as being Fred’s brother’ (259).

Virtue could well have dwelt more on what of Taylor’s projects will assure his artistic reputation. Almost certainly the creative...