Young Hunting

Taking inspiration from John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse, Young Hunting
is both a story of discovery and transformation. While Toronto changes around
him, from a puritanical British colonial outpost to a mixing bowl filled with
colourful cultural components, a young boy emerges from his middle class
childhood to become a flamboyant adolescent a questioning adult who refuses to
accept conventional wisdom. The Toronto of the '40s and '50s is often painted
as the epitome of dull convention - but this was clearly not Martin Hunter's
experience. The child of eastern Ontario farmers, he was exposed to
fundamentalist Presbyterian values; yet at the same time he was connecting
with a number of remarkable artists who profoundly influenced the course of
his young life. In Young Hunting, the dichotomy is personified by Hunter's two
closest friends: Dick, who would become an Academy Award-winning animator; and
Jimmy, who would go on to become the minister of Canada's largest Presbyterian
church. The pull of each of these influences was strong, and each helped
define both Hunter's youth and developing view of life. Along the way, he
soaked up vast and varied experience: as an actor in a children's theatre
company; a boarder at an evangelical summer camp; a messenger delivering
samples on Queen Street; an officer cadet in the Royal Canadian Navy; a
student at Oxbridge-inspired Trinity College; and as a labourer at both a
mining camp in the Yukon and a paper mill in Quebec. And while, as Young
Hunting explains, Martin Hunter "thoroughly enjoyed the often ludicrous
pretension of these various institutions," it was not until he escaped to
fulfill his "dreams of high culture" that he gained true perspective on his
life's journey - discovering that Europe's vaunted old world cultural
superiority was just as hollow as the institutions of his homeland.