The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  I don’t remember how it came into my possession; probably I stumbled on it in the drugstore, which is where I used to buy my books. In any case, it made an impression— it was one of those books you read when you are a kid that expands your understanding of the world, mainly because it is full of stuff you had no idea existed.

  So it was a deal for me, and like a fool, one day, I sold it. I did this on a spring afternoon when I was supposed to be studying for exams. I wanted to go to a movie, and I didn’t have any money, so I boxed up my entire book collection and took the box to a second-hand bookstore and sold everything— including that formative Quentin Reynolds autobiography.

  I spent the next four or five years regretting that, until the day I found myself, by chance, walking past the second-hand bookstore where I had done the deed. I wandered in and began looking through the stacks of books while a sort of melancholy settled over me, when low and behold, I came across the book I had sold, the very copy. I plucked it out of the pile and saw my name written in the inside.

  I bought it back of course, for three times the price I had sold it for; storage fees, I guess. I held on to it for a long time, and then, somewhere over the years, I lost track of it again.

  I have no idea what brought it back to mind, or what I would make of it if I got my hands on a copy today. I am not at all sure how Quentin Reynolds would strike me now that he and I have walked down the same road a little ways. One never knows with old friends. Sometimes reunions can be deep and joyful things. Other times there are nothing but awkward silences and promises to call that are never kept.

  20 November 2005

  LEACOCK COUNTRY

  The little village of Sutton, Ontario, recently swallowed by the town of Georgina, sticks to the south shore of Lake Simcoe like an old photo in a family album.

  Walking along the Hedge Road in Sutton, an evocatively narrow and twisty road that runs right along the edge of the lake, it is easy to pretend, as I often do when I walk along it, that you are strolling through the British countryside. That is how I was preoccupying myself the other day when I happened upon Canadian broadcaster Peter Gzowski’s old cottage, where I spent so many happy New Year’s Eves, and which, I feel compelled to report, has been painted an arresting shade of mauve since Peter sold it. Someone has also cut down Gzowski’s favourite (and don’t think the old tobacco bum wouldn’t appreciate the irony) Smoke Tree.

  I wasn’t in Sutton, however, to inspect or pass judgment on Gzowski’s old cottage; time marches wearily on, and so did I, along the Hedge Road, past The Briars, past Gzowski’s and over the one-lane-only, historically designated 1912 iron bridge that spans the Black River.

  I was heading to Peter Sibbald Brown’s house and studio, to visit the man who famously plucked a burning log off the living-room floor one smoky afternoon long ago, and whose wit and charm had saved the day for Gzowksi so many other times over the years.

  I was going to see PSB, as Gzowski affectionately dubbed him, partly because there are few people in this world who can make me laugh quite as joyfully as he does, and mostly because I had, over lunch that day, learned that Peter Sibbald Brown, who is a collector and an award-winning and elegant designer of books, happened to be working with six or seven handwritten original pages of Stephen Leacock’s manuscript from Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

  Leacock, as you no doubt know, is Canada’s answer to Mark Twain. He was the most famous humorist in the world in the early days of the twentieth century. In fact, it has been famously said that in his prime, more people had heard of Leacock than had heard of Canada.

  Sunshine Sketches is Leacock’s enduring Canadian masterpiece. It was published in 1912, almost one hundred years ago and still sells several thousand copies a year in the New Canadian Library edition.

  So I made my way over the bridge and past the little church where Leacock is buried, for this is Leacock country. He grew up and summered on the shores of Lake Simcoe. He knew all the little towns around and about.

  When I finally got to PSB’s house, I found the manuscript on his work table—an unlined piece of brown paper that I reached out to touch in awe. As far as Canadian letters are concerned, the piece of paper that was lying in front of me is just about the fountainhead.

  Leacock, it turns out, wrote with a straight pen. You can see, right on the page, the various spots where the ink is fainter, the exact places where he had run out. You can tell, when it darkens, the moment he had paused and dipped his pen into the inkwell. Although it didn’t look like there was a lot of pausing going on.

  “Yes,” said PSB, smiling, “it looks like he was really galloping along, doesn’t it?” PSB had studied the entire manuscript. “There are very few revisions, anywhere,” he said.

  We stood there, marvelling over the single page for a good thirty minutes, trying our best to wring some meaning out of it. And then I headed back to my hotel room, in some sort of dreamy state, feeling both connected and wistful about the past. What would I ask Leacock, I wondered, if he was alive today? What would I want to tell him?

  When I finally got to my room, I pulled out the copy of Sunshine Sketches that I had brought with me, and I spent the rest of that evening dipping into the sardonic elegance of Leacock’s prose.

  From Chapter Three: “The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias,” a story from Sunshine Sketches that recounts the “sinking” of the paddle wheeler The Mariposa Belle. I place “sinking” in quotations because, well, I’m not going to recount the whole episode wherein the sinking ship ends up floating, and then rescuing, the sinking rescue boats. But consider this lovely moment when the townsfolk from Mariposa are climbing aboard the Mariposa Belle, before the excursion begins, which Leacock has explained will be totally dry, except of course for the two kegs of beer, which don’t count, because the Knights of Pythias are, of course, by their very constitution dedicated to temperance.

  “And there’s Henry Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, ... with a small flask of Pogram’s Special in his hip pocket as a sort of ...” and here is Leacock’s brilliant flourish, “a sort of amendment to the constitution.”

  That is why people still want to read Leacock.

  Mind you, many of the citizens of Orillia who felt they were being lampooned when the book arrived didn’t. But they just didn’t get it. Didn’t understand that affection and kindness were the cornerstones of Leacock’s house of humour. His eye was focused through the sardonic lens of irony—not sarcasm or satire. And when he wrote of the town of Sutton, where I am staying this week, that it was “an orderly little place, dull as ditchwater, but quite unaware of the fact,” you have to remember he chose to be buried in Sutton, and appreciate that the telling phrase isn’t that it was dull but that it had the redeeming quality of being unaware of the fact.

  Leacock, who could sound disparaging, believed deeply that humour should be, more than anything, kind, that one should laugh with, and not at, others.

  The provincial in me would like to think that this was his Canadian upbringing revealing itself, but if I were honest, I would have to acknowledge it’s what you see in the best of Twain, whom Leacock admired so much.

  And, if you’re so inclined, you can follow the thread of kindness as it weaves together all the great American and Canadian humorists who have written since. Or the ones I think are great anyway.

  My hero, E.B. White, for one, who as well as Charlotte’s Web wrote many humorous pieces for The New Yorker magazine and then, achingly, warned that you should avoid humour if you are concerned for your reputation as a writer. The world likes humour, wrote White, but treats it patronizingly, decorating its serious artists with laurels and its wags with Brussels sprouts. Writers who take their literary selves with great seriousness, says White in his essay “On Humor,” are at considerable pains never to associate their names with anything funny.

  And yet, and yet.

  No less a serious person than that cagey old constitutional expert Senator Eugene
Forsey said of Stephen Leacock, who held a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, that he could have been anything he wanted, including prime minister of Canada. And Leacock? Leacock, who had an abiding interest in politics, said he would rather have written Alice in Wonderland than the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  And even poor old E.B. White, who mostly wrote kind and funny, and never thought of himself as a success because of it, knew that there is a fine line between laughing and crying. And when it is done right, that a piece of humorous writing can bring a person to the point where his or her emotional responses are untrustworthy, to that place where tears and laughter meet. Humour can do that, wrote White, because it plays close to the big hot fire that is truth. Sometimes the reader feels the heat.

  I stayed up much later than I expected that night looking for the heat in Leacock, finding plenty.

  And thinking of E.B. White, whom I admire so much, I remembered Mordecai Richler, who allowed me to audit his class at Sir George Williams University one winter long ago, and W.O. Mitchell, who befriended me when I was beginning to write, and showed me, by his own joyful example, that it is permissible to rejoice in one’s own work when you read it out loud. (Leacock, I am told, didn’t work out on CBC Radio because of his habit of chuckling at his own jokes before delivering them.)

  Mitchell, White and Richler were all Leacock’s children in a way, and all of them are gone now.

  Finally I went to sleep, with the sort of melancholy that can only come with a really funny story.

  PSB woke me the next morning.

  “I forgot to tell you the most astonishing thing,” he said over the phone. “When Henry Fox Talbot was inventing photography, he didn’t call it photography. And pictures weren’t called photographs. You know what he called them? He was using the natural light of the sun. He called them ‘sunshine sketches.’ Isn’t that astonishing?”

  So that is what Leacock was up to, and Twain before him, and Richler and Mitchell and the rest who have come and gone since.

  Taking pictures.

  “I throw ink at the wolf to keep it from the door,” wrote Leacock once, in a letter, trying to explain his job as a writer.

  The thing about him was he kept hitting the wolf. But softly, and with affectionate and kind contemplation on the incongruities of life. God bless him. We were lucky he passed our way. Lucky still, because mercifully whenever we want, we can, with the flip of a page and God’s good grace, still feel his heat.

  23 March 2008

  THE WAY WHICH

  IS NOT THE WAY

  We set off from Sault Ste. Marie, heading for Timmins. Our bus driver, John, had the route carefully worked out. The impulse, when you’re moving from town to town with a bus full of performers and assorted technicians, is to get where you’re going as fast as you can.

  “We’ll go up Highway 17,” said John. “We’ll cut off at Wawa. It won’t take us more than six hours.”

  Everyone settled into their seats. And everything was going fine. Until I got a hold of the map.

  “Hey,” I said, “look at this. If we turn onto Highway 556, we’ll save over a hundred kilometres.”

  Before I go further, you should know this about me: if we were in a car together, you and I, and you were driving, and we came to one of those moments where you pulled over and looked at me uncertainly, and said, “I’m not sure, what do you think? Left? Or right?” I would, reflexively and consistently, choose the back road. Fast roads bore me. I like it when roads are winding and narrow, and there are places you can stop that don’t feel like the place where you stopped two hours ago. I like the slow way. On the question of shortcuts, were you to call it to a question, I would vote with both feet. You can mark me down in favour.

  I say this because it has been my experience that shortcuts are hardly ever shorter. In fact, it has been my experience that shortcuts are almost certainly longer. If a clock is something you pay attention to, that is. If timing your way through life is something you do. If you believe that by getting there faster, you get more time.

  The thing about shortcuts is that they are just called short so people like me can convince others to give them a go. “Come on,” we say. “It’s a shortcut.” The unspoken lie, of course, is the implication that it’ll be faster than the other way, the longer way around, that we are saving time here; in fact, we might be gaining time.

  If we were to tell the truth, if we were to say, “It’s a longcut. If we go my way, it will take longer, and we could get hopelessly lost, and maybe there will be bears,” well, who would follow us then?

  The sign at the beginning of Highway 556 was our first clue: No gas for the next 86 kilometres.

  John had pulled the bus onto the shoulder. We were weighing our options.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be fine. John filled the gas tank at breakfast. Right?”

  And so we set off. Ten minutes later, when the road turned from a double-lane highway to a gravel logging road, bass player Dennis Pendrith put down his Rolling Stone magazine and began staring out the bus window. Before long Dennis had his face pressed to the window the way people stare out of small planes when they are landing in a snowstorm.

  Suddenly John slammed his foot on the air brakes of our big tour bus and we came to a shuddering stop.

  “What’s happening?” I asked cheerfully from my seat near the back.

  “Oh,” said Dennis gloomily, “nothing really.”

  Dennis still had his faced pressed to the window.

  “Unless,” added John, the driver, “you call a bear in the middle of the road something.”

  Pretty soon everyone was gathered at the front window of our bus, huddled around it like kids watching a video at a birthday party.

  No one moved as we bounced past Vixen Lake. No one moved as we skirted Gordon Lake. And no one moved at the end of Ranger Lake as we crept over a wooden bridge barely wide enough for a bus.

  We only encountered one other vehicle on that road, a logging truck, heading in the opposite direction. I can’t imagine what he thought when our forty-five-foot tour bus pulled onto the shoulder to let him pass.

  We eventually rolled into Timmins, safe and sound. Although, admittedly, a lot later than we would have if we hadn’t taken my shortcut. But that’s the way it is with shortcuts—turn right to avoid a traffic jam, and three hours later you’re sitting in someone’s kitchen talking to them about the problems they’re having with their milk cows. Crazy things happen when you take the way which is not the way. Sometimes, the craziest of all, they’re even faster. But that doesn’t happen often.

  20 November 2005

  IN PRAISE

  OF CURLING

  The Vinyl Cafe producer Jess Milton was behind the wheel. I was sitting beside her, my feet on the dash, a map in my lap. We were heading west along the Trans-Canada Highway. We had left Winnipeg after breakfast, and now were coming up on Portage la Prairie, where we were meant to cut off onto the Yellowhead. We made the turn and continued northwest, past all the little railway towns: Woodside, Gladstone and Neepawa. We arrived in Minnedosa in the afternoon and got a hotel room, and dinner, and directions to the hamlet of Clanwilliam, which we had been told might be the best place in the country to spend some time if we wanted to learn a few things about curling.

  Clanwilliam is ten kilometres north of Minnedosa, but getting there can be confusing the first time you try, and we made a couple of false starts.

  When we did get there, we stopped, as we had been instructed, at the general store to ask directions. We were looking for the Clanwilliam curling rink. But if the general store was the only place we saw in Clanwilliam, we wouldn’t have gone home unhappy. The general store would have been worth the trip.

  The Clanwilliam general store is perfect in every way. It has wooden floors and a wood-burning stove. It has groceries, and it has penny candy, but not too much of either. It has a kitchen table where folks gather in the morning to have coffee. And a pool table—a buck a
game. And in an alcove at the very back, behind the wood stove and the kitchen table and the pool table, a single old-time barber chair, empty the evening we stopped by, but there for the itinerant barber who comes to town every second Thursday. Haircuts, $10.

  We were worried the store might not be open. We had heard what had happened the last time a reporter had been sent to Clanwilliam to visit the Clanwilliam Curling Club. It was a sports reporter from the Boston Globe. Like us, he had been told to stop in at the general store for directions to the rink. When he got there, all he found was a sign in the store window that read, GONE CURLING.

  Not that finding the rink should have been difficult. Clanwilliam is really no more than a crossroads. There are only about forty souls living in Clanwilliam today. Besides the general store and the curling rink, Clanwilliam has a grain elevator, a community hall and a repair shop. Not much, but an impressive list of facilities for a town of forty. If you offered services like that for every forty people in the city where I live, you would have to erect a community centre and a curling club on every city block.

  Happily the general store was open when we arrived, and we went in, bought some penny candy and got directions.

  It turns out we were only a block away. We drove around the corner, parked beside everyone else in the shadow of the grain elevator and walked through the snow toward a long, narrow Quonset hut that looked like a cross between a bowling alley and a garage.

  There was an outdoor skating rink beside the door, with two battered hockey nets at either end. It was half the size of an official rink, but plenty big enough for a game of shinny.

  We stood there for a moment under a bone-white moon and looked at each other. We didn’t have to say what we were thinking. It was a perfect prairie moment. Our horizon was framed by a grain elevator, an outdoor skating rink and the door to a natural-ice curling arena. Neither of us knew anything about curling, but now we knew why we had been sent to Clanwilliam to learn about it.