Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  I was so startled that I agreed to have him submit it. I’m not sorry to say that it went nowhere.

  But I know that Hugh would have loved that story.

  Robert David (Bob) Symons was born in England in 1898, the son of artist William Christian Symons and pianist Cecilia Constance Davenport. He was educated at home (“I never saw the inside of a school”) in a rural Sussex household. There, visitors like artist John Singer Sargent (his father’s friends also included Whistler and Monet) and Rudyard Kipling made the wider world of the British Empire seem ripe for exploring. His father died in 1911, and with six brothers and two sisters Bob knew that the family, while rich in many things, could not afford to keep him indefinitely. At the age of sixteen his sense of adventure took him to the Canadian West, determined to be a cowboy.

  After a sea voyage to New York, and a lot of Pullman car advice to steer clear of Canada, he reached Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, by train and hung around the livery stables in his smart tweed jacket and his New York–purchased knee-high laced “surveyor boots.” How a local rancher, Scotty Gow, decided to take a chance on this five-foot-five-inch slim English lad is the start of his classic 1973 book, Where the Wagon Led: One Man’s Memories of the Cowboy’s Life in the Old West. It tells how the eager “green hand” learned the trade of mending fences, branding and driving cattle, breaking horses, and dealing with harsh winters, droughts, and long days in the saddle “with a tight belt for lunch.” Not only is the book filled with anecdotes about memorable characters, including horse thieves and poetry-quoting Mounties, it is enlivened with seventy sketches, which even illustrate details of saddle and stirrup types, showing his intimate knowledge of that now-distant world.

  After his years as a ranch hand, he joined up to do his duty in the First World War, his arrival delayed by height requirements. He saw action in France, but typically wrote more about the horses he knew there than his own deeds. After the war Symons (he insisted on the Cornish pronunciation, like “Timmins”) was a rancher. But times were hard, and in one of his later books, Grandfather Symons’ Homestead Book, intended for children, he thanks a country storeowner named Taylor with these words:

  “He had many customers among the new settlers and did pretty well until the droughts and low prices of the 1920s, which were worse in the 1930s. Yet I must tell you that I never knew a customer to leave that store without some groceries, whether he had money or not. I ought to know, for I was one who sometimes had not. But he never told anyone, which is why I tell it now.”

  He then moved to a role as a Saskatchewan game warden, in the Battlefords, then the Pasquia Hills, then around the Cypress Hills, and finally, in 1942, in British Columbia. His respect for the native people he encountered, and his mastery of a number of their tongues (he loved to demonstrate the liquid sound of spoken Cree) helped him to be fair while still vigorously doing his job, bringing the laws on hunting into lonely places, to offenders who were all armed, and often hungry. He may have been small in stature, never more than 125 pounds, and his close-set eyes may not have been strictly parallel, but his bright keenness made him an unforgettable force of nature.

  He was by birth a nineteenth-century man, and in practice such a keen student of ranching and conservation issues that he found a way to read Hansard on parliamentary debates, regularly, and to write many letters and articles on issues that engaged him. In 1945 he decided to change his life by reliving a Victorian dream. Although by now in his late forties he rode into unsettled country far beyond Fort St. John in northern B.C. He surveyed the land on horseback, staked a claim, and was soon felling the trees on the site to build a homestead cabin that became a successful cattle ranch. The traditional story — and it is told in a deliberately old-fashioned style, with the Black Wolf watching the Man and the Woman coming into his domain, and setting up the ranch — is told in The Broken Snare: The Story of a Frontier Family.

  And here I step into the picture. If we never forget a first love, an editor never forgets the first manuscript — found, read, edited, and published. The Broken Snare, published in 1970, was my first book as an editor, the first of hundreds, but I remember it and Bob Symons well. There was no reference to his previous books in the letter accompanying the submitted manuscript to make it stand out from the others in what we disgracefully called “the slush pile.” The manuscript simply stood out through its epic simplicity, and its knowledge of an excitingly remote ranching world, where an imported Highland bull could break the back of a bear attacking his herd. To my delight, I was able to persuade my bosses at Doubleday that we should publish it, and it became my first signed-up book.

  This old-style ranching was heady stuff, of course, especially for a young guy fresh to Canada, and now living among the fancy new high-rises of hip St. James Town in the centre of Toronto. These chapters about rustlers, or the Moose being stalked through the willows by the Wolf, or the Man slowly building up his ranch, even carving out a new road to the nearest settlement, might have come from 1898, not 1968 — although it was, of course, back in 1945 when Bob started this great traditional adventure, along with his brave and determined wife, Hope.

  Like most boys within the reach of Hollywood (and Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers and “Shane”) I had grown up wanting to be a cowboy, although I secretly knew that no such world still existed. And now this! A wonderfully romantic, true story! My own experiences growing up in a farming community in Scotland gave me something in common with Bob, since one summer I had been, literally, a cow-boy, helping with the milking, and so on. Working on a local farm that summer meant that I knew all about handling a pitchfork when bringing in the hay that would feed the stock in winter, as he had done on the ranch. I even knew something about horses, since as an awestruck small boy I had watched the giant Clydesdales being shod at Mr. Mabon’s “smiddy” on Dunlop’s main street. (I still catch a whiff of burning hoof occasionally in the dentist’s chair, but there is no hiss as red-hot horseshoes are dropped into a pail of water.) I had even seen horses at work in the hayfields where I laboured; the old grandfather — who spoke pure Robert Burns — would follow along with his horse-drawn rake, suspicious of wasteful modern baling machines.

  As for riding horses, I didn’t have Bob’s advantage of having grown up with them, but I had ridden in California’s Sierra Mountains with only one stirrup (fun riding down a steep slope). And there was the incident in the historical procession in St. Andrews when, in the Cavalier costume (wrong but romantic) of the Duke of Montrose, I spurred my horse into a runaway ride that scarred a centuries-old lawn.

  In my travels east by bus from Victoria I had seen lots of cowboy country. In Lethbridge I had met my second cousin, Butch Barber, a guy of my age who played pro hockey in winter and worked the rodeo as a bull-wrestler in summer. And passing through Regina I had stayed overnight at a cheap hotel with old cowboys — no doubt friends of Bob Symons — crowding the lobby.

  Bob and I worked happily together, by correspondence, and the letters went just northwest of Regina to his home in Silton. Why Bob retired there is instructive. Near the end of The Broken Snare Bob realizes that his calves can’t happily coexist with the Black Wolf’s pack. And when he sets about destroying them, the Black Wolf breaks the snare — to Bob’s secret relief — and leaves the valley. In the same way, Bob and his family are driven out when the “civilization” that he fled in the first place discovers oil nearby. Soon the boys from Texas are casually driving through his fences, paying compensation, sure, but causing him endless problems with his stock. In the end he decides to sell up. And his lawyer in Fort St. John, as Bob leaves the office, sensing the importance of the moment, tells his staff to “Stand up and say good-bye to the last of the free men!”

  Bob never mentions it in the book, but there was a further reason for his decision to sell up, and move south to Silton. He was fighting leukemia. As he crammed a lifetime of writing into his last, defiant decade, we also worked together on W
here the Wagon Led (now a recognized classic account of The Old Canadian West, as I hoped it would be, when I suggested it to Bob) and on North by West (two fictional stories of the West and the North). I had no hand in Where the Wind Blows, Many Trails, or Grandfather Symons’s Homestead Book, his fine, heavily illustrated book for children. All of his books, of course, were enriched by the sketches that he drew with such ease.

  As an artist he made his reputation with Hours and the Birds (published first here, then around the world, thanks to Oxford University Press) which established him in 1967 as a superb naturalist and painter of birds — one signed painting of a myrtle warbler, a wedding present, hangs proudly in my house. On a larger canvas, from 1951, in the winters away from the ranch, he painted dioramas in Regina’s Royal Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History. As described by a museum employee, Robert W. Nero, he initially seemed to be “a rather flamboyant cowpoke-artist. . . . unfailingly a silk scarf tucked into an open shirt, talking at a great rate while busy painting” vivid scenes against which native Indian life, or the appropriate birds and animals, were displayed. In time the sceptical Nero came to see that he knew his stuff and was “a really good man. I’m so glad to have known him.”

  Bob Nero played an important — literally, a life-saving — role in our man’s life. In 1965 his friend Bob was deathly ill in Regina General Hospital, his leukemia complicated by pneumonia. He was kept in isolation, and his family was informed that he was likely to die that night. Around midnight Bob Nero managed to sneak into his room, where he found his friend pouring sweat, but grimly reading the last of the proofs of Hours and the Birds. Nero asked how he was, and Symons gasped that he had almost finished checking the proofs, and was determined to complete that final task because “I think I’m going to die tonight.”

  “Boy,” said Nero, “that’s what I call a deadline!”

  They both laughed so hard that Bob’s temperature dropped, his fever disappeared, and the baffled doctors (unaware of the Norman Cousins system of laughing your way back to health) were able to send him home a few days later. Bob, a deeply religious man, saw this as a chance that God had given him “to write the books I was meant to write,” and I, and his readers, benefitted from the burst of creative energy that followed.

  In 1970 he was awarded an honorary LL.D. by the University of Saskatchewan, and forty years later, in the winter of 2010, the university’s Kenderdine Gallery staged an exhibition of his art and books entitled “The Symons Trail.” It was co-curated by his old friend, Dr. Stuart Houston, with whom he used to stay when he was in town, and who was a notable amateur ornithologist.

  As a bird-loving conservationist Bob earned the Saskatchewan Conservation Medal in 1965, and he is listed by Sharon and Peter Butala as one of Saskatchewan’s Environmental Champions. His most lasting contribution in this area may be his book Silton Seasons (1975), a month-by-month account of what he found in the natural world outside his door in Silton, near Last Mountain Lake. I published that remarkable local and universal book, adding a sad editor’s note that told of Bob’s death in 1973.

  He only came to Toronto once in my time, and I vividly remember the short, slim man in the white Stetson who lit up every room with his enthusiasm. I saw him being interviewed by the Toronto Star’s book man, Peter Sypnowich, and at the end heard Bob express his pleasure at meeting him by telling the surprised journalist, “I like the cut of your jib!”

  He was a man from a different era. When he invited my brother to stay at Meadowlark Cottage in Silton on his way back from graduate work in California, he couched the invitation in language that included phrases like “Mark you, ’twill be no easy task.” My brother Peter spent some time with Bob, working hard in the Silton vegetable garden, Voltaire-style, with the political and environmental ills of the world being solved between the two enthusiastic talkers.

  Some time after his death I visited Hope at their trim Silton cottage, where pride of place went to Bob’s old saddle, lovingly preserved. It seemed right. It also seemed right that one of the sons of this man out of time had moved down to South America, ranching in such hostile frontier territory that his letters home, as Bob quoted them to me, told of attacks on his household “with flaming arrows.”

  His influence lives on. On a recent birding trip near Silton, the marvellous award-winning nature writer Trevor Herriot told me that as a young man he once sought out the old tent circle hidden on the prairie where Bob had sat, imagining earlier generations of native hunters camped in that spot.

  In that passage in Silton Seasons you get a sense of Bob’s magic:

  I think I can hear the thumping of hobbled horses — lean, fleet Indian mustangs. They crop the young grass, and pause and look intently now this way, now that, blowing softly, then they crop again — but their ears are not still, and flit back and forth, for they were foaled on these plains and know its hazards. Steadily they tear the squeaking grass, and their jaw muscles work back and forth over the bony structures below their liquid eyes.

  Squeaking grass. All these years later, young Trevor was able to sit there on the silent grass, imagining Bob letting his imagination roam, and in turn finding inspiration for a writing career.

  “Cancel the lunch appointment at the Westbury, Carol. Mr. Horwood is not wearing shoes!”

  That exact quote summarizes the famous incident when the old take-the-author-to-lunch-and-feed-him-steak-with-martinis publishing culture (represented by George Nelson, a predecessor of mine at Doubleday Canada) crashed rudely up against the counter-culture of the sixties (represented by the long-haired Harold Horwood, in sandals).

  Born in St. John’s in 1923, into a seafaring family that had been in Newfoundland for three centuries, Harold was in his forties when he came to the hippie world. But by then he had already packed several lives into his single allotted one. After quarrelling with his parents about his plans for a literary career he went, not to a university, but into a life of labouring jobs, starting as a longshoreman on the St. John’s waterfront. In turn this led to a life as an organizer with the Canadian Congress of Labour, and then as a crusading journalist and editor heavily involved in the campaign to bring Newfoundland into Canada in 1949. In this he was a major ally of Joey Smallwood, whose biography, Joey, he was to write in 1989.

  I encountered Joey, who revelled in the title “The Last Living Father of Confederation,” when he was touring Toronto publishers in the early 1970s, tempting them with the prospect of publishing his memoirs. He was the only author I ever met who, in the confines of a small publishing office, rose to his feet and began to pace, thumbs in his lapels, addressing a gaping audience of two like a huge public meeting. As he strode up and down, orating, with full gestures, he struck me the same way as he did Harry Bruce, who described him as a small man with “a head like an otter.” He was sleek in other ways, too, and like so many perennially successful politicians, was a lovable rogue. He was not offended, I’m sure, by the story of his electioneering tour of St. John’s alongside his fellow Liberal, Lester Pearson, who was waving cheerfully to the crowds their car skirted. When they passed a cemetery, Pearson stopped waving — to be scolded by Joey that he was neglecting some of his most reliable voters.

  Ah, Newfoundland.

  Harold Horwood worked hard for two years as Joey’s “left-hand man” on the campaign to bring Newfoundland into Canada — which, lest we forget, was a very close decision. Then he joined Smallwood’s government in the House of Assembly from 1949 to 1951 as the Member for Labrador.

  To most Canadians Labrador is just a name, a complete mystery, a place where nobody goes. I am one of the lucky few who have sailed out of Ungava Bay all the way around Cape Chidley, then southeast down the entire coast of Labrador, which stretches almost as far as the distance from New York to Florida. It is another world, split by magical fjords fringed with black mountains plunging 5,000 feet (1,500 metres) into the sea, and the word “rugged” doesn’t beg
in to do it justice. Twenty years after his time representing the area, in White Eskimo (1972) Harold wrote about one part of Labrador:

  To port were the mountains of Aulatsivk Island, to starboard the southern extension of the Kiglapaites. We could see snow falling on their peaks, and shafts of sunlight through the clouds turning them from slate-gray to pure yellow. The lower slopes were red and brown, with icefalls cutting pale gray swaths down their sides. Naked blocks of black basalt rose through the snow, as though the rocks had crystallized ages ago into ice cubes bigger than cathedrals — as perhaps they had. It is awesome country — the most impressive bit of geography I have ever seen. Sailing through it is rather like sailing through a valley in the Rocky Mountains.

  The author’s biography in that novel pays tribute to Harold’s hard-won knowledge of that hidden land, from his time representing the huge area in the Newfoundland legislature: “He has travelled there extensively on his own boat, by other small boats and ships, by bush plane, by dogteam, and by canoe (which he was taught to use by a Labrador Indian).”

  Later, he refers to travelling “many of the inland waters described in this book, in company with a party of Eskimo hunters.” He did this in 1968, assisted by a Canada Council grant, possibly the very one that might otherwise have gone to the resentful Leacock scholar, David Legate.

  Long before then, of course, Harold’s formal political career had ended (everyone of independent mind eventually broke with Smallwood) and he was busy with his own new life as a crusading journalist, a political columnist, and an editor, creating an influential literary magazine, Protocol, on what the Globe and Mail’s obituary called “a hand-set typepress in Harold Horwood’s bedroom.” After founding a labour newspaper, the Examiner, which ran for two years, he even travelled as a delegate to the founding convention of the NDP in Ottawa in 1962. Thanks to training by the famous ornithologist, L.M. Tuck, for whom he worked as a field assistant and editor, he became a skilful naturalist who went on expeditions with his great pal Farley Mowat, another man of immensely varied, yet wildly unpredictable, talents. Indecent exposure rarely features in formal Globe and Mail obituaries, but J.M. Sullivan broke the taboo. When Farley stayed with Harold at his place on Beachy Cove outside St. John’s, “Mr. Mowat’s penchant for parading around in nothing but boots had startled the local fishermen.” Ah, yes, Farley.