Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  I knew, and published, Farley in my time at McClelland & Stewart, visiting him at his retreat in the small lakeside town of Port Hope. (Earlier, when Port Hope had trouble with nuclear fuel there, it came to regret its motto “The Town That Radiates Happiness” — but someone who went along with giving a fine novel the time-limited title White Eskimo is in no position to sneer.) By then Farley was living happily with the sobering influence of his wife, Claire, but he was still small, fierce, bearded, outspoken, and proudly controversial. He used to claim that his feud with the United States — which saw him as a dangerous left-winger, possibly because he opposed the Vietnam War, but possibly because he also (gasp) had written an admiring book about Siberia and its Commie people — led him to discharge shotgun blasts at American planes flying overhead. Thousands of feet overhead.

  Farley is a great storyteller, even to the extent of talking about his reluctance to “let the facts get in the way of the truth.” Certainly stories about him are legion, many of them possibly even true. Two of my favourites are worth mentioning.

  Once, in his drinking days, he was resentfully completing a coast-to-coast book signing tour for a new book. An expectant crowd at a Victoria bookstore was lined up around the store and into the street. What they could not see was the delivery lane at the back, where the panting local McClelland & Stewart sales rep was hauling, hands under the armpits, a small comatose body out of his car and into the back door of the store. With his feet trailing, Farley was dragged inside the storage room and plumped into a chair. “Farley, Farley!” helpful voices shouted at him, “Can you hear us?” They tried to thrust a pen into his hand, asking, “Farley, can you sign your name?” They may have tried pouring coffee into him, may even have tried gently slapping his face, but all that his pen produced looked like the final entry in a dying explorer’s diary, along the lines of “tired . . . so tired . . . the pen slips from my fing . . .” ending in a sad vertical line. It wasn’t going to work, and the scores of Mowat-lovers lined up in front of the store were growing restive — yes, even in Victoria.

  It was time for a stroke of genius.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Mowat has arrived, and is in the building.” (Mollified sounds from the crowd.) “Unfortunately, he has come down with what he fears may be a very infectious type of flu, and he’s afraid of spreading it. So what we’re going to do is have him sign copies of his new book in our back room, and you will all get your own signed copies.”

  And in the back room the M&S man rolled up his sleeves and began to sign, “Best wishes, Farley Mowat,” over and over again.

  The other story concerns a fundraising dinner for the Writers’ Trust. To raise money for this worthy charity, well-known writers would allow themselves to be rented out, for a handsome fee, as guests at smart dinner parties that the other guests could talk about for years. Apparently Farley was the Guest of Honour at just such a party in an upper-crust home in Toronto’s Rosedale district, where the table was laden with the finest in glasses, plates, napery, and wines. He behaved well, at least until the hostess proudly produced a large, creamy bowl of whipped dessert and placed it carefully at the far end of the table.

  This was Farley’s moment to give the guests their money’s worth. Climbing onto the table in his kilt (as an occasional kilt-wearing man, I shrink from explaining the implications), he began to crawl vigorously down towards the distant bowl, sending all of the table’s precious contents flying. Then, dog-like, he plunged his bearded face deep into the dessert bowl, and proceeded to eat from it, very loudly, and very messily.

  The guests were scandalized/delighted. “That Farley Mowat, I was once at a dinner party with him, and you wouldn’t believe . . .”

  Harold Horwood — as I was saying when great stories about Farley interrupted me — went on several expeditions to wild natural places with Farley. It’s interesting that Harold laughed off Farley’s famous Never Cry Wolf moment of, supposedly, frying up and eating a pan-full of mice to test their nutritional value. “Oh, that’s just Farley,” said Harold, affectionately.

  In time, Harold began to write his own books. Before my day at Doubleday Canada, in 1966 he wrote and published Tomorrow Will Be Sunday, a powerful, bleak novel of life in Newfoundland that deals with a devastating rape at a religious school (naturally, this was long before the horrors visited upon the boys at Mount Cashel were revealed). By way of contrast, he also wrote a delightful nature book (one that did not involve the author in eating mice), entitled The Foxes of Beachy Cove, in 1967. (Beachy Cove is surprisingly close to St. John’s, near Portugal Cove, and hard by the ferry to Bell Island that, open to the Atlantic swells, reminds visitors like me that a great big sea surrounds Newfoundland. The landscape at its easternmost point, Cape Spear, reminds anyone from Scotland or Ireland that, thousands of miles to the east, the same rocks and vegetation climb out of the same grey sea, as if joined by an underwater chain.) Now he was on a roll, and wrote the Newfoundland volume in the Provinces of Canada series in 1969, and revised it a few years later. He was clearly becoming the Newfoundland writer, even if as Sullivan puts it, he was “outspoken, flamboyant, and dynamic . . . a man of large gestures and a substantially gruff manner. His singular, sometimes prickly personality infused his writing.”

  In this chapter’s subtitle I have referred to Harold as a “neglected genius.” Let me explain that phrase, since he was rewarded in 1980 for his literary career with an Order of Canada, not usually a mark of neglect. Right from the start Harold struck me as having a truly amazing intelligence, the type that comes from a world where university degrees are less important than much reading, close contemplation of the things around you, and hard thought. How many writers would list their recreations as “music, mathematics, boating, ornithology, gardening,” while writing more than twenty books that range from pirates to politics, from novels to folklore, and from poetry to accurately observed science in the natural world? In yet another arena, the Writers’ Union of Canada found him to be an incisive chair, and at all times a swift and certain authority on procedures and rules of order. I speak affectionately, as an honorary member of the Writers’ Union, when I say that the phrase “herding cats” springs to mind, but not when the cats were under the bright spotlight of Harold’s shining intellect, and his crisp, slightly nasal, commands from the wheelhouse.

  What impressed me most, though, was his genius as a writer. I could have an editorial discussion with him where I would — for the first time — raise the possibility that it might be good to add an extra paragraph here. “Ah, yes,” Harold would say, “something like this.” And then he would reel off five or six polished sentences that made the ideal paragraph. And I would say, “Er, yes — that’s perfect.”

  I never knew another writer with such amazing fluency, and such confidence — which could, of course, be misunderstood. Once Harold made the mistake of using the word “genius” about himself on TV in St. John’s, and I certainly heard about it.

  As for “neglected,” consider how familiar you, dear reader, are with his work, compared with the household names featured elsewhere in this book. I’m sorry now that I didn’t manage to remain his publisher throughout, setting him higher and higher goals.

  I’m sorry, too, that I never saw him in action as a teacher of creative writing. He may well have been excellent. Alternatively, on the principle that superb natural athletes make lousy coaches, because they never really had to learn their skills, he might not have been very good. But simply being in close contact with that blazing intelligence must have been a great education for the writers who studied under him at Memorial, or later in Ontario at Western and Waterloo, where he was a Writer-in-Residence.

  When I first met him in Toronto, I was delighted by this energetic, long-haired Viking-ish character, who looked shrewdly at you through rimless glasses and, with a long-toothed smile, burst into fox-like barks of laughter if he liked your jokes. He was of middle height, b
road-chested, as was appropriate to his labouring past, and he always seemed very fit, although I never heard him speak of exercise — apart from vigorous tasks like taking flaming torches on long poles to burn out an infestation of tent caterpillars.

  Unlike George Nelson, I was pleased by his dashiki and sandals (and by the news that for a year he ran a hippie school in St. John’s called “Animal Farm” for high-school dropouts), and very pleased indeed by the car that he had driven all the way to Toronto from Newfoundland. When I peered into the back seat, it was indeed possible that the disorder contained a kitchen sink.

  “Harold,” I said, “it looks as if you have rabbits in there!” He was not offended. It may even at one time have been true.

  Our first book together, White Eskimo, allowed Harold to make great use of his travels in Labrador. One section reads: “The Eskimos still talk of the morning the giant stranger came down out of the hills in the dead of winter, dressed in the skin of a white bear, driving a team of white dogs . . .” The plot follows the deeds of a heroic rebel named Gillingham (and Harold was such a scholar that I’m certain that the echoes of the ancient Gilgamesh epic were deliberate) who sets up a trading empire in Labrador in the twentieth century. In the process, his own journeys are epic, and they involve the Indian, Inuit, and white inhabitants of the stark land where sheer cliffs rise out of the Atlantic, and powerful spirits haunt the interior. What’s notable, too, is Harold’s unsympathetic treatment of the sainted medical missionary, Sir Wilfred Grenfell, whose mission he despises. His radical views — against the Grenfell Mission, the missionaries in general, and the big traders — come through loud and clear in this book by an author who was later to deal admiringly with pirates.

  One of his greatest achievements, however, was very quiet, and that is the assistance he gave to Cassie Brown for her book, Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914, a great classic, known to every school child in Newfoundland down through the years since we brought it out in 1972.

  Cassie was a Newfoundlander, born and bred, who rose to become a reporter and columnist for the Daily News in St. John’s for seven years, as well a writer of stage and radio plays. Somewhere along the line, though, she decided to research and write a book about the historic sealing disaster, when confusion led to ships sailing around a stranded party on the ice, each believing that another ship had picked up the men, who in reality were freezing to death. She did so, and submitted it to me for publication.

  Sadly, the manuscript she turned in was only about 30,000 words long (enough to make a book of, roughly, only 100 pages). The story she had to tell, I wrote back to say, was very powerful and deserved a full book, but to stretch her story to book length she’d have to research this, and this, and this, and write much more about this, and that, and the other. Harold, I should say, got involved very helpfully at this stage, suggesting themes to be developed, and, above all, encouraging Cassie with his enthusiasm. But what we were proposing, I knew, would take months, maybe even years, of work — and if events followed the usual pattern I would never hear from her again.

  Never underestimate a determined woman from Newfoundland, especially one with the straight, regal bearing of white-haired Cassie Brown. In my talks to editors and writers I use her name as an inspiration. (Incredibly, I was able to give such a talk in 2009, on a ship that had sailed, just a few hours earlier, across the very spot on the ocean floor where the bones of some of the stranded men still lie.) Because, by God, back she came, many months later, with a greatly expanded book, more than double the size of her first version. She had not been discouraged by my horrifying demands, but had buckled down and produced a fine, publishable book.

  But there was something missing. With Cassie’s agreement, I asked my friend Harold — who knew Newfoundland history in his bones, and whose grandfather had skippered a sealing ship — to take a look at this version of the manuscript. Would he, I asked, be willing to write a foreword? And could he, I wondered, in an editorial role take a hand in refining the manuscript, perhaps even adding some vivid touches?

  Harold replied yes to both invitations. His foreword concludes:

  This is Cassie Brown’s book, not mine. She did more than nine-tenths of all the work on it. My contribution was limited to editorial advice, mainly to cutting and trimming the narrative from a much longer one to its present length.

  Death on the Ice is the most moving story I have ever read. I am proud to have had some small part in preparing it for publication.

  This is very generous, but the way he restricts his own role is not entirely accurate; he also added some very useful touches. Here’s what I’m sure is a Horwood paragraph, showing how vividly he wrote when he added such dramatic touches:

  The eager seal hunters knew what they were heading for — a terrible voyage, living and working like dogs, their arms constantly caked in blood up to the shoulder, short of sleep, and with little time to do more than snatch a bite to eat, and working, constantly cold, on heaving, cracking sheets of ice that could give way under them or break off and float away with them into the icy darkness — they knew all this, but they cheerfully flocked into St. John’s to volunteer, in fact to compete, for tickets to berths on the ships going “to the ice.” This was their one chance to earn hard cash. And besides, what else was there for a fisherman to do in Newfoundland in March?

  I published the book as “by Cassie Brown” (then, in smaller type) “with Harold Horwood,” an accurate description. When on Harold’s death in 2006, an obituary restricted his role in this great classic to merely writing the foreword, I wrote a detailed account, setting the record straight, in a letter to the St. John’s paper.

  I did so because the book’s account of the courage of the men in the lost party — one of whom froze his lips biting off the eyelash icicles that were blinding his comrades, all of them shuffling endlessly in circles on the ice, since to sit or lie down was to die, as over seventy men did before rescue came — is so unforgettable that it is a huge, continuing success. Even the ongoing debate about the seal hunt has not destroyed the modern reader’s respect for these threadbare men a century ago who went to the ice as part of their traditional struggle to keep starvation at bay.

  Two footnotes: first, to produce the cover illustration I turned to a young, leather-aproned printmaker named David Blackwood, who had already produced art on the lost party. In no time, he produced a magnificent print specially for the cover, and at the end of it all, quietly presented me with his original print, as a gift. It hangs in my house, instantly recognizable as a work by the David Blackwood whose prints have become so famous in the world of art.

  Second, when the book was offered to bookstores across Canada, from B.C. to Nova Scotia we ran into a chorus of rejections from booksellers who refused to stock more than a token number of copies of the book, because it was “just a Newfoundland book.” Meanwhile, newspapers as far away as Australia were running excerpts from this amazing story. Sometimes the provincial barriers in our country are discouragingly high.

  Time for a personal confession: I never met a Newfoundlander I didn’t like. Newfoundlanders I have known include the hungover young fellow who sat beside me on one flight from Halifax to St. John’s. From the moment we were in the air, he was pleading with the flight attendant for a can of beer, wheedling for an urgent hair of the dog. When she relented, he grabbed the can gratefully, then nudged me.

  “Watch my buddy there.”

  Buddy, sprawled in the seat across the aisle, was more than hungover, he was unconscious. Yet when my pal, with the skill and timing of a great magician, held his beer can aloft, and gently pulled off the tab with a tiny “Pfftt,” Buddy sprang to life, sitting bolt upright, eyes wide open, head sweeping wildly from side to side, while his pal nudged me again in delight.

  I think of my friend Daniel Jones, the fiddler and folk singer from Cow Head, who — despite his yards of long red ha
ir — can strut a mean Elvis routine, in costume. You had to be there, maybe — as I was on the cruise down Newfoundland’s west coast with Daniel (not to mention Latonia Hartery, the singing anthropologist, who can jump ashore on any Labrador beach and find you a centuries-old dwelling site in twenty minutes), and my cabinmate Dennis Minty, nature photographer without peer. True Newfoundlanders, all of them, with “ranting and roaring” available only on demand. We stopped in to meet the folk who live in fine places like Woody Point and La Poile, a seabound port with no access by land, where I met a brave teacher whose school must be in trouble, since it has only six pupils. And among the crew of young writers from the Rock, I know and like long, tall Michael Winter, and Michael Crummey, who comes up to about Winter’s waist, but writes big, as they say.

  I missed the chance to publish Joey Smallwood’s memoirs, as you know, but in 1993, when John Crosbie retired from politics, Avie Bennett, the owner of M&S, and I thought that it would be worth persuading him to write a book. John is a very bright man, the winner of gold medals at university, and he and Geoffrey Stevens combined well to produce a fine book, which we published as No Holds Barred, with a fighting photo on the cover of John damning all the Liberals who ever lived.

  I had two problems with the book. The first was persuading my colleagues that this podium-thumping politician, the man who had Punch-and-Judy verbal fun with Sheila Copps in and out of the House (ascribing her lateness to one event to “trouble with her broomstick”), in private was a very shy, reserved man who would sit quietly, rarely making eye contact with new people in a meeting around a table.