Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

  William also became a teacher – what kind?

  His friend, William ‘Leander’ Todd, had set up a private school in Church Street, Whitehaven, in the Autumn of 1825. His advertisements in the Cumberland Pacquet show the kind of curriculum William, with his similar education, might have offered his students.

  [H]e purposes teaching the English, Latin, and Greek, Languages, grammatically; Book-keeping, Geography, the Use of the Globes, Arithmetic, and the various Branches of Mathematics.§§§§§

  A couple of years later, he noted that he also taught ‘the Principles of Composition, Versification, the Classics, &c’.¶¶¶¶¶ It is hard to imagine that, on a fine day, William didn’t take his pupils outside and get them wrestling.

  After a few unsettled years, the Memoirist says, ‘a more certain and easier mode of life was offered to [William] in the profession of a teacher, which he accepted’.||||||||||

  To me, it seemed likely that he had a guarantee of work from one of the richer Protestant families on the northern coast of Isle Jesus, about fifteen miles from Montréal. Despite spending several days looking at state records, I couldn’t find any mention of him owning a house there, or leaving property of any sort. I imagined him as a lodger, hopefully beloved.

  William eventually came to live in the quiet, waterside Saint-Rose parish on Ile Jesus. It was a divided place. The Protestant and Catholic communities lived with as great a separation as they could manage. They spoke different languages, attended different churches. They even had different diets – the Anglophones cultivated potatoes, the Francophones grew wheat and said spuds were only fit for pigs. Of course, their children were not educated together.

  William may have taught in a schoolhouse, but with fewer than a hundred adult Britons living on the whole island, his classes must always have been very small. I pictured him as more a private tutor than a headmaster.

  This was the last of William’s identities. Plough-boy, wrestler, writer, smuggler, husbandman, umpire, brewer – he had passed through all of them. When he died, he was set down in the parish register as ‘William Lett, schoolmaster of the Parish of St Rose, County of Terrebonne & District of Montreal’.******

  William did not speak well of his new occupation. Teachers in Canada, he said, ‘are in no danger of starving; – and when they have acquired some knowledge of the country must just do the best they can, for I do not remember any schoolmaster who personified that imaginary rhodomontade of Thompson’s “Delightful task, &c.” which is very fine in every thing but the realisation’.††††††

  What William was alluding to here were the lines in James Thompson’s 1782 poem ‘Spring’ – a poem William probably had to learn by heart when himself a schoolboy:

  Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,

  To teach the young idea how to shoot,

  To pour the fresh instruction o’er the mind,

  To breathe the enlivening spirit, and to fix

  The generous purpose in the glowing breast.‡‡‡‡‡‡

  In other words, William meant, this is the sentimental view. For most teachers, the realization is less soft-focus.

  I teach.

  I can’t support myself, as I used to, just by writing books.

  I teach creative writing.

  Like sports punditry, any kind of teaching is taken as a byword for failure. ‘He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches’.§§§§§§

  But of all subjects, creative writing is the one that comes in for the hardest time. A regular arts news story is ‘Can creative writing be taught?’

  In the combative spirit of William, I recently came up with what I thought was a good answer for this. I was being interviewed and was feeling feisty.¶¶¶¶¶¶

  I would like to end this forever. I invite anyone who doesn’t believe creative writing can be taught to read the work of three creative writing students from the Birkbeck MA. First, to read the work they submit when they apply, and then to read those same students’ final dissertations. You will see what attending a creative writing MA has taught them. You will find their work has got a lot better. If you want to, you can also compare their progress, over the same period, to the writing of someone who was accepted onto the MA but wasn’t able to take up their place. This is a serious, open invitation.

  ‘Creative writing’ is a university subject; it’s not the same as ‘writing’, although – if the teaching is honest – there should be a large overlap, and it’s certainly not the same as ‘great writing’.

  Great writing cannot be taught. The only way this would be possible is if one were able to encourage a student to write in a particular way, then time-travel say a hundred years into the future, to see whether people had come to believe that student was a great writer.

  We can’t go forwards in time, but we can go back. Henry & Mary is about as self-tutored a novel as you could find. As my Dad said, it’s ‘a bit hard going’. But most of the fiction written most of the time by most wannabe writers is hard going. Most writing, unsurprisingly, is bad.

  At my most negative, in thinking about what I teach, I believe that creative writing courses in the last forty years have merely raised the level of mediocrity.

  At the beginning of each term, I tell my students two things: There are no short cuts and There is no wasted effort.

  I was in the pub recently, with a group of students, and one of them took me up on There are no short cuts.

  ‘But isn’t doing a creative writing course a short cut?’ he asked.

  For a moment, I was stumped. Then I realized I did have an answer. There really aren’t any short cuts. You have to do your bad writing (expelling the black bile, as I like to describe it). You have to go through every bit of being clumsy and clunky that you have to go through – and you have to do that on your own time. You have to make bespoke mistakes. No one else, no teacher, can do this for you.

  However, studying creative writing can speed up your progress. Partly because you’re writing a lot more. Partly because you’re writing for a group of committed, exacting readers. And partly because you’ll have a teacher to help you stop loving yourself quite so much.

  I find the best students the hardest to teach. ‘Keep going,’ I end up saying. ‘I’d like to read more.’

  I like teaching; I believe it is mostly worthwhile.

  But that’s not to say I don’t occasionally dream of reading Shakespeare and watching the seasons turn from my log cabin.

  * On 4 May 1990.

  † The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

  ‡ The Czech and Slovak Federative Republic.

  § The Czech Republic.

  ¶ Wrestling and Wrestlers: Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Athletes of the Northern Ring, Wordsworth Press, 1893, p. 70.

  || Cleator Moor Notes, News, and Views [By “Denton”.] ‘Henry and Mary Again’, Cumberland Pacquet, 21 March 1929.

  ** She was Nanny Litt’s daughter.

  †† Cleator Moor Notes, News, and Views [By “Denton”.] ‘Henry and Mary Again’, Cumberland Pacquet, 21 March 1929.

  ‡‡ ‘Memoir of the Author’, Henry & Mary, 2nd ed., p. x.

  §§ Whitehaven Free Press, ‘Random Recollections and Stray Passages in the Life of a Native of Whitehaven, containing Remembrances about Whitehaven some 60 to 70 years ago. Commenced 6th May, 1857, and brought to a close, 8th August 1869.’

  ¶¶ The Letters appeared in the Cumberland Pacquet eight long years later.

  |||| All travel advice comes from Letter No. 2, dated ‘Island of Montreal, June 2nd, 1840’.

  *** Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, Penguin, 1980, p. 144.

  ††† Tocqueville Au Bas-Canada, edited by Jacques Vallee, Les Éditions du Jour, 1973, p. 88.

  ‡‡‡ George Bilson, A Darkened House: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Canada, University of Toronto Press, 1980, p. 7. An extraordinary book.

  §§§ Francis Ramsay Simpson’s diary, from 1830, quoted in the small
details of LIFE: 20 diaries by women in Canada, 1830–1996, edited by Kathryn Carter, University of Toronto Press, 2002, p. 46,

  ¶¶¶ Details from Paul-André Linteau, translated by Peter McCambridge, The History of Montréal: The Story of a Great North American City, Baraka Books, 2013, p. 84.

  |||||| George Bilson, A Darkened House: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Canada, University of Toronto Press, 1980, p. 24.

  **** Letter No. 4. William’s use of ‘sojourn’ is telling. Eight years after arriving, he was implicitly describing his stay as temporary.

  †††† http://www.theshipslist.com/Forms

  /EmigFromUK1815_1870.shtml, retrieved 17 December 2015, 13:28.

  ‡‡‡‡ Details from Paul-André Linteau, trans. Peter McCambridge, The History of Montréal: The Story of a Great North American City, Baraka Books, 2013, p. 73.

  §§§§ Cleator Moor Notes, News, and Views [By “Denton”.] ‘Henry and Mary Again’, Cumberland Pacquet, 21 March 1929.

  ¶¶¶¶ Wrestling and Wrestlers: Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Athletes of the Northern Ring, Wordsworth Press, 1893, p. 69.

  |||||||| Wrestling and Wrestlers: Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Athletes of the Northern Ring; to which is Added Notes on Bull and Badger Baiting, Wordsworth Press, Carlisle, 1893, p. 69.

  ***** ‘Memoir of the Author’, Henry & Mary, 2nd ed., p. x.

  ††††† History of the Book in Canada: Beginnings to 1840, Volume I, edited by Patricia Lockhart Fleming, Gilles Gallichan, Yvan Lamonde, University of Toronto Press, 2004, p. 237.

  ‡‡‡‡‡ Ibid., p. 69.

  §§§§§ Cumberland Pacquet, 6 September 1825.

  ¶¶¶¶¶ Cumberland Pacquet and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser, Tuesday, 24 June 1828.

  |||||||||| ‘Memoir of the Author’, Henry & Mary, 2nd ed., p. x.

  ****** Ancestry-Quebec Vital Registers-Records & Church Register [Droin Collection] 1621–1967; Burial-Laval, Anglican Saint Vincent de Paul, Reg. [Photo Au Graffe De Montreal 1051–1052].

  †††††† Letter No. 3.

  ‡‡‡‡‡‡ James Thompson, The Seasons, ‘Spring’, T. Hurst, 1802, p. 44, lines 1149–1153.

  §§§§§§ George Bernard Shaw, ‘Maxims for Revolutionists: Education’, Man and Superman, Constable, 1903, p. 30.

  ¶¶¶¶¶¶ http://onlinewritingtips.com/2015/11

  /13/author-interview-toby-litt/, retrieved 22 January 2016, 10:45.

  19

  REVOLUTION

  William was always taking sides.

  As an Englishman living in Quebec, he could not help but side with the English-speaking minority.

  Canada is usually thought of as a peaceful country – forests, lakes, geese. But by the 1830s, Canadien resentment of British rule had brought them to the point of revolution. And William was there to see it.

  The eight letters, all addressed ‘To the EDITOR of the CUMBERLAND PACQUET’, were written in a great rush between June 1st and June 11th 1840.

  I had brought copies of them with me to Quebec. I reread them in my hotel room.

  In the letters, William covers the laws governing rents, marriages, and wills; the use of the plough, the scythe, the spade, and the flail; soil types; crop yields; butter yields; whether or not to plant particular vegetables; the price of a good milk cow; the best design for a one-horse sledge; how to counteract the effects of frostbite; differences in national types between the English, Irish, Scots, Americans and Canadians.

  A far more famous report on Canada, written for the British Government by Lord Durham in 1839, describes the English- and French-speaking populations as ‘two nations warring within the bosom of a single state’.

  William laid out his own political journey when he wrote, ‘After one year’s residence in Canada I became convinced that a great change in the manner of living among the French population must necessarily take place, and my anticipations have already been verified…’*

  Elsewhere, he described the Canadiens in a way that suggests the exasperation of close acquaintance. It was one of his liveliest bits of satirical writing:

  … the national feelings and habits of the Canadians make them difficult to deal with in a busy time… for no people can surpass the Canadians in the choice of time for making a bargain. Though submissive and anxious to work when you are indifferent about him, the moment you are busy, or in a strait, the same person will be the first to harass you. He will dictate what diet he must have; you must increase his daily wage; you must advance him money, or he cannot work; it is an holiday; or he will leave you, which he is certain to do if he is in your debt, even if he starves for a few days; and when the hurry is over he will come back as confidently as if nothing had happened…

  Here is an Englishman, describing the French. He even added, ‘commonly, from four or five years of age, the pipe is their constant companion, and smoking often trespasses upon their hours of labour’.

  William continued by criticizing the accounts of ‘the Canadian character’ given by ‘non-residents’ and ‘gentlemanly’ witnesses.

  They have seen the poorest amongst them bowing and accosting each other with more politeness and ceremony than is usual with gentlemen in England; and their limited intercourse with them has been characterised by apparent frankness, obsequiousness, and smiles. Now all this is undoubtedly true. These therefore speak of them as a well meaning, polite, honest, hospitable, and open-hearted friendly race of people. Now let me reverse the picture.

  Brace yourself.

  Consult the old country people [the Brits], settled amongst them in the country, who have had the experience of daily intercourse and business with them for years, and have been obliged to employ them both in the house and on the farm; and what will these people tell you?

  Really brace yourself.

  They will, I believe, almost universally maintain, that they are a mean, selfish, deceitful, and with very few exceptions, man and woman, a general race of liars and thieves.

  But what does William himself think, from his own experience?

  Being for some time, and during the two years of the rebellion, a resident among them, many of the prominent traits of their national character were too obvious to be mistaken. I considered them selfish, cunning, and impressed with the idea that every emigrant from the United Kingdom was a trespasser upon their rights; but…

  At last, the but.

  … but these qualities and ideas are the natural consequences of a total want of education, and prejudices fostered in youth, and more encouraged than checked by spiritual teachers, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the introduction of Protestant settlers. I believe that a great majority of those employed by the old country farmers [Brits] were addicted to pilfering, but the uncertainty attendant upon civil commotions might have some influence upon their actions, as well as opinions.†

  This is far more liberal than one might expect, given William’s earlier effusions about how easily we beat up the French at Waterloo.

  William had grown up around Protestants. He disliked Catholicism. That was not going to change. Particularly not as, in this vivid scene, he directly links the Canadians’ widely reputed ineptitude at farming (refusing to leave their fields fallow, pursue crop rotation) to their religious beliefs:

  One [Canadien] considerably above the common level was thus addressed, when sewing Wheat two years ago upon the same field for the fourth time, with one furrow, and no improvement [of the soil] whatever: – “Your Wheat has failed the last two years; why do you not try Oats, and lay it down with grass seeds?” He immediately replied – “I did think of that; but I consulted the Priest, and he said it was sinful to doubt the goodness of God, who would order every thing for the best!” I myself witnessed, for two successive years, the reverend Father riding along the concessions, at the head of the parishioners, to discharge the flies for destroying the Wheat.

  Of course, the harvest failed once again, and ‘a great many fields were not worth cutting, and
the crops were left to rot upon the ground’.

  The Priests, William averred, were keen to encourage the sewing of wheat because they received dues on the crop. They were to blame for the ‘deterioration of the land, and the wretched husbandry which has so long prevailed among the Canadians’. He then, unexpectedly, switched into the radical language of the French Revolution to say, ‘and it is surely time that the cultivators should shake off a thraldom so besotted and degrading…’

  Earlier in the same letter, he said that ‘many Canadians show evident signs of shaking off their apathy, and joining in the march of improvement’.

  From a lifelong Tory, this ‘shaking off’ was the radical language of uprising. Why? Well, a first attempt at a Canadian revolution had already taken place.

  When I got my scraps of evidence, and stitched them together, I was able to place William close to one of the most dramatic, and violent, episodes in Canadian history.‡ But – more than that – I knew from his own words that he had seen one of the main revolutionaries speak.

  Typically, William came at this sideways. He was criticizing the Canadiens for refusing to eat oats, the native breakfast of Cumbrians. He continued to detail the inferior diet of the French-speakers:

  Potatoes were no great favourites with them, and, as for oatmeal, the old country people were [they thought] pigs for eating it! It is a fact, that persuading them they would be forced to eat it, was an affective topic with the patriot leaders to induce them to rebel.

  Then he gets to it, the closest Canada has ever come to revolution, and their great revolutionary hero: