Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  What was remarkable is that the Winnipeg audience proved to be made up of old friends from various parts of my publishing past. Notable among them was David Friesen, the former head of the famous printing company down the road in Altona, who had printed literally millions of copies of books by the authors I was talking about. I remember, for instance, that the huge print run of Pierre Trudeau’s Memoirs involved just about every living Mennonite in Altona.

  But for me the highlight was the appearance in the audience of Don Starkell. To be precise, this was the dry husk of Don Starkell. The mighty man who had taken a canoe south from Winnipeg in an epic journey later described in Paddle to the Amazon (1987) was long gone. So was the Northern adventurer who had boldly paddled and dragged a kayak from Churchill all the way through the Northwest Passage in Paddle to the Arctic (1995).

  Readers of the best adventure travel books know that Don put an open canoe in the Red River, with his two teenage sons, and paddled it all the way south to Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon. During the 12,000-mile journey they took on the whole Mississippi, drug smugglers, soldiers, sharks, alligators, drought, starvation, and sickness, and benefitted from the kindness of strangers.

  One of his sons (the sensible one) quit when they were being swamped again and again by incoming waves broadsiding them as they crept along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Yet Don and young Dana kept going, completing the longest canoe trip in history. And the book (assisted by the editorial hand of Thunder Bay’s Charles Wilkins) still provides very exciting reading. A real classic.

  Later, Don found it hard to settle back into everyday life in Winnipeg where he worked at the YMCA. So he devised another adventure: taking a kayak north from Churchill at the base of Hudson Bay all the way through the Northwest Passage, dragging the kayak across the ice when the sea froze. He made it almost unscathed (losing parts of his fingers and toes) and lived to write Paddle to the Arctic, another classic, and to continue paddling on the Red River. Early one morning years ago, I was scrambling beside the river near The Forks, trying to get the rising sun framed in the rose window of the ruined St. Boniface Cathedral when I saw a kayak in the shadows of the willows near the bank. Early morning? Winnipeg? A kayak? It had to be Don Starkell, as my shouted greetings soon established. We met and embraced on the bank before he paddled off up the Red River, to head west along the Assiniboine.

  I thought that he was superhuman and would live forever. But when he struggled out to attend my show in Winnipeg in October, it was clear that the cancer was winning, and every movement was painful. We talked affectionately, and our handshake with his shortened fingers turned into a farewell hug. His death came the following January. Still, he was in many ways superhuman. I am very glad that, like all authors, he had found a way to cheat death.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  HOGTOWN HEROES

  Reading in the Shadow of Queen’s Park … Waggling with Robertson Davies … Lunch with Marshall McLuhan … Learning with “Uncle Norrie” (aka Northrop Frye) … Al Purdy, Larger Than Life … Storytelling at the Royal Ontario Museum … The Politics of Queen’s Park … Visiting the Lieutenant-Governor … The Power Corner … Literary Bond Street … Grey Owl Fooled Everyone … Prime Ministers and Other Visitors … The Arts and Letters Club … Inside the York Club with Robertson Davies … Reading Michael Ondaatje’s Body of Work … In Praise of Margaret Atwood … An Objective Critic

  * * *

  The very first event in My Life as an Author began at the annual Word on the Street (WOTS) festival in September 2011 in Toronto’s Queen’s Park. In my role as wide-ranging Canadian publisher I’ve attended WOTS events in Halifax (on Spring Garden Road, or down by the Historic Properties, right beside the salt water) and Vancouver (outside the main library, whole blocks away from the salt water), but most years I was in freshwater Toronto.

  In the old days the festivities were held, literally, on the street (strung out along Queen Street West). When they expanded and moved, to cover the northern part of Queen’s Park with a sort of literary tent city, nobody suggested changing the name to the Word on the Park, or Words and Readers Park. (Pun lovers may remember that Don Harron and Catherine MacKinnon, holding a summer tented show in Prince Edward Island, gave it the audacious title “Loitering Within Tent.” Charlie Farquharson, no doubt, greatly approved, with his famous horse laugh.)

  My very first public appearance as a published author was a fraud. My book, you see, had not actually been released in bookstores, but finished copies did exist and, like Peter C. Newman (who recalled carrying his very first book around in his briefcase so that he could pull it out every so often to check that it really existed, with his name on the cover and everything!), I sneaked constant looks at it. But because copies were around, my “reading” was to be followed by a “signing.” Too much excitement! A little nervousness, too.

  The tent where I was to read was devoted to authors who qualified as (I’m not making this up) “Vibrant Voices of Ontario.” My less than vibrant voice was preceded by the respected author and teacher Antanas Sileika, reading from his new novel. I sensed this would be harder than being the publisher offering smiles of encouragement from the audience. I was brought to the stage and very respectfully introduced by our host Stuart Woods, then editor of publishing trade magazine Quill & Quire. Too respectfully, because a pall of silent reverence fell over the audience as I read what I thought was a laugh-along chapter in my book.

  The epilogue to Stories About Storytellers, “What Happens After My Book Is Published?,” is based on the handout entitled “Awful Warnings” that as a publisher I routinely supplied to first-time authors. My new authors always reacted with amusement as I predicted the terrible, Murphy’s Lawless things that would happen to them, and their books, in bookstores, in newspaper reviews, among their friends, in interviews, and so on. About six months later, a much more thoughtful response — along the lines of “I thought you were joking” — tended to come back to me.

  Little did I know, then, that in my role as author I was to experience indignities almost beyond imagining. One example: when I went to speak to the book club members of a prestigious, expensive downtown Toronto club, my wife asked me why I was taking the time to attend such a small-scale event. I told Jane that it would be a pleasant evening with a good meal in good company, and while the numbers would be small, everyone would bring along a copy of my book to be signed.

  And so it proved. Except when I opened the copy proffered by the nice, rich lady to my left for me to sign, I noticed that it was a Toronto Public Library edition. “I can’t sign this!” I objected, and she went away, offended. So did I, although it gave me a great story.

  Now, in the WOTS tent, despite my best intentions, it was my turn to suffer. The audience reacted solemnly as I told what I thought were hilarious stories of author readings going askew, although Stuart Woods defied one of my rules by getting neither my name nor the title of my book wrong at the end.

  After this funereal reception, I was ushered to the Authors’ Tent to sign copies, and soon fell into the role of the seated, smiling professional, remembering to make eye contact and beamishly asking, “How would you like me to sign this?” In all of the signing sessions that loomed in the future I never solved the perennial author’s problem of signing the book to an old friend whose name has slipped your mind. The usual fudge — “How do you spell your name, again?” — doesn’t work well with irritated people named Mary or Tom.

  Worse, I found myself grappling with signing decisions (Do I sign on the title page? Do I strike my pen through the author’s name printed there, as Robertson Davies used to do, delicately replacing the printed name with the freehand one? Should it be signed “to” the buyer, or “for” them? Should I be “Doug,” or “Doug Gibson,” or “Douglas Gibson”? Should I, like Pierre Berton, avoid giving any hint of my cheque-signing signature? And what should the personal
ized message be?) Who knew that so many decisions had to be made on the fly — as opposed to on the fly leaf — by the signing author?

  Even worse, I found that greed was affecting me as I sat there. To my horror, I found myself resenting the old friends who stood at the front of the (very short) line, chatting amiably but not buying a copy of the damned book! Oh dear, a new chapter in my life had just begun — the transformation from greedy publisher to greedy author.

  Queen’s Park, of course, is filled with literary memories. Robertson Davies, for example, used to stroll through the park, taking his morning constitutional walk from nearby Massey College, which lies just to the west. He was a striking Jehovah-like figure, his flowing white locks riding above a flowing white beard, and often topped by wide-brimmed, almost Cavalier-style hat. The effect was so striking, in fact, that dazzled observers claimed that he was wearing a cape. His family later denied this, explaining that the cape effect was given by the Inverness overcoat that he liked to wear, with the extra layer built in around the shoulders.

  He was not unaware of the effect he created as he processed around the park, brandishing his walking stick. In fact, after a stick-waggling exchange of greetings, he once drew aside another cane-user, Reed Needles (a young man who had a bad knee), to give him a lesson on the proper use of a stick. “He did not think I waggled properly,” Needles recalls in Val Ross’s book Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic (2008). “And he thought that as an actor I should know these things. So one day he took me to the long covered walkway outside the Trinity College Buttery, and we went up and down and he showed me how to swing the stick properly. One puts it down every fourth step, not every second.”

  On his way back to his Massey College home, R.D. (even in this fond recollection of my old friend, “Rob” seems improper) would pass by Trinity College. I was the editor/publisher behind the decision to put the distinctive roof-line of Trinity, set against a summer night sky, on the cover of The Rebel Angels (1981). Catching the full moon as it passed through the window in the notable central tower proved to be a major challenge for me and Peter Paterson, the chosen photographer. Along with his sturdy assistant, we panted our way around Trinity, lugging heavy wooden boxes full of Peter’s equipment, and somehow the mid-summer moon kept moving out of the shot.

  Eventually we decided that the perfect place for a shot in five minutes was from a window upstairs. I dashed up and discovered that it was in a washroom, with windows that opened. The presence of urinals encouraged me to believe that it was a male washroom, so our midnight visit would not present a problem. Yet when we crashed through the door, behind our heavy cases, at the sink stood a terrified young female summer student in flimsy pyjamas, foaming at the mouth — no, wait, brushing her teeth. It was a bad moment for all four of us. But we pleaded literary necessity, set up our cameras, and got the shot out of the window. Ironically, the shot that graced the final cover was taken five minutes later, when we were retreating across the quad, still embarrassed by the intrusion that had so alarmed a nice young woman. You can still see the result on the hardcover edition of The Rebel Angels. And you can still see a number of fine portraits of Robertson Davies taken over the years by Peter Paterson.

  Thanks to Canada Post, the stamp that was issued in 2013 showing Robertson Davies as photographed by Yousuf Karsh has reminded all Canadians of his distinctive looks. I was pleased to be present when the stamp was unveiled at Massey College, a few short steps away from Trinity.

  A final note about the old College. I was a pallbearer for R.D.’s funeral at the Trinity College Chapel. It was an achingly cold December day, and I foolishly wore only a raincoat, as we stood on Hoskins Avenue, looking east to Queen’s Park, and waiting for the hearse to do its solemn work. I was so cold that I recalled the bitter joke that winter funerals tend to produce a crop of other funerals. The very next day I bought a warm, navy-blue formal coat, and it has served me well at funerals ever since, including the January 2013 funeral for R.D.’s beloved wife, Brenda, in the same Trinity Chapel.

  Across Queen’s Park to the east lay the territory of two world-famous University of Toronto professors, Marshall McLuhan at St. Michael’s College, and Northrop Frye at Victoria. They were two renowned figures, working within shouting distance of each other. As members of the U of T’s English Department, they even served on the same university committees, and sometimes shared a cab home. B.W. Powe, who studied under — and admired — both men, has written a thoughtful study, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy (2014), which rewards close attention. In summary, he rejects the argument that the two giant figures detested one another (as more than one critic has claimed); instead he argues that they were warily cordial, and that constant presence of the other inspired each of them, driving them onward, along their own very different career paths.

  Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)

  I got to know Marshall fairly well, thanks to the fact that his agent, Matie Molinaro, was a good friend from my earliest days in Toronto. After a few encounters with him (where I was struck by his very direct gaze) I was invited back to Marshall’s Wychwood Park home. This family house, set in a very fine midtown neighbourhood carefully created within a park, was remarkable for the air of Southern hospitality that was wrapped around it by his charming (and the word is precise) wife from Texas, Corinne. She brought the warmth of the South to a central Toronto home even in the deepest midwinter. Earlier, when the six McLuhan kids were young, the Globe’s Kay Kritzwiser recorded that visitors seeking an audience with this intellectual guru had to pick their way through “a tangle of bicycles.”

  Marshall was a wild card. Tom Wolfe once wrote a perceptive essay about him called “What If He’s Right?” Even the title caught the problem that he posed to the world. Here was this obscure professor in Toronto whose Cambridge PhD thesis had been on “The Place of Thomas Nash in the Learning of his Time.” (Not everyone knew that Nash, or Nashe, was an English dramatist and satirist who died in 1601, whose works included the promisingly named Anatomie of Absurditie, and who liked to marshal puns to help his case, as McLuhan did.) Soon the learned, prairie-born English professor, who had joined the English department at St. Michael’s College in 1946, was studying what The Canadian Encyclopedia called “the linguistic and perceptual biases of mass media.”

  In 1962 he published The Gutenberg Galaxy. As the admired Canadian editor William Toye notes in his memoir, William Toye: On Canadian Literature, that book “contains the sentence ‘The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.’” Toye goes on to comment that Northrop Frye “was the chairman of the Governor General’s Award committee that awarded the medal to McLuhan, not because they admired the writing, but because The Gutenberg Galaxy was already being celebrated as a ground-breaking, though idiosyncratic, interpretation of Western history, and they would look foolish if they didn’t choose it.”

  Toye’s interpretation is backed by Powe’s revelation that one of Frye’s private notebooks contains the entry “Global village, my ass.” McLuhan over the years directed a few zingers towards Frye, once writing, in Powe’s words, with his “voice drenched in scorn: ‘It is heartening to observe Northrop Frye venturing into his first steps towards understanding media.’” Yet he also once wrote: “Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun.”

  It was a complex relationship, two very large fish in a fairly small pond, colleagues and rivals.

  In 1964 McLuhan brought out what was to become his best-known book, Understanding Media. Now it was clear that not only was he looking at stuff that nobody had thought worth studying, he was also throwing out provocative suggestions that changed the way people might look at the world — such as the idea that “hot” media like print and radio were essentially different from “cool” media like television and the telephone, so different, in fact, that they changed the message that was received. Hence the term
that gave him the title for his 1967 book, The Medium Is the Message.

  What made Marshall even more troublesome is that he scorned the usual reserved, dignified professorial role. Although he was a very devout traditional Catholic (“If there are going to be McLuhanites, you can be sure I’m not going to be one of them”), he enjoyed being a tweedy academic showman. It was no surprise to those who knew him when in the middle of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Marshall himself shambled up on screen to join a movie-theatre lineup to adjudicate a discussion about McLuhanism. It was the ultimate cameo appearance.

  Many readers were troubled by his aphoristic style, where declarative statements also made cameo appearances, not always linked to the thoughts that came before and after. Marshall was unrepentant; linear argument was for others. He was on to the next idea.

  As for his classes at U of T, one of his former students, Damiano Pietropaolo, recalled him warning his class, “All the theatrics in this class will be provided by me!” Of his conversational style another colleague once noted, “Marshall’s very polite. He always waits until your lips stop moving.”

  My old friend Donald Gillies was a Ryerson teacher who talked his way into one of Marshall’s famous classes. Don found it very stimulating and became a great admirer. He described Marshall as “a committed, probing, engaging (though sometimes ruthless) teacher.” He was present as the ruthless side emerged; a member of the class unwisely began his oral presentation “with a definition read from the Oxford Dictionary. Marshall pounced on him: “You can’t quote an English dictionary to me. I have two BAs, two MAs, and a PhD in English!”

  Yet the weekly evening classes were very popular. “One learned to arrive early to find a chair, or else sit on the floor at the feet of the master.” Celebrities such as Pierre Trudeau and the CBC newsreader Stanley Burke were known to drop in — but presumably found a chair. In the end Don Gillies wrote: “To conclude in simple truth, my time with McLuhan both inspired and reconfigured my subsequent professional life.”