Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  As a Southam Fellow at Massey College, the writer Martin O’Malley was also pleased to sit in on these evening classes, which he found “friendly, and tweedy, and apple-juicy.” He remembers Marshall once bringing along Tom Wolfe to a session, where things were very friendly. Less friendly was the exchange with the political science professor Jack McLeod (whose idiosyncratic description in Canadian Who’s Who begins “polymath, writer, splendid person”). The splendid person once provoked Marshall’s wrath. He found a furious note on his car beginning “You are parked in my space!” Jack returned it to the McLuhan car with a welcome apology, followed by the unwelcome sentence “This is the first thing you have written that I have ever understood.”

  For all his worldwide fame, Marshall obviously troubled the university administration. When his thin, high-browed face was staring out at the world from the cover of TIME magazine, and “McLuhanism” was on everyone’s lips (with “McLuhanisme” on pouting French lips) and his theories were cropping up on every editorial page, it was clear that he was a star. So what did the university do? They gave him an office in a garage.

  That’s a little unfair, since it was officially a coach house, with the fancy name Centre for Culture and Technology, but in Tom Wolfe’s words it looked “like an unused Newfoundland fishing shack.” (Tom was very good at snap — and snappish — instant comparisons. Once, around 1970, I was involved in taking him to speak at York University, then a brand-new campus of large concrete buildings rising out of a bare landscape north of Toronto. He gazed around from the cab and said, thoughtfully, “It looks kind of like Brasilia!”)

  It was in that garage/coach house, still to be seen just off Queen’s Park (at 39A Queen’s Park Crescent, with the A significant), that I once visited Marshall to take him to lunch. He was pleased to see me, and he showed me around the paper-strewn space that he shared with a group of colleagues/acolytes, some of whom were enlisted as co-authors when publishers succeeded in persuading him to take on another project. Among them that day was his son Eric, and I was happy to agree to Marshall’s suggestion that he should join us for lunch.

  The next hour or so was extraordinary. Even as we walked to lunch, Marshall kept up a constant stream of comments on the passing scene. This man’s briefcase demonstrated this, while that noisy red car revealed that, and so on, comments too fast and furious for me to quote exactly now. Inside the restaurant, I recall, he was interested in the sheer drapes, which allowed us to see out, but prevented people on the street seeing in. And he had extensive deductions to make about the lighting, the menu, the waiter’s uniform, and so on. (I recalled from Tom Wolfe’s article that on a visit to a strip club Marshall, in his professorial role, observed about the naked stripper: “Ah, yes, she’s wearing us!”)

  What was most extraordinary to me was how his son reacted to all this. By this point Eric was almost middle-aged, well beyond the point of parental hero-worship. Yet he greeted every comment of Marshall’s with vocal admiration. “Wow, that’s amazing, Dad! How did you think of that?” or “What an astonishing insight! Nobody’s ever put it so well before.” I had never seen a son react in this way to a father, and I looked with narrowed eyes at Eric, to be sure that he wasn’t being sarcastic, putting us on. But, no, he was obviously sincere. As the sincere compliments kept flowing, I found myself reacting by stepping into the usual son role, that of critic. Marshall’s quick-fire comments seemed to me to be a mixture of the brilliant, the obvious, and the nonsensical, so I would try to challenge the last group, with “Wait a minute, surely . . .” objections. My comments went nowhere, submerged beneath the tide of “That’s so true, Dad!”

  I enjoyed our lunch, but never succeeded in publishing Marshall. Most traditional academic reviewers were lukewarm, or undecided, about McLuhan. Even Frye was deeply critical, on occasion, once writing that “McLuhan is caught up in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the news media.” The always-sensible literary scholar W.J. Keith summarized the general feeling well, writing, “Whatever the ultimate verdict, however, he remains one of those baffling but significant figures around whom circulate the dominant ideas of their age.” And while Marshall was often criticized for predicting unbelievably wide-ranging changes … such as, to take a wildly unlikely example, the rise of the internet — we’re left still wondering, what if he was right?

  Just north of St. Michael’s College, and the famous garage, lies Victoria College, the academic home of Northrop Frye from 1939 until his death in 1991. I barely knew Herman Northrop Frye (and very few people knew of the unused “Herman,” a name not exactly popularized in Canada by Reichsmarschall Goering). But I knew of him as a major international literary figure, even if this lad from Moncton had first hit the big-time by coming second in a national typing competition. This brought him to Toronto in 1929, where he enrolled in Victoria College. After a brief interlude at Emmanuel College, where he became an ordained minister (delighting in his summer service at a parish on the Prairies where he once overheard local church women denouncing a recent rain as “not necessary”), and then a spell at Merton College, Oxford, he returned to Victoria, and spent the rest of his distinguished academic life there, without the benefit of any (now obligatory) PhD.

  Northrop Frye (1912–1991)

  Christina McCall summarizes Northrop Frye’s fame perfectly in her posthumous memoir, My Life as a Dame (2008).

  When I encountered him first, Frye was in his early forties, just settling in as chairman of Vic’s English department, already acclaimed for Fearful Symmetry, his study of William Blake, writing his famous book, Anatomy of Criticism, attracting invitations to lecture at Princeton and Harvard and to publish in important learned journals in the U.S. and the U.K., early indications of his brilliant international reputation as a literary theorist that was to grow more luminous as he aged. At Victoria even then, his fame was harped on by older students so insistently that my cohort grew impatient with the hyperbole.

  As Christina’s publisher I got to know her well in full, glorious flight as the author of Grits (1982), and the co-author with Stephen Clarkson of the two-volume classic, Trudeau and Our Times (1990, 1994). She was already an ambitious student when she attended her first Frye lecture. “He came into a classroom one September afternoon, wearing an academic gown that was rusty with age, stood behind the lecturer’s podium, looked at us through his rimless glasses, and began to talk about John Milton in a voice devoid of passion. By the time he had finished speaking fifty minutes later, almost everyone in the room was in the grip of an intellectual excitement of a kind we had never known, and that night I wrote in a Commonplace Book I was pretentiously keeping, ‘I think my head is coming off.’”

  Foolishly, I never took the opportunity to see Frye lecture. I didn’t even stop to reflect how amazing it was that this world-famous scholar continued to teach undergraduate classes; this despite the fact that his shyness with young students meant that, in Margaret Atwood’s words, when he met you on campus, he seemed “to address his remarks to your shoes.”

  Yet this shy, precise scholar had moments of uncharacteristic elation. Powe has pointed out the following astonishing passage from Frye’s private notebooks: “The Twentieth Century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried on by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.”

  Others would agree, but in some surprise at the source.

  I did once go to see him in his office. My friend Harry J. Boyle (the brave author whose 1972 book I named The Great Canadian Novel) was the Vice-Chair of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, and he once spoke warmly about working with his fellow-commissioner, “Norrie” Frye. When I noted sadly that Norrie was among those Canadian authors who chose to be published by companies based el
sewhere, with the books merely distributed in Canada, Harry encouraged me to visit his friend Norrie to make my case. At the CRTC, he said, Frye was keenly aware of the uphill fight Canadian media faced, against a system that favoured American distribution. In fact, I was pleased to find that one of his essays commented on a “Spring Thaw” sketch that ended an enthusiastic account of a new NFB film with the words: “Coming Soon to a Sunday School Basement Near You!”

  In due course I visited the great man in his Victoria College office, just off Queen’s Park (very near today’s Northrop Frye Hall, and the statue of a life-size Frye sitting invitingly on a bench, open book on his lap). I remember that when I was ushered into his office it was quiet, very quiet. So was the bushy-haired, comfortably built man who greeted me courteously, then eyed me levelly through his rimless glasses as I made my case for his publishing in the future with a Canadian publisher, such as, oh, for example, me.

  I ended with a flourish by suggesting that his current publishing arrangement was really only of benefit to the man who ran the Canadian branch plant!

  “Ah yes,” replied Professor Frye, politely. “I chose him because he’s an old friend.”

  Loyalty can be very inconvenient.

  My friend Cathleen Morrison was a former student of his who became much closer in 1998 when, as a widower, he married her widowed mother, Elizabeth. Frye gratefully described this marriage to an old friend as “a miracle.” In a note to me Cathleen recalls:

  Their home in Toronto was just a couple of city blocks from ours, and Norrie and Elizabeth became regulars at our Sunday dinners. In winter Norrie liked a corner seat beside the fire, where he nursed a small glass of single malt Scotch.

  Participating in the life of our family may have been a challenge for Norrie, but he handled with indulgence the hail of small talk, much of which was focused on the children. The atmosphere was relaxed.

  “Uncle Norrie,” asked our twelve-year-old nephew Alex of Montreal (for word had somehow spread around the children that this was how Norrie should be addressed), “Uncle Norrie, you have thirty-nine honorary degrees. How many real ones have you got?”

  A postscript. In 2002, when I married Jane, I moved into her house in Toronto’s Moore Park district. A three-minute walk away (and we walk it on many evenings, and I’ve just timed it) is the house that Northrop Frye lived in for many years. A tiny plaque beside the front door notes that he was there from 1945 to 1991.

  Jane recalls that Frye’s daily walk to the subway took him past our house. One of the world’s great thinkers, perhaps fresh from a celebrated tour of Italy’s great universities, on his way to his office, thinking great thoughts, and exchanging shy greetings with accountants and garbagemen and lawyers and skateboarding schoolchildren. It’s a pleasing thought.

  Opposite Victoria College, but set inside Queen’s Park, is the marvellous black metal statue of Al Purdy, right at home among the literary tents. I knew Al well, and although I did not edit him, I was proud to publish his poetry, and his single novel, A Splinter in the Heart, set in the Trenton of his boyhood. He was a big, untidy man. I once described him as one of the few people who could shamble even while sitting down. The black statue, by Dam de Nogales and donated by Scott Griffin, catches this perfectly, with the characteristic hank of hair falling over Al’s eyes as he leans heavily on one shirt-sleeved arm.

  Like his statue, Al was a larger than life character, and I noticed that the pace of the McClelland & Stewart office seemed to pick up when he roamed the corridors. People were pleased to see this big, loud, friendly guy, who brought a whiff of Prince Edward County with him. In our office encounters he seemed to like me well enough, but what brought us closer together was an open-air reading he gave in High Park on the hottest night of the year. I was there, and went backstage to greet him. We were all bathed in sweat and he greeted me with such surprise that he clearly thought of me as just a fancy-pants downtown office guy who always wore a tie. He wouldn’t have greeted me that sweltering night with more surprise and delight if I’d swum across Lake Ontario to get there. After that, we were friends.

  Later, as I’ve recounted in Stories About Storytellers, he played a morose part as the straight man in Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s explosive onstage performance at the Harbourfront Authors Festival. But normally he was the life and soul of any poets’ party. In fact, his home-built A-frame house at Ameliasburgh was famous as the centre of many wild but inspiring get-togethers, involving poets like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Frank Scott, Leonard Cohen, and literally dozens of others over the years. Later, when Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy came out in 2000, the year of his death, both Atwood and Ondaatje wrote affectionate forewords about what he had meant to young poets like them. Ondaatje’s tribute calls Al “this self-taught poet from up the road. What a brave wonder.”

  So important was that A-frame as a sort of inspirational club-house for generations of writers, that when, in 2012, it seemed the house would be sold and torn down, it became a national crisis. Fortunately, two heroes in British Columbia, Jean Baird the literary activist and Howard White the publisher, sprang into action and started a national campaign to save the A-frame. Because of my friendship with Al, I was glad to be invited to join a Toronto-based committee to raise the necessary funds. Led by my old M&S friend George Goodwin, our group studied how best to raise money. (I remember that before one meeting with a potential donor I went and sat beside Al’s statue, for inspiration.) In the end, with the blessing of Al’s widow, Eurithe, we decided to hold a big fundraising event at Toronto’s Koerner Hall, on February 6, 2013.

  I learned that when you stage a one-off concert you take your financial life in your hands. Although all of the poets and musicians and personalities like Michael Enright and Gordon Pinsent were contributing their time free, we still had to sell around 400 tickets to break even. Two days before the event we still had not reached that mark. This was despite the fact that we had personally stuck posters all over downtown. (I’m especially proud that the renovating architect Duncan Patterson and I succeeded in putting up a poster — erecting one, you might say — at the Condom Shack on Queen Street.)

  With my friend Michael Enright’s help (I saw the internal CBC memo, where he assured his colleagues that I was “a good yak” — a technical term, no doubt) I got on Metro Morning, the local CBC radio show, to talk about the glories of the next evening’s event.

  And it worked — either that or the Condom Shack’s clients decided to postpone their amorous activity on that one evening to go to Koerner Hall. When the lights went down we had 700 people in the audience, looking at a backdrop of the A-frame and listening as Al’s recorded voice began to read “The Country North of Belleville,” reciting the roll-call of great, forgotten, back-country pioneer names. Then Gordon Pinsent slipped quietly onstage and seamlessly took over the reading of the next verse. It was breathtaking.

  The evening, which included a memorable Enright-Atwood interview about the Purdy good old days, was just as fine as we had hoped. At the end, as all of the performers took their bow in a hurricane of grateful applause, I stood at the very end of the long line of poets and musicians with my hand on Gordon Pinsent’s shoulder. He agreed that the audience seemed to like us.

  And we made money, lots of money, although the campaign to turn the A-frame into a retreat for working poets continues, and a visit in fall 2013 confirmed that necessary renovations require more money. But that night Al would have been pleased — gruffly pleased. And in May 2014, I was glad to take part in a similar Ottawa fundraiser, where Bruce Cockburn (very shy and kind when I visited him backstage) attracted the crowd to the theatre at the National Library. I had the honour of reading Al Purdy’s poetry. Once again “The Country North of Belleville” did its inspiring work on the audience, and had friends saying to me, “I didn’t know you could do that!” Neither did I. But it was Al’s magic that had entranced them.

>   Just north of Queen’s Park lies that solid, ancient establishment, the Royal Ontario Museum. And since this book is about storytelling, I must tell you now that the ROM has officially recognized me as a “storyteller.” Here is what happened.

  Early in 2012 I was contacted out of the blue by a nice official at the ROM. She understood that I was a storyteller, yes? “Well,” I mumbled, “my book is called Stories About Storytellers, and in my stage show I tell lots of stories, so I guess I am a storyteller.”

  “And you come from Scotland?” she went on.

  “Yes,” I replied, wondering where this was going.

  “All right,” she said, very pleased. “Then you’re a Scottish storyteller!”

  The logic seemed inescapable. She went on to ask if I could come to their Celtic Weekend in March as a “Scottish storyteller.” I said that I knew some good Scottish stories, so, yes, I could come along and tell them to a mixed audience of kids and parents. (I had been drilled by the fierce people at my publisher, ECW, that as an author with a new book to promote I must accept every public performance invitation.)

  A few days later, she was back with a further enquiry. This was a Celtic weekend, so could I tell Irish and Welsh stories, too? A little research provided good stories, so I said yes, and we were all set for two forty-minute sessions, at 12:00 and at 2:00, with me as a “Celtic storyteller.”

  On the great day, high in the hallowed halls of the museum, I sat on a throne-like chair in front of a collection of movable stools occupied by a group of kids, who included my grandchildren Lindsay (seven) and Alistair (five). When I told the Irish story, about Niall of the Nine Hostages who was “The Slave Woman’s Son,” I prefaced it with a word or two about slaves in different cultures, and unwisely referred to the Haida totem pole in the space just outside our room. I explained that a visit to the Haida Heritage Centre in Skidegate had revealed to Jane and me that the Haida were sea-raiders who took slaves, which allowed them (like Athenians) to have a slave-supported leisure society that could create great poetry and great art, like these totem poles.