Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  In Edmonton, I had my very first experience with the “magic carpet treatment” that authors receive from literary festivals when we were met at the airport by the friendly volunteer Jean Crozier. She promptly whisked us in her car into the south side of town, past Old Strathcona, then across the famous fur trade valley to our downtown hotel. In less than an hour I was in a nearby mall, perched on one of those bar stools apparently reserved for TV talk shows (“Where do I put my feet?”) and trying to interest the passing crowd of shoppers (not to mention people nipping out from the office to get cash at the bank machine) in the prospect of coming to my show at the Edmonton Festival, in the Milner Library Theatre that evening. The amiable CBC host/interviewer got the name of my book wrong, but recovered swiftly after I happened to mention the right title in the course of my reply. The first of my Awful Warnings to Authors coming true to life — in my own life.

  That evening the show went fine (although I was struck how perfectly Chaucer’s phrase “the craft so long to lerne” applied to stage craft). Afterwards I got to relax by sitting at a table in the foyer, smiling in a relieved way and signing books. They were supplied by Audreys, the fine store on Jasper Avenue run by my old friends Sharon and Steve Budnarchuk. Sharon had worked in sales at McClelland & Stewart, and yet despite her knowledge of the harsh realities she wasn’t afraid to get into the bookselling game with Steve. Long may they run!

  Some of the books were signed for relatives (like Graeme’s son Scot) but others were for apparently sober civilians, who said kind things. Kindest of all was the festival’s head, David Cheoros, who wrote that onstage my “lifelong passion for these great writers is contagious.” I hope it comes out on every page here.

  Then it was back to the hotel for a come-down session. If you wonder where the speakeasy or late night “booze-can” came from, consider this: any performer — any actor, or a dancer, or a musician — has to get “up” for a performance. But what goes up must come down. And after even a modest sixty- to ninety-minute show like mine, I am really “up,” and need to work at coming down if sleep is to be an option. That seems to apply across the board with performers, which is why they seek out late-night haunts, and why they often end up in trouble with the booze or other stuff that goes along with them. And this applies not only to hard-living jazz or rock musicians. My friend and neighbour Dianne Werner is a well-known concert pianist, and after a performance that ends around ten o’clock, she tells me, “I can forget about sleep till after three in the morning.” She says that after a grilling evening, professional chefs have the same problem. Adrenaline. Who knew?

  That evening in Edmonton I “came down” with a group of relatives, mostly Robertsons originally from way up in the Peace River Country, where the father, Archie (my sponsor to Canada), had been the mayor of Fairview. It was good to catch up, though my cousin Fraser had been too busy with the harvest to come all the way south from the Peace to Edmonton. Another year, maybe.

  Peace River Country, of course, is a whole other Alberta. During the Dirty Thirties it was held up as a land of milk and honey — or at least, rain — to prairie farmers who were “droughted out.” Barry Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years tells many such stories, including the one about the family fleeing north by wagon until the mosquitoes kill the horses. The farmer remembers touching the horses’ flanks: “My hand would come away positively black and red. Black was the crushed bodies of the mosquitoes. Red, well you know what the red was . . .” The horses lay down and died, leaving him and his wife and kids to walk out with what they could carry. He ends the story bitterly: “We were way off the main road, miles off, shooting off to a place nobody goes and a storekeeper in Peace River told us, he was laughing, the fool, that if we had waited till winter some sleighs and lumberjacks, loggers, would have come along. Appears we were on a winter logging road and there was no farm land up that way at all. I lost two good horses and all my patience finding out, and now I kill every mosquito lands within half a mile of me. I’m pure hell on skeeters.”

  Certainly, it’s a major surprise to travel hundreds of miles northwest of Edmonton through endless bush, in the comfort of a car, then near Grande Prairie to find yourself in … Manitoba! A fertile, green, open land of fields and grain elevators!

  As I got to know the area from my father’s cousin’s family base in Fairview I was amazed to find that at Dunvegan, the old fur trade fort on the mighty Peace River, they’ve had a rich vegetable garden, all these miles north of Edmonton, ever since 1805. The area looms so large in Gibson family lore that when my parents toured Canada in 1981, they visited not only Banff and Calgary and Edmonton, but also Lethbridge in the south and Fairview in the north. Many Albertas, indeed.

  I stumbled into the Alberta writing community very early in my career thanks to a remarkable man named George Hardy. Generations of students at the University of Alberta knew him as a perennial professor of classics, from 1922 to 1964. Ah yes, a lifetime devoted to teaching Ancient Greek and Latin; we all know the type. No, you don’t: George, born in 1895, had fought in the First World War, and was such a tough, active guy that he rose to be the president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association. Ah yes, you say, you know that type.

  Not quite. He was also a bestselling novelist. His big, brawling, traditional book about ancient Rome The City of Libertines (1957) reportedly sold more than a million copies. Very late in his life, when he was well over eighty years old, he wrote for me two epic swashbuckling novels about Julius Caesar, The Scarlet Mantle (1977) and The Bloodied Toga (1979). (“Then Brutus was in front of him. Brutus! And a dagger in his hand — raised.”) They are full not only of accurate history and fascinating details of ancient Rome, but also of adventure and violence and sex.

  The old soldier came by his knowledge in these matters honestly. When he visited Toronto (he liked to stay at the long-lost Lord Simcoe Hotel) he would astonish me with his continuing involvement with fleshly pleasures. I remember him, in his eighties, sitting and puffing placidly on his pipe, telling me, “As a man, I still get the urge. And when I do” — puff, puff — “I do something about it.”

  And then he would reveal to his astonished visitor that his hotel suite was being shared by a girlfriend — somewhat younger, still only in her seventies — who was similarly inclined. It was an education for me.

  His constant visits to see the sights and the sites of ancient Greece had gained him some good friends among modern Greeks. His best friend died in the brutal civil war between the Communists and the Royalists that tore Greece apart in 1946. “Doug,” he told me, his old soldier’s jaw clenched on his pipe, “they sawed him in half.”

  In addition to his other pursuits, he was a keen member of the literary community, and for a number of years he was the very active president of the Canadian Authors Association. Now, in the days before the highly professional Writers’ Union of Canada was formed, the CAA was the only game in town. But its amateur members left themselves open to the cruel fun poked at them by F.R. Scott in “The Canadian Authors Meet,” which includes a line about “virgins of sixty.” George, of course, was the man to change that, and he worked hard to raise the standard.

  Closer to home, he worked to help Alberta’s writers develop. With the help of a gallant sparkplug named John Patrick Gillese (who on a freelance writer’s pay had somehow managed to raise a family, including his daughter, Eileen, a Rhodes Scholar who went on to become a judge on the Ontario Court of Appeal, supervising a young articling law student named Katie Gibson, and later marrying Katie and Cindy), he created a provincially funded program for an Alberta “Search for a New Novelist” competition. He sold Hugh Kane of Macmillan on the idea of being the lucky publisher of whatever was swept up by the contest, so when I joined Macmillan in 1974 I found that a large part of my time and energy was taken up by this quixotic search.

  I found myself in Edmonton attending political events where literary oratory ran free. A cabinet minister
named Horst Schmidt bellowed out optimistic speeches about “zis zearch!” and everyone applauded. Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks admirer, the Hon. A.E. Windheaver (“and what about the roads”), would have been right at home. I, with my status mysteriously upgraded to “Dr. Gibson,” tried to tamp down the hopes of great discoveries who were bound to go on to fame and fortune, but it was an uphill fight. Everyone believed that this great government plan would flush out a brace or two of truly fine novelists.

  And it worked.

  In the few years that we ran the competition, and published the winners, we discovered, among others, L.R. Wright, Fred Stenson, and Pauline Gedge.

  If you were to fly around the world looking for a place that did not remind you in any way of the land of the pharaohs and their pyramids beside the Nile, there’s no doubt that Edgerton, Alberta, would rank fairly high. Yet Edgerton, close to the border with Saskatchewan near Lloydminster, is where Pauline Gedge lived, turning out historical novels set in ancient Egypt. They have made her a world literary figure. Thanks to her long association with her Toronto literary agent, my old Macmillan colleague Bella Pomer, translations of her fourteen novels have appeared in German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Greek, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.

  And in French. When Pauline’s presence on a boat cruising down the Nile became known, her French fellow tourists became noticeably excited. Later, her 1978 novel set in ancient Britain, The Eagle and the Raven, won the Jean Boujassy Award from the Société des Gens de Lettres de France.

  Although she has written some science fiction, fantasy, and even horror, it is for her novels of ancient Egypt that she is best known around the world. They have sold millions of copies. And it all started with the Alberta “Search for a New Novelist.”

  Pauline Gedge (1945– )

  As Pauline, who was born in New Zealand and raised in England and Canada, approached the age of thirty, she was uncertain what to do with her life. She had done some teaching and was divorced, and was now a single mother with two kids and on welfare — long before Harry Potter’s creator had provided an encouraging precedent. In the past, Pauline had entered the competition, but her two previous entries did not win. Now she was staying with her sister in Calgary and feeling that her dream of being a writer was over. She had given up. She was facing the flight of steps up to her sister’s place, when … well, here’s the story as she tells it on her website:

  I vividly remember standing at the foot of those steps, looking up towards her door, and feeling as though my life had no purpose. I began to climb. By the time I came to the top a miracle had taken place in me. I knew exactly what I was going to write about — or rather, who — an ancient Egyptian woman I had studied about and admired since I was eleven. It was an experience that every writer longs for once in a career, that flash of inspiration, and for me it happened at the moment when my future seemed dashed.

  At the time, Pauline knew little about the one and only female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, and yet she was able to research her life in detail thanks to the wonders of inter-library borrowing. Pauline, her fingers flying, wrote Child of the Morning in only six weeks. Her whole family became involved in the race to finish the book and get it off to the competition in time. For revisions her mother read the first draft aloud, while Pauline reworked the text. When the final page was ripped from the typewriter (this was before computers) Pauline’s father drove the five hours to Edmonton on winter roads to get the book in on time — unaware that we had extended the deadline because of a postal strike.

  The rest is history … ancient Egyptian history. Here’s a brief excerpt from the novel, about the great female pharaoh travelling along the Nile:

  It was but half a day’s journey from Giza to Heliopolis, true heart of Egypt, and they reached the city at noon. Dignitaries came aboard, crawling over the deck to present their welcome, but the royal couple did not disembark, for here Hatshepsut was to receive her first crown in the temple of the Sun. She sat on her little chair while they kissed her feet, remote from them, gazing over their heads at the shining towers of the city. Behind her, on the west bank, more pyramids marched; and from where she sat, they seemed to be all around her head, a crown of power and invincibility.

  The book was a worthy winner. I’m embarrassed to recall that when I met Pauline before the grand official dinner in Edmonton for the announcement, I gave her grandfatherly advice to ignore all of the political speeches predicting amazing worldwide success for her and her book. She listened politely, a quiet, self-contained woman with a level gaze. All of those ridiculous, outlandish predictions came true.

  I’m sorry that I never had the chance to show her the white-faced ibis that Trevor Herriot found for us on the prairies. She probably would have known the ancient Egyptian word for the ancient bird.

  When I joined Macmillan in the spring of 1974 I soon found myself in a race to get some new books to publish. I heard that five bright young women were keen to write a book together, each contributing two profiles of other women. I met with them and the result was an exciting book called Her Own Woman: Profiles of Canadian Women (1975). The authors were a fascinating group, and their lives have taken them in a variety of directions.

  Heather Robertson went on to great success as a prolific non-fiction author, a novelist (Willie), and as a brave defender of authors’ rights when newspapers and magazines tried to sweep them away in an electronic tide. Her name is known at the Supreme Court, and revered by other writers. When she died in March 2014, writers — and readers — across Canada mourned her loss.

  Winnipeg’s Melinda McCracken has also passed away too young. After her death, Heather continued their last joint book project, Magical, Mysterious Lake of the Woods, which came out in 2003.

  Valerie Miner Johnson has moved, first to Britain (where she was a close friend of my brother Peter), then to San Francisco, where she is now a university professor, with a memoir (The Low Road, 2001), and several novels to her name.

  Erna Paris has become a major non-fiction writer, specializing in international issues of war, peace, and justice, with books such as Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair (1985), The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America (2008), and, most recently, From Tolerance to Tyranny: A Cautionary Tale from Fifteenth Century Spain (2015). For me she wrote Jews: An Account of Their Experience in Canada (1980), and we have stayed friends. In 2010, as chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada, she had the pleasure of telling me that I had been made an honorary member. (Her exact words were, “Did nobody tell you?” but it was definitely the thought that counted.)

  And there was Edmonton’s own Myrna Kostash. Every time I go to the city I look forward to seeing Myrna again. And just about every time I try to see her she is off somewhere else, pursuing one or more of her many careers.

  You can trace those careers by looking at her books. All of Baba’s Children (1978) tells the story of Two Hills, Alberta, a Ukrainian Canadian settlement. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes that “with her first book Kostash became a prominent voice in public debates about ethnicity.” It was a good fit with her own birth in a Ukrainian Canadian home in Edmonton, and her master’s degree in Russian language and literature from the University of Toronto.

  Career number two was predicted by Long Way from Home (1980), which revealed her interest in counter-cultural movements. The next book, which she wrote for me, No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls (under the DG Books imprint in 1988), like Her Own Woman, reflected Myrna’s burning interest in feminism. Other passions are for her place as a prairie dweller and, in the words of The Canadian Encyclopedia, “her enduring fascination with the politics, histories, and peoples of Central and Eastern Europe.” So when I contact her to get together in Edmonton, she’s likely to be off in somewhere like Turkey, as when she was researching her 2010 book Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to
Byzantium (this may well be the first time that “Byzantium” appeared in a Canadian author’s title, not used as a metaphor or a fictional setting).

  But this is only a small part of Myrna’s life. She is such an organizer, and so community-minded that she constantly founds groups (like the Periodical Writers Association of Canada, or the Creative Non-Fiction Collective Society, to give two examples). It has even been suggested that it was Myrna Kostash who invented the term “creative non-fiction,” a type of writing she has practised with distinction, and advocated with missionary zeal. And if your organization needs a hard-working committee member — and which one doesn’t? — then you can count on Myrna, even to be your chair, as she was for the Writers’ Union in difficult days, bravely ushering the Union through a tidal wave of political correctness that threatened to swamp it.

  It was in 1993 that a group of minority writers approached the Writers’ Union with the complaint that they didn’t feel fully accepted in the mostly white Union.

  Crisis! The result was that the guilt-stricken Union agreed to run a conference in Vancouver in 1994 that was restricted to non-white writers. Naturally, the idea that a writers group would restrict entry by skin colour outraged many of the members, among them Pierre Berton, a former union chair, who spoke and wrote eloquently against it. Yet — now it can be told — when the Canadian government put the conference in danger by withdrawing its funding support, on the understandable grounds that it didn’t fund conferences that excluded people because of their skin colour, Pierre secretly stepped in to provide the funds. It was a stunning example of a man who genuinely believed the saying, usually (and wrongly) attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” A remarkable man, Pierre Berton. I was proud to publish him when he was alive, as I am now to spread this excellent story about him.