David was soon to whistle up a brave tale about the Niagara Frontier, which I always associate with Hugh MacLennan. One of Hugh’s most exciting passages in Rivers of Canada deals with the Niagara River. In his words,
Given a stupendous momentum by the steady pressure of the continental reservoir behind it, abetted by the 325-foot drop over a distance of only thirty-four miles from Erie to Lake Ontario, the Niagara River proved itself one of the world’s most spectacular geological agents. … So the Falls of Niagara wear steadily backwards. If they continue to erode at this rate, they will disappear all the way back to Lake Erie within another 25,000 years and disappear into a rapid.
Near that Lake Erie shore, and just west of Fort Erie, lies Ridgeway, a little town so attractive that it might prove to be a southern bookend matching Niagara-on-the-Lake at the north end of the Niagara Parkway. For its very first Ridgeway Reads Literary Festival in June 2012, Mary Friesen and her team had put together a sparkling series of authors, including Charles Foran (Mordecai: The Life and Times), Andrew Westoll (of Taylor Prize–winning fame), Olive Senior (Dancing Lessons), Richard Wright (Clara Callan, etc.), Phil Hall, whose book Killdeer was up for that year’s Griffin Poetry Prize, and our friend David (D’Arcy McGee) Wilson.
I had the pleasure of giving my show on the opening Friday night, introduced by Rhyming Barb, who concluded her vote of thanks by asking me for another “chapter,” because to provide it, ahem, no one would be “apter.” (Ogden Nash did not live in vain).
We had to leave after Charlie Foran’s marvellous Saturday morning talk on my old sparring partner, Mordecai (his letters to me would continue our duel more in sorrow than in anger, wearily beginning, “Gibson, Gibson”). Mordecai, of course, was a man with a very keen ear for stories. He once reported meeting a woman who admitted that she, too, had a gift for writing: “The only thing I struggle with is putting my ideas into words.” That afternoon Jane had a high school reunion to attend in Cambridge. High school reunions wait for no man, or woman, so this meant that we missed the following wonderful event in Ridgeway, bravely described by an anonymous observer very close to David Wilson.
On Saturday afternoon there was a formal unveiling of a mural celebrating the 1866 Battle of Ridgeway against villainous Fenian invaders from Buffalo, which lies just across the border to the south. A high point of the official speech (shouted into a high wind by the local MP, then the minister of justice, en route to becoming the minister of foreign affairs, Rob Nicholson) was when he praised the literary festival: “This is a wonderful event, with some of Canada’s best-known writers. One of them, who gave a most enjoyable talk last night on stories about storytellers, was [short pause] none other than [slightly longer pause] Doug Wilson.”
Several people in the crowd shouted out, “No, no, Doug Gibson.” But my triumphant amorphous role (as in Trudeau’s “Fred Gibson”) was established once again.
Montreal’s own Stephen Leacock was apparently directing the events around the formal unveiling of the mural. First, the procession to the mural was delayed because the two regiments involved in the original battle (or, more correctly, the original headlong retreat) were unable to agree on which of them should lead the way. The gallant men of the Queen’s Own Rifles stood firm against the equally determined, jut-jawed heroes from the 13th Hamilton Regiment. After a long stand-off (possibly longer than their appearance in the actual battle, before both regiments ran away) the Hamilton men picked up their rifles and flounced off home.
My anonymous observer’s account continues:
Second, the Town Crier immediately led the parade through the back alleys of Ridgeway, without waiting for the dignitaries to arrive, and without paying any attention to the prescribed route along the main street; deaf to all cries to wait, he pressed on fearlessly and relentlessly.
Third, when the Queen’s Own and the dignitaries finally made it to the mural, it turned out that the cover over the mural had been tied down so tightly that it couldn’t be removed. Eventually, the ropes were cut, and someone leaned out from the window above the mural to catch the cover as it billowed in the wind, and to haul it in like a ship’s sail.
Where, I want to know, were Leacock’s Knights of Pythias in all this?
At Ridgeway Charles Foran told me that for a good event in Montreal (and as the author of the prizewinning book about Mordecai you can imagine how much he knew about good literary venues in Montreal) I should approach the people at the Atwater Library. I followed up this good idea, and, bingo, some months later found myself being shown around the library before my lunchtime show. The cheerful librarian, Lynn Verge, has an interesting history; in a previous life she was the leader of the Conservative Party in Newfoundland, the province’s first female leader. And the library itself has an interesting history. It’s in the old Mechanics’ Institute Building, which has done good work from pre-Victorian times on, spreading the joys of reading and education far beyond the higher classes that traditionally enjoyed formal schooling. To this day the library still houses worthy but impecunious literary groups.
After Lynn’s enjoyable tour of these offices, I started to meet and mingle with the audience assembling for my show, including publishers, authors, and translators, as well as civilians who were not yet friends.
A pleasant, open-faced woman of about sixty approached and asked if she could have a private word with me. I glanced, not too obviously, at my watch and warned her that I could only spare five minutes before the show had to start. She agreed, and we went off to an empty office. After the usual polite preliminaries she said, “Apparently, I am Hugh MacLennan’s daughter.”
I was speechless. I knew that Hugh had been married twice, to Dorothy Duncan and then to Frances “Tota” Walker. Both marriages had been childless. So how could this be?
She told me calmly that Hugh and her mother, a married woman, had for many years been secret lovers, and she was the love child that resulted. She had, she said, a fair number of letters in her possession. Could we stay in touch to explore this further?
I agreed, then staggered off to give my performance. And we did indeed stay in touch by email, and when I came back to Montreal many months later to give a show at McGill, we arranged to meet. At the meeting, in a coffee shop on St. Catherine Street, Jane and I chatted with her — let’s call her Emily — and she told us her story before trustingly turning over to me several heavy bags of documents.
Let me be clear about this: I’m no expert in this area (and no DNA tests are available). But the most convincing evidence of her family link with Hugh was her face. She had brought along a smiling photograph of Hugh where he might have posed deliberately to look as much like her as possible — the same wide features, the same nose and eyes. I happened to know, although the photo was in black and white, that they shared the same colouring. Jane, a wise and neutral judge in such matters, later said simply, “She certainly looks like him.”
But people often look like both parents. The documents, which included photographs of Emily’s mother, show that she inherited absolutely none of her looks from that side of the family — her mother was a slim-faced, narrow-nosed, dark-haired woman. As for her mother’s husband, Emily’s official father, I cannot comment, since I have seen no photographs, and he passed away a long time ago.
Emily is comfortable with — in fact very proud of — her claimed link with Hugh MacLennan, which her mother spelled out to her very clearly after her husband’s death. But there are other family members for whom this revealed parentage would be a shock, so I must leave her mother’s identity secret, for now. Let’s call her Joanna.
Joanna was a musician and a teacher of music. I must admit that when I heard this, I reacted unscientifically, thinking, “A musician, of course!” Music meant so much to Hugh that he wrote about it, and, indeed, often to it. In The Watch That Ends the Night, written to the music of Bach, he pays a remarkable tribute to music. On the subject o
f death he writes:
Here at last is the nature of the final human struggle. Within, not without. Without there is nothing to be done. But within. Nobody has ever described such a struggle truly in words. Nobody can. But others have described it and I can tell you who they are.
Go to the musicians. In the work of a few musicians you can hear every aspect of this conflict between light and dark within the soul . . .
Hugh’s appreciation of musicians also appears in his less formal writings, such as this July 1975 letter to Joanna:
After Handel had been working night and day for fifteen days on the Messiah, his servant downstairs, hearing him tramping around, shouting snatches of melodies, never speaking when he brought in sandwiches and tea — then suddenly there was total silence and it lasted. The servant ran upstairs, afraid his master had dropped dead (he had a heart condition) and saw him sitting with liquid pouring out of his eyes.
“I have just seen the Great God in all his glory,” Handel said. Then shrugged his shoulders and went back to his desk.
He had just completed the Halleljah Chorus.
Joanna and her husband lived in Montreal and were friends of the MacLennans. In Emily’s words:
According to my mother, they all met in the late 1930s or very early ’40s. They were part of the same circle of friends, artists, writers, musicians, doctors, etc. I have a vague memory of my mother telling me that they met at a party at Norman Bethune’s place and all dipped their hands in cans of paint, put their palm prints on the bathroom wall and signed their names inside their palm prints alongside the many others who had been asked to do the same thing.
Both were married at the time. As she said, “We soon realized we were both married to the wrong people, but there was nothing to be done about that.” At that point in history, divorce was pretty well out of the question, but I am told that both were extremely attracted to each other from the get-go, both physically and intellectually. They were, however, very discreet, thank goodness. The two couples would only run into each other at social gatherings or concerts, where they would be cordial, but were definitely not friends who dined and spent evenings together. I asked my mother what she thought of Dorothy and she shrugged her shoulders slightly and said, “I liked her. She was a nice woman.”
Emily later notes that when Hugh called her house, if Joanna’s husband answered Hugh would hang up: if Emily or her brother answered he would ask to speak to “your mother.” “We recognized his voice and would mouth Hughie-Mac and then say, ‘For you’ out loud.”
It is relevant here to note that Hugh, born in 1907, married Dorothy Duncan (born in 1903) in June 1936. It is also relevant to note that from March 1947 Dorothy’s health started to decline, and she was stricken by an embolism in early 1948, and was almost an invalid thereafter. Let me also note that Hugh, the former tennis champion, was a physically active man who enjoyed muscular activities like chopping down trees in North Hatley. He revealed this in his essay praising the Eastern Townships, “my part of the country,” entitled “Confessions of a Wood-chopping Man.” There he speaks of the English politician William Gladstone and the significance of his wood-chopping: “Humbler men without the need to sublimate a libido must have stacked and burned Mr. Gladstone’s slash.”
Emily was born in 1950.
What do these carefully preserved documents — clippings and letters — tell us? That Emily has been a diligent collector of articles by or about Hugh MacLennan. That his letters to her mother are always affectionate, and often ask about Emily. And although there are frequent references to Emily’s health, there is never one that uses the word “child” or “daughter.” One letter does, however, begin with the word, “Darlings.”
Two other dates are important here. Dorothy died in April 1957, after many years of long decline, mirrored by the decline of George Stewart’s wife Catherine in The Watch That Ends the Night. In May 1959, Hugh married “Tota” Walker.
The correspondence shown to me covers many years. There is no “smoking gun” where he speaks of his fatherhood, or of his passion for Emily’s mother. A student of secret affairs might, however, be impressed by how often this married man encourages his equally married female correspondent to use “the mail drop at McGill,” or tells her precisely when he expects to be at the office there, and thus available for a visit. (Here, our knowledge about the little bed there assumes some importance.) There is the card made out “For a very precious person.” And there is the extraordinary love poem, unsigned, but clearly from his typewriter, that gives every sign of moonstruck infatuation. The second verse reads:
I would love you in the long night
be in you sleep in you
to wake in you to the wells of time.
And among the letters that end “Blessings” or “Always” there is one that finishes with the words: “So much I’d like to say and so much I can’t, but perhaps it’s not necessary. Love, Hugh.”
So where does this leave us? I think it leaves us with the extremely strong likelihood that for a number of years Hugh MacLennan (a very recognizable public figure) led a secret life, with a secret lover and a secret daughter. If Emily chooses to come forward publicly I will be glad to help her to do so. As she wrote to me, “Probably now that you know and are writing about it, I can put it all to bed and let sleeping ghosts lie still, and I can occasionally wave at the whole thing from far off in the distance.”
One of Emily’s letters, dated September 2, 1985, contained a bombshell that marked an explosion in Hugh’s life. He had taught at McGill since 1951, and even after his official retirement from teaching had continued to be a major, revered figure on the campus.
Joanna,
I’ve tried, without success, to reach you by phone. Meanwhile, since mid-June, I have felt as though the roof had fallen in on me and stayed there.
I was abruptly told by my department chief and the Dean that I must vacate my office. That over-stuffed English Dept., by this time nearly entirely American, the majority of them there because of the Viet Nam War, had for once nobody on sabbatical, and therefore my office was required. This meant going through several thousand papers accumulated (along with mss and copies of addresses I’d made) for nearly fifty years. The papers began in 1936. Calgary University Library had wanted them, and I had put off sorting them. Finally they were despatched by courier and weighed, all told, about forty-five lbs.
Then the books had to be packed, and after them the furniture. The only place for them was the North Hatley cottage and I got them down about a week ago. They still have to be sorted …
However, it now seems that I’ll get another office in Concordia. Graham Fraser, Blair’s son, is now The Globe and Mail correspondent in Quebec and he knew what had happened to the office. He was outraged, and knows the new Rector of Concordia, and apparently an office will be available for me there.
I had learned about this fiasco too late to intervene, although I tried, offering to rouse public opinion on Hugh’s behalf, but he chose not to make a fuss. Word got out, however, and the university took a well-earned hammering. The Ottawa Citizen ran an editorial that stated, “Any university that can’t find room for Hugh MacLennan has lost its mind. Has McGill lost its soul as well?” After this ugly business, as you can imagine, relations between the MacLennans and McGill were very frosty and stayed that way for the rest of Hugh’s life. Yet his 1990 funeral was held in the McGill Chapel. What happened?
After I took my show around, including my description of Hugh’s funeral, I received an explanation from Tota’s nephew, Michael Ogilvie, a friend of mine from North Hatley. When Hugh died, Michael realized that his aged aunt was in no condition to organize a funeral for her late husband. He himself was flying off to the Maritimes, but he knew that this was a crisis. So although he had never met David Johnston, the principal of McGill (and later Canada’s very popular Governor General), he looked up his home phone
number while at the airport and called him at 6:30 in the morning, introducing himself as “Hugh MacLennan’s nephew.”
David Johnston came to the phone (think pyjamas, and a bathrobe) and cut short a possibly complicated conversation with the breathtakingly wise and generous words “I assume you’re calling, Michael, to give us a chance to bring Hugh home . . .”
Michael was very grateful, and McGill proceeded to organize, on Tota’s behalf, the whole fine event the following Wednesday in the McGill Chapel, with a string quartet playing Hugh’s favourite music and four speakers honoured to be asked to talk about his life, including the most grateful of all, his publisher.
We were lucky to have a Governor General like David Johnston.
In July 2013 I gave my show at a Westmount residence for seniors, named Place Kensington. It’s a fine, lively place and the residents include two authors of mine, the charming crime novelist Ted Phillips and my friend William Weintraub, the author of City Unique (1996). Bill Weintraub is also famous for the classic novel Why Rock the Boat? (1961) and I proudly edited his last novel, 2005’s Crazy About Lili, providing it with a very funny cover illustration by the wonderful Anthony Jenkins, whose path was later to cross mine, as my readers know.
Across Canada by Story Page 19
