In his Leamington novel Nino refers to “Point Chippewa National Park,” but we all know he means Point Pelee. For a birder like me, driving south of Leamington to Point Pelee is a religious experience, because this is sacred territory; even its shape seems to represent the beak of a gannet diving south into Lake Erie. A Bird-Finding Guide to Canada (and I republished Cam Finlay’s book with great enthusiasm) speaks glowingly of Point Pelee, with its “Carolinian Forests” (meaning lush, as in the Carolinas far to the south), and its “spectacular spring migration of warblers and other land birds peaking in the second week of May.” Unfortunately, in the book publishing world, May is such a busy month that, year after year, I missed visiting Point Pelee, although in the book’s words it is “widely regarded as one of the best places to experience bird migration in all of North America.” (I’m happy to report that in Spring 2014 we finally made it, and saw our first eastern bluebird, eastern grosbeak, and prothonotary warbler, and a shabby common nighthawk that seemed to be sleeping off a hangover.)
The book’s detailed description of all the many birds (almost 370 different species have been recorded in the provincial park) that are to be seen, and heard, reaches heights of lyricism that may surprise innocent outsiders who stray into this fanatical world. “In both spring and fall, the woods can be alive with the sounds of scratching feet as hundreds of migrating white-throated sparrow actively forage in the leaf litter.” As for the yellow-breasted chat, “on occasion, it even sings at night!”
In November, however, Point Pelee was silent and bare, with not even a hint of “scratching feet,” and for us its main attraction was its southernmost point. In search of Ontario’s limits, I scrambled down to the very tip and dipped a toe in the water. As every school child knows, this is the southernmost point on the Canadian mainland. It lies farther south than parts of Northern California, although this is so widely known that few bar bets can be won by this particular piece of Ontario lore.
Independent booksellers — like some Point Pelee birds — tend to be colourful, but thin on the ground, and very welcome when spotted. As a species, however, they tend to be rare, and under threat. I’m always glad to help local booksellers whenever I can (especially when helping them helps my book sales), so when my old M&S colleague Susan Chamberlain invited me to come to Sarnia with my show, I jumped at the chance.
Susan runs a first-class independent bookstore, the Book Keeper. Susan was a sales rep at M&S for some years. Undeterred by her knowledge of just how tough the bookselling life is, she got into the game in Sarnia, and is doing a wonderful job there.
Dropping in to the store beforehand, I encountered a man coming in off the street, clutching a newspaper clipping about me. I was happy to sign a book for him, and ended up unexpectedly signing copies for two other friendly customers who also happened to be on the scene. It’s that kind of place.
We stayed with our friends Sue and Chris at their place on the spectacular, sandy shore of Lake Huron and were pleased to find that at that time their near neighbour was the mother of our friend Susan Swan, the novelist. The literary links go on forever: Susan’s great-grandfather, who bought the cottage for the family, in his youth had played cards with Walt Whitman when the American poet came to Ontario to visit Richard Bucke, the famous London psychiatrist, author, Whitman biographer — and, of course, former Sarnia resident.
Sarnia was named by the early governor Sir John Colborne (whose own name was borrowed by Robertson Davies for his fictional Toronto school, Colborne College). “Sarnia” is the Latin name for the island of Guernsey, where Sir John had practised being a governor, before a promotion in that line of work brought him to Canada.
The grandly named town (its resemblance to a small Channel Island lost in the mists of time) got an early start in the oil-refining business because it was the nearest port to Oil Springs. That is where the very first commercial oil well in North America went into production, way back in 1858. The Canadian Encyclopedia tells us that “in 1898 Imperial Oil Co. moved to Sarnia from Petrolia, and built a refinery.” Since then it has remained a petro-chemical centre, and the southern end of an oil pipeline from Alberta.
Despite what you have just read (and the jeering description “Chemical Valley”), if you go to Lakeshore Road, on the northeast side of Sarnia, you’ll find that the shoreline of Lake Huron is spectacularly beautiful. The Michigan shore lies off to the west, while waves crash in from Lake Huron to the north. The vast possibilities of the great lake leave you feeling that Alice Munro Country places like Goderich are almost in sight, just off to the northeast.
Sarnia is the hometown of Paul Wells, the shrewdly acerbic political columnist for Maclean’s. I persuaded Paul to extend his journalistic talents to writing books about our politics, which he did for me with Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s New Conservatism, published in 2006. In 2013 I was pleased to see him bring out another fine, stylish book, this one entitled The Longer I’m Prime Minister, which takes Stephen Harper’s success very seriously. It deservedly won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize as the best political book of the year. The boy from Sarnia is doing very well.
The next day we drove straight to London, and did not swerve north to Ipperwash Park on the Lake Huron shore, where Dudley George was killed. As with the story of the Underground Railroad, I’ve chosen to discuss it here, because it adds texture to the Ontario we think we know. This story, however, does not have a good ending, and is not a source of pride.
I know a fair amount about Ipperwash because after the Stoddart Publishing company went under, I was glad to be able to pick up the fine book by Peter Edwards, One Dead Indian: The Premier, the Police, and the Ipperwash Crisis. I republished it in an updated edition in 2003.
To summarize Peter’s well-researched book, a land claim dispute arose between the local Native band and the province over the ownership of Ipperwash Provincial Park. Native protesters occupied the park, and the protest turned violent. It became such a major problem that a meeting was held at Queen’s Park that included the premier, Mike Harris. The official notes of the meeting concluded: “The Province will take steps to remove the occupiers.”
Encouraged by this official instruction, the Ontario Provincial Police moved in, and an unarmed protester, Dudley George, was shot and killed.
For years the outraged members of Dudley George’s family fought for justice, both in the courts, where the OPP officer who shot the fatal bullet was tried and sentenced, and in the court of public opinion, where through an official inquiry the government’s role might be revealed, providing an explanation of how this could have happened. Finally, in 2003, a provincial inquiry was set up by the incoming Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty, under the respected former Ontario chief justice, Sidney Linden.
The inquiry’s hearings were hugely important, and very closely followed, because of the underlying possibility that instructions by a premier might have started the trail that led to the death of an unarmed citizen at the hands of the OPP. At one point, under oath, a former member of Mike Harris’s Cabinet (the former provincial Attorney General), Charles Harnick, testified that at the key Queen’s Park meeting, Harris shouted, “I want the fucking Indians out of my park.”
Former Harris aide Deb Hutton was also at that meeting. Also under oath, she failed to corroborate this testimony from the province’s former leading legal officer, because she could not recollect any specific conversations. This led one cross-examiner to note that she had used phrases such as “I don’t recall” and “I don’t specifically recall” on 134 separate occasions.
On February 14, 2006, former premier Mike Harris appeared before the inquiry. He testified that he had never made the statements attributed to him by his former Attorney General. However, in his final report, in 2007, Justice Linden “found the statements were made.” He went on to note “and they were racist, whether intended or not.”
So where are they all now?
Dudley George is dead.
Charles Harnick has found that his testimony under oath did not advance his political career.
Mike Harris has retired from politics, but continues his life as a member of many boards, including his role on the board of Magna, which attracted much criticism when under him the board awarded many millions to Magna’s former owner, Frank Stronach.
And the forgetful Deb Hutton is now married to Tim Hudak, who led the Conservative Party in Ontario to defeat in the 2014 election.
I spent my first Christmas in Canada in London. And I got to sleep in a bed!
Let me explain. When I arrived in Toronto in September 1967, I had very little money, so my sleeping bag went on friends’ floors or couches. As I looked for a job, my money drained away, and on some days it was a choice between getting a TTC bus fare or a newspaper, for the want ads. Yet for reasons of pride I avoided writing home for money, and wrote regular letters to my parents (cheaper than phone calls to Scotland) assuring them that all was well.
When I got a job in November, it was with the impressive title of “Administrative Assistant to the Registrar” at McMaster University. I had just enough money to spend a week at the downtown Hamilton YMCA.
Then some kind friends who also worked at McMaster invited me to stay with them at their apartment, in “Camelot Towers.” The deal was that I would sleep on the orange couch (the term “couch-surfing” had not yet been invented), and pay each of them five dollars a week for the privilege. The price was right, so I made the deal with Messrs. Stokes, Lou, and Van Hoeckel. Unfortunately the orange couch’s central location in the living room left me with an abiding distaste for late-night TV.
So it was a great thing when a kind London family, cousins of an old girlfriend in the other London, invited me to spend Christmas with them, in a bedroom of my own, with a bed and everything! I had a very happy Christmas with the Browns, and it left me with a great affection for London, and with dazzling memories of walking through Victoria Park in the snow to the sound of carols.
My other great London memory is of my first meeting with Alice Munro. This was in fall 1974, when Alice had returned from the West Coast, and was settling back into Alice Munro Country, initially as the writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario. I was a young editor, still close to penniless, and I took the bus down to London to meet this promising writer whose work I liked so much. We met, I recall, for dinner at the Holiday Inn downtown.
My memories of the meeting are vivid. I liked Alice from the start, but I was stunned by what she told me. I was there to worship at the feet of this accomplished author whose career was so promising. But the reality, it turned out, was different. She confessed that everyone in the publishing world was pressing her to stop wasting her time on this short story stuff — it was time to get serious, and write a novel. The pressure was so constant, and so unanimous, that she was trying to write a novel, and finding it so hard that she was now unable to write at all. She was “blocked.”
Here are her own words about the situation, in a letter written about me (without my knowledge) that’s quoted in Robert Thacker’s biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: “No one in Canada had shown the least interest in taking on a writer who was going to turn out book after book of short stories. The result of this was that I wasted much time and effort trying to turn myself into a novelist, and had become so depressed that I was unable to write at all.”
This was the moment when I was lucky enough to come on the scene, right there at the London Holiday Inn. I told her, “Alice, they’re all wrong! You’re a great short story writer, and that’s what you should keep on doing. I believe this so strongly that I can promise you that if you come and publish with me, I will never, ever, ask you for a novel.”
It seems so obvious now, but at the time this assurance was important and helpful to Alice. Her secret letter about me continued with these words: “Doug changed that. He was absolutely the first person in Canadian publishing who made me feel that there was no need to apologize for being a short story writer, and that a book of short stories could be published and promoted as major fiction. This was a fairly revolutionary idea at the time.”
I never did ask Alice to write a novel, and things seem to have worked out all right with the eleven books of short stories we’ve brought out since then. Not bad.
London plays a role in a number of Alice’s stories, especially those suggested by her own days as a student there. In “The Beggar Maid,” for example, we have Rose going to sell her blood, as Alice did, at Victoria Hospital. Discussing the year she spent as writer in residence, Robert Thacker’s book records, “One party Rose attends in Who Do You Think You Are?, for instance, was derived from some Munro attended and one she herself gave during her time in London. Much of Simon’s personal history in ‘Simon’s Luck,’ for instance, came to Munro from a faculty member recounting his own history at one of these parties.” In “Carried Away,” the last section of the story, headed “Tolpuddle Martyrs,” is set near Victoria Park in high summer, and speaks of a temporary bus station among “tall yellow-gray brick houses,” which I think catches London perfectly.
Also, in the title story of the 2014 collection of selected stories, Family Furnishings, the student narrator, on her reluctant way to meet an unfashionable aunt named Alfrida, walks through
parts of the city that were entirely strange to me. The shade trees along the northern streets had just come out in leaf, and the lilacs, the ornamental crab apple trees, the beds of tulips were all in flower, the lawns like fresh carpets. But after a while I found myself walking along streets where there were no shade trees, streets where the houses were hardly an arm’s reach from the sidewalk, and where such lilacs as there were — lilacs will grow anywhere — were pale, as if sun-bleached, and their fragrance did not carry. On these streets, as well as houses there were narrow apartment buildings, only two or three stories high — some with the utilitarian decoration of a rim of bricks around their doors, and some with raised windows and limp curtains falling out over their sills.
Alice Munro is always the shrewd observer of the details of class differences, even in the suburbs of London. “Limp curtains.”
More alarmingly, however, we find that creepy Mr. Purvis’s house in “Wenlock Edge” (“‘Here is where you leave your clothes,’ Mrs. Winner said”) is kept carefully anonymous, in terms of the outside face it presents to the world. That leaves a visitor to London wondering what goes on inside these houses, just as a reader of that story in Too Much Happiness (2009) will wonder just what mischief the mailed address in the final paragraph will produce. After all, as the final words show, this is Alice Munro’s world, where people are capable of “deeds they didn’t yet know they had in them.”
Which brings us to Doug Gibson, the editor in the shadows, now the Shameless Touring Performer. I gave my show at Wolf Hall, the central auditorium attached to the London Central Library downtown. The stage was as big as a badminton court, with the screen located uncomfortably close to the front, but by this point the old pro could adapt to almost anything. With an introduction by Sheila Lui, of the library, and a Q&A at the end, the evening seemed to go well. Mark, of the Oxford Book Shop, the sponsoring local bookseller, sold lots of copies, many of them signed by me with a legible signature. Later, Mary Lake and Robert Collins, a couple of good friends who live in “The Oldest Brick House In London,” bought ten copies of my book. Now, if all of our friends …
Even later, in October 2014, I returned to London, staying with Mary and Robert, to give a show on campus at Western, in order to spread the word about the university’s creation of an Alice Munro Chair in Creativity. It was a creative use of my show (we drew more than 200 people!) and I was honoured to be able to help the very worthy fundraising campaign, across Canada, with my next stop in Victoria.
The day after our Wolf Hall
library gig, we drove to Guelph, the last stop in this one-show-a-day, Windsor-Sarnia-London vaudeville tour. Guelph celebrates John McCrae, whose 1915 poem, “In Flanders Fields,” scribbled on the field of battle, is known to every Canadian. The McCrae House (its garden graced by notably ancient hollyhocks) is carefully preserved for visitors beside the Speed River, near downtown Guelph. That downtown is dominated by The Church That Wants To Be A Cathedral. It’s the massive Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady Immaculate, and it really does loom over the town, and in 2015 it was graced outside with a brand-new statue to John McCrae.
I once went there to check on some details for an Alice Munro story that is partly set within it (“Child’s Play”), and found that although Alice had changed the church’s name to “Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cathedral,” she got all the atmospheric details right in describing her character’s visit to a priest.
But Guelph’s Presbyterian founders, our old friends John Galt and Tiger Dunlop, would have been more at ease in two other ancient downtown churches, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian, on Norfolk Street, or even Royal City Church, on Quebec Street. Right across Quebec Street lies the Bookshelf, one of Canada’s best bookstores, which Doug Minett and his trusty team have turned into a cultural hub by offering not only books but a café upstairs, which also stages a number of events, such as — ta-da — my show!
It was fun for us to be so well received by Doug and his staff, especially the lively Dan, who runs the shows there. Returning from a trip to the car I was delighted to hear Jane’s voice intoning, “One, two, three, testing, testing . . .” I could see that she really had got into the full “techie” or even “roadie” role. Watch for tattoos next!
The stage in the café is about two paces wide, but the show went on in front of an audience of about fifty, including my old comrade-in-arms Jonathan Webb, who was M&S’s managing editor in my day (and who once watched with suppressed delight as I resisted the requests of an aged Mexican author who had, supposedly, found the key to eternal youth, and in my office was tensing his thigh muscles while urging me to test their immortal strength by squeezing them: “Feeeel! Feeeel!”).
Across Canada by Story Page 23
