Jonathan, still an editor much in demand, later posted kind things about my show, especially the interesting shrewdly paradoxical description that I am “a self-deprecating, self-assured Scot.” I blush to repeat his compliments. Almost. The audience, he wrote, “came away with a bit of insight into how books are made. They heard a number of good stories. And they were treated to a masterful performance, a life turned into art.”
The University of Guelph now has 22,000 students, and is famous for its superb Scottish Studies department. I have given a version of my show there on campus — concentrating on my authors with a connection to Scotland — in the course of an academic symposium. I’m proud to relate that I sold a copy to a visiting Scottish professor because he had been so thrilled to find his hero, Hugh MacLennan (whom he saw as a major international figure), finally being properly recognized at home in Canada.
I was well cossetted during my Guelph evening at the Bookshelf, and at dinner in the café with Doug after the show, but the kindness of the staff there extends far beyond the booklined walls of the store. The Eden Mills Writers’ Festival is held every fall in that little community nearby. The Bookshelf is the official bookseller there, setting up its booth right on the main street, which is crowded all weekend long (given good September weather) with eager book-buyers from all over the Greater Toronto Area. In 2012 I was featured alongside Alistair MacLeod, and his presence attracted so many visitors that the little church where we performed was full to bursting, the pews almost creaking with the strain. I’m told that the crowds outside were so large that some MacLeod fans even tried pressing their ears against the Gothic church windows, but no divine intervention magnified the joyful sound, and they heard nothing.
After our double act — where we gave individual readings, then I drew out great stories from Alistair, including the epic tale of the midnight ride with W.O. from Calgary to Banff in a blizzard — the bookstore had set up a signing session for the authors. I sat beside Alistair while two eccentric people lined up (can two people constitute a lineup?) in front of me and my modest pile of books. By contrast, Alistair’s lineup stretched right across the street, and almost into the woods. As I sat there idly, watching Alistair sign copy after copy of No Great Mischief or Island (or sometimes both), I whispered to him, “Would you sign the next one with the words “Please buy my friend Doug Gibson’s book, too”? but my suggestion went unheeded.
Meanwhile, the kind people from the bookstore worked hard to prevent me from feeling ignored by making bright, cheerful conversation with me. In my publisher role, I’ve found myself making precisely that sort of conversation, many times, to shield neglected authors from hurt. It was very kind of them, and they spoke the language of the situation well, but I really didn’t need their help. After all, I’m the man who wrote the rules that say that autographing sessions should never be seen as competitive events. And this was Alistair MacLeod!
I’m sorry that I didn’t run into my friend Tom King, another Guelph resident. I’ve known Tom ever since he edited a collection of Native writing called All My Relations for us at M&S in 1990. His own background is very interesting. He is a Cherokee from California, with Greek and German roots also in his family tree. He has all of the usual academic credentials, plus the unique fact that he spent some years in Australia, working as a photojournalist. (We need more of them in the CanLit world!) He also spent some time being an involved, radical protester for Native rights.
Along the way in his academic career he spent time at the University of Lethbridge, where he met his long-time partner, Helen Hoy, now an English professor at the University of Guelph, and a huge influence on his writing, as we shall see.
As a writer, Tom has done it all. An anthologist (see above); a novelist (Medicine River in 1989, Green Grass, Running Water in 1993, and, most recently, The Back of the Turtle, the G.G. award-winner in 2014); a short story writer (One Good Story, That One in 1993); a children’s book author (A Coyote Columbus Story in 1992 — when did the man sleep?); a CBC Radio series called The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour (as ironic a look at cultural stereotypes as you will ever see, or rather hear); and a series of non-fiction books, notably his 2003 Massey Lectures book, The Truth About Stories.
But for me, his crowning achievement (and of course he has won his share of prizes) is his angry 2012 book, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. It’s a powerful, shaming story that he has to tell, and he’s such a shrewd writer that he uses humour to tell it, making it all the more powerful. Very early in the book, for instance, he writes: “When I announced to my family that I was going to write a book about Indians in North America, Helen said, ‘Just don’t start with Columbus.’ She always gives me good advice. And I always give it my full consideration.
“In October of 1492, Christopher Columbus . . .”
But don’t let the fact that this is very funny fool you. This is a very fine book, telling a terrible history. Smiling Tom King hits very hard.
In person, Tom, a big, husky fellow, is very good, laconic company, full of sly jokes. It was a tragedy for Canada that when he ran for the NDP in the 2008 election — and Jack Layton was there to hold his hand aloft in triumph at the nomination meeting — the political gods decided that his witty oratory was too much for Parliament, which might have never recovered from the shock.
The Niagara Frontier was, of course, the frontier that beckoned the Loyalists escaping from New York State. The American Revolution had turned them into hated Tories, targets for tarring and feathering (and did you know that tarring and feathering, with boiling tar, was usually fatal, not just humiliating, and that being “ridden out of town on a rail” often produced serious injuries, especially to a man?), and on the run to a new life in Canada. In Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) Robertson Davies has given a vivid account of just such an escape, as we follow the Gage Vermeulen family as they run north. It’s a very sympathetic account of their escape by canoe up the Mohawk River towards Canada — as you’d expect, because R.D. based it on his own family’s journey. As his narrator/observer/stand-in, Gil Gilmartin, puts it:
August Vermeulen is sitting on the step of his very decent house at a small settlement called Stoney Creek. He is smoking a long pipe, and resting from a long day at his profession, which is that of a land surveyor. He is very busy, for new lands are being apportioned to new settlers, refugees from the American States. He is a contented, prosperous man.
Who are these tatterdemalions who have opened his gate and are coming towards him? A woman, brown as an Indian and in rags, with a dirty boy who holds his head very high, and a girl carrying what might be a monkey, but which from its wails he judges to be a child.
The woman is weeping. “Gus,” she calls; “Gus, it’s Anna.”
Gilmartin is weeping, too, because he has recognized the Anna figure as his great-great-great-great-grandmother. And possibly R.D.’s eyes were damp as he wrote this account of his own ancestors, a story that had been bred in the bone.
You’ll notice that “Uncle Gus” was a surveyor, which is interesting. Even a brief look at a map of the Niagara region shows that these early surveyors did their work differently here. To accommodate the flood of refugees they made the lots smaller, which means that a modern visitor finds concession roads criss-crossing the country every two minutes. A fascinating 1790 map (“For the use of His Majesty’s Governor and Council, Compiled in the Surveyor General’s Office”) makes this very clear, showing the plans “for the District of Nassau,” dividing the area all along the Lake Ontario coastline, and the area fronting the Niagara River, into tiny, quilt-like patches. The map is signed by an assistant named John Collins, and by the surveyor general himself, Samuel Holland.
We’ll meet Holland again in another chapter, when we cross the Holland Marsh, but for now let’s take the time for an amazing story about a famous Canadian duel. His son Samuel, a lieutenant in the 60th Regi
ment, stationed in Montreal, became embroiled in a bitter feud with a brother officer, a Captain Shoedde. Eventually, a duel was arranged, at Point St. Charles. In the words of Don W. Thomson in Men and Meridians (1966),
Hearing of the insulting behaviour of Captain Shoedde towards the Holland family, the father sent Samuel a brace of engraved duelling pistols which he claimed had been given to him by a famous commander. “Samuel, my boy,” wrote the Surveyor General, “here are the weapons which my beloved friend, General Wolfe, presented to me on the day of his death. Use them to keep the old family without stain.”
The dazzling history of the pistols in his opponent’s hand did not affect Captain Shoedde’s aim. Young Samuel Holland was shot and killed. His duelling pistols are still to be seen at the McCord Museum in Montreal.
For Holland, and every other surveyor, the great challenge in the Niagara area is the abrupt, craggy Escarpment. This is where Brock University — named after the genuinely gallant general who died in 1812 defending this very frontier — is located, high above St. Catharines. Brock U. will always be admired in our house, because it was the very first Ontario university to invite me to present my show, which I did to a mixed group of students and visiting faculty attending a conference on Canadian themes. I presented the show in what is maybe the only room in an Ontario university with an Arctic name — Pond Inlet — and my re-enacted polar bear attack on James Houston’s dogs seemed to benefit from it. And I was very glad to descend from Brock’s academic heights to the Garden City, St. Catharines, the home for many years of Richard B. Wright.
Richard was born and raised in Midland, Ontario, but came south from Georgian Bay to work in Canadian publishing. He worked first for Macmillan, the company I was soon to join, and legends lingered of long, liquid lunches among the lads. He rose, in due course, to become a sales manager, but his main claim to fame is that he secretly wrote a book for young people, and submitted it anonymously to his colleagues. Against all the odds, it worked! (Although the first meeting with the nom-de-plumed new author must have been interesting.)
He had moved to work at Oxford University Press, in the suburbs, when his first adult novel, The Weekend Man, came out in 1970, followed by In the Middle of a Life in 1973. Both were realistic, ironic looks at typical middle-class, suburban life. The first, for example, includes an office Christmas party scene in which Wes Wakeham finds himself alone with Mrs. Bruner, requesting her Christmas kiss:
And a fine hot open-mouthed kiss it is too, full of searching tongues and wild warm air a-mingling in our throats! Really we find ourselves locked together in the most stormy embrace, groping into each other’s mouths like teenagers. She pushes her long groin into mine while I clutch her corseted bottom and hang on for dear life. … And so in this quick flagrant ardour we muzzle each other for the longest time, pressed against my steel-top desk. An amazing turn of events!
Both books attracted admiring attention. Mordecai Richler, for instance, described him as “a very talented man, the best novelist to emerge out of Canada in recent years,” and the New York Times said that he “writes with the apparent ease of breathing, and he is both touching and very, very funny.”
Richard is a small, neat, undemonstrative man, with a dry voice and a dryly sceptical view of the world (In The Weekend Man, a relative exhibits family affection: “‘Well now. And here we are again. Our own little family happily reunited. Isn’t it delightful!’ She immediately linked arms with Landon and Ginny and pulled them towards her. This show of feeling was unlike her. She must have been into the sauce.”) This unsentimental realism must have come in handy when he became a teacher at Ridley College to bolster his income from fiction writing. But he kept on writing novels, and hit the jackpot (a modest, Canadian jackpot) with Clara Callan in 2001, which won the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and Ontario’s Trillium Book Award. It’s a fine example of the epistolary novel, where everything unfolds in letters. I hope that the many readers who enjoyed it will explore his earlier novels, some of which I was lucky enough to edit.
The best of these (although Brian Moore warned that it is “as brutal as a mailed fist”) is Final Things (1980), a taut story of what happens to a divorced Toronto man when his twelve-year-old son doesn’t come back from the corner store. Very powerful and very bleak. The Teacher’s Daughter (1982) has the courage to deal directly with the forbidden subject of class, as a middle-class girl gets involved with a guy who loves muscle shirts and muscle cars. (I recall that we put a Camaro’s flaming hood decoration on the cover of the hard-cover book, to make our point.)
Above all, I’d recommend Farthing’s Fortunes (1976) because it’s almost unique in Canadian writing, a big sprawling novel that covers many decades as our young hero leaves small-town Ontario, survives life as a young thief on the Toronto streets, works for a society family, follows a music-hall star to New York in the not-so-gay nineties (where a friend wins a brothel competition with the help of eight impressed ladies in a few, short hours), is swept up in the Klondike gold rush, and fights in the First World War, where his experience on the Somme, on July 1, 1916, “the blackest day in the history of the British army,” shakes him — and the reader — and sets him off to try to assassinate the man responsible, General Douglas Haig.
The later chapters deal with riding the rails in Canada’s West in the Depression, or surviving in hard times by managing a young black prize-fighter, until fate brings him back home, and to the Craven Falls retirement home, Sunset Manor, where he encounters the solemn, humourless publisher who introduces this surprising volume of “memoirs.” Although the stolid publisher is (to me) an unconvincing figure, Richard’s novel is a fascinating look at the development of a country, as well as one man. I’m surprised that more people don’t try their hand at writing plot-driven, picaresque novels that move around. I’m even surprised that more people don’t try their hand at writing picaresque non-fiction books, full of stories. Come to think of it …
The other great physical feature of the Niagara Frontier is the Welland Canal. Built in 1829 to smooth out the drop from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario (few cargo-bearing ships adapted well to the 100-metre drop over Niagara Falls) it is an engineering feat that apparently excites canal fans everywhere. According to the breathless words of The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Locks 4, 5, and 6 comprise the world-famous series of twinned flight locks, with a length of almost 1249.7 m and a rise of 42.5 m.” Bird-watching seems restrained in comparison.
The canal created Port Colborne, at the south end where Lake Erie flows into it. And somehow, the little town of roughly 20,000 has created the Best Reading Series In Canada. Let me explain. Every year, from September to May, with a break for Christmas, there are monthly “Readings at the Roselawn,” the theatre where all 300 seats are sold out for an evening with a selected author. And this has been going on for eighteen years!
As always, there is a moving spirit here, one person driving it all forward. In this case it’s a writer, William Thomas of nearby Sunset Beach. You may know some of William’s popular funny books, such as 2003’s The Dog Rules (Damn Near Everything!), or 2002’s Never Hitchhike on the Road Less Travelled, or his humorous newspaper columns. You certainly will know many of the authors he has persuaded over the years to come, have dinner with him in an Italian family restaurant, then head off to the Roselawn theatre to be greeted by sold-out crowds eager to hear them and then buy their books. William persuades them to come, even if (perhaps especially if) they don’t know where the hell Port Colborne is. One Toronto author, who shall remain nameless, assured him that there would be no trouble getting there, since she’d had a cottage in Muskoka for many years . . .
So who are the people who come, and who sit for their photographic portrait so that they can join the astonishing Roselawn photo gallery? Well, they’re all what we might call “surname-only authors” like Atwood, Berton, Richler, Mowat, MacLeod, Hill, Fotheringham, Vassanji, Quarrington, Lam, R
ooke, Ferguson, Johnston, and on and on and on. And even Gibson.
My turn came on a harsh night in February, yet, as promised, every seat was sold. With Jane high in the projectionist box overhead, changing the slides for me, it went off well. So well that William later wrote of my show as “CanLit to the power of one,” and claimed that he had never seen his audience “leap from their seats so fast and stay on their feet so long.” Warming to his work, he even called me “the editor who is outshining his stable of stars.”
Not quite. But it’s a nice way to end a chapter.
* * *
CHAPTER 9
* * *
THE ON-TO-OTTAWA TREK
Linwood Barclay, the Suburban Storyteller … Marching to a Different Drummer … A Short Drive East of Toronto … Tuxbridge … A Detour to the Land of Leacock … Peterborough, Lakefield, and the Mafia … Along the Front … The Loyalist Al Purdy … Amherst Island … Hissed at in Kingston … Ottawa … Politics and the Pen in the Nation’s Capital … The Deserted Bookstore … Arnprior and the Robertson Davies Trail … Good Cheer at Bonnechere … Muskoka Cottage Country
* * *
In 1998, at my publisher’s office at McClelland & Stewart, I received the following letter:
Dear Mr. Gibson,
So I came home from the Writers’ Development Trust dinner back in November and told my wife Neetha a very friendly guy said hello and told me about how his daughter often feels embarrassed when he drops in to the restaurant where she works, just like in the column I wrote about our daughter Paige not wanting to be seen with me in the mall. And he said he really liked my takeoff on Bre-X books, particularly the Pierre Berton coffee table book The Bre-X Quest, seeing as how his company had just published the first of the Bre-X books. And I said:
Across Canada by Story Page 24
