Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  All very different, all very good. I recommend each one of them whole-heartedly, and am proud that our discussion centred exclusively on the books, as opposed to the prizes won, or the brothers or husbands (including Ron Davis, an excellent photographer) who might have earned a mention. Our main problem was that we ran out of time before all of the audience’s eager questions could be answered. But the books are there to be read.

  And I didn’t collapse, onstage or off, and even attended a post-show party before sleeping very soundly that night.

  In the nineteenth century, before the trains carved up the land, immigrants from Europe to Upper Canada or Ontario always arrived by boat at one of the many Lake Ontario ports dotted along “The Front.” In those days towns like Cobourg and Port Hope were busy with boats unloading white-faced settlers clinging anxiously to their children’s hands — and later with schooners loading up with timber or wheat for sale across the lake.

  Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993) catches that scene beautifully, through the eyes of six-year-old Liam, arriving with his parents from Ireland. He is dazzled by the sight of the white house on the Port Hope shore, which “burst out at him from the collection of darker buildings in the new harbour; glass and carved verandahs and whitewashed clapboard.” Then Liam looked “beyond the house and the small harbour town for a moment, to a line of hills and heard his father say, ‘That darkness there … that darkness would be the forest.’”

  Indeed it is. And Liam and his family are soon swallowed up in it, in the wilds of Hastings County, north of Belleville. In Jane Urquhart’s memorable words,

  In a few years’ time, Liam would know corduroy roads and rail fences and stumping machines, horses and cutters and banks of snow taller than a man, and the webbed shoes shaped like teardrops that one must wear to cross fields in winter. He would know the smell of wood in newly constructed buildings and the view through glass to graveyards only half filled with alert white stones. He would come to be familiar with cumbersome tools invented to cut through the flesh of trees or to tear at earth and rock.

  This, of course, is the land described by Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill in their books about “the backwoods” and “the bush.” Neither of these literary pioneers became acquainted with Liam.

  Robertson Davies used to tell of going to see The Cherry Orchard in Cobourg in the early 1950s, when the old Upper Canada was being transformed almost daily. Yet the traditional audience of old local families stood around at intermission “in dinner jackets green with age” complaining that they didn’t see what this fellow Chekhov was on about; all the while, the countryside was full of the metaphorical sound of cherry trees being felled, to make way for subdivisions. Today, each little historic town on what used to be “The Front” now has its share of writers.

  Farther east, Prince Edward County brings us into Loyalist territory, as the little towns filled with old Georgian orange-brick houses indicates, while the expansive farmhouses show that this was rich land. Follow the road past the ancient aboriginal Carrying Place to Ameliasburgh. That’s where the old Al Purdy A-frame is to be found, far from the spacious Loyalist mansions.

  You may recall that I was part of a group that decided to save this old clubhouse that Al and Eurithe had banged together out of scrap lumber on the shores of Roblin Lake. It was visited by several generations of Canadian poets, providing epic tales of wild parties with homemade wine or beer, and legends of good discussion, not to mention indecorous peeing by the boys of all ages. And it really was on the point of crumbling away. We were just in time, and were able with local help to restore it, so that now lucky young poets can hole up there, to see what life will be like surrounded by trees that knew Al Purdy, and how it will affect their work. If they’re really lucky, they might even spot a man high in the air, repairing the lofty steeple across Roblin Lake.

  Al Purdy (1918–2000)

  Here I turn to our old friend from Thunder Bay, Charles Wilkins. One of his later books begins in that city, and you can guess where it ends from the title, Walk to New York (2004). He was such an Al Purdy fan that he angled his blistering walk to include a visit to Al’s sacred Ameliasburgh, because, “in a sense it was Ameliasburgh that made him a poet. He moved there still in obscurity, in 1957, because it was close to his home town of Trenton. And there, in the earth fields and crumbling architecture, he discovered a sense of his own constitution and past and began immediately to redirect his own poetry.”

  Charles gives us alarming details about life in the A-frame. Al and Eurithe moved there in 1960, and “spent their first winter in the house without electricity or plumbing. They lit oil lamps to read and chopped through a metre of ice for water. During the coldest months, Purdy set the alarm to wake him every two hours to stoke the cast-iron stove that was the building’s only source of heat.”

  Al wrote about these hard times for Maclean’s in 1971: “While living there — trapped if you like — I was forced to explore my immediate surroundings. Wandering the roads on foot or driving when we had money for gas I got interested in old buildings — not as an expert, but with the idea that houses express the character of long-dead owners and builders.” (An interesting link, perhaps, with Al’s own rescued A-frame.) Certainly Charles Wilkins writes admiringly about Al’s “insistence on the link between a person’s verse-making and his or her landscape or scenery.”

  During their limping visit to Ameliasburgh, Charles and his friend George failed to find the A-frame (it’s on Gibson Road, for Heaven’s sake!) and had little success in rousing quotable memories of Al at the local store. At the cemetery, however, they “came to the riverside where a shiny black slab of granite in the shape of a book had been erected over Al’s remains, ‘The Voice of the Land.’”

  Prince Edward County — “the County” — is rolling land full of varied farms, and even vineyards, where the combination of limestone and a warming climate has produced good wines for weak-minded souls (like Jane) who enjoy that sort of thing. Geoff Heinricks described the magic of the lure that turned him from a Toronto writer into a winemaker: his 2004 book is entitled A Fool and Forty Acres, and I was pleased to publish it. Now the County is full of other such fools, some of them friends of mine with names very similar to Michael MacMillan and Seaton McLean.

  Meanwhile, not only does Sandbanks Provincial Park draw my grandchildren for happy camping weeks, it also has astonishing windsurfing, with conditions so good on occasion that keen surfers in on the secret are drawn all the way from Montreal. But we know of an even better secret: Amherst Island.

  Amherst Island lies farther along the Loyalist shores that run all the way from Glenora to Kingston, and beyond. Christopher Moore’s The Loyalists reminds us that, incredibly, the British army under Swiss-born Sir Frederick Haldimand moved so fast that they were able to take in, and settle, 10,000 Loyalists in Upper Canada right after the American Revolution. These, I’d remind you, were real refugees. They may have been rich lawyers in New York, or politicians in Boston, they might even have come with slaves, but they had to start afresh, clearing the land assigned to them, with the tools (and, in some cases, the food) handed out by Haldimand’s men. Al Purdy’s ancestors were among them. So were the ancestors of millions of Canadians today.

  After driving east along the Loyalist shores beyond the Glenora ferry, past places like Adolphustown and Bath, when you reach the port of Millhaven you know that you’re ready for the ferry across to Amherst. The name Millhaven, of course, reminds us that we’re near Kingston, with its array of prisons. The touring singer Mary Lou Fallis (a relation, yes, of the man who wrote No Relation) once told me of appearing at the prison for women. As usual, her act contained the sentimental country-and-western song “Home on the Range” (you know, where the deer and antelope play). Big mistake. Tears and more tears. Sobbing everywhere.

  Mary Lou had forgotten that the long balconies around the prison’s central hall, encircled by indiv
idual cells, are known as “ranges.” Her sweet song literally came too close to home.

  The ferry ride across to Amherst Island is not a major voyage, like the trip from Digby to Saint John or Tsawwassen to Sidney. It’s more like the shuttle across to Denman, or to the Toronto Islands. But like all islands, Amherst Island is different. It feels different from the mainland, and its residents will happily tell you that they are, well, different. Looked at objectively, the shortage of the grand, elegant, old Loyalist houses you’ll find on the mainland would seem to indicate that the flat land of Amherst Island was never as rich for farming, although we visited friends who have the largest sheep farm in this part of Ontario. The sheep are safe from wolves except in very harsh winters, when the ice provides a safe passage over from the mainland for hungry, fairy-tale wolves — although the sheep are guarded by large dogs.

  Another note. Like Wolfe Island just off Kingston, Amherst has hordes of little voles, such a delicacy that the two islands have attracted more snowy owls than any other place on the continent. Birders have taken note, and can be spotted gathering at the ferry on winter weekends, in full winter plumage.

  The island is named after the British military officer Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who played a distinguished role in the capture of Quebec in 1760. Sadly, he was also a genocidal thug. In the long history of broken promises that marked the dealings between white invaders in Canada and the Native people they replaced, nothing was so terrible as the germ warfare that Amherst proposed to introduce around Fort Detroit in 1763 by giving local Indians a gift of smallpox-infected blankets, hoping, in his own words, to “extirpate” them.

  Despite its namesake, Amherst Island is a fine place, home to almost 1,000 people in the summer, with pleasing roads that circle the island, or cut right across it, to make a rough figure eight. The centre spot is Stella, at the ferry dock, and the central spot there is the Lodge. This is the combined hotel and arts and community centre owned by Molly Stroyman, who invited Jane and me to stay and put on another show. When we gave the show on Saturday night, the turnout was amazing, so that by the end a surprisingly high percentage of Amherst Island residents were proud owners of a copy of Stories About Storytellers.

  One female member of the audience, impressed by my introduction of Jane as “my lovely and talented assistant,” asked her seriously if she had married me in the course of our tour. A very pleasing thought … lowly young techie succeeds in persuading the great star to marry her, and make an honest woman of her.

  Kingston should be perfect territory for a book like mine. Its grey limestone buildings ring out the message that this is an old city (Canada’s capital for some years) with a fine literary tradition. Robertson Davies grew up here after Renfrew, and made it the “Salterton” of his early novels. The filmmaker John McGreevy persuaded him to tour the streets in an ancient carriage, telling stories that sprang to mind, to John’s camera. One that I recall is of an idealistic Queen’s University professor who started a series of lectures for prisoners in one of Kingston’s jails with the inspiring title “Literature as a Means of Escape” (and R.D. leans towards the camera and says, “And that story is true!”).

  I have a number of Kingston literary friends, and have attended several literary events there. I remember the Writers’ Union conference held at Queen’s when Hugh MacLennan gave the inaugural Margaret Laurence Lecture. He reported with delight a recent conversation with a very frank small boy. “You’re eighty years old, and that’s an awful thing,” said the boy. “What does it feel like to know that you’ll soon be dead?”

  I should have taken that as a warning. But here I was in bookish Kingston, invited by the mighty Indigo chain to come and perform in their main downtown store. What could possibly go wrong?

  Well, despite the fact that Indigo had asked me to come there from Toronto, and the fact that I’d chatted with the store organizer by phone, it was clear when we got there that they had no idea what to do with me. Um … what about sitting at a little table near the door, in case someone wanted to get me to sign a copy of my book? Not a good idea, I suggested.

  In the end they put me, with a dozen chairs for a gigantic audience, upstairs beside the in-store coffee bar. And when I say “beside,” I mean within spitting distance. I can tell you that a coffee bar with customers shouting out their orders above the racket of hissing espresso machines is not a silent place. “Yes, let me tell you how Alistair Mac —” HISSSSS. Or “Well, Alice Munro once said —” GRRRRRRIND. (Hold onto your chairs while everything shakes.) It was so bad that one member of the audience, a brave female friend of mine, actually went up to the coffee bar to shout a protest. It was a noble idea, but it didn’t work.

  Eventually, I brought things to a dignified close (“I said A DIGNIFIED CLOSE!”) and signed a few copies and escaped. Since then, Kingston has remained a Gibson-free zone.

  I know Ottawa fairly well. I even know the history, of the Shiners Wars in the 1830s when street fighting between gangs of French and Irish over the lumber trade made it the most dangerous town in the country. Just think, gangs fighting in Ottawa, without any formal party affiliation!

  In the late 1980s I was on the board of the Canadian Conference of the Arts, an Ottawa-based group that lobbied for government support of the arts in general. I vividly remember one day when our elite attack squads were dispatched to a variety of government offices to press our message home. I was with the group that included Karen Kain, for ballet, Lotfi Mansouri, for opera, and R.H. Thompson, for theatre. We were making our case with the minister of communications, Flora MacDonald, and I had not yet spoken when Flora objected. “All your talk of ballet and opera is great, and is just fine for big cities. But I’m from a small town. What use is what you’re doing to a young girl like me, growing up in a small town?”

  Sometimes the gods are good to us. I spoke up as the publisher of W.O. Mitchell, and Margaret Laurence, and Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, all of whom (can you hear my voice rising?) were giving young Canadian readers the most priceless gift of all: the belief that the lives that they, and their friends, and their parents, and their neighbours were living was material for great literature. Great literature was not about dead Englishmen or big-city Americans. It was about us, right here.

  I think it is fair to say we won that one. And Flora has remained a friend.

  For many years now the Writers’ Trust has sponsored a very successful fundraising event in Ottawa. The Politics and the Pen dinner at the Château Laurier is now a fixture on the March Ottawa social scene, with guests promised that their table will feature both a politician and an author.

  In the past I used to attend the dinner as a publisher. In fact, my first book tells how I first met Sheila and Paul Martin when I was placed at the prime minister’s table because an organizer had said, “Oh, Doug can talk to anyone.” And I always had a good time, especially when my authors (such as Max and Monique Nemni) were winning the evening’s big award, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize.

  After my book came out, however, I was upgraded, and became an Author. This meant that I was invited to attend, free, and flown to Ottawa, and positively cossetted at the dinner, where all authors are issued a medal and a colourful ribbon (green one year, red the next) to hang around the neck like a proud Olympian. It’s all very good fun, and for an excellent cause.

  Before the dinner I visited Sean Wilson, who bravely took an early chance on me at his Ottawa International Writers Festival, then spent a fascinating half hour at the office of my old friend Jeffrey Simpson, of the Globe and Mail. He’s always full of interesting ideas (the man’s a columnist, after all!) but he’s also a fascinating witness to major changes in the Canadian book business. He has produced non-fiction bestsellers about Canadian public issues in the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, and right up until 2012, when his book about our medical system hit the stands.

  He told me that everything had changed from the “magic carpet”
days when your publisher would whisk you around the country from city to city, from one book talk show to the next. Now it’s up to the author to behave as his own publicist. He used the adjective “brazen,” and estimated that of the forty or so public appearances/speeches he made to promote his new book, he personally arranged thirty of them. He and I found ourselves excitedly (although Jeff doesn’t do “excited” very well) confirming each other’s findings that the new world out there demands ever more active author involvement in promotion — although I can’t promise a one-man stage show from Jeff Simpson in the near future. (I’d buy a ticket.)

  My final stop was at the CBC building, where my wife’s niece, Amy Castle (the producer of the daily TV show Power and Politics with my old author Evan Solomon as host), invited me to sit in the control room. Fascinating! Everyone knows about the number of screens up there in front of the room, and the constant directions to switch to this camera or this piece of film, but the instant typing of the links for the host on the teleprompter and the person at the front choosing which tweets to add as crawlers to the screen were new to me.

  After that it was time to rush to the Château Laurier and don my forty-eight-year-old dinner jacket, plus medal, and then mingle. Luckily my Ottawa links go back to the civilized days of inter-party contact. I suspect that few guests were able to range as widely on the political spectrum as I did, chatting with old friends from Ed Broadbent to Preston Manning. Later, at the bar I was able to tell Justin Trudeau stories about his father that he had never heard, including my “Trivial Pursuit” moment, when he almost killed me.

  At our table I had a very good time, enjoying the evening that was MC’d by John Baird and Mark Carney, but I did not shine. In my role as author, I politely went around the table to meet my companions. I found myself sitting beside a very pleasant woman named Diana who spoke with an English accent. Because we had just established that our table neighbours were Swiss diplomats, and since she had mentioned that she was moving back to England very soon, I asked her if she too was in the diplomatic service. Not exactly, she replied, she was moving to England because her husband had just been appointed the new governor of the Bank of England.