Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

When he finished, he was warmly applauded. A number of the Japanese visitors even came up, congratulated him, and said loudly to his boss, “Very good Japanese.”

  When the successful visit was over, and they waved the bus away, his boss was very pleased. “That went really well, Will. But tell me, what was the joke you made early on that really got them laughing?”

  “Ah,” said Will, “it’s kind of hard to translate.”

  The next time Jane and I returned to Prince Edward Island, its swim-before-breakfast sunny landscape had become chilly, bright, wintry Christmas card scenes. On our way to Charlottetown, we paused for lunch at Amherst. Now there’s a place shot through with history, where every fine old building on the main street is associated with a Father of Confederation! Its association with the eighteenth-century British soldier is, of course, less happy.

  But that day we shared a lunch table in Amherst with a friendly stranger who knew all about me and my book, and wished us well on PEI. And when we drove across the Tantramar Marsh, and turned north to the Confederation Bridge, it was hard to avoid the excitement of the approaching Island. It was a great thrill to find ourselves crossing the ice-choked Northumberland Strait.

  Unlike our summer visit to North Rustico, this time we drove straight to Charlottetown, marvelling at how varied the hilly island landscape could be. In Charlottetown we stayed with Jane’s cousin Norman and his wife, Heather, and went in the late afternoon to the CBC Radio station to talk about that night’s show, to be held at the Art Gallery of Prince Edward Island, Confederation Centre. Yet again, the link between the CBC and local readers was demonstrated. When we showed up there, the crowds (“Hi, I heard about your show on the radio!”) were extraordinary. So extraordinary that we had to delay the show for some minutes while extra stacks of chairs were brought up and distributed to such distant parts of the gallery that I had to give my show with my back turned to part of the overflow audience of 130.

  My old Banff Centre friend Richard Lemm, who is now at the University of PEI, helped me organize this Maritime universities tour. That night, Richard (still a trim, active, athletic fellow) was very funny introducing me, recalling brave days in Banff when he and I were young, and W.O. was heading the writing program, where he told everyone how lucky they were to have brought a young writer named Alice Munro to grace their program because “she spins straw into gold!”

  At the end of my show — full of good questions — I was able to sign the new paperback edition of my book for the first time. Then we were taken to Mavor’s, in Confederation Centre, for a fine post-show meal. Right at the end, a political science professor named Don Desserud pulled me aside and told how he was once at an event in France where Jack Hodgins spoke, and was asked from the floor why as a Canadian he did not speak in French. Jack, always a nice guy, replied with a good-humoured story about how his childhood experience with other languages had left him badly scarred. When his family moved into a new house, when he was four, he found a stack of comic books. Although he had not yet learned to read, he spent so much time studying them that he, yes, learned to read them, secretly, working out that this word meant “No!” while this one meant “Crash!” and so on.

  When his parents broke the news that next week he had to go to school, he was resistant. Why did he have to go to school?

  “Well, to learn how to read.”

  Jack dropped his bombshell: “But I can read already! Just look at these!” and he brought out his stack of comics, and proceeded to read what the letters meant.

  Then the parents dropped their own bombshell: “But, Jack, these comics are in Finnish. The Saarinens left them behind in the house. You’ve learned to read Finnish!”

  That, Jack explained to the audience, had made him very suspicious of any language that was not English, so he, regrettably, had never learned French.

  My spring 2014 Maritime tour also brought me to Dalhousie, where Karen Smith, the Special Collections librarian, arranged for us to stay in the Oscar Wilde Room at the Waverley Inn. At breakfast the next day we were mindful of Oscar’s dictum that “only dull people are brilliant at breakfast,” but enjoyed our chat with the Kingston-based writer Diane Schoemperlen who had been giving a talk at St. Mary’s for Alexander MacLeod at exactly the same time as my Dalhousie show. The world of Canadian literature is small, but endlessly overlapping, as this hotel encounter shows.

  At Dalhousie I gave my show in an intimate setting in the Killam Library, flanked by distinguished old walnut desks that belonged to distinguished old writers, topped by leather-bound editions of authors like Thomas Haliburton. The audience was heavy on Dalhousie students and academics, with a leavening of old publishing colleagues, old academic allies like Andy Wainwright, and good friends like Silver Donald Cameron and John Houston.

  The Q&A session produced a story from John Houston about how I once eased his ailing father’s embarrassment at coming to dinner in a dressing gown by appearing in my own dressing gown, so that we could behave like two trendsetting eighteenth-century beaux. Andy Wainwright recalled an early encounter with Alice Munro, which hit him so strongly that he wrote a poem about her. When she received it, gratefully, she told him that it was the first poem ever written about her, and, thanks to Andy, I now have a copy. And Silver Donald recalled that in the early days of the Writers’ Union Alice was among the writers who proposed to raise money for the Union by producing a hilariously pornographic joint novel, with each racy chapter contributed anonymously. Don reported that the result was such a boring, steamy mish-mash of tangled bodies panting their way through totally unreadable sexual activities, that it left everyone involved much sadder and wiser.

  The next day we drove to Antigonish. At Truro we remembered Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief story about Gaelic-speaking Cape Breton men being rousted out of a Truro backyard and finding that the muttered curse “Pog mo thon” led to fine hospitality from the Cape Breton woman of the house. Beyond Truro the usual tunnel vision of the Nova Scotia highway builder falls away, and in the bright winter weather we enjoyed the vistas of snow-clad hills and valleys all the way to Antigonish. We came into town, as usual, down past the St. F.X. campus, and past Chisholm Park, before finding our way to our usual home, the Maritime Inn, where Doug Smith, the poet and our St. F.X. faculty host, had arranged for us to stay.

  Antigonish (emphasis on the “nish”) is a delightful little town, with a curving main street at the bottom of the university hill. We roamed around, grinning happily, and revisiting the Lyghtesome Gallery where we heard news of my old friend Lynda Johns (the “bird lady”; eating with her might involve starlings and robins flying around the dining room and sampling your spaghetti). Then we came across the superb new public library on Main Street. I was pleased to see that there is a flourishing Gaelic section, and was able to read an English translation of lovely poems by Sorley MacLean, Alistair MacLeod’s Scottish friend.

  That evening my show was held in the Schwartz Centre (a spectacular new building devoted to the study of business, donated by Gerry Schwartz, the husband of Indigo’s Heather Reisman, who should, in theory, know all about the business of selling books in Canada). The facilities are spectacular, and left some of the arts students who crowded into my show somewhat jealous. But we all had a good time. I exposed some young students intriguingly to authors they didn’t know, like Robertson Davies — to the pleasure of my host, Doug Smith, who saw the prospect of swelling CanLit classes in the next year, which would be good. And of course I was glad to spend extra time talking about my two St. F.X. authors, Alistair MacLeod and Brian Mulroney.

  I came away with a great story about Brian. It’s well known that during his days as a skinny young undergraduate, where his nickname was “Bones,” he was a keen debater. In his 2007 Memoirs, this kid from Baie Comeau bravely recalls a detail from his maiden speech: “The word I had used to describe the Liberal lust for power was ‘insatiable,’ which I mispronounced as ‘i
n-sat-eye-able.’” Later, as he grew more polished, he was, in his words, “extremely active on the debating team.” He even included the proud boast, “During those years our team was undefeated.”

  Hold that thought. Mulroney’s book does not include the story that I heard from one of the St. F.X. audience, an older gentleman who approached us after the show. Apparently, when Brian was debating against another team (can it have been UNB?) the debate was going very badly for his side, and they seemed to be headed for defeat. Brian, a smoker, had some matches in his pocket. Surreptitiously he lit one, and quietly dropped it into a half-full wastepaper basket.

  Flames! Smoke alarms! Fire extinguishers! And total disruption of the course of the debate, thanks to Brian’s well-timed arson. (It opens up the prospects for a nice Anglo-Saxon amendment to the chant, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”). And the St. F.X. debating team remained undefeated.

  Among the kindly reports on the evening sent by Doug Smith’s students (who, they revealed, had been forced to attend my show) was one I’m happy to quote:

  My grandfather met [Alistair MacLeod] one day in some part of Cape Breton (I can’t remember where). He needed a drive to work and my grandfather went out of his way to get him there. They had a long chat in the car and that was that. Years later when MacLeod was discovered my papa received a letter and two signed copies of his books, No Great Mischief and Island. MacLeod had remembered my grandfather’s small act of kindness and wanted to thank him.

  The letter concludes: “Both those books now reside on my shelf and last night you inspired me to crack open Island for the first time in years. Thank you. Last night was a pleasure.” And it’s a pleasure for me to recall that in January 2000, I wrote the Editor’s Introduction to that book, ending with the words, “All sixteen of his lovingly crafted stories are contained here, organized chronologically, in the order in which they first appeared in print. They are accompanied by no commentary, no explanations, no critical apparatus. These are Alistair MacLeod’s stories, and they speak for themselves.”

  From time to time here, you’ll notice that I’ve quoted from a classic 1973 book entitled Conversations with Canadian Novelists. That’s exactly what it is, in two volumes, thanks to a young B.C.-raised professor named Donald Cameron, who decided to take a tape recorder along when he talked with some interesting Canadians about their writing. The list of the subjects he chose is amazing. Ernest Buckler, Roch Carrier, Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Harold Horwood, Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Laurence, Jack Ludwig, Hugh MacLennan, and David Lewis Stein are in Volume One. Then there’s George Bowering, Morley Callaghan, Dave Godfrey, W.O. Mitchell, Brian Moore, Martin Myers, Thomas Raddall, Mordecai Richler, Gabrielle Roy, and Rudy Wiebe in Volume Two.

  Not a bad series of choices. The man should have been a publisher! To be fair, in a career spanning lots of roles, this self-described “author, educator” has been just about everything, and he was indeed the “Publisher and Founding ed.” of The Mysterious East magazine.

  But how did he get his name? In an amusing piece called “By Any Other Name” he has written a full explanation, including the tragic line, “You wouldn’t believe how many Donald Camerons there are in this debased North American Scotland. Hundreds, I tell you. Thousands.”

  So how is a Donald Cameron who tries to make a living as a writer going to stand out? When he moved to Cape Breton, local custom came to his rescue. His friend, the folksinger Tom Gallant, explained that in Cape Breton people with the same names were distinguished by having specific, personal details added to the names:

  Tom struck a chord on his Yamaha, gazed at me. “That hair,” he said. It’s my most striking feature, prematurely grey hair, set off by black eyebrows and moustache. Don’t ask me how I got that colour scheme, ask God. He did it. Children stop me in the street to ask me if I’m wearing a wig. Adults chalk it up to noxious personal habits and secret vices.

  “That hair,” said Tom. “That’s it. Silver Donald Cameron.”

  That notable byline has since graced hundreds of screenplays, radio dramas, films, documentaries, reports, articles, short stories, and books, both fiction (Dragon Lady, 1980) and non-fiction (The Living Beach, 1998). He continues to use it in his ongoing, tireless crusade to spread the alarming news about our assault on the health of our planet.

  We had been in touch over the years (I once ran into him by chance when he was sailing in Baddeck, Cape Breton), and I was aware of his skills as a sailor producing lively touring books like Wind, Whales, and Whisky: A Cape Breton Voyage (1991), and Sniffing The Coast: An Acadian Voyage (1993). So I phoned him to chat about possible future books. What follows is his account of our conversation. After Don, eager to write a new novel, had denied having any ideas for non-fiction books I spoke up in protest:

  “Come, come,” said Gibson. “You must have something in the back of your mind.”

  “Well,” I allowed, “I’ve just put an engine in our boat, and it has occurred to me to sail her south via the Intracoastal Waterway, spend the winter in the Bahamas, and write a book about that.”

  Aaargh, cried the Artistic Conscience. Dinna tell him that!

  “Sailing Away from Winter!” cried Gibson. “Great! Who’s publishing this book?”

  “It’s not a book,” I protested. “It’s just a notion. A passing fancy. A foggy fantasy.”

  “I want you to do this trip,” Gibson declared. “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

  One thing led to another, as Don’s Sailing Away from Winter goes on to duly record. Urged by his mate (in every sense), Marjorie Simmins (now the author of her own book, Coastal Lives), Don found himself engaged in an exhausting search for the perfect little boat for this voyage. They had immense difficulties and complications, but eventually they found Pumpkin. They later changed her name to Magnus, as nature intended, and had her shipped to their place in D’Escousse on Isle Madame, at the southeast corner of Cape Breton.

  I drove there from Halifax one snowy day, across the Canso Causeway, with no dangerous waves washing across the roadway. After a hard right turn through the snowstorm, I soon found myself on Isle Madame, enjoying the sign that pointed to sunny “Martinique.” In Don’s words: “I led Gibson to the boat-shop. He climbed up the ladder and boarded Pumpkin. He sat at the wheel and gazed through the windshield at the shop doors. ‘Ahhh!’ he said, smiling. It was all his fault, and he felt not a shred of remorse.”

  You can see why Jane and I love to stay in Halifax with Don and Marjorie at their place right at the end of the Northwest Arm, where boats not necessarily named “Pumpkin” or “Magnus” can moor behind the house, with the chance to sail off to anywhere in the world, as readers of Sailing Away from Winter learned when it was triumphantly launched in 2007.

  Our final Maritime stop was specially arranged by Danielle LeBlanc of Moncton’s Frye Festival, who took friendly advantage of our being “in the neighbourhood” to arrange a special Friday night show. We dropped our car off at the airport, and she (a former local girl who made the perfect guide) took us downtown, where we stayed in the central Hotel Beausejour, which is very, very central, and very, very bilingual. In Moncton people switch between French and English at the drop of a toque, and it seems to work well, with many marketing companies and their call centres making use of this bilingual workforce.

  As eager tourists we made our way to the downtown shore of the Petitcodiac River at the publicized time to see the tidal bore come sweeping in from the advancing Bay of Fundy. We had heard brave tales of summer surfers riding the incoming wave for miles, which sounds like an exciting tourist trade to develop. But on this occasion the arrival of the bore was (I’m fighting a bad pun with every sinew) let’s say “sedate,” and involved the river simply floating the ice chunks a little higher and faster.

  Downtown Moncton is very conscious of its link with the great scholar, with quotes from Northrop Frye to be fo
und everywhere. Even our hotel had a Frye quote outside the front door: “Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it’s as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep. The native language takes precedence over every other subject of study; nothing can compare with it in usefulness.” That’s from The Educated Imagination, 1963.

  The literacy problem didn’t affect the fine Monctonians who came to my show in the Aberdeen Cultural Centre, in Northrop Frye’s old high school. The crowd was swelled by, of course, my lucky interview on local CBC Radio. That night, after a tactful opening sentence in French, I had fun celebrating Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize.

  Despite the many book-lovers in attendance and the local support for the Frye Festival, headed by the lively Dawn Arnold, it was disheartening the next day to see the lead story in the Moncton Times Transcript, which reported that New Brunswick, dragged down by some rural areas, suffered from the lowest literacy rates in Canada. But in a minor, local way Northrop Frye, the advocate of literacy, is doing what he can to change that. Outside the main door of the downtown Moncton Library stands a friendly, inviting bench. At one end sits a lifelike sculpture of Norrie Frye, at his most avuncular, beaming as he reads an illustrated book on his lap. (A week later I checked the same statue outside Victoria College in Toronto, daringly brushing snow off his head to confirm that some of the statue details do differ, very slightly.)

  As I stood admiring the statue of the scholar revered by academics around the world, a class of eight-year-olds came out of the library after a happy visit. “Say hello to Mr. Frye!” their teacher sang out. All of the kids filed by, saying cheerfully, “Hello, Mr. Frye” as they passed his bench. “Hello, Mr. Frye.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 11

  ROCK TALK

  Gordon Pinsent vs. Kevin Spacey … Icebergs Are Cool … Jim Lamb’s Corvette Navy … The Bloody War of Hal Lawrence … Wayne Johnston and My Very Stupid Decision … A Richard Gwyn Footnote … Death on the Ice … Farley Mowat’s New-Founde-Land … West to Woody Point … Charles Ritchie, the Axeman of Black Duck … Four Great Newfoundland Characters … The Secret View of St. John’s … A Toast to Alistair MacLeod