Across Canada by Story Read online

  The “finally” is significant here, because in his kindly column alerting Winnipeg to my forthcoming show, as an honest man he refers to his link to Gibson the Impatient Publisher. He admits that as one of the writers who has “heard the crack and felt the slash of his deadline whip” he had been pleased to hear that I had had trouble with my own book.

  As soon as we hit town, Gordon took Jane and me for a literary and historic tour. He took us across the river to the lovingly preserved St. Boniface home of Gabrielle Roy. Now, Gabrielle Roy was described by my distinguished publishing predecessor Jack McClelland as “the greatest writer in the country” in his correspondence with her, excerpted in Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland. His faith in her was so great that in 1976, when Canada seemed under threat from Quebec separatism, he urged her to ­support the new translation of The Tin Flute by Alan Brown, because he hoped her novel might help the national situation. “I mention The Tin Flute specifically,” McClelland wrote, “because it remains the fact that you are unique in being the only Canadian writer who has totally bridged the gap between the two cultures. You are the only writer who is critically accepted and widely read in both our two languages. There simply is no one else.”

  This was not a minority opinion. The original French novel, Bonheur d’occasion (1945) won many prizes, including the Prix Femina in France, while The Tin Flute won many more, including Gabrielle Roy’s first Governor General’s Award. When Jack McClelland organized a historic Calgary Conference in 1978, where scholars were asked to rank Canada’s greatest novels (a promotional coup for Jack), The Tin Flute placed second, behind an embarrassed Margaret Laurence, with The Stone Angel. Gabrielle Roy, who spent her later years in Quebec City, charmingly resisting Jack’s pleas to promote her books more, went on to be elected to the Royal Society of Canada, its first woman member.

  I remember Gabrielle in person as a very striking woman whose aquiline face was lined with what I can only describe as wise, mature, beauty. I was aware that when The Tin Flute came out in English in 1947, the Globe and Mail reviewer hailed it as “the Great Canadian Novel.” Later, after producing other fine books, she in turn inspired one of the greatest of Canada’s literary biographies, by François Ricard, which I was proud to publish in Patricia Claxton’s translation in 1999.

  That biography recounts an extraordinary family story. Gabrielle was the youngest in a family of eight children. Over time, her matchless success and fame provoked some jealousy among her sisters, most notably with Adele, who also had hopes as a writer, and who complained primly that her own lack of success was because “her books were not in the fashion of the day (and) not to the liking of young people hungry for erotic sensations.” As François Ricard wrote, “What could Adele do about such a situation except harbour her ill temper and wait for the moment of revenge?”

  That moment came when Adele was eighty-six years old. A Quebec literary figure named Gérard Bessette (far from blameless in this matter) approached her asking if she happened to have “anything unpublished” about her famous sister. The floodgates opened, with a manuscript denouncing, in Ricard’s description, “Gabrielle’s selfishness and unscrupulous ambition,” and so on, and so on. Gabrielle learned of her elderly sister’s forthcoming bitter book and tried very hard to stop it from being published. Ricard was himself an important figure in the Quebec publishing world, and records: “From August to October she telephoned me two or three times a week, in tears, each time fluctuating between despair and rage, a towering rage whose target was less Adele herself — ‘a poor thing who’s very sick really’ — and more Adele’s publisher, ‘one of those vultures who deliberately exploit sensational themes.’”

  Gabrielle Roy (1909–1983)

  The pressure on Gabrielle built up. In the fall of 1979, just three weeks before her sister’s book was to be published, she suffered a serious heart attack. She was rushed into hospital and spent eleven days in the coronary unit, and a full month in hospital. Afterward, she continued to write when she could, but she never recovered full, robust health, and died in July 1983 at the age of seventy-four. Her triumphant sister Adele died in St. Boniface in 1998, at the age of 105.

  After taking us to the Roy home, our Winnipeg guide Gordon Sinclair then showed us the site of the Battle of Seven Oaks, where the rivalry between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Nor’Westers and their pemmican suppliers among the Métis led to an 1816 clash where Scottish Selkirk settlers were killed by Métis buffalo hunters on horseback. These well-disciplined light cavalry troops were led by Cuthbert Grant, a “halfbreed” whose father had sent him east with the plan that he would be educated in Scotland. (And what was the name of the street where my show would be held, again? Ah yes, Grant Avenue. In Winnipeg, history is all around you, even in the shape of an old building downtown named after Thomas Scott, the man executed by men acting for the provisional government led by Louis Riel — whose gravestone Gordon also showed us, in the grounds of the St. Boniface Cathedral, to which Gabrielle Roy’s father had been one of the original building fund donors.)

  Finally, for old times’ sake, he took us to the Fort Garry Hotel, where my Mavis Gallant incident had occurred. In conversation there I laughed about my trouble with writing my own damned book, and blamed Winnipeg’s own Margaret Laurence. The story goes that at the height of her fame Margaret attended a cocktail party where she met a brain surgeon. “A novelist, eh?” he asked. “Well, when I retire from being a surgeon, I plan to take up writing novels.”

  “What an amazing coincidence,” said Margaret. “When I retire from writing novels I plan to take up brain surgery!”

  I’ve repeated this fine put-down many times, and laughed heartily. Yet it turned out that I had made the same mistake as the arrogant surgeon. I had thought that writing a book was just a matter of time — or, more precisely, of clearing the time to do it. After retiring from the world of publishing I had lots of time. But as the title of the rueful piece I wrote about it on my blog demonstrates, I found it “Harder Than I Thought.”

  I knew Margaret, and had been surprised to find that we had roots in common. Her maternal grandfather Simpson, the lawyer who moved to Canada to set up his practice in Neepawa, Manitoba (which became the basis of the fictional Manawaka), had gone to Glasgow Academy, the high school I attended much later. His traditional Scottish education, with lots of Latin, must have made him an impressive figure on the frontier, and it was clear that Margaret’s family was at the top of the social tree on the almost treeless prairies. His former house, where Margaret grew up, is now the Margaret Laurence House, visited by admirers from around the world.

  Her true publishing relationship was with Jack McClelland, but I came to know her in due course as a redoubtable figure. A British journalist once called her features “mannish but not unmotherly” — to Margaret’s rage, as she revealed in a letter to her great friend Adele Wiseman. But he had a point. She had strong features, and large, thick-framed, dark-rimmed glasses that gave her a decisive, straightforward look. To me she looked almost shaman-like.

  Margaret Laurence (1926–1987)

  That, certainly, was the role she played when she acted as a sort of den mother to Canada’s writers, whom she called her “tribe.” And when she helped to create the Writers’ Union of Canada, she was an inspiring leader.

  She was a brave woman, pilloried by ignorant boors for writing “obscene” books (like The Stone Angel and The Diviners, for God’s sake!) that should be removed from the local library system and kept out of the schools. She and the equally obscene Alice Munro (who nobly showed up to defend her at a Clinton meeting full of vocally Christian neighbours) were attacked by local religious extremists. (Thank Heavens they missed “Sex at the Cottage”!) Living in Lakefield as chancellor of Trent University must have been uncomfortable for Margaret when she was attacked by similarly small-minded folk in nearby Peterborough. But with the help of s
upporters like young Linwood Barclay and his Trent girlfriend Neetha she gamely served out her three-year academic term. Not everyone knew that she always wore a long dress for her speaking engagements — and there were many, as she received fourteen honorary degrees — in order to conceal the fact that her knees were trembling. In Christopher Moore’s 2015 book, Founding the Writers’ Union of Canada, Margaret Atwood says, “She was very nervous speaking in public. She had to sit down, she shook so much.”

  Her 1964 novel, The Stone Angel, was selected as the best Canadian novel at Jack McClelland’s famous 1978 Calgary conference. The novel’s narrator, ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley, is a tough, determined character, “rampant with memory,” who in turn will not be forgotten by her readers. (If you watch the 2007 film version of The Stone Angel, look closely at the Winnipeg mansion scenes: they’re set in the Ralph Connor House.) Among the characters who inhabited the fictional prairie town of Manawaka, Morag Gunn of The Diviners (1974) also lives on triumphantly, as does the novel’s unforgettable opening line: “The river flowed both ways.”

  For many of us, The Diviners is Margaret’s greatest book. Myrna Kostash (a writer we’ll meet in the Alberta chapter) is fascinated by Cuthbert Grant, the man caught between two worlds, who worked for the Nor’Westers as a Bourgeois but also led the Métis. She reminded me how large the Battle of Seven Oaks looms in Margaret’s book, for a small skirmish on the outskirts of modern Winnipeg. In his cups, Morag’s stepfather, Christie, will proudly recount the story of his people, the penniless Scottish Highlanders evicted to make way for sheep. They find hardship here, across the ocean, but inspired by the legendary Piper Gunn (and the clenched-jaw clan war cry, “The Ridge of Tears”) they tough it out in the Red River, until their threat to the Métis pemmican trade leads to trouble.

  There was a difference between the “halfbreeds,” like Cuthbert Grant, who were English-speaking, with fur trade fathers and Native mothers, and the French-speaking Métis, who were the backbone of Louis Riel’s rebellions in defence of their way of life. They were so distinct that they even had their own French-based language, Michif. Not only Alistair MacLeod admirers must regret that no great Michif writer has come to the fore.

  In Christie’s words, the settlers had hard times, with “winters so cold it would freeze the breath in your throat and turn your blood to red ice. Weather for giants, in them days. Not that it’s much better now, I’d say.”

  Young Morag asks, “Did they fight the halfbreeds and Indians, Christie?”

  He replies, “Did they ever. Slew them in their dozens, girl. In their scores.”

  Yet when Morag asks, “Were they bad, the breeds and them?” Christie’s answer is uneasy:

  “Bad?” He repeats the word as though he is trying to think what it means.

  “No,” he says at last. “They weren’t bad. They were — just there.”

  Later Morag’s lover Jules Tonnerre tells the story of Métis resistance down through the years, against the intrusions of the English and “the Arkanys,” the Orkney men who made up a huge part of the Hudson Bay workforce. As a folksinger, and the father of Morag’s daughter, he proudly recreates the stories of Riel and Dumont, and he does it in song. We all remember history, our history, in our own way.

  Margaret’s friend and biographer, Clara Thomas, summarized her career well when she wrote: “She was much beloved and will be remembered for her works and her personal warmth, strength and humour, which she shared so generously.” For example, she was the proud godmother of Andreas Schroeder and Sharon Brown’s daughter, Sabrina, and took her role very seriously. Towards the end of her life she phoned their house in B.C. almost every week, passing on advice that would help Sabrina’s writing. This regular contact meant that Andreas was aware that she was fighting an even greater enemy than the lung cancer that had struck her. She was “blocked,” unable to write. This affected her terribly, attacking the core of her being: if she was no longer a writer, what was she? She would tell him, “I’m a writer who can’t write anymore, yet here I am, giving advice on writing. I feel like a fake.”

  This, like her advancing cancer, preyed on her mind. She began to explore the road to a painless death. She collected the required ingredients, and researched the procedures. Andreas remembered a phone conversation that left him and Sharon feeling that Margaret’s death was not far off. The next day, she decided it was time. She was found at her Lakefield home on January 5, 1987.

  In happier times, she had met, and tickled, my baby daughter Meg, when we dropped by an early Writers’ Union get-together in Toronto. More than a decade later, Meg was at high school on Bloor Street in Toronto when Margaret’s funeral was held in a church right opposite the school, but teenage propriety (“I didn’t really know her”) prevented Meg from joining me at the historic funeral. The most moving part of the service was when a lone piper marched outside the church, playing a lament. Afterward, Ken Adachi, the Toronto Star’s soft-spoken books editor and the author of the book about Japanese Canadians The Enemy That Never Was, remarked to me that he wanted a piper at his funeral. It was not to be.

  One of the most interesting authors I ever published was Winnipeg’s George Swinton, the author of the 1972 classic illustrated book Sculpture of the Eskimo. Updated and revised and re-titled editions of Sculpture of the Inuit appeared, the last in 1999. When we visited Winnipeg I made a point of taking Jane to see him, not just as a great expert on the art of the North, but because he was a remarkable man.

  He was born into high society in Vienna in 1917. He was twenty when Hitler’s army marched in and took over Austria in the Anschluss of March 12, 1938. That night young George went to the opera. As a patriotic Austrian he cringed with shame when the orchestra began the evening by playing the triumphant German national anthem, “Deutschland über alles.” Everyone rose to their feet, and stood at attention.

  Not quite everyone: George sat there defiantly, his arms folded, all eyes upon him. At the end of the show, he received word that the Nazis were after him, and would arrest him that night.

  (“Who warned you?” I asked him, when I first heard the story.

  “Oh, a friend who was high in the Nazi party.”

  “A friend … ?” I spluttered.

  “Yes,” smiled George, the Viennese socialite, “we played bridge together.”)

  It was the role of a rich young idiot — a sort of Viennese Bertie Wooster — that got him out of Austria that very night. With a few young friends, he bought some bottles of champagne and went to the train station, where he purchased a ticket for Switzerland. Then, with no luggage, he reeled towards the entrance to the platform, manned by ugly men in leather coats who were on the look-out for someone like him trying to escape. He and his loudly drunken friends reeled around, offering champagne to everyone they staggered against, and got George through. A friend bribed the train carriage attendant to let the poor young drunk sleep it off, undisturbed, when they reached the Swiss border. And thus George escaped to freedom, and later, to Britain.

  The rest of his life was equally remarkable, including the fact that as the owner of an undeniably Austrian passport, he was “Deemed Suspect” when war came and shipped out of Britain to a Canadian prison camp. There he and other German speakers like Eric Koch (my distinguished CBC friend who used “Deemed Suspect” as an ironic book title) were prevented from playing any part in the war against the Nazis who were killing their families. Finally, George, desperate to help, managed to persuade the Canadian army that, fluent in German, he could be very useful working in military intelligence.

  They finally agreed … and sent him to Japan.

  Later George wound up in Winnipeg and fell in love with Inuit art, making annual visits to the North and becoming one of the world’s greatest authorities on the art and the artists. I asked him once why the Inuit people had been so open to visits to their camps from this outsider, this big white man. “Ah,” George
said, laughing, “I was very strong, so they were glad to have me around, and to use me.” A new version of the white man’s burden, fetching and carrying and dragging sleds.

  The combination of his on-the-icy-ground knowledge of the artists and his own artist’s eye made George a recognized world authority on Inuit art. Indeed, the Winnipeg Free Press said the final version of his classic book “remains the best book there is on the subject, and a work of art in itself.” Praise came from all over. The Ottawa Citizen reviewer called it “a wonderful catalogue of a style of art as uniquely Canadian as the paintings of the Group of Seven.”

  Canada was lucky to have him.

  When Jane and I visited, we toured his Winnipeg apartment, amazed and delighted by the range of Inuit sculptures and prints that made it a superb art gallery. George told us that he was moving into a small apartment in a seniors’ residence and would have to give up all but a handful of the choicest pieces of art.

  We were horrified. How would he cope with having his beloved art removed from his everyday life? George smiled contentedly. “It’s all up here,” he said, tapping the side of his head.

  The Winnipeg show was held in the café area of the Grant Avenue bookstore. It was very efficiently set up, with Jane, having helped with the PowerPoint in her role of “techie,” watching nervously from the audience, as John Toews worked his technical magic.

  I was not to learn until many performances later that café-style seating, with tables, is not ideal for audience involvement. A performer gets the best response when the audience is crowded into rows of theatre-style seating, as close to the stage as possible, giving people a sense of shared experience. Who knew? Actually, lots of people knew this, but my education in the ways of the theatre was just beginning. By the end I was still learning, but knew some details of local audiences, such as the tendency of Prince Edward Islanders to enjoy comic moments in shoulder-shaking near-silence.