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:
“And what did you say your name was?”
“Doug Gibson, with McClelland and Stewart.”
“And what do you do there?”
“I’m the publisher.”
And Neetha said, and I believe these were her exact words: “You twit.”
So maybe I don’t know the names of Canada’s top publishers the way I should, but I hope that doesn’t mean you won’t take a look at the enclosed proposal, about my teen years, which I spent living at and running a cottage resort in Ontario.
The letter was signed “Linwood Barclay.”
The new book idea turned into Last Resort (2000), a fine memoir of the summer when young Linwood helped his mother run the family business, keeping it going after his father’s untimely death. One of the most affecting themes in this gentle reminiscence is how much help the struggling Linwood got from many of the regular dads on holiday. Instead of demanding the perfect vacation, when things like the plumbing went wrong, they were there to fix them, with plungers, wrenches, and rolled-up sleeves. It was a lovely book, and we published it in 2000 with great pride. And that, in turn, gave me not only a friendship with Linwood, but also a front-row seat as Linwood Barclay became one of Canada’s most successful authors.
Most Canadians don’t know what a world figure we have in Oakville’s own Linwood Barclay. He’s a middle-aged, middle-height, middle-weight dad, with lots of wavy grey hair. After Trent University he had a fine career in newspapers, rising to become the man in the hot seat who laid out the front pages of the Toronto Star. Then he astonished the Star’s John Honderich with the jaw-dropping news (and John has the jaw for it) that he’d like to become the new Gary Lautens, the beloved veteran who wrote funny columns about family life (including the details of the visit to a fancy bathroom store where a four-year-old Lautens boy happily used one of the sleek, dry toilets in the floor display).
Linwood made the change with ease. It’s always tricky to write for the public about your family, yet Neetha (a teacher) and their son, Spencer, and their daughter, Paige, seemed to have survived just fine. His first book of collected columns had the title Father Knows Zilch (1996), which catches the general tone very well. Equally significant, when the new premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, first met him — long after the columns had ended — what she urgently wanted to know was, “How is Paige?”
Yet in the wider world, his crime novels now sell in the millions. They rack up hundreds of thousands of sales in North America, and they routinely shoot to the very top of the bestseller lists in Britain. In 2007 the Guardian newspaper listed No Time for Goodbye as the bestselling book of the year in that country. What’s surprising about that last point is that his novels are always set in the USA — more specifically in the suburbs of some anonymous town in New England or near New York.
The anonymity, I think, is a key point (“Well, it sounds just like our town! This could be happening right here!”). But I’d suggest that the suburban setting is equally important, because Linwood has come up with the obvious truth that (pause to allow head-slap) most readers live in the suburbs. If you want to engage your readers with a story about dramatic things happening to someone just like them, it’s a great start if that someone lives in a place very like their own.
So Linwood’s stories involve ordinary guys who spend a lot of time in the car (and the make of car is pretty important, too), and who know their way around the local malls, and the streets and the sports fields where their kids play. But that really doesn’t help them much when dirty Fate steps in, to turn their ordinary, suburban lives upside down.
Even the titles are compressed works of genius: Bad Move (2004, and the first of the wildly successful string of books that, by the way, I did not publish), Bad Guys (2005), Lone Wolf (2006), Stone Rain (2007), No Time for Goodbye (2007 — and you can see how his training as a Star newspaper columnist affected his amazing output), Too Close to Home (2008 — no comment), Fear the Worst (2009), Never Look Away (2010), The Accident (2011), Never Saw It Coming (2012), Trust Your Eyes (2012), A Tap on the Window (2013), and No Safe House (2014).
Linwood Barclay (1955– )
If you think the word genius is too generous when it comes to his undoubtedly clever titles, take a look at his opening paragraphs. Any writers who are reading this book in search of tips should get a pen at once and make a note to study how Linwood grabs his reader in the opening sentence. For example, here’s the start of Fear the Worst: “The morning of the day I lost her, my daughter asked me to scramble her some eggs.”
There you go, hooked by the first eight words in the book. No wonder the National Post praised the book’s “throat-grabbing premise.” Note, too, the domestic simplicity of good old Dad scrambling eggs.
As for Trust Your Eyes, Stephen King, who knows something about storytelling, wrote about it in these words: “Riveting, frequently scary, occasionally funny, and surprisingly, wonderfully tender. I could believe this might happen to people living two streets over from me. Great entertainment from a suspense master.”
Aha! “Living two streets over.”
Let me give one more example of a perfect start, even if it takes more than eight words to set the hook. Here’s how Linwood begins A Tap on the Window: “A middle-aged guy would have to be a total fool to pick up a teenage girl standing outside a bar with her thumb sticking out. Not that bright on her part, either, when you think about it. But we’re talking about my stupidity, not hers.”
And soon there comes the titular tap on the window, and before he can get rid of her she recognizes him as “Scott Weaver’s dad.”
“‘Yeah,’ I said. I had been.”
And we’re off, in Scott’s dad’s trusty Accord, on a scary ride you’ll enjoy as much as Stephen King did.
When I roam around the country, I’m often cornered by apprentice writers asking, “What is your advice on the best way to get published?” People of all ages are visibly disappointed when I tell them that the trick is to write a first sentence that draws the reader on to the second sentence, and so on, and so on. That’s why reading — and studying — the hard-working Linwood Barclay can be so useful. You don’t have to mimic all of his habits; constructing a huge model train layout in the basement (complete with a sleazy bar on the wrong side of the tracks) is one of his habits that may not be necessary for every fiction writer keen to create a new world. But you never know.
Certainly, if you follow his writing lessons, it will help. And if it leads to fame and fortune, you can always modestly say that you never saw it coming.
Linwood lived for many years in Burlington, home to A Different Drummer bookstore, which hosted my last show of 2011, which was in several ways the biggest. Ian Elliot at the store had bravely booked the new Burlington Performing Arts Centre (recently opened by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and then christened by a performance from the more generally popular Sarah McLachlan). Even more bravely, he had asked me to — damn the torpedoes — do the full ninety-minute version of the show.
The hall (the smaller of the two) was so new that the sound guys were still finding out which switch did what. This delayed the start, meaning that the crowd was kept in the lobby, milling outside the closed theatre doors. I took the chance to go out (no tortured artist squirming in the Green Room here!) and walk around, explaining that this was just a brief technical hitch, and we’d be starting soon. The best part was that I was able to meet lots of old friends, and to make some new ones, so that when the show started, I felt at home.
In the end, 125 people showed up to fill the place, paying ten dollars for the privilege and stretching their legs in appreciation at the end. Best of all, Ian reported that an usher on duty, who had been disgruntled at not being assigned to work the (very expensive) Sarah McLachlan show, felt compensated — at least partly.
In the bookselling world (and, boy, we really need these people) everyone admires Ian and his predecessor, the rabbinically bearded Richard Bachmann. He was such a notable book-lover that he kept the store afloat, despite the fact that successive chain bookstores set up shop in the neighbourhood, with the apparent aim of driving him out of business. They came, and they went. A Different Drummer marches on.
I should mention that my old friend Richard was an insistent voice in the friendly campaign to persuade me to write my first book. When I, aware of his frequent very witty letters to newspapers, in turn suggested that he might try his hand at writing, perhaps a novel, he was quick to reject the idea. He said, decisively, “I don’t know other people well enough to be a good novelist.” So then we talked about Alice Munro, and about my reaction after reading each of her stories for the first time: “How does she know so much?”
On a fine Saturday in May I travelled east to Whitby to speak at a well-attended local Ontario Writers’ Conference. The sun-dappled setting was the Deer Creek Golf Course. I was there to give a lunch-time talk to the 175 people at the conference, and was wearing my “publisher’s uniform.” As a publisher I always instructed my authors that on the promotion trail they should plan to look like their book cover photo, wearing the same clothes, hairstyle/beard, and so on. Obedient to my own advice, when I’m appearing as “author,” I routinely wear the blue blazer, grey flannels, white or blue button-down shirt, and the striped orange-and-blue Brooks Brothers tie that the unflattering Tony Jenkins caught so well on the book cover.
As you’d expect, this was a much more formal outfit than the ones being worn by the dozens of golfers who were enjoying the Deer Creek sunshine, warming up by dreamily swinging the clubs that were soon going to break their hearts. When I left the conference to stroll around the tees before lunch, my outfit led to a misunderstanding. I was silently standing there, watching people teeing off (always an interesting experience for an old golfer — a slice of life, you might say), when — on two occasions — golfers keen to start their round mistook me for the Official Starter. They were polite Asian Canadians, and they came up to me, bowed low, and presented me with their official Starter’s card.
I explained that I was just a spectator, and withdrew before there were any more Authority Figure misunderstandings. (The best of which was when a French tour guide in Cambodia assumed that I was running a Cambodian circus, which is another story for another day — although after running a Canadian publishing company, a Cambodian circus sounds pretty easy.) But the possibilities for golf course mischief (“Sure, go ahead and drive, I’m sure you won’t hit the players just in front … they’re farther off than they look”) have stayed with me. There may even be a murder mystery plot there. And a title, Drive, He Said. I must pass it on to Linwood Barclay.
Uxbridge (or as Terry Fallis called it, since the event was a formal dinner, “Tuxbridge”) staged a fine Book Lover’s Ball in April 2012, in aid of the local library. The setting was the local Wooden Sticks Golf Club, a name that spoke to the ancient tradition of golf clubs with handles of hickory or some other strong, whippy wood. In my talk I was able to boast that in my ancient Scottish village I actually grew up playing golf with wooden stick clubs, which at the time seemed normal to me. But then, true to my “make things last” Scottish roots, I confessed that I was wearing the tux that my parents had given me in 1964 as a twenty-first birthday present. Dinner jacket styles hadn’t really changed much over forty-eight years, and nor had my lean shape — nor had my respect for my mother’s sage advice that if I looked after my tux properly I “should get many years of wear out of it.”
After our salad course, the excellent Terry spoke wittily about his three books (and he really is an example of the Nice Guy Who Finished First in the Author Stakes). I did my stuff after the chicken course, talking about some of the authors featured in my book, and telling stories about them.
But the best speaker of the evening — and by far the best storyteller — was Michael, a local dentist. He told us about his family’s experience escaping from Vietnam as “boat people” who were sponsored by kind people in Uxbridge. The local librarian, he said, always made a point of asking him what he was reading. Like dental patients flossing before an appointment (an interesting professional analogy that sprang to his mind) he read constantly to be able, always, to answer her question.
When the family moved away from Uxbridge to downtown Toronto, things were hard for them. Although his parents worked at two jobs, the young family could afford only to live in a tough area. Then their old Uxbridge friends contacted them, offering to bring them back, with a down payment on a house provided by an anonymous benefactor. The family accepted eagerly, with one condition: that they learn the name of the benefactor, in order to pay him back.
It was the librarian.
Now here was Michael (like his brothers and sisters, a successful professional) giving back to the Uxbridge community northeast of Toronto by providing major sponsorship for this fundraiser for the Uxbridge Library.
Stories really matter, don’t they?
Loyal followers know that Orillia (or Mariposa, if you like butterfly kisses) has been hugely important in my life. Not only did it lure me to Canada, thanks to Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, it then provided me with the classic 1977 war book The Corvette Navy by James Lamb (editor of the Packet and Times). In the summer of 2012 I went to Orillia for the thrilling announcement about the winners of the Canadian Authors Association prizes. I and Jonathan Vance and Richard Gwyn had been nominated (from among, they told us, countless authors of Canadian non-fiction books) for the Lela Common Award for Canadian History.
I was, of course, very pleased to have my book nominated for an award, and in such good company. But the “history” designation worried me. So when the local TV station asked me what I planned to do if I won, I said, “Demand a recount!” My objection was that while Richard and Jonathan are real historians (who wear white gloves in archives, and get ancient dust up their noses as they research Sir John A., or Canadians in Britain during the First World War) my book was a cheerful personal memoir of working with twenty famous Canadian authors, some of whom are still with us. I argued in fact that while I am certainly a “mature” individual, I am not yet “history,” and I want no part of it. Yet.
As the day wore on, however, and I and Jonathan (a very tall, very friendly historian from Western) read aloud from our books, smiled continuously, and were relentlessly charming, my objections to receiving the award weakened. At the evening dinner I was the keynote speaker, and the stars seemed to be aligned for a triumph for Stories About Storytellers. It was not to be. The absent Richard Gwyn received the award, and Jonathan and I consoled ourselves by confiding that this was the result that we’d expected.
And as the announcement was made, sitting with my game face on I had just enough of a whiff of the smell of success to realize that while it’s very pleasing to be nominated for a book prize, it must be much more pleasing to win one. Is anyone listening?
July 2013 brought me to the Lakefield Festival, where the organizers remembered me affectionately from a few years earlier, as host/interviewer at an evening celebrating Michael Crummey’s Galore (now there’s a title!) and Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man. This time they presented me with an offer I could not refuse. I would give my solo Stories About Storytellers show at 2:30 on Saturday afternoon, then act as host/interviewer for the evening session at 8:00 with three authors — count them, three. Then, presumably, I would collapse offstage, but the show would be over by then. No problem.
Ruthless people, these folks who live in idyllic Lakefield.
On the Friday evening we had dinner with Orm and Barb Mitchell (W.O.’s son and daughter-in-law) and Norman Jewison and his wife, Lynne. Norman, the distinguished Hollywood film director from Ontario, enlivened our dinner with tales of his Caledon neighbour, Robertson Davies, and also about his friend Sean Connery, whom I can imitate shupremely well. (Once, Norman was worried about casting an aged Italian actor, and called his friend Sean, who had acted with him recently, for an honest report. “He can’t shee,” said Sean indignantly, “and he can’t hear … and he’ll shteal every fuckin’ sheen!” Norman hired him.)
Saturday was spent roaming around downtown Lakefield, with more ice creams per square foot than any other community in cottage country. We found Margaret Laurence’s old house, before we went on to the superb encircling theatre at Lakefield School. There, I was introduced by Alistair’s son Lewis, an English professor at nearby Trent University. At a previous show at Trent’s Catharine Parr Traill College he had also introduced me, speaking of growing up aware of the name “Doug Gibson.” Its owner was a mysterious someone who distributed good things “like a sort of Tooth Fairy,” but who over time developed a more threatening side, “like a Mafioso.”
At the end of my show so many books were sold, and signed, that the local bookseller ran out, and we were able to replenish her supplies with extra copies brought in from the hot car. Ah, the glamorous life of a touring author.
The evening session featured three very fine novelists, reading from their recent books, then chatting about them with me. The final part of the evening allowed the audience to throw questions at any of the authors.
The books in question were very different: Annabel by Kathleen Winter tells the story of an intersex baby raised as a boy in Labrador in the 1970s; The Empty Room by Lauren B. Davis tells the modern story of a day in the life of a middle-aged Toronto woman when her alcoholism catches up with her; The Purchase by Linda Spalding is set on the violent Virginia frontier around 1800 when an abolitionist Quaker finds himself the owner of a slave.
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 individual 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.
Nice work, Doug. Or as Linwood Barclay’s wife would say, “You twit.”
A sad Ottawa story for all book-lovers. Before the 2012 Writers’ Trust dinner I walked down Sussex Drive to the site of the old Nicholas Hoare bookshop. Before its shameless landlord — the National Capital Commission! — raised the rent and put it out of business, it used to be a fine, elegant store, so well-placed opposite the glass glory of the National Gallery and so spacious that I selected it regularly for launch parties and readings for books by important Ottawa authors like Jeffrey Simpson and Graham Fraser and Eddie Goldenberg. On my retirement Jane and I even held a farewell soiree there for our literary friends, with the help of the manager, David Dollin. I, like thousands of book-lovers, was devastated when the store closed.
By happy contrast to this Ottawa disaster on Sussex Drive there is the thriving bookstore in little Arnprior. The morning after my time swanning around the Château Laurier as an honoured guest at Politics and the Pen, I was picked up at the hotel (after admiring the lobby’s Karsh photograph of Leacock in his garden in Orillia) and whisked an hour northwest to Arnprior. The whiskers were my old friends David Lewis Stein and his wife, Alison. Dave is famous as an author (whom I’m proud to have published), as an early Writers’ Union chair, and as a Toronto Star columnist who dressed like a Damon Runyon character, a fedora always perched on his “Stop the presses!” head. He was also famous as a man who really knew Toronto city politics, inside out, and was the ultimate street-wise, gravel-voiced, big-city guy. And now he has retired to Arnprior, a little town of about 8,000 in the Ottawa Valley, where Alison’s family has ancient links.
How are they doing? Very well indeed, to judge from my happy stay with them at the big Victorian house that stands a three-minute stroll away from the distinctive Arnprior Museum, where Alison puts in volunteer time. Another fifty paces down the main street stands Gwen Storie’s inspiring bookstore. That evening the amazing Gwen and her staff rearranged the store to accommodate forty paying customers (fifteen dollars, which included a delicious snack in the bakery next door!) and I gave my show. We sold twenty copies! If you walk down the street in Arnprior, the odds that the first person you meet on the street has a copy of my book at home are pretty good.
The more serious message here is that a good local bookstore can act as an important community centre — and I’m always glad to do whatever I can to help the Gwen Stories of this world, even avoiding puns to do it well.
The morning after the Arnprior show, Dave and Alison fed me kippers, then took me on a sentimental journey to Renfrew. This was the town, eighty kilometres northwest of Ottawa, where Robertson Davies, born in 1913, spent what W.O. Mitchell called “the litmus years,” from 1919 to 1925. The town, a little larger than Arnprior, its rival to the east, had a huge influence on Davies during these formative years. As Judith Skelton Grant shows in her expert biography, Davies did not enjoy Renfrew, and he got his revenge with the picture he painted of Blairlogie in 1985’s What’s Bred in the Bone. I note in the paperback edition of my own book that R.D. wrote to his New York editor that he was finding the writing of the Blairlogie scenes “heavy and exhausting work. It has roots in my own childhood — in the emotions, not in the actualities — and it is painful to drag out of the past.” Even at the age of seventy, his feelings about Renfrew were so strong that he felt that he had to write “to get it out of my system.”
In the novel he says, “It thought of itself as a thriving town, and for its inhabitants the navel of the universe.” (The physical metaphor could, I suppose, have been much worse.) He wrote about the town’s proud ignorance, and its exclusivity where newcomers were concerned. He commented specifically on the three-layer cake of its inhabitants, with the Scots on top, above the French, then with the newer, Polish immigrants at the bottom. I got a whiff of this on our Renfrew tour.
We began with a visit to the McDougall Mill Museum, kindly opened up for us by the very knowledgeable Mr. Gilchrist. The museum itself is sturdily impressive, a thick-set stone building set beside a fast section of the Bonnechere River. Since Renfrew was at the heart of the timber trade, the museum is rich in examples of the tools involved in “hurling down the pine.” There are also many photographs of the local bands that must have entertained young Robbie Davies, and posters for the O’Brien Opera House, which we know he attended. For What’s Bred in the Bone he turned Senator O’Brien (who was in fact an important figure in the lumber trade that built London’s offices and houses, and in the development of hockey, since he was the man behind the Renfrew Millionaires) into “Senator McRory.”
Robertson Davies (1913–1995)
We noticed that the photos of the sports teams from the pre–First World War years all featured Scottish and Irish names. By the 1950s there was a fair sprinkling of Polish names on the teams. But I didn’t see any Batterinskis, like Felix, the Ottawa Valley hero of Roy MacGregor’s fine 1983 hockey novel, The Last Season.
We tried to trace the three Davies houses in Renfrew. Of the first house Judith Skelton Grant writes that “the Davieses were dismayed to find that the house … arranged for them was in the Polish section of town.” We found the house on Cross Avenue, and I wandered around outside, taking in the stark brick exterior. As if on cue a young man came out to check the mailbox (with a Polish name) just by the front door. I greeted him with my usual charm. “Hi there! Did you know that a famous author once lived in this house?”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, his name was Robertson Davies, a famous Canadian writer. He lived right here when he was a boy, about a hundred years ago.”
If I’d told him that birds sometimes landed on his roof his shrugging reaction would have been the same: “Whauuh,” followed by a determined return to the house and a loud, final slamming of the door.
We found the old site of the Renfrew Mercury office, where young Robbie sometimes helped his father; at the age of nine he even wrote a review of a local event, where a lady performer must have been relieved to find that she had sung “very acceptably.” The newspaper office that made the Davies family prosperous is now a sporting goods store, right next door to the grand central post office on Raglan Street. We failed to find the second house, but did cross the dramatically swaying suspension bridge over the Bonnechere River that Robbie crossed every morning to get to school. And we did find the dramatic final Davies house (now a doctor’s surgery) in the best part of town, marking the rise of the Davies family throughout those Renfrew years.
We didn’t knock on the doctor’s door. Although the friendly woman who runs the sporting goods store had heard of him.
For eleven years the little Ottawa Valley town of Eganville has played host to the Bonnechere Authors Festival. The moving spirit (there is always a moving spirit for these things) is a Force of Nature called Doyne Ahearn. She contacts you, tells you just how remote her festival is (about five hours from Toronto) and how they can’t really afford to pay anything, but you can stay with her and Frank in their big log house and get to know the Ottawa Valley, including nearby Foymount, the highest inhabited town in Ontario.
How can you say no?
Well, I tried, just as others such as Nino Ricci before me had tried (until Doyne somehow arranged for a police driver to bring him from Toronto), but Doyne wore me down. Too busy for the summer of 2012? OK, we’ll put you down for 2013.
So Jane and I planned an anti-clockwise sweep, first up to Peterborough, then to Marmora and the gold-rush country near Madoc, then via Bannockburn (in the summer of 2014 I was involved in organizing a 700th anniversary symposium in Toronto about this admirable battle) up to Bancroft, then sidling north and east to Cormac, near Eganville.
Our arrival at the famous log cabin coincided with the descent of amazingly thick clouds of flies, but Doyne and Frank were there to greet us. Doyne is an imposing figure, as you’d expect, but her husband, Frank, is built along the lines of a butterfly, and seemed in danger of being carried away by the swarms of insects. We were soon to learn that neither Doyne nor Frank should be considered a lightweight. They introduced us to the joys of “bug suits,” and we were able to go swimming off a raft moored in the bug-free middle of a lake, Lake Doyne. The raft, by the way, was reached by means of a circulating rope ferry system, the rope pulled by Jane or me as keen, bug-suited Charons.
A fine dinner was followed by a tour of the Valley, far from the county seat of Renfrew. In Eganville we learned about “the Catholic side” of town, as it was in the old days (and as late as the 1920s Orange-Catholic hostilities were so fierce that the military came in “with cannon,” we were told, to keep the opponents to their own side of the Bonnechere River that divides the town, both physically and religiously). In these saner times we toured the fine old museum, and the library, which the Authors Festival helps to maintain.
Late in the day “extreme weather” took over. Rain fell in sheets, thunder rolled, and lightning flashed. The pre-show dinner at the best restaurant in town was shaping up well, with our mouth-watering orders taken by the friendly waitress, when everything went black. The power was off.
It stayed off, and dinner was cancelled, and we groped our way out. Showtime was approaching. Since my show was due to take place in a windowless church basement, the lack of power was fatal. For safety reasons we would not be allowed in the dark basement.
With thirty minutes left before the show, it was time for plan B. I suggested that with the thunderstorm rain now gone we could bring chairs out to the parking lot and I could do the show there, in the open air. We had started to bring the chairs out, and then, ta-da, the lights went on … and, after some heart-stopping flickers, they stayed on.
And the show went on! We all had fun, and a few books were sold. Doyne told me that we attracted the very first standing ovation the festival had seen in its eleven years; I could get to like the experience, especially when the reluctant Jane joins in. And I was very pleased to receive a fine original painting, entitled “The Storyteller”! Local delicacies made up a very welcome “gift pack.”
When we got back to Doyne and Frank’s big log cabin, the power was off there, so we went quietly to bed. And the next day, after a lavish breakfast, we set off for the long ride through Algonquin Park, armed with Frank’s fascinating book on the subject, Algonquin Park: Through Time and Space. What a revelation! It turned out that our modest, self-effacing host, quietly supporting his wife as she ran the literary festival in fine style with lots of local help, was a PhD in astrophysics. Even better, he had turned his telescope upside down, and observed the world from space. Specifically, he became a world leader in adapting satellite images from space into a useful source of on-the-ground information. Looking at these Algonquin Park images, you’d like to see exactly where the hardwood trees are? OK, no problem. Here’s how. And so on. Amazing.
As my father’s son, who grew up around sawmills, I found the Algonquin Park Logging Museum a constant delight. And then, after leaving the park, via Huntsville, Rosseau, and Foot’s Bay, we were back at beloved Loon Island, the cottage on Lake Joseph owned by our good friends Hope and Phil, who live next door. After four days of swimming (why do they put the navigation buoy we swim around farther out in the lake each year?), canoeing, rowing the skiff, cruising the lake admiring the moon and stars, and gathering buckets (oh, all right, cups) of the world’s best blueberries, it was time to head south to Barrie and Toronto, after almost 900 Ontario kilometres.
On this occasion we didn’t head west to continue our tour of Ontario libraries, although later we had fun in Thornbury, and Collingwood, and even, thanks to our friends Barry Penhale and his Jane Gibson, on “the roof of Ontario” at Flesherton. But as usual, after Barrie we headed south down Highway 400, across the Holland Marsh.
I thought of two things while crossing the Marsh. First, the phone call I took as I was sending Betty Kennedy’s 1979 book, Hurricane Hazel, to the printer. The man at the other end had a story that was, I said dismissively, simply too late to fit into the book … until he told me about being a kid in Holland Marsh when the hurricane raised the water so that his house floated away. In pitch darkness he and his parents and brothers and sisters spent hours squealing in terror as their house spun and whirled around, dipping and creaking, until finally it ran aground, miles away. I took his story down over the phone, and you’ll find it in the book.
The second story is in the name, which has nothing to do with sturdy Dutch farmers, as most people suppose. I can’t go across the Holland Marsh without thinking of how it’s named after the surveyor general from 200 years ago, our old friend from the Niagara frontier, Samuel Johannes Holland. You’ll recall that his son fought a duel in Montreal to defend the family honour, and died with the duelling pistol presented to his family by General Wolfe falling from his hand.
Fascinating history is all around us.