THE ONE FARLEY Mowat book I had read before I came to Canada was Never Cry Wolf. I had read it in New Zealand, where there were no wolves—a pity, since I was seized with the desire to save them, though I am pretty sure they would have made short work of New Zealand’s iconic bird, the small, brown, flightless kiwi, whose last descendants were still lurking in the undergrowth on the South Island.
Farley was Jack McClelland’s closest friend. They had both served in the Second World War. Jack had first crewed on a minesweeper, patrolling Nova Scotia, then commanded a Royal Canadian Navy motor torpedo boat. He was commended in dispatches and demobbed as a lieutenant. Farley had served in the Hasty Pees, a.k.a. Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, battling its way up through Sicily, then the rest of Italy, through rivers of blood. He lost most of his friends and found himself “staring down a vertiginous tunnel where all was dark and bloody and the great wind of ultimate desolation howled and hungered.” Those words are from the final pages of And No Birds Sang, his extraordinary memoir about coming of age in a world gone mad.
Devastated by man’s ability to wreak mindless havoc, he tried to balance the horror by writing about Mutt, who would become the hero of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, for a while my children’s favourite book. His travels to the Canadian North after the war had not improved his impressions of humanity. He wrote about the fate of the endangered people of the Arctic and the equally endangered wolves and, later, the whales and other animals that had once roamed our oceans and our land.
Jack used to tell the story of how Farley had first appeared in his office, a small, red-haired, wild man who wanted, more than anything, to be a writer. He thought words had the power to change the world. I believe that is what he was trying to do with People of the Deer, the book that opened the debate about the fate of the peoples in the so-called “barren lands,” which had never been barren and where greed, incompetence, and injustice passed for government policies.
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I FIRST MET Farley in 1969. It was summer and he was marching down that long, hot, gloomy corridor on Hollinger Road, waving and helloing at everyone. He walked with such aplomb that he seemed taller and heavier than his 180 or so pounds. He had greyish red hair over most of his face, uncombed bits on top. He was loud and cheerful. When he reached Jack’s outer office, he hugged and kissed the somewhat flustered Marge, who guarded the entrance, then barged past her, yelling and swearing at “the old bastard” and inquiring “how the fuck” he was. Jack, as always, sat leaning back in his chair, his feet on his desk, a cigarette in one hand, the Dictaphone in the other.
He greeted Farley with a broad grin but didn’t change position.
The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float had just been published. It was the hilarious tale of Jack, Farley, and Farley’s soon-to-be wife, Claire, trying to navigate a recalcitrant, leaking tub called The Happy Adventure around Newfoundland.
Jack had not been pleased with his own portrayal in the book—he thought it detracted from his reputation as a seaman—and Peter Davison, Farley’s American editor, had not been pleased with the title. “A boat is a that, not a who,” he had said in one of his more forceful notes to me. Peter was a gentle soul, a very fine editor, a respected poet, essayist, lecturer, and poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Despite his objections, the title remained.
August 11, 1969
Dear Peter:
Well, what do you know—the title is back again to THE BOAT WHO WOULDN’T FLOAT . . . This is apparently what Jack and Farley came up with during their weekend together.
Yours,
Anna Szigethy
I had so far kept my last name, my father’s only gift. People trying to contact me via the M&S switchboard had the unenviable task of trying to pronounce it, while the receptionist, used to the confusing sound of s and z and that baffling thy, would wait and enjoy their suffering. Farley would ask for “Anna Spaghetti,” Al Purdy said “Szszsz, what the hell.” Peter Newman, who was born Czech, rather enjoyed his perfect pronunciation of my name, as did Frank Newfeld (it’s pronounced Sigetti). But they were the only two.
Boat won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1970. It’s impossible to read it, even today, without laughing out loud and without seeing those determined, larger-than-life characters as they wrestle with the obstinate little schooner.
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MY FIRST BATTLE with Farley was over his manuscript of Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia, about his travels in the USSR during the coldest months of the Cold War. He loved the Russians, their energy, their welcoming vodkas, their poets, and their vociferous enjoyment of his books. He was thrilled that most of his books had been published in Russian. He said he had been bent on using up all his Russian royalties for food and drink while he was there. But they had obstructed his plans at every turn, insisting on offering him free food and booze in outsized portions, hosting him at banquets and applauding him at every opportunity.
I am not sure whether this story is true, but one of his hosts had told him that Never Cry Wolf, translated into Russian as Wolves, Please Don’t Cry, had been so influential that the Russian people demanded an immediate end to the slaughter of wolves. Canadian wolves had not been so lucky.
Farley was as much in love with Russians as I was not. I had seen Soviet soldiers mow down civilians in Budapest with machine guns and flatten them with tanks in 1956. It had not been a pretty sight. Farley still thought of them as Second World War allies. Given our very different points of view and my desire to make changes in his manuscript, it is a miracle that we didn’t come to blows. We fought and argued all afternoon, mostly in the Mowats’ garden, then stumbled into the sunroom, where Claire had prepared some food we both ignored and some wine we both drank.
I drove home from Port Hope late, after we had settled into an exhausted peace and Farley had shown me his extensive collections of books and photos. During the ensuing years, we became cautious friends. Cautious in the sense that Farley didn’t entirely trust anyone in business, not even the business of books.
I travelled west with him and Claire on a couple of his more arduous book promotion tours, planned with him and artist David Blackwood, for their book Wake of the Great Sealers, a eulogy for the Newfoundland fishermen who had once harvested cod and seals before they became scarce. I still have a couple of David’s eloquent etchings on the second floor of our house. The three of us celebrated the unintended publicity stunt when the United States banned Farley from travelling there (he hadn’t wanted to go anyway). After the birth of my own company, Key Porter Books, in the 1980s, I ended up being his publisher.
Farley’s books have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide in umpteen languages and editions, yet he remained quintessentially Canadian: extremely serious about preserving life on the planet, serious about his art, but also funny about the silliness of everyday things other people value: money, cars, big houses, elegant clothes.
At first Farley, who was naturally shy, had been very uncomfortable with Jack’s forced author performances, the publicity tours that demanded a writer should be centre stage, an entertainer ready with the quick quip, always up for whatever the occasion demanded. Farley compensated for his shyness with exaggerated bonhomie, too much rum, and legendary exhibitionism. A while ago in Montreal, a woman of about eighty told me how Farley once crawled down her dinner table (it was a benefit for the Writers’ Trust) and buried his face in the cake. He was, of course, wearing his traditional kilt with no underpants.I
I. Some years later, my daughter Catherine was enchanted when Farley asked her to dance at novelist John Irving’s son’s wedding. Farley was a lively dancer and he looked splendid in his kilt.