THE DECADE HAD already become a disaster when Farley Mowat’s bestselling Never Cry Wolf and People of the Deer were used by journalist John Goddard to launch an attack on Farley in Saturday Night magazine. It was 1996 and Farley was seventy-five years old. I felt responsible because we had arranged the interview with Goddard as part of our promotion of the new book, Aftermath—Farley’s memoir of his travels after the “charnel house of mud and rain and shells and death” that was the Second World War.
For the first part of the interview, Goddard drove to the Mowats’ home in Port Hope. A second interview followed in our dingy Esplanade boardroom. Farley had been reluctant to come to Toronto, but he came because he was a McClelland-trained author and I was a McClelland-trained publisher. Both of us believed that author publicity can only help sell books.
In this case, though, we were both wrong. Goddard’s second interview turned into an interrogation “during which I was accused of misrepresenting,” Farley said, what he had observed and written in the 1952 and 1963 books.
In a letter to Ken Whyte, then publisher of Saturday Night, Farley protested that People of the Deer was written “to expose the unconscionable and barbarous treatment of a group of Canada’s Inuit by the government, the missions, the RCMP, the traders . . .”
It was not and had never been intended as an anthropological text. He had always made it clear that he had altered some times, places, names, and dates in order to present a dramatic narrative.
Since I had met Ken Whyte on several previous occasions and knew Saturday Night owner Conrad Black, I phoned, wrote, and blustered to try to stop publication of the attack on Farley. I repeated what he had already written to Ken Whyte: that he had never presented himself as a traditional non-fiction writer. He had proudly declared that his talent lay “somewhere in what was then a grey void between fact and fiction.” What he was writing is the non-fiction novel,I a form that has become celebrated since as creative non-fiction. In fact, the RBC Charles Taylor Prize, named after my late friend, was founded by his artist widow, Noreen Taylor, specifically to reward “the pursuit of excellence in the field of literary non-fiction.”
We both failed. The hurtful article appeared and, to add insult to injury, that month’s magazine cover featured Farley with a long Pinocchio nose. He retreated to his summer place in Cape Breton and wrote me a letter I have pinned on my wall at our cottage. It is vintage Farley and it used to make me feel good on bad days in publishing. This is how the letter ends: “I want to thank you (emphasis on want), you mad, bloody Hungarian, for doing all the things you did in my defence. A mother puma couldn’t have done more in defence of her kitten. I’m only sorry you got shat on in the process. . . . But not to sweat: you and I can handle the stuff.”
He was right. I recovered quickly from my sense of outrage for Farley. But it took a long time for him to get over it. He was still smarting from the insult to his integrity when I next visited the Mowats at their Cape Breton home to talk books with Farley. It was a long way from Halifax to River Bourgeois. After the causeway and the spewing paper mill at Port Hawkesbury on the way to Sydney, there was still that stretch of gravel road before the barn that was no longer a barn but headquarters of the Mowat Environmental Institute. Out front there was a weather-worn mailbox, arm raised to signal uncollected mail. The lettering on the mailbox announced MOWAT.
Farley and Claire lived there for the warmer half of the year in an old, white-painted wooden house with grey peaked roof, tall bramble bushes, spruce forest, and narrow paths leading to the bay below. We picked string beans and tomatoes in their vegetable plot and walked on the rough, stony beach in the late afternoon. Chester, the small black Lab, chased seagulls, pirouetting on three legs, scratching a sore spot on his side with the fourth. “His back hurts,” Farley explained. The dog, like Farley, was listing slightly to the left. Though Farley had a long record of supporting the Left, this was not all political persuasion: he had hurt his back putting fresh paint on the house, getting it ready for the winter. Chester, so much younger, was aping in sympathy.
An osprey circled overhead; its thin, sharp cries stopped abruptly when it dove for its supper. Farther out a few seals popped their heads above water to peer at us. There were discarded bottles and cans amongst the stones at the edge of the sea.
“I haven’t been able to change one goddamn thing,” Farley declared. “I thought I could make a real difference, force people to see what I see. Devastation. Death. We’re dying in our own waste. Killing everything.” He stopped for a moment, watching the osprey grab a fish with its outstretched talons and struggle to lift off again. “Sea of Slaughter was too dark, maybe. Too grim. Once they put it down, people wouldn’t pick it up again.” In 1984, when it was first published, there was still a Newfoundland fishery. Cod was still king. But the age of the great whalers had already emptied the seas of most whales. The numbers were numbing. “And they are still blaming the seals,” he said, his eyes scanning the horizon for those few bobbing black heads. “The slaughter goes on.”
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THE LAST TIME I saw Farley was in early 2014. It was sunny and cold in Port Hope, though not too cold for the Mowats’ daily walk along the waterfront. He said he still missed Chester, who used to prance along on these walks, but there was no sense now in buying another dog. What, he asked, would a man his age want with a young dog?
He was wearing a green vest with his Order of Canada just above his heart. He was thin but claimed to be as healthy as anyone can expect to be at ninety-two, an age he had never anticipated he would reach. He was contemptuous of his doctors’ prescriptions for operations he had invariably refused. He was grey-haired, balding, slightly stooped, but still cantankerous and still protesting the evil that people wreak. He was still mourning wolves, seals, whales, and caribou, though no longer sad for the earth. The earth would take care of itself; it was humanity, in its greed and stupidity, that was doomed. With us gone, there would be no one to tell the stories.
Earlier in April, the good ship Farley Mowat, captained by Farley’s friend Paul Watson, had sailed to the ice floes’ killing grounds with a small group of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society folk. Armed with only their cameras, they had tried to confront sealers carrying clubs and high-powered rifles.
“I couldn’t go this year,” Farley said apologetically. He was working on his thirty-ninth book. In one of his letters to Jack McClelland, Farley had promised not “to grow old gracefully. I’m going down the drain snarling all the way.” In that too he succeeded.
I. Truman Capote’s 1965 bestseller In Cold Blood was written in the same form.