Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  A final story about Morley Callaghan, which also tells us a lot about Alice Munro. She was once on the Toronto subway when she saw Morley, by then a widower, tottering aboard her car, looking old and frail and ill. She went over to him and reintroduced herself, and sure enough, Morley confessed that he was sick and was going to his doctor’s. Alice was alarmed enough by Morley’s condition that she got off a stop early and took his arm to help him; and being Alice Munro, she admits that she did so with some awareness of her own kindness in the matter. And just as she was about to help the poor shuffling old man across the road, he pulled back his head, looked her in the eye, and said, “You know what’s the matter with your work, don’t you?” — and proceeded to tell her.

  He was a fine, feisty fellow. When he died in 1990, the funeral at St. Michael’s Cathedral was even better attended than the fictional funeral for Eugene Shore. He had lived to a great age, and the minor slights (like the autographing session in a Toronto department store that was so ill-attended that I had to rope in a passing friend, the editor/literary agent John Pearce, to pose as an eager book-buyer) were long gone. He was now part of Canadian literary history, with several of his books ensconced in the New Canadian Library and taught in universities across the country. He had received his share of honours and honorary degrees, and was a Companion of the Order of Canada.

  It was a solemn service, with all of the great, formal dignity St. Michael’s Cathedral could provide. And then, as the coffin was borne out past the silent congregation towards the great entrance doors, everyone jumped. A Dixieland jazz band stationed out of sight above the entrance had burst into full cornet and trombone and clarinet action, blaring out, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Then the tempo changed up to “St. James’ Infirmary,” (a tune with the significant, defiant lyrics “Put a fifty-dollar gold piece on my watch-chain / To show the boys I died standing pat”). Suddenly everyone was smiling and chatting, delighted by the uplifting surprise. We were all stepping lively as we moved behind the coffin through the old cathedral doors, and out into Morley’s Toronto sunshine.

  W.O. For millions of Canadians the initials alone were enough to identify him. They knew W.O. Mitchell as the author of a famous book called Who Has Seen the Wind and a series of stories, immortalized on CBC Radio and beyond, about Jake and the Kid. And if they had ever seen him in person or on television, they knew that he was a wild-haired old guy with a salty tongue and a scratchy Prairie voice. A real character. And they liked him.

  It went beyond liking for those who had read his books — thirteen in all — and seen his plays and laughed till they hurt at his public performances. Peter Gzowski summed it up best at the tribute to W.O. staged by the Calgary PanCanadian Wordfest in October 1997; he said that other Canadian writers may sell more books, may be richer, may even be better known around the world — but that “there is no writer in the country who is more or better loved than W.O. Mitchell.”

  I suspect that the news of his death at home in Calgary on February 11, 1998, produced widespread grief from coast to coast, with people far beyond the literary world feeling that they had lost a friend. He was a Canadian icon, a link with the old Canada of farms and small towns that, defying urban reality, many of us still tend to think of as home.

  On the Prairies, his status was special, and I found that walking a block with him on any Main Street in the three central provinces was a slow but lively business: within twenty seconds it seemed he could find a common link — a relative, a former neighbour, a doctor — with anyone who hailed the familiar figure.

  Other Prairie authors have talked and written about how his work opened up possibilities for them, and all of them come fully equipped with their share of affectionate “W.O. stories,” since nobody ever forgot meeting him. The Alberta writer who said that she didn’t know you could put gophers in a book until she read W.O. Mitchell humorously noted his inspiration.

  Gophers, I should add, were to play a prominent part in the rich vein of Mitchell lore. When he wrote a role for a gopher squeak in the CBC Radio version of Jake and the Kid, he ended up producing the most convincing squeak himself, and being paid for it. The old Depression Prairie boy who had ridden the rails during those ten lost years needed no prompting. Thereafter gophers started popping up in his scripts with profitable regularity — until an edict came down from on high, and the gophers squeaked no more.

  His special hold on Prairie people is easy to understand. He was one of them — from Weyburn, then Winnipeg, then High River, and then Calgary — and for them the brief sojourns elsewhere didn’t really count. When he wrote about the land and its people, he showed that their everyday life and its setting could be the stuff of literature, and they appreciated what he was doing, in every sense. Discussing his last collection, An Evening with W.O. Mitchell, the newspapers in Saskatoon and Regina produced precisely the same phrase in their different reviews. In something more than a coincidence that phrase was “he belongs to us.”

  Coincidence — and history — dictated that I should be smitten by the man. Everyone who has read Who Has Seen the Wind will remember that at a time of sorrow in young Brian’s household the old Scottish granny takes down the family Bible and reads, “This is Maggie Biggart’s book. It was given to her on her wedding day in Dunlop, Scotland — May — 1832.” Like many of the details in his books, this reference is to a Mitchell family link. As it happens, Dunlop, Scotland, is a small town of fewer than a thousand people, even when all the dairy farmers are in town.

  I know this because the Gibsons have lived in Dunlop for generations, and I was raised there, and my mother, the Jenny mentioned in the dedication, still lives there. So when as a young editor in 1974 I found myself working on a new edition of Who Has Seen the Wind illustrated by William Kurelek, I realized that running into this fellow Mitchell was significant. Over more than twenty years we were to work together on ten books.

  There were strong indicators from the outset that working with W.O. would be an interesting proposition. The signing of the contract was marked by a celebratory lunch at the Westbury Hotel hosted by my boss, the convivial, white-haired Hugh Kane. He and I and William Kurelek — a quiet, gentle man — watched enthralled as Bill (for so I was learning to call him) launched into a cutlery-rattling imitation sermon by his creation, hypocritical preacher the Reverend Heally Richards, beginning with the shouted words “Brothers and Sisters!” Our fellow diners — stolid Harold Ballard look-alikes — were not amused. There were complaints. When the flustered maître d’ reached Hugh Kane, Kurelek and I gaped while money discreetly changed hands, and Bill was persuaded to resume a normal conversational tone.

  Not, of course, forever. The Westbury Hotel incident was almost repeated before my eyes in a Victoria dining room when Bill’s delight at embarrassing a TV interviewer with the full-volume punch line “So when did you last have an erection?” resulted in a few old ladies nearby almost fainting into their soup, and the head waiter hovering. After that dinner, I recall, Bill persuaded me to take along some personal remaindered copies of his books to the reading, and to stand there and sell them to the crowd, to his great benefit. He was a charmer.

  I have never known anyone around whom stories clustered in such numbers. He was, shall we say, incident-prone. If I were walking on the street with W.O. and two pigeons collided in the sky and fell on our heads, I would have regarded it as a normal hazard of being in his company. Pierre Berton told of visiting the Mitchell household in Toronto during W.O.’s stint as fiction editor at Maclean’s magazine. As Berton told it, when he arrived for dinner an indignant mother-in-law was leaving, suitcase in hand, the house was on fire, and the children were outraging the neighbours in imaginative ways. (In Toronto there was even a petition to persuade the terrible Mitchell kids to leave the neighbourhood.)

  The three Mitchell children went on to lead respectable lives but, as you would expect, produced their own share of stories. Once W.O. con
tacted his teenaged daughter Willa, then living a determinedly independent life in Vancouver, and they had a talk in his Hotel Vancouver room. Taking a crowded elevator down to the lobby with her, he pressed a fatherly twenty dollars in her hand. True to her Mitchell genes, she loudly denounced this sum to their fellow passengers, noting that most guys usually gave her far more. For once, W.O. was reportedly speechless.

  From the Alberta foothills my friend Andy Russell (author of Memoirs of a Mountain Man — and you can imagine how much fun I had editing and publishing that book) recalled hunting trips with groups that included our man. According to Andy — a master of embellished campfire yarns — one goose-hunting expedition set W.O. digging his pit off to the right. After the geese had come in, the silent gun on the right was noted. A search party found W.O. red-faced and buried up to the shoulders in caved-in-dirt. On another occasion Andy and some pals looked down on a field containing W.O. and a very inquisitive bull. Trying to cross a barbed-wire fence in a hurry, W.O got the crotch of his pants hung up on the top wire. As the bull cruised closer his manly predicament brought joy to the watchers — almost as much joy as his later imaginative account of how his pants got torn.

  On another occasion, when he was in the car with his wife, Merna, near their summer place at Mabel Lake in B.C., he impatiently assured her that a wasp in the car was no cause for concern. Until, that is, the daring wasp crawled up W.O.’s shorts and stung him in the groin. As Barbara Mitchell tells it (in Mitchell, the second volume of the biography she and her husband, Ormond, wrote, after the first volume, W.O.), “Fortunately, they were right in front of the Enderby drugstore. W.O. bolted out of the car, into the drugstore, and up to the dispensing counter. In as quiet a voice as he could muster, he asked for ammonia. Flabbergasted, the druggist and shoppers looked on as W.O. held open the top of his shorts and doused himself with half the bottle. Relieved, he casually asked the druggist, ‘How much is that?’”

  He knew that he was “incident-prone,” but prided himself on his powers of recovery. In my role as publishing educator I used to run the first week of the Banff Publishing Workshop, founded by the brilliant Yuri Rubinsky. Each year, teaching about thirty keen young would-be publishers at this mountain retreat, I made a point of bringing in an author to talk about the publishing process from the author’s point of view. These young people were spoiled, meeting people like mountain man Andy Russell, historian of the West James Gray, and Robertson Davies. One year it was W.O. who, unsurprisingly, ranged widely with his comments on an author’s life. In fact one central anecdote was his tale of an outboard failure in mid-lake when he was at the summer place near Enderby. Trying to fix the outboard, he spilled gasoline all over his shorts (his only garment). A quick glance around assured him that no boats were nearby on the silent lake, so he slipped out of the now-stinging shorts and crouched to work on the engine. Standing up later, arching to ease his back, he found himself ten feet from a sailboat quietly drifting by, full of pop-eyed female sailors. Rarely at a loss for words, outside of Vancouver hotel elevators, W.O. claimed that he instantly inquired, “What class is that boat?”

  Presumably his ill luck with things such as matches and gasoline (oh, the stories I could tell!) persuaded him to stop smoking in favour of taking snuff. His snuff-taking became legendary. Indeed, such a strong smell of snuff accompanied every Mitchell manuscript that I could identify it almost before the package hit my desk. (And I was touched when his family sent me a snuff box after his death. Just opening that box, now in our dining room, brings him back.)

  At Banff he tried to do some snuff missionary work with my girls, Meg and Katie. He sprinkled snuff on the dent where the base of the thumb meets the back of the wrist. Then, high drama. “Watch closely, now! Sniffff! Now, where did that go?”

  Four-year old Katie, in deep-voiced disgust, replied, “Up your nose.”

  Later, back in Toronto, Katie joined us for a Mitchell book-signing session at Britnell’s, the dearly departed bookstore at Yonge and Bloor. Katie was reaching the haul-back-on-Dad’s-hand stage, accompanied by the four-year-old whine, “Daaaad, let’s go!,” when W.O. intervened.

  “Katie, I need your help,” he said plumping her up on the table beside the pile of books to be signed. “See this page? Every time I say ‘Katie!’ you open the next book there, then put it down right in front of me. Okay? ‘Katie!’” It worked like a charm, and as a production line team they charmed the lineup as they finished the entire pile of books.

  Once, for the cover of a collection of his plays entitled Dramatic W.O. Mitchell (1982), I took him to the photographer’s studio to encourage him to be dramatic. It was, I discovered, like asking the Atlantic Ocean to be wet. He was a man of gigantic enthusiasms. On one visit to the Macmillan office, he was asked to look at an ailing potted plant. This led to an enthralling, arm-waving, audience-generating account of the titanic battle he had waged against the evil forces of the mealy bugs at his greenhouse at home in Calgary in defence of his beloved orchids. In the same spirit, his alder-smoked salmon was, apparently, beyond compare, like his youthful prowess on the diving board. In fact, he led a life of superlatives: a fairly good Chinese meal would be the product of the Best Goddamn Chinese Restaurant in Canada. And his enthusiasms for people were equally strong: If some of his swans were actually geese, there are many worse faults in a man’s view of the world.

  Ironically, for a writer who gained great fame in the bookshops, he seemed to set great store by success in the movie theatres. This continued to elude him, despite constant excitement about this proposed deal, and that potential director, and that interested star. He was so disappointed by Allan King’s version of Who Has Seen the Wind (not bad, in my view of it) that he took to calling it “Who Has Seen the Waltons” until he was legally constrained from doing so. When he himself was the subject of a movie, Robert Duncan’s NFB documentary W.O. Mitchell: Novelist in Hiding, he was incensed by the thesis that he spent too much time “being” a writer, giving the public performances that he loved, and not enough time actually writing. His anger (and he really did, on occasion, hoot with rage) was so fierce that he turned out more books in the next ten years than in the previous thirty.

  Robert Duncan was on to something, although he didn’t give full weight to the fact that, as a writer, W.O. had suffered the terrible misfortune of creating a classic with his first book. One result was that for many years, whenever he sat down to write, Who Has Seen the Wind crouched like a huge crow on his shoulder, silently defying him to write another book as good. Perhaps it was only in 1981, after he brought out How I Spent My Summer Holidays (a dark story’s deliberately sunny title, which I favoured, although it drew some criticism) that he felt free to write with no crow on the shoulder. That 1981 book was controversial. But in their biography, Barbara and Ormond Mitchell note that “George Woodcock, who had always been dismissive of Mitchell’s work, grudgingly admitted that How I Spent My Summer Holidays ‘compels one’s attention with a vision that seems to have stepped straight out of the Puritan nightmare.’”

  Working with him on that pivotal book reminded me that for all of his eccentricities, when it came to his writing, he was deadly serious. His biographers remind me that at a late stage in the editing process, I managed to persuade him that we needed an extra scene, to make the relationship between the two main male and female characters clearer to the reader. Right there in the Macmillan offices, W.O. commandeered a typewriter and an empty office to produce the extra scene. Conversely, when I tried to persuade him to place some harsh, shocking material farther back in the book than the opening pages, we discussed it at length, but he was adamant that though it might be commercially risky (frightening off some readers), it was artistically necessary.

  But there is no doubt that W.O. was the opposite of the typical author, who likes the quiet, private life of a writer, but has to be pushed to do any promotion. W.O. so loved the promotion tour that he gave the impression of d
oing the troublesome writing stuff just as a preliminary for THE REAL THING, the promotion tour, the interviews, and the readings.

  His public performances, of course, are legendary. All of the doubts that he associated with the lonely act of writing (“like playing a dart game with the lights out,” he once famously observed), were removed by the instant response of the audience. As a one-time actor, he loved “the immediate thrust of a live audience as it responds to story magic,” and it showed. His performances were immaculately professional: voice husking or thundering, fist raised, white hair flying, mouth creased in a foxy grin, or eyes wide in innocent astonishment at a double entendre raising a laugh. His performances, now fortunately captured on audio cassette, were unforgettable, and he himself was perhaps the most outrageous character he ever created.

  He was such a stellar presence — and such a mischief-maker — that anyone introducing him before a speech had an impossible task. I learned this, to my cost. If I gave him a well-deserved reverent introduction (“a man whose work has altered the course of Canada’s writing, one of Canada’s cultural treasures”), he would get to the lectern, lean on it, look around, then say, with impeccable timing, “Aw, horseshit!” So if the next time around I gave him a funny, irreverent introduction, using his own “folksy old Foothills fart” description, he would come up, look over his glasses, and gravely give us ten minutes on “the role of literature in society,” while I squirmed, and people wondered why that rude lightweight had been asked to introduce this fine, scholarly old gentleman.

  Another irony: This larger-than-life performer, not short of ego, valued selfless work. A couple of years before his death, when his health was failing, I asked him what, looking back on his long career, had brought him the most satisfaction. He thought hard and then said, “The teaching, I think.” Grateful former writing students who had learned from “Mitchell’s messy method” at Banff, Calgary, Toronto, Windsor, and elsewhere, will know why. Perhaps the fact that both of his sons, Orm and Hugh (the juvenile fire starters who alarmed the neighbours), grew up to become teachers, is not an accident. It’s interesting to note, too, that he was a fine judge of talent. He was proud to be the first professor to use in his class the stories of a young author named Alice Munro. Throughout his life he remained a fervent admirer, putting “Sweet Alice” in a special category. Very late in his life Alice sat by his Calgary bed, holding his hand and talking gently to him till Avie Bennett, observing this, was overcome, and removed himself from the room.