Who were these people, and where did they come from? Family legend has it that “Big Jim” Hodgins was the unofficial founder of the London-area community, arriving in 1832. As a local agent for the Canada Company he was so successful at recruiting Irish immigrants from feud-scarred Tipperary (his brother Adam had to be smuggled out in a coffin, for his own safety) that, to quote Ray Fazakas in The Donnelly Album, “within a generation there were at least forty-six different Hodgins households in the township.” Adam’s grandson, “Running Joe,” eventually moved west to Vancouver Island, to produce, in due course, a grandson named Jack Hodgins.
So we have a Hodgins ancestor, “Big Jim,” bringing over scores of Irish immigrants to invent a new world in Upper Canada, just as in Jack Hodgins’ breakthrough novel, The Invention of the World (1977), we have Donal Keneally, a nineteenth-century giant, persuading an entire Irish village to come to Vancouver Island to set up a community. Interesting.
The Donnelly story came to my door in the shape of Thomas P. Kelley, the author of two sensational mass-market books about the Black Donnellys. He was a larger-than-life character, with the air of a carnie barker, who was in his sixties when he arrived at my Doubleday office to pitch me a new Donnelly book. He came with his wife, a shy, silent, silver-haired lady who wore genteel white gloves for the occasion. She watched proudly, her purse on her lap, as he leapt about, grunting, telling the exciting Donnelly tale, with imaginary spades swung, to sickening effect. Then, carried away by his narration, he jumped onto my desk to continue his arm-waving oration.
My desk was in its usual cluttered state, piled high with letters and layered manuscripts from many authors (who must have been surprised by the boot marks on their pages when they were returned). Sadly, once he had scrambled atop my desk, Mr. Kelley’s nerve failed him. An older gentleman, not in good training, he found that he needed my steadying hand to climb down, while his wife looked on affectionately.
I did not publish his book, though over the years I did bring out several books about the Donnelly killings, by the preacher Orlo Miller and the lawyer Ray Fazakas. And the case of the author who leapt excitedly onto the editor’s desk did enter publishing lore, as evidence of the lengths that authors will go (or perhaps the heights they will scale) in order to get published.
Jack Hodgins did not have to climb such heights to get published, but I remember that it took us at Macmillan a shamefully long time to decide to sign up this genius from Vancouver Island. This was different from taking on the latest book from Robertson Davies or Morley Callaghan. This was my attempt to bring a brand new, promising young author to our list, and I knew that it was an investment in his career that would almost certainly lose us money at the start. As Margaret Laurence put it later (reviewing that first book, Spit Delaney’s Island) most publishers “feel about as welcoming towards a volume of stories as they would to sudden attack of paper-eating termites in their warehouse.”
I didn’t feel that way, and our slow caution in signing Jack was not caused by my facing obdurate superiors. George Gilmour, the president, was a nice Maclean-Hunter man who took a hands-off attitude towards editorial decisions, while Don Sutherland ran the trade division. A former Chinese scholar, Don went on to head McGill-Queen’s University Press. When he participated in meetings with his Quebec publishing industry peers, the discussion was, of course, in French. At the end of a tiring day, the “foreign language” synapse in Don’s brain sometimes produced a flow of idiomatic Mandarin, which surprised and delighted the French colleagues with whom he was debating.
Hugh Kane, too, was anything but an obstacle, although over many years at M&S as Jack McClelland’s right-hand man, Hugh had often tried to rein in his enthusiastic boss. Lured away by John Gray to succeed him as the head of Macmillan, Hugh (a white haired, red-faced little dynamo with thick glasses), had found himself side-lined by Maclean-Hunter’s takeover in 1972. When I arrived in 1974 I was horrified to find that he was not even invited to editorial meetings, which I chaired. I fixed that, to everyone’s benefit. And instead of sulking, Hugh was busy changing the world of Canadian children’s books forever.
At the time there were no Canadian bookstores for children, and only May Cutler’s Tundra in Montreal published specifically for children. In fact, things were so bad in Canada that in 1972 I had made the infamous joke: “If all publishers are born gamblers, the men and women who publish children’s books are the sort of people who jump out of a tenth-storey window in the hope that an open truckload of mattresses will be going by.”
When I arrived at Macmillan the corridors in the stately old building at 70 Bond Street were alive with gossip of how Hugh was championing a crazy project, a couple of children’s books by a poet named Dennis Lee, illustrated by Hugh’s old friend Frank Newfeld, that would need to sell ten times the usual number of copies sold by Canadian children’s books before they broke even. The whole thing was going to be a disaster.
Dennis Lee, for his part, remembers that Hugh’s faithful support included discovering the ideal title for the main book. After a trial run, with Dennis reading some of the poems from his still-unnamed book to a group of Toronto kids, Hugh told him excitedly, “I think we’ve got our title, Dennis. Did you see how at the end the kids were dancing around chanting to each other, ‘Alligator Pie, Alligator Pie’?”
The rest is history. The success of the book was encouraged by Hugh’s determination to keep rolling the dice, indeed to keep Dennis rolling across Canada, giving endless readings and performances. Once, in Fredericton, Dennis sauntered into the local bookstore and introduced himself to the lady bookseller, who remembered Hugh Kane the salesman very affectionately. Dennis, not an overbearing man, politely offered to autograph the copies of Alligator Pie and Nicholas Knock that she had on display. The owner thought hard and then, with the precise phrasing of a diplomat, said, “If it were Pierre Berton or Farley Mowat, I’d say yes, but in this case I don’t think so.”
Which brings us back to Jack Hodgins. Jack was, and remains, a tall, lean, gangly figure, so loose-limbed that his hands and feet seem to be perpetually surprised to find themselves stuck so far away from him. He is such a nice, unassuming guy that humiliations like the one that befell Dennis in the bookstore happened to him all the time. As you will soon see, they were gleefully collected and cherished by this man with a love of a good story, or to put it another way, a passion for narrative.
In the end, after a delay caused by excessive caution, we signed up Jack, and I began one of my most rewarding author-editor relationships. Over the years I have been proud to publish twelve books by Jack, from short story collections to novels to a travel book set in Australia (Over Forty in Broken Hill), all the way to his classic book on the art of writing fiction, A Passion For Narrative.
“Jack Hodgins, he got curly hair” was the first recorded comment by my daughter Meg (aged two) on one of my authors, after Jack had visited the house for dinner. (I remember fondly that at a return engagement at Jack’s house outside Nanaimo, his kids, Shannon, Gavin, and Tyler, kindly took me outside to see their pullets in the yard overhung by arbutus trees.) Jack’s hair was curly then in 1976 and it’s curly now, although it’s less springy, and a purist would notice that it has gone grey. But Jack is still impossibly boyish, lean, and active. And he’s still shy, in a stooping sort of way that allows him to rear back with a sudden smile or a laugh, as the conversation — or the instructive talk about the craft of fiction — demands it. Those who have seen him in action in a classroom know that he is that very rare blend of a shy person who is also a natural teacher.
As a writer, he arrived with a bang in 1976 with Spit Delaney’s Island. The book produced many reviews like the Montreal Gazette’s: “Jack Hodgins has done for the people of Vancouver Island what John Steinbeck did for the inhabitants of California’s Salinas Valley and William Faulkner for the American South.”
The stories in the collection were set on the
Vancouver Island that he knew well, having been raised in the logging/small farming community of Merville in the Comox Valley. Like the community itself, the stories were filled with memorable characters, but Jack Hodgins was careful to explain, as he told Jack David (a promising academic soon to become a notable publisher) in an interview, “I’m one of them. I’m not an outsider looking at them and laughing at them and saying, oh ho ho, look at those funny people who live on this funny island. They’re not funny to me at all, except where they share the same feelings that I have. When I laugh at them, I’m laughing at us, all of us.”
Margaret Laurence called the book “remarkable” in her Globe review, and wrote of Jack’s ability “to convey human beings in all their uniqueness and nuttiness, and an ability to convey a sense of place — that Island which is both a vivid geographical place and an island of the spirit.” It was clear from the chorus of praise — and the resultant book sales — that an important new writer had arrived.
I had deliberately tied Jack to Vancouver Island by putting a fine Emily Carr painting on the cover of Spit, and it delighted me to see how quickly Jack did indeed become the fiction writer portraying the Island to outsiders. I was not aware that in the process I was sharpening a double-edged sword; over time a writer who brilliantly describes a region can run the risk of being downgraded to the easy description “a regional writer.”
Jack and I have worked happily together as author and editor over the years. Family legend goes that once Dianne, his wife, as his first reader, objected that a passage of magic realism went much too far, that no reader would believe it. Jack sniffily rejected her advice — until the day the same passage came back from my desk with the words “No! No! No!” written on it. More often, in my role of editor, all I needed to do was highlight a passage as being not quite right, and Jack would supply a brilliant revision that solved everything.
I am proud of the friendship that has allowed me to make many visits to Jack and Dianne’s home in Victoria. One other marvellous side benefit for me was that I got to know the Island well. I learned that as you travel from Victoria north over the Malahat to the logging museum at Duncan (where I saw a “crummy” that had rolled straight out of Jack’s writing about loggers), then up the highway to Nanaimo (where he taught high school) and beyond up to Campbell River, en route to Port Alice (a.k.a. “Port Annie, Pulp Capital of the Western World,” where his fictional hero Joseph Bourne resided) or, if you choose, west past the “goats on the roof” and the forest giants at Cathedral Grove to Port Alberni, then further west through the mountains where the roadside snow lies deep in winter to Ucluelet or Tofino, land of the surfers — why, you have travelled through the equivalent of a dozen little European countries, each with their own geography, climate, and culture. And that’s not counting the Duchy of Saltspring Island, where Jack and I once gathered and ate the best blackberries in the world, in the lineup to the ferry.
I know, of course, that islanders anywhere — in Skye, in Toronto, in British Columbia — are different, proudly different. My former wife Sally’s fine 1984 book, More Than an Island (“a model of civic history” according to Jane Jacobs) was a history of Toronto Island that made that point very clear. But I was amused to have the difference confirmed whenever I went to Vancouver Island.
I preferred to come by ferry, either through Active Pass to Sidney or straight to Nanaimo, nearer to Jack’s home territory, the ferry gliding in past the Gabriola Island “galleries” shown to me by my friends Rufus and Bee Churcher.
Even aboard the ferries, the characters started popping up. Once I stepped outside to the outer deck and found a small family softly singing hymns into the wind — dozens of hymns. Ancient Mariners would accost me with dramatic stories of fishing fortunes made and lost at the whim of the Weather Gods, and so on, until I suspected that Jack had hired this cast of Vancouver Island “characters” for my benefit.
The UBC scholar and critic W.H. New went beyond Spit Delaney’s Island to look at the cumulative impact of Jack’s first two novels, The Invention of the World (1977) and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979): “By the late 1970s then, with three books appearing in rapid succession, Hodgins seemed to burst upon the literary scene in full bloom. This was an experienced writer, writing something ‘different,’ not an imitative apprentice. Journalists trumpeted the arrival of a major talent. Interviewers asked where he’d been. Readers sat back and enjoyed.”
Bill New reminds us that where Jack had been was on Vancouver Island, apart from the spell he left to get a five-year teaching degree at UBC, where he took a creative writing class with Earle Birney. Then he taught high school in Nanaimo, and wrote and wrote and wrote, the years of rejection allowing him to become what the world calls “an overnight success.”
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature is intended to be a sober record of undisputed facts, yet it singles out The Invention of the World and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne as “two immensely good-humoured and formally innovative novels.” “Immensely good-humoured” is absolutely right. The perceptive Toronto critic W.J. Keith caught exactly the same spirit by praising Jack’s work for its “sprightliness.” Some critics have in fact complained that his books are devoid of truly evil characters. The human villains tend to be unlikeable and cranky and grumpy, but never truly malevolent and evil. True evil is to be found not in people — who for Jack are always capable of redemption — but, in Broken Ground (Jack’s superb 1998 historical novel), for instance, by impersonal forces like the meat-grinding machine of the First World War, or the casually malevolent forest fire that destroys a new community in the woods — ironically a soldier’s settlement granted to survivors of the war.
To me, The Invention of the World is Jack’s greatest book. It begins brilliantly, with the reader directed to watch the man who waves us aboard the ferry to the Island. “Follow him home,” we are told, and we soon learn that he is trying to reconstruct the whole island and its history. One of the book’s sections, in fact, consists of his Barry Broadfoot–style recorded interviews with old residents as he tries to take intellectual possession of the place. “And he will act as if he himself had set all this down in the ocean, amidst foamy rocks and other smaller islands where sea lions sunbathe and cormorants nest and stunted trees are bent horizontal from the steady force of the Pacific wind.”
The rest of the book is woven out of an astonishing variety of brightly coloured strands: a love story, a study of a nineteenth-century Irish village, a comedy of manners (the culture clash between wild loggers just out of the bush and prim, weight-watching townsfolk), a retelling of a pagan myth, a portrait of tough pioneer days in the rainforest, a mystery story, and a wry look at our constant search for Eden.
The final scene, one of the greatest in Canadian literature, takes us to the crowded wedding reception that really takes off when Danny Holland (axe throwing champion and former lover of Maggie the bride)
pulled the starter on the chain saw he’d hidden under his bench, swung it up over his head, roaring and belching blue smoke, and let out a wild yell of delight. Then he turned and, before anyone realized what he was up to, cut a door-size hole in the wall right through to the ladies’ washroom. The battle that followed, it was generally agreed, was all the fault of a man named Herbie Purkis from Beaver Cove: when the hole had been cut in the wall, he was upset, it seemed, that for one startled moment the whole assembled crowd was given a flashing peek at the creamy white buttock of his surprised and fumbling wife.
The brawl that follows sets the loggers, armed with roaring chainsaws, against the people of the town, who fight back with other weapons. Besides hurling insults “like hand grenades . . . They raised their prices, they cancelled appointments, they cut off supplies.”
After the brawl has destroyed the hall, it’s time for wedding speeches and Danny Holland himself crawls up to the stage. His speech is typical:
And since he, who had more man
hood in his little toe then all the rest of these bastards put together, and since he had been the one, don’t forget, who had been the first to, been the first to . . . He eyed up the bride who, sitting in a pile of debris, eyed him back with a vengeance, and found that he had forgotten what he’d come up here to say. It didn’t matter, he said, because they all knew this one thing for sure: you can’t beat a goddamn wedding for fun.
Reviewers inside Canada noted that at last Canada had a Bunyanesque answer to the magic realism of the Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez. Abroad, people sat up and took notice. Gordon Lish, the esteemed fiction editor of Esquire magazine, went so far as to say, “Jack Hodgins’ The Invention of the World joins Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business as the decade’s most distinguished achievements in Canadian fiction.”
It was like Fifth Business in another way. For all the praise, and a number of prizes, it did not win the Governor General’s Award. As with Davies, a later jury seemed to make up for the omission by awarding the prize to the next book: to Davies for The Manticore and to Jack for The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne.
By a happy coincidence the G.G. Awards were given out in Vancouver that year, so I had the pleasure of sitting beside Stanley and Reta Hodgins, Jack’s quietly thrilled parents, and the rest of the beaming Hodgins family, led by Dianne, a very good beamer. The winning book starts with a giant wave out of Alaska that leaves strings of kelp hanging all over town and a fishing boat stranded up a tree, but the Granville Island vulnerable waterside setting for the award didn’t seem to worry anyone. And the French-language recipients, far from Winnipeg, were all gracious.
Stories About Storytellers Page 17