Just west of Calgary, at the Banff Centre, Roddy Doyle (an alert, wiry elf of a man) delighted us all by explaining that he had taken local warnings about unusual hazards very seriously. Like me he was staying in the Banff Centre for the Arts, and we had all been warned that it was rutting season for the elk that roamed the campus. This was new to him, Roddy explained, in his North-Dublin accent. He was prepared for most of the hazards facing a touring author, but these had never before included “the danger of being focked by an elk.”
The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was in a class by himself. Born in Siberia in 1928 he gained worldwide fame by writing anti-Stalinist poetry that was nicely calibrated to make him a popular literary hero while staying out of jail. When he came to Toronto in 1984 he had recently published a novel, Wild Berries, which M&S had distributed, so I looked after him on his visit.
He came loaded for bear. His novel had just received a bad review from the Globe’s literary critic William French, and Yevtushenko apparently came off the plane saying “Vhere is Vhilliam French?” That evening I introduced the two at a cocktail party and Yevgeny, sat down with Vhilliam. It was a terrible thing to watch. Yevgeny, tall, glamorous (wearing, I recall, a sharp metallic silver suit), and very passionate, leaned close to Bill French. “Vhilliam,” he said, apparently affectionately, “I am a mann (hand on chest). You are a mann (hand on Bill’s chest). So vhy, Vhilliam, you must drop leetle bits of deert (and the long expressive fingers crumbled grave dirt in the air) on my book.”
Bill’s background in London, Ontario — and even in the squabbling world of Canadian books — made him no match for this Siberian brigand, and he made the mistake of claiming that he had quite liked the book, really. Memory quails at the response. The finale was when Bill’s adult son joined the party and Yevgeny formed such a friendly attachment to him that he kissed him long and lingeringly full on the mouth, before his father’s eyes. Yevtushenko is an accomplished heterosexual, and this was not an accidental case of culture clash.
The next night Yevtushenko gave a reading at Harbourfront. I was backstage partly to look after him (ha!) and partly to give out the door prize at the intermission. When the lucky winner whooped her success, I peered into the audience and made a very unwise joke: “Hey, it worked! See you back at the office tomorrow!” I did not realize that most of the audience were recent Russian immigrants, who were familiar with that sort of casual corruption. They took it seriously.
They were there to see their great hero, Yevtushenko, but first they had to outwait the English author, Fay Weldon, reading a witty little home-counties domestic novel. Sadly, she read too long. The crowd grew restive. Backstage, around me, Yevtushenko was going wild. His entourage — a cellist, and an American reader that he had insisted on flying in, thus insulting his official Canadian reader, my poet friend Al Purdy — was also restive. Al, a big, shambling guy, was nursing his hurt pride with the help of beer. Poor Greg Gatenby of Harbourfront was trying to handle Yevtushenko, who was stalking around backstage, sparks flying off his gesturing hands as he insisted that “that vhooman” must be taken off.
Ultimately, as Fay Weldon read on, Greg did his high-school-vice-principal walk onstage and announced that it was time for Fay to leave. “What, right now?” she protested, and he ushered her towards the side of the stage.
Now things moved fast. Poor Fay was so distressed that she blundered offstage into a sharp, shin-high box of equipment and fell to the ground, moaning. I rushed to her aid, but she is a sturdily built lady, and she was weeping, and it was not easy. To make matters worse the Yevtushenko entourage — the mad Russian, rival readers, cellist, cello, and all — was thundering past us, even over us, as they stormed the stage.
The stage manager and I dragged Fay to a seat, and she was glad to accept his offer of an aspirin. She soon recovered as from the wings we watched Yevtushenko perform. From our side view we could see that he worked the microphone like Sinatra, now whispering close, next drawing back to make the hall ring with his declarations. “My God!” exclaimed the awestruck Ms. Weldon.
The duel of the English readers was frightening to see. The sulking Al (“You wouldn’t believe what’s going on,” he’d confided to me) was reading in a monotone. When he finished the English version Yevtushenko would leap at the microphone, practically waving a sign that said, “That was terrible — now listen to how it should be read, in the original Russian.”
It was an astonishing performance. The crowd loved it so much that when finally the entourage bowed its way offstage I found myself taking Yevtushenko by the shoulders and turning him around for an encore with the (entirely unofficial) words: “Back you go, Yevgeny.”
What I remember best is that his Cossack shirt was so soaked with sweat, he might as well have been in a warm shower for several minutes.
When Jack Hodgins wasn’t enduring amazing promotional ordeals (like the time in Sydney when the Aussie who had befriended him in the audience insisted on accompanying his new mate, beer in hand, up onstage for his reading, to sit at his feet) or writing wonderful books, he was teaching writing. His UBC training led to many years teaching in high school, then spells teaching creative writing at various places, as well as his full-time post at the University of Victoria from 1985 to 2002.
He was a remarkable teacher, as I saw whenever he wheeled me in as a visitor who could talk to the class about the real world of publishing. It was a lunch at the Faculty Club at the University of British Columbia before one such session where (as Jack explains in the afterword to A Passion for Narrative) his editor “saw me take a pile of handouts from my briefcase in preparation for the class.” I read them, and said, “Jack, this is terrific. Do you do this all the time? We should publish a book!”
“Not a chance,” he said, “I’m not going to be another one of the writers who write books on how to write books.”
For twelve long years I worked on Jack, and eventually, in 1993, the first edition of A Passion for Narrative: A Guide for Writing Fiction came out. Together with the revised edition (2003) it has sold over 25,000 copies in Canada, and is the Canadian classic in the field. Jack writes, “To my horror, one student who had moved several times from one university to another across the country told me that he’d been assigned the book three times by three different instructors.”
Jack goes on.
My publisher, flush with excitement over the advance sales figures, had his own plans for the book. Shamelessly, he contacted every publisher in the country, commiserated with them on the anguish of trying to find something helpful to say in the hundreds of rejection letters they have to write every week, and offered them free copies of A Passion for Narrative if they would recommend it to all the writers they rejected. Astoundingly, most publishers took him up on it.
I’m especially proud of the word “shamelessly.” Almost as proud as I am of the dedication to the revised edition where, after a graceful bow to his teachers Earle Birney and Jack Cameron, Jack writes, “and to Douglas Gibson, editor from the beginning, and friend, whose initial suggestion and continuing interest made this book possible.”
“And friend” is very good.
When James Houston received an honorary degree from York University in 2001, as his publisher I was asked to summarize his career for the lunchtime crowd of special guests. “James Houston,” I began, “is the most interesting group of people you will ever meet.”
The list of characters includes: accomplished artist, instructed as a boy growing up in Toronto by teachers including Arthur Lismer; soldier, as a long-serving member of the Toronto Scottish Regiment and the illustrator of the Canadian Army’s Second World War marksmanship training manual, Shoot to Live; in fact he was such a marksman that an old friend at his funeral told of once asking him just how good he was, Jim shyly responding that he could hit a playing card at a hundred paces, and when the friend was underimpressed, Jim moved his hand from palm out to h
and-edge out, adding, “Sideways”; and a serious art student in post-war Paris (until, he said, his mother became suspicious), who returned to set up a commercial artist’s studio in Grand-Mère, Quebec, its deliveries handled by a kid on a bike named Jean Chrétien.
It was in the role of artist on a sketching trip that Jim Houston was visiting Moose Factory, at the southernmost extension of Hudson Bay, when his life changed. It was 1948. A bush pilot friend offered him a free seat on a medical emergency trip by float plane north into the heart of the eastern Arctic. When they arrived at Inukjuak, or Port Harrison as it was called at the time, Houston found himself surrounded by smiling Inuit — short, strong, utterly confident people who wore sealskins and spoke no English. His book, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller (1995), records that “their eagerness to shake hands, their wide smiles and friendly way of laughing, their gruff sing-song voices, excited me. I had never dreamed of seeing people like these unknown countrymen of mine.” By the time the medical plane was about to leave, to rush a child — gnawed by dogs — to hospital, Jim Houston had decided to stay. He had found his most interesting role of all. Or perhaps it had found him.
That day, as the plane flew away, he was aware that “I didn’t know anyone’s name, of course, and only the two words of Inuktitut that everyone knows, ‘igloo’ and ‘kayak.’ These people spoke no other language.” But it all worked out. He was led by the arm to a corner of one of the summer tents, and a pile of fish and other red meat lying on the gravel was pointed out to him. When eventually the tea he drank had to be drained from his system, he records, “that brought some young sightseers out to check, I guess, that everything was normal.” His memorable first chapter ends with the words: “People lay down close on either side of me and we all went to sleep.”
Jim Houston’s decision to stay among his new friends changed the course of his life. It also changed the North, Canada, and the world of art. Discovering that his neighbours were almost casually producing wonderful soapstone carvings, the sort of thing he associated with museums, he took a sackfull of them south and found a Montreal gallery that was eager to sell them. After his first meeting with the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (now known as the Canadian Guild of Crafts), which had long been baffled by the problems posed by the North, one veteran exclaimed, “We’ve found our man!” With the support of the Guild he returned to the Arctic, using a barter system with the Hudson’s Bay Company that allowed the Inuit sculptors to be paid for the work they handed in. Jim would allot tokens worth two blankets for this sculpture of a seal, or a rifle and a set of shells for this mother and child piece, and in the barter economy they could be cashed in at the local Bay trading post.
He took the carvings south, and they were so well received that he pushed to expand the system. In 1949 the first Montreal sale was organized, with great success. In Montreal he met (and soon married) Alma Bardon, a journalist from Nova Scotia. Their son, John Houston, summarizes what happened next: “Then word came through from the Canadian government that there was funding to go further north, to Cape Dorset. Instead of the trip to sunny Mexico they had planned, the couple spent their honeymoon bouncing around on a dogsled, sleeping in igloos, on their way west along Baffin Island’s southern coast to a place called Cape Dorset.”
Jim established himself in Cape Dorset in 1951 with the mission of encouraging the Inuit throughout the north to exercise their artistic skills. He was, as his successor, Terry Ryan, said, “like Johnny Appleseed,” sowing the idea of creating Inuit art, and often doing it by dog team on prodigious travels across the trackless land, his Inuit companions miraculously using occasional silent Inuksuit as their only guides.
For more than a dozen years, he spent his time spreading the idea of art and in turn being educated by these kindly, patient people who became his friends, and who named him “Saomik, the left-handed one,” when they were not nicknaming him, affectionately, for his prominent chin or bushy beard. He stumbled amusingly through their language, slept in their igloos, ate raw fish and seal meat, wore skin clothing, travelled by dog team, hunted walrus, and learned how to build a snow house. And they especially liked to have him in their boats when it was time for hunting seal or walrus, making use of his shooting skills, in those days when a food cache filled from the land and sea was very important.
As a result of his extraordinary efforts, year after energetic year, in his other role as promoter/impresario he brought Inuit art to the attention of the outside world. “No James Houston, no Inuit art,” said one American museum director. Right idea, right place, right time, and, above all, right man.
In time, Jim and the gallant Alma (who went on to make her own huge contribution to the Inuit art world) raised two sons, John and Sam, in the North (the boys once bursting into tears when they learned that their playmates’ taunts were true — they were indeed white). But he took time off in 1958 from his government job administering southwest Baffin Island (where technically he was responsible for every human being and sled dog in a territory of 168,000 square kilometers, or 65,000 square miles) to go to Japan to study printmaking at the feet of the old master Unichi Hiratsuka — a visit that was controversial with one relative who had been a Japanese POW.
A hunting trip with his friend, the legendary artist Osuitok Ipeelee, was what originally led to the creation of Inuit prints. Osuitok observed that creating exactly the same picture of a sailor on each Player’s cigarette package must be boring work. Taking the walrus tusk Osuitok was carving, Jim demonstrated the principle of printing with the incised tusk, some seal lamp soot, and toilet paper. Confessions of an Igloo Dweller recalls Osuitok’s reaction: “‘We could do that,’ he said, with the instant decision of a hunter. And so we did.”
Returning to Cape Dorset from Japan, Houston introduced stoneblock printmaking techniques to the repertoire of artists who are now world famous; the prints of Kenojuak Ashevak, Osuitok Ipeelee, Pitseolak Ashoona and many others now hang in homes and galleries in scores of countries. The cumulative economic impact of his work in the North runs into millions of dollars each year. Its importance for individuals was stated very clearly in a letter of condolence to his family from an Inuit artist: “He put bread on our table.”
Not that he always avoided culture clashes. Once, as his book records, he instructed the Inuit printmakers in the use of paper money, explaining that, for example, ten-dollar bills were worth twice as much as these blue five-dollar ones. Then to emphasize that paper money was useful, like their artistic work, he stressed that “bigger money can be made from printmaking than from trapping foxes.”
With that phrase ringing in his ears, he went home, proud of his new role as economics instructor — until the next day, when on the printmaking drying line he found “big money” in the form of “a huge, chest-wide stencilled print of a green dollar bill.” Big money, indeed.
Elsewhere he tells of his failure to introduce competitive games like basketball and soccer to a society based on co-operation, so that basketball defenders would help the attacking team to get the ball finally through the hoop. It was indeed another world (arguably, a saner one) clearly described, and sensitively understood, by a man who bridged both worlds. In the words of The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, “Houston’s passionate involvement with Arctic life, legend and art enabled him to record an ancient culture at a critical turning point in its history.” Add anthropologist to his list of careers.
Having helped to set up the Cape Dorset co-op and seen it running smoothly (as it continues to this day, under his good Northern friend Jimmy Manning, who grew up playing with the reluctantly white Houston boys), in 1962 Houston decided to leave. It was time for another career. His parting gift, as he sadly left the people he loved, speaks for itself. A crowd had gathered as he prepared to step into the plane that was taking him south. A spokesman stepped forward.
“Left-handed, we have something for you, tunivapovit, a small gift from many here.”
> He held out a small, brown paper bag. It was old and crumpled with what looked like seal-fat stains that made irregular shiny blotches. . . . Light as a feather, it seemed to contain nothing, just a crumpled bag. . . .
I opened the bag and reached in. Inside was a clutch of small, tightly folded letters many people had pencilled in Inuktitut. I drew out a handful of one- and two-dollar bills, each one wadded up tight. There were a lot of them in that little paper bag — thirty-three Canadian dollars.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“A gift for you,” Kiaksuk said. “Everyone gives them to you. You’re going away, everyone says, to try and make more money.”
As you can imagine, Jim Houston was in distress as he climbed into the plane and “left that unforgettable place that had so long been my home.”
In April he was in Baffin Island, eating raw seal meat and worrying about his dog team (and worrying even more about the breakup of his marriage, which had led Alma to take her sons to Britain, in John’s words, “to get some space.”) In May he was living in mid-Manhattan, wearing a dinner jacket pressed by a butler and worrying about his new role as a designer at Steuben Glass.
Now, of course, in the world of glass design, James Houston the master designer is a legend. He wrote excitingly in his memoir, Zigzag, about the challenges of creating over 100 sculptures in glass — which some have suggested were inspired by the ice he knew so well — for the collector’s market. A show at Ashley’s in Toronto in the 1990s prompted a McClelland & Stewart salesman to marvel at the fact that Steuben had brought out all of their best work to this display in Jim Houston’s honour. He was astounded when I told him that all of the pieces there had been created by Jim. It seemed like a full life’s work.
Stories About Storytellers Page 19