The move to Manhattan also created James Houston, author and illustrator of children’s books. From 1965 to 1998 he wrote seventeen children’s books, including Tiktaliktak, River Runners, Ice Swords, Drifting Snow, The White Archer, and Frozen Fire, winning national and international awards, and becoming the only three-time winner of the Book of the Year Medal given by the Canadian Library Association. When he delivered the prestigious Helen E. Stubbs Memorial lecture in Toronto in 1999, it was clear to me that the worshipful assembled audience regarded him as a supreme children’s book author and illustrator, who perhaps did one or two other things on the side.
Among the “other things” was writing bestselling adult novels. The White Dawn (1971), a tale of nineteenth-century Yankee whalers stranded in the Arctic for a winter, amid deteriorating relations with their Inuit hosts, was a huge international bestseller, selling millions of copies around the world and becoming a major Hollywood film. Jim helped to write the screenplay and was the associate producer, with great tales to tell of the clash in the North between filmmakers on a Hollywood timetable, with the million-dollar meter running, and a lead Inuit actor drawn away from “playing” by excellent hunting weather. There’s an unforgettable scene in Zigzag when Jim flies off in pursuit of the truant actor and gently explains that what he’s doing — “um . . . the playing” — is really important to all these white people from the South. As a favour to his pal Jim, the hunter came back to “play” some more (Shakespeare would have approved). His role was to lead the final assault on the film’s star, Timothy Bottoms, which outraged some of the Inuit observers on the set, older women who shouted, “Bad, bad to kill that boy!” and “Bad, bad to kill Timothee!” The movie is still available on TV some nights, and shouting at the screen is always an option.
Other historical novels followed, including Ghost Fox (1977 — set in eighteenth-century New England and Quebec, near North Hatley), Spirit Wrestler (1980 — set in the Arctic in the 1950s), Eagle Song (1983 — set in Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, before white settlement), and Running West (a fur-trade novel set in the eighteenth-century Canadian West that won the Canadian Authors Association medal for fiction in 1990). All are linked by the provocative theme of an aboriginal society in uneasy contact with white settlers, and, unusually, encourage white readers to see themselves in the role of strange intruders. Presumably there are worshipful adult readers out there who think of James Houston as exclusively a writer of thoughtful, well-researched historical novels.
I saw him in action when he researched his final novel, The Ice Master (1997), which is also about whaling. Together we clambered all over the Charles W. Morgan, the very last New England whaler, now moored at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. We peered into every bunk and every try pot, like small boy stowaways eager to find an apple barrel to hide in, like Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. He liked to call me Dougal, and when he named the drunken Scottish mate in the novel Dougal Gibson, he liked it even more, and when I was present for a slanderous reading (as I was at Richard Bachman’s Burlington bookstore, A Different Drummer), his delight knew no bounds. (His interest in Arctic whaling history was longstanding. In his early years up north he was thrilled to meet a very old, very wrinkled, Inuit lady. Did she remember, he asked gently, ever meeting the old whalers, the “Yankee men” or the “Dundee men”?
“Remember meeting them? I danced with them and slept with them!” she replied, approximately.)
I came onto the scene late. When I became M&S’s publisher in 1988, I had to stop taking on top authors for my Douglas Gibson Books imprint, since that would have been unfair to my colleagues. But Jim Houston, a major M&S figure (perhaps encouraged by his contemporary and old friend Jack McClelland) insisted on working with me as his editor, and I could not resist. We worked happily together on his last two novels, and on his three books of memoirs. And on the memoirs I was genuinely useful, helping this quite private man tell his own life story.
As you can imagine, I enjoyed spending time with this fascinating man as often as I could arrange it. With my two daughters, Meg and Katie, both at Harvard, I was often “in the neighbourhood” of the Connecticut home of Jim and his second wife Alice. Whenever we got together (and once it was in Toronto on a strangely busy Tuesday night, when it was hard to get a table for dinner, and the roses at our table seemed excessive, until we realized that it was February 14th) he would tell me amazing stories about the people he had met and the things he had seen and done in the North, and I would urge him to put it all down on paper, since it would make a book that I was desperate to publish. But, despite the fact that he was one of the most creative and energetically productive people I ever knew, with a sketch or a painting or a new novel or an art documentary or a glass sculpture or a children’s book always on the go, nothing ever happened.
Finally, it became clear what the problem was. Sure, he had all these great stories from his days in the Arctic, but he didn’t know if he threw out all the letters from his Ottawa bosses in 1956 or 1957, or if the bear attack was 1959 or 1960, and so on. Most of the dates, and the order of events, he felt, were too vague for him to put in a book. And some of the stories would provide a ten-page chapter, others only half a page.
“Jim, it doesn’t matter a damn,” I told him. “Just get the stories down on paper. Give them dates when you know them, otherwise you can ignore the order of the chapters, and leave that to me. And forget about having chapters that are the same length; they’ll be just as long or as short as the story you’re telling. But for God’s sake get to work on this — your memories of those days and those artists are priceless.”
That was what he needed to hear, and he set to work on collecting stories, and telling them in the usual understated Houston way. When Confessions finally came out in 1995, the reviews confirmed the wisdom of this style of book, with the New York Times saying, “You just want to see another piece. Hear another story.”
Working with him on that book of Northern memoirs, followed by Zigzag: A Life on the Move (1998), and Hideaway: Life on the Queen Charlotte Islands (1999), as well as on his last two novels, meant that I was too late to see Jim in his role as a volunteer art teacher in Harlem in difficult times in New York, or in his role as a New England sheep farmer. That particular zag came after his divorce and his encounter in Manhattan with a “super girl” called Alice Watson, who was working in the book division of American Heritage Publishing Company. They got married (in the Yale Dwight Chapel that I knew so well, from the outside) and moved to Rhode Island to be close to her native Connecticut, as was only right for a Yale professor’s daughter. It was a very happy marriage.
In due course, Jim and Alice stopped counting sheep and retired to the peninsular Stonington, Connecticut, to an old white clapboard house that boasts evidence of damage from the cannon of evil British ships. It was at one time occupied by Whistler’s mother, who apparently continues to pay nocturnal visits to the guest bedroom, but not on any of the five occasions when I was there.
Strolling about the historic old fishing town, Jim seemed a typical retired citizen, craggily handsome, jovially greeting other New York corporate retirees. But on occasion the irrepressible old Arctic hand would leap out. Once, looking south from Stonington Point with my binoculars, I was excitedly hailing the arrival of a flock of Brant geese, the duck-size migrants that are always a beautiful sight to a keen birder. Jim saw them differently. “Very good eating,” he remarked, sticking out his square jaw and gazing far into the distant past. Then he chuckled, and rounded his eyes at me in the distinctive smile that charmed companions in Manhattan nightclubs, Scottish castles, Parisian ateliers, and Baffin Island igloos. And when he sat, leaned forward, spread his hands, and started to tell a story, he was one of the world’s best. The ultimate storyteller.
I once saw him in action before a crowd of bored and restless school kids in Calgary. He and I had spent the previous evening at dinner in the Palliser Hotel’s
Rimrock Room with the legendary “mountain man” Andy Russell, with Andy and Jim trading grizzly and polar bear stories. I could have sold tickets, and a tape recording could have made my fortune.
The following morning, as part of the Calgary Book Festival, Jim was due to speak to roughly 300 fourteen-year-olds crammed into a former movie theatre. With an hour or two to spare, I went along, and found Anne Green, the usually composed Head of the Festival, pacing the lobby in despair. All three speakers were now ready, and the kids were thrumming with impatience. But the chair was held up (as it turned out, behind that local Albertan hazard, a cattle drive). So I volunteered to chair the meeting, and to introduce the authors. Problem solved, let’s go.
I was ill-prepared for my first two introductions, but I was ready for Jim, who was to speak last. “You already know this man’s work, ” I told the surprised kids. “How many of you have been to the Glenbow Museum, along the street here?”
Every hand went up, except for the cool rebels’.
“And you know when you go in, the main staircase winds around a huge hanging plexiglass sculpture, seventy feet tall?”
Heads nodded.
I pointed to Jim. “He did that. He’s the sculptor who made that giant piece, called Aurora Borealis. And he’s also a man who has spent a large part of his life in the far North, living in snowhouses, igloos, driving dog teams, and eating raw seal meat.” (Cries of “Ewww!” and general consternation, especially among the girls.)
And so on.
When Jim rose to speak, he went to the front of the stage, spread his tweed-jacketed arms wide, and said, “I’m a really old guy! And I’ve had a hell of an interesting life!”
They clapped, they cheered, they loved him, and they couldn’t get enough of his stories. You can guess where all the questions were directed at Question Time. (Apart, that is, from a thoughtful girl who came up to me privately in the aisle, to ask “How do I get to do what you do?” Just possibly, my enthusiasm for the publisher’s life might have peeked through. I hope she made it.)
In 1999, the Canadian Museum of Civilization staged a special show, Iqqaipaa, on the early, Houston years of Inuit art. Maria von Finckenstein was the exhibition curator, and Jim was involved as a special advisor to the show, to which he lent twenty pieces from his personal collection. After the official ceremonies, about a dozen of us, including Governor General Adrienne Clarkson (my predecessor as publisher at M&S) and the chief sponsor, my pal Duncan McEwan, followed Jim around as he chatted about individual pieces — how he watched this one being completed, or got to know the sculptor, and what was special about the rock in this piece, and so on — priceless information that now is gone. Fortunately, Jim wrote some notes about Inuit art, and his own astonishing career has been documented here and there, as in the late Charles Taylor’s fine book Six Journeys (1977) and in many magazine pieces, although each one usually concentrated on only one of the many Houston lives. Jim’s extraordinary career did not go unrecognized; the best-known photograph of our craggy northern legend was taken by the legendary Irving Penn.
There is yet another life to describe. In 1968, he was asked by the government to tour British Columbia to write a report on redeveloping Northwest Coast Indian art. He travelled widely and was especially impressed by the Queen Charlotte Islands. In Hideaway he describes standing on the bridge over the Tlell River watching its waters “as smooth and brown as buckwheat honey” and falling in love with an old green cottage right beside the bridge. Next year, he and Alice bought the cottage, appropriately named “Bridge Cottage.” They spent the last part of each summer fishing for salmon (Jim was such a keen fisherman that he cast flies after them across the world, and Alice was no slouch) and enjoying the company of their friends. Notable among these was Teddy Bellis, a Haida friend and neighbour, who liked to interrupt Houston’s cocktail parties for off-island visitors by asking loudly if they were “enjoying eating dog.” He would let them consider their canapés thoughtfully for a while before specifying that they were eating dog salmon, very tasty.
Jim and Alice loved their West Coast hideaway. When I visited, I recall that the tidal pull on the Tlell was so strong that I had to swim full out to stay in place opposite the cottage and avoid being swept down into Hecate Strait, while Jim stood there making “Mao, the Great Helmsman” swimming jokes.
Jokes and stories were a large part of conversational life around Jim, but I’m not entirely sure that he was joking when he instructed me not to marry Jane until he had “had a chance to check her out.” In the event, all went well, and he approved. In fact, on our first Stonington visit, he even told Jane an astonishing story, just for her, with me off helping Alice in the kitchen, about a polar bear attack on his sled dogs. On the trail, he explained when Jane asked, there was no need to tie the dogs up. They had lost their ability to hunt, and stayed with the sled, their source of food. The only thing they would attack was a marauding polar bear, which was such a killing machine that they were programmed to attack it en masse, instantly, in self defence.
On this occasion he and his hunting companion (it may have been Osuituk) had halted for the night and set the dogs free, when a bear appeared over a nearby rise. The dogs went for it, and the bear used its scythe-like claws to gut the first dog, flinging it aside, yelping, trailing yards of red guts. Seeing the other charging dogs, backed by two fur-clad humans scrambling for their guns, the bear turned and disappeared.
Jim grabbed his gun to attend to the dying dog.
“What are you doing?” said the other hunter. “You don’t need the gun. Nanuk, the bear’s gone.”
When Jim explained that he was going to put the hopelessly gutted dog out of its misery, his friend stopped him, saying in effect, “That’s not your decision. “
Jim went over, and with the side of his boot tried to scrape the entrails back into the stomach cavity. The other dogs gathered around, and started to lick the wound clean, helped by the antiseptic northern air. The dog lived, to pull again!
I was impressed by Jane’s account, but mildly irritated to hear it. I thought that I had coaxed all of his best stories out of him for inclusion in Confessions of an Igloo Dweller.
On our last visit Jim’s health was going downhill. The treatment against shingles over so many years, he said, had shot his liver. When we arrived to stay overnight, Alice announced that Jim had been in bed all day, but would be at the dinner table in his dressing gown. That gave me an idea. When he came carefully down for dinner, he found me dressed in my dressing gown, openly amazed that he was so up to date with hip Toronto dinner fashions for men. Within seconds the outfit did indeed feel natural, and he was soon telling more stories.
Of course, I shouldn’t have resented that new story he told Jane. He was a man whose stories, like his many lives, were too rich and varied to be contained. The honours and the honourary degrees that were showered upon him are only one mark of his impact on the world. His books, drawings, and glass sculptures are everywhere. Above all, every Inuit print and every Inuit sculpture will always bear the invisible mark of James Houston.
Someone like Jim doesn’t disappear from your life after his death. His continuing influence emerged right at his funeral in Connecticut, held at the Mystic Seaport Museum, hard by the whaling ship that he and I had clambered over. The historic church, now used as a hall, was packed with dignitaries from most of his careers, along with Stonington neighbours who knew him just as a friendly figure whose stories always enlivened their dinner parties among the crystal and the old family china.
I was nervous about the lack of an officiating clergyman, and the crowded old church was tense and sombre. Then Oz Elliot, Jim’s great friend who had run Newsweek, ascended the podium.
His first words were addressed to Jim’s widow.
“Good morning, Alice.”
From her seat in a central pew Alice replied, “Good morning, Oz,” loud and clear. And the
whole congregation visibly relaxed, ready for the speakers — including me and an Inuktitut speaker from much further north — to reveal many of the different aspects of Jim’s life.
At the reception afterwards I was greeted by a fellow Canadian, a friendly chap named Richard Self, from Vancouver. All the way from Vancouver? Richard explained that he and his wife, Nancy, were close to the Houstons, having bought Bridge Cottage on the Queen Charlotte Islands. When I congratulated him, saying how much I had enjoyed visiting Jim and Alice there, he invited me to come back “any time.”
Jane and I have a rule that invitations issued at weddings and funerals don’t count. Yet a year later Richard followed up with a phone call out of the blue. Weren’t we interested in coming to stay for a few days at the cottage on the Tlell? You bet! We rushed to make arrangements.
In September 2008 Jane and I arrived at Sandspit airport, found Richard and Nancy’s car in the parking lot, and plunged into that glorious Houston Hideaway world for five days. Every day we watched the river ebb and flow just twenty paces outside the main cabin window, the view full of memories and guarded by bald eagles. It was the middle of the salmon run, and we spent many happy hours with our rods thrashing the water, following in Jim and Alice’s wader-steps. Despite the helpful presence of their great friend (woodsman, artist, and expert angler) Noel Wotten, we had no luck. But we learned the most basic lesson of fly-fishing, that actually catching something is only part of the fun.
We roamed around on dry land, too, revisiting Rosespit Beach, where on a notably cold, clear day Jim and I had seen Alaska in the distance. I also remember that he commented admiringly on the “hardy” young Haida women who, in jeans and T-shirts, were standing waist-deep in the frigid surf, trying to net crabs. “Hardy” was one of the greatest compliments Jim could bestow.
Stories About Storytellers Page 20