I certainly made the wrong choice when I agreed to be on a Writers’ Union AGM panel discussing “Racism in Canadian Publishing.” The previous publisher on the panel had withdrawn, for some reason, and I was there as late replacement and Target-in-Chief. With some sense of irony I dressed in my nice blue blazer, and looked very white and suitably insensitive.
It went as you would expect. I happened to be sitting beside an aboriginal representative named Lenore Keeshig-Tobias. If her name is not familiar to you as a writer, I can suggest in her defence that she was kept pretty busy by panels like this. In fact, we were held up while she went back to her room to get the speech that she had written. When she arrived, she sat next to me, where I occupied the end seat.
This vantage point meant that I was the only person in the room who was aware that as Lenore expertly whipped up anguish and white guilt in the audience and then became so emotional herself that she was unable to continue, she broke down at precisely the point where her typed speech ran out.
I had an uncomfortable time up there, as Target-in-Chief, but I survived. Until the following Monday, when the Globe and Mail report on the entire AGM was headed “Racism in Canadian Publishing Denounced,” along with a photo beside the headline of me, looking very white. Just as bad, the article had me categorically denying that there was any racism in Canadian publishing. When I called the journalist, a friend, he was apologetic; it made a better story. Later, a miracle occurred. A writer named Libby Scheier wrote a piece on the AGM for Saturday Night magazine. When she contacted me in the course of her research, I said, “Oh, no, I’ve been burned once!”
“I know,” she said, “and my article is going to set the record straight!” And, by God, it did.
More recently, I’ve had happy personal contacts with the Native world. As a member of the Historica national council (a group set up to promote interest in Canadian history) I strolled into my first meeting where about 100 of us were spread out among ten-person tables. I chose a nearby table, walked over, and introduced myself. It was only hours later that I learned that, by good fortune, I had sat at the Aboriginal Table, and by that time we were getting along really well. So well, in fact, that a strong tradition was born. So strong that when a few years later I and Georges Sioui, the great historian of his people, the Huron-Wendats, met in the corridor for an excited catch-up conversation that led to us slipping in late to another table, we were reprimanded for not sitting at “the table.” (“What’s the matter with you guys?” said Rarihokwats, the amazing non-lawyer who knows more about Supreme Court land claim rulings than any lawyer with a string of degrees, smiling.)
That attitude of friendly irreverence is to be found on every page of Bob Hunter’s book, Red Blood: One (Mostly) White Guy’s Encounters with the Native World, published by me in 1999. It’s a fine account of Bob’s surprising lifetime encounters with such people as the Huron who appears out of the trees when eighteen-year-old Bob is just realizing that his romantic plan to stay out all night in the January woods in zero degrees, without a tent, is going to kill him. Later, after his spell working as an adviser to the Kwakiutl band, he confesses to realizing, “It was a grinding line of work, being an Indian chief. It required, I quickly realized, the patience of a saint.” Then there is the journey with a group of B.C. chiefs to intercept the Columbus fleet of 1992. How these well-intentioned pirates overcame the internal onboard battles between the Saintly Vegans in the galley and the Native Trappers, meat-eaters to a man, is hilarious. Almost as funny, in fact, as the boarding of the Spanish ship to extract an official apology to aboriginals from Spain for all the post-Columbian unpleasantness.
But my favourite Bob Hunter tale is his account of winning the Governor General’s Award with Robert Calihoo. At the official dinner, at the top of Toronto’s Bank of Montreal Tower, both Bob and his pal Calihoo, a proud graduate of Stoney Mountain Penitentiary, are slightly ripped.
Sixty storeys up we emerged from the elevator into an enormous dining area, with a string quartet playing, looking out over the lights of the biggest concentration of wealth and power in Canada. Surrounded by the nation’s economic, political, and literary elite, we were guided to a round table where we joined our publisher, the urbane, erudite and merry Doug Gibson, as well as, among others, one of the vice-presidents of the bank itself (presumably a human monster beneath the veneer of charm and breeding), and his delightful and attractive running-dog trophy bride.
It all falls apart. Calihoo and the banker do not see eye to eye on the role of banks, the merits of the Free Trade deal, and pretty much everything else.
“Despite the urgency of maintaining decorum, voices began to rise at our table. . . . My wife finally couldn’t take it any longer and yelled at Royer: ‘Will you just shut up!’ That created quite a stir at surrounding tables.”
A brawl seems to be imminent.
There was a ten-second pause at the end of which the banker’s wife — a nice, north-Toronto respectable lady, who hadn’t expected this as part of the ‘for richer for poorer’ deal, finally cracked, letting out a small scream. We all sat there, interested. Gibson, unable to resist a joke, said, ‘Well, I guess you had to be there.’ Which was met with chuckles or glares.”
It was indeed a night to remember.
The magical thing about Red Blood was that in the course of writing it, Bob discovered that he had a Native great, great grandmother, making him one thirty-second Native, and making him very happy. Meanwhile, in addition to the string of books he was producing (by the end of his life he had written or co-written thirteen) he had two great gigs at CityTV in Toronto. Every morning, before breakfast, a cameraman would show up at the Hunter house, and Bob, in his bathrobe, would chuckle his way through the morning papers, giving the story behind this headline, and the reason why this paper is playing up this story, and ignoring that one. Great, cynical, informative stuff. Oh, yes, he was also contributing a column to Eye Weekly, writing the odd documentary, and making a couple of movies, too (in the dim past he wrote ten scripts for The Beachcombers, with Bruno Gerussi slapping his forehead). That is besides slipping off occasionally to risk his life with Paul Watson on the high seas. I remember him laughing when he told me about a Japanese whaler throwing a knife at him. I protested that knives were sharp, pointy things, but Bob enjoyed the high-seas action too much to care.
For some reason, Hollywood never quite took the plunge with a movie about him, though they came close. Over the years names like Kevin Costner were floated (“Hey! Dances with Whales! I like that!”) and Bob was taken to Hollywood and chauffeured around at great expense more than once. He told me of a Major Breakfast Meeting, held at The Right Hotel, with A Very Big Player. At the end, the Very Big Player leaned across the table and gripped Bob. Looking him in the eye, he said that he was going to make this movie, “Not just because it’ll be a great movie, but because, Bob, I really, really like ya!”
Bob felt obliged to do a little modest Canadian gripping in return, and came home elated. (He never heard from the guy again.)
By day, in those later years he was the CityTV environmental reporter, attending press conferences, investigating sewer spills, and so on. He was so good at it that the ruling Liberal Party tried to get him elected as an MPP, but the Gods of Irony would not allow it.
In 2002 he brought out perhaps his most serious book (if you can ever use that word about Bob Hunter without qualification): 2030: Confronting Thermageddon in Our Lifetime, which suggested that we only have till that pivotal year to clean up our global act, before the damage becomes irreversible. He wrote, in what was almost his last testament, in the book’s prologue: “Those of us living now in the industrialized countries should be thankful that the barrier of time appears to be firmly locked, because if they could ever break through, the people of the future — starting with Dexter’s [his grandson] people — will surely come back to strangle us, the ancestors from hell, in our sleep, for having
squandered the Earth’s legacy in a handful of generations.”
The book is part of an impressive legacy. I’m proud that in his presentation copy for me Bob wrote:
Doug, I phoned you twice to say, “I can’t do this.” But I was afraid of your . . . silence.
Cheers,
Bob Hunter
Prostate cancer took Bob in 2005, after he had tried everything to preserve the life he loved. A park just east of Toronto is named after him, and he lives on in his wife and kids, in his books, in Greenpeace, and in many memories.
A final, personal note. Gail Stewart was my faithful assistant for eleven years, before cancer took her. She had such a protective attitude towards my excesses that, just as she was about to leave, she reacted with horror to the news that another wise, restraining assistant on our staff was also about to leave: “Oh, Doug!” she cried, “Who’s going to stop you?” Gail knew instinctively that Bob Hunter was precisely the wrong man when it came to influencing me, that we egged each other on. Every time we left the office together, her face told me that she worried that after our lunch we would both end up in jail.
I remember Bob and I were laughing ourselves silly over something (possibly the fact that I had created a sly new publishing joke, by indicating in the caption to the cover photo of Red Blood that the hideous “Wild Man of the Woods” mask face was on the left, and the Hunter face on the right) at a restaurant, when the waitress asked, “Are you guys brothers?”
A wonderful compliment, all things considered.
Alistair MacLeod’s people left the Scottish island of Eigg in 1790 to come to Nova Scotia. Proud memories are long in the Western Isles. When he won the international IMPAC prize for No Great Mischief in 2000 a local paper ran the headline . . . “Eigg Man Wins Prize.”
Yet that appropriation is almost appropriate. In the words of the authority on Scottish emigration, James Hunter, to read Alistair MacLeod’s fiction “is to be constantly aware of the extent to which his literary world is one that draws no sharp distinction between the Scottish and North American components of the Highland experience. The one — for Alistair MacLeod at least, is simply an extension of the other — the act of emigration denoting no sharp break with what had gone before.”
Alistair was not born in Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton, although his summer home was built there by his great-grandfather, born in 1838. Alistair’s own father was a miner, and his trade took him out west, to Alberta and to Saskatchewan, where Alistair was born. But the family home was and remains in Cape Breton, on the west coast, at Dunvegan near Inverness. In the context of James Hunter’s account in A Dance Called America of callous captains of emigrant ships simply setting shivering families ashore, it’s interesting to note that the old French name for the Inverness coast was “Taille de Corps,” which might be translated as “The Wade-Ashore Coast.”
Alistair went to school in Cape Breton, and finding that, in his words, he was “good at school” he kept going, first to teacher’s college, then to a year’s teaching in a little country school, then to attend St. Francis Xavier University. He supported his education there and at the University of New Brunswick and while getting his doctorate at Notre Dame, with the hard, dangerous jobs — fishing, logging, and mining — that he portrays with such knowledge and sympathy in his books (along with the dogs and horses that he describes so well).
In his authoritative survey, Scotland’s Books, the noted St. Andrews University scholar Robert Crawford calls No Great Mischief a “great Scots-Canadian novel” (a very interesting term) “by a writer nurtured by the Gaelic-speaking community of Cape Breton.” That puts it very well, since knowledge of the old language varied even among brothers, and Alistair himself knows far less than his Cape Breton wife, born Anita MacLellan, who is fluent in the ancient tongue.
After their marriage in 1971 they had six children, whom they raised in Ontario during the school year. Following a brief teaching spell in Indiana, Alistair has spent a lifetime as a much-loved teacher of English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, right across the river from Detroit. In summer they all return like pilgrims to their spiritual home in Cape Breton, looking west to Margaree Island.
In the midst of this busy life, he started to write short stories. He wrote very slowly, at the rate of one or two stories a year. And they were wonderful, and people — including Hugh MacLennan, I recall — noticed, and recommended them to their friends.
His very first story, “The Boat” (1968), is told by a teenage son whose mother wants him to go on fishing with his father (a singer of Gaelic songs), while the old man wants to free him for a wider choice in life, and will go to any length to provide it. The last line of that very first story is to be found in anthologies across Canada and far beyond: “There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair.”
In that first collection, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1974) all but two of the seven stories are set in Cape Breton. One of them, “The Road to Rankin’s Point,” tells us very precisely about the Scottish history of the area. The grandmother on her fiddle plays old Gaelic airs from Lochaber, and we learn of an inscription on the rafters in the barn . . . “We are the children of our own despair, of Skye and Rum and Barra and Tiree.” Near the end, when the grandmother dies, the storyteller says, “for the first time in the centuries since the Scottish emigrations there is no human life at the end of this dark road.”
That first book of short stories made Alistair MacLeod’s reputation, and soon he was earning money in the summer at the coalface of writing instruction, teaching at the Banff Centre for the Arts. That was where I met him, around 1980, when he was a much-admired teacher working alongside my old friend W.O. Mitchell. The Banff sessions were the source of many anecdotes, not least Alistair’s side-splitting account of his epic winter trip by taxi with W.O. from Calgary to Banff. (“Oh gentlemen,” wailed the lost driver, a man not raised among midnight blizzards and white-outs, “I do not believe there is a Banff!”) W.O. and Alistair were very different personalities, yet remained the best of friends, in Banff and in W.O.’s guest years at the University of Windsor, where Alistair politely listened to every word read aloud (in exultant tones, I can testify, from many phone calls with W.O.) as his colleague’s new novel emerged on paper.
Alistair wrote more privately, creating a short story at the rate of roughly one a year, which meant that it was not until 1986 that his next seven stories appeared in the collection As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. All of these stories are set in Cape Breton and deal with Highland heritage. As for the title story, Edinburgh University’s Colin Nicholson has pointed out that the story of the great grey dog — cu mor glas — that foreshadows death, was collected by ethnologist Calum Maclean from “a shepherd in the mainland district of Morar, south of Skye.” He continues: “Off the western coast of south Morar stands the island of Eigg, which Alistair MacLeod’s ancestors left for Cape Breton in the 1790s, and by beginning the title story of his second volume with the simplicity of ‘Once there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea,’ MacLeod makes regional identification at once territorially specific and mythically resonant.”
Certainly, the “mythically resonant” story collections made such an impression on the editors Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín that they stretched the rules to include them in their Modern Library book, The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. The Irish novelist Tóibín even said: “Reading these two books, knowing that I could tell other readers about them, was the high point of the Modern Library project for me.”
Given his reputation around the world as a short story writer, you can imagine the excitement that greeted the news that Alistair MacLeod was working on a novel. Slowly, of course, earning the affectionate name that I have given him, “The Stone Carver,” as he inscribes every perfect word with loving care. I was able to play a role in enc
ouraging him, because when I became the publisher at McClelland & Stewart (‘The Canadian Publishers,’ as we boasted), I was lucky enough to “inherit” my friend Alistair as an author. And my guerrilla campaign to get him to finish and deliver his manuscript led to the great Canadian literary equivalent of the urban myth of alligators in the sewers.
For ten years Alistair MacLeod and I have been living in the midst of just such a myth. As it spins more wildly out of control, we compare notes, bemused by the directions the myth takes, aware that we seem to be in the grip of something bigger than both of us. The once-simple story of how I encouraged Alistair to finish the novel that became No Great Mischief has taken the following turns. In Nova Scotia, local legend has me flying to Halifax then driving to Cape Breton (soon, presumably, it will be in a storm, with the closed Canso causeway, under water, proving no obstacle to the wild-eyed publisher), and then rushing on foot to Alistair’s writing cabin to wrest the manuscript from his grasp. Even in Ontario, the range of stories can make a reader dizzy. Sometimes the manuscript is exchanged for a bottle of whisky in Union Station. Sometimes the exciting new versions involve my driving to Windsor, dashing into the office of Professor MacLeod and grabbing a manuscript written by hand on exam paper notebooks. Best of all is the story first aired in the National Post — a story that was very popular in the halls of McClelland & Stewart — where the delivery of the manuscript’s final chapter at the M&S office causes me to burst into tears of relief.
Alistair has perfected the art of being non-committal about such stories, perhaps a legacy of his years as a Creative Writing teacher reluctant to stamp out any fictional spark. Presumably by the time this account sees the light of day the legend will have expanded in other directions, possibly involving parachutes and guns.
Stories About Storytellers Page 32