And Mel? After a lively career in bookselling, and an even livelier one in publishing, he became an author. (I am skipping lightly over his other career as a politician.) His autobiography, At Twilight in the Country (1996) was a great commercial success and revealed some of the confidence that had marked his career. His other political books all demonstrate his alert, concerned patriotism. We need more Mel Hurtigs — even if no one would call him understated — standing on guard for all of us.
At M&S we published a number of his books, and when I took on the role of editing The Truth About Canada in 2008, his former editor, Jonathan Webb, warned me what to expect. According to Jonathan — a superb editor — Mel’s general enthusiasm, even reverently expressed admiration, for the vitally useful work of editors, tended to stop abruptly at any actual concrete examples of proposed editorial changes to his own pristine work. I found this to be largely true. . . .
I should explain that I have known Mel for over forty years, having visited him in the room overlooking the first Edmonton bookstore. As a visitor to his magnificent apartment above the Saskatchewan River valley, I have sat on a couch, very still, while his two great German shepherds, Jasper and Oliver, crouched nearby, looking tense and hungry. Mel, dashing in and out of the room, proudly assured me that they were both very intelligent, and that Oliver, indeed, understood a vocabulary of over 500 words. I tried to find this reassuring as I carefully crossed my legs.
Domestic upheaval led Mel to leave Edmonton (where he was a fixture, and a well-deserved member of the city’s Cultural Hall of Fame) and move to Vancouver, where he continues to scan the papers and maintain his contacts in the political world, seeking (and finding) evidence of the corporate sellout of Canadian independence. As he promoted his 2008 book I was sorry to see that, at seventy-six, he had lost some of his vitality and found a nap in my car a necessary prelude to a talk in Burlington. But he is still unsinkable. Some weeks later, reporting on a brilliant success with a speech elsewhere, he challenged me to guess what mark out of ten that superb speech had deserved.
“A ten?” I ventured, knowing my man.
“No. A twelve!” crowed Mel.
Incorrigible.
Morningside changed Peter Gzowski’s life. And it changed the lives of Canada’s writers and their publishers. Because Peter the writer never forgot how hard it was to fill a blank sheet of paper, or a screen, with well-ordered words. As a result he respected the work of other writers, and delighted in celebrating their talents. What he achieved with his one radio program for the authors — and the booksellers and readers — of Canada is almost beyond belief. Long before there was an Oprah there was Peter Gzowski. And long before there was an “Oprah effect,” there was “the Morningside effect,” introduced by words that can still make millions sit up and start to hum. “Good morning, I’m Peter Gzowski, and this is Morningside.”
“Immeasurable” was the word Jane Urquhart used at the tribute in Convocation Hall to describe the debt that she and the other Canadian writers owed to Peter Gzowski. It may be hard for anyone who was not an adult in Canada in those days to understand just how important that program was to the creation of an audience for our own books and writers. Peter and his brilliant staff actively sought out young and unknown writers — even a young poet named Jane Urquhart — and gave them a public forum. If the interview took flight (as with writers of all sorts they often did), then the phones would start ringing in bookstores across the country. The impact on a book’s sales was so immediate and so strong that before the end of the eighties booksellers were pleading with publishers to tell them when an author was going to be on Morningside, so that they could order extra copies accordingly. And people in publishing will remember that in the peak years of the program a confirmed interview with Peter Gzowski — or in the case of Alice Munro, a series of interviews — was enough to send publicists whooping down the halls.
Alice Munro has for many years been famously reluctant to undertake publicity tours, and in a position to tell her publisher to abandon any hopes in that direction. But even she was willing to make an exception for Peter Gzowski, and she has given a lovely author’s account of an interview with him:
Having Peter interview you was a lot like learning to swim. He held you up for as long as you needed it, so easily and gracefully and unobtrusively that it almost seemed as if he was learning to swim, too. Then, at some moment, he let you go, let you take your own direction, trusted you to do it right. I think his listeners felt that he trusted them, too. He trusted them to take an adult interest in their country, to wish to be informed and entertained without condescension. And their response showed how their lives were opened and their days warmed by such easy courtesy, such comfortable respect.
I should say, too, that he was a wonderful help to writers. Nobody was ever more effective in getting news of our books out to the people who might like to read them. So I’d say he was a help to readers as well. He was a help to all of us, for a long time.
I first met Peter when he was an aging “boy wonder” in the 1960s, and he struck me then as someone who was working hard at being unimpressed by those around him. But we were moving in the same world and we stayed vaguely in touch. In 1978, during his time as a daily columnist for the Toronto Star, for example, he called me up and asked if he could spend an evening canvassing with me for the local municipal elections. Sure enough, we roamed around door-to-door one autumn night, with Peter standing politely in the background while I encouraged the household to vote for my friend William Kilbourn, and put in a good word for the outsider who was running for mayor, John Sewell.
Peter got his story of a typical canvasser at work, and my involvement in the Sewell Campaign reached the unexpected point that on the day before the vote I found myself addressing the final campaign rally in the St. Lawrence Market North Hall with the words: “And now, the man we’ve all been waiting for — our candidate, and the next Mayor of the City of Toronto . . . John Sewell!” To everyone’s surprise it proved to be true. The outsider made it, and did well at City Hall. Peter did not cover my amazingly successful speech, which clearly turned the tide in John’s favour.
Once, during his time with Jan, the Gibson family was invited for a visit to the place at Rockwood, near Guelph. We must have arrived early, for Jan was not around, and our calls of “Anyone at home?” produced no results. Wandering in, we found Peter asleep with his bare feet up in the main room, snoring loudly. What to do?
We tiptoed back out and restaged our arrival in the car, slamming the car doors and shouting cheery comments before banging on the door. It worked. But he really was like a bear with a sore head waking up, and it took a while for him to become a gracious host. And he really did snore to beat the band. He could have snored for Canada.
Peter and I were what you might call working friends. Although I once stayed with him and the admirable Gill Howard (his final life partner, in sickness and in health) at the lovely Sutton house where the backyard merged with a fairway of the Briars golf course (the course his grandfather had played), it was to spend time planning a book. Later, I visited that house on other occasions, around the time of his Red Barn Theatre event and the next day’s golfing to raise funds for literacy; they were both events that he loved, surrounded by friends.
Here I must make a confession: although I grew up in an athletic household in Scotland (and my father was the captain of the local golf club, Barassie, on the Ayrshire coast), I became the Most Erratic Golfer in the World. I am the only golfer you will ever meet who lost a ball approaching the eighteenth green at St. Andrews. That sacred green, of course, is backed by roads, and buildings, including the big sandstone one that was my residence during my first year at university, and on the right the approach is guarded by parked cars, crowds of pedestrians, shops, and houses. And that was where I sliced my approach shot. Hard. For about ten seconds there was a series of clangs and thuds and jangles, and when I searched
for it — afraid of lynching — the ball had simply disappeared. It seemed prudent to abandon the hole. . . .
On occasion, my game achieved respectability. At the Peter Gzowski Invitational Golf Tournament for Literacy (still going strong every summer, having raised over $12 million) at the Briars my game was predictably erratic. There was, however, a short hole where one of the sponsors had donated a new car that would go to anyone who hit a hole in one there, under the eye of a careful watcher. Miraculously, that was the moment my swing came good. As the ball sailed towards the pin, then rolled across the green straight towards the hole I had time to ponder — take the prize, or make the Grand Gesture by transforming it into cash that you donate to the Literacy Fund? But the ball stopped five feet from the hole — a long five feet — and my anguished decision was averted. I still don’t know.
In his biography, one of Fleming’s two most contentious points concerns golf. He claims that Peter “cheated” at golf (smile when you say that, pardner). Peter, famously, hated to lose at any game, from Monopoly to snooker to bridge, and would go to great lengths to avoid it. But Fleming’s golf accusation is not proved in his book. Peter was guilty of bad manners on the occasion in question, and of pushing the envelope, certainly, but not of cheating.
His other very contentious point concerns Peter’s supposed ambivalence about homosexuality. Fleming quotes many references to male athletes in his writing, and notes Peter’s discomfort with homosexuality, even (unfairly, I think) noting that Peter’s name was not among the signers of a pro-gay petition. Fleming may be onto something when he notes Peter’s discomfort with the subject of homosexuality, but I think that he underestimates the degree of ignorance of “the love that dared not speak its name” that prevailed in most circles that Peter inhabited in those benighted days.
A story will help to make my point. Around 1970 two of Peter’s former colleagues at Maclean’s, Doug Marshall and Allan Edmonds, were looking for an office for the new magazine, Books in Canada, that Doug was co-founding with Val Clery and Jack Jensen. I know this story because (now it can be told!) I was involved as an anonymous essayist, “STET,” in the earliest issues.
On this famous occasion Doug Marshall was intent on touring the potential new office premises with the landlord. His colleague Allan Edmonds was at a loose end and asked if he could come along, just to pass the time. Marshall agreed, making it clear that Edmonds had no active role there.
After the landlord had given the tour of the office (around Yonge and Charles Street, as I recall) Marshall agreed to think about the deal, and they parted. Then Marshall shrewdly decided to check on the landlord, the heating, the services, and so on, with another tenant in the building, any random tenant. He and Edmonds found themselves outside the office of the leading homosexual advocacy group in the city, the Toronto Homophile Society. They knocked on the door, and a nice man who introduced himself as George Hislop received them politely.
As Marshall asked him factual questions about the heating and the janitors, Edmonds began to act very strangely, pacing around and snorting. Finally, to Marshall’s amazement he burst out, “God, I feel so sorry for you people.” This was greeted by stunned silence. But the good-hearted Edmonds was just warming up.
“You must feel so different about your bodies. You must feel so vulnerable.”
Marshall was gasping in disbelief. It was getting worse and worse, and Hislop was clearly not impressed.
“And of course,” Edmonds blundered on, “so many prominent people in history have been — well, like you, have suffered your disease in secret.”
Now Marshall was on the point of manhandling Edmonds out the door, when he went on: “Yes, people like Queen Victoria, and of course the Russian Royal Family.”
The penny dropped as these prominent hemophiliacs were mentioned, and Hislop and Marshall went from outrage to helpless laughter. But Edmonds, an experienced journalist at Maclean’s, had just given an important lesson on just how widespread ignorance of homosexuality and the gay world was in Peter Gzowski’s early days.
Since these distant days I have edited books of his such as his autobiography, The Private Voice (1988), and am proud that his last book, A Peter Gzowski Reader, also bears the Douglas Gibson Books logo. This is because after many years as a McClelland & Stewart author Peter told me that he’d like to work with me in my editorial imprint. “Ah well,” I said, “that really is only open to authors coming from outside M&S. I can’t just take over the best authors for myself.” He was unimpressed. “What if I stamp my pretty little foot and say that’s the way it’s going to be?” He won, of course; the stamp of approval, you might say.
I may have counted him as a friend, but Peter was never easy to work with, if “easy” means automatic agreement with the publisher’s plans. We sparred over contracts, where I was shocked to discover that he liked to get his own way, and he was a perfectionist over the book’s contents. He was, in other words, a pro, and I enjoyed working with him over the years. I was distressed almost beyond speech when I first visited him at the Toronto waterfront apartment he shared with the faithful Gill, and found him with his walker and oxygen tank. Some of my McClelland & Stewart colleagues who had the misfortune to be taking a relaxing cigarette break outside the building that afternoon still recall, no doubt, my explosive return by taxi from seeing Peter laid low by nicotine.
I was less outspoken when on my first phone call after a major operation, I heard him pause and make a tiny sucking noise. “Peter,” I said, aghast, “that wasn’t what it sounded like? You’re not smoking again?” There was nothing to say. His last piece of writing, for the anthology Addiction, was entitled “How to Stop Smoking in 50 Years or Less.” It was very sad.
My own interviews as a guest on Morningside were uniformly sad, dealing with the recent death of authors like Hugh MacLennan or Robertson Davies. (My Vancouver friend Alan Twigg once saw me on TV, and said, “Oh dear, Doug’s on the news again — I wonder who has died now.”) But I was glad to go through the experience of a Peter Gzowski interview that so many others have described: little eye contact, not much attempt at personal charm, all of the energy going into the questions. He was a keen-eared interviewer, but never a keen-eyed one. At the private funeral at Frontier College, a relative spoke of a moment by the hospital bed near the end when he was drifting in and out of consciousness, and his eyeglasses were put in place. They looked wrong, somehow, and one family member suggested that everyone should fix that by smearing the lenses with their thumbs.
R.B. Fleming’s biography shows clearly that Peter was not a saint. Fleming quotes many former friends who talk convincingly about what a fierce competitor he was, and how he could be “brutal” in verbal judgements, and sulk when he lost at games of volleyball (for God’s sake) at his Toronto Island summer cottage. In the fundraising book Remembering Peter Gzowski that I published in 2002 after his death, his Morningside assistant for many years, Shelley Ambrose, affectionately tells of how he tried to dissuade her from taking the job “explaining that he was a difficult person to work with — a perfectionist, a workaholic, a grump — and advised me that I really didn’t want this job.” Although she took it, and thrived, I have the sense that he was giving her fair warning.
Fleming’s book indicates that life at Morningside was not always sweetness and light. What, a five-days-a-week three-hour program staffed by bright, competitive people occasionally showing strain? Hard to believe. But I know from my own special friends like Gloria Bishop, Hal Wake, Shelagh Rogers, and Shelley Ambrose — and the many other staffers who contributed so eloquently to the posthumous tribute book — that Peter was for them the life and soul of their program. Hal Wake, in a private letter to Peter in 1997, summed it up. “Everything I know and understand about radio,” he began, “I learned from Morningside.”
Fleming also established beyond doubt that Peter’s relations with women were far from perfect. There were, of course
, his long, intimate relations with his “three J’s”: with Jennie, his wife; with Jan Walter; and finally with faithful Gill Howard, his life partner for his last twenty years. Of all people, Mavis Gallant was involved in this final switch in his intimate life. As writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto in 1983–84 she was glad to be asked with her friend Kathleen Davis, wife of Premier Bill Davis, to come with Peter to see the Woodbine Racetrack outside Toronto. (Peter knew of Mavis’s enthusiasm for horse racing and light betting on the races.) In Fleming’s words, “Gallant noticed that Peter paid a lot of attention to a young woman whom he asked to give Gallant and Davis a tour of the facilities. Gallant wondered about the young woman’s identity. ‘Oh,’ explained Davis, ‘that’s Gzowski’s new girlfriend.’” The young woman, of course, was Gill Howard, who handled publicity for the Jockey Club. They had first met when Peter was writing An Unbroken Line, his book about horse racing.
Fleming’s book tells an amusing story where simply being under Mavis Gallant’s eye unnerved Peter. In 1997, he and Bonnie Burnard joined Mavis in Paris to make their decisions as the Giller Prize jury. Mavis has (as I know) a cool, appraising eye. Suddenly, when the three judges were chatting over coffee, Peter burst out, “Oh, stop being Mavis Gallant.” She was shocked, and was never clear what he meant. I think that we can assume that Peter, torn between being a public figure who wanted privacy, and a private person who enjoyed publicity, was afraid of Mavis’s watchful study, and its potential appearance in a story some day.
He had reasons to be nervous. Hidden in his past — successfully, until Fleming the dogged researcher dug it up — was the story of his affair with his former Maclean’s colleague Cathy Perkins of Kingston, who in February 1961 gave birth to Peter’s son Robert Lawrence Perkins. Peter maintained secret contact with her, and with young Rob (“‘You’re my father!’ exclaimed Rob”), but he never met Rob’s daughter, Caitlan.
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