Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  Eventually, MacIntyre became an associate producer for the CBC television network. As a producer-journalist for CBC’s ground-breaking national current affairs program The Journal, he was assigned to documentary reporting in various parts of the world, including the Middle East, Central America, and the USSR. From 1990 to the present, he has worked as a co-host on CBC’s flagship investigative program the fifth estate.

  MacIntyre has won several Gordon Sinclair Awards for his work in journalism and broadcasting, as well as nine Gemini Awards from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. He has written and reported for numerous other award-winning projects, winning an International Emmy, a Canadian Association of Journalists Award, the Michener Award for meritorious public service in journalism, and several Anik Awards. He has also written and presented award-winning documentaries for PBS’s Frontline.

  MacIntyre holds an honorary Doctorate of Laws from University of King’s College, Halifax, and an honorary Doctorate of Letters from St. Thomas University, Fredericton.

  MacIntyre’s first novel, The Long Stretch (1999), became a national bestseller and was shortlisted for the Dartmouth Book Award and the CBA Libris Book of the Year Award. Causeway: A Passage from Innocence (2006) was shortlisted for the Dartmouth Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award. It won the Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-fiction.

  About the book

  The MacIntyre Family Photo Album

  Dan Rory MacIntyre, Linden’s father, circa 1934, shortly before leaving home to work in the mines at age 16.

  Alice Donohue MacIntyre, Linden’s mother, circa 1940.

  The MacIntyre siblings (from left: Danita, Linden, and Rosalind) with Dan Rory at the family’s home, 1953.

  Dougald and Margaret (Peigeag) MacIntyre, Linden’s grandparents, on MacIntyre’s Mountain, 1944.

  Alice, Sylvia, Ted, and Linden (age 14), ready for the prom, 1957.

  Miners in East Malartic, Quebec, in the late thirties.

  All photos courtesy of the author.

  Q & A with Linden MacIntyre

  While writing Causeway, how were you affected, if at all, by controversies about the truthfulness—or lack thereof—of the memoir genre?

  “My childhood unfolded in a kind of time warp.”

  My first discussions about possibly writing a memoir took place in 2004. I’d become aware, over the years, of the fallout from some egregious literary lies. The Hitler Diaries, the notorious forgery of Hitler’s personal papers, stands out in my mind. Writing a memoir, particularly about a distant childhood, seemed to me to be a recipe for trouble. My instinct was dramatically confirmed by the uproar that resulted from James Frey’s pseudo-memoir, A Million Little Pieces.

  For most of my adult life, I’ve been conscious of the fact that my childhood unfolded in a kind of time warp. Chronologically, I grew up in the middle part of the twentieth century, but culturally—and in many respects materially—it was a much earlier time…possibly the late nineteenth century. This interesting anomaly of time and place was full of peril. Stories and books about where I grew up are all too often marred by quaintness, stereotypes, and exaggeration.

  During a casual conversation about plans to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Canso Causeway, I felt a flash of inspiration. The causeway had been the focal point of our lives as a community during a crucial period of time. For my family, it offered a potential economic miracle. For me personally, it was an adventure that in many ways revealed a wider and more interesting world.

  I decided to try to write a memoir conceived around the building of the causeway, and almost immediately I had to confront the challenges that have led writers with far greater skills into the murky waters of untruth. The impulse to indulge in self-mythology is powerful; the creative impulse to convert memory to art is ever-present; and, of course, there is the constant pulse-beat of urgency—the need to fill a page, to satisfy an editor, to get the monkey off your back.

  “The impulse to indulge in self-mythology is powerful; the creative impulse to convert memory to art is ever-present.”

  In the end, I applied fundamental rules: details were not invented; facts were not deemed as such unless credible sources were found to buttress memory; dialogue was, of necessity, invented and therefore was limited, and the circumstances in which dialogue occurred had to be factual. I have almost total recall of certain conversations with my father because the circumstances surrounding them were invariably unusual—as in the cases that I report of our two “man-to-man” talks when we lived together in mining camps.

  I think the challenge of the memoirist was best captured by Nancy McCabe (after the Flashlight Man, 2003), who observed that, during every moment of the process, the memoirist confronts questions about ethics and the boundaries of what’s true and fictional.

  You’ve been a journalist for many years. Was that a help or a hindrance in what is, to a large extent, a creative exercise: reconstructing and reshaping distant memories?

  A background in journalism was enormously helpful. The essential skill of journalism isn’t writing. In fact, many good journalists are not good writers. A journalist’s fundamental skill is fact-finding and fact-checking. The defining quality of a good reporter is curiosity coupled with an instinct for communication. But it is the skill of tracking information sources that gives journalism its integrity. The same can be said of all non-fiction writing, but in the case of a memoir—where the subject is not a historically important individual—the challenge of finding factual support for the notoriously erratic memory can be daunting.

  “The challenge of finding factual support for the notoriously erratic memory can be daunting.”

  You’ve also written fiction. There are similar techniques in the writing of fiction and memoir. How does one employ the techniques of fiction without fictionalizing the memory?

  Writing fiction is about imagining and developing characters, inventing plot, and shaping imagined people and circumstances into a coherent narrative that will inform, entertain, and—in the best cases—inspire. The memoir shapes real experience with real people into a story that reveals something that might have been hidden or was just not obvious to most of the people who shared it. Bringing characters to life on a page, be they imaginary or real, is difficult for most people. Storytelling techniques don’t necessarily come naturally to all of us.

  I became interested in writing fiction because of a life-long fascination with the power of the imagination and the gift of using ordinary words and situations to convey extraordinary ideas. I grew up in a culture enriched by the oral traditions of storytelling and music. I think the discipline of journalism imposed some stringent controls on my writing. What might otherwise have been an exercise more in mystical creativity became one grounded in memory and research. In addition, I took the precaution of showing the unedited manuscript to relatives, including my mother.

  “People who were once intimately familiar do become strangers, and this invariably comes as a surprise.”

  People change over time. Obviously, revisiting your childhood required reconnecting with people from the past. How did this affect you and the story?

  People who were once intimately familiar do become strangers, and this invariably comes as a surprise. Somehow we expect figures from our past to be as they have always been, frozen in memory. In reality, they are not. I found one exception to this often distressing fact of life. For many years, I had presumed that Ted, the young Korean man featured in Causeway, had returned to Korea and had made a life for himself there. To my surprise, he resurfaced in the mid-eighties, and I discovered he had been living in Toronto almost since the time he left Cape Breton. I met his family—his wife and two children. We socialized a bit, then lost touch again. Twenty years passed. While preparing Causeway for publication, I looked him up again. In 2006, I found him to be—as when we had first reconnected—virtually unchanged physically or in personality; he was still the funny and curious young engineer who had ar
rived in our village half a century earlier.

  He remains a vigorous and athletic man with a bemused appreciation for a world he knows well from his extensive travels. He remembers Cape Breton fondly. He and his wife, Sara, were able to correct some potentially embarrassing errors that arose from my flawed understanding of what he had originally told me about his early life in Korea.

  Superstition plays a large role in the lives of many of your characters, some of them your close relatives. Are you superstitious? How do you regard superstition?

  “No matter how informed we become, there will always be mysteries.”

  Arrogant people tend to equate superstition with ignorance. I disagree with them. I believe superstition is a form of knowledge—a bridge between what we can know rationally and phenomena that we cannot possibly explain or even understand. Religious people call it “faith.” No matter how informed we become, there will always be mysteries. I personally witnessed at least one of my grandmother’s little “miracles.” Was it the result of some supernatural power? Coincidence? Mind over matter? I would be reluctant to discount her psychic ability—even now.

  There is a moment in Causeway when you decide, with your mother’s help, against attending high school at a monastery. Where did you go, in the end?

  The school in Port Hastings only offered up to grade ten. There was a high school a few miles away in Port Hawkesbury, but because our village was part of a rural municipality (Inverness County), I attended a consolidated school in Judique, another small community eighteen miles away. I still recall the culture shock of leaving a two-room school with maybe forty pupils for a new, much larger school teeming with about two hundred students.

  “For many of my generation, personal history is shrouded in a language that exists only in fragments.”

  At the end of Causeway you mention moving back to Cape Breton after the death of your father and reconnecting with your Gaelic roots. Why was this important to you at a time when your most direct links—grandfather, grandmother, and father—had been severed?

  The death of a parent causes, along with the predictable grief, a great deal of introspection. In the aftermath of such a loss, I think most people become acutely conscious of their own mortality and, as a consequence, curious about identity and personal history. Our existence as part of a timeless biological community is our victory over extinction. So, following personal loss, we become anxious, and we seek to experience the reassuring reality of the people who have gone before us. For many of my generation, personal history is shrouded in a language that exists only in fragments. I thought this void represented a serious problem for the future—the potential loss of a heritage that is enriched by stories of personal courage, endurance, and survival in conditions of great hardship. A grasp of personal history reassures us of our abilities to rise above adversity, including death itself. The fragility of language, and the resulting vulnerability of our self-knowledge, alarmed and depressed me—and continues to do so.

  Read on

  Telling Stories by Linden MacIntyre

  From my narrow perspective when I was growing up during the fifties, there were only two people born in 1943. I was one of them. The other was Ian MacKinnon, who lived just over the hill. My relationship with Ian was often testy. Consequently, I often considered myself the only person born in 1943.

  My understanding of this demographic anomaly was rooted in the precocious knowledge that it somehow took a man to activate the reproductive power of a woman and that in 1943 most men were too busy with other things to see to that task. They were in a horrific war fighting for our survival or otherwise “away” earning a livelihood.

  “In childhood, significant age differences are measured in the span of a year or less.”

  I owed my unique existence to the fact that my father spent the war working in a mine which produced a mineral called fluorspar. This mineral was used to manufacture aluminum for fighter aircraft, bombers, and other necessities of war. My parents were thus able to live together, as did Elsie and Alex MacKinnon—Ian’s parents. All the other married young men, I eventually concluded, had been away in 1943, working, killing, or being killed.

  In childhood, significant age differences are measured in the span of a year or less. During the fifties, everyone except Ian MacKinnon was either significantly younger or older than I was. This created, along with a sense of privilege and destiny, a peculiar feeling of alienation, and, from time to time, even loneliness. It was perhaps a condition of my isolation that for a long time not much happened where I was living—a small Cape Breton village, population approximately a hundred infants and ancients, plus Ian and me.

  “Out of some deep human instinct, the elements of story surface naturally and give experience a shape and purpose.”

  The normal response to absences—of people and/or external stimulation—is to turn inward. We instinctively compensate for deficiencies in the real world by imagining a richer and more interesting one. In addition, the senses become alert for evidence in older people of past or hidden lives that were enriched by romance, adventure, conflict. Stories become substitutes for reality—in my case, a reality that was untroubled, predictable, and frequently boring.

  Out of some deep human instinct, the elements of story surface naturally and give experience a shape and purpose. In the beginning, stories become play and games become stories. The activities of childhood are organized as narratives. In playing house or playing war, roles are assigned, informal scripts articulated. Later, we discover ready-made narratives around us. Later still, we discover larger, distant cultures, but the response is the same: impressions and insights organize themselves as stories. Today, there is a vast industry for the production of amusement. But the elements are still essentially the same: love, hate, greed, virtue, and conflict conflate into narrative.

  Stories arise from a universal impulse to escape the limits of time and space imposed by our common mortality. Life is transient, but a good story can assure a special moment in a finite life, a measure of permanence.

  My earliest memories are of my mother recounting classic stories from memory; of old people chilling a kitchen with earnestly told tales of dire events foreseen by special people, or of the restless spirits of the not-so-dead; of shaping anecdotes from a chaotic world. In a good story, even the most ordinary occurrences become hilarious or terrifying or instructive. Thus, I came to an early understanding that there are few things more valuable than a good story and few gifts greater than the talent to tell one well.

  “There are few things more valuable than a good story.”

  An excerpt from Linden M acIntyre’s The Long Stretch

  SEXTUS WAS standing just in front of the liquor store, a bag of booze under his arm, squinting. I was coming from the drug store, keeping close to the brick because there was a wicked rain dashing against the pavement. A typical Saturday. November 19, 1983. I remember the date because it’s close to an anniversary I don’t often forget…though I wish I could.

  “I felt a great knotted ball of fear and anger and excitement.”

  Until that moment, my plan had been simple and not unusual for a Saturday: buy a flask, call Millie, drop by for supper, watch the hockey game, maybe go home, maybe stay. Depending on her cheer.

  Well, I said to myself. There’s a bunch of options all shot to hell.

  The style of him caught my attention first. The overcoat was practically dragging on the ground. Flapping open. Belt tied casually behind. First I thought: a politician. Then I saw that familiar, unmistakable profile. Jesus. Look at him. I felt a great knotted ball of fear and anger and excitement.

  There was nothing stopping me from turning on my heels right then and there. Pretending I never saw him. Just carry on the way I have for thirteen years, recovering from the last time. But I was in the grip of something stronger. Curiosity. And, yes, pride. I wanted him to see that I haven’t just survived these thirteen years. I have grown.

  He plucked his little rea
ding glasses from his face, flipped the overcoat open, and plunged them into the breast pocket of a fancy camelhair jacket. As he turned to walk away he spotted me.

  “Johnny,” he said, amazed.

  I looked, trying to act like I didn’t recognize him, but I could feel the flush on my cheeks.

  “Sextus is my cousin. First cousin. Around here that’s about as close as a brother.”

  He, of course, pretended not to see my reaction. There are people like that, who know how to project whatever they want, no matter what they feel. I just go blank, which is useful in my work. I work with people. Or personnel, as they’re called now.