by Doug Munro
I
... before they go about collecting evidence, historians must have
a reason for looking, a question in mind, and that question will
determine what evidence is found, and how it is interpreted.
— Peter Lamont
Wanting to interview someone about the use and abuse of history by
governments, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation turned to Ramsay
Cook, professor emeritus at York University.1 The conversation centred
on the problems that arise when a government advances a version of the
past as the past. At one point, Cook cited René Magritte’s famous 1929
painting, The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), to comment on
just what a complicated business writing history is. In the same way that
Magritte’s painting of a pipe is not a pipe, he said, ‘History as it is written
is not the past; it is a representation of the past’.2 Listening to Cook’s
defence of historical complexity, I realised that his biography would make
the perfect third volume to my study of the historical profession in English
1 For a brief summary of Cook’s career, see Michael Behiels and Marcel Martel, ‘Introduction’, in Behiels and Martel, eds, Nation, Ideas, Identities: Essays in Honour of Ramsay Cook (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2 Ramsay Cook, CBC Radio, The Sunday Edition, 16 June 2013.
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Canada. Genuinely surprised, Cook wondered if I would not be wiser and
saner after completing a biography of Donald Creighton – a notoriously
difficult man and, curiously enough, his doctoral supervisor – to turn
my attention to something more distant and less controversial, ‘like early
Inuit settlements in Greenland’.3 Still, he would think about it. Eight
days later he agreed, on two conditions. First, I was to treat this project
as I would any project, as an independent piece of research and writing.
Second, I was to read The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: The Biography
of a Legend by Peter Lamont.
Of course, I was pleased, but what did a history of a magic trick have
to do with anything? The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick is about many
things – the rope trick itself, the West’s fascination with the ‘mysterious’
East and, as its subtitle suggests, the problem of biography.4 Obscured
by imperfect memories, competing accounts, contested facts, archival
silences, stretches, compressions, elisions and omissions, to say nothing of
the biographer’s own reasons for undertaking the project in the first place,
biography is not the person in the same way that history is not the past.
Like Magritte’s pipe, it is a representation of the person. Hermione Lee
called it ‘an artificial construct’ while Mark Twain likened the challenge
of writing a biography to that of reconstructing a dinosaur from ‘nine
bones and 600 barrels of plaster’.5 In telling me to read The Rise of the
Indian Rope Trick, Cook was sending me a message: Wright, the best you
will ever do is a representation of me so read widely, be thorough in your
research, ask tough questions, check your own reasons at the door and
take nothing for granted. In other words, do your homework. This essay,
therefore, constitutes my first real homework assignment: a biographical
reconnaissance of Ramsay Cook’s childhood, adolescence and early 20s.
A reconnaissance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a survey,
inspection, etc., carried out in order to gain information of some kind’.6
To this end, I intend to map the main features, key influences and
recurring themes in Cook’s life as a child and adolescent growing up in
Canada’s prairie west and later as a graduate student at Queen’s. If I am
3 Ramsay Cook, email to author, 19 June 2013.
4 Peter Lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: The Biography of a Legend (London: Little, Brown, 2004).
5 Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
122, doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199533541.001.0001; Mark Twain, ‘Is Shakespeare Dead?’
in Charles Neider, ed., The Complete Essays of Mark Twain (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 422.
6 ‘reconnaissance, n. ’, The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
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6 . CECI N’EST PAS RAMSAY CooK
right, the key to understanding the most important historian and public
intellectual of his generation, a man who consistently articulated an open,
decent and tolerant Canada, is to be found there.7 But my use of the word
reconnaissance is also historiographical. According to Ian McKay, a strategy
of reconnaissance obviates the need for synthesis and comprehensiveness
at the same time as it accepts ‘the contingency, difficulty, and political
riskiness of any and all attempts to generalize beyond the particular – and
the inescapable necessity of doing so’. Explicitly political, McKay’s strategy
of reconnaissance is also linked to what he calls ‘a multi-generational
and protracted struggle for equality and justice’.8 By locating paths both
taken and not taken in the past, and by identifying men and women
who reasoned and lived otherwise, who found ways to oppose prevailing
capitalist certainties and bourgeois orthodoxies, or liberal rule, McKay
aims to contribute to the historical struggle to imagine and achieve
a more equitable and democratic present. McKay’s own reconnaissance
has focused on those rebels, reds and radicals who challenged Canada as
a project of liberal rule. My reconnaissance has a different focus because
Cook was neither a rebel nor a radical. He was a liberal who did not have
much to say about property and its unequal distribution.
But he had a lot to say about minority rights and equality. And as
Elsbeth Heaman reminds us, the struggle for minority rights and equality
is historical and ongoing, not over and done with.9 A biographical
reconnaissance of Ramsay Cook, therefore, is the necessary first step in
understanding where his ethical voice came from. It was that voice that
enabled him as a historian to put social, ethnic and linguistic complexity
at the heart of his interpretive understanding of Canada’s past and present.
Cook’s intellectual journey, like that of every historian, began early in life.
7 What do I mean by public intellectual? As Doug Munro writes, ‘the term evades ready definition because the range of individuals to whom it is applied is so amorphous, the issues they confront so varied, the methods they employ so contrasting, and the circumstances and contexts within which they function can be so different’. Ramsay Cook was not a ‘cultural critic’ and he did not occupy the
‘corridors of power’, except briefly in 1968. But from a place of ‘civic obligation’ and ‘moral imperative’, he engaged, in print and in person, with what the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism called the ‘greatest crisis’ in Canadian history – the threat of Quebec independence. Doug Munro, J.C.
Beaglehole: Public Intellectual, Critical Conscience (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2012), 64.
8 Ian McKay, Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada, 1890–1920
(Toronto: Between the Lines, 2008), 3, 2.
9 See E.A. Heaman, ‘Rights Talk and the Liberal Order Framew
ork’, in Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds, Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
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II
This is the story of a boy and the wind.
— W.O. Mitchell
‘Canadians born on the prairies are especially fortunate in at least one
respect’, Ramsay Cook once said, because ‘their childhood has been
immortalized’ in Who Has Seen the Wind, a novel about one boy’s coming
of age in a small prairie town in the 1930s.10 The town itself has a couple
of churches, a school and a newspaper; the main street features shops
and businesses with names like Nelson’s Bakery, Harris’s Hardware and
Blaine’s Store; there is a hotel, a pool hall and a small restaurant, the
Bluebird Café, owned by a man from China named Wong. Laying
‘wide around the town’ is the Saskatchewan prairie, ‘the least common
denominator of nature’, and it, more than anything else, gives the novel
its evocative power.11 Cook’s fondness for W.O. Mitchell – he even named
his sailboat The W.O. Mitchell – comes from his memories of growing
up in small towns in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. But it is more than
simple nostalgia, because the wind in Who Has Seen The Wind is God
and God – or at least organised religion – played a central role in Cook’s
childhood and adolescence: his father, George Russell Cook, was a United
Church minister and his mother, Lillie Ellen Cook, was a United Church
minister’s wife.
When Russell Cook was 14 years old his father died, leaving him with no
inheritance and a difficult decision: he could work on the fishing docks
of Grimsby – a busy port city on the east coast of England where the
Humber estuary meets the North Sea – or he could emigrate. Having
already spent a year or two collecting and selling cod livers, he chose to
emigrate. To countless late Victorian and Edwardian British boys, the ‘very
word “Canada” seemed to epitomize adventure’. In those days, Canada
meant the North West, ‘an ill-defined and variously defined’ place of
cowboys, Indians, horse thieves and whisky traders, of forts, outposts and
shacks belonging to old trappers, of prairies, rivers, coulees (ravines) and
footpaths walked by both ‘the war-whooping scalp hunter’ and the noble
10 Ramsay Cook, ‘William Kurelek: A Prairie Boy’s Visions’, in Cook, Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 147.
11 W.O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen the Wind (Toronto: Macmillan, 1947), 3. On using literature to write history see Ramsay Cook, ‘The Uses of Literature in Cultural History’, The English Quarterly 4:3 (Fall 1971), 25–30.
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red child of the great plains.12 Seeking adventure and perhaps hoping to
escape ‘the rigidities of the English class structure’, Cook boarded the
Lake Manitoba in Liverpool in April 1913 with $25 in his pocket. He was
one of about 150,000 Britons emigrating to Canada that year ‘in search
of a better standard of living’.13
Too young to homestead, Cook worked as a farm labourer in
Saskatchewan, not far from Carlyle, a town settled primarily by British
settlers and named after Thomas Carlyle, the great nineteenth-century
historian. When the war broke out a year later, he did not enlist. He would
have been just 16 years old. But as the war dragged on, the pressure to
enlist increased. The local newspaper even suggested that candidates in
the 1917 general election who opposed conscription ‘should be put in
the front line trenches without a gun’.14 Still, Cook continued to work as
a labourer until he was conscripted under the terms of the Military Service
Act and taken on strength by the 1st Depot Battalion, Saskatchewan
Regiment, on 28 May 1918. He never made it overseas: only 24,000 men
of the nearly 400,000 men who registered for conscription ever reached
the front. Although his service record provides few clues, he may have
been exempted under the rules of what the Act called ‘Domestic Position’:
if a family member had enlisted, and ‘especially’ if that family member
had been ‘wounded or killed’, one could apply for an exemption.15 Cook’s
brother had enlisted as a private in the British Expeditionary Force, in the
10th Service Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment, or the Grimsby Chums,
and been killed at Vimy Ridge on 11 April 1917. His silver cigarette case
had stopped the first bullet, but not the second.
After being struck off strength on 13 January 1919, Cook returned to
Carlyle and to the woman he had married just six months earlier, Lillian
Ellen Young, the daughter of a local farming family. With help from his
mother in England, Russell and Lillie Cook purchased three quarters, or
480 acres, near Alameda, a town just south of Carlyle that had been settled
in the 1880s by a handful of families from England and Scotland and
by German Americans from Michigan. They also started a family: a son,
Vincent; a daughter, Luella; and, in 1931, another son, George Ramsay.
Born in the farm house of a local midwife – and, according to family
12 R.G. Moyles and Doug Owram, Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of Canada, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 40, 49.
13 Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada, 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 57.
14 ‘Additional Locals’, Alameda Dispatch, 7 December 1917.
15 Parliament of Canada, Military Service Act 1917, Section 11.
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history, during an early winter blizzard – he was named George after his
father and both of his grandfathers.16 At least initially, Russell Cook made
a go of it as a mixed farmer – principally grain and Holstein cattle – but
as the Great Depression entered its second year, as prices dropped and
markets disappeared, he fell further and further behind. Although only
a child at the time, Ramsay Cook can still picture the family farm ‘more
or less blowing away’ in 1936.17 Twenty-three years earlier, Russell Cook
had faced a similar fork in the road when his father died: he could stick it
out on a recalcitrant farm or he could take a chance.
Entering St Andrew’s College, the theological college of the United
Church of Canada on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan, he
took a chance. He was 39 years old, hardly the typical 18- or 19-year-old
first-year theology student, but a few years earlier he had become a lay
supply minister in the United Church, conducting services in churches
that were either too small or too poor to have a regular minister. He liked
the work, and when a United Church minister and administrator told him
that he would make a good minister, he thought, well, why not? Studying
theology was not easy, but St Andrew’s was a lot of fun: he curled on a
college rink, served as vice-president of the St Andrew’s Undergraduate
Association, and on at least one occasion found himself decorating the
dining hall in purple and gold, the college colours.18
In addition to his stu
dies, Cook had a mission field in Raymore and
Punnichy, which required him to lead two services every Sunday in
addition to fulfilling his pastoral care duties, visiting shut-ins, holding
the hands of the dying and comforting the bereaved. Ramsay Cook
remembers his father returning from Saskatoon on Friday night or
sometimes Saturday morning and leaving again on Monday morning,
sometimes as early as four o’clock, to catch the train back to Saskatoon.
It was exhausting, especially in the winter months when he had to walk
from Raymore to Punnichy if the roads were not ploughed.19
16 Ramsay Cook’s birth announcement states that he was born in the ‘Nursing Home of Mrs R.W.
Wood on Saturday, 28 November 1931’. Nursing homes were not licensed and midwives did not
have formal training. Still, they got the job done. See ‘Births’, Alameda Dispatch, 11 December 1931.
17 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
18 ‘Theologs Hold Banquet’, The Sheaf, 21 February 1939, University of Saskatchewan Archives (USA).
19 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
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Initially, the Raymore congregation complained about having to pay ‘a
married student preacher’ because it meant more mouths to feed. But
Cook quickly earned their trust and admiration for his efforts to turn
Raymore United into a vital social institution by improving the Sunday
school, keeping the church clean, ensuring that the bells were rung
according to a schedule, and assisting in a vegetable drive for the ‘dried-
out areas of the province’.20
A ‘deeply religious’ woman with a ‘caring, gentle soul’, Lillie Cook also won
over the congregation, readily assuming her responsibilities as a minister’s
wife.21 Her experience was not the experience of the minister’s wife on the
Depression-era prairies depicted by Sinclair Ross in his novel As for Me and
my House. Mrs Bentley is unhappy, unfulfilled and, above all else, tired –
tired of being ‘close to the financial breaking point’, tired of being ‘frumpy’
because she cannot afford a new dress, and tired of being the object of the
congregation’s gaze, especially the gaze of the Ladies’ Aid in the form of its
president and ‘first lady of the congregation’.22 For her part, Lillie served