by Anna Porter
For the first part of the interview, Goddard drove to the Mowats’ home in Port Hope. A second interview followed in our dingy Esplanade boardroom. Farley had been reluctant to come to Toronto, but he came because he was a McClelland-trained author and I was a McClelland-trained publisher. Both of us believed that author publicity can only help sell books.
In this case, though, we were both wrong. Goddard’s second interview turned into an interrogation “during which I was accused of misrepresenting,” Farley said, what he had observed and written in the 1952 and 1963 books.
In a letter to Ken Whyte, then publisher of Saturday Night, Farley protested that People of the Deer was written “to expose the unconscionable and barbarous treatment of a group of Canada’s Inuit by the government, the missions, the RCMP, the traders . . .”
It was not and had never been intended as an anthropological text. He had always made it clear that he had altered some times, places, names, and dates in order to present a dramatic narrative.
Since I had met Ken Whyte on several previous occasions and knew Saturday Night owner Conrad Black, I phoned, wrote, and blustered to try to stop publication of the attack on Farley. I repeated what he had already written to Ken Whyte: that he had never presented himself as a traditional non-fiction writer. He had proudly declared that his talent lay “somewhere in what was then a grey void between fact and fiction.” What he was writing is the non-fiction novel,I a form that has become celebrated since as creative non-fiction. In fact, the RBC Charles Taylor Prize, named after my late friend, was founded by his artist widow, Noreen Taylor, specifically to reward “the pursuit of excellence in the field of literary non-fiction.”
We both failed. The hurtful article appeared and, to add insult to injury, that month’s magazine cover featured Farley with a long Pinocchio nose. He retreated to his summer place in Cape Breton and wrote me a letter I have pinned on my wall at our cottage. It is vintage Farley and it used to make me feel good on bad days in publishing. This is how the letter ends: “I want to thank you (emphasis on want), you mad, bloody Hungarian, for doing all the things you did in my defence. A mother puma couldn’t have done more in defence of her kitten. I’m only sorry you got shat on in the process. . . . But not to sweat: you and I can handle the stuff.”
He was right. I recovered quickly from my sense of outrage for Farley. But it took a long time for him to get over it. He was still smarting from the insult to his integrity when I next visited the Mowats at their Cape Breton home to talk books with Farley. It was a long way from Halifax to River Bourgeois. After the causeway and the spewing paper mill at Port Hawkesbury on the way to Sydney, there was still that stretch of gravel road before the barn that was no longer a barn but headquarters of the Mowat Environmental Institute. Out front there was a weather-worn mailbox, arm raised to signal uncollected mail. The lettering on the mailbox announced MOWAT.
Farley and Claire lived there for the warmer half of the year in an old, white-painted wooden house with grey peaked roof, tall bramble bushes, spruce forest, and narrow paths leading to the bay below. We picked string beans and tomatoes in their vegetable plot and walked on the rough, stony beach in the late afternoon. Chester, the small black Lab, chased seagulls, pirouetting on three legs, scratching a sore spot on his side with the fourth. “His back hurts,” Farley explained. The dog, like Farley, was listing slightly to the left. Though Farley had a long record of supporting the Left, this was not all political persuasion: he had hurt his back putting fresh paint on the house, getting it ready for the winter. Chester, so much younger, was aping in sympathy.
An osprey circled overhead; its thin, sharp cries stopped abruptly when it dove for its supper. Farther out a few seals popped their heads above water to peer at us. There were discarded bottles and cans amongst the stones at the edge of the sea.
“I haven’t been able to change one goddamn thing,” Farley declared. “I thought I could make a real difference, force people to see what I see. Devastation. Death. We’re dying in our own waste. Killing everything.” He stopped for a moment, watching the osprey grab a fish with its outstretched talons and struggle to lift off again. “Sea of Slaughter was too dark, maybe. Too grim. Once they put it down, people wouldn’t pick it up again.” In 1984, when it was first published, there was still a Newfoundland fishery. Cod was still king. But the age of the great whalers had already emptied the seas of most whales. The numbers were numbing. “And they are still blaming the seals,” he said, his eyes scanning the horizon for those few bobbing black heads. “The slaughter goes on.”
* * *
THE LAST TIME I saw Farley was in early 2014. It was sunny and cold in Port Hope, though not too cold for the Mowats’ daily walk along the waterfront. He said he still missed Chester, who used to prance along on these walks, but there was no sense now in buying another dog. What, he asked, would a man his age want with a young dog?
He was wearing a green vest with his Order of Canada just above his heart. He was thin but claimed to be as healthy as anyone can expect to be at ninety-two, an age he had never anticipated he would reach. He was contemptuous of his doctors’ prescriptions for operations he had invariably refused. He was grey-haired, balding, slightly stooped, but still cantankerous and still protesting the evil that people wreak. He was still mourning wolves, seals, whales, and caribou, though no longer sad for the earth. The earth would take care of itself; it was humanity, in its greed and stupidity, that was doomed. With us gone, there would be no one to tell the stories.
Earlier in April, the good ship Farley Mowat, captained by Farley’s friend Paul Watson, had sailed to the ice floes’ killing grounds with a small group of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society folk. Armed with only their cameras, they had tried to confront sealers carrying clubs and high-powered rifles.
“I couldn’t go this year,” Farley said apologetically. He was working on his thirty-ninth book. In one of his letters to Jack McClelland, Farley had promised not “to grow old gracefully. I’m going down the drain snarling all the way.” In that too he succeeded.
* * *
I. Truman Capote’s 1965 bestseller In Cold Blood was written in the same form.
The Last Berton Party
THE SUMMER OF 1995 was the last time I had a conversation with Pierre Berton on the lawn of his Kleinburg home. The occasion was the last Berton party—billed thus on the invitation. There were fewer of us than there used to be. Some of the regulars, including Pierre’s old birding friend and fellow newspaperman, Fred Bodsworth, had died.
Pierre was wearing a red apron and flipping burgers on the barbecue. He was still tall but his frame was thinner and he was bent over his cane. Even his voice had become softer, his steps less certain. But he was still eager to correct my version of the tale of Headless Valley, his first big breakthrough newspaper story. In that valley, east of the Yukon, fourteen men were said to have died in mysterious circumstances. In his series of articles, the young reporter’s—Pierre was in his mid-twenties—quest for the truth turned into an adventure up the mysterious South Nahanni River, where he finally found the source of the mystery: a lonely, desolate place that is haunted only by men’s imaginations. But the way he told the story established him as one of the best reporters the country had ever known.
I asked him whether his life would have been different had it not been for the Headless Valley story. “Why?” he asked.
“Because that story made you famous.”
Pierre gave me one of his withering looks. “I’d have found another,” he said.
Several of his seven children, most of whose first names started with a P, were in attendance, as was his wife, Janet, who had once told Barbara Frum that the family’s lives revolved entirely around Pierre. Often it seemed to me our lives at M&S had also revolved around him.
He was still lively and enthusiastic about his lifetime birds’ list, his annual trip to Point Pelee National Park in pursuit of some impossible-to-pronounce brown bird, and he was planning ano
ther book. He had already written fifty but thought he still had time to write a few more. He had won every prize that could be given to a writer, including “Man of the Century” from the Canadian Authors Association, and they were not exaggerating. Berton was, by both temperament and avocation, the man who embodied Canada’s twentieth century. That he didn’t share Bob Fulford’s view of feminism, that he seemed unaware of Canada’s Indigenous history, did not detract from his nationalism, his abiding curiosity, his passionate belief that we are a Northern people with more in common than what draws us apart. His fiftieth book, published in 2004, was Prisoners of the North. In the Preface he celebrates the fact that he was born in the Yukon. The North gave him all the inspiration he needed to become a writer. “It was my great good fortune, thanks to my father, the sourdough, and my mother, the journalist’s daughter, that I was born in what was then the most interesting community in Canada.”
Pierre Berton died on July 12, 2004. The Globe and Mail ran Sandra Martin’s long obituary above the fold with the headline, “A Voice of Canada Is Gone.” Even Farley paid him a compliment: “He was one of the real honest-to-God giants of the writing, not literary, scene.” All the other dailies celebrated his life on their front pages.
Elsa Franklin produced her last Berton show in the CBC’s Barbara Frum Atrium. Everybody who was anybody in the media, in publishing, in television, in political life was there, and many of them gave tearful eulogies. The only person missing was Barbara Frum herself. She had lost her battle with leukemia in 1992. I never go to that atrium without paying my respects to her.
At the end of the Berton eulogies, Elsa took the stage to say her own farewell.
Pierre’s home in Dawson City has been turned into a haven for professional writers. Lawrence Hill was the winter 2017–18 writer-in-residence.
The Incomparable Dalton Camp
I HAD EAGERLY read his 1970 book, Gentlemen, Players & Politicians, but in those early days I was still too much a newcomer at M&S to have an editorial opinion for Dalton Camp. In any event he had shown little patience with editorial comments and even less with copy editing. He said he knew best what he wanted to say and he would be the best judge of how to say it. An intellectual, a witty and acerbic speaker, an astute political commentator on both radio and television, a columnist, a strategist, Camp was the kind of guy who could have given Pierre Trudeau a fair challenge for the leadership of the country. But given his controversial role in ending the John Diefenbaker era, he had no chance to win a seat in Parliament.
I didn’t really get to know him until about his seventy-fifth year. He was a bit lonely in Toronto over Christmas, so we asked him for dinner on Christmas Eve, the traditional time for Hungarians to celebrate Christmas. He was warm, genial, considerate of my mother, but what our daughters remember most is how Dalton lay on the living room carpet with them, playing board games in front of the fire.
In the summer we were invited to spend a few days at Linda Camp’s cottage at Robertson Point on Grand Lake, New Brunswick. It’s the biggest body of fresh water east of the Great Lakes, brown, muddy, slippery on the rocks, but there are cottages all around, many of them belonging to the Camp family. Linda and Dalton had met while they were at Acadia University, been married very young, and had five children in quick succession. They remained friends after their divorce.
When Dalton came to visit the cottage, he sat in his “usual” chair; Linda poured him his “usual” vodka, nominally a martini, just the way he liked it; and we talked late into the evening.
The next day he drove me down to Saint John to meet with the authors of our K. C. Irving book, K. C.: The Biography of K. C. Irving by Ralph Costello and Douglas How. Dalton had little regard for the Irvings. He was convinced that our book would be a whitewash, leaving no blemishes on the gigantic reputation of one of the richest men in the world, who had been involved in virtually every aspect of New Brunswick business, industry, and politics. “There would not be a mention of the Irving WhaleI in that book,” he said with confidence. And he was right.
* * *
THE LAST TIME I was with Dalton, he was eighty-one years old. I had gone to New Brunswick to talk about the book he thought he might be writing—his reflections about Canada and its political life.
He picked me up at Fredericton airport at around nine a.m. The people around the luggage carousel were all looking at him. “Hey, Dalt, how ya doing?” and “Whatdya make of those eejits in Ottawa?” The commissioner in charge of handing out parking tickets told him, “It’s a good thing you write better than you park, eh Dalton,” and gave him no ticket. We drove to the Sheraton. The doorman leaned in to shake Dalton’s hand. “We missed you last week. Hope there’s no truth to the rumour you’ve been ill.” We parked near the entrance in disabled territory. “What the hell, I am likely disabled,” Dalton said. “The air force thought I was, the buggers, that’s why they wouldn’t send me to active duty.”
In the restaurant there was a corner with a plaque that said Dalton’s Corner, and his old typewriter was on display on the shelf just above the table.
We sat and Dalton talked politics. He had been thinking about the state of the nation. There were too many “eager no-talents” seeking office, and the good people who should be serving chose to make money instead. “The world is upside down. Our system of values gone, no one wishes to give of themselves anymore unless well rewarded.”
“And how is your friend Conrad?” Dalton asked. “Does he still think he can escape being one of us?” Back then, Conrad was spending most of his time in London. He had been appointed to the House of Lords and he was still the proud owner of the Telegraph. I think Dalton admired Conrad’s independent spirit but was not sure about Conrad’s Canadian loyalties.
All the way to Jemseg he talked about the past. He drove his too-large car as if the highway belonged to him. His older brother, Dalton said, had died years ago, never making peace with him. He had been Dalton’s childhood hero, an alcoholic, living off old times, borrowing when he could. His younger brother was now in an institution. “Couldn’t leave him in the house alone while I had my heart taken out. Might have set fire to things.” Dalton had had a heart transplant.
He’d lost his best friend in the war and felt guilty about that still. I asked him why still, when most people had buried their dead long since. His friend was a pilot, shot down over the Channel, and his body was never recovered. For decades Dalton had believed that the story was not yet finished.
Why guilty? “They wouldn’t take me into the air force because of this wandering eye. I had perfect vision, really. But I couldn’t convince them. And later, when my regiment shipped out, I was on leave. With Linda. Somehow I just missed out on the war.”
The wandering eye had failed him years ago, now the other was playing old-man tricks, barely able to focus. A few weeks earlier, searching for a car repair shop, Dalton had crashed his car when he hit a hole in the narrow highway, banged his head, broke a rib, clambered out of the car, and started walking in the heat, surrounded by blackflies, barely noticing a thunderstorm. Eventually he walked into a farmhouse and he was rescued.
Though he denied it, Dalton was somewhat deaf. Signs of aging, he said, were annoying but hardly important. What he feared was losing his memories.
We looked at pictures. Young Dalton, a blond, insecure kid. His brother strutting. Maybe that’s what happened, Sandy (his name was Sanborn) took independence too far, hated their father: who wants to be a minister’s son? Dalton was a mother’s boy, still struggling to understand who his mother really was. The photographs don’t do her justice, he said. After she died, he found these sexy, passionate, romantic poems hidden in the false bottom of her box of letters. “What do you make of these? Could she have had a lover? Did she write them herself? Or were they written to her? Why keep them for more than sixty years?” Though he remembered so much about her, loved her so much, perhaps he barely knew her?
She had been good at everything, but all al
ong something had been missing from her life. Dalton thought it had been all about his dad, the preacher who travelled too much and maybe found some solace with other women, less demanding than his wife. He used to listen to their arguments when his father was home. Dalton had disliked his father. Though there was the time, in California, when young Dalton was hospitalized, and his father brought him books, encouraging him to read and find things out for himself. Every day, there would be more books and sometimes the preacher read to him, but never preached.
I held his mother’s tiny leather-bound diary in my hand for a few minutes and let it breathe. Dalton was watching to see whether I noticed it was haunted.
At sunset we sat on his wooden porch, drinking dreadful Mouton Cadet and talking about his next book.
He showed me a photograph of his second wife. He had been quite besotted with her beauty, vivacity, and youth. It had been a wonderful late-life love affair—he was fifty-two and she only twenty-six when they met—then a short-lived marriage of six good years and, he said, a tempestuous divorce. She loved company and entertaining; she had found living in the big, isolated house too lonely. Their son, Christopher, was about twenty now. So much younger than the other Camp kids.
He searched in the fridge for something to eat. When he came up with nothing, he decided we would visit Linda at Robertson’s Point. She received us graciously, eighty years old and still in love with her ex. Various children and grandchildren trooped by to see Dalton. One of them brought warm fish chowder. She knew Dalton would have forgotten to buy food. We ate in the dark as he tried to recall the words of the Browning poem “My Last Duchess.”