At this point, our paths crossed, since I became his publisher at M&S. But I can claim absolutely no credit for the success of his poetry collections, or for the novels that were published in my time, like The English Patient (1992) and Anil’s Ghost (2000). They, like Divisadero (2007), were all edited and well looked after by my esteemed colleague Ellen Seligman. Michael and I have always remained on good terms but have never been especially close, although I remember how he laughed at my story of the novelist who tried to sell his book to me at Hugh MacLennan’s funeral. His eye-rolling laughter seemed tinged, however, by sad familiarity with the desperation authors sometimes display encountering someone who might help them to get published, such as a publisher, or a famous novelist.
As his novels became worldwide successes, it was fun for me to be along for the ride, printing and reprinting many copies. But I admired the fact that he managed to keep Hollywood-style fame at arm’s-length, even when the film of The English Patient won the Oscar for the Best Picture. That would have tempted all too many authors into a Monte Carlo life of parties and paparazzi. Instead, Michael has stayed resolutely low-key. He devotes his time, outside writing, to supporting a few good causes, like the Griffin Prize, and to occasional books that pay tribute to favourite authors, like Mavis Gallant. For M&S he selected his favourite Gallant stories for a book called Paris Stories (2002), and said admiringly of her work: “Gallant’s subject is the comic opera of character … Before we know it she will have circled a person, captured a voice, revealed a whole manner of life in the way a character avoids an issue or discusses a dress.”
He works hard at his writing. When he was creating Divisadero, with some scenes set among professional gamblers, he consulted David Ben the magician to give him “hands-on” demonstrations of how card sharps cheat. David tells me that he found him “very respectful, and a pleasure to deal with, even when I was telling him that gamblers wouldn’t talk that way.” And admirers of his wife, Linda Spalding’s prizewinning fiction (and Michael, of course, has won every award going, including the Booker, the Giller, and several Governor General’s awards) respect both of them for managing to create fiction in the same house, at the same time.
As an Ondaatje admirer, I have a humble suggestion. I think we can get more out of his books if we learn to read him in a special way. All authors write with their eyes: we see what their characters see. Fewer authors can also write with their ears; we hear what goes on around their characters, and how they sound. Even fewer write with their nose, so that smells, good or bad, seem to arise from the book. Almost none write with their bodies, letting us sense what their characters are feeling and touching, and what, literally, they may be rubbing up against.
Michael Ondaatje, I’d suggest, is our great writer of the senses. Sports writers sometimes tell us that a player, on a given day, was “playing out of his skin.” I find that Michael, always, every day, is “writing out of his skin.”
Think about it. How often do we find the word “feel” or “feeling” in his work? How often do the bodies of his characters notice the warm stone, or touch the rough brick, or feel the rain in their hair, or wrap this piece of clothing around them? All of this — although far removed from love play, which he can describe very ably — is “sensual” writing. Sometimes the sensual writing hits our own bodies hard, as when in Coming Through Slaughter Buddy Bolden slices off a male nipple with a straight razor, and you jump as you read it. How, literally, chilling is the early scene in In the Skin of a Lion where Patrick has to work in the cold river, trying to get a rope under a drowning cow. By contrast, in Divisadero, how comforting is the feel of the father’s checkered shirt as his daughter lies against him on the couch? And in The Cat’s Table, how often does the feel of the wind, or the movement of the ship, affect the passengers’ bodies, and how they feel?
His use of smell is so strong that in The Cinnamon Peeler he has the title character become, in effect, a smell. And even contemplating the title There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do is bound to set many readers thinking of hands, and cuts, and blood, and pain. But usually his strength lies in his ability to engage all of our senses. That being so, it’s amazing that the central character in The English Patient is a man so badly burned that he is almost beyond having any sense of touch, as we understand it. But of course he remembers, with his wounded lover in the cave in the desert: “I leaned forward and put my tongue against the right blue eye, a taste of salt. Pollen. I carried that taste to her mouth.” And in Anil’s Ghost, Michael handicaps himself by introducing so many bodies that have died so horribly that the reader’s senses almost shut down. But it is always worth reading onward. Reading with our bodies.
I associate the University-and-Annex part of Toronto with Margaret Atwood. Now there’s a famous figure to consider, and reconsider. Not only has Margaret Atwood written many books, but she has also had many books written about her. There will be many more. Her roles are so wide-ranging — poet, novelist, short story writer, anthologist, opera creator, critic, economist, librettist, political organizer, nature lover, defiant computer geek, inventor, and much more — that she is almost impossible to classify. But it is fair to say that for many people, in many languages, Toronto’s (and Canada’s) most important artist is our own Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood.
Margaret Atwood (1939– )
I know her fairly well. I have never edited her, but have enjoyed publishing her. Over the years I have acquired a number of stories about her. If your distant view is of a politically correct, very clever woman with a cool, level stare that is intimidating, and with an even, deliberate speaking style that is intimidating, and with frizzy hair that becomes fashionable every ten years or so and is itself intimidating, some of these stories may surprise you.
The first story is from her youth, in what she describes as “my first moment of truly public embarrassment.” When she was growing up in Leaside (a few years before another typical Leaside kid named Stephen Harper), the woman next door, for whom she babysat, was the producer of a CBC TV show called Pet Corner. Margaret, then aged fourteen, was asked to bring along her pet, a praying mantis named Lenore, and talk about her. (I pause for a New Yorker praying mantis cartoon, wherein the female says to the male, “Before I make love to you, then kill you and eat you, can you help me with this shelf?” There will be no more praying mantis jokes, I promise.)
Margaret’s account of what happened next is to be found in That Reminds Me, a book of author horror stories:
Lenore was such a hit that Pet Corner decided to have me back. This time I was to be merely an adjunct. A woman was coming onto the show with a tame flying squirrel. I was to be the person the flying squirrel flew to, a sort of human tree.
All went as scheduled up to the time of the flight. Flying squirrels were explained, this one was produced (close shot), then raised on high, aimed and fired. But flying squirrels are nocturnal, and it was annoyed by the bright television lights. When it landed on me, it immediately went down my front.
At my school we wore uniforms: black stockings, bloomers, white blouses and a short tunic with a belt and a large square neckline. It was this neckline that the squirrel utilized; it then began scrabbling around beneath, and could be seen as a travelling bulge moving around my waistline above the belt. (Close shot.) But it was looking for something even more secluded. I thought of the bloomers, and swiftly reached down the front of my own neckline. Then I thought better of it, and began to lift the skirt. Then I thought better of that, as well. Paralysis. Nervous giggling. At last the owner of the flying squirrel fished the thing out via the back of my jumper.
After that, minor author interview problems like having a sudden nosebleed or falling off the podium (two real examples from her life) seemed like kid’s stuff to Margaret.
I admire the fact that Margaret rolls up her sleeves to get things done. When the Writers’ Union of Canada was just a gleam in a few authors’ eyes, she and Graeme G
ibson (no relation) were heavily involved in setting it up. She and Graeme were living together on a farm north of Toronto, which allowed William French, the Globe’s book man, to describe them as “co-agriculturalists” (a term that has never been employed since, to my knowledge). Here, from Val Ross’s book Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic, is the perceptive piece that Margaret wrote about approaching the magisterial figure of Robertson Davies in 1974, when he was being recognized around the world as a major literary figure:
In the early 1970s, I’m with Graeme and I’m in my early thirties. Davies is in his early sixties. We were forming the Writers’ Union of Canada, and Graeme and I went to his office at Massey. He was sitting in his Masterly chair, and he was backlit. The light was shining through his beard. And you could see the face underneath. It was a very different face from the bearded presence. The face under the beard was sensitive, vulnerable, anxious, not the magisterial presence, the magician who says “I command you” — none of that.
Graeme and I said our blah-blah-blah Writers’ Union speech, and when we’d finished, without missing a beat, Davies replied, “I’ll join.” Right away! He knew the situation of writers in Canada. He knew how we were treated.
I remember a fundraiser for writers at the St. Lawrence Centre on Front Street when Margaret and R.D. presented a surprising double act. Margaret produced an ear-splitting Annie (Get Your Gun) Oakley version of “Anything You Can Write, I Can Write Better,” with R.D. gamely playing along (“No, you can’t.” “Yes, I can.”) Film may even exist.
When I was in Orkney, north of the Scottish mainland, helping out as part of an Adventure Canada cruise that also featured Margaret, I was stopped on the street in Kirkwall by an excited stranger who blurted, “My wife thinks she has just seen Margaret Atwood!” I confirmed the sighting. The Scottish couple were thrilled. Margaret went on calmly about her business.
A few short weeks later, I was able to tell this story to a Toronto crowd that was rallying in support of Toronto’s beleaguered librarians. They were under assault from the Don’t-Waste-Taxpayers’-Money-On-Stuff-Like-Books Ford brothers (called “The Twin Ford Mayors” by Margaret), and she had sprung to the defence of our libraries, like the writer engagé she is. Her unwelcome entry into the fray had produced the belittling boast from Doug Ford that he wouldn’t recognize Margaret Atwood if he saw her on the street. My story contrasted his proud ignorance (a worrying Ford family trait) with the recognition she sparked among strangers on a street on a remote Scottish island. Intelligent strangers.
Another scene shows another Margaret. She and Graeme live in an old house in the middle of Toronto’s Annex, just north of the university and the York Club. It’s an area of winding streets, and full of the large red-brick Romanesque Victorian houses that form Toronto’s most interesting architectural heritage. Jane and I were invited there to a Boxing Day Party, and we brought along Jane’s mother, Louise, then in her late eighties. Inside, near the front door, Louise sat on a chair amid the clutter of snow boots that mark any Toronto winter party. She had never met Margaret before that afternoon, but Margaret kneeled on the floor to help her put on her indoor shoes. It was all done very naturally and easily and without a hint of intimidation, which is why I tell the story.
One last story, about Larry Gaynor, to whom Margaret’s 2013 novel, MaddAddam, is dedicated. Larry was in every sense a larger than life character, and also a friend of mine. His life intertwined with Michael Enright’s long before Michael became the voice of CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition. They were young and foolish together, and had to leave Canada after the fire-breathing trick in Guelph went wrong onstage. In England they kept a bear in their London flat, because, well, Larry was working for a circus. I won’t tell the story here because it will certainly appear in Michael’s eagerly awaited autobiography. I’ve seen enough of it to know that will be a wonderful book.
But I can tell the story that I produced at Larry’s wake, organized by his friend Michael in 2010. Larry was staying in Edinburgh with his old pals Graeme and Margaret in the flat that Graeme was given as the University’s Writer in Residence. I was also visiting Scotland’s capital city, and had been invited to join them there.
Now it’s important for you to know that Larry was a gigantic man, with a chest like a barrel and a voice to match, trained on Canadian military parade grounds. His friendship with Graeme and Margaret had seen him through many careers, which were rumoured to include a time spent as a bouncer in a Soho night club, and even a spell as a gun-runner. Certainly, over the course of his life he did time as a CBC script-writer, as a novelist whose book almost made it into print, and as a travelling circus man — “a carnie” — in both Britain and Canada. He once took my pop-eyed four-year-old daughter Katie behind the travelling carnival scenes, throwing open a tractor trailer stuffed to the roof with pink and purple plush toys, saying, “Pick any prize you want, kid.” I remember that during the carnie years the police found that one of his employees was, in Larry’s words, “selling smack out of The Birthday Game.” Larry was delighted, when he appeared in court to defend his shiftless assistant, to be able to describe him — with a straight face — as “a victim of society.”
In the Toronto media world, the stories flew about him. “Were you there when Larry broke the desk at that magazine party?”
“Did he sit on it?”
“No, he got mad, and picked it up and smashed it over his knee!”
This was the man who was staying at the flat in Edinburgh, sometimes taking Graeme and Margaret’s daughter, Jess, to her little play group, to the surprise of the other intrigued “mummies.” On the evening in question, however, Graeme and Margaret were going out for dinner, so when my brother Peter arrived to take me out to dinner, rather than leave Larry sitting there, we did the polite thing and invited him to join us. As the three of us walked towards the restaurant, I was trying to find a way to warn my brother that Larry was gelignite, likely to explode unexpectedly at any moment. But he was chatting politely as we walked along, and Peter went unwarned.
As luck would have it, Peter had booked dinner at Hendersons vegetarian restaurant, surely the most quietly respectable restaurant in the most quietly respectable city in the world, where people spoon their yoghurt with their pinkies raised. As we stood there in the entrance, waiting to be seated, Larry took in the air of whispery gentility. Without any warning, he threw his massive head back and bellowed, “I used to be only five foot tall and weighed only seven stone UNTIL I BECAME A VEGETARIAN!”
There was a stunned silence … and then people began to laugh. Peter and I reeled about, drooling and colliding with the cash desk, and the laughter grew and grew. As we were shown to our table there was no doubt where every eye, and every ear, was directed. Larry certainly gave them value for money, regaling us with circus tales that began with lines like, “Have I told you about the night the giraffe fainted?”
In Toronto, Larry fell on hard times, and eventually emphysema took hold. But he was still defiantly good, smoky company. His old friends Graeme and Margaret stood by him. Like Graeme, Margaret, although she was juggling dozens of book projects around the world that kept two full-time assistants busy, found time to visit Larry. In fact she was the last person to visit him before he died.
And then she dedicated her next book to him.
Margaret is also very generous in her treatment of other writers. The literary world is not short of malicious gossip, as we saw when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize. Because Margaret’s name had often been mentioned as a possible Nobel contender, there were some small-minded people eager to find evidence that she must resent this win by another Canadian that would, the way the world works, set back her own prospects. Anyone searching for such evidence must have been disappointed when they read the triumphant, admiring piece that Margaret wrote about her friend Alice in the Guardian.
There was no surprise there for me. Some of the best, most
perceptive things written about Alice’s work have come from other writers — and the introduction to Alice Munro’s Best (the 2006 selection of stories) that was written by Margaret Atwood is perhaps the best appreciation of Alice’s work that I have ever seen. And when Farley Mowat died, the most thoughtful and gracious short tribute to him that I saw came from Graeme and Margaret.
A remarkable woman, Margaret Atwood. It may take Canadians a long time to wake up to just what a remarkable person she is, internationally. Just after Alice Munro’s Nobel award, a Canadian in London was celebrating the news with friends in the British capital. She found that she had to argue hard to convince them that Margaret Atwood was also a Canadian. She was so constantly present at the centre of British culture that they had always assumed that she was one of them. A world figure, in fact.
I began this chapter in the centre of Toronto, in Queen’s Park, so it seems right to end it just north of the park, in the Gardiner Museum. In 2011, on St. Andrew’s Day, I was lucky enough to be the first speaker in a lunch series hosted by the Literary Review of Canada and the museum. While people munched their paper-bag lunch, I whizzed through the Tony Jenkins caricatures, then asked the audience for suggestions about which authors they’d like to hear about. The requests came thick and fast, and I was able to be a polar bear gutting James Houston’s husky, and so on.
At the end I signed a dozen copies or so. As I was about to leave, compliments still ringing in my ears, I was approached by an elderly member of the audience. Always eager to meet my admiring readers, I stooped graciously to accept her comments. “I notice,” she said, severely, “that you frequently use ‘who’ when it should be ‘whom.’ ‘Who’ is the subjective, and ‘whom’ the objective case.”
I thanked her, as objectively as I could.
* * *
Across Canada by Story Page 7