I was the publisher of Macmillan of Canada back in 1981 when Anne and other editors there started urging me to read a new collection of short stories that had just been submitted by an unknown young writer from Saskatchewan. I was very busy with grand publishing issues, and it was only when I caught the flu and had to stay home in bed that I had time to read this unknown’s manuscript.
The accompanying letter was not promising. In my memory it was addressed to “Dear Sirs,” ran only to a couple of paragraphs, and shyly mentioned that some of the stories enclosed “for your consideration” had appeared in this or that literary magazine. So when I tell you that I started to read feverishly, I’m using a medical term, and not referring to any level of excitement.
Yet within a few pages I knew this was something exceptional. Very soon I knew that my colleagues had been right to pester me to read this. By the time of my second hot drink I knew that we had to rush to publish Man Descending, and that we would do very well with it.
Here I must confess that at the Writers’ Union of Canada meeting in St. John’s in 2014, Guy had the perfect platform to project how terrible it was to be a lowly writer, endlessly waiting for word, while this remote figure named “Doug Gibson” lay around (presumably languidly eating grapes, or figs, from a silver salver), taking his time to reach a decision. In his Margaret Laurence Lecture, Guy recalled with great precision that he finally gave me a deadline, which I just managed to meet. When concerned friends later asked me for my side of the story, I said that Guy’s version was too good not to be true.
Guy was only thirty-one when his first book came out, and it changed his life. He was an archivist/teacher, patching together a living with writing grants, along with his artist wife, Margaret, in Saskatoon. After the book came out, his life continued to be a patching process, but now the patches were larger, and a little more predictable. Short story writers tend not to become rich, but Guy was on his way to becoming famous. The tough, clear prairie voices (often of working-class young guys, who are rarely heard in “Literature”) rang out from every page, and readers everywhere were impressed.
Guy Vanderhaeghe (1951– )
Canadian reviewers sat up and took notice that a major new writer had just appeared on the Prairies. The Montreal Gazette said: “If his ability to create rich human beings is impressive, even more stunning is his narrative ability.” Books in Canada said: “These are stories to be read and remembered.” Maclean’s summed up the general excitement about this new kid: “Man Descending, with its felicities of language and characterization, launches a writer whose ascent is likely to be well worth tracking.” Later, as the book was published around the English-speaking world, in London the Spectator called Guy “an energetic, eloquent, bitterly indignant wit, a Canadian Gentile Philip Roth.”
Man Descending won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1982. The prize was given in Quebec City that year, and much later — in March 2013 — Guy and I happened to be there together at the fine local literary festival. We were able to compare happy memories of how he and his wife, Margaret, and I (along with the Non-Fiction Prize winner, Christopher Moore and his wife, Louise) enjoyed the awards ceremony in the Laval University buildings dating from the Ancien Regime, and then they enjoyed the formal evening dinner at the Citadelle mess hall of the Royal 22nd Regiment, “the Vandoos,” surrounded by military waiters in bright red uniforms.
It was a long way from the small town of Esterhazy, in southeast Saskatchewan, where Guy grew up, the grandson of a Belgian immigrant who came to Canada in 1910. His father was a good man with horses, even competing in rodeos. His mother, by contrast, urged him to read books. Guy recalled small-town life in Esterhazy to Noah Richler in his 2007 book, This Is My Country, What’s Yours?: “Until I was six or seven years old any work that wasn’t on a farm was part-time. Then suddenly people could work twelve months of the year.” The potash mines had arrived … but of course, as Guy (a true son of Saskatchewan) gloomily notes, “potash is not a renewable resource.” But what did prove to be a renewable resource was the life Guy saw around him, so that his short stories feature visits underground, or teenage fights in pool halls.
His career continued to make steady progress. I was proud to publish My Present Age in 1984, in which Ed, the unbalanced anti-hero, wages war on a neighbour in the apartment downstairs with the help of equipment from his shot-putting days — depth-charge style. The novel also takes us on a memorable tour of the Prairie city as Ed seeks out his fleeing, pregnant wife. A second novel, Homesick (1989), travelled so well from its Prairie setting that it won the City of Toronto Book Award.
I never did see either of Guy’s plays (I Had a Job That I Liked, Once and Dancock’s Dance), but every one of his books reveals the dramatist’s mastery of dialogue, with the lines snarling or whooping off the page. You can see that in every story in his 1992 collection, Things as They Are, whether the people involved are old ranchers bucked off and dragged on the prairie, or the fierce Grandma Bradley cutting enemies down to size, or the teenage boys setting up a boxing match that is sure to end in disaster. All wonderful stuff.
Then, out of the blue, Guy changed direction completely. He turned his historian’s training to look hard at our past, and started to reclaim Canadian history for all of us. He wrote three historical novels: The Englishman’s Boy (1996, which won him a second Governor General’s Award), The Last Crossing (2002, which won many prizes), and A Good Man (2011, which deserved to). All of them were dramatic lessons that were bound to smarten up anyone who believed that Canadian history was boring, and that the Canadian West was settled in a peaceful way, without any violent incidents.
Here let me draw attention to one of Guy’s greatest skills as a writer. No other Canadian writer can match his skills when it comes to scenes of action, of violence. One example: early in The Englishman’s Boy, our skinny young hero is grabbed at the saloon bar by the bully who runs the hotel. (“Stevenson grinned in his face. ‘Hello,’ he said, and suddenly struck him a savage blow to the ear with his fist.”) The out-matched teenager manages to get his knife from his boot and sticks it in the bully’s armpit. He keeps it stuck there, as the bigger man, on tip-toe, twists in spitted agony, his blood “pouring down the blade like rainwater down a drain spout.” When eventually the boy realizes it’s time to back out of the bar, there’s a special Vanderhaeghe moment:
The boy stepped over the body to where the black silk hat had rolled and trampled it savagely under his dirty boots. No one moved as this was accomplished. “None of this was my doing,” he told the room, brandishing the pistol above his head for all to see. “I’m walking now. If this bastard has any kin or friends setting here making plans — you’ve seen my gun. It’s cocked.” He took a step toward the door, then pivoted on his heel and kicked the senseless body in the head.
“Hello,” he said to it one last time.
One other example of Guy’s mastery of violent scenes. In The Last Crossing, there is a dramatic account of the best-known nineteenth-century Native battle on the Prairies, when more than a thousand Cree and Assiniboine warriors clashed with Blackfoot fighters. It ends badly for the “halfbreeds” on both sides. Jerry Potts, for instance, one of Guy’s main characters (and a notable mixed-blood figure in the old West, the scout who led the Mounties on their march west) arrives to find his Cree rivals, the yellow-haired Sutherland brothers, now at bay. “The brothers sit back to back in a puddle of blood, unable to stand. Both men’s legs are useless, broken by bullets. Their carbines are empty, but they have drawn their knives, prepared to fight to the death, to sell their lives dear. Potts swings down from his pony, hurries up to the ring circling them.” When one Sutherland brother sings his death song in Cree, the other, remembering his Hudson Bay Company father’s teaching, sings the slow Scottish psalm “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow . . .”
In person Guy is a quiet man. Noah Richler describes him well: “Vanderha
eghe, a diabetic, is a tall man of good build who had only recently decided against the punishment of playing hockey with kids twenty years his junior. He spoke quietly in that soft-spoken but resolute, mesmerizing prairie manner that dictates its own pace and attention from those who listen.”
What’s missing there is the Vanderhaeghe chuckle. All through the years I’ve known him, I’ve felt certain that within a minute of our phone call’s start, we’d both be chuckling. Maybe I started it, but it was more likely to be our joint memories of funny stories and encounters in the past. It might be the tale of Guy and his rink-rat friends featuring in a Ken Dryden hockey film for the CBC. Or about the time I was delayed en route to a Saskatoon dinner with Guy and Margaret (described in my earlier book) when a very big man who had just left a bar in a great hurry pointed at his own large feet and asked me the alarming question, “Are these women’s boots?”
All great, shoulder-shaking stuff.
And then Margaret fell gravely ill. It was a terrible, downhill progression. Guy, nursing her around the clock, became so exhausted that he too was taken to Emergency, and sheltered by friends. All of the good people around them did what they could to help, but Guy’s experience with the medical system was a series of infuriating disappointments. When Margaret died in 2012, all of his friends worried about him. No more shoulder-shaking laughter.
David Carpenter, one of those staunch friends, has reported that Guy is back to playing golf and returning to everyday life, and Guy has confessed that he is indeed mistreating golf balls again. We all wish him well. We all rejoice in the news that there is already another book, Daddy Lenin and Other Stories. And, in due course, we hope, much more of the Guy Vanderhaeghe chuckle.
A final word: it’s not widely known, but one of Guy’s greatest admirers was Mordecai Richler. The mutual admiration between the Jewish kid from St. Urbain Street and the Prairie boy from Esterhazy was perhaps unpredictable — until you realize that these were two master craftsmen who recognized rare talent when they saw it. They became friends. Indeed Charles Foran’s quotable 2010 biography, Mordecai: The Life and Times, recounts their friendship in some detail, from the time in Saskatoon when “the shy young novelist … initially balked at bringing a courtesy bottle of Scotch to Richler’s hotel room, fearing his notorious bark. David Carpenter persuaded Vanderhaeghe that Mordecai Richler had been asking to meet him.”
They became such good friends, in fact, that in September 1991 Mordecai flew out to Saskatoon to appear at a fundraiser for local writers. He was there when the biggest literary bomb to hit Canada in decades went off. The New Yorker published Mordecai’s scathing attack on Quebec’s language laws under the title “Inside/Outside” (later expanded in book form as Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!). In Foran’s words, “No single article published by any Canadian had ever achieved such instant notoriety — or impact.”
The New Yorker sold out instantly in Quebec, and the response was almost hysterically hostile, with one Quebec provincial politician wanting the author arrested for treason. Mordecai was having a Scotch at Guy and Margaret’s house when he called home to Montreal. That was when he learned about the threatening calls his wife was receiving. On the spot, he cut short his visit and flew back into the storm.
In future years, Charles Foran notes, Guy went on to receive “the sure signs of Richler affection: a ‘good word’ put in on his behalf with publishers and editors internationally, and brief, jokey faxes.” They remained such close friends that Guy served as a pallbearer at Mordecai’s Montreal funeral in July 2001.
An unexpected final story about Guy. In September 2013, I mentioned Guy’s name to Joanne, a teacher at a Toronto school where I was giving my show. She reacted very strongly. “Guy Vanderhaeghe! My mother-in-law stayed alive until I could finish reading The Last Crossing aloud to her. Then she died.”
The last crossing, indeed.
Before we leave Saskatoon it’s time to quote Charles Gordon again. In the acknowledgements to The Canada Trip he says kind things about me. “In his editing, Doug consistently amazed me with his knowledge of what is where in Canada. Many times he was able to tell me that I could not have been looking at what I thought I was looking at from a given spot — a sunset, a mountain, an ocean — because I was facing the wrong way. This invariably sent me back to my map collection, and invariably forced me to conclude he was right — except maybe for once in Saskatoon.” (Ah, yes, the Idylwyld highway, reliably north-south until it turns east-west after the river, dammit. But isn’t it nice to see another editorial role revealed: make sure the author is headed in the right direction.)
Which brings us to Lilac.
George Bain was the superb Ottawa editorial columnist for the Globe and Mail for many years. A small, neat man, and a former bomber pilot, he never lacked courage. He was a lone voice protesting that the imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970 was an overreaction to what should have been a matter for the police. This principled stance led to a move to have him barred from the Ottawa Press Gallery — strange but true — a move that fortunately failed, as the defenders of press freedom finally came to their senses.
Not surprisingly, George welcomed the chance to take his readers out of Ottawa, alerting them to the importance of Lilac, Saskatchewan, “Jewel of the Wheat Belt.” Between 1965 and 1973 he would punctuate his usual columns about the parochial affairs in Ottawa with weekend letters of wider interest sent to him by his friend Clem Watkins Jr. of the “Lilac Advance.” In 1978, I was proud to help George Bain advance the causes that Clem Watkins held dear by publishing the collected Letters from Lilac by Clem Watkins Jr. (edited and selected by George Bain, illustrated by Duncan Macpherson).
Lilac emerges as perhaps the most important small town in Canada. Not only is it the point of balance for an unsteadily seesawing nation (there is more land to the east, of course, but the Rockies weigh more), politically it is equally pivotal. Thanks to Clem Watkins, those with eyes to see were able to detect what issues were swaying the grass roots and which way the political wind was blowing. Without fail, in every national election held during those years, Lilac followed — or, more properly, led — the national trend.
Thanks to George’s “editing,” Lilac’s history comes in for full attention, including the Hitler-defying creation of the Icarus Elementary Flying School. The exciting 1968 run for the Liberal Party leadership (won by the upstart Pierre Trudeau) by Harry Melfort, the local MP, is widely discussed in the Round Table Room of Irvin Mervin’s Commercial Hotel, or in the Legion. Local worthies include Knut Svensson who, in the absence of any local Scandinavian group, has risen to be head of both the Sons and Daughters of Scotland and the St. Andrew’s Day Society.
To the embarrassment of the editor, George Bain, his own name sometimes enters the discussion. Once, when Clem Watkins Jr. is discussing a vacancy in the Senate he quotes a letter from the Bertrand Russell Branch of the Canadian Legion in Lilac, sent to the prime minister. It reads, in part: “However, if you wanted to take a chance on a boy in his forties, I’d suggest to you George Bain. He’s young, I admit, but he can sit there at times so you’d swear he was dead. Senate timber if ever I saw it.” Stephen Harper might have used similar advice.
In his Introduction, George Bain tackles the question of Lilac’s location. “I should say something about Lilac, Sask., itself because people have tended over the years, for reasons which never have been clear to me, either to confuse its location, or, in a few cases, even to suggest that it does not exist — which, of course, is absurd, as Watkins’ letters prove.”
Later he gives precise directions: “Actually, if you take the map of Saskatchewan and trace along the first fold about six inches, and then let your finger travel obliquely about another … well, it is a little difficult to explain, but if I were there I could point it out to you in a second. That is the Lilac of C. Watkins Jr., lettrist.”
It seems to me that Clem Watkins Jr. deserves to
stand in literary history alongside the unforgettable Sarah Binks, the “Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan.” Culturally, any Lilac poetry competition is certain to reveal that the spirit of Sarah Binks still pulsates in several local bosoms (especially that of Miss Mildred Keats, the librarian, author of the Centennial poem, “Soul and Sinew, We’re Yours, Canada”). Sweet Sarah’s creator, Paul Hiebert, is one of the few people in the world to be described in a reference book as “chemist, humorist.” But whatever formula the University of Manitoba professor applied to create his parody of literary biography, it deserves to be reapplied elsewhere. I have presented his 1947 book Sarah Binks to many friends as sui generis (totally unique) … although perhaps that should be “sooky,” in deference to Sarah’s famous pig poem, entitled “Hi Sooky, Ho Sooky.”
The Afterword of the New Canadian Library edition of this humorous classic is written by, of course, our friend Charles Gordon. He abandons his usual understatement in his praise of Sarah Binks and its author. “On the basis of Sarah Binks alone, he should have been rich and famous and never have had to teach chemistry again.”
And even for urban readers who rarely use the word “manure,” as Sarah dances around exulting over the joys of “Spreading Time,” there is a warm pleasure in knowing just what it is that is being spread over the fields. And as a translator, Sarah reaches new heights. One supreme example: the German love poem by Heine, “Du Bist wie eine Blume” becomes “You are like one flower.” Translation is truly an art — or perhaps one art.
We didn’t drive to Moose Jaw via Lilac, or Sarah’s Willows (or Gordie Howe’s Crocus). We flew there the following summer, to take part in the Saskatchewan Festival of Words, arriving in Regina (admiringly described by Paul Hiebert as “the Athens of Saskatchewan” and a place where Sarah, a simple girl from Willows, found herself abashed by “its polish, its sophistication, and its long rows of boxcars”). Jane and I, in our rented box-like car, were struck by how, unlike the rolling parkland to the north, here Saskatchewan is flat, flat, flat — watch-your-dog-run-away-for-days flat. It’s all too easy to forget that the Cypress Hills (where The Englishman’s Boy is set) are the highest point between the Lakehead and the Rockies. In summer the constant contrast between the bright blue of the sloughs, fringed with green trees, and the yellows and golds of the growing crops, and the blue-tinged flax fields had us exclaiming over the patchwork of colourful beauty.
Across Canada by Story Page 9