I took my Swedish colleagues down to the lakefront, near the salt mine, where a ship was being loaded in a constant funnelled stream of falling whitish salt. While Sven-Ake filmed the sun setting on “Ontario’s West Coast” I walked out along the pier. Here I had once surprised Alice and Gerry enjoying the same walk, Alice’s hair blowing in the lake breeze.
The salt mines are Goderich’s great local industry. Their discovery might have inspired an Alice Munro story. Do you remember how in “Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Marriage,” a prank played by two teenage girls sends a woman out West to join a man who is not expecting her? And how it all turns out well? In 1866, impressed by the value of oil strikes in Ontario, a local entrepreneur named Samuel Pratt tried drilling for oil in Goderich. Local legend has it that he had drilled so deep, with no success, that he was on the point of giving up. Then some local pranksters secretly dropped some oil in the bottom of his dry well. Encouraged, he kept drilling — and proceeded to find the largest salt mine in the world.
Goderich is the setting of one of Alice’s greatest stories, “Meneseteung” (the Native name for the Maitland River). It’s a fascinating look at a town in the post-pioneer stage, where the local paper, the Vedette, is hard at work keeping its readers up to the civilized urban mark. The “Poetess,” Almeda, for example, comes close to romance with a neighbour, Jarvis Poulter, a man in the salt business. When he intervenes to roust a drunk woman that Almeda fears may be dead, the Vedette lectures its 1879 readers: “Incidents of this sort, unseemly, troublesome, and disgraceful to our town, have of late become all too common.”
Then, having convinced us of the reality of the world of this woman, revealed in excerpts of her writing — not to mention finding Almeda’s tombstone in the graveyard — the modern narrator steps into the final paragraph to say, “I may have got it wrong.” Another short story rule broken. Another great Alice Munro tale created.
In the absence of Bailey’s, people in search of a place to eat that has links with Alice Munro can now visit the Park House Hotel, at the top of the slope leading down to the harbour. One corner of the dining room preserves “Alice Munro’s table.” It was there that I had my last meal with Alice and Gerry. I had driven down to see if I could persuade Alice to do some publicity, but she and Gerry were firm in their rejection of the idea, so I simply enjoyed the company and the lunch.
As we left, in the doorway there was an elegiac moment. Alice held me at arm’s-length and said, “Well, you and I have had many interesting adventures.”
I mumbled something inadequate, and we hugged farewell.
The holiday town of Bayfield has long been one of Alice’s favourite places around Clinton. The town on the lake is named after a great Canadian hero, a man who has saved thousands of lives over the years. But Henry Wolsey Bayfield is almost unknown, compared to the other two great British map-makers who charted our coasts, Captain James Cook and Captain George Vancouver. Yet perhaps he did more for Canada, and those who sail its waters, than both of them put together.
Bayfield joined the British navy at the age of eleven, and was a twenty-year-old midshipman at Quebec when he was persuaded to give up a dashing naval career (think Horatio Hornblower) for what Don W. Thomson in Men and Meridians calls “the vagaries, hardships, and low pay of hydrographic survey work.”
Think about it. In naval surveying you’re mapping in three dimensions, with lives to be lost on every unmarked reef. And unlike land surveyors, you can’t ever spread your surveyor’s chain on the surface of the water to measure distance. Every measurement involves compasses, sextants, lead lines, and other instruments. Endless calculations are involved, and most of the facts are gathered while bobbing about in small boats, at the mercy of winds and waves. Yet from 1817 until 1826, Henry Wolsey Bayfield quietly mapped the Canadian coasts of all of the Great Lakes.
A plaque in Charlottetown’s central square tells the world that after his Great Lakes marathon (which involved chopping through the ice on Lake Superior in order to, literally, plumb the depths) Admiral Bayfield “conducted a thorough survey of the Gulf and River St. Lawrence, the coasts of Anticosti, Magdalen Islands, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton, Sable Island, and parts of Nova Scotia and Labrador.”
Whew! And he gave his name — for his long-forgotten services to ensure safety on the water — not to a city like Vancouver, but to a little town just south of Goderich.
In the past I’ve met Alice and Gerry for dinner in Bayfield at The Red Pump. In August 2014 she met Jane and me for an affectionate lunch in that favourite restaurant, and life went on with a Nobel Prize winner calmly eating mussels at one of their tables. I know that she has kindly agreed to do promotional events at the little bookshop there in the past. She once did a favour for her pal Margaret Atwood by staging a LongPen signing session at the store then run by her friend Mary Swan.
The bookshop has now moved to the village main street (on a summer weekend the sidewalks are so crowded with visitors that Yonge Street seems quiet in comparison), very close to the historic Little Inn. The new owner, Mary Brown, invited me in the summer of 2013 to do my show, and we stayed at the Little Inn — admiring the bookish Alice Munro reminders in the upstairs corridors.
My evening event was held in the historic clapboard 1882 town hall, on Clan Gregor Square, and it was a fine experience for me. As usual, I mingled with the audience beforehand, introducing myself and chatting. I came across several old friends, and, equally pleasing, a number of Alice’s friends, who had fond stories to tell about her. There was a distinctly Huron County moment when I met a friendly lady, who said, “I came tonight because my friend saw your show in Stratford, and she told me that it was . . .” and I beamed modestly, awaiting the superlative adjective that was to come (although she was a little old for “awesome”) “that it was … quite interesting.”
Alice enjoyed that story when I told her about it the next day at home in Clinton, on the couch beneath the famous eighteenth-century print of a Scottish minister skating primly on an Edinburgh loch. She also liked the story about another town in the area where I attended a family funeral. I was pleased to be recognized by the lunch lady as the man who had given the show in Blyth, which was worth some extra sandwiches. When I was greeted at the reception by the local bookseller, I was emboldened by the belief that my deceased relative had bought some copies of my book.
“So,” I said, smiling at my bookseller friend, “I guess you sold a few copies of my book last fall?” (It was, as language textbooks say, “A question expecting the answer Yes.”)
“No, not really,” she answered.
As Alice said, laughing delightedly, “That’s Huron County — honesty over politeness every time!”
* * *
CHAPTER 7
* * *
HUGH MacLENNAN’S COUNTRY
Cape Breton Beginnings … Dickens Would Have Liked Halifax … A Thousand Miles to the Sea … Recalling How Trudeau Almost Killed Me … Brave Deeds on the Niagara Frontier … Hugh MacLennan’s Secret … In the Treasure Trove … A Montreal Coincidence with James Houston … Quebec, the City that Was Never Young … Mothers and Mad Dogs … North Hatley’s Piggery Might Fly … The Man with Two Tongues, Graham Fraser … To Sherbrooke and Lennoxville … Wolf Stories … The Colour of Canada
* * *
“The MacLennans originally came from near here.” The speaker was Alistair MacLeod, at his summer home in Dunvegan on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, and he was talking about his friend Hugh MacLennan’s family. Grandfather Neil MacLennan had left Kintail in the northwest of Scotland in 1832 to settle near what is now Alistair’s place. Just north of Dunvegan lies the lovely valley of the Margaree River. In his wide-ranging 1974 book, Rivers of Canada, Hugh called it “the noblest stream of all Nova Scotia.” Book-lovers will note that one branch flows out of Lake Ainslie, an unusual name that Hugh was to borrow for a major character in both Each Man’s Son a
nd Return of the Sphinx.
Both in his novels and his essays (and he won three Governor General’s Awards for his novels, and two for his non-fiction essay collections) Hugh loved to write about the geography of Canada, starting very near to the traditional homestead. Just south and west of the Margaree lay “the valley of the Middle River, broad well-farmed meadows with many wine-glass elms, and it was here that my forebears on my father’s side settled after their escape or deportation (it was never discussed what it was) from Kintail.”
“I love these Nova Scotian streams because they are so intimate,” Hugh wrote. “The air about nearly all of them is delicious with the fragrance of alders and wild flowers, especially clover, in some times and places so strong it is overpowering.”
Glace Bay, where he grew up, was very different. In the words of his biographer, Elspeth Cameron (in her 1981 book, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life), in the middle of the nineteenth century it was “a primitive place, a stark and lonely outpost on the northeastern edge of Cape Breton Island. On top of the black cliffs overlooking the sea, a single path had gradually become a road along which the coal miners had built their crude wooden cabins, surrounded by long, dry grasses flattened by the winds.”
Here Hugh was raised, just outside the mining town, as the son of Dr. Sam MacLennan, the colliery doctor. Each Man’s Son gives a vivid, unflattering portrait of that community, where the doctor spent his time patching up men maimed in the mine, or injured in the Saturday night fights.
In 1915, when Hugh was eight, his father moved the family to Halifax, which was to be Hugh’s home until he left Dalhousie for Oxford. A distinct picture of old Halifax comes through Hugh’s essays. It was a city of the Atlantic Ocean. One of Hugh’s earliest memories is of being aboard a large ocean liner while wreaths were thrown onto the sullen face of the sea, and the ship’s band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” He later learned that they had just sailed across the spot where the Titanic had gone down, exactly one year earlier.
Less formally, he remembered messing about in boats in the Halifax harbour, and how he and Tommy Waterfield almost lost their lives because of his friend’s misplaced faith that British naval vessels were ready, aye ready, to give way to boats under sail, even when the contest was between Olympus, the second largest ship in the Navy, and Tommy’s twelve-foot red dinghy. He recalled going with his father aboard a visiting naval ship, where the officer of the watch, in full Gilbert and Sullivan headgear, entered the wardroom, sat down, drank a little tea, and asked the small boy if he lived in Halifax. When Hugh politely said yes, the naval hero drawled: “Beastly place.”
But Hugh admired Halifax. There, he wrote, he “grew up believing that eccentricity was a social asset.” In another essay he wrote, “If Dickens had been given a choice of a Canadian town in which to spend Christmas, that’s where I think he would have gone. … He liked places where accidents were apt to happen.” For most readers, Halifax comes alive in Hugh’s first novel, 1941’s Barometer Rising. Alistair MacLeod provided the Afterword to the New Canadian Library edition (which came out under my aegis at M&S in 1989). He writes that his family recalled the 1917 explosion being heard in Cape Breton, although “Halifax was some 250 miles away, at the end of winding and often muddy roads and across the waters of the Strait of Canso.” He goes on to say, shrewdly, “The city of Halifax is one of the novel’s major characters. … Dominated by an older English aristocracy, it has become comfortably, if unimaginatively, well-to-do, but still it suffers from a certain static listlessness and the feeling that it is being largely ignored by the larger world. It is not in the mainstream of either European or North American life.”
In the novel, Angus Murray, who often expresses what we know to be Hugh’s own opinion, muses about the city, thinking that “it was her birthright to serve the English in time of war and to sleep neglected when there was peace.”
As I have travelled across the country with my show I have scandalized cautious souls by reading aloud a passage from early in the novel and describing it as the most important paragraph in Canadian literature. Let me repeat it here: “The sun had rolled on beyond Nova Scotia into the west. Now it was setting over Montreal and sending the shadow of the mountain deep into the valleys of Sherbrooke Street and Peel. It was turning the frozen banks of the St. Lawrence crimson.”
And so on, across the Great Lakes, and across the Prairies, and over the Rockies, until we end with a sentence about the vital railway line that “lay with one end in the darkness of Nova Scotia and the other in the flush of a British Columbian noon.”
You can see what Hugh was up to there, deliberately creating a national literature, a sense of Canada as a unit. This book of mine, I hope, will give you some sense of the importance, and the literary magic, of our geography. And Hugh MacLennan (“the cartographer of our dreams,” as Robert Kroetsch called him) is a man who weaves his dreams from coast to coast.
To this day, whenever I visit Montreal, I see it through Hugh MacLennan’s eyes. This is especially true when I come by car or train from Toronto, crossing the Ottawa River to reach the island of Montreal, and remembering the superb opening of Two Solitudes (1945), starting with the words:
Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec. It comes down broad and ale-coloured and joins the St. Lawrence, the two streams embrace the pan of Montreal Island, the Ottawa merges and loses itself, and the mainstream moves northeastward a thousand miles to the sea.
Hugh moved to Montreal in 1935, first to teach at Lower Canada College, then, from 1951, at McGill. The city was his home, apart from summer breaks in North Hatley, until he died in 1990. It was there that I used to visit him, at his Summerhill Avenue apartment. This lay west along Sherbrooke from McGill, a walk that he made famous in some of his essays — and in The Watch That Ends the Night (1958), where his narrator, George Stewart, also lived west of his McGill office, along Sherbrooke.
Hugh MacLennan (1907–1990)
That office is well described in Silver Donald Cameron’s 1973 book, Conversations with Canadian Novelists. His chapter on Hugh MacLennan begins: “The Arts Building at McGill exudes that slightly dignified shabbiness characteristic of old Canadian halls of learning. The door off the staircase landing would seem to lead to a closet, but behind it is a room less like an office than a rather gracious study in a private home.”
A story about that office came my way in the fall of 2013. At the end of one of my shows a bright woman from the audience came to talk to me about her affectionate memories of Hugh MacLennan. She had been one of his students at McGill in the 1960s. In those innocent times university authorities were not alarmed that part of the course could involve female students (like her) going alone to the office of a male professor (like Hugh) for individual tutorials, where the student read an essay aloud and then they discussed it.
On this occasion, she told me, she had been ill, but felt well enough to go to Professor MacLennan’s office to read her essay. In mid-reading, however, the sickness came back. Hugh noticed it, and kindly interrupted.
“Look,” he said, “You’re obviously not well. I have a bed in my inner office, and you should come and lie down.” (Modern Deans would be pulling emergency switches at this point, setting alarm bells ringing.) She gladly agreed, and he ushered her into the inner room, saw her arranged comfortably on the little cot, and tiptoed out while she fell asleep.
About an hour later, he gently checked on her, and found that she was feeling a little better. So he helped her up, escorted her out of the office, an arm at her elbow, and ushered her down to Sherbrooke Street. There he hailed a cab, put her in it, gave the driver the money for the fare, and sent her home.
She was still grateful, all these years later, for his kindness, and she remembered the inner room, and the little bed. Keep it in your mind.<
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In my new role as an author I was delighted to come for the first time to Montreal to promote my book in the fall of 2011. This was at a very fine regular event, the brunch organized by Paragraphe Books on regular Sundays at the Sheraton Hotel on René Lévesque Boulevard. When my turn to speak came I was able to surprise the crowd with the news that Pierre Trudeau had come very close to killing me on the street right outside our hotel. Although he was then a retired man well into his seventies, he had insisted on crossing the six-lane boulevard in the middle of the block. When the lights changed we were stranded in mid-stream. He cheerfully barked “Run!” and I, fresh from a back operation, did my limping best to follow him through the screeching, honking traffic. I lived to tell the tale, and never became the Trivial Pursuit question: “What was the name of the man killed alongside Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the tragic traffic accident on the Montreal street named after Trudeau’s greatest rival?”
It was a very pleasant, well-attended brunch event, with lots of books signed and sold at the end. I was touched to find that several former authors like Dick Irvin (“He writes! He publishes!”) and Bill Weintraub (who had passed along Mavis Gallant’s famous quote about me, “I’ll kill him!”) had showed up to cheer me on.
Among the other authors speaking at that breakfast was David Gilmour, who mysteriously chose to sit outside the event, with his publicist, to the surprise of the rest of us. By way of contrast, David Wilson, the author of a fine book about D’Arcy McGee, did join the other authors and the book-loving crowd, and indeed sat at the same table as me, and we became good friends. I knew David Wilson slightly already, since he was then the head of Celtic Studies at St. Michael’s College in Toronto, and I, as the president of the St. Andrews Society of Toronto, was involved in supporting his students with grants each year. But our table talk that day in Montreal revealed what a fascinating, witty man he was, and our friendship was sealed when he brought his D’Arcy McGee speech to a close by whipping out a tin whistle and playing a plaintive Celtic tune on it. I hope that his new job as the head of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography allows him the same musical opportunities.
Across Canada by Story Page 18