Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  As always, I adapted my show for the local audience, and I decided to spend extra time on James Houston and his Montreal-based Arctic adventures. I told them that once, on the train to Montreal, I happened to look up at the spring skies above. I noticed a skein of geese heading north to Jim Houston’s Arctic. Then I noticed another giant V, then another, then another. Soon the skies above our train were filled with hundreds, then thousands, then many thousands of geese. But as the train rattled on beyond Cornwall the other passengers were all seemingly oblivious to the seasonal miracle that was filling the skies above us.

  In the show I talked about Jim Houston and Montreal, where he had met his wife, Alma Bardon, when she interviewed him for a Montreal newspaper — and one thing led to another, including John and Sam Houston. And I recalled the huge role that the Montreal-based Canadian Guild of Crafts played in encouraging Jim to collect and display early Inuit art, and his own superb Arctic sketches.

  In the course of my show, when I was talking about Jim bringing that early art out of the North, an older man in the audience spoke up, “When was this?”

  “In 1948,” I replied.

  “Yes, that sounds about right.”

  He went on to explain that he had been setting up his medical practice around then, and had wandered into the Canadian Guild shop and come across a very fine portrait of a young Inuit woman in a full sealskin traditional outfit. He stood there admiring this piece of finely drawn art that revealed another world, far from Montreal. Then another customer, a young dark-haired man, came and stood beside him, looking over his shoulder at the drawing.

  “Do you like it?” the stranger asked.

  “Yes, I do,” said the young doctor, “but I’m just setting up my medical practice, and I’m sure I can’t afford it.”

  “Can you afford fifty bucks?” asked the man.

  “Yes,” said the surprised doctor, and James Houston made the deal with him right there and then, remarking that this was the first of his Northern drawings that he had ever sold.

  Hugh wrote in Rivers of Canada, which has, at its heart, a chapter all about the St. Lawrence above and below Quebec City,

  Quebec, to me at least, has the air of a city that never was young. No city in America, few in Europe, give out such a feeling of antiquity as does Quebec’s Lower Town. A little like Calais perhaps, but far nobler with its rock and wilderness behind it and the great river at its foot. These stern grey walls with their Norman or Mediterranean roofs two centuries ago sheltered an embattled, isolated people who lived as long and as hard in a decade as most communities live in a century.

  He reminds us of just how old this old city is. “At the core of the modern capital lie the stones of Champlain’s fortress, founded a dozen years before the Pilgrim Fathers saw Plymouth Rock.”

  I know Quebec City a little, and I like it a lot, so I had been pleased to learn about the Quebec City ImagiNation Writers Festival, an English-language event that takes place in the heart of the old city every spring. I was delighted when, thanks to local friends like Neil Bissoondath, I was invited to bring my show there.

  The organizer, Elizabeth Perreault, is so calm and efficient on email that I was expecting a much older person than the fresh-faced young woman who greeted Jane and me. She runs a top-class festival, too, with authors like Charles Foran, Emma Donoghue, and Guy Vanderhaeghe in attendance. We saw readings in two remarkable rooms in the Morrin Centre, in the heart of old Scottish Quebec. If you think I exaggerate there (old Scottish Quebec?), the Morrin Centre is named after a Scottish doctor from the early nineteenth century, and stands on the Chaussée des Écossais, right opposite the old Scottish church, St. Andrew’s, and the “Kirk Hall.”

  Inside, the great hall of the centre (housing the Literary and Historical Society) is constructed on nineteenth-century Scottish traditional lines, so that the electric light bulbs seem almost like an intrusion on the chandeliers. The library is equally famous, with its wooden statue of Wolfe casting a dramatic arm out from a corner of the two-storey ranks of shelves. Louise Penny fans will be familiar with the setting, and after seeing Peter Dube talking about his books there, I learned that authors from Charles Dickens to Mark Twain had given readings in the ancient building.

  Jane and I were housed in the grand old Clarendon Hotel, in the heart of the ancient upper town, just north of the Château Frontenac. Almost next door stood the Anglican cathedral, a traditional Wren-style building modelled after St. Martin-in-the-Fields. We were not far from the former St. Matthew’s Anglican Church, where Canon Frederick Scott officiated before heading off to the First World War as the First Division’s padre, leaving his son, my friend the poet F.R. Scott, at home.

  Three stories there, the first two from Sandra Djwa’s biography of the poet son: Reverend Scott once plunged off the Quebec to Levis ferry on a cold night to save a man from drowning. This heroic act prompted “one of the reigning Anglican ecclesiastics” to marvel, “And to think that you did it for a French Canadian.” Scott swiftly replied, “My lord, I did it for a fellow Canadian.”

  At the front, Canon Scott was also heroic. Sandra Djwa, in The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (1987), tells of how the canon’s son Harry was killed by a sniper, and buried hastily in no man’s land. In the shell-ploughed landscape, in mud both slippery and sticky, lit by the flash of exploding shells, Canon Scott and the soldier helping him searched for twenty-four hours, digging here and there, until it seemed hopeless. Eventually they dug beside a little white cross, and in the canon’s words, after the soldier “had taken off a few shovelfuls of earth something white was laid bare and there was darling Harry’s left hand with the signet ring on his little finger. It was like a miracle . . .” With the sound of shells whistling overhead, Canon Scott conducted the burial service for his son.

  The final story is appropriate, given St. Matthew’s long association with the literary Scott family. When falling numbers in the congregation caused the church to close in the 1970s, it was transformed into a notably beautiful library.

  Right below our hotel room window, to the west, huddled the Ursulines Convent. This is so ancient that the nuns famously performed acts of Christian charity to assist the invading Scottish soldiers who occupied the city after the battle in 1759. During the fierce winter that fell on the shell-shocked town, the kilted Scottish soldiers were at great risk of suffering frostbite and other painful indignities. The maidenly Ursulines (many of them farm-raised, among herds of brothers) were all too aware of the Highlanders’ manly predicament, so they very kindly knitted woolen underwear for them, to protect their privates — although, of course, their corporals and sergeants and other ranks were equally grateful.

  The Ursulines, of course, continued for generations to provide Quebec’s best finishing school for the daughters of the province’s landed gentry. Their culture was so strong, apparently, that it was fashionable for well-bred young ladies on seigneuries across the province to speak with “an Ursuline lisp.”

  But at the ImagiNation Writers Festival we were immersed in more recent history. After Guy Vanderhaeghe entertained us with tales of western history in this eastern city, I recalled for him that it was exactly thirty years earlier that he and I had celebrated his Governor General’s Award win for Man Descending in Quebec City. This year, on the Sunday afternoon, I gave my show in the grand old hall, and the crowd responded very kindly with a standing ovation. (Jane, I must report, far from leading this excellent development, said to Elizabeth Perreault, “Do I have to stand up, too?” If anyone wonders about my being a grounded sort of fellow, look no further than this story for a reason.) But a standing ovation in Quebec City is something worth recording, if I can find a suitably capacious tombstone.

  Time for a family story. Not a boring one, but a matter of life and death. By this time you may be wondering how I became a storyteller, or at least a man who loves stories. It’s always sensi
ble to blame the parents. Specifically, I blame my tiny mother (only five feet tall) who was the great storyteller in our family, and loomed large in my life, and perhaps in my choice of career.

  I grew up in the small village of Dunlop in southwest Scotland. It was so small that it held only about 700 people, even when all the dairy farmers were in town. In fact it was so small that it couldn’t even muster a real crossroads. The centre of the village was indeed called “the Cross,” but I was in my teens before I realized that it was really just a Y junction. Around it clustered the news agent’s shop (which sold important bottles of fizzy “lemonade”), the post office (with mysterious tailors’ dummies that let Mr. Hamilton keep his stitching hand in, between weighing letters), the bank, and the five general stores where the local housewives like my mother did their daily shopping, with their wicker baskets in hand.

  These shopping expeditions were the 1950s Scottish equivalent of a giant, floating cocktail party. Every housewife (and my mother wore that description like a badge of honour, like all of her friends) met and chatted with every other housewife, returning home with exciting stories.

  I grew up, then, in a house where every shopping expedition — even if the walk took less than a minute — was expected to produce interesting stories well worth repeating. In this concentrated world, this moveable stage setting, everyone was expected to play his or her part as “a character.” It was important to be “a character” (or, even better, “a real character”) and it was much better to be an eccentric — even an unpleasant one — than to be so dull that no stories resulted from your behaviour or conversation. Alice Munro’s small towns know all about this. And Hugh MacLennan, you’ll recall, grew up believing that “eccentricity was a social asset.”

  As a result, I remember the village of my youth (what W.O. Mitchell called “the litmus years”) as being populated by accomplished eccentrics, who seemed to work at it. For example, there was Miss McKnight, who would pause in the laneway beside our house after every shopping trip. To my mother’s delight she would shelter beside the hawthorn hedge in order to count her change, penny by penny, to be sure that she had not been unfairly treated in any of the village shops. My mother was so thrilled by this performance that she would beckon me to the window to peek out at Miss McKnight and the ritual checking of the purse.

  As a storyteller, my mother was voluble and tireless, and gained local fame as “wee Mrs. Gibson,” a reliable source of great stories. But one story she told only with great reluctance, and it concerned me. Family legend tells us that I was gurgling happily in my baby carriage one fine day at “the Cross.” My pram was parked right outside Mrs. Bull’s, the best shop for fruit and vegetables, where my mother was perhaps discussing the merits of the new Ayrshire potatoes, when a mad dog jumped up on my baby carriage and confronted me.

  I assume that they knew the dog was mad because it was foaming at the mouth, and growling menacingly. I assume, too, that my mother (a brave woman) was either unaware of this drama outside, or physically prevented from intervening, while the manager of the Clydesdale Bank across the street was summoned, and appeared in this emergency carrying a shotgun.

  The mad dog was swept off my baby carriage, and shot.

  My reaction is not recorded, since my mother did not enjoy recalling details of The Incident of the Dog in the Daytime. But I think we can take it that I didn’t like the shotgun blast going off so close to my baby ears. (And who would ever have thought that the banker in our sleepy little village would be armed, since there was no local Bonnie and Clyde tradition, even in the bonny Clydesdale Bank?) And it is certainly true that all of my conscious life, my enthusiasm for barking dogs has been noticeably restrained.

  “Find North Hatley on the map. Go there.” That’s the advice given by one tourist guide, for people looking for the ideal place to visit in the Eastern Townships. It’s a place that I know well. In Rivers of Canada Hugh writes of the rivers “of the Eastern Townships with their deep volcanic lakes and rolling hills like the Scottish Lowlands.” Perhaps that’s why I felt at home in this part of Quebec, when I married into a family that summered there, with Hugh MacLennan a cottaging neighbour and friend. Everything was perfect, and Lake Massawippi was ideal for long swims or canoe expeditions, although the roads were not perfect for jogging because of barking farm dogs — aha! — especially near the Piggery Theatre.

  In recent years we’ve been lucky enough to visit the little town as friends of Norman and Pat Webster. Norman, a superb journalist, was the editor of both the Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette. Pat is a woman of many talents, who leads gardening tours around Europe, not to mention of her own lakeside garden. They are such good friends that in Montreal, after my bruising encounter with Mavis Gallant (“I’ll kill him!”), Pat took me home and fed me dinner and sympathy.

  In 2013, Pat suggested that I contact the people at the Piggery, a little theatre converted from its original use raising pigs, to give my show. I was delighted. After a few phone conversations with Ruth McKinven, we were all set. Or almost all set. I had stupidly failed to specify the sort of equipment that my show would require, but this is a rural community where everyone helps out in an emergency, even just before a show. Miraculously, a screen came from here, a projector was picked up from there, and we started just twenty minutes late. The Piggery held about 100 people, in comfortable seats, and the show seemed to go well, with Alison Pick commenting that the contents had really changed since she had seen it in Moose Jaw.

  I had made special local changes to deal with Hugh MacLennan and the 2004 North Hatley book I’ll Tell You a Secret by Anne Coleman, about her teenage infatuation with “Mr. MacLennan.” It’s a fascinating book, about what was clearly a strong attraction between Hugh and her, although nothing physical ever occurred. I even suggested that Hugh, immersed through all these years in writing The Watch That Ends the Night (where the fourth most important character is young Sally, the daughter of Catherine and Jerome Martell), might have had literary reasons for spending so much time with this teenaged girl, the same age and background as his character. After all, I said, he had no daughter of his own . . .

  One of the best things about my Piggery performance was that I was introduced by Graham Fraser, a friend for more than forty years. I’ve learned that he wasn’t given much time to prepare his introduction that night, but he certainly used it well. He clearly relished the fact that after many publishing events where I had introduced him as the author, he was able to turn the tables.

  He was very, very funny. He spoke about the lonely life of the author, submerged for weeks, or months, or even years, in the depths of his writing, always with the gnawing doubt at the back of the mind that this is all a waste of time, it’s no good, nobody will be interested in this stuff. Then comes a call from the publisher, thrilled by what he has just read. Apparently, if the publisher was me, the enthusiasm was so extreme, for the writer it was like a shot of adrenaline to the heart, as I talked about how the writing was splendid, very close to perfect.

  The long-jawed face that Graham inherited from his father, Blair, softened in delight as my friend warmed to his task, re-enacting my inspiring conversations. As the phone call about this superb manuscript developed it seemed that I would mention that perhaps there might be a useful little nip here, and just possibly a beneficial tuck there — and by now the North Hatley audience was rocking with mirth — and had he considered the possibility of a tiny new insertion there, a matter of a few minutes’ work. I emerged as a cross between a cheerleader and Macchiavelli. It was a bravura performance, warm, affectionate, and very funny.

  Of course, Graham knew about the challenges of an author’s life from an early age. His eminent father, for many years the Ottawa correspondent for Maclean’s (before becoming the editor), wrote the fine history The Search For Identity: Canada, 1945–1967 for Doubleday Canada, the company that hired me. I note that he dedicated it to my predecessor wit
h the words “To George Nelson — a man of saintly patience.” This speaks for itself.

  Blair brought his family to North Hatley every year, which meant that Graham grew up there among literary greats like Hugh MacLennan and F.R. Scott. I’ve told the story of the tall, stork-like poet falling splashingly out of his canoe at a picnic farther up the lake, to the delight of four-year-old Graham, who clapped his hands and requested, “Do it again, Mr. Scott, do it again!”

  Canoes were not always a source of merriment. Blair died in a canoeing accident, going down the Petawawa River with some Ottawa friends, at the age of fifty-nine. I remember the shroud of sorrow that hung over the Doubleday Canada office the day in 1968 that young Graham came in to look after some final business. In the summer of 2013, Graham led three generations of Frasers on a memorial trip on the Petawawa, sympathetically reported by Roy MacGregor in the Globe.

  Graham’s own career in publications like the Globe, the Star, and Maclean’s took him to many important foreign postings. But it was his move to Quebec City in 1979 for the Montreal Gazette that changed his life. Quebec was in the headlines, its future in Canada uncertain, and Graham (an Ottawa-raised anglophone who had decided to really work at becoming bilingual) had put himself on the front lines. I was proud to publish his important book PQ: René Lévesque and the Parti Quebecois in Power in 1984 (mischievously launched at the Literary and Historical Society building in Quebec, to remind Lévesque and his cabinet members of its existence), and was pleased when it was nominated for the Governor General’s Award that year.

  That Rideau Hall reference reminds me that since 1968 Graham has been married to the remarkable Barbara Uteck, with two sons, two grandchildren, and many friends to applaud their marriage. Barbara’s distinguished career in the public service reached its zenith when she ran Rideau Hall for the Governor General, as the chief of staff to Adrienne Clarkson. This meant that she and Graham had to slum it in “Rideau Cottage,” a mansion on the Rideau Hall grounds that I, like many of their friends, stayed in overnight. It was wonderful, although I resented the absence of a butler at breakfast.