Every Canadian should have the fun of rising early, then setting out westward through the morning mist from Digby into the open bay. Jane and I loved it, crossing the deck excitedly to see the misty land on this side (“Look, it’s Digby Neck!”), then the other, recede from view. Then we’d catch exciting wildlife sightings up ahead with our binoculars. (“Is that a whale, or was that a dolphin jumping?” “Did you see that gannet dive?” “What is that crowd of gulls doing in the water? Look at all the fish!”) That is, when you’re not relaxing below decks, enjoying a hearty meal.
The straight-ahead passage is not nearly as exciting as the B.C. ferry ride from Victoria through Active Pass, and it becomes dramatic again only at the end as you approach the New Brunswick shore just south of Saint John. But on this trip we were tempted by thoughts of piracy, to take us straight to our destination. If Saint John stood at 12 on the clockface, we were really headed for 9 o’clock, Grand Manan. A swift takeover of the wheelhouse, and a turn hard to port, would have saved us several hours.
But they were happy hours, and even when we sailed into the big industrial port we thought of Jane’s nephew, Jeff, and the work he had done as a deep-sea diver out of these big oil stations near Saint John. On the central waterfront I could see the steeple of the downtown church where I had once watched the outraged minister, hands on hips, glaring at two attractive tourists sunbathing in their bikinis on a patch of grass beside the tombstones. No caption was necessary, and his determination not to be a narrow-minded old spoilsport colliding with carefree youth was clearly putting his blood pressure at risk. I wonder how it ended.
We lost no time in driving ashore and turning south on Highway 790 towards the Maine border. But we were bound for Blacks Harbour, to catch the ferry to Grand Manan.
Why Grand Manan? In a world where most authors were sitting wistfully at home, wishing there were some way to promote their book, why were we off, both beaming, our hair blowing in the breeze, to this remote little island to give my Stories About Storytellers show to a surprised audience of locals? Because it’s remote, closer to Maine than the New Brunswick coast, about as far to the south and east from the Pacific Islands of Haida Gwaii as you can get without leaving Canada. And because I suffer from the geographic compulsion that, for example, had me jubilantly dipping my toe off the southernmost point of land in all of Canada at Point Pelee. And because Jane’s cousin Dyanne and her husband, Alex (the Alex Frame behind Peter Gzowski’s Morningside), had invited us to come and see their wonderful home on the island that they loved.
On the map the island is shipshape, looking like a sloop with ragged sails heading north and east towards Saint John. We learned that it’s an ancient island, skirted more by cliffs than gentle beaches, surrounded by Fundy tides so full of whales that, to help identification, local leaflets show the tails of humpbacks, right, and sperm whales. The extraordinary location means that more than 400 types of migrating birds are affected by the predictable storms that go with the sea climate. We learned how organized the settlement of roughly 2,500 residents is when we asked for the address of Dyanne and Alex’s place. “OK,” we said. “We’ve got the number. But what street? Ahhh, there is really just one street, Route 776, right down the island? OK.”
And that gives you a sense of this island, with the three Loyalist communities of North Head (where the ferry arrives, and where there are actual streets), Grand Harbour (where the home of early settler Moses Garrish Farmer, who came in 1784, now houses the Grand Manan Museum, ideal for public meetings with visiting authors), and Seal Cove to the south, where curious seals popping up in the water to groom their moustaches explain its name. Apart from Route 776, the main link is the clifftop walking path that runs across hundreds of private properties, and is carefully maintained by the Grand Manan Trails Association.
I was delighted to make my show — held in the museum, and introduced by Dyanne — a fundraiser for the Trails people. We raised a fair amount of money, and I got some great stories. For example, the Grand Manan folks — unlike any other audience, before or since — burst into song when I played the piano version of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”
And it’s not as if these hardy islanders have never been anywhere else. We found that one of the Frames’ friends had served in the Arctic with James Houston, and even had one of his cartoons framed on the wall at home, alongside other Inuit art, to remember those great days in the North.
But this is all very remote from world literature, right? Not quite. The famous American novelist Willa Cather spent every summer for many years on Grand Manan. And Alice Munro visited the island in 1979, and set a story there. You’ll find that story, “Dulse,” in the collection The Moons of Jupiter that I published in 1982. It’s notable for a number of reasons. First, it’s clearly set far from Alice Munro Country. Second, it allows Alice to deal with the subject of readers who become unbalanced admirers of a chosen author, like the extreme Willa Cather fan “Mr. Stanley” whom the narrator encounters, just as Alice did in real life on the island, as Robert Thacker records in his biography. Third (and Alice Munro scholars love this), while the original version of the story that ran in the New Yorker was in the first person, Alice changed it to the third person for the book. And I, of course, went along with it, since in these matters Alice’s instinct was always right. And Bob Thacker (also a Willa Cather scholar) notes that “the most compelling changes between the two published versions lie in Munro’s depiction of Willa Cather — this story offers a beautiful analysis of a writer’s self-absorption, and of Cather’s in particular. In her revisions, Munro makes her Cather more inscrutable and much more compelling.”
Like a true, unbalanced admirer, on the island I sought out the hotel where Alice had stayed: “A guest house overlooking the docks, with their stacks of lobster traps, and the few scattered stores and houses that made up the village.” It was closed when we dropped by, but we could still peer into the windows, revealing what looked like a perfect memorial piece, frozen in time, for Alice’s visit in 1979. And the “dulse” of the title, the edible seaweed collected and dried on Grand Manan, is still a proud local specialty. I can report that it is an acquired taste.
The next day we took the ferry back to the mainland, then were almost the only car on the wide new highway north out of Maine. We whizzed past Saint John (“Is that a codfish or a salmon at the top of that old church spire?”) and did not make a detour this time up the lovely Saint John river valley to Fredericton, the capital, and the centre for the University of New Brunswick. I have fond memories of the elegant elm trees down by the river, and of many capital literary stories. It was at a Fredericton bookstore that Dennis Lee once offered to sign copies of Alligator Pie, to be told, diplomatically, “If it were Pierre Berton or Farley Mowat, I’d say yes, but in this case I don’t think so.”
My publisher friend Bill Clarke (of Clarke Irwin) once attended a Fredericton funeral, in this case for his author Alden Nowlan. At the end of the solemn graveside service, the attendees were invited to participate in filling the grave. To Bill Clarke’s amazement, the usual Ontario formal trickles of earth were replaced by spit-on-the-hands hard shovelling, with jackets shed by people like the premier, Richard Hatfield. Ah, New Brunswick!
We whizzed on northward, pausing to admire the downtown murals in Sussex, and passed Moncton, knowing that we would do it justice later. But one important part of the province that we ignored this time was the Miramichi, north of the Acadian Shore. David Adams Richards territory.
In the last forty years, Dave, born in 1950, has been the province’s major novelist, ever since he burst on the scene with The Coming of Winter in 1974. I was proudly involved in publishing (although never in editing) later novels of his with typical gnarly titles like Nights Below Station Street (1988), Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (1990), and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993). These are not the slick, memorable titles that publishers leap on. But what they los
e in slickness they gain in authenticity, and Dave’s novels (which have won almost every major Canadian prize going) are an authentic, clear-eyed look at the hardscrabble lives of the people of the Miramichi, around Chatham and Dave’s home town of Newcastle.
David Adams Richards (1950– )
Here’s Jerry Bines, to give one example, in For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. He has been in and out of prison:
Years ago Bines used to drive a truck into town with his two dogs in the truck and a knife in his boot, and one day when the dogs started to fight he took his shotgun and shot one.
“Which one,” someone had asked.
“The one on the left,” Bines said.
It’s tough to be a novelist, “the writer fella,” who stands out in the non-literary community that you’re writing about. Ernest Buckler summed it up perfectly for Silver Donald Cameron: “When the first book came out I had an awful time around here, because all kinds of people were identifying themselves with this or that person in the book and there was a great clamour. Although strangely enough the people were identifying themselves with people who were not the people I had written about. But fact is no good novelistically.”
I know that Dave faced similar local pressures. My friend Arthur Herriott, the award-winning designer, was once hired by CBC-TV to work on a screenplay by Dave entitled “Small Gifts,” which was set in his traditional blue-collar world. To catch the right atmosphere Arthur flew to New Brunswick, and drove around the Miramichi area with Dave. All was well until he jumped out of the car in Chatham, pulled out his camera, and started to photograph the streets and the buildings — and the people.
“Jesus Christ, Arthur,” Dave exploded, “what the hell are you doing?”
It was alarmingly clear to Dave that a stranger in his company going round snapping with a camera was going to confirm the local suspicions that “the writer fella” was writing about real people — them — and that this would be trouble. In the end, Arthur and Dave agreed to park the car secretly, with Dave in it, a block away from wherever Arthur produced his camera to take his design photos.
By the way, you may think that nobody before Dave had ever written well about that part of New Brunswick. Consider this. One of the greatest set pieces in Canadian literature is in The Watch That Ends the Night, when young Jerome Martell sees his mother murdered in a logging camp, and escapes at night in his canoe down the river. The river is clearly the Miramichi, and the place where he comes ashore and jumps aboard a train is clearly Chatham. And Hugh MacLennan has him re-entering the “real” world in Moncton.
But this time we left Moncton in our wake as we headed north to cross the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island, the ninth province on our tour.
Arriving on the Island, like all sensible Anne of Green Gables fans, we headed northwest to Sunnyside, and worked our way clockwise through all the sites (and sights) until we reached North Rustico. There we checked in at the Watermark Theatre, where we found my friend, the lively Duncan McIntosh. He proudly showed us around his summer theatre, then led the way to the cottage that was to be our home for the next couple of days. We were dazed, not only by the perfect cottage (on kindly loan from a professor who supports the theatre), but by the setting. The cottage stood in the beach grass near the old lighthouse at the end of the harbour, with white egrets wading thoughtfully in the water in front of the house, while Cavendish Beach (yes, the Cavendish Beach!) lay just a three-minute stroll behind it.
We asked Duncan about where to eat. “Ah, you must go to Maxine’s restaurant!” he said, and phoned Maxine then and there, to arrange for us to go to dinner there at 7:30. Sure enough, we had a fine dinner, and were well looked after by Maxine. At the end of the meal we chatted, and she revealed that she was coming to our show the next night. We looked forward to seeing her there.
The next day was devoted to drinking in the delights of Prince Edward Island in the August sun. Some pleasures were new, like buying the newly issued Robertson Davies Canadian stamps at the post office just down from the theatre. Some were old, like renewing my acquaintance with Shaw’s Hotel, the family hotel where the Gibsons stayed when the girls were young, and the path through the sand dunes to Brackley Beach was the most exciting one they’d ever skipped along, wrapped in their beach towels. A chat with a young teenage guy working hard outside revealed that he knew a lot about the history of this famous old hotel, the oldest in Canada to be run by the same family. How come? Well, his name was Shaw, you see …
My show went just fine in the theatre that evening, and I was able to hail Maxine, among the last to slip in before I got started. Afterwards there was the usual friendly mingling, and some books were sold and signed. Right at the end it was just Jane and me and middle-aged Maxine, who seemed to want to tell us something. “I’m really glad that in the show you talked about Jack Hodgins and Spit Delaney’s Island,” she began, “because when I got married, I took my husband’s name. But when we split up, I didn’t want to keep his name, but I didn’t want to go back to my unmarried name. So I didn’t know what to do.”
We didn’t know where this was going, but nodded encouragingly.
“Then I came across Spit Delaney’s Island, and I thought … Maxine … Delaney. Maxine … Delaney. So, you see, I’ve been Maxine Delaney ever since.”
Then she said, “I haven’t told many people this story, but you seemed the right people to hear it.”
“Well, I know a man named Hodgins in Victoria who’s going to be delighted to hear this story when I tell him,” I said. And of course he was, once he got up off the floor. You can’t invent stories like these. Not even the author of The Invention of the World.
On Prince Edward Island, I always feel right at home. I grew up in Ayrshire, a county famous for its potatoes, and as a teenager I dug my own potato patch. On the island you’re never far from the salt water, and I grew up within a dozen miles of the sea, smelling the same scent on the wind, which after really big storms left our windows whitened with salt. The closest port was Irvine, the birthplace of our old friend John Galt. And the big family name in Irvine from Norman times onward was Montgomery.
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942)
Of course, on PEI any publisher-turned-author feels at home, because so much of the province’s economy is based on a book. Since it first appeared in 1908 Anne of Green Gables has been published everywhere, and has sold many millions of copies.
The story behind the book is amazing. Lucy Maud was an Island girl who had written some newspaper material and wanted to be a writer. As her 1917 book, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, tells it,
I had always kept a notebook in which I jotted down, as they occurred to me, ideas for plots, incidents, characters, and descriptions. In the spring of 1904 I was looking over this notebook in search of some idea for a short serial I wanted to write for a certain Sunday School paper. I found a faded entry, written many years before: “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.” I thought this would do.
The rest is history. If Lucy Maud was ever asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” her honest answer would have been: “Oh, I jot them down in a notebook, and then, if they’re really good, I ignore them for many years, until I’m ready to write my first novel.”
Millions of tourists have been drawn to the novel’s idyllic setting, including my bewitched daughter Meg, and many, many Japanese tourists charmed by “the red-haired girl,” as my story about Will Ferguson will remind us.
Although I have never published Will Ferguson (author of Why I Hate Canadians, and the Giller-winning novel 419, and other fine books that show the range of his talents), we have had a friendly acquaintanceship for some years, and I have a story about him and PEI that is too good not to be true.
After getting an arts degree, like so many young Canadians, Alberta-born Will headed off to teach English in Jap
an. He lived in an English-speaking bubble, so his use of Japanese was restricted to the usual tourist stuff: “Men’s room?” “How much?” “What time train to Yokohama?” and so on. And everyone he met socially was keen to practise their English on him, so he stayed at a basic tourist level.
When he came back to Canada, after the usual spell of hanging out with friends, it became necessary to get a job. A newspaper ad for a job in tourism on PEI caught his eye. He met the general requirements — a BA, and a willingness to relocate to PEI (sounds great!) and an ability to write. But what caught his eye was a line about “the ability to speak Japanese” being an asset.
Will is like the rest of us, and he really wanted the job. So in his application, and the subsequent interviews, he did not, let’s say, understate his fluency in Japanese. And he got the job!
He spent a number of happy months on PEI until the day his boss came into the office, rubbing his hands.“Great news, Will. You know how keen Japanese tourists are to come here to visit Anne of Green Gables sites. Well, next week, a whole busload of Japanese tourist agency owners are coming here, and you’ll have a chance to use your Japanese language skills on them!”
It was a dreadful week for Will. He spent hours secretly combing through phrase books and dictionaries. Then the fateful day came, when the busload of smartly dressed Japanese men filed off their bus, and stood attentively before Will’s boss. He welcomed them, in English, then proudly introduced “my colleague, Will Ferguson, who will address you in your own language.”
Will stepped forward, and said, in Japanese: “As you can hear, I not really speak Japanese. But my boss here, he not know that. So please not to tell him.”
There was a gale of laughter.
Then Will said, in Japanese, “Many thanks, nice to see you here, welcome to Prince Edward Island, and now I talk in English.”
Across Canada by Story Page 30