Stupid, stupid, stupid. But publishers are in the business of making hasty, stupid decisions. Intelligent outsiders marvel at how many publishers, for example, turned down Harry Potter when J.K. Rowling sent the manuscript around. Insiders know that publishers are dealing with hundreds, no, thousands of manuscripts, and in the rush to cope, stupid mistakes are made. Often.
Since I have made so many in my time, I’m keen to explain that choosing this piece of writing over that one is always a subjective decision, involving judgment. It would be fine to say: “Well, we’re looking for a 100,000-word book, and this one comes in at 99,500, so let’s take it.” No such luck. There are no such objective measures. The editorial meetings typically involve discussion by editors saying, “I’ve read it, and here’s what I think about it” (and many readers will know how rarely book club meetings are unanimous). Meanwhile, a sales manager predicts likely sales for such a book, based on the historical record of similar books. Then there is discussion, and an editorial decision is reached.
I remember the discussion about Wayne’s book. We had published him in the past, and enjoyed the process, but neither of the books had been a big success. As for the new novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams was very long (my current copy, brought out by a wiser publisher, runs to 554 pages), and thus would be expensive, both for the publisher and the book-buyer, which made it risky. And the title made it clear just what an ambitious, risky book this was … a first-person account by a real historical figure, not long dead, the remarkable Joey Smallwood, whom we watch as he performs the real historical deeds for which he was famed — and sometimes excoriated — as he changed the history of Newfoundland. To make things more complex the book’s other main character, Sheilagh Fielding, is a totally fictitious character, whose unusual relationship with Joey spans many decades, but never involves physical love. To make room for Sheilagh, the “real” Joey’s real-life wife, Clara, makes what in effect is only a walk-on appearance.
A very unusual book, in other words, and some of our experienced editorial team did not like it. I felt constrained from joining the debate too vigorously, because I feared that my judgment was impaired by the fact that I had known — and been charmed by — the real Joey. In the 1970s he had visited a number of Toronto-based publishers to whip up interest in acquiring his memoirs. You’ll recall that he visited me and a colleague at Doubleday Canada and began to tell the two of us about his planned book. As his oratory flowed, he jumped out of his chair, seized his lapels, and began to pace around the small room, addressing us like an outport meeting. I was hopelessly smitten, and stayed that way — which in the Wayne Johnston debate kept me more in the role of listener.
The book’s advocates at the meeting, of course, caught the sweep of Wayne’s ambition, which was to tell a sardonic version of Newfoundland’s long journey through history until she joined Canada in 1949. They spoke admiringly of his larger-than-life central character and of the outrageous fun Wayne has with Joey during his years as premier, when his determination to get his people to turn their backs on the sea led him to throw money at any outside industrialist who promised to set up a factory in Newfoundland (although fortunately when a condom factory was suggested, it was kept away from Conception Bay). Perhaps the most outrageous of his advisors in all this was Dr. Alfred Valdmanis, a Latvian economist who shrewdly made a point of always gravely addressing Joey as “my premier.” This is non-fiction.
As an inspired piece of fiction Wayne has Sheilagh Fielding travel with Joey and the Latvian deal-maker, apparently sleeping three to a bed, as she reports in her newspaper column:
As for your premier and your director-general of economic development, dear reader, they will often lie awake, late into the night, side by side in their pyjamas, their hands behind their heads, talking, planning strategies, devising schemes. To think that the most masterful of which to date may have had their origins in pillow talk!
“We will dot Conception Bay with factories,” your premier said the other night. I, too, lay there, listening, wondering if I had perhaps misjudged them.
They are a lively, fun-loving pair who betimes will while away the hours playing “pedals,” a Latvian children’s game in which two participants lying flat on their backs at opposite ends of a bed, with their hands behind their heads, place the soles of their bare feet together and “pedal” each other like bicycles, the object of the game being to pedal one’s opponent off the bed, though my premier and the Latvian are so evenly matched that neither can budge the other and they pedal themselves into a state of mutual exhaustion, then fall asleep.
Brilliant! You can see why, when we turned the book down, it went on to win numerous prizes, to gain ecstatic reviews (“Wayne Johnston is a brilliant and accomplished writer,” said E. Annie Proulx, and “As beautiful and imaginative as writing gets,” said David Macfarlane, in the Globe and Mail), and to establish Wayne as one of Canada’s best writers, a rank that has been confirmed by subsequent books such as Baltimore’s Mansion (1999), The Navigator of New York (2001), and The Son of a Certain Woman (2013).
Raised in Newfoundland, Wayne now makes his home in Toronto, where his cheery face makes him a welcome presence in his neighbourhood. As anyone who has met him at an authors’ festival will tell you, he’s a great storyteller in person. Here’s one story, about his return to Newfoundland as writer-in-residence at Memorial University.
He was the third writer in the post, so the professor behind the still-young program was very keen that everything should go well. Wayne soon got an excited phone call from him with the great news that the Dean himself had invited both of them to lunch. It was made clear to Wayne that he had to be on his best behaviour … the future of the program depended on the lunch going smoothly.
And so it did, at first. Because lunch was at a grand old St. John’s hotel with a traditional menu, both Wayne and the professor politely ordered the cod’s cheeks on the menu. They were both working their way through this delicacy, chatting politely with the Dean himself, when Wayne saw the professor turn red, and hunch his shoulders a little. Concerned, Wayne asked him if he was all right. He waved a hand dismissively, as if to say, “Yes, I’m fine, don’t worry about me.” But he got even redder, and hunched even more. “Are you choking?” Wayne asked in alarm. The professor tried to wave away the question, not wanting, at any cost, to disturb this important lunch. But as Wayne pressed the question, he finally, very sheepishly, nodded. Wayne sounded the alarm about a man choking here, and as if by magic, a flying squad of waiters descended on the table, and dragged the victim away, his feet trailing. All eyes followed them to the kitchen.
A short time later the professor returned. He was no longer red-faced. In fact, he was a little pale, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “My goodness,” he said in wonder, “these boys know how to deal with that.”
And so the man who had been willing to sacrifice his life to preserve the writer-in-residence program lived to look after it for another year. His fondness for cod’s cheeks may, however, have been lost forever.
The famous journalist and historian Richard Gwyn became a Newfoundlander by marriage. His beloved wife, Sandra (author of such fine books as The Private Capital), was the creator of the phrase praising Newfoundland’s astonishing cultural scene as “flowers on the rock.” This recognized the achievements of old Newfoundlanders like the painter Maurice Cullen and the poet E.J. Pratt (who was a colleague of Northrop Frye at Toronto’s Victoria University), even before the explosion of writing talent with Lisa Moore, Michael Crummey, Michael Winter, Kathleen Winter, and others, worth a whole book in themselves. Even after Sandra’s death Richard kept the faith with Newfoundland, where he and Carol Bishop Gwyn still live every summer.
His superb 1971 biography of Joey is singled out for special thanks by Wayne Johnston at the end of his novel with the words “I acknowledge a special debt to D.W. Prowse’s A History of Newfoundland … and to Richard Gwyn’s Small
wood: The Unlikely Revolutionary.” I happen to know that Richard is not completely happy about how extensively his book was used in the novel, although he has made no formal complaint. I followed my recent rereading of Wayne’s book by rereading Richard’s well-researched account, and was struck by the problems of patrolling this area. I’d urge you to take a look at both books, and see what you think.
One of the finest things about Richard Gwyn’s book is that he pays full tribute to the man who introduced me to Newfoundland, my author and friend Harold Horwood. I devote a whole chapter in my Stories About Storytellers to the amazing Harold, whom I describe as a “Neglected Genius.” He played a huge role as Joey’s “left-hand man” in the campaign to join Canada, one of the so-called “Bolsheviks” around him. Then Harold was elected to represent Labrador in the Smallwood government. After he broke with Joey in 1951, Gwyn quotes him once describing Smallwood as “a mountebank … with an inferiority complex the size of Signal Hill.” Harold’s role as a “fierce critic as a columnist for the Evening Telegram” so infuriated Smallwood that he approached the paper to offer them the provincial printing contract — worth many, many dollars — if they would drop Harold’s column. They refused.
If publishing The Corvette Navy opened some doors for me in St. John’s, editing Cassie Brown’s Death on the Ice has opened just about every door in Newfoundland. I’ve told the story of how Cassie, a young woman from the southwest of the Rock, became a reporter, a columnist, and a playwright in St. John’s. At some point she became fascinated by the story of the great Newfoundland sealing disaster of 1914 (and the “Newfoundland” tag applies twice, since the seventy-eight men who died on the ice were off the sealing ship Newfoundland, and the disaster was the worst in the history of the island). She started to read everything she could dig up on the event — court records, memoirs, and other documents — and then interviewed the few survivors she could find.
Then, out of the blue, she sent it in to me as a potential book. I didn’t get it wrong this time; I didn’t turn her manuscript down. But I didn’t accept it, either. I told her that it was much too short to make a book, and she would need to dig up more about the weather records, and about the ships involved, and research the living conditions aboard … and so on. And then we would see. Usually when an author gets a letter full of troublesome requests like that, the book never happens. The author decides that life’s too short. But Cassie Brown — silver-haired Cassie Brown with the straight-backed bearing of a queen — didn’t give up. She buckled down to the challenge, so that by the end she had spent two full years researching the book, and a full year writing it.
When the revised version came in, I was ecstatic. I quickly brought Harold Horwood (a superb writer, sprung from a line of sealing skippers) to contribute to the project, and his enthusiasm for what we were creating was total: “Death on the Ice is the most moving story I have ever read. I am proud to have played some small part in preparing it for preparation” is how he ends his Introduction. I even hired a young fellow (hey, this was 1972) named David Blackwood to create the perfect cover, showing the lost party on the ice. The original print hangs in our house today, thanks to the generosity of David Blackwood, the young printmaker in the leather apron.
The 1972 book became a classic, known to everyone in Newfoundland, and many far beyond. The year of my last visit, 2014, marked the 100th anniversary of the disaster. In The Rooms, the combined art gallery and museum and provincial archives high on the hill above St. John’s near the basilica, there was a special display devoted to the disaster. A moving short film by the NFB, “54 Hours” (named for the hours the soaked, freezing men were left stranded on the heaving icefield), written by my admirable friend Michael Crummey, a man with talents galore, played on a continuous loop. Meanwhile photos of the men on the ice, and the corpses being brought in to St. John’s, flickered on the wall opposite. Downstairs, in the bookstore, copies of Cassie’s book were piled up, still adorned by David Blackwood’s cover. I turned to the description on the back, and recognized it. I had written it in 1972, and it was still going strong.
Once, on an Adventure Canada Cruise down the Labrador coast, I had the eerie experience of talking about this tragedy, soon after we had sailed over the sealing grounds off the northwestern tip of Newfoundland. This meant that we had just sailed over the bones of the drowned men from the Newfoundland who had dropped off the ice and were listed as “died and never found”: Henry Jordan, David Locke, Michael Murray, Art Mouland, “Uncle Ezra” Melendy, Henry Dowden, James Howell, Philip Holloway.
Say the names.
If you’re interested in pursuing this further, it’s possible for a visitor to walk a few blocks to see where this tragedy hit St. John’s. Just south of the War Memorial on Duckworth Street (beside the steps to the Crow’s Nest, and near the larger-than-life statues to the Newfoundland dog, and its rival, the Labrador dog) you’re looking at the pier where 10,000 horrified people gathered to see the Bellaventure returning the stacked corpses of the frozen sealers. Just west of there, on Water Street, you’ll find the King George V Institute (the foundation stone, apparently, was laid by the king in Buckingham Palace by means of “an electrical current,” on the day of his coronation in 1910). The institute served as a hospital for the frostbitten sealers who survived. Its swimming pool was used to thaw out the seventy bodies of those men and boys who did not.
It was such a hammer blow to Newfoundland that the outbreak of the First World War later that year seemed almost an anticlimax. Indeed, the story of Death on the Ice is so central to Newfoundland that in his novel about Joey Smallwood’s life, Wayne Johnston has devoted many powerful pages to Joey’s memories of sailing as a journalist on the Newfoundland that fateful year, and watching helplessly from the ship, because “Captain Kean was adamant that if I set foot on the ice, I would no longer have the use of his telegrapher.” In Johnston’s telling, Joey Smallwood’s horror at what he sees onboard ship, out of the porthole, and from the deck of the returning ship as the corpses are unloaded in St. John’s, apparently led him to take up the Socialist cause.
It’s a powerful story, and the scenes of the frozen men on the ice are unforgettable. It’s also fine fiction. Let me stress that: Joey Smallwood was born on Christmas Eve, 1900. When the Newfoundland disaster occurred in spring 1914, he was thirteen years old.
There can be no quibbling about the symbolic importance of the event to all Newfoundlanders. Farley Mowat quotes one old man saying, “It seems to me as something broke in the heart of our old island that spring of 1914 and never rightly healed again in after times.”
Turning to Farley Mowat, Harold Horwood, as so often, is my point of entry. When he still lived near St. John’s, at Beachy Cove, Harold would have his good friend and fellow naturalist Farley stay with him. The visitor so loved the caressing sea breezes that he would stroll the beach in a pair of stout boots — and nothing else. This scandalized the local fishermen. There were complaints. Farley strode on. This, after all, is the man who once declared that to sell more books he would happily do handstands in his kilt in any town square in Canada. Compared to that (and of course he wore his kilt dangerously untrammelled) why should he care about a few prudish Newfoundland fishermen — normally a contradiction in terms — averting their eyes in shock.
When Farley’s long and creative life came to an end in May 2014, I was asked by a number of radio and TV programs to speak about his amazing career. Such interviews are always hurried and unprepared and, in my case, often inexpert. I feel that I did not do Farley justice, and would like to do better now.
Farley Mowat (1921–2014)
Mind you, in his ninety-three years Farley led so many lives, and produced so many books of so many sorts, that he deserves a whole book. In fact he already has one, a fine biography entitled simply Farley: The Life of Farley Mowat (2002), by James King. It is an informative, balanced look at a fascinating character, and I found much the
re that surprised me. For example, who knew that Farley’s father, Angus, a prominent librarian, was also, in effect, a bigamist who set up a rival household with another woman and enlisted his son in a conspiracy of silence against his mother?
There are so many Farleys — son, naturalist, soldier, sailor, possibly tinker (but with no recorded tailoring or candlestick-making), Northerner, husband, historian, environmentalist, biographer, children’s book author, father, controversialist, nationalist, enthusiastic celebrant, friend, and many more — that it is hard to write about the whole life of the whole man. So I plan to see him through the prism of Newfoundland.
His 1989 book, The New Founde Land, which I was proud to publish at McClelland & Stewart, speaks in the Introduction of his determination one day to produce “a magnum opus about the Rock and its people. One day I was bemoaning my failure to Newfoundlander and fellow writer Harold Horwood. He brought me up short.
“‘Farley,’ he snapped in his waspish way. ‘Don’t be so bloody dense! You’ve already written your “Great Book” about us, but you’ve been flinging the pieces of it about like so much confetti. All you need to do is gather the bits together. Why don’t you just get on with it?’”
And so he did.
The book is an updated collection of his best writing about the province down through the decades. It begins magnificently:
Newfoundland is of the sea. A mighty granite stopper thrust into the bell-mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, it turns its back upon the American continent, barricading itself behind the three-hundred-mile-long rampart that forms its western coast. Its other coasts all face the open ocean, and are so slashed and convoluted with bays, inlets, runs, and fiords that they present more than five thousand miles of shoreline to the sweep of the Atlantic. Everywhere the hidden reefs and rocks (called, with dreadful explicitness, “sunkers”) wait to rip the bellies of unwary vessels. Nevertheless, these coasts are a seaman’s world, for the harbours and havens they offer are numberless.
Across Canada by Story Page 33