Memoir

by Farley Mowat

  Communications between Dudley and me that summer were suc cinct and infrequent. In mid-summer I wrote:

  Working on a novel. Max holds what’s left of the advance from River and doles it out parsimoniously. I’ll bet you’d love to give me another advance on the next book? I’ll bet!

  And again, in September:

  Dear Dudley:

  It is to weep!

  Corn borers, potato weevils, cabbage maggots, flea beetles, tomato worms, and grasshoppers are not enough for me to deal with? You want me to write some children’s books, a novel, and – yuck – another book about the arctic too?

  Yuck is what my Eskimo pal Ohoto always said when things got too much to bear.

  Well, the novel is progressing – about 200 pages in rough draft – but still pretty nebulous.

  It is set in Brochet – a small and very isolated northern community peopled by two Indian races, mixed-breeds of every degree, and a small group of whites including missionaries, free traders, H.B.C. traders, white trappers, and renegades.

  The general theme is what happens to the taut balance between these groups when a small group of Canadian soldiers is dumped in by air in 1946 to establish a weather station and spy outpost.

  Where does it go from here? God alone knows. When the first half dozen chapters are in better shape I’ll send them along and you can draw your own conclusions.

  I have considered your suggestion (or was it not mine?) of a boys’ book. A book for young minds might do more to disseminate the truth about what has been going on in the north than can be dealt with by old and warty minds. So I will shortly send you an outline for a boys’ book.

  We took our annual holiday last week. Two days in Toronto. A movie, a Chinese dinner, and a ride on a streetcar. Fran, by the by, will be teaching at S.S. No. 12 this winter. It’s a one-room schoolhouse on a lonely side road a couple of miles from us and will have something between five and eight students, mostly kids from the Catholic Children’s Aid in Toronto who have been farmed out – literally – to impoverished local families. She’ll get $40.00 a month, which will help keep us eating, if she can hack it. Wood stove for heat, but it does have an indoor john – a hole in the floor of the back hall, or rather 2 holes, one for boys and one for gals.

  We had had a good spring and summer and were slowly growing into the place and it into us. Repairing the damage done to the land by our predecessors was a priority. That spring Fran and I planted seven hundred young trees on our blighted hill – broad-leafed trees and conifers in what I thought was something like the original mix when this had still been primal forest.

  I was determined to ensure lots of water so for a dollar I bought a battered, antique, horse-drawn drag bucket from a nearby farmer who had abandoned it in favour of a tractor. Then with Lulu’s and Fran’s help I began excavating a pond at the edge of the swamp. Fran drove the jeep, dragging the heavy iron scoop, which looked a bit like a giant sugar scoop except that instead of a single handle it was fitted with two stout wooden arms to which I clung while trying to steer the monster, and with which I could theoretically tip it up-and-over when it had dragged its load of muck out of the hole.

  This was hot and heavy work. Lulu had a tendency to jolt forward, causing the wooden arms to sometimes heave me clean off my feet and catapult me over the bucket to land up to my ears in the slurry.

  I also built a writing cabin that summer where I could sweat my brain instead of my muscles, and where I could mutter and curse without distressing Fran or the dogs, of which we now had three – Tegpa-the-Second and two of her male pups, Kipmik and Ohoto.

  All the dogs showed remarkable tolerance for a vixen who was rearing a litter of cubs in a rock pile on our hill. No dog-fox was ever in evidence (I suspect he had been shot by one of the many hunters from Toronto who plagued the township). Kipmik would sometimes visit her den, very circumspectly, and we had seen him actually sniffing an especially forward fox cub, without the lurking vixen offering to interfere.

  The garden tended to dominate our lives. The abundance and vigorous growth of our crop gave us the illusion we were wizards. It seemed we had but to throw seed of any kind in the ground, then stand back. I had doubled the size of the garden, which doubled the amount of work I had to put into it and trebled Fran’s efforts to preserve a crop big enough to feed a dozen hungry mouths.

  I particularly remember the Jerusalem artichokes. These tall, tough plants produce tubers that resemble dog droppings and probably have about the same nutritional value. The artichokes grew like wildfire and became a royal pain, not only because they were practically inedible but they were also virtually ineradicable. Even now – sixty years after I let them loose – they are still thriving even though all other vestiges of that garden have long since vanished.

  Early in the autumn the gods of Modernity waved their wands and electricity came to us. As can be supposed, it revolutionized our way of life. Now we had running water – including running hot water; a bathtub that did not have to be filled and emptied with a bucket; and an indoor toilet that flushed. Or that could be flushed. However, since no sewer existed to which the toilet could be connected it remained out of action until I found the cash to buy a huge discarded oil tank to serve as a septic tank. I had it trucked to our place, dug an enormous hole in which to bury it and then a long trench to house the connecting pipe.

  The evening I completed this task we celebrated by enjoying a ceremonial indoor flush.

  But it rained all night – poured cats and dogs – and next morning when I looked out the window I beheld the septic tank in all its austere majesty floating on a pond of the rain’s making. The tank had risen out of the earth like some spectral elevator because, as Lloyd happily pointed out, I had neglected to “pile a jeezly big pile of big rocks onto it to hold it down till it was pissed full.”

  Summer had been full of manual labours but I still managed to get a lot of writing done.

  Dear Dudley: Nov. 29, 1951

  SatEvePost has bought a third yarn from me and Maclean’s has bought a second one. The latter is about two guys wintering in a cabin away up north who got bushed and killed each other. No women, and hardly what you’d call a happy ending! Anyhow Maclean’s has now commissioned a third piece, to be published next spring.

  When I can’t sleep at night I am reading Fowler’s Modern English Usage on how to get rid of “thats.” News that should cheer the hearts of you and your staff.

  I recently got a telegram from Atlantic Monthly Magazine wanting photos of me for the cover of their January issue, in which they say there will be an excerpt from People of the Deer.

  Me on the cover? Who do they think I am? Lana Turner? But please tell them: no more telegrams. You can’t have the slightest idea what happens when a telegram hits Palgrave. Blacksmiths drop their horses! Millers, their mills. The village drunk is sober in the twinkling of an eye. Church bells peal out as if the Huns were coming. Then the whole bloody works come screaming over the Albion hills yelling: “Mr. Morfat! Mr. Morfat!… Come quick; somebody’s dead!”

  Yours in faith.

  F.

  Dear Dudley: Dec. 13, 1951

  You ask about us being able to come south for a visit around publication date. Well, Fran has quit the teaching trade so we are now available any time.

  She has been muttering about Boston for two years so nothing short of the flux will stop her coming like a shot. To be honest I wouldn’t take much persuading either.

  Sorry if you have trouble reading this. My “liberated” Italian typewriter is on its last legs and I can’t get ribbons that fit him. Guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and buy a new typewriter though, as you doubtless realize, I can’t really afford such a luxury.

  Cheers for now.

  F.

  Fran gave up teaching partly because her two Grade Eight students were fifteen-year-old male wards of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society who became such ferocious competitors for her favours she was afraid they might kill o
ne another, or her; and partly because she now thought (again mistakenly) that she was pregnant; it was illegal to teach in an Ontario public school while pregnant.

  I did bite the bullet. I bought a new Underwood Standard for eighty dollars – a horrendous sum at that time. As happy as if it was a Rolls-Royce Phantom, I wrote to Dudley, revelling in the fact that what I typed was now generally legible.

  Dear Dudley: Dec. 24, 1951

  Much excitement at the prospect of a trip to Boston. Your kind offer to take us under your wing is greatly appreciated. As to costs – it all depends. If we travel by dog team they will be low, though I don’t really know the cost offish [dog feed] in the little towns en route. If we should decide to come by train I will ascertain the toll and let you know.

  Sorry you are against the hero of my boys’ book being a half-breed. I’ve polled a number of prospective younger readers and all like the idea. But then it is their parents who will buy the books, I suppose. My own parents have just adopted a five-year-old laddie named John whose mother is white and father is Indian but, and I say this without malice or smugness, we seem to have less feeling about “colour” up here.

  Maclean’s wants an article about some rather fantastic experiences I had toward and after the end of the war in Europe. In looking over the material, I was forcibly reminded that it had always been my intention to do a war book, if only as an antidote to the adolescent literary bullshit which has come to be accepted in North America as the soldier’s view of World War II.

  The early months of 1952 would see the publication in Atlantic Monthly of three excerpts from People of the Deer. A foretaste of the jubilation that would be mine came on January 24 when I received an advance copy of the book itself. I wrote exultantly to my editor.

  Dear Dudley:

  A virginal POD was waiting at the post office yesterday. By 8:00 P.M. Fran and I had staked a claim on the Park Plaza bar in Toronto and the wolves were howling!

  Excelsior! And Eureka! It is, in truth, one hell of a fine job of book-making you’ve all done and by God I’m proud as hell to be F. Mowat. There’ll never be another moment like this one. Thank you, friends.

  By way of a small return I can report progress with the second draft of the boys’ book. Four new chapters done, so the plug is out and I hope to bring you a complete MS when we come down.

  The editor-in-chief of Michael Joseph in London has written a glowing letter confirming that they are going to publish POD in England. I am well into its follow-up, a version of my Barrenlands journal book that should give the reader a better idea of the non-human elements of the Barrens – the birds and the bees as it were. I have no desire to become an arctic specialist, but first I have to get that country out of my literary system.

  I’m banging away at a wolf chapter for it and we’ll see if Max can sell that as a magazine piece. You asked about the new book’s “specific purpose.” Well, I guess it’s an attempt to reconnect mankind (i.e., the poor bloody reader) with Mama Nature.… I’d like it to reveal a little truth about the usually misunderstood, much-maligned, yet tremendously attractive relatives of ours ranging from lemmings to loons and everything in between. Comprenez-vous? Maybe I’m being Schweitzerish. Sanctity of Life and all that. Why not? I’ve seen enough of the other side, God knows.

  I’ll work on this till March 2 which is D-Day for us. Departure Day. The Saturday night train from Toronto gets us to Boston Sunday at 9:00 A.M. Fare is $56 per bod return, not counting berths. Does this suit?

  Could you let me know the sched for the promotional trip to New York? If your people could find us a small room in an inexpensive little hotel then we might stay on in N.Y. a few days after the Little Brown men (are they really little brown folk?) of the advertising department are through with us. At our own expense, of course.

  The official publication date for People of the Deer was February 26, but review copies had been sent out a month earlier, and the first review appeared on February 24 in the New York Times Review of Books. Written by a schoolteacher who, in the 1930s, had spent part of a summer canoeing north of Reindeer Lake, it was dismissive of my venture.

  This review was followed by an outright attack on me in The Beaver, the house organ of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in which I was accused of being a know-nothing, if not an outright liar.

  Max hastened to warn me that these first reactions had ruffled a lot of feathers at Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown and Company.

  Atlantic is getting irate letters from so-called northern experts claiming you are full of it. Maybe that should be past tense because a hell of a lot of “it” seems to have already hit the fan.

  You may have to hunker down in a slit trench for a while. But have no fear. Not only is the Lord righteous, He is also a bibliophile and will doubtless come to your rescue. Meantime the publicity generated by these lummoxes will rebound upon them by selling lots of books for us.

  As I wrote to Dudley, the roof seemed to be falling in.

  Your three telegrams and letter arrived yesterday. Not quite a bolt from the blue, but like enough. The balloon is going up and it is a mite scary. Seems I have taken on some rather imposing adversaries: the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, the Government of Canada, and at least one very large and wealthy business corporation.

  Wonder if I’ll get crucified. Or just boiled in oil. I’m even wondering if my proposed boys’ book might bring the World Institute for Child Welfare down on my neck too.

  The raking over the coals in the New York Times is actually pretty trivial. Its author makes me out to be untrustworthy mainly because he claims I have mistranslated some Chipewyan place names and have neglected to list every previous white man to have found his way into the Barrenlands, including himself although he never got closer than its southern edge.

  I’ve pounded out a reply which I’ll get off to the editor of the Times Review in a couple of days. Maybe they’ll publish it – maybe not. It ends like this:

  Mr. Downes evidently feels I should have written a scholarly compendium of facts about this obscure part of the world. Let me put him straight. I am no pedant and make no claim to being a scholar. Abstract facts, real or contrived, selected to serve a purpose, do not concern me half as much as do the stories of living people and the difficulties they encounter in trying to survive.

  This is what my book is all about.

  I’ve also enclosed a reply to The Beaver piece. This is a different matter. I’ve taken the H.B.C. to task in no uncertain manner so they have every reason to counterattack. Don’t know how it will end. An individual has never successfully taken on the H.B.C. (Here Before Christ, it’s called in the arctic), though many have tried. This Beaver piece is a warning shot across our bows. When they’ve seen the whole book they’ll bring up the big guns, so stand by for action!

  See you Sunday, and it won’t be in church.

  F.

  On March 2 Fran and I caught the night train from Toronto. Jeannette and Dudley welcomed us at the Boston station. Dudley was an expansive, pipe-smoking Labrador, while Jeannette was an effusive and well-coiffed chow. Instead of parking us in a hotel, they gave us the run of their own warren in an ancient building on venerable Pickney Street and treated us as rare birds from another world.

  Next day at a cocktail party in our honour, we were exhibited to the staffs of Atlantic Monthly and Atlantic Press, whose curiosity about us seemed as great as if we had come from Patagonia. Most knew little about Canada but were very curious about the “North,” which word they pronounced as if with a capital N.

  Anxious to oblige, I told stories about Eskimo life and entertained with demonstrations of Eskimo string figures. Some of these were very explicit, especially one called (my translation): Horny-dog-screwing-snotty-bitch-whose-feet-are-froze-to-the-ice.

  We were also put on display at a glittering dinner party given by Arthur Thornhill, president of Little, Brown and Company, for Boston’s publishing elite. Arthur was of the bull mastiff type, with
bloodshot eyes and bad halitosis. He did not endear himself to me with his introductory speech, which began:

  “We at Little, Brown believe writers are of considerable importance …”

  To make up for this, Dudley, who was a dedicated woodworker, took me to his favourite tool shop where I blew most of our budget on Swedish-steel handsaws and English-made wood chisels.

  Jeannette took Fran to Fileen’s Bargain Basement in downtown Boston, where my wife was mesmerized by a plethora of marked-down goodies culled from the giant department store’s vast selection but had not the wherewithal to do much about it.

  After three days of being fêted in Boston, we were put on another train and sent to New York, where we were astonished and somewhat intimidated to find ourselves booked into the Algonquin Hotel, the venerable establishment that was the favourite watering place for such luminaries as the New Yorker’s Dorothy Parker and James Thurber and for visiting literary giants from overseas. We were suitably impressed, although most of our stay was spent shuttling between bookstores and radio stations (television was then still in diapers even in New York), enduring an early version of what would become the ritual book promotion tour of later years.

  We enjoyed one memorable evening with Max Wilkinson, an ebullient if somewhat lecherous lamb in wolf’s clothing. On our final evening we were guests of honour at a dinner party held in the Algonquin’s renowned Oak Room. In attendance were several free-loading literary critics who, as I noted in my journal:

  … gave me a royal pain, patronizing Fran and me to a fare-thee-well while making it clear Canada and Canadians were of less concern to the Master Race than Hottentots were to the British Raj. One fat-assed bastard actually proposed this toast: “Someday your little country may get to join the States – something it should have done a couple hundred years ago.”

  By the time Fran and I got home to Albion, the frost was coming out of the ground and the 30th side road was again impassable. Nevertheless, this was a wonderful spring. The skies were high and bright, and the returning sun warmed everybody’s blood, including that of our resident fox snake who, having hibernated in the foundation of our fireplace chimney, now came out the wrong hole to find himself in our living room. There he cowed our dogs and gave Fran a bad few moments, buzzing his tail and baring non-existent fangs as he pretended to be a rattlesnake.