Eastern Passage (9 page)
Authors: Farley Mowat
Dudley had tried to soften my reaction to this bad news by pointing out that Little, Brown might not be willing to publish my book at all if I insisted on being “obdurate” and demanding that the original publication date be adhered to.
The prospect of postponement was hard enough to bear. Worse followed in the next paragraph, where Dudley firmly scotched my hopes for co-publication with a Canadian company. Little, Brown, he wrote, “was adamantly opposed to relinquishing any portion of its exclusive North American rights.” It intended to distribute the book in Canada under its own imprint, possibly but not necessarily through McClelland & Stewart. Furthermore, if I insisted on a Canadian imprint, Little, Brown could be expected to suspend publication “indefinitely.”
Dudley refrained from telling me to shut up and back off but Max had no such compunctions. When he heard about this contretemps he wrote:
“If you insist on being difficult you had better find yourself another agent.”
Something else was on his mind too. Both he and Dudley had been trying to interest me in writing an “action
novel”
about the north. “That,” Max insisted, “would be as good as finding gold up there, could actually
be
about finding gold and could result in all of us finding a useful chunk of gold down here.”
I now began to pull in my horns and wrote to Dudley.
Dear Dudley: May 12, 1951
I guess your decisions about timing and about Canadian publication must prevail. Hell’s bells, what do I know about the publishing business? And what could I do if I did?
One thing I do agree with is that the name
, River of Men,
won’t do. There have been too damn many Rivers published recently, but here is the best I can offer as an alternative
.
The Desperate People
Inuit Ku (River of Men in Eskimo)
People of the Deer
Plains of Kaila
Blood of the Barrens (Zane Grey would like that one)
.
I have a number of small corrections to make on the setting copy for What’s Its Name. However, there will no doubt be plenty of time to do that before Little, Brown publishes the book – if and when…
.
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 one 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
.