Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (11 page)

Long before it was summer I had decided this place was warm enough to stay a while. By then I was working for Jack McClelland, Canadian publishing legend, lover of fine writing and Scotch whisky, rakish World War II hero, self-deprecating boy-man with all the charm and enthusiasm of Rhett Butler in his finest moments. He thought I should learn about Canada by reading Canadian writers. Besides, he pointed out, his company was called “The Canadian Publishers,” and how the hell
would I manage in the editorial department if I knew nothing about the country? “It’s the price of admission,” he claimed.

I began with Gabrielle Roy, whose strong, isolated heroines spoke of loneliness and betrayal. I went on to Lucy Maud Montgomery and the Anne of Green Gables books, so much less challenging than Roy but pleasant enough, and I determined to go to Prince Edward Island right after I had breathed in the scent of the tall grass on Roy’s Prairies. Stephen Leacock proved to be a cheerful if often acerbic companion through the next couple of evenings, then I took off for the Arctic with Farley Mowat and Halifax with Thomas Raddall. I struggled through Frederick Philip Grove, and told Jack I found him plodding and difficult. He suggested I abandon the effort and read Margaret Laurence instead. I had already read
A Jest of God
in England but hadn’t known she was Canadian. I stayed up nights reading everything else she had written. Then it was Earle Birney, from “David” to the newest
Selected Poems
, and Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Brian Moore, Peter Newman, Pierre Berton.

I discovered Yorkville in its late sixties folk music glory, and Kensington Market, where a Hungarian delicatessen sold Debreceni sausages next to Chinese fruit
stores and used clothing boutiques. I hiked the ravines and explored the lakeshore near the Scarborough Bluffs.

Around this time, McClelland and Stewart’s editorial department was ghosting a textbook on Canadian history by a well-liked teacher. We had been promised a province-wide book purchase if we submitted the manuscript within two weeks. The problem was, the teacher couldn’t write. There were four of us working on creating a manuscript from notes he had produced. My chapters owed considerable credit (unacknowledged to this day) to Pierre Berton, Peter Newman and the most recent addition to my nighttime Canadiana reading, Donald Creighton. “The real Dean of Canadian history,” Jack had called him, but I enjoyed Berton’s stories much more than Creighton’s.

The first Pierre Berton manuscript I read was
The National Dream
. Then I worked backwards through
Klondike
and
The Smug Minority
. In person Berton was intimidating, too large, too solid; he proclaimed rather than talked. But he was thunderously enthusiastic about stories—all-Canadian tales with quirky, wild-eyed heroes and men who believed that just about anything could be done if you put your mind to it.

Then I graduated to
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
and
The Incomparable Atuk
. I fell in love with Mordecai Richler. I laughed through most of those novels. “Jack, you didn’t tell me Canadian writers were funny!”

“Funny? Wait till you read
Cocksure
—you’ve just been in London, right?”

In person, Richler was rumpled and grumpy, but I learnt how to sit quietly with him in the Roof Bar of the Park Plaza Hotel, trying to match him drink for drink until he began to talk to me. “Are you sure you want to be in publishing?” he asked. “Can’t see why.” But when his manuscript for
St. Urbain’s Horseman
landed at McClelland and Stewart, he actually asked me what I thought.

I read Margaret Atwood’s poetry and her first fiction manuscript,
The Edible Woman
. When I met her, I was amazed at how small and fragile she was for a woman with such a powerful and uncompromising voice. She wore a long skirt made of some thin material and a shawl over her head against the cold. Her editor, Pamela Fry, told me Atwood might read my palm. In a small coffee shop on Yorkville she looked at my hand, but it was too dark to see, she said. Maybe another time. I was quite sure she had seen nothing remarkable and decided to spare me. I was
beginning to think that most Canadians were kinder than other people I had met on my travels.

Earle Birney was in his late sixties when he loped into the office demanding to see the young woman Jack McClelland had dared put in charge of his newest book of poems. He was tall, thin, almost gaunt, with sparse white hair, a beard that left his chin naked, and long, strong-fingered hands that grabbed the edge of the desk as he examined my face for signs of trepidation. The truth is I could not be frightened by a man who had written poems (“I call them pomes,” he said.
“Poetry
is pretentious.”) that ran in circles and squares, that leapt off the edge of the page, formed chairs, buildings, even the Alaska Passage. “It is meant to be spoken. Maybe sung.” Pomes shouldn’t lie dead on the paper.

Earle had seen the whole country. He spoke of False Creek and the lights over Vancouver, the High Rockies, Newfoundland, Winnipeg and Nova Scotia, and even, lovingly, of Toronto. He talked of Louis Dudek, A.M. Klein, Paul Hiebert (he thought Sarah Binks was fine), Robertson Davies, Ralph Gustafson, Eric Nicol, George Woodcock, and the drunken binges that almost destroyed
Under the
Volcano
. He had travelled the world, written about the Delhi Road, Cuzco, Cartagena, Kyoto, Greece, met Trotsky, survived the war as a rebellious good soldier and turned the experience into his hilarious
Turvey
. “He reminds me,” I told Earle, “of the good soldier Schweik.” “And so he should,” he said. Turvey, Schweik and, later, Hawkeye were cut from the same cloth.

Irving Layton, exuberant, leonine, booming his prophetic warnings at an ever-appreciative world, told me he was born circumcised and might, in time, turn out to be the real Messiah. It was 1970, and he was in love with Aviva and in love with life. He wrote poems he believed would change the world. “Poets err or they lie. / Poems do not give us the truth but / Reveal like lightning the / forked road that leads us to it.” My grandfather had said that only poets know the truth; that dictators, if they are smart, imprison poets first because they are the ones who know and can tell.

Irving was the picture-perfect poet. He could see through man-made fog and detect what people really believed. His erotic love poems shocked the prudish. He raged against injustice, anti-Semites, Communists
who jailed writers, the Russian empire that had silenced Osip Mandelshtahm, the narrow-minded, the pitiless, the self-righteous, the categorical, the “rat-faced cunning mercers,” men whose worlds were built entirely of money, hypocrites, and those who had never read a poem.

He gave me “For Anna,” in a restaurant on Yorkville:

I debated with Farley Mowat about his book on Siberia and the true nature of Russian communism, about Stalin’s heritage. His
Never Cry Wolf
had become such a trail blazing best-seller in the Soviet Union, he was convinced the system would work, given time and trust. I wasn’t. I was afraid to tell him about the young Russian soldier I had watched die in
Budapest, and didn’t mention my experiments with firing a machine gun. The sun was too bright that day in Port Hope, and he was too ecstatic about the Russians he had met.

I had already read his
And No Birds Sang
. In 1942, when Farley was barely out of his teens, his regiment fought through the blood-soaked mountains of Italy. There was no time to bury the dead. His war made my revolution look like child’s play.

It was Farley who insisted I would never know Canada until I had been to the Arctic.

When Matt Cohen entered my life, I was beginning to feel settled in Toronto. He handed me his manuscript for
Johnny Crackle Sings
, and was stunned that I loved it. He was a gawky young man, around my own age, painfully shy, uncertain of his talent but sure he was already a writer. We drank wine at the Inn on the Park and debated God and Maimonides, German determinism, discussed George Grant’s
Lament for a Nation
, Camus, Sartre and his circle of sycophants, and what was the reason for literature. When, at his request, I edited
The Disinherited
, I felt as if I had lived in southern Ontario forever; all his people seemed to be kin.

Later, when I drove through the area north of Kingston, hardscrabble farming land, I recognized Matt’s landscape. I thought I saw Richard Thomas striding from an old stone barn towards the gabled farmhouse, and maybe Erik and Brian and, in the distance, running towards the town, Kitty Malone.

I met Al Purdy in front of his house in Ameliasburg. It was early evening, the day turning orange around the trees. I had been sitting in the back of Jack McClelland’s Mustang convertible, my knees scrunched under my chin, leaning forward to hear Jack and Harold Town planning how to approach Purdy with the proposition for a new book of love poetry to be illustrated by Harold. Harold was one of Canada’s most celebrated and outspoken artists, and Jack’s close friend. My role was to be a kind of peacemaker, someone who could bridge the gap between the poet and the artist. It’s good to have an outsider for this, Jack suggested; both men have giant egos, both are irascible, but if they can agree to work together, the book will be brilliant. Irving Layton’s
Love Where the Nights are Long
had been such a critical success that another such book, this time by Purdy, could not fail.

Al poured drinks—vodka for Jack, Scotch for Harold—and we headed towards the lake. It was a
pleasant Ontario fall day, birds getting ready to fly south. The cool air would help us think, or somesuch. Jack wore an Irish knit pullover, Harold had a big batwing cloak he whipped around his shoulders, and Eurithe (Al’s very quiet wife) gave me a soft, embroidered shawl. I remember sitting on a tree stump for what seemed like hours while the battle raged between Harold and Al about the relative merits of their contributions to such a book, Harold pacing about in the succulent mud near the lake, Al leaning back on his heels, big hands fisted, like a fighter. Jack swore. I said little.

The argument festered as we marched back to the house. I slept in the loft overlooking the red lantern by whose light they were still arguing, and in the morning, insanely early, we headed off, in silence, to Toronto.

“He is not,” Harold asserted when Jack dropped him off at his house near Castle Frank subway station, “a romantic poet.”

I disagreed.

“Why in hell didn’t you say so earlier?” Jack asked. “Not much sense in your having a point of view now, is there?”

There wasn’t. But I hadn’t yet acquired the confidence to join in arguments about Canadian poetry.

Al’s book was published a couple of years later:
Love in a Burning Building
, some of the most moving love poetry in the world. The book had no drawings by Harold.

My first sight of the Rocky Mountains was on the way to Banff from Calgary. I asked the driver to stop, and walked alongside the car so I could watch the mountains grow, slowly, as we approached. Sure, there had been the Tatras in northern Hungary, and Mount Cook on the South Island of New Zealand; but I had never seen mountains till the Rockies hove into view and grew to their monstrous height around me. They make you understand how insignificant you are. They put your life in perspective. They were also the perfect setting for W.O. Mitchell.

I had read and loved his books during my early marathon tour through Canadian literature. He was now holding court for a small group of creative-writing students in the cafeteria of the Banff School of Fine Arts. He talked as if he had always known them, comfortable, expansive, leaning back long-legged in the too small armchair, telling them about writing in Canada. I thought I had seen most of the country by then, so I decided I’d tell him I had seen it all.

All? He started laughing. You haven’t stood on the prairie and known you were the tallest thing for hundreds of miles around, hell, you could pull the whole damn sky down over your head—that’s when you know where you belong. When I saw the Prairies, I knew what he meant.

Then I met Margaret Laurence. I think it may have been around the time of her collection of essays called
Heart of a Stranger
. She was warm, hospitable, friendly and intense, wanting to know all about where I had been and what had brought me to Canada. She talked about Africa and about living in isolation both there and in England. She knew how it felt to be out of sync with the world around you, to be a stranger, to try different ways of fitting in. Although she had written eloquently about Africa, she was not of there, wasn’t even sure exactly where “there” was. Africa is so vast, so harsh and accepting at the same time. In England she had felt lonely, a stranger, but now, back in Canada, she was not sure of her roots.

We were sitting at her kitchen table. She reached across and put her hand on mine where I had been stubbing out my cigarettes. She said I smoked too
much, that I should give myself leave to relax and settle; that Canada was even more accepting than Africa, if you allowed it to be.

She had been working on a novel she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to finish. Later, when
The Diviners
was published, I escorted her around the grounds near the Science Centre, as we both played our parts in one of Jack McClelland’s nuttier promotion efforts. There was a real water diviner, Margaret with her own divining branch, and myself with a mickey of gin, trying vainly to return the favour and keep her spirits up.

Has anyone ever had such an education in becoming a citizen?

I am not sure exactly when I knew I belonged, but I remember hearing a woman at a cocktail party in Vancouver say that Canada had produced no writers of international quality. (She may have said “world-class,” though I think that horrendous phrase hadn’t yet made its way into the language.) I was so outraged, I yelled at her and the assembled group who had been listening to her nonsense. I told her she
wouldn’t know quality if she tripped over it, and later I called Jack and asked him whether, being Hungarian, a New Zealander and British, I could join his Committee for an Independent Canada.