Literary Review of Canada Vol. 16, No. 10.

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Homeless History Charlotte Gray on the uncertain fate of Canada’s Portrait Gallery

I nside this issue

Biography Bonanza Roger Hill

Pierre Berton Judy Stoffman

Nellie McClung & Emily Carr Ray Conlogue

Christopher Plummer & William Shatner

Arthur Schafer

The End of Ethics?

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Robert McGhee on Siberian settlers + Trina McQueen on Christina McCall + Peter Dinsdale on truth and reconciliation + Charles Wilkins on the mysteries of Darien + Sharon Butala on Louis Riel’s grandmaman fiction Reviews by Sam Solecki and Anne-Marie Todkill poetry Julia McCarthy, David Clink, Tom Wayman, Alexander Offord, Florence Treadwell nonfiction

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Vol. 16, No. 10 • December 2008

Editor

Bronwyn Drainie

editor@lrcreview.com

3 Canada’s Homeless Portrait Gallery An essay Charlotte Gray

8 Witty and Wise

Robin Roger

A review of What They Wanted, by Donna Morrissey Anne Marie Todkill

17 Singing the European Blues

A review of My Life as a Dame: The Personal and the Political in the Writings of Christina McCall, by Christina McCall, edited by Stephen Clarkson Trina McQueen

9 A Different North A review of Settlers on the Edge: Identity and Modernization on Russia’s Arctic Frontier,

by Niobe Thompson Robert McGhee

11 Compromised Eden A review of The Darien Gap: Travels in the Rainforest of Panama, by Martin Mitchinson Charles Wilkins

12 Does Technology Make Us Do It? A review of The End of Ethics in a Technological Society, by Lawrence E. Schmidt with Scott Marratto Arthur Schafer

14 Darkness Then a Blown Kiss A poem David Clink

A review of Josef Škvorecký’s Ordinary Lives Sam Solecki

18 A Storyteller’s Story A review of Pierre Berton: A Biography, by A.B. McKillop Roger Hall

20 Novel Pleasures A selection of fictional journeys worth exploring Bronwyn Drainie, Robin Roger, Rosie Aiello, Anna Candido, Moira MacDougall, Helen Walsh and Mark Lovewell

22 Creating a Canadian Pantheon A review of Nellie McClung, by Charlotte Gray, and Emily Carr, by Lewis DeSoto Judy Stoffman

24 A True Canadian Hero A review of Maggie Siggins’s Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Story of Louis Riel’s Grandmother Sharon Butala

26 After the Apology A review of Where the Pavement Ends: Canada’s Aboriginal Recovery Movement and the Urgent Need for Reconciliation, by Marie Wadden Peter Dinsdale

14 Beneath Cyrillic Stars A poem Julia McCarthy

15 The Uniqueness of the Dark

A poem Alexander Offord

Associate editor

16 Rocks and Hard Places

A review of Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–51, by Kurt F. Jensen James Eayrs

15 “Bloor & Eyeless Ave.”

Anthony Westell

A poem Florence Treadwell

6 Canada’s Black Chamber

A poem Tom Wayman

Contributing Editor

15 Downtown Love

28 Delicious Canadian Ham A review of Up Till Now: The Autobiography,

by William Shatner with David Fisher, and In Spite of Myself: A Memoir, by Christopher Plummer Ray Conlogue

30 Letters & Responses David E. Smith

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Literary Review of Canada

Canada’s Homeless Portrait Gallery A historic collection falls victim to economic and intellectual uncertainty.

Charlotte Gray

L

ocked in a high-tech storage and laboratory facility in western Quebec, way beyond the sightlines of Parliament Hill, is a most intriguing collection. Inside Vault 34 at the Library and Archives Canada Preservation Centre, dozens of paintings are hung on rolling art racks, about one foot apart. Between cold cement walls, under brutal fluorescent lighting, a helpful curator rolls them out for the occasional visitor.

Eighteenth-century British soldiers rub shoulders with 20th-century musicians. Along with unsophisticated depictions painted “in the style of” or “from the school of,” there are works by well-known artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Jerry Grey and Frederick Varley. There are the “Indian kings”: life-size images of four North American Indian leaders who visited the court of Queen Anne in 1710 and were painted in ceremonial dress by Jan Verelst.

The collection also boasts thousands of Karsh prints and negatives, in which heroic individuals loom out of deep shadows.

Some of the subjects are recognizable, particularly politicians such as Wilfrid Laurier and Pierre Trudeau. Others are anonymous individuals or groups caught by photographers on the beach at Lake Winnipeg, or around a prairie grain table, or at sewing machines. You don’t have to spend much time examining the oils, watercolours, busts, statues, photographs, engravings and prints to realize that the motive underlining the core acquisitions of this collection is not their aesthetic appeal (although that is present) or even the fame of the subject. It is all about history. This is a visual record of men and women who have shaped and continue to shape the history and culture of Canada.

The sprawling collection originated in the omnivorous appetite for historical materials of Arthur George Doughty, a dapper, gregarious English immigrant who held the position of Dominion Archivist from 1904 to 1935. Disturbed at the neglect of Canada’s documentary heritage, Doughty scoured sales rooms and importuned private collectors for material to lodge in a national archive. Doughty was a friend of Mackenzie King (he may have introduced King to spiritualism), and with King’s encouragement he acquired manuscripts, including government records, transcripts of key documents in British and French archives, Charlotte Gray is the author of seven best-selling books of history and biography, and the winner of the Pierre Berton Award for popularizing Canadian history. She is an adjunct research professor in history at Carleton University.

December 2008

private papers and maps. But Doughty did not stop at written material. He also scooped up flags and trophies, posters and works of art.

The National Archives (which became Library and Archives Canada, or LAC, in 2004, when the National Archives and the National Library merged) evolved a small program to look after portraits amassed by Doughty and his successors, but the collection did not have a clear identity until 2001, when the Portrait Gallery of Canada was created. Today, the portraits occupy storage space in Gatineau, while the Portrait Gallery of Canada has a dedicated website, 26 staff and half a floor in the LAC building in downtown Ottawa. However, the portrait collection is still treated as archival material: it is embedded in the rest of LAC’s vast collection, available only to researchers. The past seven years has seen a prolonged and expensive effort to find a permanent display space for the collection. But the culture-phobic Harper Conservatives never warmed to the idea.

First they distorted the process; then, last month, they declared the whole project “on ice.”

As artworks, the quality of the pieces runs from exquisite to appalling. But as historical artifacts, each item is part of a larger story—often several larger stories. Here are the sketchbooks of George Back, the British naval officer who was part of the second overland expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1825–26. On one small page, Back caught the likeness of Egheechololle, a fur-clad Dogrib Indian with a quizzical expression. The collection also includes an 1819 miniature of shy young Demasduit, one of the last of the Beothuk people

of Newfoundland, and a watercolour from the 1840s of an anonymous young African Canadian boy, wearing a smartly buttoned jacket and a cheeky smile, in Nova Scotia. In Vault 34, an entire side of one of those rolling partitions is occupied by a 1904 full-length, Whistleresque portrait by Wilhelm Heinrich Funk of Grace Julia Lady Drummond, an imperious figure in full-length satin gown, who was the first president of the Montreal Council of Women. And carefully placed on its back in a specially constructed box is a Joe Fafard sculpture of David Suzuki, Canada’s most famous environmental scientist.

As a viewer, you lock eyes with the subject and the questions begin. What did Egheechololle think of the young naval officer who asked him to pose? Why is the young Nova Scotian so dressed up? Did Lady Drummond, a grande dame from the Square Mile, support the suffrage campaign? “People are always fascinated by other individuals,” comments Dr. Ruth Phillips, professor of art history at Carleton University and Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture. “Portraits engage you.”

The portrait collection comprises more than 20,000 works of art, 4 million photographs, 10,000 medallic and philatelic works, and several thousand caricatures. There is a disproportionate number of fine watercolours executed by the wives of British officers and Hudson Bay factors. Until recently, works by amateur artists in an unfashionable medium had little appeal for art collectors, public or private. This meant they were within the chronically stretched and utterly risible LAC acquisition budget.

There are treasures here. Eva Major-Marothy, the portrait gallery’s senior curator in charge of acquisitions and research, says that the collection “compares very favourably with other portrait gallery collections.” What makes it unique in the portrait gallery world, she suggests, “is our focus not just on the rich and famous but on men and women from all walks of life who have contributed and continue to contribute to building Canada.” So why will these treasures, which are public property, remain locked away? The answer to that question is part political, but also part existential—the whole issue of why Canadians, and particularly Canadian governments, fight shy of large statements about our culture and our history.

F

irst, the politics. In 2001, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien announced that a new portrait gallery of Canada would be established, in which portraits from the LAC and other

collections would be showcased. The Chrétien proposal was part of a larger federal effort to reinforce a Canadian sense of identity—an increasing concern as the country’s ethnic mix grew more diverse and regional tensions more acute. The choice of location was inspired: it would be installed in the former American embassy, an elegant Beaux Arts–style building opposite Ottawa’s Peace Tower.

A design competition for the building’s renovation was held, a budget allocated, a prominent British architect—Edward Jones—chosen, plans were drawn, the interior was stripped, $11 million was spent … but before the bulldozers moved in to dig a hole for an addition, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper was elected. The new government was not enthusiastic about either cultural initiatives (cuts to museums and arts programs began almost immediately) or investment in the national capital. Plans ground to a halt.

But the idea of a national portrait gallery has international momentum. Portrait galleries elsewhere attract thousands of visitors each year. In 2005, the National Portrait Gallery in London was Britain’s tenth most popular tourist attraction: one and a half million people visited it. Washington’s National Portrait Gallery shares a glorious mid 19th-century Greek Revival building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum; in the first two years since the building reopened in July 2006, after a $6 million restoration, nearly two million people walked through its doors. A new building for Australia’s National Portrait Gallery will open to great fanfare in Canberra this month. Why is Canada so reluctant to display its collection?

In November 2007, the Conservative government stated that it was not reluctant: it wanted to take a different approach that reflected its preference for the private sector and decentralization. It announced a competition, in which commercial developers in Canada’s nine largest cities could bid for the right to build a home for the portrait collection by 2012. The deadline for bids was last May; developers in three cities, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa, are known to have made submissions.

The competition enraged the proposed gallery’s supporters, who accused the government of selling of national treasures to the highest bidder and tipping it toward the prime minister’s political base.

When James Moore, the new minister of Canadian heritage, announced recently that the whole process had been susptected because of the current economic turmoil, there was a grim sense of relief.

The idea behind the competition and the process itself were badly flawed. Better no gallery at all, at least for the present, than the wrong building in the wrong city for the wrong reasons.

However, alongside these political squabbles, there is the existential source of uncertainty about the proposed gallery. What is a portrait gallery for?

Why does Canada need such an institution? Is it about art or history? And who qualifies for inclusion?

Some critics fear that a portrait gallery of Canada will simply reflect governing elites from the past. Jeff Spalding, director of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, argues that a collection of artworks acquired for their historical interest “cannot be a physical manifestation of the nation or reflect today’s reality. The nation is not in Ottawa, and doesn’t reside in the national capital or a national collection. This is about Old Canada versus New Canada.”

Other observers are concerned that it could be too oriented to central Canada, and too conventional in its choice of what goes on the walls.

Margaret Conrad, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at the University of New Brunswick, wants to see a portrait gallery built. But she points out that “the biggest pitfalls in a gallery purporting to deal with the ‘Canadian’ experience is lack of balance regionally and culturally. There is also the danger of trying not to offend.

The gallery should be edgy, thought provoking.”

N

one of the issues in the Portrait Gallery of Canada debate—centre versus regions, history versus art—are new. Exactly the same questions emerged when the idea of a national portrait gallery was raised in the 1850s in the Westminster parliament. Several British MPs protested that such an institution would cost too much, and only Londoners would visit it. Members of the House of Lords worried about who would be included.

(However, their concern was the opposite of Jeff Spalding’s. A certain Lord Ellenborough wanted to see only toffs on the walls, not “railway men, rich grocers, speculators and wealthy Regent Street tradesmen.”) There was also unease that the por-

tion of history makers, and appropriate depictions, is far more inclusive. Among the NPG’s most popular portraits are a video image of football player David Beckham and a DNA depiction of physiologist Sir John Sulston, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the human genome project, as well as more conventional (and quite unflattering) portraits of Sir Paul McCartney and Germaine Greer.

But one crucial distinction continues to differentiate the National Portrait Gallery in London and the national portrait gallery in Canada. The British believe in their history. The British gallery was the creation of a confident people, points out David Cannadine, “at the peak of their prosperity and power, who possessed a deep desire to commemorate and celebrate the stirring and reassuring national past.” Since then Britain has evolved from being the world’s greatest imperial power to a more modest European state, but the NPG continues to relish its role as an institution that celebrates history, and those who have contributed to it.

In contrast, contemporary Canada is a country that, although wealthy, stable and influential, is a middle power with a gnawing sense of insecurity.

We have never done much to celebrate its history, for fear of keeping old schisms alive. Compulsory high school courses in Canadian history have been dropped from curricula in all provinces except three.

Academics, as historian Jack Granatstein frequently complains, have carved Canada’s history up into micro slices of social or regional history. Museums, federal and provincial, that explore the past in various ways are chronically underfunded. Each Canada Day, the Dominion Institute publishes a poll that reveals how few Canadians know such basic historical facts as the name of the first prime minister of Canada. A proposed Canadian history centre, to be established in the former Ottawa train station, lasted exactly six months before it was quietly killed in 2004.

Ruth Phillips voices an opinion (echoed by many historians and museologists) that none of the federal museums in the national capital, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Canada Science and Technology Museum, the Canadian Museum of Nature and the National Gallery of Canada, gives a more or less linear narrative of Canadian history that will engage visitors. (The Canadian Museum of Civilization has the “History Hall” and the “Biography Hall,” but neither reveals the diversity of the shared past.) There may be no master narrative in Canadian history, acknowledges Phillips, “but there is an entity called Canada which a portrait gallery can reflect.”

Anyone who goes to the portrait gallery’s website is quickly disabused of the idea that the collection is simply a national pantheon. “The portrait gallery is about all Canadians,” Lilly Koltun, the gallery’s director general, insists in the short video that welcomes visitors to the gallery’s website. “Yes, we have the stories and the faces of Sir John A. Macdonald and Margaret Atwood, but we’re also going to tell the stories of others, such as the First Nations, the immigrants, the voyageurs.” However, those individual faces, drawn from Canada’s smorgasbord of regions and ethnic groups, are placed in a larger context. “By presenting a unique visual history,” Koltun insists in interviews, casual conversations and public lectures, “the gallery reflects the values that link Canadians across the country.”

Contemporary Canada, although wealthy, stable and influential, has a gnawing sense of insecurity.

We have never done much to celebrate its history, for fear of keeping old schisms alive.

traits would be of mediocre quality, since all the really good stuff might remain in ducal palaces.

But the British proposal had a powerful advocate: the prime minister. Lord Palmerston grasped the most important function of any portrait gallery.

“When we read history,” he intoned, “it is merely a record of abstract names.” Portraits could bring history alive. London’s National Portrait Gallery, which opened in 1856, was the first state-sponsored gallery devoted exclusively to the collection and display of portraits of nation-builders, and it remains the model against which all subsequent portrait galleries compare themselves. Like the Portrait Gallery of Canada, “history, not art, was the National Portrait Gallery’s ‘governing principle,’” in the words of historian David Cannadine, former chair of the NPG’s trustees and author of a brief history of the gallery.

Its founding trustees announced that their key criterion for accepting portraits, whether by purchase, donation or bequest, would be “the celebrity of the person represented rather than … the merit of the artist.” Its founding trustees announced that their key criterion for accepting portraits, whether by purchase, donation or bequest, would be “the celebrity of the person represented rather than … the merit of the artist.”

Today, the British gallery is located in a splendid Florentine Renaissance–style building off London’s Trafalgar Square. However, it is a very different institution from the one envisaged by its founders, whose tastes were weighted heavily toward stuffy oil paintings of monarchs, politicians and military heroes. “During the 150 years of its existence,” writes Cannadine, “the notion of what constitutes a nation’s history and the identity of the people who make it has significantly evolved and broadened.”

The Great Men of History theory (espoused by historian Thomas Carlyle, who was an early NPG trustee) has been discredited and the NPG’s defini-

Literary Review of Canada

The blueprints for the portrait gallery that would have occupied the former American embssy indicate what this might mean in practice. Six main galleries followed a chronological framework, with names that, superficially, seem to come straight out of an old-fashioned history textbook (“Becoming ‘Canadians’,” covering the Confederation years, “Rising Voices” focused on the 1950s through the 1970s). Yet this was not a straightforward, celebratory story of nation building. Koltun hoped “to create layers inside this thematic approach, illustrating people at the bottom of the power structure as well as at the top. It will be an unsettling experience for the visitor—and it will make us unique among portrait galleries.”

Joan Schwartz, associate professor in the department of art at Queen’s University, commented: “A really exciting aspect of the Canadian initiative was that this was not the Dead White Guys gallery. It was about all Canadians who have made this country great, as well as the great Canadians who made this country.”

The first gallery, for example, was called “Facing the Other,” and included “the earliest unique representations” of contacts from the 16th century between First Nations and newcomers. Ruth Phillips, who was guest curator for the aboriginal component of the portrait gallery, points out that “there is an inherent tension between an ideal model of pluralism and the singularity of the construct of nation.”

So the gallery made it clear that, when Europeans first arrived on these shores, they encountered highly diverse, complex and sophisticated societies with their own traditions for representing identity— traditions that included dance and music. Some of these would have been represented, alongside more conventional two-dimensional images. The rest of w

the galleries featured both famous faces and portraits of people who did not share the backgrounds or values of the government or military elites.

“There were different threads throughout,” explains Phillips. “A visitor would have been able to follow stories from their region, group or gender.”

As visitors approached contemporary works displayed in the final gallery, they would have seen “portraits that are about portraiture itself,” explains Eva Major-Marothy, “and the issue of Canadian identity.” The gallery has already embarked on a program of commissions, matching prominent Canadians with artists of distinction. Nominations for the subjects were invited from the public. But the collection also includes the edgy stuff that Margaret Conrad wants. A recent acquisition is “Group of Sixty-Seven,” by Vancouver artist, Jin-me Yoon, who is of Korean descent. Jin-me Yoon photographed 67 Korean-Canadian citizens looking into her camera against a backdrop of a Lauren Harris painting of a lake. Then she photographed the same 67 subjects, as they turned their backs to the camera and gazed at an Emily Carr painting of trees. There were 67 subjects, explained the artist, because 1967 was the year that Ottawa dropped a particularly obnoxious restriction against Asian immigration into Canada.

The juxtaposition of iconic Canadian images and Korean immigrants, suggests Major-Marothy, prompts the question: where do we belong?

But before the Portrait Gallery of Canada can answer that question for Canadians, a post­meltdown federal government will have to rise above purely political considerations and dair to face the question itself. Canada has a fascinating collection of portraits, but will we ever see it? LAC staff today talk bravely of a “post-modern portrait gallery, unconfined by four walls,” that relies on its

web presence and special shows organized at other museums and institutions. Nothing, however, can replace the rich experience of a whole building throned with faces from yesterday and today For for academics such as Joan Schwartz, it makes no sense to separate a portrait from the contextual material that accompanies it. “There is a superb album that belonged to Thomas Evans Blackburn of photographs of the building of the Grand Trunk Railway between 1858 and 1861. It includes pictures of workers and managers alongside images of landscapes. What are you going to do? Take it apart?”

At the same time, there would be more visitors to a portrait gallery in Ottawa that tells, through images, a larger national story, because the national capital gets more tourists looking for that experience than any other Canadian city. In Fredericton, Margaret Conrad believes that a portrait gallery of Canada located in the national capital “would add more focus to the national show.”

Visitors to Ottawa who drive west down Wellington Street soon realize that this is a country with a profound disregard for any national show that includes our history. On their right is the Gothic splendour of our Parliament buildings.

On their left is a line of buildings that should be a smiling and historic streetscape—except that every third tooth has been punched out. The old railway station, once scheduled to be the Canada History Centre, remains virtually unoccupied. The windows of the former American embassy are dark. A heritage building that was once a Bank of Montreal branch and is now owned by the Department of Public Works, is shuttered and unused. Edith Wharton once described the United States as “a land that has undertaken to get on without a past.”

The description fits Canada even better.

SPieS. SainTS. DiPloMaTS. roGueS. CANADIANS.

Contributing Citizens

Modern Charitable Fundraising and the Making of the Welfare State, 1920-66 Shirley TilloTSon

Contributing Citizens tells the social, cultural, and political history of Community Chests – the forerunner of United Way – to provide a unique perspective on professional fundraising, private charity and the development of the welfare state.

Written with lucidity and precision, this innovative work breaks new ground in the debate about the relationship between the private and public sectors of social welfare.

– James Pitsula, New World Dawning May 2008, 352 pages, 6 x 9” 18 b&w illustrations throughout 978-0-7748-1474-4 PB 34.95

LRC_Dec08-Jan09_Oct27.indd 1

December 2008

Cautious Beginnings

Canadian Foreign intelligence, 1939-51

Brock Chisholm, the World Health Organization, and the Cold War

Canada’s Rights Revolution

KurT F. JenSen

John Farley

DoMinique CléMenT

In the late 1930s, Canada had no foreign intelligence capacity. But with the advent of the Second World War, Kurt F. Jensen writes, the government created a clandestine service that still influences the structure of this country’s intelligence community.

From WWII, when Canadians intercepted and decrypted Vichy messages, to the 1950s, when Canada reconfigured its operations to meet the needs of the Cold War, Jensen argues that the country was an active intelligence partner in the wartime and post-war alliances.

Largely forgotten today, Brock Chisholm – world-renowned psychiatrist, champion of the United Nations, fierce critic of jingoistic nationalism – was one of the most influential Canadians of the twentieth century. Chisholm was the first director-general of the World Health Organization, and built it up during its uneasy infancy. Post-1945 international politics, global health issues, and medical history intersect in this highly readable account of a remarkable Canadian.

Drawing on newly acquired archival sources, extensive interviews, and materials released through access to information applications, this pathbreaking new book – the first major study of postwar social movement organizations in Canada – documents the “explosion of activism” in the sixties, when homes, offices and street corners across the country witnessed the beginning of a new generation of human rights organizations.

June 2008, 240 pages, 6 x 9” 978-0-7748-1483-6 PB 32.95

June 2008, 272 pages, 6 x 9” 978-0-7748-1477-5 PB 32.95

Social Movements and Social Change, 1937-82

Renegades Canadians in the Spanish Civil War MiChael PeTrou

A painstaking account of the courageous band who chose to fight fascism before it was politically fashionable. – Bob Rae, Literary Review of Canada april 2008, 304 pages, 6 x 9” 978-0-7748-1418-8 PB 24.95

May 2008, 296 pages, 6 x 9” 978-0-7748-1480-5 PB 32.95

order online: www.ubcpress.ca | thought that counts 10/27/2008 10:51:50 AM

Canada’s Black Chamber An account of early Canadian code breaking is mostly accurate but very dry.

James Eayrs

Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–51 Kurt F. Jensen University of British Columbia Press 230 pages, hardcover isbn 9780774814829

C

autious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–51 is a history of the bureaucracy created by the Canadian government to acquire “foreign intelligence.” Kurt F. Jensen, an intelligence specialist in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade before joining Carleton University’s Department of History, rightly claims that his book, an outgrowth of his Carleton dissertation, is “the first comprehensive account, based on primary sources, of the birth and postwar reorganization of Canada’s foreign intelligence community.” As such, it is the first intensive history of the origins of Canada’s black chamber. Dr. Jensen avoids the term “black chamber” in his text, and we must learn from Wikipedia rather than from him that it is a generic term used to describe the agencies created by governments over the last five centuries to crack the secret code messages of their rivals and to devise undecipherable codes for themselves. Jensen justifies what inhibition has prompted him to exclude from his study a term so relevant to it by citing the fact that the Canadian government never admitted until 1995 “that Canada was engaged in ‘the collection of foreign signals intelligence’.”

Jensen defines foreign intelligence as “information relating to the capabilities, intentions or activities of foreign states, persons, corporations or organizations.” The first thing we are told about it, in the introduction, is that “Canada’s foreign intelligence activities are not of long duration, having only truly begun with the onset of war in 1939.” This assertion is repeated in the first chapter, “Foreign James Eayrs, former professor at the University of Toronto and professor emeritus at Dalhousie University, is currently writing A Man’s Reach: C.S. Eby in Canada and Meiji Japan.

Intelligence at the Beginning of the War,” where it is stated that by September 1939 Canada did not possess “a foreign intelligence capability. None existed within the sphere of foreign policy making.”

These statements are erroneous. Canada’s foreign intelligence bureaucracy originated during the 1870s and ’80s with the sending of emigration and trade agents to foreign countries. It was developed further by the creation of a foreign ministry in 1909 and, following the opening of diplomatic missions in Washington, Paris and Tokyo, the appointment of foreign service officers for whom former commercial agents became assisting trade attachés. In 1929 the first secretary at Tokyo undertook a major intelligence-gathering journey in Japan’s existing and future empire in Northeast Asia, resulting in a report to the Department of External Affairs that was, as he wrote, “of immense value when the Manchurian powder keg exploded just over one year later.” That is but one of countless examples demonstrating that Canada was equipped with a foreign intelligence capability prior to 1939.

Jensen, I feel sure, knows all this. Indeed, he goes out of his way to remind us that “one of the most valuable intelligence tools is the activity of diplomats stationed abroad.” It is simply beyond me to understand why he fails to acknowledge, and even denies, the existence of such activity prior to

1939. This oversight, while baffling, fortunately does not damage the remainder of his painstaking and pioneering research.

Chapter 2 is devoted to “the Examination Unit,” the first “of the instruments of foreign policy collection that remained in place for the duration of the war” (more on this later). The remaining chapters deal with the wartime exchange of intelligence within the North Atlantic triangle; Canadian human intelligence, or HUMINT (as distinct from signals intelligence, or SIGINT), notably by means of POW interrogation (uninhibited by the Geneva Conventions); the decision to forego a Canadian spy network abroad; Canadian SIGINT activity in the United States during 1942–43, monitoring “commercial cable, wireless, telephone and radio traffic” in the operation known as “Mousetrap”; sea warfare SIGINT against German U-boats in the North Atlantic; efforts, largely unavailing, to carve out a similar role in the Pacific War; further work by an expanded Examination Unit, which until November 1942 was busily intercepting and analyzing diplomatic traffic between Vichy and Ottawa and thereafter deeply into “high-grade, coded, Japanese messages”; post-war intelligence structures, in which again no place was found for a Canadian spy network; and, finally, the post-war (until 1951) SIGINT community. An exemplary glossary (from “Arlington Hall” to “‘Z’ Work”) is a much-needed guide to this often complex and esoteric material. There are, alas, no pictures.

What Jensen assembles from these varied and fascinating topics is a case history of the bureaucracy of espionage. With such a subject ought we not to have a thriller in our hands? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Jensen tells his complicated story on a minute scale. Historians of Canadian public administration and of Canadian foreign policy should welcome its detailed approach. Non-specialists may be put off by it. Cautious Beginnings—the in-your-face diffidence of the title begins to grow on you after a while—is not a reader-friendly book. It is both dense and drab, its dramatis personae deprived of both drama and personality. Instead of pageantry

Literary Review of Canada

we are offered genealogy—a lineage of committees and subcommittees, departments and offices, agencies and bureaus. His chapters are digests of their paperwork—dispatches, letters, telegrams, historical raw material of the kind in which a file clerk writes something and another writes something back. True, Jensen does not call them file clerks: he calls them “a handful of exceptional individuals” and lauds their “vision and conceptualization.” But he depicts them playing relentlessly (seldom mindlessly) at office politics, usually of interest only to its participants. Transposed to film (“Yes, Minister”, “Yes, Prime Minister”), the subject has demonstrated wide appeal; but even here its keenest fan was Margaret Thatcher, the mother of all office politicians.

Throughout his history of office politics Jensen sticks to the evidence; but for him information only becomes evidence when found in files, aka “the available archival material.” Research not so assembled will be, he believes, “analysis of events that reflects assumptions and fills gaps”: worthwhile work, one might think, but he finds it “egregious” and productive of “weaknesses.” “All of this is simply to say,” Jensen explains, “that analysis of limited source material can be dangerous and can misdirect historians. Therefore, the present study has been cautious about interpreting material unless it was known to be correct. This makes for a book drier than some”—indeed—“but hopefully with fewer errors.” Jensen’s errors may be fewer but, as has been shown, one of them’s a whopper.

To no historical practice does Jensen seem more averse than the use of anecdotal evidence, indicting “much of the existing literature on intelligence in Canada” for being “anecdotal in nature.” Not for him John Gross’s recent definition of anecdote as “a short account of an entertaining or interesting incident.” Yet even this academic puritan occasionally relents sufficiently (although not in this book) to permit, even encourage, the use of anecdotes when one’s argument seems sturdy enough to withstand a bit of tomfoolery here and there. In reviewing a work on the CIA, Jensen declares: “This is a scholarly book … [Its author] writes in a dry style geared to capturing as much information as possible. Sometimes the details are overwhelming and might have been balanced by an anecdote or two.” He might have been reviewing his own book. Dr. Jensen, heal thyself!

Literary triage suggests that chapter 2 most urgently needs healing. Here Jensen provides a detailed but pallid account of Canada’s acquisition during 1941 of its own cryptographic capability.

The government quickly hired for that purpose the renowned American cryptographer Herbert Osborne Yardley, then just as quickly fired him.

Yardley’s career is always dramatic but the few months of it spent in Canada is lurid melodrama to which Jensen’s preference for arid over florid narrative cannot do justice. The following version, condensed but more anecdotal than the author’s, may suggest how his self-imposed stylistic restrictions deprive his readers of what they have a right to expect.

As head of the first cryptography unit functioning clandestinely within the U.S. State Department after the end of the Great War, Yardley had singlehandedly deciphered the Japanese code in time to frustrate Japan’s plans for naval rearmament.

During the 1920s, Yardley and his helpers cracked the codes of 20 other countries. When Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. secretary of state, found out in 1929 about Yardley’s work he was disgusted.

Memorably expostulating, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” he cut off the cryptography unit’s funds, ordered permanent cessation of its activities and dismissed Yardley and his staff.

The discredited Yardley, seeking to salvage his reputation and rescue cryptography as a legitimate instrument of U.S. policy, composed and published The American Black Chamber. The excitable tone of this exposé, no less than the fascination of its subject, made it a best seller. The book reflected aspects of Yardley’s own flamboyant personality, none more obvious than boastfulness: “The Black Chamber,” he bragged of his handiwork, “bolted, hidden, guarded, sees all, hears all … Its far-seeking eyes penetrate the secret conference chambers at Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome.”

Oooooh! Wouldn’t it be great if Canada could get its hands on something like that …

Turned out it could. A pair of Canadian mathematicians had been sent by their government to Washington in May 1941 to learn what cryptography might do and cost, when it could be made available and whether the Americans had anyone who might in due course become a suitable Dominion cryptologist. They were introduced to Herbert Yardley;

But cryptographic bureaucrats are not all Keystone Cops all the time, as Yardley was about to discover. Even as he productively set to work at the fledgling Examination Unit, hoping that its results, praised as they soon were by his new employers, would lead to at least a renewal of his contract, British officials—despite having previously urged Canada to acquire cryptographic capability posthaste to help to win the war—and, more adamantly, American officials, too, were making it very clear to Ottawa that Yardley would have to go. Were he to remain, they threatened, it would be the end of tripartite cooperation in intelligence matters, war or no war. While a backhanded tribute to the disruptive potential of the Yardley persona, this falling out because of him between Canada and its two most powerful friends was unnerving, most of all to Ottawa, which fired Yardley on December 1.

Jensen pronounces Yardley’s hiring by Canada “inexplicable”; but it is his firing that, if not inexplicable, is arguably ignoble and certainly regrettable.

A week after Pearl Harbor, Yardley (according to his biographer) in a last-ditch effort to regain his job told Canadian officials that he was “‘the only white man who is thoroughly conversant with every type of Japanese Battle Communications,’ … explained some of the tricks needed to understand telegraphic kana and listed various Japanese cryptosystems.” To no avail.

What level of proficiency and vision might Yardley’s retention have attained for the Examination Unit— particularly after being joined there six months later by E.H. Norman following the diplomat’s return from internment in Japan? Think of Canada’s black chamber powered by the two “Herberts”— one the Prince of Cryptology, the other the Prince of Japanology! Or rather, don’t think of it: such speculation could not be more at odds with Jensen’s modes of analysis, and we should not be detained by it a moment longer.

In Chapter 8, “Postwar Intelligence Structures,” Jensen asserts: “The decisions made at that time have influenced the path of Canada’s foreign intelligence collection until the present day.” Canadian foreign intelligence had hitherto been largely the prerogative of Foreign, né External, Affairs, if only because its members wanted the role and fought to retain it. “We certainly cannot afford the risk,” argued T.W. Stone (one of External’s officers most closely concerned with wartime experience) even more robustly than usual in June 1945, “of allowing another agency or Department, military or civilian, … to muck about in the fields of high, top secret political intelligence.”

Stone’s worst fears have been realized. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is mentioned twice in Cautious Beginnings but without comment. CSIS’s recent mucking about in Canadian foreign intelligence, a function for which it possesses neither competence nor credibility (nor for that matter parliamentary mandate), has attracted much, blessedly unfavourable, comment.

If, as I hope, Jensen is planning a sequel to his worthwhile if in some ways unsatisfying study, he should give CSIS its comeuppance. At least he will have a perfect title: “Reckless Endings.”

To much cryptographic work there seems to cling a certain slapstick, delightedly recounted by former participants such as James Thurber and Malcolm Muggeridge.

December 2008

but at the same time some of their hosts did their best to convince them that Yardley was unreliable and distrusted by his former colleagues because of his contempt for secrecy, his boastfulness, his liking for liquor and ladies, all making him the very model of a modern security risk. To the Canadians, however, Yardley had the arcane knowledge and technical skills that some in Ottawa wanted Canada to acquire; he had a proven record to back up his boasts; and he was currently unemployed.

In Ottawa for his job interview on May 12, 1941, Yardley showed his colours by acting as if he had already been welcomed aboard, providing his own job description and indicating his immediate work priority, decryption of the Japanese codes.

He was offered a contract for $10,000, the headship of a new bureaucratic entity to be called the Examination Unit, a small staff and offices at a National Research Council building. In return, he was to work for six months, report to External and assume an alias. Yardley chose Herbert Osborne. It was “the same name he had used in China where his activities were known to US authorities, and,” Jensen comments astutely, “was a ploy unlikely to fool anyone.” It did, however, temporarily confuse British Intelligence, which inquired of Ottawa on June 5 whether a certain “Emeley” was “the same person as H.O. Yardley since the alleged Emeley had also worked in China and had written a book on American cryptography.” A telegraphic garble.

To much cryptographic work there seems to cling a certain slapstick, delightedly recounted by former participants such as James Thurber and Malcolm Muggeridge in memoirs of working respectively for Yardley and “C,” Yardley’s British counterpart (whom everyone knew to be Stuart Menzies but could not say).

Witty and Wise A great Canadian journalist leaves a lasting legacy.

Trina McQueen

My Life as a Dame: The Personal and the Political in the Writings of Christina McCall Christina McCall, edited by Stephen Clarkson House of Anansi 384 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780887842214

H

er writing was gorgeous, and so was she. Her words came, not trippingly, but precisely. Clear, fresh; on the rocks with a twist. She liked to set the scene in a first paragraph, and she could put you exactly where she wanted you to be.

Here she is musing on style and class in the Toronto of 1971: One day last spring, I was standing in the reception area of a fashionable hairdresser’s in midtown Toronto, waiting to pay my bill ($12 for a stark haircut that made me look exactly like the Presbyterian aunts I’d spent most of my life avoiding looking like). Ahead of me in the line was this very slick, chic lady of maybe thirty-eight or so, dressed exactly as such a lady should be when she is going to spend the morning at the hairbenders (which is what chic ladies call all those rickety-cheeky Cockney boys who’ve taken over big-time women’s barbering in the last half-decade) and then on to luncheon with an old friend from school, and maybe a meeting of the women’s committee of the symphony.

Well, I bet Christina McCall’s haircut looked amazing. She was beautiful in the Katharine Hepburn–Rosalind Russell–Greta Garbo style of natural beauty made radiant by redoubtable character. On the cover of My Life as a Dame: The Personal and the Political in the Writings of Christina McCall, she is wearing a capital-H Hat. I think the Hat is a sort of fedora, a tall, felt flowerpot with a large tilted brim. On 93 percent of the world’s female population, this Hat would be a terrible, shuddering mistake. But Christina McCall’s spirit inspires the Hat, and makes it glorious and perfect.

Can she do the same for this collection of journalism and essays, written between 1957 and 2005, but mostly in the 1970s and ’80s, edited by her husband, Stephen Clarkson? The journalism has much more going for it than the Hat: Christina McCall was an eminent writer on politics and society at a time in Canada when profound change was Trina McQueen, a veteran broadcaster and journalist, currently sits on the boards of the CBC and McClelland and Stewart.

transforming both; she was a dedicated (and often wry) feminist; she was a smart–dinner-party insider who could speak like a friend to the hard timers and the outsiders. The books she wrote, particularly Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party, co-authored by Clarkson, defined the political age she lived in. Those books will endure. What of the journalism?

Journalism has oxymoronic qualities. It is often crude, but it is always delicate. It badly needs the active involvement of its readers. Journalism is written in the expectation that it will be read in the heat of the moment, when the subjects are alive, roiling, powerful and disturbing. The readers insert their own context and their own excitement. The writer and the readers are in the middle of the story; we are figuring it out together. Thirty or 40 years later, that dynamism is gone.

When McCall reported on the launch of Mel Watkins’s Waffle manifesto in 1969, many thought, and she wrote, that “Watkins may have launched … a whole new era in Canadian politics. It’s somehow satisfying to imagine that future patriots may mark September 4, 1969, as the day when we crossed our Rubicon, put out more red and white maple leaf flags, spat in the eye of the American eagle, and maybe even declared our positive existence after 102 uncertain years.”

But reading this now, we future patriots know how the plot turned out: we have seen the whole movie. Mel Watkins himself reflects on the piece in a short comment at the book’s end, and writes “today the Waffle is a fading memory, its legacy more problematic than Christina thought.”

When she writes about Peter Lougheed in the 1970s, she writes of a provincial, easily offended, red-meat capitalist. There is no hint of the graceful and generous wisdom, or the solid Canadian statesmanship of the later years.

The difficulty with pieces like this is not that she got it wrong; mostly she did not, and anyway, getting it wrong can be interesting. It’s that we read these intense writings with either no idea or only a dim memory of what it was like then and there.

What on earth were they thinking? a reader might ask, crossly or curiously. To me, it is a shame that the question is not answered. Present-day reflections on the articles were shortened and shifted to the back of the book, and commissioned introductions were dropped. The book would have been richer, more alive if they had stayed; and if this had meant the exclusions of a couple of the more relentless political insider pieces, okay.

Nevertheless, this is a nourishing book and a tasty one. The editing allows the reader to customize his or her own Christina McCall. For me, her pieces on society and feminism, especially, were fascinating, provocative and great fun to read.

Allan Gregg said at the book launch that McCall could be “pants-pissingly funny.” Her writing on the opéra bouffe adventures of Pierre, Margaret and the Ottawa press corps in Russia definitely was, even with its undertone of skepticism about the mission.

McCall was an unwavering feminist, generous and constant in her support of the cause, and of many individual women. Although she was both successful and greatly loved, her empathy for those who were not was clear. In 1975, she remembered how it was for women when she was growing up.

Although she yearned to be Rosalind Russell, she knew that in real life, in Canada, the ideal role for women was to be a wife and mother with an impeccably run household, its food cellar stocked with preserves, its laundry whiter than the neighbours, and its children better than good. Any woman who did not fit this circumscribed pattern was an “old maid.” No grace of gesture, quality of mind, freedom of spirit, or worldly accomplishment could possibly make up for the horror of being identified by that phrase, which clearly damned a woman to be unloved, asexual, and lonely forever.

It strikes me that the “ideal role for women” has not changed much if you add a phrase such as “and to be the top litigator in her firm.” McCall’s writing is still provocative, still capable of stirring emotion.

This is nowhere more true than in the personal sections of a book whose subtitle is “the personal and the political in the writings of Christina McCall.” Some of the political or journalistic pieces may be dusty, but the personal writings are as gripping as any novel. These include the only completed chapter of her memoirs. She chose the title My Life as a Dame, and she begins with her last year at the University of Toronto, when she was engrossed with anxieties “not the least of which was my need to distance myself from my classmates, all those good girls with shiny hair and diamond engagement rings, taking careful notes around me … preparing themselves for worthy careers as school teacher or librarians and who would mutate before long into stay-at-home wives and mothers in the prosperous Ontario towns from which most of them had sprung.”

It is absolutely entrancing, as are all her reflective writings about herself and her personal time and place. How sad for us all that she could not finish her assignment. How fortunate for us all to have at least a glimpse of the story of this fabulous dame.

Literary Review of Canada

A Different North The Russian Arctic sees extraordinary changes over half a century.

Robert McGhee

Settlers on the Edge: Identity and Modernization on Russia’s Arctic Frontier Niobe Thompson University of British Columbia Press 304 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780774814676

C

hukotka is Russia’s most distant and most isolated territory. Separated from Moscow by nine time zones, it lies 4,000 kilometres north of the Pacific railhead at Vladivostok. This was the last fragment of eastern Asia to be added to the Russian empire, and only during the 1950s were the Soviets able to effectively colonize the territory and collectivize its hunters, trappers and herders. Until that time Chukotka was occupied primarily by Chukchi, a people who obtained their livelihood from immense herds of reindeer that they shepherded across the Arctic tundra. A scatter of coastal Eskimo villages provided access to the marine resources of the Bering Sea, and to trade connections with their Alaskan relatives across the narrow channel of the Bering Strait. Until separated, by the Cold War Chukotka was more closely linked to Alaska than to the rest of Russia. Half the size of Alaska, Chukotka is an environmental reflection of its eastern neighbour, a land of Arctic tundra rolling inland from icy coasts to the northern edge of the great Siberian forests.

This isolated region (an autonomous okrug in Russian administrative terminology, a district with limited self-governing powers somewhat like those of Canada’s northern territories) is the setting for Niobe Thompson’s study. Thompson is an anthropologist with previous experience in Arctic Canada, and was invited to Chukotka through a chance meeting with a Cambridge friend who had joined the entourage of the newly elected governor of the district. Between 2002 and 2007 he was in a unique position to witness the wholly unexpected transformation of the nation’s poorest and most distressed region into a showpiece of the New Russia. Settlers on the Edge: Identity and Modernization on Russia’s Robert McGhee is an archaeologist who has worked across Arctic Canada and occasionally in other circumpolar regions. His most recent book is The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (University of Chicago, 2007).­

December 2008

Arctic Frontier is a description of the political, social and psychological factors that accompanied this revolution. It is also a fascinating historical account of Soviet society, and of the chaos of the 1990s resulting from the collapse of Soviet power, as seen from the most remote region of the Soviet Union.

Anthropology is distinguished from the other social sciences by its emphasis on “participant observation.” Rather than study documents and statistics based on polls and formal interviews, the anthropologist tries to live in the society being studied and gather information by observing daily life or by asking questions of friends and acquaintances.

This type of work is particularly appropriate to research on small-scale societies, and has traditionally been associated with the study of “aboriginal” peoples. I have argued elsewhere that the discipline of anthropology is largely responsible for defining aboriginal peoples and their cultures as patently different from those of other human societies.1 I see this false dichotomy as the direct intellectual progeny of the Victorians’ primitive man, a theory that developed in its turn from earlier notions of the noble savage. In my view, the adoption of this concept by the social and political ideologies of the past century can be blamed for many of the problems encountered by Canada’s First Peoples and

similar indigenous societies in other colonial nations.

Although there is no scarcity of anthropological research on the way in which the Chukchi, Eskimos and other indigenous inhabitants have adapted to changes brought by the past decades, anthropologists up to now have ignored the ethnic Russians who comprise more than half the population of Chukotka.

Russian settlers form their own smallscale society, identify themselves as Chukotkans or northerners as well as (or in some cases rather than) Russians, and were forced to develop their own distinctive means of adaptation and survival following the collapse of the Soviet state. This book focuses on the Chukotkan Russians, how they met the storms of social and economic change that swept the region over the past 20 years and how the vision of their own identity shifted in response to adaptive necessity.

The intensive settlement of Chukotka by Russian immigrants began during the 1950s, when Stalin’s strategy of northern development through prison labour gave way to a policy of attracting willing workers from central Russia. Good jobs at high wages brought a stream of southerners to the mines, smelters and seaports opening across the North, just as they did in northern Canada during the same period. Although Thompson occasionally notes comparisons between northern development in Russia and Canada, he does not explore the striking temporal parallels. The surge of northern development during the 1950s suggests that differences between the social and economic theory of Soviet and Canadian governments was less important than was the availability of technology developed during the Second World War. Efficient radio equipment revolutionized both communication and transportation in the North, while the most successful bush planes ever built, the Antonov AN-2 and Canadian de Havilland’s Beaver and Otter, all came off the assembly lines between 1947 and 1951.

Two other factors influenced the inter-hemispheric coincidence in northern development during the 1950s. One was the Cold War, during which the Arctic regions became a venue for launching and detecting nuclear strikes by intercontinental bombers, and later by missiles. The other factor was literary. In Arctic Canada, northern economic

opportunity was enhanced by the romance of Arctic adventure fired by the books of Farley Mowat and other writers of the North. Sherrill Grace describes the Arctic presented in mid-20th century Canadian novels as “a space for virile, white male adventure in a harsh but magnificent, unspoiled landscape waiting to be discovered, charted, painted, and photographed as if for the first time. It is a place of masculine romance, offering challenge and escape … to those special few who can go North … and return safely to tell the tale.” Literary historian Yuri Slezkine describes a similar Soviet literature of the time, books in which “dozens of orphaned fictional youngsters stampeded out of the soulless old capitals to a land where the snow never melted and where men kept their word.” These were the entusiasti, the young people of the 1950s and ’60s who set out to tame the northern wilderness and bring socialism to the natives of the tundra and taiga. Their offspring, together with the descendants of Stalin’s prisoners who stayed in the North, look on their parents and grandparents as the old-timer aristocracy of northern settlement.

Thompson elegantly describes the system of “managed scarcity” that was used to attract northern immigrants while the Soviet system fossilized into the disillusioned decades of Brezhnev’s leadership. Northerners not only received wages double or more than those of central Russia, but also had access to a wide range of goods and benefits not available to those who remained in the central Russian “mainland.” The doctors, teachers, miners, administrators, mechanics, technicians and operators of heavy equipment who came north during these decades formed an elite society that soon outnumbered the indigenous population and easily maintained a superior and economically privileged status. They saw themselves as representing the modern world, bringing enlightenment to the natives and dragging them into the late 20th century. Most thought of themselves as temporary northerners, staying only until they had accumulated a financial nest egg or enough to retire to the mainland with means far beyond those of their southern compatriots.

Having set the historical scene, the author introduces the first of two sudden and unexpected transformations in the Chukotkan way of life. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s it was quickly apparent that most of the economic enterprises in Chukotka were not viable, and that the central government could no longer afford to maintain the subsidies that had supported the economy of the region. Government funding transfers disappeared, paycheques stopped arriving and airline tickets suddenly became both scarce and unaffordable to most. The savings of Russian settlers vanished as inflation increased by 10,000 percent, and plans to return to Russia as wealthy citizens or secure retirees suddenly vanished.

This was the Chukotka that I saw during the summer of 1995 when I spent several weeks on an archaeological project near the Bering Strait. The drive from the airport to the capital city of Anadyr followed the estuary of the Anadyr River, and in the rainy afternoon the shore was lined with small fishing parties netting salmon. The town itself was a grid of the ubiquitous five-story concrete apartment blocks that housed most Soviet citizens, but there was little obvious work being done. The statue of Lenin in the main square had been splashed with red paint that nobody had bothered to remove. By

1995 many of those who remained in Anadyr continued to perform jobs that provided paycheques only occasionally if at all, but supplemented this work by fishing, hunting and gathering mushrooms and berries for food. There was deep concern that supplies of heating fuel would be inadequate to last through the coming winter, and communities in northern Canada and Alaska collected money to send food and clothing to the people of Chukotka who were facing potential starvation.

Thompson describes, and illustrates with specific case histories, the variety of means by which Russian settlers attempted to deal with the situation of sudden economic collapse. For the governing class of administrators with responsibility for state property, asset stripping provided the quickest and surest route to personal wealth and a secure future on the Russian mainland. The system of patronage and corruption that developed around the governor’s office became the focus of social and economic organization. The new atmosphere of free enterprise encouraged local entrepreneurs, ranging

in choosing to serve as governor are still unclear.

Thompson notes the tax advantages that accrued to his oil empire and the political security gained by remaining far from Moscow, but it still seems incongruous that the man who owns Chelsea FC and several Mediterranean super-yachts was also a public servant in Russia’s most distant and isolated territory. Whatever his reasons, in 2000 Abramovich brought shiploads of food supplies from Seattle and flew thousands of Chukotkan children for their first holidays at Black Sea resorts. Thompson reports that since then he has invested the equivalent of more than US$2 billion in Chukotka. Anadyr now has a shopping mall, cinema complex, casino, hockey rink, fitness centre, even brew pubs and a massive log cathedral. Canadian construction teams have rebuilt isolated villages using the house plans and building techniques used in Canadian Arctic communities.

What interests Thompson the anthropologist is the effect of this transformation on the society and the self-image of the settlers who survived the 1990s in Chukotka. The people who once saw themselves as bringing Soviet modernity to the Arctic are now faced with a small army of new modernizers wearing jeans and designer stubble, their mobile phones in continual contact with Moscow and abroad, forever travelling to and from the airport, and more than willing to put in long days to complete a project. To these newcomers the old settlers are frozen relics of a bygone age, incapable of understanding either the technology or the work ethic of the new century. Their sentimental attachment to obsolete methods and the remnants of the Soviet era is an affront to modernity.

In 1995 a young Russian woman told me with great pride how the House of Culture in Anadyr had been built by volunteers. Each evening after a full day on the job, her mother and other entusiasti of the 1950s had gathered to work long into the cold night, mixing concrete by hand and laying blocks so that the town would have a library and a concert hall. When Thompson reports that the recent decision to demolish the building was met with local resistance, I have little difficulty imagining the depth of feeling involved. The Soviet settlers, who once saw themselves as the vanguard of the modern world look on the new modernizers with incomprehension, and take refuge in a self-image that is increasingly rooted in local knowledge of the environment and culture of the Arctic.

Thompson writes clearly and well. His occasional brief excursions into social science theory betray the academic origins of the book, but are merely annoying interruptions in a compelling narrative. This is an important story telling how a contemporary people dealt with events beyond their experience and control, and it gives us reason to consider how we would behave in similar ­circumstances.

In the era of the oligarchs, Anadyr now has a shopping mall, cinema complex, casino, hockey rink, fitness centre, even brew pubs and a massive log cathedral.

10

from the man who established a greenhouse to produce local vegetables to the much more common businesses of bootlegging and distilling semi-toxic vodka. Thompson describes a family that developed a forest fire–fighting contract into the economic and political control of a small interior settlement, and another Russian who joined a Chukchi partner as a commercial hunter selling meat and other products of the tundra. In 1995 there were rumours of small private gold mines operating with slave labour.

Among the more fortunate settlers were those who had married into or formed other alliances with native families. Although the breakdown of the state fur and reindeer farms caused considerable distress to native communities, the knowledge of local resources gave rural inhabitants more options in dealing with economic collapse.

Thompson describes how Russians who remained in Chukotka found it increasingly difficult to see themselves as “modernizers” bringing a superior way of life to the natives, and self-image began to shift toward that of the “northerner” or the native. My memory of a berry-picking expedition on a brilliant August day tends to support his analysis. The warm tundra was a garden of blueberries, crowberries, bearberries, bakeapples and mushrooms nestled among the soft knee-high forest.

To my Russian companions tundra was personified as a form of gigantic being, generous but also potentially dangerous, an entity that required and deserved a sprinkled libation of food and vodka before we ate and drank. Chukchi stories of the giant who created the local landscape, and whose hat formed the single island in Anadyr Bay, had been transformed into Russian folk tales.

Thompson’s own experience was of a very different Chukotka, one that originated in 2000 with the election of Roman Abramovich as governor of the district. Abramovich, who resigned from the governorship only a few months ago, is one of the youngest of the oligarchs whose wealth was originally based on obtaining control of state enterprises during the privatization of industry in the Yeltsin years of the early 1990s. Abramovich’s motives

Note 1 See “Aboriginalism and the Problem with ‘Indigenous Archaeology’,” American Antiquity, volume 73, number 4, pages 579–597.

Literary Review of Canada

Compromised Eden Documenting one of the most isolated and dangerous places on earth.

Charles Wilkins

The Darien Gap: Travels in the Rainforest of Panama Martin Mitchinson Harbour Publishing 283 pages, softcover ISBN 9781550174212

O

ff and on for 20 years during the 1980s and ’90s, Martin Mitchinson concocted plans to visit the fabled Panamanian province of Darien—perhaps even to possess it in the way that ambitious and self-delusional young travellers tend to “collect” rare territories and deposit them in their backpacks.

But he never made it. On a succession of aborted trips, his car broke down, his wallet got stolen, he joined a Honduran circus instead.

And we are the beneficiaries. For if, as a 20-yearold, Mitchinson had reached this remote territory just south of the Panama Canal—had he in effect got it out of his system—we would not have his fanciful and captivating new travelogue, a book that could only have been written by a man whose sensibilities have been honed by time and whose understanding of the world is no longer primarily about himself.

As we meet the author (40something, melancholic, beset by self-doubt), he is alone near his thatched hut at Cavimál, contemplating how long it would take a man to disappear entirely if he were to sit in the nearby rainforest and simply let it take him. The sailboat on which he arrived in Darien is disintegrating, he has no money to fix it, and his partner, Kathy, is unhappy and on the verge of heading out (as she does without fanfare in Chapter Two).

Mitchinson’s original plan—to stay three weeks, to write a travel article and leave—gets scuppered, when, as he puts it, “I realized that Darien was complex, many-sided and confusing. I’ll dig deeper, I decided. For once in my life I wanted to understand a place down past the scenery.” And in so doing perhaps better to understand himself.

For those who don’t know, or have forgotten, the Province of Darien, which spans the isthmus of Panama just north of the Colombian border, is an all but impassable tract of rainforest, swamp and mountains, a mystic ecology and conundrum, famous as the single land link between Alaska and the southern tip of South America where the PanAmerican Highway does not exist. Cannot exist.

Hence the “Darién Gap.”

The territory’s rivers are inhabited by crocodiles, its palm-thatched villages by Kuna and Chocó tribespeople, its forests by jaguars and monkeys.

More famously, these days, the Darien forest is an impenetrable shelter for Colombian guerrillas, whose tactics include the kidnapping and murder of foreigners, particularly those whose countries are seen as inimical to the interests of Latin American self-realization.

Not that terrorists are in any way new to Darien.

The first of them arrived as Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s, practising murder and plunder, demanding obeisance to God and the Spanish monarchy, which in the eyes of the natives were more or less the same thugs. Then came English and French pirates. And Scottish colonialists. And later the United States military, which, when its aircraft carriers became too large for the Panama Canal in the late 1940s, hatched a plan to blow a new canal through Darien, using 275 successive nuclear bombs, each up to 200 times as powerful as the bomb they had just dropped on Nagasaki.

the sun and the moon,” reports the writer. “When I tell Manqueque that astronauts have walked on the moon, Autemio looks down at the floor.

He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he doesn’t believe the astronaut story.” Autemio eventually asks Mitchinson whether he can find the Darien wells drilled by Gulf Oil in the 1960s … and whether if Autemio breaks the padlock on one of those wells, he can get unlimited fuel for his outboard motor.

While Mitchinson is estimable in his ambitions and resourcefulness, he is more recognizably human in his ineptness. He is lousy at business, lonely in romance, a duffer at provisioning and staying healthy. At one point, a villager is shocked to discover that the writer possesses no medication, not even an aspirin, to alleviate the brutalizing headaches that accompany an attack of intestinal parasites. Marooned on a sandbar one night, Mitchinson clings to a sharpened stick as protection against quarter-ton crocodiles.

While the book is not driven by an overarching storyline, it eddies with narrative impulses, intense little stories: about the beheading of Balboa at Acla; the kidnapping and torture of the village storekeeper; the drowning of a twelveyear-old and the recovery days later of her perfectly preserved body.

The most sustained piece of narrative in the book comes toward the end when Mitchinson decides to cross Darien from sea to sea, beginning at Caledonia Island on the Caribbean coast, traversing the coastal mountains to the Chucunaque River, and following the river valley through the rainforest to the Pacific. The trip, on which the writer is accompanied by two Kuna guides, is a harrowing series of blunders and ineptitude. Mitchinson and his guides bring no food, each assuming the other has taken care of it. The writer’s shoe falls apart mid journey, so that he has to tie it on with vines. At journey’s end, the guides disappear back into the jungle, while Mitchinson takes a plywood motel room in Metiti, which is pretty much where we leave him. “I lie down on the bed,” he says, “and for the first time in so many months, maybe even years, I am at peace. It feels as though I’ve done what I came to do.”

Mitchinson leaves us hopeful for his own rather tortuous destiny (a hope borne out by his fine and compelling book)—and ambivalently optimistic about the chances for Darien, where in recent years the people have organized against those who would buy up the rainforest and log it or otherwise degrade it. We are left equally hopeful that Darien’s historic capability for survival, for the wise husbanding of the planet, will eventually be perceived as a lesson, instead of a mere curiosity.

These days, the Darien forest is an impenetrable shelter for Colombian guerrillas, whose tactics include the kidnapping and murder of foreigners.

Charles Wilkins is, most recently, the author of a memoir entitled In the Land of Long Fingernails (Penguin, 2008), about the summer of 1969 when he worked in a big Toronto cemetery.

December 2008

It was only in 1966, when the Kuna Indians, who had originally supported this maniacal project, grew testy about it and withdrew their cooperation, that the U.S. backed off.

And so here it was, in this compromised Eden, one of the poorest parts of the planet, that, for a year or two, Mitchinson took up residence among the villagers, planted a garden, fished the rivers, travelled by dugout through the rainforest, sometimes in fear of terrorists or jaguars, invariably attempting to find in his adventures both himself and the poetics of a culture.

His reports on those adventures are laced with vivid and detailed observations: on the plants, the animals, the history of the territory; on legends and landscapes and local politics; on the unseen inhabitants of the forests, the spirits of the dead who, according to Chocó mythology, wander the jungle spreading good and evil, responsible for any events that cannot rationally be explained (events aplenty in a territory where most people do not understand the basics of science or geography).

In the village of Mogue one night, Mitchinson’s hosts pepper him with questions: How does an outboard motor work? A submarine? Why did God make the world so that the sun comes up at different times in various countries? “I draw a crude map of the world on a grapefruit and I use two limes for

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Does Technology Make Us Do It? Two very different views of ethics in the modern age.

Arthur Schafer

The End of Ethics in a Technological Society Lawrence E. Schmidt with Scott Marratto McGill-Queen’s University Press 246 pages ISBN 9780773533363, hardcover ISBN 9780773533356, softcover

D

r. Schweitzer, may I introduce Dr. Frankenstein.

Images of the miracle-working whitecoated scientist are embedded in contemporary western culture. The hoped-for miracles are various. Medical scientists, we believe, are on the verge of bringing us a cure for cancer, along with a vaccine for AIDS. Agricultural scientists are creating genetically modified crops whose fecundity will, they promise, save the world’s poor from starvation.

Teams of biologists are working to create forms of microbial life that will save us from the dire effects of the next oil spill. Coal industry scientists promise that in ten years or so they will give us clean coal by developing a technology to sequester greenhouse gases.

That’s on the one hand. But another, less attractive, image competes for the science-andtechnology niche in our consciousness. In this alternative iconography the scientist is named Dr. Victor Frankenstein, or perhaps Dr. Henry Jekyll, rather than Dr. Albert Schweitzer or Dr. Jonas Salk, and he (or occasionally she) is creating technologies that will degrade our humanity or, worse, technoloArthur Schafer is the director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.

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gies that threaten to make our planet inhospitable if not entirely uninhabitable. Think weapons of mass destruction, human reproductive cloning, nuclear power or industrial agriculture. The latter, for example, with its heavy reliance upon pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilizers, threatens to destroy the quality of both our soil and our water.

These rival tropes—white-coated saviour versus white-coated villain—might be classified, respectively, as technophiliac and technophobic. The technophiles berate the technophobes for being mired in the stagnant past; the technophobes accuse the technophiles of putting at risk everything we hold dear.

It would be misleading, however, to think of these warring camps as comprising two entirely distinct groups of people. It would be misleading because the battle of competing images is often internal rather than external. Each of us feels hopeful and optimistic some of the time, attracted by the vision of a better world through better technology.

At other times, we feel fearful that efforts to achieve mastery over both nature and human nature will produce a catastrophic result that no one could desire. In our anxious moments we remember the ancient Greek warning that Hubris is inevitably followed by Nemesis. When we are feeling hopeful, however, we imagine a world in which the ancient scourges of poverty and disease have been banished by modern technology or at least a world in which fewer of our fellow human beings suffer unremittingly.

Ours is a society marked by general affluence, in a world marked by general poverty. Despite the shameful existence of a sizeable minority of our own citizens who continue to live in abject poverty, we are proud of the fact that per capita

income (adjusted for inflation) has been doubling roughly every generation over a period of almost two centuries. In other parts of the world, notably China and India, hundreds of millions of people have recently made the great leap from starvation to poverty and they have done so by following a technology-dependent path similar to ours. Many hope that their next leap will be from poverty to comfort and then onward and upward to westernstyle luxury. Our exhortations—that they seek a more modest path to development, so as to spare the global environment from further (possibly fatal) damage—strike many in the developing world as hypocritical. Billions of Chinese and Indians, after all, remain mired in poverty, as do billions of others in Africa and South America.

Scientific discovery and technological innovation are indisputably making an important contribution to growing prosperity, thereby providing evidence for the claim that life goes better in a technological society. As Francis Bacon famously remarked, “knowledge is power.” Bacon was writing at the end of the 16th century, but his aphorism presciently captures the spirit of the 18th-century European Enlightenment. A century later, faith in the liberating power of scientific knowledge was echoed and amplified by such otherwise disparate 19th-century thinkers as the liberal John Stuart Mill and the socialist Karl Marx. Mill and Marx share a striking confidence that civilizations progress through the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Both believe in Progress (with a capital “P) and both insist that modern science is critically important if humankind is to ameliorate such evils as disease and starvation. Equally important, Mill and Marx share the conviction that scientific thinking will, more or less rapidly, transform modern men and women into well-educated, reasonable and tolerant citizens. Ignorance, irrationality, superstition and intolerance (all associated with traditional religious faith) may never be totally abolished, but they will surely yield, over time, to the Enlightenment forces of science and reason.

In The End of Ethics in a Technological Society, Lawrence E. Schmidt and Scott Marratto reject completely the Enlightenment faith in reason and progress and seem personally affronted by Bacon’s aphorism that “knowledge is power.”1 On the technophilia-technophobia spectrum, they fall near the extreme end of the technophobia pole. Whereas Enlightenment philosophes were confident that the advance of modern science would make our world more reasonable, humane and prosperous, Schmidt and Marratto deny that scientific knowledge brings progress in any form. They do concede at one point that “we cannot turn off the lights and

Literary Review of Canada

live in the dark.” Nevertheless, they advocate a “clear and absolute” set of limits “to what human beings may ethically do to themselves, to other human beings or to the environment (nature)” and they appear to reject most, if not all, of what technology has to offer. Readers who seek rational criteria with which to evaluate the moral acceptability of new technologies will find little more on offer than vague platitudes.

The authors argue at length that liberal (consequentialist) theories cannot offer “any solutions to the moral dilemmas that we face in the technological society.” Instead, they ask the reader to accept a “supersensuous, supernatural, or metaphysically transcendent good.” The supernatural, they insist, will provide all the answers we need.

Disappointingly, however, when it comes to the crunch they fold their tents and slink away into the night. “It has not been our purpose in this book … to argue for the superiority of transcendental moral realism.” Readers who prefer evidence and arguments to dogma are unhelpfully referred to Real Ethics by John Rist. Perhaps Schmidt and Marratto ought to have held up on publishing their thoughts until they were prepared to offer some kind of reasoned justification for their position. At all events, they either cannot or will not tell us how to draw a reasonably defensible moral dividing line between good and bad technologies.

According to the religious traditionalism favoured by the authors, the universe is part of God’s benevolent creation and human beings are assigned a starring role in the cosmic drama. Since no scientific worldview can offer similar assurances, science appears bleak and pessimistic. In place of religion’s flattering assumption that heavenly bodies exist as human adornments, science informs us that planet Earth is merely one of many planets in a solar system that is merely one of innumerable solar systems in a galaxy that is merely one among billions of galaxies. Thus, science makes it difficult to hang onto the comforting notion that humankind is at the centre of the universe. Worse, biological science tells us that humanity has gradually evolved from a series of animal ancestors over a period lasting millions of years. This does not fit well with such religious claims that the earth is less than ten thousand years old and that God created humankind in one fell swoop and in His own image.

In other words, if one accepts the perspective of physics and evolutionary biology, then the theologians’ “orderly universe” vanishes. If humanity is the product of evolutionary natural selection acting on random heritable variations, then appeals to Human Nature as the absolute foundation for ethics will be stripped of their normative force. If there is no divine blueprint, then we can no longer denounce scientific developments on the grounds that they are “unnatural” attempts to “play God.” Science is subversive precisely because it undermines traditional appeals to Natural Law of the sort favoured by Schmidt and Marratto.

This largely explains why the authors are highly critical of modernity. They see modern ethics as amounting to no ethics at all. That is because modern ethics denies that the meaning of life can be read off from Nature. According to modernism—secular, liberal and humanistic—there is no meaning of life waiting “out there” to be discovered.

Progress is possible but first we have to decide what we mean by progress. For today’s secular humanist, progress is usually defined, minimally, as a reduction in pain and suffering for human beings and other sentient creatures. To achieve this, we are obliged to use science and technology in order better to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. The overarching goal is to make life a little less terrible for each succeeding generation. On this secular view, it is we (rather than God) who must work out what it means for a life to go well or badly.

Since we are alone in the universe, it is we who must ultimately decide what is to count as meaning and purpose.

Against this secular approach to ethics, Schmidt and Marratto advocate that we view the universe sub specie aeternitatis. They cling unshakeably to their conviction that the universe is ordered accord-

think.

As a secondary theme, Schmidt and Marratto subscribe to Jacques Ellul’s version of technological determinism. Technology, according to Ellul, is in the driver’s seat and we humans are driven, willy nilly, to whatever destination technology dictates.

Whatever can be done, will be done. Because technology is seen as “autonomous and dynamic,” the ethical questions that might slow down progress have become irrelevant. Dental floss and modern pain-free dentistry may help us to keep our teeth into old age and Gore-Tex clothing may help us to keep dry but, the authors adamantly insist, we are incapable of accepting the benefits of such benign technologies without getting suckered into such dangerously antisocial technologies as nuclear weapons and genetically engineered crops.

Frankly, I do not find the technological imperative thesis very plausible. Which technologies are developed in any given society and which are not is dictated not by the technologies themselves but by the prevailing socioeconomic system. Canadians are likely to get oil from tar sands and a renewed round of nuclear power plant construction, but if that is our sad fate it will be because Big Oil and the powerful nuclear power lobby dominate our society economically and (hence) politically. If these industries were not so overwhelmingly wealthy and politically powerful, the dominant powergenerating technologies might be wind, solar and tidal energy and they would be supplemented by a huge push on the conservation front. The mantra “technology made me do it” is little more than a cop-out.

In short, when Schmidt and Marratto finger science and technology as the prime villains of their story they provide a smoke screen that tends to obscure the fact that our destiny lies much more in the hands of short-run profit-maximizing ruling elites, political and economic, rather than in the hands of white-coated scientists and ­technologists.2 The authors occasionally acknowledge that we cannot reject modern technology holus-bolus (unless we are willing to condemn billions of people to freeze and/or starve to death). But their favoured alternative—that we ascertain the proper limits of technology by relying on “timeless human obligations”—is so vague and ill developed that it amounts to little more than vapid posturing.

The “mysterious dimension of reality” on which they place near-total reliance looks suspiciously like magical thinking, a black box from whose inscrutable contents they can extract the absolute prohibitions they seek because of their religious commitments. Finding the optimal balance between our best hopes for technology and our worst fears is not going to be an easy task. Appeals to “miracle, mystery and authority,” in the spirit of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, are likely to make our task more rather than less difficult.

Schmidt and Marratto reject completely the Enlightenment faith in reason and progress and seem personally affronted by Bacon’s aphorism that “knowledge is power.”

December 2008

ing to a (divine) blueprint, designed and brought into existence by a benevolent creator. Once we discover the harmonious design that pervades the universe, we will then also have discovered the key to “objective” ethics. Unlike scientific investigation and experimentation, which merely reveal the nature of the physical world, the doctrine of Natural Law promises to reveal how we should live.

Here is an example of how the debate plays out.

The world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born 30 years ago, in 1978. It would be no exaggeration to say that this event generated a widespread sense of moral panic. Doomsayers abounded, eager to announce that the technology employed by doctors Edwards and Steptoe was the beginning of the end of human civilization. Religious leaders and some bioethicists stepped smartly to the microphone in order to anathematize IVF technology as profoundly unnatural; scientists were accused of playing God. Inevitably, the fearful image of Dr. Frankenstein was invoked. To manufacture a baby in this way was an unparalleled act of hubris. If IVF technology were not immediately banned it would quickly destroy the mystery of sex, procreation and childbirth. Marriages would crumble, sex would cease or would lose its significance, and respect for the sanctity of human life would erode. We were, it was claimed, on the slippery slope to a dystopic brave new world. The only way to avoid these dire consequences would be to impose a world-wide ban on IVF. Eighteen years later, with the cloning of Dolly the sheep, a second moral panic generated similar fearful predictions.

On a consequentialist approach, by contrast, one investigates the facts pertaining to any new technology and then attempts to do a careful balancing of the likely benefits and harms before deciding whether individuals should be permitted to make their own decisions about adopting or rejecting this technology. Admittedly, predicting and assessing the likely future consequences of our decisions, both individual and collective, is no easy task. But this much is clear: the doomsayers were wildly wrong in their fearful predictions about the negative consequences of IVF. Louise Brown is today a well-functioning young woman and some 100,000 childless couples have been able to give birth to children. Not such a big deal, you might

Notes 1 Unaccountably, Schmidt and Marratto situate Bacon in the 18th century. The aphorism “knowledge is power” occurs in Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae, published in 1597.

2 At a couple of points in the book Schmidt and Marratto show glimmers of recognition that socioeconomic systems matter, but this does not slow down their incantations of the technological determinism mantra.

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Darkness Then a Blown Kiss The dark Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid The dark at the top of the stairs: a new play Dark city dames: the wicked women of film noir Dark eros: the imagination of sadism Dark journey: black Mississippians in the age of Jim Crow Dark lanterns: secret political societies, conspiracies, and treason trials in the Civil War Dark life: Martian nanobacteria, rock-eating cave bugs, and other extreme organisms of inner Earth and outer space The dark matter of words: absence, unknowing, and emptiness in literature Dark midnight when I rise: the story of the Jubilee Singers, who introduced the world to the music of Black America Dark paradise: a history of opiate addiction in America The dark side of creativity: blocks, unfinished works, and the urge to destroy The dark side of democracy: explaining ethnic cleansing The dark side of Europe: the extreme right today Dark side of the moon: the magnificent madness of the American lunar quest Dark sun and the woman who wore a hat Dark vanishings: discourse on the extinction of primitive races, 1800–1930 A darker ribbon: breast cancer, women, and their doctors in the twentieth century Darkness then a blown kiss The darkness we carry.

David Clink

Beneath Cyrillic Stars The full moon is a stamp on a dark letter arriving and arriving Cyrillic stars their untranslatable script bleeding through as though the pen was held too tightly pressed too firmly against the page which is the sound time makes rising and passing me in its paper dress the slight rustle of its skirt like leaves falling off their wooden hangers or the sound thread makes pulling its thin river of colour through the eye of a needle all the small deaths of no fixed address receding in time and space until what’s left to the eye what’s left to the mind murmurs like Heraclitean water washing its own hair the river’s memoirs which is light left eons ago and now arriving in small white envelopes like letters after dark.

Julia McCarthy

David Clink is the artistic director of the Rowers Pub Reading Series. He is the webmaster of <poetrymachine.com>, a resource for poets. His first book of poetry, Eating Fruit Out of Season, was published by Tightrope Books in 2008. He is currently reading La infancia y los exilios/Childhood and Exile (Poesia/Poems) by Claudio Duran.

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Julia McCarthy, originally from Toronto, spent ten years living in the United States, Norway and South Africa before returning to Canada to settle in rural Nova Scotia. She has published one book of poetry, Stormthrower (Wolsak and Wynn, 2002). This poem is from a new manuscript. Currently she is reading Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade, and A Philosophy of Solitude by John Cowper Powys.

Tom Wayman’s latest volume is a book-length critical essay, Songs Without Price: The Music of Poetry in a Discordant World. His first novel, Woodstock Rising, will appear in 2009. He is reading Tom Hayden’s Writings for a Democratic Society and poet Paul Hunter’s Come the Harvest.

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“Bloor & Eyeless Ave.” The Uniqueness of the Dark Morning again: Thursday, though it feels Wednesday, my routine in effect before I am: bathroom, exercises, orange-coffee-bagel, at the desk by nine, computer clicked on. Then, as abruptly, 10 p.m.: teeth brushed, the delicious ease of sheets and duvet, the float toward dawn.

No night passes as my days. I never tell myself One more Tuesnight or Frinight to get through.

Whatever bizarre intricate dreams shape themselves and whether I can recall a sliver of feeling that one evoked, the dark hours never replicate themselves, nor can I slot their events into a nightbook. No calendars, no schedules. I don’t establish or plan for what occurs. I’m here for the huge, wild ride.

Tom Wayman

Here lies the city beneath December’s white linens. Pale and thin of ankle, harsh of eye and quiet of whispering secrets through her streets, crisscrossed with the scars of streetcar tracks and foggy in the tunnels of her skyscrapers, and now in the still of the nighttime beneath streetlight syzygies and blindeyed neon down beside doors he walks with a hand in his pocket counting sixtyseven cents in dimes and nickels and pennies and no traffic can be heard.

And here he turns into a doorway, its wood frame weatherworn and tired. It groans in effort as he opens it, kicks the snow off the heels of his boots and shuts it behind him. Behold the din of hopefuls: behold firelight. A fiddle playing in one corner, an argument played across the teeth of an upright piano. Coffins and fallen soldiers and women who wear jeans pulled low over the leather of their boots. His heels click themselves to the crooked smile of the bar and he sits.

It was Miss Sylvia’s place, and she ran it like a freight train through a thunderstorm. Slight and bright of iris, cruel and unusual in the way she worked her tongue, a tool for speech yes, and can you guess what else? What a red whale’s tail that is. An aphrodisiac for an insomniac, an apotropaic talisman. He sits and orders a pint of her special homemade brew: a deep amber in color: the color of wit warmed by a fire in the wintertime: the color of roasted chestnuts.

Across the room the pianoman takes his seat again on a stack of milk cartons before the Heinztman, and fiddler stops for a swig. Out of the top of that instrument of weather and tears come memories of Stooley’s in Kingston, of the Cadillac. Of Meisje Loos in that Lake District sun. He finishes his first glass and buys one for the bassman. Sylvia is sitting beside him. They tap their boots, hum along with this paean in the cold.

Yer still the same, she says. A jitney for yer thoughts?

No. Here written and writhen are secrets old as snow, as young as skylarks. Here in this city beneath December’s white linens, where children wish on streetlights instead of stars, and here in the din of hopefuls he leans back and winks. So Queen Sylvia, get your autoharp out and play with the boys again, because tonight I’ll dance fast for you, who knows when tomorrow will get here? Or if he’ll be tossed out?

Downtown Love Our first hotel room twenty-fifth floor of a gleaming tower no sandy beach no mossy forest bed heart of January blue sky beating down on concrete denied the redemption of snow on the main arteries the bed a square island typhooned by the late afternoon but that’s nothing she said the mattress bared to shimmery satin the glistening constellation of shadow stars opalescent fluids oozing from our bodies nothing compared to in the crude glare of the bathroom we barely touch unaccustomed to the stranger’s habits a gentle mist descends upon mirrors and our aching skin our blood busy secreting bruises and mementoes next day’s infallible untruths the power of words

Florence Treadwell

Here’s an Aeolian wind, here’s my darlin’s eye, Here’s where dreams get lost, Here’s where they go to die.

Alexander Offord Alexander Offord is a writer of plays, poems and short stories. He divides his time between Guelph, Ontario, where he is a student, and his home in Toronto, a city that plays a starring role in many of his works. He is currently reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver, and V, by Thomas Pynchon.

December 2008

Florence Treadwell is a bilingual poet and a photographer who lives in Peterborough, Ontario, and in France, her native country. Her poems and photographs have appeared in numerous Canadian literary journals. as well as several of the League of Canadian Poets anthologies. Her first book, Cleaving (1999), a collection of poems and

photographs was published by Ronsdale Press. A mini-collection (nicknamed “chipbook”), Death Sentences, was published by littlefishcartpress in 2005. She has recently been immersed in The Birth House by Ami McKay and Prodigy by Nancy Huston.

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Rocks and Hard Places Newfoundland, Alberta and the dark night of the soul.

Anne Marie Todkill

What They Wanted Donna Morrissey Viking Canada 328 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780670044788

My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it.

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, I.5 s an image of the resettlements forced upon the outport communities of Newfoundland and Labrador in the mid 20th century, there is none sadder or more astounding than that of a wooden house being floated miles over open water. None, that is, except the image of such a house in the opening scene of Donna Morrissey’s What They Wanted. The family we first met in her third novel, Sylvanus Now, had spurned the government deal. But now that the fish are all gone, “sucked into the bowels of a thousand foreign factory ships,” they must launch their house into an economically plausible future. Ah, but it is a narrow channel that leads there—so narrow that the house must be sawn in half.

Houses, both divided and whole, sum up many things in this novel. Raised between two households, Morrissey’s narrator Sylvie Now “always felt … just halfways home.” Abandoned outport homes stand bereft, visited by the spirits of the drowned.

The strange neighbour-child, Trapp, observes family life warily, “as though he’d never seen the insides of a house before.” Houses are like souls, and souls like houses; as Sylvie says to her beloved brother, Chris, “That’s how I see you, full of voices and all boarded up.” Even Newfoundland is an unsettled house, its work-starved youngsters leaving home.

Sylvie’s father once cut a heroic figure working the sea the old way, resisting the evil of gill nets and factory trawlers. By the opening of What They Wanted the changing times have forced him to work against his own soul, as his wife puts it, and well nigh to death. Out of his element, his boat adrift, he lies in a hospital in Corner Brook while the stricken family gathers, reckoning how they will survive. And so Sylvanus’s house is divided again as his daughter and elder son head out to make fast money in the Alberta oil boom.

A

Whatever wistfulness there might have been in the past generation of this family’s labour— Sylvanus Now spanned the years 1949 to 1960—is replaced by a Stygian nightmare. Work on a mudmired drill rig is a brutal purgatory of noise and dread. Isolation here is not the stalwart solitude of the lone fisherman; it is an industrial isolation—man against machine, and against inchoate, unregenerating geological forces. Mother Ocean is more fathomable than a sea of gas ten kilometres underground, and the human losses to which fishing families are inured are nothing to the inevitability of disaster that comes with “sitting on a mega bomb some stun bastard might trigger any minute.”

Sylvie quotes the statistics: “Four thousand, three hundred accidents in one year—out of a crew of seven thousand, five hundred.” In the unevenness of the match the worker’s dignity is lost. “No worthy man,” she concludes, “would put himself here.”

saint’s admonition to those who “hold their heads so high in the clouds of learning that they do not hear [Christ] saying Learn from me.” (Confessions VII.9). Otherworldly knowledge is also suggested in Chris’s Jungian dreamscapes and the “spells” that overtake him, like epileptic absences—an intriguing parallel, possibly, with Augustine’s idea of a mind “seized and held still” by insight into eternity.

(Whereas Sylvie’s love interest, Ben, whose literal drawings are a way of “holding things steady,” is prone to absences of a drug-related kind.) Perhaps the philosopher-saint presides over Sylvie’s ruminations on the ineffability of time, and, most importantly, over the desire of both mother and daughter for grace, that “unearned gift from God.” Sylvie and Adelaide, at the emotional centre of the book, struggle with metaphysics in a manner that arises organically from life. Whatever the possibilities of subtextual interpretation, their characters are never abstract.

It makes psychological sense for Adelaide to seek the companionship of a personable saint whose confession of failings alternates with the pondering of mysteries and emotional asides to God. Morrissey writes unpretentiously about the many levels on which life is lived and puzzled out, and closely observes the ambiguities and misfires of human relationships. And so, despite the brute material reality of What They Wanted, where the warm and briny dialogue of Morrissey’s earlier novels is replaced by raw vulgarity, the real action is interior, rooted in private struggle. Family tragedy and childhood events tie her dramatis personae to an uncanny fate, and we see how accidents of nurture or neglect leave no one untouched.

To what precise extent this autobiographical novel mirrors sad events in the author’s own life is no business of ours. Suffice it to say that Morrissey’s depiction of Sylvie’s agony when tragedy descends is the most moving description of shocked grief I have ever encountered. Equally wrenching is Adelaide’s act of confession, by which she delivers her daughter from that dark night. I leave this novel caring about these characters as if they had entered my own life, and hoping—as the last pages hint—to meet them again. Morrissey has an authentic gift not only for creating characters who live off the page, but also for bringing alive the sweep of time and fortune that is bigger than any of us. These forces are not only history and material circumstance, but also the human bonds that, in a tangled and imperfect way, shape our spiritual destiny.

Isolation [in Alberta] is not the stalwart solitude of the lone fisherman; it is an industrial isolation— man against machine, and against inchoate, unregenerating geological forces. Mother Ocean is more fathomable than a sea of gas six miles underground.

Anne Marie Todkill is a writer and editor in Ottawa.

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Meanwhile, distrust and animosity fester dangerously. Freddy Four-Eyes, the “book-happy” engineer responsible for interpreting pressures and formations, is viewed with undisguised contempt; the crew would rather bet their lives on the experience of the fiendish Push, boss of the rig floor; reading the drill gauges is the unnerving Trapp, a fifth-business character caught in a vortex of hate. From her vantage point in the cookhouse, Sylvie sees the crew as “men without comfort … no thoughts, no song, no commitment or loyalty—like the houses back in Cooney Arm, emptied shells, awaiting the souls that once were to come back and inhabit them.”

The tension between science and instinct on the rig is one variant of the theme of human knowing that runs throughout this book. It is the homeschooled Sylvie who has fulfilled her mother’s old desire for travel and education: a graduate of philosophy, she has gone “through Descartes’s meditations like a miner with a pick.” But it is her teacher-mother, Adelaide, who finds the greatest consolation in philosophy, through her lifelong reading of Saint Augustine. In their bitter argument over Sylvie’s plan to pry her brother away from the “meagre scrap of life in the outports” to study art in Halifax, her mother’s defence of grateful attention to one’s own sphere may be influenced by the

Literary Review of Canada

Singing the European Blues A Czech-Canadian author brings a major career to a close.

Sam Solecki

Ordinary Lives Josef Škvorecký Translated by Paul Wilson L&OD, an imprint of Key Porter Books 237 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780886194437

J

osef Škvorecký is a prolific writer, but there is no doubt that his major body of work is contained in the seven semi-autobiographical novels he wrote during the past 60 years. The Cowards, dealing with the end of the Second World War and written during the early years of the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, was the first; Ordinary Lives, a remains-of-the-day elegy looking back at a disastrous century, is the most recent and doubtless the last. Like several of it predecessors, Ordinary Lives has been sensitively translated by Paul Wilson, whose several collaborations with Škvorecký constitute a significant contribution to our literary culture.

Roughly chronological, the self-contained volumes in the series encompass the history of his nation from the 1920s (Škvorecký was born in 1924) to the years after the Velvet Revolution. If we add Dvorak in Love (1986) and The Bride of Texas (1995), his novel about Czechs in the American Civil War, we have a body of work that engages a century and a half in the life of a people. It may not be a unique accomplishment—Gore Vidal and Hugh Hood have done something similar—but it is nevertheless an impressive act of what might be called national proprietorship: a national epic in a postmodern era that claims not to believe in epics. Škvorecký’s focus throughout the sequence has been on the lives of ordinary people who find themselves prevented by extraordinary historical forces—call them Hitler, Stalin, Gottwald—from having the mundane lives they (and we) desire.

The books written before his arrival in North America emphasize the tragicomic absurdity of everyday life under Fascism and Communism.

Politics, understandably, is dealt with obliquely, even in code. What is impressive, however, is how rarely the reader has the impression that Škvorecký has conceded anything to the censor. In Prague, Škvorecký’s alter ego, Danny Smiricky, is a bachelor and a moderately successful dramatist more interested in women and friends than in the political events beyond his control; he is a perceptive and

compassionate observer and an ironic flâneur. Two of the books from this period, The Cowards and The Bass Saxophone (1963), are among the author’s finest.

The novels written after the author’s exile show a darkening of the fictional palette. Writing in Canada, Škvorecký deals more explicitly with historical events such as the rigged trials of the early 1950s, persecutions of various groups and the 1968 invasion. Although Danny remains as detached and skeptical as ever, the two great novels of the 1970s, The Miracle Game (1972) and The Engineer of Human Souls (1977) bring to mind Faulkner’s comment that “there is a dimension of mission in the writer’s vocation.”

Another way of putting this would be to recall François Truffaut’s not altogether facetious suggestion that World War Two was a struggle for the soul of Europe between Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin.

The novels now show an exiled writer trying to preserve in fiction what Solzhenitsyn calls in his Nobel Prize speech “the living memory of a nation … a

thriller mixing fact and fiction, but it was not part of the Smiricky cycle. Only in 2004 did he finally publish in Prague the conclusion to the ambitious series that is his masterpiece and will be his monument. Ordinary Lives (Obyejne zivoty) is a compelling group portrait of a generation whose lives were poisoned by the mustached man with the pockmarked face and his followers. The novel is structured around two class reunions in Kostelec, a small town on the Polish border. The first is held in 1963, the second 30 years later. The characters—the ironic ordinary lives of the title—graduated in 1943 and, as one would expect, there are more ghosts at the second reunion than the first. The mood in 1963 is grim as the former classmates divide into those who have been party members (complicit in the party’s crimes) and those who have not and have suffered as a result. Although the 20 or so characters are clearly individuated in speech and appearance, they also represent the different kinds of “ordinary lives” that people lived during the years covered by the fiction.

By 1993 the political situation has changed, but the mood is, if anything, even more morose as the sad remnant of a betrayed generation looks back on lives of remorse and quiet despair while anticipating illness and death. As Smiricky remarks, “We were all old folks.” To ask either How have you been? or How are you? is to risk hearing a litany of different kinds of public and private suffering. They are at an age when it is hazardous either to look back or forward. All would agree with Faulkner that in some cases “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The novel is written in what might be called Škvorecký’s late style—a minimum of description, laconic dialogue, more implied than explained, and a narrator almost as neutral as a camera. Several of the scenes and even some of the lines are taken from earlier volumes in the series as if the author— like Proust in Le Temps retrouvé—is reinforcing continuities and unobtrusively weaving the separate volumes into a single tapestry. Continuity in Ordinary Lives is established by simple juxtapositions of thematically or dramatically related scenes, and the character-driven plot develops inconspicuously and incrementally on the basis of the several subplots that are the characters’ lives.

Alhough he observes everything, Smiricky has been away too long—“you can’t go home again”— to judge his classmates. He leaves that up to the reader and to God. The paternoster, which aptly ends the series on a note of mystery, suggests that this particular dark night of the Czech national soul is over.

The novel is written in what might be called Škvorecký’s late style—a minimum of description, laconic dialogue, more implied than explained, and a narrator almost as neutral as a camera.

Sam Solecki lives in Toronto and is the author of Prague Blues: The Fiction of Josef Škvorecký (ECW Press, 1990).

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spent history … safe from deformation and slander.”

I would make the same point about the work in exile of Czesław Miłosz and Solzhenitsyn himself.

This is writing that both engages us in a variety of complex ways and intervenes in contemporary history. After 1968, Škvorecký’s fiction looks in two directions—East in Czech and West in translation.

His canvas is no longer just his homeland. The novels now move back and forth among countries and different eras. As the scope of his vision expands, his style and form become more venturesome, even experimental, though his transitions between scenes and the intricacies of his plots are as subtle and smooth as the montage in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Škvorecký’s ever-present undogmatic Christian humanism, grounded in charity and forgiveness, begins to be felt more strongly.

The series was put on hold after The Engineer of Human Souls, the first translated novel to win the Governor General’s award for fiction in English.

Although Škvorecký was as prolific as ever during the 1970s and ’80s, I have the impression that he did not have anything new to say either about Smiricky or the situation in Czechoslovakia which, under Gustáv Husák, seemed frozen in time.

Then came the miracle of 1989. Like Milan Kundera, Škvorecký took his time writing the novel of return. His first effort was Two Murders in My Double Life (1999), a complex and intriguing

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A Storyteller’s Story An academic examines the life and times of Canada’s most successful popular historian.

Roger Hall

Pierre Berton: A Biography A.B. McKillop McClelland and Stewart 791 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771057571

“W

ho is this Pierre Bear-tawn I keep hearing about?” The Globe and Mail’s editor, Englishman Richard Addis, is reputed to have asked early in his tenure (1999–2002).

The response is unrecorded, but the question indicates that the newcomer had plenty to learn about the society he was to join. Pierre Berton, by the turn of the last century, arguably was one of English Canada’s best-known public figures. When he died, on November 30, 2004, at age 84, of a combination of heart disease and diabetes, he had authored some 50 books, written countless newspaper columns and articles, and appeared thousands of times on television and radio. Bruce Hutchison, an author he greatly admired, had earlier and famously written of Canada as “The Unknown Country.” By the time of his death, Berton’s untiring efforts conclusively had made it, at least in popular historical terms, much more of a Known Country.

But how much was really known about the man himself? than one Pierre Berton—and that the Canada he A.B. McKillop, himself not unknown to savvy experienced and eventually influenced had many Canadian readers, has written an undeniably mas- guises as well. sive biography of Berton—at near 800 pages as The bare bones of Berton’s career have often large as the larger-than-life character he is pursu- been told—not least by the man himself. At least ing. McKillop, author (amongst many scholarly four of his books, Drifting Home (1973), Starting tomes) of the non-slender and much praised The Out (1987), My Times: Living with History, 1947– Spinster and the Prophet: Florence Deeks, H.G. Wells 1995 (1995) and the strange and revealing Cats I and the Mystery of the Purloined Past, has done a Have Known and Loved (2002), are in the first-perbrilliant job with this new Berton bio, which simply son singular, as is the transparent guide for writers, asks who was this Pierre Berton. And since this is The Joy of Writing: A Guide for Writers, Disguised as a “life and times” in the grand tradition, how was a Literary Memoir (2003). So to use the journalese he shaped by the era during which he lived? En he understood so well, had he already covered the route to the not particularly surprising answer, we waterfront? Well, certainly in terms of a basic chrolearn, also not surprisingly, that there was more nology most of it has been said before, but what is really revealing are the ‑shading and perspective, and that is where McKillop is at his best.

Roger Hall is the general editor of the Champlain Pierre Berton was born July 12, 1920, in Society, a member of the Department of History at Whitehorse.

Within a year his family had moved the University of Western Ontario and a senior fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto. to the isolated, near ghost town of Dawson City.

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Here was something of a “boy’s own” dream, redolent with an exciting past and a town whose abandoned buildings and contents were open to exploration and imaginative speculation. If ever there were a seedpod for a romantic imagination, Dawson encapsulated it, but to Child Berton the effect was subliminal. When his father, Frank, lost his job as a mining recorder in the government retrenchments of 1932, the Bertons retreated to staid Victoria, another place where little of interest occurred. It was in Victoria that Berton grew into an impressionable, shy and gawky young man. Then, suddenly, his father found himself recalled to Dawson in 1935. But this time he went alone, and father and son were isolated from each other at that teenage stage when intimacy is so necessary.

Emotional longing for people and places—nostalgia—would play no small part in Berton’s professional and personal life. Berton was too intelligent to be overwhelmed by it, but he exhibited a lifelong curiosity about the nature of the past, and the separation from his father and Dawson may well have kindled it. Not a little of Berton’s life would be spent not so much coming to terms with Frank, but trying to understand him, and in so doing trying to comprehend the society that had motivated him to move to Yukon at the century’s turn. It was more than mucking for gold that took Frank there and, since he was not particularly lucky, it was something more that kept him there. McKillop writes beautifully and meaningfully of Frank’s departure and the decisive impact it had on his 15-year-old son: “These were confusing and bitterly sad days for him, and they became the most painful ones he was to suffer in a very long life, searing deep and leaving an emotional scar that never did fully heal.”

He then relates Berton’s own writing of the incident in Drifting Home and notes how, “for once” Berton “managed to plumb depths in his own dark waters,” in “a book very much about Pierre’s understanding of his father” and “raw with love and despair, possibly the closest he could come to an emotional self-reckoning.”

The passage McKillop is referring to describes the leavetaking in Victoria, his father “talking in low tones” behind a closed door to his mother and then

Literary Review of Canada

coming out “and his eyes were red and I could see my mother crying softly into her pillow and I felt I had never in my life been so miserable.” A friend, Bob Allen, then takes Berton and his crying sister down to the ferry dock, where he had “to fight back the tears for, having turned fifteen and now being the man of the house, I was determined not to cry then or ever again.” He concludes: I can remember my father saying, over and over again: “They’re good children, Bob; they’re good children,” and Bob answering: “Yes, they are good children, Frank,” and then we were at the dock and he was going up the gangplank, waving back at us, and the boat was whistling and he was gone and nothing was ever quite the same again.

A lifetime later, when Berton was talking in an interview with McKillop, still “tears welled up in his eighty-two-year-old eyes and words failed him.”

For this reviewer the incident and its impact seem central to understanding Berton. After this incident, in spite of spending teenage summers working in Dawson and living with his father, he erected a wall against the world, a shield forged with bravado and braggadocio and sheer talent that insulated him from emotional exposure.

After high school, where he did not excel, Berton attended Vic College, as it was known, essentially a two-year feeder for the University of British Columbia. Victoria in the 1930s was not exactly a place to cut loose and send postcards from the edge, but Berton grew intellectually there. In 1939 when he settled into UBC, he was ready for new challenges and the autonomy that comes with going away to ­university.

The UBC years, or more appropriately the Ubyssey years, were the making of Berton. Here he became a cub reporter extraordinaire, in his eyes, “Scoop Berton,” living out a university version of the hit play and movie The Front Page. And arguably he was good—very good—snaring such personalities as then-neophyte explorer Thor Heyerdahl for the paper before the Vancouver dailies did, but also acting as UBC stringer for Vancouver’s News-Herald. The News-Herald was more than sophomoric enthusiasm; it was a real, if struggling, serious paper and it was there that Berton essentially learned his trade. When the war came to Vancouver after Pearl Harbor, the place came alive and Berton “had found [his] niche.”

But Berton was also eager to do his bit and joined the Canadian army. He did not have what some recall as “a good war”—at least in his view.

Berton was a consummate and conscientious trainer of men and only made it overseas for the grand finale and then never got further than the United Kingdom. But he continued writing—in army papers he helped found and develop—all the time honing his reportorial and narrative skills.

Back in Vancouver he landed a job with the Sun, which was then locked in a circulation war with the grander Province, and he unleashed his flair for the dramatic. McKillop is particularly good at showing Berton’s wild ride through these years—and suggesting that he often had moral lapses of judgement in pushing family members too hard in reporting a murder story, in engineering crazy stunts calculated to embarrass and, in one case, faking a politician’s photo. He came to national—and even

international notice—with a breathless tale about the Nahanni Valley, christened “Headless Valley,” where in a grand trek north, reported daily, he exploded the myth of “head hunting savages and pre-historic monsters.” The tale caught the notice of Maclean’s magazine. Berton had grander dreams and thought Toronto would be a way station on a triumphant tour to New York to work at Life or the Saturday Evening Post. As it was he would spend the rest of his life centred in Toronto.

But Berton would not be alone, although it took him much time to settle down. One of the bonuses of the Ubyssey had been working with Janet Walker—but seven years passed before he could commit to her and marry her in 1946. Janet would provide him—besides a bumper crop of children whose names all begin with “P”—the stability he had craved since his father’s death. He would later say there were three key career moves in his life: to the Ubyssey, then to Maclean’s and, finally, becoming a daily columnist for the Toronto Star. He should have added marriage to Janet, as she provided the carapace that made it all possible—including tolerating his occasional fidelity lapses.

Berton—through bylines and behind the scenes—made Maclean’s necessary reading in the Canada of the 1950s. As writer and editor he was relentless in getting the news behind the news, and through good writing, and recognizing and sponsoring good writing in others, he became a national figure. His fame was enhanced further when he joined the Toronto Star as a columnist tackling sympathetically all the great social and

this academic intolerance. In the end, in no small part because he could recognize and absorb justified criticism of his work, he would triumph and academe would recognize his value. It seems so simple—surely an idea is only as good as its successful communication. And unlike so many of his scholarly contemporaries, Berton was—in many media—a superb communicator.

Berton the great storyteller dovetails in this biography with Berton the celebrity writer and TV personality. One fed off the other, of course. Canada in the 1950s and ’60s was ripe for both—storytelling and celebrity. The country was no longer a British appendage and wanted to be something more than America Lite. Berton was a bridge between an old dominion and a new nation—and he was eager to make sure that the place would not become a new colony of its powerful, magnetic southern neighbour. Berton was not alone in his self-appointed task—writers such as Farley Mowat and Peter C. Newman, publishers such as Jack McClelland, TV impresarios such as Ross McLean and Patrick Watson, magazine and newspaper editors such as Arthur Irwin and Ralph Allen, built a national basis for the emergent talents that give substance and credibility to our current resilient national cultural consciousness. McKillop’s narrative is frequently as much their story and the tale of the Canada they fashioned as it is a biography of Berton—and it is none the less for that.

A word about Berton and his histories. I was briefly interviewed for this book because decades ago I defended Berton and lamented that too many of my contemporaries, in a misplaced rush to endow history as a social science, had forgotten the significance of style in their support of methodological substance. Much of the criticism of Berton’s work was deserved—he would choose the romantic over the mundane, the exciting over the humdrum, passionate character over tedious circumstance. But his research was always thorough. He did find the evidence for what he wrote, but he always added a prospector’s thumb to the weighing scale to tip it in the direction of readerliness. In so doing he occasionally was highhanded, but McKillop shows how well he considered professional criticism. The proof of Berton’s success is that our contemporary historical output again values synthesis as being as creative as specialized research—and celebrates good writing overall. No better example can be found than A.B. McKillop.

And a final word on Pierre. What did make him run? I think the answers are in Dawson and the Klondike and that is why it is so significant to emphasize the early parts of his life. What his father, Frank, found there was the excitement of the unknown, and he had the curiosity to follow it up long after the drama of the gold rush was over.

His son, Pierre, had the same sort of curiosity and he found inspirational gold through his writings— especially his histories. The emblematic moment of departure from his father at that Victoria dock necessitated a lifetime of rebuilding, a search for personal stability satisfied by his marriage, and then a linking with the land and the people in it. We all profited when he struck his brand of gold.

Emotional longing for people and places — nostalgia — would play no small part in Berton’s professional and personal life.

December 2008

political issues of the day in a sharp, punchy style that enraptured readers as much as it annoyed his targets. Appearances on radio and then television, including 38 years as a regular panellist on Front Page Challenge, only enhanced his impact (although he was awkward in both media at first), but he still wanted more. And one senses through McKillop’s lens that what he wanted was less applause, less razzle-dazzle and more thoughtful respect.

The route to this respect was storytelling, which he had always been good at, but now developed on a national scale and on national themes. Beginning with his monumental account of the Klondike gold rush, really an exploration of his own backyard and his father in many ways, he became a creature rare in Canada: the popular historian. Decades later critics would still call this his best book—and it certainly is a candidate with its fast-paced style and engaging detail. It might be safer to say that he set the bar high—for himself.

The relation of, and reflections upon, Berton’s role as Canada’s popular chronicler is the centrepoint and attenuated climax in McKillop’s account. McKillop knows the territory very well, being, himself, that academic oddity, a professional who can write for all audiences. It takes one to know one and although McKillop’s scholarly bona fides are beyond doubt, he knows that the historical academy too often is inbred and protective of its turf—its self-appointed mission to protect and interpret the national past. Beginning with the publication of Klondike in 1958 and continuing for decades, Berton would butt up against

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Novel Pleasures From the plains of Troy to Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin to a Saskatoon hospital, a selection of fictional journeys worth exploring.

Bronwyn Drainie

T

his is turning out to be a bumper season for Canadian fiction. The superstars are not on this year’s list—Atwood, Munro, Ondaatje, Vanderhaege—but many of our most solid prose artists, as well as many promising rookie voices, are on display in the stores with new novels and story collections. Regular LRC readers will have seen, or will see in the coming months, fullscale reviews of works by Mark Anthony Jarman, Mary Swan, Libby Creelman, Joseph Boyden, David Bergen, Donna Morrissey, Joan Barfoot, Fred Stenson, Nino Ricci, Joan Thomas, Patrick Lane, Kenneth J. Harvey and Josef Škvorecký.

That’s a rich list, but it is not complete. There are many more fiction titles worth discussing this season, and we simply do not have room for them all. So in the run-up to the Christmas season, we have decided to give our readers just a short taste (more descriptive than critical given the space constraints) of ten more Canadian novels that might appeal to you or to someone in your reading family.

For these mini-reviews, I thank our in-house readers: Robin Roger, Rosie Aiello, Anna Candido, Moira MacDougall, Helen Walsh and Mark Lovewell.

The Flying Troutmans Miriam Toews Knopf Canada Miriam Toews follows up her Governor General’s award–winning novel, A Complicated Kindness, with this book, a hilarious and heartbreaking road tale about the search for a missing father. Hattie, recently dumped by her ashram-bound boyfriend, returns home to Canada from Paris after an SOS call from her eleven-year-old niece, Thebes. Things have fallen apart again and Min, Hattie’s mentally ill sister, is comatose in bed. Logan, Thebes’s 15-year-old brother, is skipping school, carrying condoms, shooting hoops and refusing to talk.

Hattie hospitalizes Min and, panicked at her inappropriateness as surrogate parent, packs Logan, the purple-haired Thebes and a very thinly sketched game plan into a van that has seen better days, and heads off across the United States in search of paterfamilias Cherkis, driven away years earlier

by Min’s craziness. Readers of Toews’s work will recognize the precocious teenage dialogue of her

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earlier novel, pitch-perfect in its flatly ironic tone and pop culture references, that leaves you either laughing or aching for its vulnerability depending on the page. It is a journey both physical and emotional, as the narrative weaves between the events of the current day, and events of Hattie and Min’s childhood, including attempts at suicide, murder and redemption.

Dragonflies Grant Buday Biblioasis Revisiting Homer seems to fascinate contemporary Canadian writers. Margaret Atwood gave The Odyssey a spirited feminist spin with The Penelopiad, and now novelist Grant Buday takes on the actioncharged final sequences of The Iliad, including the resonant episode of the Trojan Horse, and invests them with all the psychologically invasive traits of the modern novel. For younger readers in particular, who may find the Homerian epic itself too daunting, Dragonflies is an intriguing way into the story of the Trojan War, made more accessible particularly for female readers because Buday spends a lot of time on Odysseus’ longing for Penelope and Telemachus, and on Penelope’s spitting hatred of her cousin Helen. Since the story is told from cunning Odysseus’s point of view, and he is far from being the most bloodthirsty member of the original cast, Dragonflies is not as violent as its famous progenitor (although it has its moments). Buday enjoys portraying Odysseus as a secret non-believer in a god-drenched age, which gives his retelling of the epic an especially contemporary twist.

Distantly Related to Freud Ann Charney Cormorant Books The title of this novel aptly captures both the depth and the pretentions of Ellen’s Montreal family of Central European Jews displaced by the war. From an early age, Ellen grows up learning not to get attached to people and not to explore history, two classic refugee traits. Naturally, the book takes the reader on Ellen’s journey of relearning. But it is also a Bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist as a young girl, describing Ellen as she grows, slowly

and quite painfully, into a writer. One has to admire Charney’s willingness to people her novel with a cast of unlikeable, suspicious, often untrustworthy characters, including her protagonist. The flatness of the narrative tone also reveals the emotional disjunction between Ellen and the “normal” North American life going on around her, including the friends she makes and the boys she goes to bed with. Although Charney indicates that Ellen eventually learns how to connect, both with others and with her history (including her relationship with that famous long-gone ancestor), the effect one is left with is that of a prickly outsider whose life will always be a struggle. But of course, that’s where the art comes from as well.

Uproar Jack MacLeod Porcupine’s Quill A mid-life crisis descends upon an unsuspecting professor of economics, J.T. McLaughlin, when his beloved wife of 24 years, Trish, leaves him to pursue a career as a local daytime talk-show host. Between his closed-door office at Chiliast University and the disrepair of his marital nest, McLaughlin drowns his grief in single malt scotch and Pepto-Bismol.

The love of his children and the concern of revered intellectual colleagues are no match for his mounting anxiety, dilapidating health and the general rupture of his orderly life. His plans for isolation and incoherence are interrupted when he hears from an old college friend (and reappearing MacLeod character) Francis Z. Springer (aka Zinger), whose antics and camaraderie may just pull J.T. out of the senselessness of loss. MacLeod colours the characters and landscape of Uproar with a contemporary Canadian sensibility. He infuses a universal tale of loss and healing with the familiarity of physical and intellectual locales from Toronto’s lively neighbourhoods, and with an evocation of Saskatchewan newspapers, managing along the way to delineate Canadian communications theory from Innis to McLuhan. Ultimately, Uproar is a story about the possibility for reconstruction and joy amidst chaos and wreckage.

Literary Review of Canada

Eva’s Threepenny Theatre Andrew Steinmetz Gaspereau Press Patrick Dennis had his Auntie Mame, Graham Greene travelled with his Aunt Augusta, and now Andrew Steinmetz joins the ranks of eloquent nephews with his brilliant portrayal of his memorable Aunt Eva. As with Mame and Augusta, Eva breaks both the mould and the rules, but in her case, there are darker, richer shadows in a life that begins as a Lutheran in pre-war Breslau and shifts unexpectedly to a Nuremberg-defined Jew escaping to Canada. Before Hitler rewrote her religious status, she defied convention by joining the theatre and performing with the first cast of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Her theatrical skills were life savers, enabling her not only to flee Germany but also to get herself and her dog airlifted to safety.

Steinmetz calls this work about his Aunt Eva a “fiction about memoir,” meaning that key aspects of the book are not invented, least of all the character of Eva Steinmetz, but a significant portion is.

Although it is disconcerting that they are blended together without distinction, the result is a compelling, evocative work that gives us another depiction of a life shattered by Hitler. Eva is so fascinating a character it is hard to know why her nephew felt the need to add fancy to fact.

Vishnu Dreams Ven Begamudré Gaspereau Press Canadian readers have feasted on the exotic, the tragic and the challenging elements of immigrant narratives. The bar has been set high. Ven Begamudré attempts to inject this story with the exotic by framing it with Hindu tales of Vishnu: “So he dreams the lives of his people, even those who have crossed the Black Water into so-called civilized lands. For, however far his people may venture, they can never leave his dreams.” But the dream that unfolds is painted sparingly with a reliance on the stereotypes of Americans in the late 1960s and early ’70s: cheerleaders, romance with the gun and an uncritical love of U.S. history. It is told from the perspective of two children, Durga and her younger brother, Subhas, as they make their way in the so-called civilized land. In the end, the classic immigrant father’s career frustration splits the family apart. Mother accepts a teaching post at the University of British Columbia, and daughter journeys north with her to a life that includes a stint with the Seaforth Highlanders’ reserve. Subhas, the young male protagonist, is no match for the humiliating taunts of his father or the reality of American aggression. The final myth of Kurma Avatara makes for an incomplete resolution, however much Vishnu insists that he needs

December 2008

humans as much as humans need their gods.

The Tristan Chord Bettina von Kampen Great Plains Publications Bettina von Kampen, whose first novel, Blue Becomes You, was nominated for the Amazon.ca/ Books in Canada First Novel Award, brings an encyclopedic knowledge of music from her career as a violinist to her new novel, The Tristan Chord. Taking its name from the chord first heard in Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, the novel examines the reclamation of a German identity apart from the guilt of World War Two—an identity that is founded in German culture, food and, especially, music. Like the multifaceted sound of orchestral music, this novel intertwines different narrative perspectives: first-person diary entries of an antiwar composer in 1944 Germany, the third-person point of view of an SS soldier who helped the composer with his opera and a present-day account of a German Canadian, still shouldering the grief of her experiences in the war. Although the characters may be ideologically opposed, the juxtaposition of viewpoints reveals a mutual understanding, one that is predominantly based on music. While the book does address the horror of the Holocaust, it is essentially an exploration of many functions of music: music as an escape from the atrocities of real life, as a unifying force and as a healer.

Good to a Fault Marina Endicott Freehand Books The happy/unhappy family trope gets a refreshing workout in this second novel by an Alberta-based writer whose first book, Open Arms, was serialized on CBC’s Between the Covers. Spinsterish Clara is driving through her home town of Saskatoon one day when she hits another car and suddenly acquires an instant family. The mother in the other car has cancer and the feckless father vanishes, leaving Clara with three small children and an inherited mother-in-law from hell. There are comedy, pathos and melodrama aplenty to be wrung out of this situation, to be sure, but Endicott’s prime concern is the state of Clara’s soul: is she taking this hardscrabble family under her wing out of guilt, generosity or covetousness, or some very human combination of all three? Endicott excels at capturing the slapdash nature of family life, reminiscent of earlier North American classics like Ah, Wilderness! or You Can’t Take It With You. There is also a great deal of poetry in this novel, and large airy doses of spirituality. But it remains anchored in harsh truths (cancer being one, the closed nature of families being another) that save it from overdosing on charm.

Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Edeet Ravel Viking Edeet Ravel comes from the only generation of writers whose fate it is to have been reared by the tortured, humiliated and haunted survivors of Hitler’s extermination campaign. In this novel, set in post-war Montreal, she describes a group of survivors’ children who live with two dilemmas. First, there is the parental torment, irrationality, tyranny and eccentricity that conditions every breath of their day and every dream of their night. Second, there is the bleak recognition that their parents are so different from anyone else’s that they cannot convincingly convey how bizarre and extreme they are in order to get help or understanding. These parents just cannot be understood by anyone else on the basis of shared human experience. The shocking culmination of the adolescence of these friends illustrates the way in which trauma is not only transferred from the generation that suffered it to the next one, but can literally destroy it. Ravel brings a paradoxically bitter compassion to her subject, conveying characters whose struggles make them harsh, weak, distant, superficial, cruel and pathetic, but most of all shattered. It is a poignant lamentation for a generation that ultimately could not free itself from Hitler’s brutality.

The Soul of All Great Designs Neil Bissoondath Cormorant Books This is a tale of intrigue from a seasoned author extending his thematic range with the portrayal of an urbane schemer, Alec, who is aiming for commercial success as an interior decorator. Required to don a gay persona, Alec discovers the emotional costs of closet heterosexuality. For a while, he loses himself in his career, surrendering occasionally to nights with female escorts. Then he meets Sumintra, a young Indian woman eager to escape the stultifying world of her first-generation immigrant family, their time in Canada already scarred by the Air India disaster. Tragic formula and political statement fuse as Alec and Sumintra’s affair moves to an inexorable conclusion, with a romantic pas de deux played out against the backdrop of a forbiddingly rendered contemporary Toronto. In “this new and slightly manic city,” where exhaust fumes are overpowered by the smell of money, the fleeting pleasures the pair derive from their various deceits are finally punctured. If a role-playing poseur like Alec is able to survive, it is because he is crafty enough to plot ahead in his dangerous game.

Within this stylish novel—Bissoondath’s sixth—lies a fully formed script for a future Hollywood thriller.

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Creating a Canadian Pantheon John Ralston Saul attempts to delineate the national character by spotlighting individuals.

Judy Stoffman

Nellie McClung Charlotte Gray Penguin Canada 204 pages, softcover ISBN 9780670066742 Emily Carr Lewis DeSoto Penguin Canada 185 pages, paperback ISBN 9780670066704

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n 1938, the feminist social reformer, novelist, devout Methodist and temperance crusader Nellie McClung was asked by Prime Minister Mackenzie King to represent Canada at a meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva. Her son, Mark, a Rhodes Scholar, came down from Oxford to meet her. The two went out to dine and at the end of the meal, Mark persuaded her to let him order a couple of mild afterdinner drinks.

When the drinks arrived, McClung, then 65, would not touch a drop.

“I am too old to change,” she told him.

This anecdote, heavy with subtext, is told for the first time in Charlotte Gray’s compact biography Nellie McClung. It does not appear in Mary Hallett and Marilyn Davis’s Firing the Heather: The Life and Times of Nellie McClung (1993), the only full-dress biography. We glimpse through it the tensions between mother and son, youth and age, Europe and Canada, religion and secularism, and something more: the way in which the ideals that appear so clear and shining to one generation are incomprehensible if not laughable to the next.

Today McClung is chiefly remembered for her part in the enfranchisement of women in Manitoba in early 1916, before women could vote anywhere else in Canada, and well before they could vote in the United States and Great Britain. In addition, she was one of the “Famous Five” who, in 1929, petitioned the Privy Council in England to obtain clarification of whether women were persons under the British North America Act and therefore eligible to be appointed to the Canadian Senate. (She is on the $50 bill for that triumph.)

Yet when she died in 1951, her obituaries

mentioned these things only in passing, while elaborating her achievements as a churchwoman, one-time member of the Alberta legislature, bestselling author of novels and non-fiction books (16 in all), newspaper columnist, wife, galvanizing and witty public speaker, mother of five and lifelong opponent of alcohol. Gray, who has a string of successful biographies of redoubtable women under her belt—Isabel Mackenzie King, Susanna Moodie, Catherine Parr Trail, Pauline Johnson—paints a lively and balanced portrait of McClung in all her roles, played out on the larger stage of Canadian history.

Above all, Gray presents her as a westerner, a product of a more egalitarian society closer to its pioneer origins than central or eastern Canada of her day. The Mooney family into which Nellie was born in 1873 in Ontario’s Grey County moved seven years later to a tract near Brandon, Manitoba, in search of more fertile land. This is where Nellie

E

mily Carr, that eminent Victorian, was another strong-willed western woman of the same generation and, like Nellie Mooney, the beloved youngest child in her family. The South African–born Toronto-based novelist and artist Lewis DeSoto is the author of a short biography that is less successful than Gray’s Nellie McClung, in part because there is really nothing new left to say about Carr. Her life has been raked over by four biographers and each of the big retrospective exhibitions since her death has generated catalogues with detailed biographical essays. No other Canadian artist has undergone as much scrutiny.

Readers with any cultural interests know the broad outlines of her life: Born in Victoria into a conventional well-to-do family, orphaned in adolescence, studies art in San Francisco, visits Indian villages and discovers totem poles, goes to London to attend the Westminster School of Art, rejects an offer of marriage, falls ill. After five years in England, returns home and teaches art to children, embarks on sketching trips into the rainforest, goes to France with her sister Alice to learn modern painting techniques, returns to Victoria where her art is misunderstood and rejected. Stops painting and supports herself by running a boarding house, hooking rugs and making ceramics. Keeps pet monkey named Woo and many dogs. In 1927, her work is exhibited at the National Gallery in Ottawa, and she meets members of the Group of Seven who praise her talent and affirm her vision. Lawren Harris suggests that she paint pure landscape instead of rotting totem poles. She continues to sketch alone around British Columbia and has a final creative burst until a heart attack saps her strength and she turns to writing, often working in bed. Her stories of her early life and of her encounters with Native people win her a Governor General’s Literary Award. Dies in 1945, aged 73, already a legend.

DeSoto calls her a “complex and contradictory individual who lived a varied existence of great originality” and in the process made the B.C. landscape “visible in all its beauty and mystery.” True enough, but not exactly a fresh view.

Whereas in Gray’s Nellie McClung the right information arrives at the right moment, DeSoto’s book has a frustrating roundabout structure. He tells us on page 28 that Carr spent time recuperating in a sanatorium in England but does not tell us why until page 57 (she had had a big toe amputated after a carriage accident and it did not heal; in addi-

It is no accident that the three prairie provinces were the first to grant women the vote or that the Famous Five came out of Edmonton.

Judy Stoffman is the former book review editor and literary reporter for the Toronto Star.

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Mooney grew up, far from the amenities of town life such as schools. She was ten when she learned to read, and was herself a schoolteacher only six years later. A highly intelligent woman, she was conscious of her insufficient education all her life.

On the prairies, the hard work of breaking sod and surviving on the land was shared equally by both sexes, giving rise to a generation of women who felt fully entitled to equal rights. It is no accident that the three prairie provinces were the first to grant women the vote or that the Famous Five came out of Edmonton.

Gray quotes from a sarcastic letter to McClung written by Judge Emily Murphy, who organized the petition (originally to the Canadian Supreme Court) challenging the exclusion of women from the Senate. It perfectly illustrates the East–West divide.

“I hear that it has been a terrible shock to the Eastern women,” Murphy wrote her friend, “that five coal heavers and plough pushers from Alberta went over their heads to the Supreme Court without even saying ‘Please ma’am, can we do it?’”

Literary Review of Canada

tion, she had a nervous breakdown). He waits until nearly the end to tell us about Carr’s relationship with her father and a key episode in her childhood that may explain her rejection, much earlier in the book, of love and marriage. Richard Carr had told his young daughter the facts of life in a blunt, repellent manner that put her off sex for good. She referred to this as “the brutal telling.”

Neither biography has an index or footnotes, but a more glaring omission in the case of Emily Carr is the absence of any reproductions of her art so that readers can see what is being referred to in the text.

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harlotte Gray’s and Lewis De Soto’s books lead off the Extraordinary Canadians series, 17 compact biographies to be published by Penguin Canada over three years.

In addition to Carr and McClung, subjects include Glenn Gould, Tommy Douglas, Max Aitken, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mordecai Richler, Wilfrid Laurier, Stephen Leacock, René Lévesque, Pierre Trudeau, Norman Bethune, Lester Pearson, Marshall McLuhan, Big Bear and (in double biographies) Louis Riel paired with Gabriel Dumont and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine with Robert Baldwin.

Each personality is filtered through the lens of a celebrated contemporary author—writers such as Mark Kingwell, André Pratte, M.G. Vassanji and Jane Urquhart—so that we get a readable nonacademic account of our martyrs and rebels, our artists, novelists, statesmen, reformers and musicians. Absent from the list are notable scientists, great educators, city builders or military leaders.

One would like to see at least Sir William Osler, Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Best, and Sir Sanford Fleming added.

Any doubt that the books are needed was dispelled for me by a young man next to me at the series launch in April of this year at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. After explaining that he was raised in the U.S., he asked: “Who is Norman Bethune?”

Penguin has invested $1 million and intends to keep the books in print for a long time (related halfhour television documentaries are being broadcast on Rogers OMNI and the Biography Channel). The series thus stands to become the leading source of knowledge of these figures for thousands of people in years to come.

While the project might appear to be, like the Heritage Minutes on television, yet another attempt to make Canadian history seem sexy, its general editor John Ralston Saul has another purpose: to trace the formation of national character via those larger-than-life individuals who, he believes, set the pattern for it.

Lewis DeSoto’s Emily Carr is sui generis, an eccentric genius with unique gifts that resist emulation. DeSoto spends a lot of time defending Carr against charges of expropriating First Nations material. Perhaps she embodies the complicated relationship we have with our First Nations heritage—admiration and affection mixed with exasperation, incomprehension and guilt.

Charlotte Gray writes that for her, McClung was the archetype of the forthright, self-assured Canadian women she encountered when she moved to this country, quite different from the women she knew in England, her birthplace.

I was also born abroad but had a different encounter with McClung’s legacy. As a refugee kid in the late 1950s, trying to grasp how Canadians thought and, in particular, what made them laugh, I became an avid reader of the rotogravure maga-

December 2008

zines that came with the Saturday papers. I was particularly puzzled by the folksy columns of Gregory Clark, who apparently was considered very funny.

His columns were either about fishing or about hiding his bottle of rye from the disapproving eyes of the Missus. The lingering sense of shame about alcohol, and of alcohol as a battleground between men and women was new to me—a national trait that could also be traced back to the Nellie factor.

Temperance was the primary cause that McClung seized upon passionately as a young woman; “votes for women” was simply a means of suppressing the liquor trade, as well as bringing about other legislation to improve female lives.

Indeed, prohibition followed hard on the heels of female enfranchisement. Yet Gray manages to rescue McClung from the image of the puritan scold with the undivided bosom by making the reader understand why prohibition seemed like a fine idea at the time. Whiskey was sold everywhere and was cheaper than milk. There was no such thing as moderate social drinking—a man was either a drunk and wife abuser or a teetotaller. (No woman drank, McClung believed—they were morally ­superior.)

McClung received “the shock of her life” when her home province Alberta, having ended its brief experiment with prohibition, opened governmentowned liquor stores where booze was sold at a profit. It confirmed for her the essential corruption of politics. Later she was forced to admit that prohibition does not work, but as a member of the CBC’s board of governors in the 1940s she still protested any time she heard a lighthearted reference to cocktails on the radio.

McClung’s firm religious faith and can-do optimism were sorely tested by the tragedies and ironies of her life. Her husband, Wesley, appears to have suffered at least two bouts of debilitating depression, which led to his wife becoming the chief breadwinner, and all four of her sons struggled with alcohol. Alcohol was likely a factor in the suicide of her eldest son, Jack, in 1944.

Gray makes the most of the few known facts about these events, but admits that the private Nellie is hard to locate. After McClung’s death, her daughter Florence burned her diaries and personal papers.

WLU

23

A True Canadian Hero Not all the great settlers of the West were men.

Sharon Butala

Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Story of Louis Riel’s Grandmother Maggie Siggins McClelland and Stewart 292 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771080296

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ver the years Maggie Siggins has been digging deeper and deeper into the West’s lesser-known history, starting with Revenge of the Land, about one quarter section of land near Moose Jaw whose owners begin in theft and end in murder, through Riel, a thorough history of the most famous man the West has so far produced, and now giving us Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Story of Louis Riel’s Grandmother, the awe-inspiring story of the first white woman to live in the West. This is a pedigree of which any writer should be very proud. Given that Maggie Siggins grew up a Torontonian, I might add that this list of books should also give western writers pause, a pause in which to consider how, with our eyes firmly fixed on more distant horizons, we have been, for the most part, neglecting or ignoring our own best stories.

Most even moderately educated westerners know the name Marie-Anne Lagimodière; they know the “first white woman” designation, and the fact that she was Louis Riel’s grandmother. But that is pretty much all they know. There have been several works about Marie-Anne, the one closest to her time written in French, full of praise for her, but also, apparently, full of mistakes, so this book is what we’ve been needing—a full-length biography of a woman whose name deserves to be added to the list of Canadian heroes.

We are a nation that up until lately had carved in stone the notion that our national heroes are men, that the settlement of the West in particular was an all-male venture. Of course, we say, there were women there, too, and they were … uh … tough and brave and high-minded, upholding the virtues of church, school and the family hearth, keeping their husbands, by example, from descending completely into creatures of the wild.

No doubt Simone de Beauvoir could make sense of the tumult of feeling that this notion gives rise to in the breasts of today’s western women whose mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers

homesteaded with their husbands on the “bald prair-ee,” or up in the bush, and who may have walked West beside the oxen from what became Winnipeg all the way to near Prince Albert, who put every wit and some they did not know they had to the simple survival of themselves and their children through blizzards and droughts, dust storms and accidents, illness and sometimes deaths. My memory of my mother and grandmother’s stories about those days is that they were not about embroidery or how to roast a turkey, but about how they saved lives by quick thinking, devising instruments of salvation from trees and water and the flour barrel in the corner, from walking ten miles to get a few eggs to make a cake for a wedding celebration, to fending off bears and wolves and egg-stealing skunks, to giving birth often without even the help of a neighbour woman, never mind doctors, hospitals and homecare nurses. And they call the men the heroes!

But emotion overcomes me. Deep breath.

a time, while eventually producing eight apparently healthy children. (The remarkable fact, given conditions in “civilized” areas, is that they all lived to adulthood.) But she did not go back East; she stayed and lived to tell her stories, ending her life in a proper house in St. Boniface where she had lived with her husband, finally in prosperity, for many years after his death in 1850.

What did I miss in this book? Better maps, for one, and a more detailed account of what happened to her children for another. (Her daughter Julie became Riel’s mother.) A discussion of why none of her children became literate interests me, too. Perhaps she no longer believed, after her thrilling life, that literacy mattered. As well, in Siggins’s attempt to tell a complete and detailed story of the situation in which Marie-Anne lived, occasionally our heroine disappears from the narrative for too many pages. In fact, the problem with trying to develop a character for someone far back in history is that there seems simply not to be enough information. The writer must walk the tightrope with such few facts as are known on one side, and with solid fiction on the other, staying safely in the middle, making educated guesses and indulging in reasonable speculation, as Siggins has done. Even though I sometimes wished she had written a novel instead, I am glad, in the end, that she did not.

What we get in place of a detailed biography is a thorough history of the period in the West. We get it often in minute detail down to the rank-signifying colours of the feathers in the hats of various voyageurs, and the various and seemingly endless skirmishes among the North West Company men, those of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the area’s governors, Lord Selkirk’s managers and the many First Nations people, in which, finally, I simply got lost. I wondered myself if, given her intrepidity, Marie-Anne did not sometimes simply want to leap on the nearest table, fire a musket in the air and shout, “Enough, boys! Quit your bloody squabbling! I’m taking over!” I’ve no doubt she’d have set things to right in minutes, and that bloody and in some ways faintly ridiculous history—all those drunken or ignorant or simply stupid or downright malevolent or insane male leaders who never put the peoples’ needs first (other than the remarkable Chief Peguis)—might have had an entirely different tone. Important as it is to recognize the “Famous Five” (all women of privilege), as we have done, Marie-Anne deserves to have in central Winnipeg and replicated throughout the country, statues to commemorate her, all of them larger than life, as she was.

Marie-Anne escaped death at the hands of a jealous “country wife” of her husband’s, and from the many attacks of various aboriginal bands against the white traders.

Sharon Butala is the author of 16 books of fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent book, Girl from Saskatoon, about the unsolved 1962 murder of a school friend, was published by HarperCollins earlier this year..

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Marie-Anne Lagimodière, born in 1782 near the village of Maskinongé, Lower Canada, undertook such an arduous life that the mind boggles contemplating it. She had been brought up in an era when women were the “angel of the house,” devout, chaste, silent. Unusually, she was literate and, it is said, beautiful, and might have had a more conventional life. She did not have to move West with her freeman-hunter-trapper husband after their marriage in 1807; she chose to, and having made that choice, she went West with him into the wilderness and did not go back, ever. She lived to 96, having been a part of the fur trade, the fort era, the Seven Oaks deaths and the agitation leading up to this event, living even to see her grandson, Louis, “lead Manitoba into Confederation.” She had escaped death at the hands of a jealous “country wife” of her husband’s, and from the many attacks and skirmishes of various aboriginal bands against the white traders. She escaped often in the night, on horseback, with her babies on her back or hanging from cradleboards tied to her saddle or seated behind her and tied onto her with a blanket. She planted fields of corn, lived nearly a year without even her husband to help her with her then five children, and doubtless also, given her beauty, fended off many the drunken trader or trapper and even an aboriginal woman trying to steal one of her babies. Not only did she survive the impossible trip West, she then lived in conditions from tipis to brush shelters in the bush, to filthy and overcrowded forts, and faced near starvation many

Literary Review of Canada

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December 2008

25

After the Apology A passionate journalist asks where do we go from here?

Peter Dinsdale

Where the Pavement Ends: Canada’s Aboriginal Recovery Movement and the Urgent Need for Reconciliation Marie Wadden Douglas and McIntyre 264 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781553653073

We still have to struggle, but now we are in this together. I reach out to all Canadians today in this spirit of reconciliation.

—National Chief Phil Fontaine responding to Stephen Harper’s historic apology in the House of Commons arie Wadden’s latest book, Where the Pavement Ends: Canada’s Aboriginal Recovery Movement and the Urgent Need for Reconciliation, comes at an important time in Canada’s history. On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose in the House of Commons and offered an apology to aboriginal people, and indeed all Canadians, for the sad legacy of residential schools. The apology came on the heels of a landmark settlement with residential school survivors intended to compensate their pain and suffering, and prior to the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was struck to help all involved heal from this terrible history.

The question left unanswered is Where do we go from here? Marie Wadden tries to answer it in this heartfelt book, and she partly succeeds.

Wadden’s ambitions are laid out early on: “The pages of this book contains some answers. None of them are simple, since the problems are complex.

Taken together, though, they outline some necessary steps on the path to finding solutions.”

It is a bold yet refreshing claim, in a field where so many want to testify to how bad things are and not offer any solutions. In many ways Wadden succeeds in shaping some answers in the areas of programming and community development. She uses personal profiles and interviews to create a story of hope and potential. Yet it is clear we still have a long way to go.

Marie Wadden is a journalist and a CBC radio producer who lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

She received an Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy to conduct the research that forms the basis of this book. Her first book was the award-win-

M

Peter Dinsdale is an Anishnawbe and member of the Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario. He is currently the executive director of the National Association of Friendship Centres.

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ning Nitassinan: The Innu Struggle to Reclaim Their Homeland. Wadden undoubtedly has a passion for aboriginal peoples, which comes through in her writing, and she does not attempt to simplify the issues or the necessary responses.

Wadden comes at this project both as an insider and an outsider. She is an insider as a result of her personal relationships with some of the key players she writes about. The book begins with a story of two Innu high school students, Peter Penashue and Edward Nuna, who went to live with her in St. John’s to finish their education. She writes how she came to an understanding about the boys’ community of Sheshatshiu and the myriad problems it faced, and continues to face. It was this community that later came to international prominence when children were videotaped sniffing gas and wishing to die.

Wadden writes of visiting Peter’s and Edward’s families and being shocked how the change from a traditional lifestyle to a modern one caused such tremendous social change.

Wadden speaks about reconciliation in a number of ways that resonate well with the aboriginal community. First, she looks at the concept from a political perspective, trying to reconcile the ideals and spirit on which our country was founded with our current realities. Throughout the book she calls for the full commitment to the spirit of the treaties. She interviews Marcel Hardisty, administrator of the social development programs for the Wanipigow reserve, who states:

This was a riddle for me. How could a change in lifestyle produce such self-destructive behaviour from such fine people? … Many households in Sheshatshiu were headed by alcoholics who were transformed on the land into hunting camp leaders, because they were such great providers of warmth and food.

Second, she seeks reconciliation within aboriginal communities between traditional ways and modern realities, attempting to find a meaningful relationship between the aboriginal spiritual fullness of the past and the hopeless addictions so many find themselves enslaved to in the present. The book as a whole is a breathless attempt at encompassing many complex aspects of reconciliation. It is an approach that reflects an aboriginal holistic view of reconciliation, and Wadden is very proficient at it.

Where the Pavement Ends contains 21 chapters, each dedicated to a different aspect of reconciliation. The chapter on fetal alcohol syndrome disorder does a good job of bringing voice to a very

From this personal foundation Wadden expands her view and looks across the country for answers.

She becomes an outsider who is clearly approaching these problems as a journalist. While she never comes out and states it, it appears that Wadden’s version of reconciliation is linked to healing: healing of peoples, communities and nations.

What governments fail to do is educate the public about the real nature of or the real spirit of intent in treaty making. The intent as far as our people understood it, is that we would share the real resources of the land, and that means the raw resources: the royalties from the use of water, minerals, the land and the air. That hasn’t been properly recognized within governments and Canadian society.

Literary Review of Canada

significant and often overlooked issue. Wadden writes that while the national average for babies with FASD is 10 babies for every 1,000 born, the number is estimated to be 190 babies for every 1000 born in the aboriginal community. Even more shocking is the claim that nearly 40 percent of the babies born in Nunatsiavut have FASD. Wadden quotes Dr. Ted Rosales, a pediatric geneticist in St. John’s on the scope of the problem: “If alcohol use during pregnancy is not stopped, the next generation will not have the brain capacity to appreciate their own culture as something they should be proud of.”

Unmistakably, this is a call to action if there ever was one. The chapter effectively explores the issue from the perspective of healthcare professionals on the front lines of this challenge.

Wadden writes about the frustration felt by Rosales when he intervened after 40 Innu children were airlifted from Labrador and taken to St. John’s to remove them from gas sniffing in their community. He worked with these children for four months and provided specific recommendations on how to deal with the FASD many of the youth have. The recommendations were not followed:

well.

The various chapters also highlight some tremendous people and organizations doing really good work in the communities. These are critical stories that we do not hear enough about. Maggie Hodgson is featured as a long-time leader and organizer. Maggie is the creator of Healing Our Spirit Worldwide, an international conference on aboriginal people and alcoholism. Her tireless efforts are rightly applauded. Organizations such as the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and programs such as the National Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program are featured and celebrated. These leaders in the field have made a tremendous contribution to the betterment of our communities and Wadden’s book does a great service in highlighting

and some of them are overly idealistic. The helpful ones include calls to create a national aboriginal economic development agency, to develop a FASD strategy, to honour the Kelowna Accord commitments, to provide child sexual abuse services in aboriginal communities, to provide support for an aboriginal youth mentoring program and for the establishment of aboriginal mental health as a national priority. Each of these areas would help to address some of the most pressing social challenges that exist across Canada.

But a broad-based citizens’ coalition to support aboriginal aspirations? Funding for national aboriginal organizations for addiction consultations?

Increased media coverage of aboriginal issues?

What would any of these add to the quality of life of people living in communities? Concerned citizens have been raising awareness for years, to no effect. More consultations will not support people dying from alcohol abuse. Media coverage is often ill informed at best and biased at worst. Any efforts in our communities should be focused on helping people, and these recommendations, fully implemented, will not help one person on the street.

Other, more obvious recommendations are left unsaid. Wadden frequently calls for general society to respect the original terms of our federation that were identified in treaties or other relationships. Yet a call for public education systems across Canada to properly teach about these treaties in schools is missing. Wadden also cites the resolutions of land claims as a part of a critical foundation to move forward. Yet she does not recommend the expedient resolutions of land claims, and the oldest of them have been under negotiation for decades.

Do not, however, allow these criticisms to take anything away from this effort. In the end, there is a lot to applaud about this book. Where the Pavement Ends occupies a rare space on the aboriginal studies bookshelf, because it is about hope. As Wadden concludes her book she writes: “There have been a lot of losses in Aboriginal society and the depth of grieving is quite intense. Ultimately, healing will come when there is renewal of hope. What better way to give hope than to let people know that their priorities are national priorities, too.”

Marie Wadden’s commitment to aboriginal reconciliation issues comes through at every turn of the page. If only the rest of society would pay this much attention, we might be able to get somewhere. Canadians generally seem to be suspicious of claims from aboriginal people for more support.

Stories of large land claim settlements and inefficient aboriginal governance systems have raised doubts that more action is needed. I am not sure that this book will make much of an impact on the priorities of Canadians and their politicians. In the aboriginal community the impact will probably not be much greater. There is a long history of outsiders who try to help the aboriginal community, with varying levels of success. But political development in First Nation, Métis and Inuit organizations has resulted in a very sophisticated level of leadership enabling them to speak for themselves and establish their own priorities. What Wadden’s book does provide is an important reminder that we need to ensure the healing and reconciliation movement remains at the forefront of our thinking, white and aboriginal alike.

Wadden attempts to find a meaningful relationship between the aboriginal spiritual fullness of the past and the hopeless addictions so many find themselves enslaved to in the present.

Rosales poured his heart and soul into a report that included not just diagnoses but also recommendations on ways to support children with FASD throughout their lives.

However, he told me, after some counselling and solvent abuse therapy, the children were sent back home and his report was set aside.

The lack of action had tragic consequences.

Rosales tells the story of J.B. Rich, a mischievous ringleader but one for whom the doctor had affection. The boy continued to get in trouble with the law, and Rosales emailed his lawyer to see how he was doing. Wadden writes: Rosales read down through the reply … The lawyer’s final words shocked him: “Sad to say, he killed himself.” “J.B. hung himself shortly after the trial, and a few weeks later his brother Charlie did the same. Charlie also had FASD,” Rosales told me, … his voice cracking.

“I could have done more.”

It is Wadden at her best.

Wadden’s skill as a broadcaster allows her to highlight the words of individuals as they fight their daily battles. Here, the pain of social relationships unravelling as an alcoholic quits drinking comes through sadly and dramatically. As one man says, I used to have friends back then (when he was still drinking). [sic] It’s kind of confusing in one way, because you used to have these people with you when you were drinking, and now you don’t have them. They’re all gone now. They’re around here, but they’re still drinking and never come to see me.

This, Wadden makes clear, is the choice that must be made: stop drinking and lose your social relationships, or continue and lose so much more.

The pain of knowing that whatever decision is made will have negative consequences is illustrated very

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their contributions. If you do not know about them, that alone is reason to read this book.

Where the Pavement Ends is far from perfect however. The book could have been strengthened if it paid attention to the fact that the majority of aboriginal people live in urban areas. The 2006 census affirms that there are 1.3 million people with aboriginal identity in Canada. Of these, 29 percent live on reserves and 54 percent live in urban areas, with the balance living in rural but non-reserve communities. Yet there is little attempt in Wadden’s book to determine how to achieve her notion of a reconciliation movement in urban areas. The ability to reach urban aboriginals is a critical indicator of any future success. There is no shortage of work being done in cities. The Friendship Centre Movement began in the 1950s and has been very active in providing all sorts of social supports for urban aboriginal peoples. Other service delivery organizations have been engaged for more than 50 years in cities trying to support transitions and improve the quality of life for urban aboriginal peoples. It is puzzling that Wadden would not have spent time on the approaches to these very pressing problems in cities.

The main weakness of this book is its frustrating moments of naiveté. A couple of examples will suffice. In the introduction Wadden offers the following proclamations: “We must make social healing in Aboriginal communities an immediate national priority. We must also demand public policy that guarantees First Nation, Inuit and Métis people the right to live as full and equal citizens.”

Does Wadden really want to tell the aboriginal leadership what its priorities must be? Surely she will allow that while social healing is a critical goal, the varied leaders in the aboriginal community can determine which priorities must be first.

Additionally, who would disagree that all public policy must ensure aboriginal people live as full and equal citizens? In fact, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms ensures no less takes place! The inclusion of soapbox statements like this adds little to the value to this effort.

The other source of frustrating naiveté takes place at the end of the book. Wadden bravely attempts to put forward recommendations and an action plan to resolve many of the issues identified. In total eleven points are made in this regard

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Delicious Canadian Ham Two show-off actors strut their stuff in new books.

Ray Conlogue

Up Till Now: The Autobiography William Shatner with David Fisher Thomas Dunne Books 342 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780312372651 In Spite of Myself: A Memoir Christopher Plummer Alfred A. Knopf 656 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780679421627

L

aurence Oliver once observed, apropos of Method actors who dig deep into personal experience for the motivation of their characters, that he had never been conscious of any motivation in his own work apart from the desire to show off. Christopher Plummer and William Shatner, casting aside Canadianness, set out to become show-offs of great amplitude. But only Plummer, wretched toward his family, fickle with his women and as malicious as he insists he is—the title of his memoir is In Spite of Myself—is also a show-off possessed of insight and decisive artistic power.

Shatner, on the other hand, is as nice a man as—well, as Captain James T. Kirk. The biographies are a study in contrast. While Plummer laments the dumbing down of popular culture and retreats whenever possible from lucrative movies to the classical stage, according to Up Till Now: The Autobiography Shatner threw over the classics the moment he was offered a commercial endorsement.

Today Shatner is a fixture of Star Trek conventions and late-night TV where he shills for companies like Priceline.com. His overwrought spoken version of songs such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” are universally regarded as kitsch.

Is this a bad thing? Depends. I suspect Shatner has become a skilled vaudeville clown, falling over chairs from stage left to stage right, insisting he did it on purpose, and garnering the extravagant love of a mass audience that cannot wait for his next pratfall.

Both young actors grew up in Montreal.

Plummer, a scion of the upper class, lived on his mother’s ancestral estate with a beloved dog named after a governor general. Such was the trauma of his parents’ early divorce that he barely mentions his father. Shatner, on the other hand, was the son of a loving and hardworking Jewish shmatte dealer. His trauma came from outside the home, in the form of anti-Semites waiting to beat him up on his way to the synagogue.

Both were masters of emotional disguise from an early age. Both worked their way up through Dominion Drama Festivals, and both arrived at the Stratford Festival in 1956. Plummer arrived with a contract to play Henry V, having previously performed to acclaim in New York. Shatner arrived as his understudy. That summer Plummer fell ill with a kidney stone and Shatner got his big chance. His performance was dazzling. “It came together in a way it never should have,” he writes, already selling

“What you had taken to be an essentially heartless city opened its doors, and … presto!—it had adopted you!”

For a self-described vain actor, Plummer is surprisingly aware of the larger currents of cultural history. Looking back, he observes that he arrived on Broadway at “a time when the American theatre was still rich in invention.” If that was the year that saw the premiere of A View from the Bridge, The Diary of Anne Frank and Waiting for Godot, this was not unconnected to the fact that Martin Luther King had just begun to preach, and Nabokov had just published Lolita.

Two persistent Plummerian characteristics had already emerged. One is self-dislike. Working with Boris Karloff in Jean Anouilh’s The Lark, Plummer observes that the gentle and elderly Karloff is one of the few “truly good humans” he had met. “I realized, with a sharp pang of envy, I could never be one of them.”

The other is astute judgement of others.

He says no to a multiseason offer from David O. Selznick because it hinges on his performing with Selznick’s wife. She is too old for the roles; he is too young; and Selznick is “blinded by love.”

Later he will do likewise when Laurence Olivier proposes to direct him as Coriolanus: the great actor was, in his view, a weak director.

Plummer rapidly became as corrupt as a young prince in a medieval city. He revelled in parties where Marilyn Monroe sat “at the feet of Isak Dinesen” while Comden and Green spoofed their own hit song at the piano: “It’s the fuckiest fuck of the year.” Then he would head off to the Palace Bar and Grill with Jason Robards, where they persuaded a traffic cop to bring his horse inside to have a drink with them.

Unhappily for his daughter, Amanda, she chose this time to be born. Plummer fled the delivery room and got too drunk to return. Tammy Grimes would soon become his first ex-wife, and he would see his daughter only once between then and her 18th birthday.

Like any libertine, Plummer needed a place to regenerate from time to time. Stratford, Ontario suited the bill. Here he performed his memorable 1957 Hamlet, which he recalls with a fine literary understanding of the Dane and a generous account of Frances Hyland’s uncanny voice as being like “sweet bells jangled out of tune.”

Can this be the same fellow who, the following year, is drinking his way through a Florida swamp in Nicholas Ray’s dreadful film, Wind

For a self-described vain actor, Plummer is surprisingly aware of the larger currents of cultural history.

Ray Conlogue spent 27 years as an arts writer at The Globe and Mail, including a lengthy stint as theatre critic. He has recently published Shen and the Treasure Fleet (Annick Press, 2008), a young adult novel, and teaches magazine writing at the University of Guelph and Humber College.

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himself short. Tyrone Guthrie then gave him lead roles in subsequent seasons and named him Most Promising Actor at the festival.

The kidney stone incident also occurs in Plummer’s book. “Someone (in the hospital) told me that Bill Shatner had scored full marks as Henry.

I knew then that the SOB was going to be a ‘star’.”

Plummer’s enchanted childhood, where Oscar Peterson dropped by to play the piano, was nonetheless haunted by emotional insecurity. A beautiful boy, he was French kissed by a nanny at the age of twelve. By the time he was 18 he had already been in a police lock-up, performed Oedipus in an alcoholic fog and had his first affair (inevitably, with a married woman).

An interlude with a repertory company in Bermuda gave him the contacts necessary for a New York launch. Like Shatner, also present in New York by this time, Plummer learned to make easy money in television serials. Unlike Shatner, he looked on TV with contempt, a medium “drunk with power” that would “tell us how to eat … swing elections, topple government.”

Plummer’s book, though often brilliant, must perforce take the form of all actors’ biographies: a dizzying succession of celebrity encounters. Bt the age of 26 he is playing opposite Judith Anderson in her historic Medea—in Paris, with Jean Cocteau and Alice B. Toklas partying backstage. Two years later he stars in Cyrano de Bergerac in New York.

Literary Review of Canada

across the Everglades? It is a Shatnerian moment, and a vivid reminder that America’s commercial culture is always on the lookout to castrate talent.

But Plummer was nimbler than Shatner. He loved celebrity culture, he loved the game. But he names Bertolt Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble as his most important influence at the time. And by 1961 he has joined Peter Hall’s new Royal Shakespeare Company, performing an acclaimed Richard III at the age of 31.

At the same time, he made awful epic movies to support his lifestyle. The first was Samuel Bronston’s overblown Fall of the Roman Empire (shot in Spain with Franco’s approval) and proceeding to Russian director Sergei Bondarchuk’s bizarre Waterloo (which the New York Times called “a very bad movie”). Here Plummer evinces a growing fondness for flamboyant aristocracies—just in time for The Sound of Music.

This will certainly be one of the best-read chapters in the book.

Plummer does not conceal his feelings about the film, which he elsewhere refers to as “The Sound of Mucus.” He spent much of the shoot dead drunk in a picturesque Austrian hotel, had an affair with a buxom nurse, got too fat to get into his Von Trapp costume and misplaced his wife: “God knows where my real-life bride was—somewhere in England, no doubt.”

And why did he do this movie? A certain “vulgar streak … made me fancy myself in a big, splashy Hollywood extravaganza.” He also needed the money. This is the man who ordered lark’s tongues for supper while returning to London on the liner France.

“I just went along with it all. I didn’t harbour much self-respect,” he wrote. He wanted “to be the bad boy always, convinced it made me more interesting … offstage my real existence had little in it to write home about. I saw there was nothing particularly original about me.” At this low point he fell in love with the actress Elaine Taylor; more surprisingly, considering his record, she fell in love with him—then and forever. They are still together nearly 40 years later.

He was about to turn 40 himself at the time, “already with bags under the eyes the size of trunks” and beginning to feel the cold wind of mortality.

He gave up the gin and the Moscow Mules. He and Elaine bought a permanent home and became involved in a project to re-create Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

Artistically he struggled. The times were changing. A project to do a new version of Peer Gynt collapsed when the sublime poet/playwright Christopher Fry declared it was no longer possible to write verse plays. Shortly after that, Plummer went backstage to congratulate Olivier on his Othello, for which the great actor had blackfaced himself and performed with anklets and matted hair. “They booed me!” cried Olivier. “They think I’m a fucking racist pig!” Plummer arranged for his beloved Cyrano de Bergerac to be made into a musical, in which he starred and won a 1974 Tony Award. But the public stayed away. A clue to what was happening can be found in his collaboration with the director John Huston on The Man Who Would Be King. Huston approached him at one point and said, “Ah, Chris, just take the music out of your voice.” In essence, Huston forced him to do the Method, to learn to be a modern actor.

Plummer’s talent is redoubtable, and he made

the transition. A few years later he played a contemporary psychopath in The Silent Partner. By 1981 he attempted his own Othello, and he was not called a racist pig: he won the Drama Desk Award.

“The theatre is not for sissies,” he writes, wondering to himself why he continued to take on uncommercial vehicles such as Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. “My actor-partner knows that. There is a gleam in his eyes—the promise of adventure. My partner begins to sniff the air—he smells the scent of danger and excitement.”

That he imagines the actor within him as a separate being, his “actor-partner,” explains a lot about Plummer—both good and bad. I think it explains why, a few pages earlier, he wrote some very cruel remarks about Amanda, now a celebrated actress: “Nothing she did seemed familiar to me; none of it

franchise itself, it has given birth to a strange metaproduct.

The definitive moment for this came several years after the series was cancelled by Paramount.

People had begun holding Star Trek conventions and Shatner dutifully attended them, answering hundreds of inane questions. Then one day on impulse he made the famous speech in which he ordered the Trekkies to “get a life, will you, people?

I mean, for crying out loud, it’s just a TV show. Look at the way you’re dressed!”

Nobody was offended. Instead, Trekkies began to greet each other at conventions with the salutation “Get a life!” Shatner now refuses to say whether his “get a life” speech was serious or faked. He has become a sort of Klingon battle cruiser in human form, destroying rational thought and good taste wherever he goes. He recounts with glee that DVDs of one of his movies sell for one cent on Amazon.com.

Eventually Shatner did create another hit TV series, albeit a modest one, called T.J. Hooker.

And he finally won a desperately desired Emmy for his work in the series Boston Legal. While he ends his book by declaring that he is a happy man, a reader may seriously doubt it. But then, the truly great comedians are, as a rule, deeply unhappy.

And by making himself the centre of a great spreading stain of self-parody, he has actually anticipated and informed the direction in which American culture is evolving.

And that is one thing which Christopher Plummer never succeeded in doing.

Shatner has become a sort of Klingon battle cruiser in human form, destroying rational thought and good taste wherever he goes.

December 2008

had come from my genes … It was not my daughter up there on that stage but a perfect stranger—nothing of me in her at all.”

He seems not aware of the cruelty. His actorpartner is sniffing the air, and saying the truth without the least thought of the harm it might do.

It appears that he and Amanda somehow became friends nonetheless. I guess it is because her actorpartner understands what he is doing.

The rest of Plummer’s story is an amiable one: a Tony Award for his John Barrymore one-man show, Syriana, A Beautiful Mind, The Inside Man and the scaling of the inevitable mountain of King Lear.

“How lucky I have been,” he writes, to work with “extraordinary vagabonds from both halves of the twentieth century.”

Although William Shatner is the lesser talent, there are many parallels between the two. In that great 1956 season recalled by Plummer, Shatner was on Broadway too, playing in Tyrone Guthrie’s production of Tamerlaine. And he had embarked on a Plummer-like personal life, having married the first of four wives. But there is a big difference.

“I’ve never had great fortune planning my career.

I would describe my career plan as answering the telephone.”

Early on Shatner had the courage to take on projects for artistic quality alone, such as Roger Corman’s anti-segregation movie The Intruder. But he was looking for the show that would make him a star. One after another failed. Shatner was discouraged: there was only one left on the shelf. NBC picked it up. It was called Star Trek.

The Star Trek chapter of Shatner’s book is revealing. It is an odd mixture of serious observation about the innovative style of Star Trek, mixed in with whole pages listing the hundreds of merchandising products that helped make him rich. This kind of incongruity, or slapdash mixing of genres and tones, has been Shatner’s singular achievement. It has led to apparent embarrassments such as his 1968 video of Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” Called “The Transformed Man,” it is usually described as the worst music video ever recorded.

Shatner responds by observing that it is the “bestknown performance of the song ‘Rocket Man’ ever done,” implying that what is the most popular cannot be the worst. He also observes that he may have intended a parody. Or not. This Sphinx-like stance has led to the peculiar stardom he now enjoys.

Mixed with the undeniable charm of the Star Trek

JH note: The “get a life” speech was in a skit on Saturday Night Live, pre-scripted, rehearsed. See it at http://video.aol. com/video-detail/get-a-life-full-version-william-shatner/2504246532 . So “on impulse” seems a bit off—goig with the skit idea might have been to some extent impulsive, but it wasn’t spur of the moment. Of course he subsequently may have been ambivalent about whether he meant it or it was really just a joke.

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Letters & Responses To

the

Editor:

Christopher Moore’s review/essay (“Our Canadian Republic,” November 2008) echoes the lament heard a century ago: Why can’t Canada be more like Great Britain? The new world country always falls short of the old. Then, the flaw lay in its provincial culture or primitive economy; now, it is a deficient republican sensibility, measured by government tolerance for public opinion as mediated through Parliament.

Virtue lies in respect for independence, vice in enforcing party discipline. The unexamined assumption in this analysis is that Canadian voters hold the same order of values. Why then do they demand that members of Parliament who cross the floor of the House of Commons be required to seek constituency approval in a by-election?

Moore is much taken by demonstrations of MP independence at Westminster. He is less impressed by arguments I offer in The People’s House of Commons: Theories of Democracy in Contention as explanation for the phenomenon: the British chamber twice the size of the Canadian, the greater autonomy of constituencies there than here in the selection and re-selection of candidates, and the contribution these factors make in sustaining political careers for some individual MPs at Westminster. By contrast, backbench careerism in Ottawa is almost an oxymoron.

Leadership conventions are the work of the prince of darkness. Introduced as democratic mechanisms, in Moore’s view they actually weaken Cabinet and caucus control of leaders. Canada is the only Westminster parliamentary system where parties use conventions, and it is worth a moment’s reflection to consider why this innovation happened when it did, after the First World War. Rather than pursue that thought, the Parliament of a unitary, comparatively homogeneous, island realm is offered as a democratic standard for Canada—a transcontinental country that is federal, bilingual and still sparsely populated.

It is quite right to say that republicanism is about more than abolishing the monarchy. Then too, popular sovereignty is about more than weak party discipline. Moore is unhappy with the emphasis I give to the Crown as keystone in Canada’s constitutional architecture. Still, it is not enough to say that power derives from the people.

As long as the Crown’s prerogative continues to be a source of governmental authority, even when in conflict with statute law, as happened with the dissolution of the last Parliament; as long as its patronage power is exercised on advice of the first minister, with only the promise of parliamentary participation, then it is misleading to conclude that the end of the three-line whip is the Canadian equivalent of storming the Bastille.

David E. Smith Saskatoon, Saskatchewan The LRC welcomes letters — and more are available on our website at <www.reviewcanada.ca>. We reserve the right to publish such letters and edit them for length, clarity and accuracy. E-mail ­ <editor@ lrcreview.com>. For all other comments and queries, contact <review@lrcreview.com>.

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