Heroes Page 3

  Not being Polish, I can’t pretend that I was part of the scene, but I was there, and what I caught, like a galloping fever, was the kinetic energy and unbridled optimism afloat in the Courtyard and its piano bar. If these guys could make movies out of cigar smoke and chutzpah, I could transform the comatose monthly Maclean’s, whose editorship I had recently inherited, into a profitable weekly newsmagazine.

  It was here in Club 22 that Canada’s weekly news magazine was conceived, and those optimistic improvisers of Canada’s cult fillums were its godfathers.

  — 2005

  Terry Fox on the Run

  FEW CANADIAN BUSINESSES have more richly earned a shoddy reputation than our indigenous film industry. Touted as the mirror of our identity and the high road to fortune for tax-shelter-happy dentists, it wiped out its investors, did little to define the nation and spawned a motley crew of deal makers who, if there were any justice, should have been circus barkers for freak shows.

  In the mid-1980s, into this artistic abattoir arrived The Terry Fox Story, about the cancer-stricken amputee determined to cross Canada. The movie, much like Fox himself, overcame many seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Yet it may well have been the most artistically coherent, and certainly the most authentically Canadian, of the many weak attempts to make a film worthy of its subject.

  Eric Fryer, who brilliantly portrayed Fox, was so believable, it hurt. At first, Fryer as Fox (in the movie, as in real life) ran alone, with no fanfare or support systems. The journey started with the simple ceremony of sticking his artificial foot into the Atlantic Ocean at Cape Spear in eastern Newfoundland. Doggedly, he began to hobble the eight thousand clicks home. In the harsh morning light, huddles of well wishers in tiny Newfie outports, as luminous as figures in Renoir canvasses, coalesced to wish him luck. There was a lame Patrick Watson, in a brilliant cameo, hobbling out to deliver an obscene but heartfelt benediction.

  Inexorably and almost imperceptibly, Fox’s pilgrimage developed its own field of force. The kid started to draw crowds and media groupies. The movie’s pace took off when Fox was joined by Bill Vigars, a Canadian Cancer Society official (played by Robert Duvall). A noble-looking but uncompromising mentor with a devilish countenance, Vigars turned the lonely trek into a “Marathon of Hope.”

  The film had serious flaws. The music, by Bill Conti, was bubbly elevator-style fluff, more suitable for afternoon TV soaps. What the film needed was some hard-edged, early Lightfoot or the evocative chants of Stan Rogers. The indoor lighting was poor throughout, and the first thirty minutes threatened to turn the film (literally) into a sleeper.

  The Terry Fox of this movie was just an athletic kid given only six short months to live, wanting to make the best of it. The undeniable courage was there, but at first he couldn’t work up the nerve to break the news to his father that he intended to run across Canada. When his mother told her husband for him, the response was a flat and very Canadian “When?”

  What raised the film beyond its pedestrian potential was the camera work of Richard Ciupka and the direction of Ralph Thomas. Ciupka captured subtle shifts in landscape and the differences of shadings of light as plot and character moved across the lanscape, from Newfoundland in spring to Ontario in deep summer. The wispy mists of dawn over a Quebec cornfield, the mauve shadings of twilight in the lush farmlands of the St. Lawrence Valley were less a backdrop than the movie’s dominant theme.

  The country was playing itself, and it was a star. Every town was a landmark; the road became the movie’s narrative arc. There was an austere chill in the land across which Fox struggled—a parallel but very different texture from Ingmar Bergman’s tidy Sweden or Richard Attenborough’s teeming India. This was Canada, with its isolation and haunting potential, its dominant reality: an empty land filled with wonders.

  By the time Fox approached Thunder Bay in what turned out to be the tragic end of his run, he was alone again, lost to the destinies that dominated his brief life. But alone or not, he became what he wanted to be, and in the last week of his trek, he pronounced his own epitaph: “ … Life is about reaching out to people—and having them touch you back.”

  Terry Fox was determined to cross Canada “from telephone pole to telephone pole.” His interrupted ordeal is commemorated by this jewel of a film, which managed to suspend disbelief without romanticizing his odyssey.

  — 1980

  Jack McClelland: The Authors’ Publisher

  AT THE HEIGHT of the 1981 publishing season, when bookstores in western Canada started running out of The Acquisitors, the second volume of my series on The Canadian Establishment, my publisher, Jack McClelland, reacted in typical style. Instead of loading boxes of books aboard trains or planes, he hired half a dozen trailer trucks and dressed their drivers in rented tuxedos. I was never quite certain what the ultimate purpose of this exercise was meant to be, since no one except McClelland and me—who waved off the brave convoy with appropriate formality and exaggerated bravura gestures—paid the slightest attention to the strange caravan snaking its way across country.

  But it was vintage McClelland, and I was reminded of this small incident when it was announced that, after twenty-nine years at the operating helm of his publishing house, McClelland was assuming less onerous duties as chairman of the board. He was my mentor and advocate, who launched and nurtured my writing career. He almost single-handedly endowed the country with its indigenous popular literature, publishing authors, instead of printing books. Until then, domestic volumes had been sold in obscure corners of our few bookstores, in modest sections self-consciously labelled CANADIANA. Jack willed us into the mainstream.

  His publicity ploys and promotional gimmicks gilded the McClelland legend, such as his annual skating appearance on the rink in front of Toronto City Hall, where he handed out free Canadian paperbacks to anyone who confessed that reading was their pleasure. Or his hiring a tough-looking professional wrestler to page me throughout a Conservative convention, following publication of my controversial biography of John Diefenbaker. (It was during that convention that several western Tories threatened to “tear off my writing arm”—which was a slightly dated sanction, since by then, I had moved from my poison pen to a typewriter; but their intent was unmistakable.)

  To those of us who were fortunate enough to be his authors, Jack McClelland was very much more than a good promoter and a great publisher. He was, above all, a sensitive and shrewd editor, spotting the weaknesses in a sentence, paragraph, page or book, writing casual fix notes that magically resolved literary blocks. More than that, he was what all authors need when facing the terror of blank pages and blanker minds: an understanding friend who appreciated the essential loneliness of our craft. He would do anything for his authors, not excluding the arrangement of bail or abortions.

  A surprisingly modest individual (and closet war hero as commanding officer of a motor torpedo boat in the Mediterranean during the worst days of the Second World War), McClelland was an irreplaceable and irrepressible force of nature. But at times his sense of the ridiculous ran away with him. A certain Rosedale society lady, whose chauffeur’s uniform I had described in my first Establishment book as having specifically been ordered to match the bottom of her swimming pool, took my words to the Supreme Court of Ontario, accusing me of having made fun of her. McClelland did not take kindly to the lawsuit. It was only with great difficulty that Julian Porter, our ubiquitous lawyer, convinced him not to appear in the judge’s august chambers dressed in a white toga, prepared to bear witness that its colour matched the bottom of his bathtub. Now, that’s a loyal publisher.

  — 1982

  Hugh MacLennan: Charting Canada’s Psyche

  IF CANADA EVER had a spiritual town crier—the James Boswell of our aspirations and afflictions—it was Hugh MacLennan, the Montreal novelist and humanitarian who has died at eighty-three. The author of seven major works of fiction, the best of which, The Watch That Ends the Night, ranked as one of the great Canadian novels, and six magnifice
nt essay collections, he was an ardent Canadian, as much in his life as in his writing. To toughen himself to the local climate, he spent ten years of his youth living in a tent at the back of his parents’ Halifax house. And despite international honours that included a Rhodes Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a PhD from Princeton, he never considered living or teaching anywhere but in Canada. His five Governor General’s Literary Awards notwithstanding, the favour was not returned. His best-known work, Two Solitudes, which became the fountainhead for defining the shared loneliness that is at the heart of the Canadian experience, brought him initial royalty cheques of only $4,500. Worse, although he had taught English literature with distinction at McGill University for more than three decades and inspired generations of young writers, in 1985 he was unceremoniously evicted from his modest office and left to drift.

  None of this soured his writing or his outlook. His prose was saturated with wisdom, humour and tenderness, the passionate cry of a writer determined to assert the unfashionable view that existence is more than a meaningless accident. He was at his best chronicling slow lives, examining men’s and women’s feelings, portraying their self-imposed distances and their subconscious protection of one another. The truth that he revealed was not in the least sensational. Just truth.

  A friend and mentor, MacLennan wrote the introduction to one of my books and became a prolific contributor to Maclean’s when I was its editor, publishing thirty-three major articles in the magazine. When I asked him how he picked his themes, he replied, in that melancholy Calvinistic burr of his, that they picked him. “You get things through the pores,” he explained and left it at that. Released from the novelist’s bonds of plot and characterization, his essays succeeded in portraying what U.S. literary critic Edmund Wilson called “a point of view surprisingly and agreeably different from anything else I knew in English: a Canadian way of looking at things.” In one of his essays, he warned against our absorption by the Americans and advised Canadians to act “in the spirit of a girl in the backseat of a taxi, with one eye on the meter and the other on the profile of the determined man who took her out that night.”

  Equally scornful of anything British or American, MacLennan jealously guarded his Celtic heritage. Born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, in 1907 to surgeon Samuel J. MacLennan and his wife, Katherine, he credited his Highland roots for the sensitivity of his perceptions. “A Celt,” he once confided, “hears a dog-whistle sound that an Anglo-Saxon simply doesn’t get.” Contemptuous of academic aesthetes, whose books he dismissed as “poetry of the menopause,” he believed that a writer must be engaged with the issues of his time, echoing D.H. Lawrence’s dictum that “the novel treats the point at which the soul meets history.”

  He was obsessed with Pierre Trudeau. “The light in his eyes has a subtle and curious Gioconda-like intensity. I doubt if even the painter of Mona Lisa herself could capture it,” he wrote me, and then blasted Trudeau for being a cheapskate. “He once invited Peggy Atwood and me to 24 Sussex for lunch, at the end of which he departed in his limousine, and it took us an hour to get a taxi to the airport.”

  MacLennan’s last years were filled with suffering. After he was expelled from his McGill office (he never complained; I only found out about it through a change-of-address card), his second wife, Frances Aline (first wife, Dorothy Duncan, had died in 1957), was struck by lightning and suffered brain damage, while he was afflicted with a rare form of MSG food poisoning. “The symptoms are preposterous,” he wrote. “One wakes up and believes one is dead.”

  None of that diluted his passion for life or for his country. “I have really enjoyed my existence,” he noted in the last letter I received from him. He complained that Canadian politics were running at least forty years behind the times and that Quebec had gone crazy as never before. He felt not at all certain that Canada would, at last, amount to anything: “Some fibre went out of us.”

  No fibre ever went out of Hugh MacLennan. He was a fine man and a great writer, and we were lucky to have lived in a time and place that had him for its town crier.

  —1978

  Remembering Pierre Berton, the Big Foot of CanLit

  WHEN I HEARD the news of Pierre Berton’s passing, I reacted with grief, disbelief and dismay. Grief because he had been such a loyal friend; disbelief because he had been the essential curator of the Canadian Dream; and dismay because he was quite simply irreplaceable.

  He was the first to take a shot at defining the poignant mystique of our national identity: “The country is still an unknown quantity,” he wrote, “as elusive as the wolf, howling just beyond the rim of the hills. Perhaps that is why it holds its fascination.” (I never accepted Berton’s more popular definition that “a Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe.” All you had to do was to scan his six-foot-plus frame to know that was a non-starter. Besides, I tried it. No way, José.)

  Berton’s books, TV series, sermons and other public utterances celebrated his country so convincingly that he almost single-handedly made patriotism an acceptable form of behaviour in polite circles of Canadian society, instead of the semi-subversive emotion it had once been. He did this by recreating Canadian history as a heroic pageant worthy of a significant nation instead of a self-governing colony, as we were so dismissively labelled.

  Berton’s approach to history had a knack for the unexpected. In one of his later volumes, Marching as to War, he argued that counter to their image of themselves, Canadians have never been citizens of a peaceable kingdom. He made a convincing case that in the four wars we fought between 1899 and 1953—in South Africa, twice in Europe and in Korea—Canadians became involved because they wanted to be. The politicians declared war in order to follow the will of the people, not the other way around.

  He gained equal fame as a TV panelist and interviewer, managing editor of Maclean’s, raconteur, army-of-one and frequent accessory-before-the-fact of countless worthy causes. In his political heyday, there were few public petitions championing liberal or left-wing causes that didn’t lead off with his name and financial support. He brought to his writing the bias of a social democratic activist. He hesitated not a moment before pledging his loyalty and dollars to the most obscure of humanitarian crusades—bellowing over his portable telephone while lounging poolside at his country estate in Kleinburg, Ontario.

  That was where he found his greatest solace, among his extended family and especially with his wife, Janet, who was his anchor. The bluster that marked his daily passage through a crowded lifetime was just that: bluster. His body language could be deafening. He was a tough hombre when it came to writing or editing but treated nearly everyone who came in contact with him kindly and generously—unless they were public relations flacks. He banned these self-inflated messengers from the Maclean’s editorial floor.

  Before his energy was gutted by the heart failure from which he suffered in his final years, his strident physique lent force to his habit of emphasizing his convictions in a voice that must have frightened every stray moose for miles around and left little room for argument. He was a large man with large appetites, the Big Foot of CanLit. Passionate and opinionated, he was unmarked by the gloomy introspection of his calling. His Yukon heritage not only produced some of his best books (Klondike, The Mysterious North, Drifting Home and Prisoners of the North), but also kept him from becoming a full-fledged member of the Toronto literati with their self-indulgent chatter and habits. That was what kept his focus so clear and his prose so accessible.

  Deference to established academic authorities was never his long suit. Berton not only survived his academic critics, but bested them. He understood better than they that history is made up of individual and collective memories refined, the sequence of encounters between character and circumstance. And that Canada’s history needed to be told not just through facts, but also with feelings. That Canada will always have more geography than history but that we cannot learn to appreciate the former unless we better understand the l
atter.

  The last time we appeared together was at the Vancouver International Writers Festival in the fall of 1998, at a shindig to celebrate the merits of popular history. He walked in with the aid of a cane, appearing drawn and debilitated. But once we started declaiming the glories of our trade, he came alive, the energy visibly flowing back into his body and his hog-caller’s voice back at full volume. “The whole secret,” he told the audience, “is to make history read like a novel.” That, of course, was exactly what I—and most of the non-fiction writers in the hall—had been trying to do, but we lacked his panache and self-confidence. If he had written music instead of prose, his scores would have carried instructions for the orchestra to play “bravura with abandon.” Subtlety was not his strength.

  After our presentations, Pierre and I walked over for sandwiches at the Hotel Vancouver. “It’s now called the fucking Fairmont,” he snorted in the disparaging tone appropriate to any historian of the CPR who had condemned the acquisition of the railway’s hotel chain by American owners who changed its name. “We have to preserve the fabric of our nationhood through things like medicare and the gun laws, and all that stuff that is different from the Yankees. We are different,” he insisted that day. “Our background is different. Our history is different. The geography is different. We have to sing our own songs and create our own heroes, dream our own dreams—or we won’t have a country at all.”

  What made Berton’s five dozen books so valuable was his eye for anecdotes, those tidbits of observable trivia that illuminate human character. His description of the shameful banishment of twenty-one thousand Japanese Canadians from their homes and businesses on Canada’s West Coast during the Second World War began not with a statistical summary of their financial losses but with the story of Toshiko Kurita, a Japanese Canadian woman who was quietly walking to her suburban home when a white man came up to her and spat full in her face.