Across Canada by Story: A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure

By Douglas Gibson

Canada is a country rich in stories, and few take as much joy as Douglas Gibson in discovering them. As one of the country’s leading editors and publishers for 40 years, he coaxed modern classics out of some of Canada’s finest minds, and then took to telling his own stories in his first memoir, Stories About Storytellers.

Gibson turned his memoir into a one-man stage show that eventually played almost 100 times, in all ten provinces, from coast to coast. As a literary tourist he discovered even more about the land and its writers, and harvested many more stories, from distant past and recent memory, to share.

Now in Across Canada by Story, Gibson brings new stories about Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, and adds lively portraits of Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Atwood, Wayne Johnson, Linwood Barclay, Michael Ondaatje, and many, many others. Whether fly fishing in Haida Gwaii or sailing off Labrador, Douglas Gibson is a first-rate ambassador for Canada and the power of great stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781770907799

Book preview

ACROSS CANADA

BY STORY

A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure

by Douglas Gibson

with illustrations by Anthony Jenkins

ECW Press

for Alice Munro

and every Canadian author.

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CHAPTER 1

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THE STORY BEGINS

The Fur Trade and the Book Trade … Becoming a Real, Live Author … Thunder Bay and the National Cottage … Ralph Connor, Scribe of Glengarry … Around Winnipeg with Gordon Sinclair … The Unique Gabrielle Roy … Margaret Laurence’s Careful Ending … Vienna and Winnipeg’s George Swinton … The Superhuman Don Starkell

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It all began in Thunder Bay. That was where the strange idea of doing a stage show based on my book, Stories About Storytellers, first came to me. Now, after a tour involving all ten provinces and more than 90 separate shows, seen by thousands of polite people (no jeers, no tossed tomatoes!), it seems like an obvious idea. It wasn’t obvious at the time.

Here’s how it happened. The volunteers who ran the Sleeping Giant Literary Festival in Thunder Bay invited me to come there in the summer of 2010, more than a year before Stories About Storytellers was published. They asked me, as a former editor, to teach a couple of classes: one about writing, and one about working with an editor. At first, I was mildly interested, but as soon as I learned that the classes would be given in Old Fort William, a historic fur-trade site, I was desperately keen to go.

A confession about one of my wild enthusiasms: I’m fascinated by the history of Canada’s fur trade, and by people like William McGillivray (1764–1825), the fierce Scot who gave his name to Fort William. His fort, I knew, was literally at the heart of the North West Company’s fur trade empire, which flowed right across the country. This was the central point where the Grand Rendezvous took place each summer, where the Montreal voyageurs who had paddled west from cold dawn to dusk in canoes full of trade goods like blankets, kettles, and guns met their fur-trading comrades from the North and the West, who had raced to get their smaller canoes (the fifteen-foot canots du nord), jammed with bales of fur, east in time to make the great exchange. More than 2,000 of these tough characters would converge on the fort for a few short, hectic days to, in Charles Gordon’s words, trade and plot, and perhaps have a drink or two. Then they dunked their heads, loaded their canoes up to the tumblehome, and headed back. Whether they were paddling east or west, every man in every canoe was in a deadly race against the early freeze-up that could kill him.

I had heard that Old Fort William was a marvellous reconstruction of those days, specifically of around 1816, and that it was complete with surprising details like the six acres of potato fields that were needed to keep the year-round fort staff alive through the winter. In fact, I had heard it described as one of Canada’s greatest tourist sites, underappreciated because so few people went to Thunder Bay. Now I was going to Thunder Bay!

So I was happily agreeing to give the two lectures when the ­festival organizer Dorothy Colby said from the Thunder Bay end of the line, Oh, one other thing: besides your two classes, you’ll be one of the authors reading from their books on Friday night.

I was taken aback. But I’m not an author yet, and I don’t have a book, I stammered.

Ah, she said kindly, but we hear that you’re writing a book. So you can read from it as a work-in-progress — and we’re sure you’ll enjoy reading in a lineup with people like Miriam Toews and Richard Scrimger and David Carpenter and Terry Fallis.

This just made things worse. No, no, I really didn’t belong with authors like that, this wasn’t right. But she was adamant, and I, very reluctantly, agreed to be part of the authors’ reading.

The Friday evening reading was held at the grand old Prince Arthur Hotel in Thunder Bay. It’s one of the traditional railway hotels, very near the old station on the Lake Superior waterfront. (Jane Urquhart, a Northern Ontario girl from Little Longlac, mentions the hotel in her 1997 novel, The Underpainter. In a dramatic late chapter, the central character looks from the hotel window at the dazzling snow-covered lake and he dreams he’ll see his lover walking to him against a backdrop of the Sleeping Giant: the huge man made of rock slumbered now on a smooth white sheet, not on the textured dark bed of glimmering water I remembered from my summer arrivals.) In real life, the hotel played a major part in Canadian history. Before the days of airports, national groups liked meeting in central railway towns like Thunder Bay or Winnipeg. So it was here, in 1921, that a group drawn from across Canada formally adopted the wild idea that the red poppy — seriously, a red poppy! — should become the nation-wide symbol of Remembrance Day. For more than ninety years that idea has held up pretty well.

Our own Prince Arthur Hotel event was a revelation. It changed my life.

The reading setup was in accordance with the usual tradition: one author after another trudges onstage to stand behind a podium, modestly introduces the reading, then reads from his or her book for twenty minutes, takes a bow, and shuffles off to make way for the next reader.

You’ve probably seen readings like this, and you probably know that some authors read aloud better than others. But the static format — and the unchanging setting — is terrible, and might as well have been designed to bore the audience, giving them nothing much to look at, no spectacle, and no drama — just a series of readers barricaded behind a lectern.

I was so nervous about my undeserved role among these experienced and well-known authors — real authors — that I prepared my twenty-minute reading with great care. I chose to read from my chapter about W.O. Mitchell. I knew that the early material there was very funny, and the later stuff very sad.

It worked wonders with the Thunder Bay crowd. They laughed till they cried at the early W.O. stories, then they mopped away real tears, with some sobs audible, when I told of W.O.’s joking bravely on his deathbed. (In the audience, my wife Jane’s cousin Paul Inksetter whispered that he felt sorry for whoever had to follow that particular powerful ending.)

It was very gratifying. But it was something more. It made me think, in a quieter moment: Wow, they seem to really like these behind-the-scenes stories about working with famous authors! That seemed to bode well for my book.

But I also thought, "My goodness, there I was, stuck behind a podium, remote from the audience, who were given nothing apart from me to look at during my static reading … yet they seemed to like it. Now, if I could change things around, find a way to get out from behind the podium and roam around the whole stage, to break down the barrier between me and the audience, and turn it into a real stage show by giving them something interesting to look at — well, we might have something unique: a new kind of ‘author event’ that brings it all back to its origins, storytelling."

To cut (ahem) a long story short, I came home from Thunder Bay and, drawing on the skills I had developed writing sketches for the theatre back in my student days, wrote a one-man play based on my book.

I was encouraged from the start by my lovely and talented assistant (i.e., my wife, Jane) and by my friend Terry Fallis, who had been there in Thunder Bay cheering me on, and who was able to help me with the electronic side. Because I knew this was not going to be in any way a reading. I was going to wander around the stage telling stories. And I would make it visually exciting by basing the stories on the authors who appeared onscreen behind me, in the form of the brilliant caricatures by Anthony Jenkins that punctuate the book. To add even more variety I would build in unexpected bursts of music, and an intriguing new kind of show began to take shape as I inserted scenes that were slightly more dramatic than a man sitting at a desk, editing. Boxing against Ernest Hemingway or imitating a polar bear gutting a sled dog was a little more exciting, everyone agreed.

While, offstage, the book was being printed, I worked with a skilful director, Molly Thom, to sand down some of the play’s rougher edges, and I received good advice from theatre friends like Albert Schultz and R.H. Thomson. With Robert Thomson’s help I got in touch with Mike Spence at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto, and we staged a public run-through. It ran too long, but left me feeling able to start a Western tour that had been kindly set up for me by my publisher. We’d see how far this tour went. To our modest surprise it went everywhere. Starting in October 2011, the Grand Tour allowed me to see the country — not for the first time, but from a different viewpoint, as an author. And not only as a storyteller, but also as a collector of tales: stories from that ten-province, coast-to-coast tour form the spine of this book.

Before I left Thunder Bay in 2010, I was pleased to be able to wander around and renew my acquaintance with it (There’s the Hoito, the famous Finnish restaurant!). As I recount in Stories About Storytellers, when I first came to Canada, sailing into Victoria in September of 1967, I crossed the country by Greyhound bus. Only someone who has left the Pacific Coast and crossed half a continent of mountains and prairie and rocks and trees and more trees can appreciate the true drama of finally reaching the Great Lakes. When I spotted Lake Superior, and looked down on the giant grain ships filling up at the Port Arthur and Fort William terminals, it was a hugely important moment, worthy of thunderbolts from the sky. These ships, I realized, flattening my face against the bus window, were able to sail all the way east through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean, and then to ports around the world. This, right here, was where the Canadian West really ended.

(In 1967, there were still two cities, Port Arthur and Fort William. In 1970, voters were offered a choice in naming the new single city: Thunder Bay, Lakehead or The Lakehead. In the words of Charles Gordon, Thunder Bay came up the middle and won.)

Now, in this later visit, as a fur trade enthusiast I got my local friend, the folksinger Bill Houston, to show me the location of the real, historic Fort William, now hidden among train tracks. Then he joined me in renting a canoe at the new Old Fort, so we could paddle up the Kaministiquia River in the silent wake of ghostly voyageurs.

I’ve quoted Charles Gordon once or twice already. Get ready for more, because I believe he’s one of the country’s finest writers. And a not-too-bad jazz trumpeter, too. You may remember him as a witty columnist for Maclean’s, or as a writer for the Ottawa Citizen. (When a Citizen reader on holiday met his hero by chance in Manitoba, to Charles’s delight he exclaimed, Glory Hallelujah!)

Charles has written books that include The Governor General’s Bunny Hop (1985), a satire on life in his hometown, Ottawa, and also The Grim Pig (2001), a comic novel about the newspaper world he knows so well. He also produced Canada’s answer to the wave of boastful and triumphant self-improvement books flooding in from the USA, promising excellence, with his own brilliantly titled 1993 book, How to Be Not Too Bad: A Sort-of Guide to Superior Behaviour.

All of them reveal Charles Gordon as a man with a finely understated style that is a joy to read and a dry sense of humour so Canadian that it deserves to occupy our seat at the United Nations.

In the summer of 1996 he and his wife, Nancy (known in the book, to her slight irritation, as The Business Manager), set out in the family car to drive across Canada and back. The result is a wonderful book, The Canada Trip, which shows what typical travellers are likely to find as they enjoy the journey. (Jane, my very own Business Manager, and I consulted the book whenever our own tour involved driving.) This is not an earnest Whither Canada? book as much as a Whither the moose? book, or even a Whither the washroom? book, and we’re all grateful for it.

You may know Charles as the author of the classic book At the Cottage: A Fearless Look at Canada’s Summer Obsession, which came out in 1989 and proceeded to sell like campfire marshmallows for the next twenty years or so. Better still, you may know the follow-up that showed his greedy publisher (guilty as charged) knew a profitable classic when he saw one, publishing Still at the Cottage in 2006. Many sober citizens have fallen out of hammocks laughing at his affectionate portrait of life at The Cottage, or The Cabin, The Shack, The Lake, The Beach, or Camp or wherever Canadians choose to spend their summers.

The books are studded with phrases that will bring memories of summer sweeping back. Is there something wrong with the map, Daddy? Does anybody know what made these droppings on the path? That rock wasn’t there last year. Do you think we should go ahead with the picnic? Or even, at The Cottage Wedding, the mosquito-tinged words I Do (slap!).

Charles is famous for his At the Cottage chapter on Sex at the Cottage; The Beast with Two Backs and Three Spider Bites. He warns us that despite all of the healthy outdoor cottage activity that sets the blood flowing,

There is the question of the bed. It squeaks, and the short leg bumps. And the walls are thin and don’t go all the way up to the ceiling. And there are people around, at close quarters, so sex at the cottage tends to be a rather muffled activity. Groans and cries are stifled, in the interests of decency and good taste. But there is no stopping the short leg from bumping. That is why sex at the cottage sounds like the approach of a short-of-breath person with a wooden leg.

Halfway between Nancy’s home town of Thunder Bay and the traditional Gordon family roost at Winnipeg lies the Gordon family cottage. After all of Charley’s affectionate descriptions of the place, so many Canadians know it as their cottage, too, that a movement has been started — by me, right now — to have it designated The National Cottage.

The cottage was built on a Lake of the Woods island near Kenora by Charley’s grandfather, another Charles Gordon. The elder Charles was known to millions of readers by his pen name, Ralph Connor. This Winnipeg Presbyterian Church minister was, in the words of The Canadian Encyclopedia, the most successful Canadian novelist in the early 20th century. His early bestsellers were based on his adventures preaching in the early days near Canmore, Alberta. The Sky Pilot (1899) and The Prospector (1904) are described as fast-paced sentimental melodramas, with stereotyped characters dramatizing the conflict between good and evil in frontier settings presided over by exemplary churchmen.

Charles Gordon/Ralph Connor (1860–1937)

Readers around the world loved them, and they sold in the millions. So did his historical novels set in Ontario, The Man from Glengarry (1901) and Glengarry School Days (1902). The Gordon family roots run deep in Glengarry County. An earlier Gordon, the Reverend Daniel, was famous for his role in a dispute over a shared pioneer church there. He kicked in the church door locked against him, in order to preach The Word of a tough Presbyterian God from the pulpit.

Books by Ralph Connor were shipped on the railway by the carload, as publishers liked to boast in those days, and he became very rich. With his royalties he built both the cottage on the island, Birkencraig, and the huge three-story family home at 54 Westgate in Winnipeg, now marked by a government plaque (so we have a precedent for the National Cottage plan!). The Canada Trip summarizes what followed:

After the money went, in bad investments while he was overseas in the First World War, the house and the island were all he had, and after he died the house was sold for back taxes. The University Women’s Club bought it in 1945 and maintains it beautifully, renting out two apartments upstairs, and using the rest of the house for luncheons and cultural events, renting it out for receptions and meetings. … At the last reception, a year ago, I walked into the office and announced that I was a Gordon and we would like to have our house back now. This was treated as a joke.

Stories About Storytellers begins in Winnipeg, where I spoke on Mavis Gallant’s behalf at the Governor General’s Award ceremony there, and found myself jousting with a separatist winner from Quebec. So it was appropriate to start my stage show tour there, too. It was booked by Paul McNally, the quietly effective co-owner (with his wife, Holly) of the McNally Robinson western chain of bookshops. I must stress here that he is no relation of Ben McNally, the excellent Toronto bookstore owner. (I look forward to reading a PhD thesis investigating the genetic oddity that explains why a significant portion of Canadian independent bookstores are now owned by bright middle-aged men named McNally.) Paul kindly took a chance on me, inviting me to give a show at his Prairie Ink store on Grant Avenue.

He had no idea how many people would be interested in turning up. Neither had I. But I was very grateful that the way had been helpfully prepared in the Winnipeg Free Press a few days earlier by the astoundingly perceptive and gifted Book Page editor, Morley Walker. How else can I describe a man who began his review of my book by calling me a Scottish immigrant and Toronto publisher extraordinaire who has a greater appreciation of regional Canada than 99 percent of us born here. Clearly, the man’s a genius!

This was backed up later in the paper by the remarkable Gordon Sinclair Jr. Gordon (another case where no relation is appropriate) is an almost unique survivor from the days when columnists could write about whatever the hell they wanted to. I knew this big, cheery, green-eyed, smiling charmer very well because I had coaxed an important book out of him, finally, entitled Cowboys and Indians: The Shooting of J.J. Harper (1999), about a tragic incident in which an aboriginal leader was shot and killed by Winnipeg police on the street.

The finally is significant here, because in his kindly column alerting Winnipeg to my forthcoming show, as an honest man he refers to his link to Gibson the Impatient Publisher. He admits that as one of the writers who has heard the crack and felt the slash of his deadline whip he had been pleased to hear that I had had trouble with my own book.

As soon as we hit town, Gordon took Jane and me for a literary and historic tour. He took us across the river to the lovingly preserved St. Boniface home of Gabrielle Roy. Now, Gabrielle Roy was described by my distinguished publishing predecessor Jack McClelland as the greatest writer in the country in his correspondence with her, excerpted in Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland. His faith in her was so great that in 1976, when Canada seemed under threat from Quebec separatism, he urged her to ­support the new translation of The Tin Flute by Alan Brown, because he hoped her novel might help the national situation. "I mention The Tin Flute specifically, McClelland wrote, because it remains the fact that you are unique in being the only Canadian writer who has totally bridged the gap between the two cultures. You are the only writer who is critically accepted and widely read in both our two languages. There simply is no one else."

This was not a minority opinion. The original French novel, Bonheur d’occasion (1945) won many prizes, including the Prix Femina in France, while The Tin Flute won many more, including Gabrielle Roy’s first Governor General’s Award. When Jack McClelland organized a historic Calgary Conference in 1978, where scholars were asked to rank Canada’s greatest novels (a promotional coup for Jack), The Tin Flute placed second, behind an embarrassed Margaret Laurence, with The Stone Angel. Gabrielle Roy, who spent her later years in Quebec City, charmingly resisting Jack’s pleas to promote her books more, went on to be elected to the Royal Society of Canada, its first woman member.

I remember Gabrielle in person as a very striking woman whose aquiline face was lined with what I can only describe as wise, mature, beauty. I was aware that when The Tin Flute came out in English in 1947, the Globe and Mail reviewer hailed it as the Great Canadian Novel. Later, after producing other fine books, she in turn inspired one of the greatest of Canada’s literary biographies, by François Ricard, which I was proud to publish in Patricia Claxton’s translation in 1999.

That biography recounts an extraordinary family story. Gabrielle was the youngest in a family of eight children. Over time, her matchless success and fame provoked some jealousy among her sisters, most notably with Adele, who also had hopes as a writer, and who complained primly that her own lack of success was because her books were not in the fashion of the day (and) not to the liking of young people hungry for erotic sensations. As François Ricard wrote, What could Adele do about such a situation except harbour her ill temper and wait for the moment of revenge?

That moment came when Adele was eighty-six years old. A Quebec literary figure named Gérard Bessette (far from blameless in this matter) approached her asking if she happened to have anything unpublished about her famous sister. The floodgates opened, with a manuscript denouncing, in Ricard’s description, Gabrielle’s selfishness and unscrupulous ambition, and so on, and so on. Gabrielle learned of her elderly sister’s forthcoming bitter book and tried very hard to stop it from being published. Ricard was himself an important figure in the Quebec publishing world, and records: From August to October she telephoned me two or three times a week, in tears, each time fluctuating between despair and rage, a towering rage whose target was less Adele herself — ‘a poor thing who’s very sick really’ — and more Adele’s publisher, ‘one of those vultures who deliberately exploit sensational themes.’

Gabrielle Roy (1909–1983)

The pressure on Gabrielle built up. In the fall of 1979, just three weeks before her sister’s book was to be published, she suffered a serious heart attack. She was rushed into hospital and spent eleven days in the coronary unit, and a full month in hospital. Afterward, she continued to write when she could, but she never recovered full, robust health, and died in July 1983 at the age of seventy-four. Her triumphant sister Adele died in St. Boniface in 1998, at the age of 105.

After taking us to the Roy home, our Winnipeg guide Gordon Sinclair then showed us the site of the Battle of Seven Oaks, where the rivalry between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Nor’Westers and their pemmican suppliers among the Métis led to an 1816 clash where Scottish Selkirk settlers were killed by Métis buffalo hunters on horseback. These well-disciplined light cavalry troops were led by Cuthbert Grant, a halfbreed whose father had sent him east with the plan that he would be educated in Scotland. (And what was the name of the street where my show would be held, again? Ah yes, Grant Avenue. In Winnipeg, history is all around you, even in the shape of an old building downtown named after Thomas Scott, the man executed by men acting for the provisional government led by Louis Riel — whose gravestone Gordon also showed us, in the grounds of the St. Boniface Cathedral, to which Gabrielle Roy’s father had been one of the original building fund donors.)

Finally, for old times’ sake, he took us to the Fort Garry Hotel, where my Mavis Gallant incident had occurred. In conversation there I laughed about my trouble with writing my own damned book, and blamed Winnipeg’s own Margaret Laurence. The story goes that at the height of her fame Margaret attended a cocktail party where she met a brain surgeon. A novelist, eh? he asked. Well, when I retire from being a surgeon, I plan to take up writing novels.

What an amazing coincidence, said Margaret. When I retire from writing novels I plan to take up brain surgery!

I’ve repeated this fine put-down many times, and laughed heartily. Yet it turned out that I had made the same mistake as the arrogant surgeon. I had thought that writing a book was just a matter of time — or, more precisely, of clearing the time to do it. After retiring from the world of publishing I had lots of time. But as the title of the rueful piece I wrote about it on my blog demonstrates, I found it Harder Than I Thought.

I knew Margaret, and had been surprised to find that we had roots in common. Her maternal grandfather Simpson, the lawyer who moved to Canada to set up his practice in Neepawa, Manitoba (which became the basis of the fictional Manawaka), had gone to Glasgow Academy, the high school I attended much later. His traditional Scottish education, with lots of Latin, must have made him an impressive figure on the frontier, and it was clear that Margaret’s family was at the top of the social tree on the almost treeless prairies. His former house, where Margaret grew up, is now the Margaret Laurence House, visited by admirers from around the world.

Her true publishing relationship was with Jack McClelland, but I came to know her in due course as a redoubtable figure. A British journalist once called her features mannish but not unmotherly — to Margaret’s rage, as she revealed in a letter to her great friend Adele Wiseman. But he had a point. She had strong features, and large, thick-framed, dark-rimmed glasses that gave her a decisive, straightforward look. To me she looked almost shaman-like.

Margaret Laurence (1926–1987)

That, certainly, was the role she played when she acted as a sort of den mother to Canada’s writers, whom she called her tribe. And when she helped to create the Writers’ Union of Canada, she was an inspiring leader.

She was a brave woman, pilloried by ignorant boors for writing obscene books (like The Stone Angel and The Diviners, for God’s sake!) that should be removed from the local library system and kept out of the schools. She and the equally obscene Alice Munro (who nobly showed up to defend her at a Clinton meeting full of vocally Christian neighbours) were attacked by local religious extremists. (Thank Heavens they missed Sex at the Cottage!) Living in Lakefield as chancellor of Trent University must have been uncomfortable for Margaret when she was attacked by similarly small-minded folk in nearby Peterborough. But with the help of supporters like young Linwood Barclay and his Trent girlfriend Neetha she gamely served out her three-year academic term. Not everyone knew that she always wore a long dress for her speaking engagements — and there were many, as she received fourteen honorary degrees — in order to conceal the fact that her knees were trembling. In Christopher Moore’s 2015 book, Founding the Writers’ Union of Canada, Margaret Atwood says, She was very nervous speaking in public. She had to sit down, she shook so much.

Her 1964 novel, The Stone Angel, was selected as the best Canadian novel at Jack McClelland’s famous 1978 Calgary conference. The novel’s narrator, ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley, is a tough, determined character, rampant with memory, who in turn will not be forgotten by her readers. (If you watch the 2007 film version of The Stone Angel, look closely at the Winnipeg mansion scenes: they’re set in the Ralph Connor House.) Among the characters who inhabited the fictional prairie town of Manawaka, Morag Gunn of The Diviners (1974) also lives on triumphantly, as does the novel’s unforgettable opening line: The river flowed both ways.

For many of us, The Diviners is Margaret’s greatest book. Myrna Kostash (a writer we’ll meet in the Alberta chapter) is fascinated by Cuthbert Grant, the man caught between two worlds, who worked for the Nor’Westers as a Bourgeois but also led the Métis. She reminded me how large the Battle of Seven Oaks looms in Margaret’s book, for a small skirmish on the outskirts of modern Winnipeg. In his cups, Morag’s stepfather, Christie, will proudly recount the story of his people, the penniless Scottish Highlanders evicted to make way for sheep. They find hardship here, across the ocean, but inspired by the legendary Piper Gunn (and the clenched-jaw clan war cry, The Ridge of Tears) they tough it out in the Red River, until their threat to the Métis pemmican trade leads to trouble.

There was a difference between the halfbreeds, like Cuthbert Grant, who were English-speaking, with fur trade fathers and Native mothers, and the French-speaking Métis, who were the backbone of Louis Riel’s rebellions in defence of their way of life. They were so distinct that they even had their own French-based language, Michif. Not only Alistair MacLeod admirers must regret that no great Michif writer has come to the fore.

In Christie’s words, the settlers had hard times, with winters so cold it would freeze the breath in your throat and turn your blood to red ice. Weather for giants, in them days. Not that it’s much better now, I’d say.

Young Morag asks, Did they fight the halfbreeds and Indians, Christie?

He replies, Did they ever. Slew them in their dozens, girl. In their scores.

Yet when Morag asks, Were they bad, the breeds and them? Christie’s answer is uneasy:

Bad? He repeats the word as though he is trying to think what it means.

No, he says at last. They weren’t bad. They were — just there.

Later Morag’s lover Jules Tonnerre tells the story of Métis resistance down through the years, against the intrusions of the English and the Arkanys, the Orkney men who made up a huge part of the Hudson Bay workforce. As a folksinger, and the father of Morag’s daughter, he proudly recreates the stories of Riel and Dumont, and he does it in song. We all remember history, our history, in our own way.

Margaret’s friend and biographer, Clara Thomas, summarized her career well when she wrote: She was much beloved and will be remembered for her works and her personal warmth, strength and humour, which she shared so generously. For example, she was the proud godmother of Andreas Schroeder and Sharon Brown’s daughter, Sabrina, and took her role very seriously. Towards the end of her life she phoned their house in B.C. almost every week, passing on advice that would help Sabrina’s writing. This regular contact meant that Andreas was aware that she was fighting an even greater enemy than the lung cancer that had struck her. She was blocked, unable to write. This affected her terribly, attacking the core of her being: if she was no longer a writer, what was she? She would tell him, I’m a writer who can’t write anymore, yet here I am, giving advice on writing. I feel like a fake.

This, like her advancing cancer, preyed on her mind. She began to explore the road to a painless death. She collected the required ingredients, and researched the procedures. Andreas remembered a phone conversation that left him and Sharon feeling that Margaret’s death was not far off. The next day, she decided it was time. She was found at her Lakefield home on January 5, 1987.

In happier times, she had met, and tickled, my baby daughter Meg, when we dropped by an early Writers’ Union get-together in Toronto. More than a decade later, Meg was at high school on Bloor Street in Toronto when Margaret’s funeral was held in a church right opposite the school, but teenage propriety (I didn’t really know her) prevented Meg from joining me at the historic funeral. The most moving part of the service was when a lone piper marched outside the church, playing a lament. Afterward, Ken Adachi, the Toronto Star’s soft-spoken books editor and the author of the book about Japanese Canadians The Enemy That Never Was, remarked to me that he wanted a piper at his funeral. It was not to be.

One of the most interesting authors I ever published was Winnipeg’s George Swinton, the author of the 1972 classic illustrated book Sculpture of the Eskimo. Updated and revised and re-titled editions of Sculpture of the Inuit appeared, the last in 1999. When we visited Winnipeg I made a point of taking Jane to see him, not just as a great expert on the art of the North, but because he was a remarkable man.

He was born into high society in Vienna in 1917. He was twenty when Hitler’s army marched in and took over Austria in the Anschluss of March 12, 1938. That night young George went to the opera. As a patriotic Austrian he cringed with shame when the orchestra began the evening by playing the triumphant German national anthem, Deutschland über alles. Everyone rose to their feet, and stood at attention.

Not quite everyone: George sat there defiantly, his arms folded, all eyes upon him. At the end of the show, he received word that the Nazis were after him, and would arrest him that night.

(Who warned you? I asked him, when I first heard the story.

Oh, a friend who was high in the Nazi party.

A friend … ? I spluttered.

Yes, smiled George, the Viennese socialite, we played bridge together.)

It was the role of a rich young idiot — a sort of