Eastern Passage (10 page)
Authors: Farley Mowat
The official publication date for
People of the Deer
was February 26, but review copies had been sent out a month earlier, and the first review appeared on February 24 in the
New York Times Review of Books
. Written by a schoolteacher who, in the 1930s, had spent part of a summer canoeing north of Reindeer Lake, it was dismissive of my venture.
This review was followed by an outright attack on me in
The Beaver
, the house organ of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in which I was accused of being a know-nothing, if not an outright liar.
Max hastened to warn me that these first reactions had ruffled a lot of feathers at Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown and Company.
Atlantic is getting irate letters from so-called northern experts claiming you are full of it. Maybe that should be past tense because a hell of a lot of “it” seems to have already hit the fan
.
You may have to hunker down in a slit trench for a while. But have no fear. Not only is the Lord righteous, He is also a bibliophile and will doubtless come to your rescue. Meantime the publicity generated by these lummoxes will rebound upon them by selling lots of books for us
.
As I wrote to Dudley, the roof seemed to be falling in.
Your three telegrams and letter arrived yesterday. Not quite a bolt from the blue, but like enough. The balloon is going up and it is a mite scary. Seems I have taken on some rather imposing adversaries: the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, the Government of Canada, and at least one very large and wealthy business corporation
.
Wonder if I’ll get crucified. Or just boiled in oil. I’m even wondering if my proposed boys’ book might bring the World Institute for Child Welfare down on my neck too
.
The raking over the coals in the
New York Times
is actually pretty trivial. Its author makes me out to be untrustworthy mainly because he claims I have mistranslated some Chipewyan place names and have neglected to list every previous white man to have found his way into the Barrenlands, including himself although he never got closer than its southern edge
.
I’ve pounded out a reply which I’ll get off to the editor of the
Times Review
in a couple of days. Maybe they’ll publish it – maybe not. It ends like this:
Mr. Downes evidently feels I should have written a scholarly compendium of facts about this obscure part of the world. Let me put him straight. I am no pedant and make no claim to being a
scholar. Abstract facts, real or contrived, selected to serve a purpose, do not concern me half as much as do the stories of living people and the difficulties they encounter in trying to survive
.
This is what my book is all about
.
I’ve also enclosed a reply to
The Beaver
piece. This is a different matter. I’ve taken the H.B.C. to task in no uncertain manner so they have every reason to counterattack. Don’t know how it will end. An individual has never successfully taken on the H.B.C. (Here Before Christ, it’s called in the arctic), though many have tried. This
Beaver
piece is a warning shot across our bows. When they’ve seen the whole book they’ll bring up the big guns, so stand by for action!
See you Sunday, and it won’t be in church
.
F
.
On March 2 Fran and I caught the night train from Toronto. Jeannette and Dudley welcomed us at the Boston station. Dudley was an expansive, pipe-smoking Labrador, while Jeannette was an effusive and well-coiffed chow. Instead of parking us in a hotel, they gave us the run of their own warren in an ancient building on venerable Pickney Street and treated us as rare birds from another world.
Next day at a cocktail party in our honour, we were exhibited to the staffs of Atlantic Monthly and Atlantic Press, whose curiosity about us seemed as great as if we had come from Patagonia. Most knew little about Canada but were very curious about the “North,” which word they pronounced as if with a capital N.
Anxious to oblige, I told stories about Eskimo life and entertained with demonstrations of Eskimo string figures. Some of these were very explicit, especially one called (my translation): Horny-dog-screwing-snotty-bitch-whose-feet-are-froze-to-the-ice.
We were also put on display at a glittering dinner party given by Arthur Thornhill, president of Little, Brown and Company, for
Boston’s publishing elite. Arthur was of the bull mastiff type, with bloodshot eyes and bad halitosis. He did not endear himself to me with his introductory speech, which began:
“We at Little, Brown believe writers are of considerable importance …”
To make up for this, Dudley, who was a dedicated woodworker, took me to his favourite tool shop where I blew most of our budget on Swedish-steel handsaws and English-made wood chisels.
Jeannette took Fran to Fileen’s Bargain Basement in downtown Boston, where my wife was mesmerized by a plethora of marked-down goodies culled from the giant department store’s vast selection but had not the wherewithal to do much about it.
After three days of being fêted in Boston, we were put on another train and sent to New York, where we were astonished and somewhat intimidated to find ourselves booked into the Algonquin Hotel, the venerable establishment that was the favourite watering place for such luminaries as the
New Yorker
’s Dorothy Parker and James Thurber and for visiting literary giants from overseas. We were suitably impressed, although most of our stay was spent shuttling between bookstores and radio stations (television was then still in diapers even in New York), enduring an early version of what would become the ritual book promotion tour of later years.
We enjoyed one memorable evening with Max Wilkinson, an ebullient if somewhat lecherous lamb in wolf’s clothing. On our final evening we were guests of honour at a dinner party held in the Algonquin’s renowned Oak Room. In attendance were several free-loading literary critics who, as I noted in my journal:
… gave me a royal pain, patronizing Fran and me to a fare-thee-well while making it clear Canada and Canadians were of less concern to the Master Race than Hottentots were to the British Raj. One fat-assed bastard actually proposed this toast: “Someday your little
country may get to join the States – something it should have done a couple hundred years ago.”
By the time Fran and I got home to Albion, the frost was coming out of the ground and the 30th side road was again impassable. Nevertheless, this was a wonderful spring. The skies were high and bright, and the returning sun warmed everybody’s blood, including that of our resident fox snake who, having hibernated in the foundation of our fireplace chimney, now came out the wrong hole to find himself in our living room. There he cowed our dogs and gave Fran a bad few moments, buzzing his tail and baring non-existent fangs as he pretended to be a rattlesnake.
Next day we were privy to a show put on by a pair of porcupines smitten by spring fever. I found them in a spruce tree in our swamp, nose to nose on a horizontal branch quite literally screaming at each other with such intensity they could be heard half a mile away. But it was love not rage they were expressing. When they had sung themselves out they settled down to business – in the missionary position, but standing up.
Incidents like these, together with the return of migrant birds ranging from hummingbirds to turkey vultures; the chirruping and galumphing of toads and frogs in the swamp and ponds; and, in general, the all-pervasive aura of hell-for-leather sex permeating woods and waters; plus the relentless demands of gardening and of planting another thousand treelets, left me little time for my profession.
I did not get in touch with Dudley again until spring was almost over.
Dear Dudley: May 29, 1952
I’ve been too busy to write these last several weeks because the debtor’s prison has been hanging over my head, but now all is rosy again. Max has sold another story for me and the garden is up
.
My peas are six inches high, my onions are edible, and radishes too, despite being nibbled by flea beetles. The woods and swamps are producing a bounty of wild leeks, fiddlehead ferns, and morel mushrooms. Our hens are laying like bloody mad. Soon we shall be independent of the cruel world of commerce
.
Surprisingly the Governor General’s Literary Award Commission (Christ, what a mouthful) has picked me to get a medal for the best short story by a Canadian in 1951. It’s the one W.O. Mitchell and
Maclean’s
turned down!
Jack McClelland of McClelland and Stewart has finally awakened to the fact they are supposed to be my Canadian publishers and everything is hunky-dory between us. He and I call each other pet names and drink out of the same glass. Also, Max tells me that POD is the non-fiction choice of the Book Society in Britain, so all seems lovely in my literary garden
.
The multiplicity of things to be done this spring have kept me away from the Machine, but a draft of the wolf story is with Max, who now says he likes it very much. The first time he saw it, back in 1950, it made him gag. But since then I have learned that flippancy and coyness are not my forte
.
The boys’ book nears completion and I’ve sold another yarn to SatEvePost so we can afford to eat store food again. I’m beginning to think Canadian writers who have to live by their trade can only succeed in doing so by selling their wares to magazines. Publishing books has to be just a sideline. I also note that I am one of the very few independent writers in this country who makes his full-time living by writing. Sort of
.
Another letter followed in early June.
We go to London (our London, on our Thames here in Ontario) on Friday to collect my lead medallion. No cash, of course. This is
Canada! The bastards expect me to show up in full dress and, by God, don’t even offer to pay the travel expenses involved. I shall wear worn-out mukluks and a worm-eaten caribou parka and if that gives His Excellency peptic ulcers they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves
.
The investiture was staged in the ballroom of the Hotel London. Trumpeted as the most significant literary event ever held in Canada, it was presided over by Governor General Vincent Massey, one of the country’s wealthiest men, and it gave Canada’s “best” writers a free dinner and a medal but nothing else.
Not even free drinks.
Earle Birney, winner of the poetry award; sports writer Scott Young; and some other “literary scribes,” as we were later stigmatized, adjourned to the men’s washroom of the hotel, where we played a kind of bowling game by rolling our medals into the urinals (each of which we had numbered) ranged against the far wall of the lavatory. The prize for the highest score was to have been a bottle of rum donated by Blair Fraser, one of
Maclean’s
editors; but we ended by sharing it in a series of decidedly irreverent toasts to the organizers of the affair
.
On June 27 the mail contained a clipping from the summer issue of
The Beaver
, sent to me by a friend who had scrawled across it:
In case you ain’t seen this yet. Keep your head down, chum!
“This” was a bombshell disguised as a review, written by an employee of the federal government and published in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s
Beaver
, intended to blow both me and
People of the Deer
into the dustbin. The author was A.E. Porsild, a botanist with the Canadian Museum of Nature and on this occasion spokesman for the federal Department of Northern Affairs. At three thousand words,
the piece was quite the longest “review” ever published by
The Beaver
, but no space was wasted on literary matters.
Porsild devoted himself to discrediting what I had written about the fate of the Ihalmiut and other inland-dwelling Inuit while accusing me of inventing scurrilous nonsense about legitimate businesses such as the Honourable Company of Merchant Adventurers (the Hudson’s Bay Company’s official title). Moreover, according to him I had maliciously maligned the several arms of government charged with caring for native peoples, together with the selfless Roman Catholic and Anglican missionaries who had dedicated their lives to bringing Light into Darkness in the North.
Porsild went on to suggest I had spent only a few weeks in the Barren Lands and that, if the Ihalmiut ever
had
existed outside my imagination, they could never have been numerous enough to warrant such a hue and cry as I had raised. He assured his readers there was no truth in my book – and precious little in me either. The “review” concluded by bestowing upon me a pseudo-Inuit title:
Sagdlutorssuaq –
Teller of Tall Tales.
I soon discovered that copies of this issue of
The Beaver
had been sent to all the prominent newspapers and magazines in Canada and the United States, together with a covering letter implying that I had perpetrated a hoax on the public. One of these incendiary bombs was received by Ontario’s Minister of Education, accompanied by a request that
People of the Deer
be removed from Ontario school libraries on the grounds that it was “a work of fiction.”
I had been anticipating trouble, but not on this scale. I wrote to Dudley.
It’s taken a few days to stop the tremor in my limbs – not of fear, but of rage! This is a major counterattack which is bound to have considerable adverse effect. I’ve written a rebuttal, but
The Beaver
is only published quarterly so even if they print my reply, which they
probably won’t, it will be too late even to limit the damage. The
Montreal Star
has already done an editorial echoing Porsild and I expect the rest of the establishment will follow that line
.
Hugh Kane at McClelland and Stewart tells me the H.B.C. is spreading the story they are going to sue me and the publishers but he says they won’t really do it – just bluffing to make us keep quiet. Hope he’s right
.