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FOR MADELEINE AND JEAN-PAUL LEMIEUX

I
n wartime, in Montreal, I applied to work on a newspaper. Its name was
The Lantern
, and its motto, “My light shall shine,” carried a Wesleyan ring of veracity and plain dealing. I chose it because I thought it was a place where I would be given a lot of different things to do. I said to the man who consented to see me, “But not the women’s pages. Nothing like that.” I was eighteen. He heard me out and suggested I come back at twenty-one, which was a soft way of getting rid of me. In the meantime I was to acquire experience; he did not say of what kind. On the stroke of twenty-one I returned and told my story to a different person. I was immediately accepted; I had expected to be. I still believed, then, that most people meant
what they said. I supposed that the man I had seen that first time had left a memorandum in the files: “To whom it may concern – Three years from this date, Miss Linnet Muir will join the editorial staff.” But after I’d been working for a short time I heard one of the editors say, “If it hadn’t been for the god-damned war we would never have hired even one of the god-damned women,” and so I knew.

In the meantime I had acquired experience by getting married. I was no longer a Miss Muir, but a Mrs. Blanchard. My husband was overseas. I had longed for emancipation and independence, but I was learning that women’s autonomy is like a small inheritance paid out a penny at a time. In a journal I kept I scrupulously noted everything that came into my head about this, and about God, and about politics. I took it for granted that our victory over Fascism would be followed by a sunburst of revolution – I thought that was what the war was about. I wondered if going to work for the capitalist press was entirely moral. “Whatever happens,” I wrote, “it will be the Truth, nothing half-hearted, the Truth with a Capital T.”

The first thing I had to do was write what goes under the pictures. There is no trick to it. You just repeat what the picture has told you like this:

“Boy eats bun as bear looks on.”

The reason why anything has to go under the picture at all is that a reader might wonder, “Is that a bear looking on?” It looks like a bear, but that is not enough reason for saying so. Pasted across the back of the photo you have been given is a strip of paper on which you can read: “Saskatoon, Sask. 23 Nov. Boy eats bun as bear looks on.” Whoever composed this knows two things more than you do – a place and a time.

You have a space to fill in which the words must come out even. The space may be tight; in that case, you can remove “as” and substitute a comma, though that makes the kind of terse statement to which your reader is apt to reply, “So what?” Most of the time, the Truth with a Capital T is a matter of elongation: “Blond boy eats small bun as large bear looks on.”

“Blond boy eats buttered bun …” is livelier, but unscrupulous. You have been given no information about the butter. “Boy eats bun as hungry bear looks on” has the beginnings of a plot, but it may inspire your reader to protest: “That boy must be a mean sort of kid if he won’t share his food with a starving creature.” Child-lovers, though less prone to fits of anguish than animal-lovers, may be distressed by the word “hungry” for a different reason, believing “boy” subject to attack from “bear.” You must not lose your head and type, “Blond bear eats large boy as hungry bun looks on,” because your reader may notice, and write a letter saying, “Some of you guys around there think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” while another will try to enrich your caption with, “Re your bun write-up, my wife has taken better pictures than that in the very area you mention.”

At the back of your mind, because your mentors have placed it there, is an obstruction called “the policy factor.” Your paper supports a political party. You try to discover what this party has had to say about buns and bears, how it intends to approach them in the future. Your editor, at golf with a member of parliament, will not want to have his game upset by: “It’s not that I want to interfere but some of that bun stuff seems pretty negative to me.” The young and vulnerable reporter would just as soon not pick up the phone to be told, “I’m ashamed of your
defeatist attitude. Why, I knew your father! He must be spinning in his grave!” or, more effectively, “I’m telling you this for your own good – I think you’re subversive without knowing it.”

Negative, defeatist and subversive are three of the things you have been cautioned not to be. The others are seditious, obscene, obscure, ironic, intellectual and impulsive.

You gather up the photo and three pages of failed captions, and knock at the frosted glass of a senior door. You sit down and are given a view of boot soles. You say that the whole matter comes down to an ethical question concerning information and redundancy; unless “reader” is blotto, can’t he see for himself that this is about a boy, a bun, and a bear?

Your senior person is in shirtsleeves, hands clasped behind his neck. He thinks this over, staring at the ceiling; swings his feet to the floor; reads your variations on the bear-and-bun theme; turns the photo upside-down. He tells you, patiently, that it is not the business of “reader” to draw conclusions. Our subscribers are not dreamers or smart alecks; when they see a situation in a picture, they want that situation confirmed. He reminds you about negativism and obscuration; advises you to go sit in the library and acquire a sense of values by reading the back issues of
Life
.

The back numbers of
Life
are tatty and incomplete, owing to staff habits of tearing out whatever they wish to examine at leisure. A few captions, still intact, allow you to admire a contribution to pictorial journalism, the word “note”:

“American flag flies over new post office. Note stars on flag.”

“GI waves happily from captured Italian tank. Note helmet on head.”

So, “Boy eats bun as bear looks on. Note fur on bear.” All
that can happen now will be a letter asking, “Are you sure it was a bun?”

F
rom behind frosted-glass doors, as from a leaking intellectual bath, flow instructions about style, spelling, caution, libel, brevity, and something called “the ground rules.” A few of these rules have been established for the convenience of the wives of senior persons and reflect their tastes and interests, their inhibitions and fears, their desire to see close friends’ pictures when they open to the social page, their fragile attention span. Other rules demand that we pretend to be independent of British foreign policy and American commerce – otherwise our readers, discouraged, will give up caring who wins the war. (Soon after victory British foreign policy will cease to exist; as for American commerce, the first grumbling will be heard when a factory in Buffalo is suspected of having flooded the country with defective twelve-inch pie tins.) Ground rules maintain that you must not be flippant about the Crown – an umbrella term covering a number of high-class subjects, from the Royal Family to the nation’s judicial system – or about our war effort or, indeed, our reasons for making any effort about anything. Religions, in particular those observed by decent Christians, are not up for debate. We may, however, describe and denounce marginal sects whose puritanical learnings are even more dizzily slanted than our own. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, banned as seditious, continue to issue inflammatory pamphlets about Jesus; patriotic outrage abounds over this. The children of Witnesses are beaten up in public schools for refusing to draw Easter bunnies. An education officer, interviewed,
declares that the children’s obstinate observance of the Second Commandment is helping Hitler. Everyone knows that the Easter bunny, along with God and Santa Claus, is on our side.

To argue a case for the children is defeatist; to advance reasons against their persecution is obscure. Besides, your version of the bunny conflict may be unreliable. Behind frosted-glass doors lurk male fears of female mischief. Women, having no inborn sense of history, are known to invent absurd stories. Celebrated newspaper hoaxes (perpetrated by men, as it happens) are described to you, examples of irresponsible writing that have brought down trusting editors. A few of these stories have been swimming, like old sea turtles, for years now, crawling ashore wherever British possessions are still tinted red on the map. “As the niece of the Governor-General rose from a deep curtsey, the Prince, with the boyish smile that has made him the darling of five continents, picked up a bronze bust of his grandmother and battered Lady Adeline to death” is one version of a perennial favorite.

Privately, you think you could do better. You will never get the chance. The umpires of ground rules are nervous and watchful behind those doors. Wartime security hangs heavy. So does the fear that the end of hostilities will see them turfed out to make way for war correspondents wearing nonchalant mustaches, battered caps, carelessly-knotted white scarves, raincoats with shoulder tabs, punctuating their accounts of Hunnish atrocities perceived at Claridges and the Savoy with “Roger!” and “Jolly-oh!” and “Over to you!”

Awaiting this dreadful invasion the umpires sit, in shirtsleeves and braces, scribbling initials with thick blue pencils. “
NDG
” stands for “No Damned Good.” (Clairvoyant, you will
begin to write “
NBF
” in your journal meaning “No Bloody Future.”) As a creeping, climbing wash of conflicting and contradictory instructions threatens to smother you, you discover the possibilities of the quiet, or lesser, hoax. Obeying every warning and precept, you will write, turn in, and get away with, “Dressed in shoes, stockings and hat appropriate to the season, Mrs. Horatio Bantam, the former Felicity Duckpond, grasped the bottle of champagne in her white-gloved hand and sent it swinging against the end of
HMCS
Makeweight
that was nearest the official party, after which, swaying slightly, she slid down the ways and headed for open waters.”

A
s soon as I realized that I was paid about half the salary men were earning, I decided to do half the work. I had spent much of my adolescence as a resourceful truant, evolving the good escape dodges that would serve one way and another all my life. At
The Lantern
I used reliable school methods. I would knock on a glass door – a door that had nothing to do with me.

“Well, Blanchard, what do you want?”

“Oh, Mr. Watchmaster – it’s just to tell you I’m going out to look something up.”

“What for?”

“An assignment.”

“Don’t tell
me
. Tell Amstutz.”

“He’s organizing fire-drill in case of air-raids.”

“Tell Cranach. He can tell Amstutz.”

“Mr. Cranach has gone to stop the art department from striking.”

“Striking?
Don’t those buggers know there’s a war on? I’d like to see Accounting try that. What do they want now?”

“Conditions. They’re asking for conditions. Is it all right if I go now, Mr. Watchmaster?”

“You know what we need around here, don’t you? One German regiment. Regiment? What am I saying?
Platoon
. That’d take the mickey out of ’em. Teach them something about hard work. Loving your country. Your duty. Give me one trained German sergeant. I’d lead him in. ‘O.K. – you’ve been asking for this!’ Ratatatat. You wouldn’t hear any more guff about conditions. What’s your assignment?”

“The Old Presbyterians. They’ve decided they’re against killing people because of something God said to Moses.”

“Seditious bastards. Put ’em in work camps, the whole damned lot. All right, Blanchard, carry on.”

I would go home, wash my hair, listen to Billie Holiday records.

“Say, Blanchard, where the hell were you yesterday? Seventy-nine people were poisoned by ham sandwiches at a wedding party on Durocher Street. The sidewalk was like a morgue.”

“Actually, I just happened to be in Mr. Watchmaster’s office. But only for a minute.”

“Watchmaster’s got no right to ask you to do anything. One of these days I’m going to close in on him. I can’t right now – there’s a war on. The only good men we ever had in this country were killed in the last one. Look, next time Watchmaster gets you to run his errands, refer it to Cranach. Got that? All right, Blanchard, on your way.”

N
o good dodge works forever.

“Oh, Mr. Watchmaster, I just wanted to tell you I’m going out for an hour or two. I have to look something up. Mr. Cranach’s got his door locked, and Mr. Amstutz had to go home to see why his wife was crying.”

“Christ, what an outfit. What do you have to look up?”

“What Mussolini did to the Red Cross dogs. It’s for the ‘Whither Italy?’ supplement.”

“You don’t need to leave the building for that. You can get all you want by phone. You highbrows don’t even know what a phone is. Drop around Advertising some time and I’ll show you down-to-earth people using phones as working instruments. All you have to do is call the Red Cross, a veterinarian, an Italian priest, maybe an Italian restaurant, and a kennel. They’ll tell you all you need to know. Remember what Churchill said about Mussolini, eh? That he was a fine Christian gentleman. If you want my opinion, whatever those dogs got they deserved.”

I
nterviews were useful: you could get out and ride around in taxis and waste hours in hotel lobbies reading the new American magazines, which were increasingly difficult to find.

“I’m just checking something for
The Lantern
– do you mind?”

“Just so long as you don’t mar the merchandise. I’ve only got five
Time
, three
Look
, four
Photoplay
and two
Ladies’ Home
. Don’t wander away with the
Esquire
. There’s a war on.”

Once I was sent to interview my own godmother. Nobody knew I knew her, and I didn’t say. She was president of a committee that sent bundles to prisoners-of-war. The committee was launching an appeal for funds; that was the reason for the
interview. I took down her name as if I had never heard it before: Miss Edna May Henderson. My parents had called her “Georgie,” though I don’t know why.