Canadians Page 16

  They held Will Barker’s funeral in Toronto, the cortège two miles long, with two thousand uniformed men, honour guards from four countries, and fifty thousand people lining the streets. As the coffin was carried into Mount Pleasant Cemetery, six biplanes swooped down, sprinkling thousands of rose petals over the crowd.

  “His name,” said Canadian forces commander Sir Arthur Currie, who had led the troops at the battle of Passchendaele, “will live forever in the annals of the country which he served so nobly.”

  Not quite, sir.

  Barker’s name didn’t live even long enough to be etched on the crypt where he was laid to rest. His wife’s snobbish family could never accept, and certainly could not glorify, the rough-hewn outsider from a prairie farm. The only mark on Barker’s grave is the most common name imaginable: “Smith.”

  Many years later, when little Dauphin approached the government to place a small plaque in the town to commemorate his Manitoba birthplace, it was at first rejected.

  Today, no one but the military historians remember the name that “will live forever in the annals of the country which he served so nobly.” Barker’s biographer, Wayne Ralph, thinks that perhaps he was too much the “warrior” for Canadian tastes.

  Had Will Barker been born only a little farther south of Dauphin, just over the Minnesota border in, say, Humboldt, he might well have been the Audie Murphy of his day, the much-decorated war hero who became an even bigger hero on the silver screen. But Canadians today don’t even know what Barker looked like.

  “He was an international superstar,” Ralph told me in an interview from White Rock, British Columbia. “Barker had all the traits of the great Hollywood heroes. He was disobedient, gregarious, flamboyant. He was a frontier kid, a classical figure in the American style of hero. Born in a log cabin, went on to fame and fortune, and died tragically at thirty-five.

  “Now he’s basically buried in anonymity. To me, it’s the perfect metaphor for Canada, where we bury our past.”

  “NATIONS,” Aldous Huxley claimed, “are to a large extent invented by their poets and novelists.”

  Huxley obviously knew nothing about Canada. This country was far more failed by its early recognized writers—bad poets, bitter immigrants, and outright frauds.

  For the most part, the mirror held up by early writers wasn’t for Canadians to stare into to see themselves but for British readers and, to a lesser extent, British theatre audiences to look into and imagine a country that often didn’t exist. Such are the realities of the book business. There weren’t enough readers in early Canada to bother writing for—so they wrote, instead, for the outside lecture circuit.

  Early Canadian literature, then, is the literature of other countries. “The books that are made elsewhere,” Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee said not long before he was assassinated in 1867, “even in England, are not always best fitted for us, they do not always run on the same mental gauge, nor connect with our train of thought.”

  In many instances, a connection wasn’t even sought. The train of thought—a more delicate phrase than “economic necessity”—that drove many early writers was British first, then American, where the markets lay for magazine serialization, books and, with luck, stage presentations.

  The lecture circuit required persona as much as product, and so it’s hardly surprising that so many of the early known Canadian writers weren’t at all who they said they were. Grey Owl was no “full-blooded Red Indian,” as he advertised, but a full-blooded Englishman named Archibald Belaney. Pauline Johnson, though half Mohawk, was not Princess Tekahionwake. Frederick Philip Grove was really Felix Paul Greve, the rich son of a merchant back in Hamburg, Germany. Ernest Thompson Seton, whose eyes were known to cross under the slightest stress, changed his name so many times he ended up telling people to forget all the previous incarnations and just call him “Black Wolf.”

  Grey Owl, to give Belaney due credit, at least wrote with some accuracy, unlike Seton, who liked to give his animals names and emotions and reason. Belaney also genuinely loved the wild, of which he had no fear. Seton was almost as terrified of the deep bush as he was of those awful nocturnal emissions that haunted him and could be treated, he believed, only by sleeping on hard boards and splashing his private parts frequently with ice water.

  I don’t know how much Seton a young Northrop Frye bothered reading—he read everything, it seemed, so would certainly have studied some—but I do know that Frye eventually produced the seminal study on Canadian literature: The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. He looked at a vast array of Canadian poetry and fiction and saw Canadian writing unique in that the question that preoccupies artists in the rest of the world—“Who am I?”—had been replaced in Canada with “Where is here?” and “How do I live here?”

  Frye was, and remains, hugely celebrated for his insights on what became known as the “garrison mentality” of Canadian writing. It was a notion he came upon while studying the tragic poetry of his own mentor, E.J. Pratt, author of such epics as “The Titanic” and “Brebeuf and His Brethren.” Frye claimed—and the claim was widely accepted—that the story of Canada was one of beleaguered settlers up against the impossible and endless wilderness.

  He wrote that, in reading through Canadian literature, he’d been long struck by a tone of “deep terror in regard to nature.” It occurred to me, upon first reading Frye, that if I crossed out the word “nature” every time he used it and inserted the word “city,” his perception would apply perfectly to my parents. They were completely at home in the bush of Algonquin Park, where they both lived—mother as a child and young woman, father as a lifetime logger—for considerable amounts of their lives. They were terrified driving to Toronto. They worried more about traffic lights than wolves, more about big crowds than heading off into the bush.

  And they were hardly alone.

  “The line which marks off the frontier from the farmstead, the wilderness from the baseland, the hinterland from the metropolis,” historian W.L. Morton said many years back, “runs through every Canadian psyche.” And, if I may add, it runs in both directions—as befits this contradictory country.

  I began to wonder if it were possible that Frye had it wrong for a vast number of Canadians. For them, nature might be the comfort zone. For them, Frye’s “deep regard” and “terror of the soul” would be reserved more for the world, for the different languages and different customs that lie beyond Canada.

  Frye, after all, was the direct opposite of my parents and the vast majority of Canadians his age, few of whom would have wasted a moment of their lives worrying about the defining features of early Canadian literature. He was born in the city (Sherbrooke, Quebec), raised in the city (Moncton, New Brunswick), educated in cities (Toronto and Oxford), and taught for decades at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College. How much contact, I began to wonder, could he possibly have had with Canada’s nature?

  According to his own journals, Frye didn’t venture much into the countryside. He had terrible hay fever. He also had little inclination. He once wrote in his diary that the work the Lord had chosen for him was to sit happily and think beautiful thoughts, occasionally stopping to write them down.

  Find me even a handful of fellow Canadians who could say the same. In one of Frye’s more compelling arguments for his widely accepted theory, he compared the immigrant landing at New York City to the early immigrant reaching Canada. The American-bound immigrant would find New York busy and bustling, the Statue of Liberty welcoming, the harbour safe and filled with promise. Canada, on the other hand,

  has, for all practical purposes, no Atlantic seaboard. The traveller from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the Straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible.… To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien cont
inent.

  A brilliant metaphor—the mouth of the St. Lawrence opening up like the mouth of the biblical whale that swallowed Jonah—but, really, get a grip, professor.

  The mouth of the St. Lawrence, to the early immigrant, would have felt far more like a safe warm womb than any hungry whale. The poor wretches would have somehow survived the often-terrifying two-month sail across the Atlantic, would have often seen parents, children, spouses die during the passage, and would have lived in filth and vomit and, often, human waste for weeks on end in cramped quarters.

  Surely they would cheer, would they not, when they saw the green and welcoming banks of the St. Lawrence take them in?

  Even that elitist whiner Susanna Moodie—who would later serve as one of Frye’s primary examples of this terror—was ecstatic to enter the St. Lawrence when she sailed over on the Anne in the late summer of 1832. “Never,” Moodie wrote in her day journal, “had I beheld so many striking objects blended into one mighty whole! Nature had lavished all her noblest features in producing that enchanting scene.”

  Moodie would be swallowed by her whale a bit later. Unable to recreate in Canada the genteel life she pined for back in Britain, she’d become the new country’s sharpest early critic and denouncer.

  “If,” she wrote in Roughing It in the Bush, “these sketches should prove the means of deterring one family from sinking their property and shipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prison-house and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain.”

  One conclusion to take from Frye’s interpretations, even if a tad unfair, is that he spent far too much time sitting in his comfortable office staring at a map of the country and letting an exceptional imagination run away with him. Little did he realize that so many would happily follow.

  Frye’s enormous reach—and of course there is much to admire in this man and much to agree with—can be found in almost any discussion of Canadian literature. Margaret Atwood’s Survival largely grows out of her old professor’s thinking; Gaile McGregor’s The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Landscape begins with John Richardson’s 1832 Canadian novel Wacousta and uses its savagery and outside threats to agree with Frye and Atwood that “the Canadian experience is one of the unrelenting harshness of nature, and the characteristic Canadian response to turn inwards, back to the garrison.”

  Fine, that’s part of it, I’ll concede. But then she goes on to say that Americans “have generally viewed nature as a source of inspiration, natural wisdom, moral health, and so on. Canadian writers seemingly do not even like to look on the face of the wilderness.”

  Poppycock.

  Perhaps the problem lies in the writers studied. We can safely presume that these academics scrutinized vast amounts of Canadian poetry, from E.J. Pratt to Bliss Carman to Earle Birney, as well as the fiction of Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, and Sheila Watson, and even those more “literary” nonfiction efforts of the Strickland sisters, Moodie, and Catharine Parr Traill. But many of the early explorers, who surely did not share this Fryean terror of nature, left behind journals. Though there was rarely much introspection, the writings were often wonderfully evocative of a landscape that inspired less fear than awe. The early immigrants to Canada, of course, were often unable to read, let alone write, yet it could be argued—though never proven—that they were quickly very much at ease in the very nature that was supposedly swallowing them up. Even those who were literate would have been so busy with clearing and wood-gathering and planting and harvesting and, yes, simply surviving that they might never have found the time to write the celebratory stories of nature they might have felt.

  There is, alas, no way to include in the literature of a country the books that never get written.

  Wayne Grady, a fine Ontario writer and translator, is another who’s become wary of Frye’s interpretation of Canada’s pre-Centennial printed word. Grady has studied the journals of numerous explorers, and while he rues the fact that so few attempted to be poetic or introspective in their carefully noted observations, he’s found ample evidence that appears to contradict Frye. “There is very little in the way of terror in the journals of David Thompson or Samuel Hearne,” Grady writes in his introduction to Treasures of the Place. “What there is is a continuous sense of wonder at the vastness and the splendour of the Canadian wilderness.”

  A great deal has changed since 1971 when Frye published The Bush Garden, his collection of literary essays written over three decades. Those early explorers’ sense of wonder is found increasingly in modern Canadian fiction. Not only that, but the Canadian “landscape” now covers even more ground, from the wilderness of the Far North to the inner city and, for that matter, the inner workings of the northern personality.

  In the years since Frye’s key pronouncements on Canadian literature, this country found its real literary voice in such writers as Atwood, Richler, Margaret Laurence, and Gabrielle Roy. An entire new generation emerged, including the likes of Jack Hodgins in British Columbia, Sid Marty in the Rocky Mountains, Guy Vanderhaeghe on the Prairies, Jane Urquhart in Ontario, David Adams Richards in New Brunswick, Wayne Johnson in Newfoundland…. And more are just beginning what are sure to be long and creative careers in fiction. Canada has moved from the silly world of Seton into the more rarified literary world of the Giller Prize, international recognition, and summer book festivals that seem as popular as lake regattas and family picnics.

  But let Americans debate the greatest character of their literature— Natty Bumppo, Gatsby, Huck Finn, even Moby-Dick. The prime personality of Canadian writing has always been, and to a large extent remains, the land itself.

  It’s telling that, when Bruce Hutchison came to the end of his great book on Canada, he gave the final word to Captain George Vancouver, who was neither a poet nor a novelist.

  The Canada of the imagination isn’t quite as Aldous Huxley believed it to be for other nations. Here it was invented by its nonfiction writers—from George Vancouver through Pierre Berton—as much as, if not more than, by its novelists and poets.

  THAT SAID, Canada fared far better in its early fiction than it has in American fantasy. When Hollywood does Canada, the results can make Frye’s wacky image of the frightening, open-mouthed Gulf of St. Lawrence seem practically scientific. The movie Saskatchewan featured extraordinary mountain vistas. The movie Quebec turned the 1837 Rebellion into a bunch of horny frontiersmen storming the fortress to get their filthy paws on the sexy heroine….

  Long before film tax breaks, and long before Vancouver became a stand-in for virtually any American city you might name, Canada had a special relationship with Hollywood—though reality had nothing to do with it. Many of the great names of Hollywood had Canadian roots: Mack Sennett, Norma Shearer, even Sam Goldwyn, who passed through Nova Scotia as a child. Raymond Massey, brother of Vincent, Canada’s first native-born governor general, would play the classic Abe Lincoln. Gladys Smith of Toronto would go on to become “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford. Cecilia Parker and Ann Rutherford, both Canadians, would later star with Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy series—and one day be proud recipients of special achievement awards for so wonderfully representing “the American way of life.”

  As for the Canadian way of life, Hollywood merely distorted it to suit the needs of whatever movie was being made. In Hollywood’s Canada, Pierre Berton delights over one B movie scene in which a tycoon snatches his daughter away from his conniving wife and announces he’s taking her “Far away in Canada—safe from the evils of civilization.” Hollywood films, Berton believed, had “given the world no real image of Canada at all, except that of a geographical absurdity—a vast, empty snow-swept land of mountains and pine trees.” It was a country devoid of cities.

  It must be said that Canadians themselves are often accessories to the fact here, in that this is an image we not only cling to but actively promote i
n tourism posters, brochures, and advertisements. And it’s very much the image that Canadian Winter Olympians—with their Hudson’s Bay Company toques and mukluks—present to the world every four years.

  Berton also charged Hollywood with imposing its idea of the Old West on the Canadian northwest without the slightest thought to reality. The western shot in Arizona with John Wayne riding hard was no different, psychologically, from the western shot in Alberta or Saskatchewan. The American clichés—war-painted Indians, covered wagons, lynchings, posses, standard cowboy and Native dress, and tin-starred sheriffs—“were moved across the border with scarcely a change in the plot except for the presence of the movie Mounties.”

  This, Berton argued, ran contrary to historical reality. Canada didn’t have the same mythological frontier justice. Law in Canada didn’t come from the grassroots but from above, and with rare exceptions it arrived ahead of the settlers, not racing behind them to catch up. The truth, Berton argued, was that shootings were extremely rare in the Canadian West. Canadians tended to solve their problems with talk and conciliation, Americans with might and victory. Canadians by and large had no sense of “frontier” that had to be tamed but rather a sense of “prairie” that would accept settlement.

  Canada had no Frederick Jackson Turner to voice the quintessential frontier theory as he’d done for America in his famous 1893 address to the American Historical Society. So much of Hollywood’s impression of the West comes out of the widespread acceptance of Turner’s thesis, a genuinely held belief that the frontier had defined many of the characteristics of the American people, characteristics that would persist for as long as America itself. He found coarseness but also strength, practicality and resourcefulness, great energy, domineering individualism, a rigid sense of good and evil, and an infectious enthusiasm that came from freedom of choice. And the sheer existence of the frontier, Turner said, drew similar qualities out of the more effete East.

  The province of Alberta, much of it settled by former Americans, comes closest to Turner’s description, particularly in its can-do mentality of which he so greatly approved. Overall, however, the Canadian prairie—I hesitate to use the word “frontier” here—was marked by mutual assistance and as much faith in authority as in technology. If the six-gun was the symbol of the settling of the American West, the building bee would be the symbol for the Canadian West. One co-option, the other cooperation.