douglasgibsonliterarytalks: Recent Episodes
Douglas Gibson
CANADA'S GREATEST STORYTELLERS Decade by decade these lively book talks take us from 1867 all the way up to today. This survey by the "iconic" Editor and Publisher, Douglas Gibson, is very informal and deals with Canada's greatest fiction writers, both English and French. Bursts of music from each decade enliven this look at Canada's storytellers and their times. Douglas Gibson is the author of Stories About Storytellers (2011) and Across Canada by Story (2015).
This is the final podcast in my series Canada's Greatest Storytellers 1867 to today. But this look at the past decade from 2010 to today is full of interesting authors and questions. Drew Hayden Taylor's book Funny You Don't Look Like One:Observations from a Blue Eyed Ojibway makes it clear that determining who is an Indigenous writer in Canada is complicated. It's become very complicated in the case of Joseph Boyden. But I celebrate him by asking the question: Has Joseph Boyden's writing revealed to many readers the important role of Indigenous people in our country's history, and answering with a clear YES.
Dany Laferriere escaped assassination in Haiti and came to Canada where he has become a respected writer in French. So respected that he has become "an Immortal", one of the 40 immortal members of "L'Acadamie Francaise".
The novelist David Adams Richards, who writes about blue collar life in New Brunswick, has become a Senator, and is certain to speak truth to power.
Finally-triumphantly-this podcast deals with Canada's first Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Alice Munro. I have had the honour of editing and publishing Alice ever since The Progress Of Love in 1977, and proudly attended the prize ceremony in Stockholm.
Alistair MacLeod's long awaited first novel, No Great Mischief, drew me to his Windsor home to grab his manuscript in what he called "a home invasion". It went on to win the IMPAC Award and gain a headline in the local paper in Eigg, Scotland which the MacLeod's left in 1790 to sail for Cape Breton, "EIGG MAN WINS PRIZE".
Alan Fry's brave 1970 book, How A People Die, showed me the extent of what we called "the Indian problem". Since then I have been pleased to support the rise of exciting new Indigenous writers, notably Thomas King and my friends Richard Wagamese and Eden Robinson, and my Cree friend from Saskatchewan, Harold Johnson. Meanwhile this decade recognises the huge contribution of Marie Claire Blais who has been a major figure on the Quebec scene over six decades. Finally we recognise Wayne Johnson and the remarkable group of Newfoundland writers- including Joey Smallwood pacing around my small office, orating.
Sadly. this decade marked a time when in Canadian Fiction the Old Guard was dying off. Margaret Laurence died in 1987 and the 1990's saw us lose people named Callaghan, Mitchell and Davies. But names from a new diverse Canada were emerging, like Sri Lanka's Michael Ondaatje, or Mumbai's Rohinton Mistry (or even Chicago's Carol Shields, our first Canadian Pulitzer Prize winner, matching Ondaatje's achievement as the first Canadian to win the Booker Prize). Pierre Trudeau's Memoirs became one of the greatest Canadian best-sellers ever, to my delight. And New Brunswick's Antonine Maillet won the Prix Goncourt for Pelagie La Charrette modelling her Acadian heroine on the singer Edith Butler.
These were years of steady progress in Canadian writing, with major names like Davies, Laurence, Mitchell, Callaghan and MacLennan still writing, and new authors emerging. The most prominent was Margaret Atwood, who was to establish a huge international presence. Leonard Cohen remained a larger than life character. Yves Beauchemin's Le Matou ( The Alley Cat) became a world-wide best seller, while Quebec separation continued to threaten Pierre Trudeau and his Tory successor Brian Mulroney. On the Prairies Guy Vanderhaeghe re-wrote Canadian history with his novels of violence on the western frontier. On a personal note, I left Macmillan in 1986 to establish Douglas Gibson Books at M & S, and to become M & S's Publisher in 1988.
The 1972 hockey showdown with Russia was a central moment for all Canadians, including the great hockey fan Mordecai Richler, who returned to Montreal after his apprenticeship in England. In French his equivalent was Anne Hebert, a Quebecoise exile in Paris for many years. Unlike Mavis Gallant, she found that living in Paris did not harm her Canadian standing. Her 1970 novel Kamouraska was hailed as the best Quebec novel written in French.
Thanks to Dennis Lee's Alligator Pie, children's books took off in Canada, and thanks to Vancouver Island's Jack Hodgins, magic realism reached Canada's shores.
The Sixties were years of turmoil. In the U.S.A. Martin Luther King fought for Civil Rights for Blacks and reminded Canadians of their proud role in the Underground Railroad. Canada continued to force residential schools on Indigenous families. Manitoba's Margaret Laurence emerged as English Canada's most popular novelist. In Quebec the arts scene flourished with stars like Borduas and Riopelle while separatism grew, encouraged by General De Gaulle with his "Vive Le Quebec Libre" speech in Montreal in 1967. After the murder of Pierre Laporte, one of the leading Quebec novelists, Jacques Ferron, became a negotiator for the FLQ, while W.O. Mitchell spoke for Canada's sorrow.
The 1950's were when Canada prospered, with new TV sets and washing machines filling houses in new suburbs, as immigrants continued to arrive. This was the decade when Glenn Gould's recording of Bach was sent into space, and Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize. At home, John Diefenbaker rose to power, and I acquired a behind-the-scenes story about him by sitting on his wife's hat. This decade saw the rise of Robertson Davies, who later was to transform Canadian writing with his 1970 novel Fifth Business. This was the decade when James Houston (author of Confessions of an Igloo Dweller many years later), changed the Inuit Art World for ever. Meanwhile, in 1958 Yves Theriault wrote the great Arctic novel, Agaguk.
In 1939 Hitler put an end to Canada's Depression when money not available for starving Canadians on relief suddenly became available to buy war supplies. Canada's P.M., Mackenzie King was brilliantly satirised by Frank Scott in the poem W.M.L.K., while Gabrielle Roy's novel, The Tim Flute transformed Quebec writing by taking it into a grimy Montreal slum. Meanwhile Hugh MacLennan, whom I later edited, gave us all a new term for Canada with his novel Two Solitudes. The decade also saw the rise of two immensely popular novelists, Roger Lemelin (Les Plouffe) in Quebec, and W.O. Mitchell (Who Has Seen The Wind) on the Prairies.
The Depression from 1929 to 1939, hit Canada very hard, and we got a good sense of its impact in Barry Broadfoot's oral history, Ten Lost Years, which I edited. I also edited later novels by Morley Callaghan, whose 1937 book, More Joy in Heaven is the great Canadian English book about these hard times. In French, the harsh novel, Trente Arpents/Thirty Acres by Philippe Panneton/Ringuet, ended the tradition of idyllic rural fiction worshipping the land.
The Roaring Twenties saw the rise of the Group of Seven and Canadian Art, while Stephen Leacock became the world's most popular humourist, dividing his life between Orilla, Ontario, and the very Scottish McGill University in Montreal. Meanwhile a truly terrible novel set in Canada, involving a French hero boiling and eating his moccasins, won the Prix Goncourt for Maurice Constantin-Weyer.
The First World War cost Canada over 60,000 dead and changed the country. Hugh MacLennan's first novel Barometer Rising (1942) dealt with the Halifax explosion of 1917. His later book Two Solitudes described the conscription crisis in Quebec.
The great novels of the decade were by Charles Gordon/Ralph Connor and sold in the millions.
In French, the most important book of the decade was Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine.
Emile Nelligan is arguably Quebec's most talented and tragic poet. Lucy Maud Montgomery is the author of Canada's most perennially popular novel, Anne of Green Gables, which has brought millions of tourists to Prince Edward Island.
This decade includes the Indigenous writer Pauline Johnson and her Brantford schoolmate, Sarah Jeanette Duncan. Duncan was the first woman to write for the Globe and to become a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery before creating the Canadian classic novel,The Imperialist.
The decade of The Last Spike deals with Felicite Anger, who wrote as Laure Conan, the first great Quebecoise story teller, and a look at Louis Riel projects us forward to Margaret Laurence and her treatment of the Metis in The Diviners.
Decade by decade these lively book talks take us from 1867 all the way up to today. This survey by the "iconic" Editor and Publisher, Douglas Gibson, is very informal and deals with Canada's greatest fiction writers, both English and French. Bursts of music from each decade enliven this look at Canada's storytellers and their times.