Joan Rivers and Me

Aug8 by Douglas Gibson

I was on the stationary bike at my local gym, when the TV screen in front of me flashed an intriguing message: “POLICE WERE CALLED TO A L.A. STORE WHEN JOAN RIVERS HANDCUFFED HERSELF TO A SHOPPING CART.”

I should explain that the bank of TV sets at the gym produces some of the most amazing daytime programs, so that I regularly return home with breathless news about what Dr. Oz has discovered about pills to prevent cancer, or the special melons from the south of France that prevent Cindy Crawford’s face from aging, and much else. It’s a different world out there.

But now this, about Joan Rivers!

I have never met Joan Rivers, and if we did meet I suspect that we would not agree on many things, especially around the area of cosmetic surgery. And while she does not play a regular role in my imaginative life, the “handcuffed to a shopping cart” story certainly caught my eye.

Soon the second shoe dropped. The follow-up line came five minutes later. “SHE IS PROTESTING COSTCO’S FAILURE TO STOCK HER BOOK.”

Aha! The shopping cart ruse was not a stupid tantrum thrown by a never-was celebrity. It was an act of literary defiance by an author spurned. The people at Costco, you see, do not stock many titles, and work hard to screen out books of literary merit. They, and presumably their customers, want only popular blockbusters by established authors (or, to be fair, flavour-of-the-month newbies). And their choices run heavily to big novels, and self-help books, and books by show biz celebrities like . . . well, when you come to think of it, like Joan Rivers.

Another Aha moment! If you are Joan Rivers, and used to seeing banks of your latest artistic creation displayed in the book section at Costco, it must be a terrible moment of betrayal to find that Costco has decided to take a pass on your new “book.”

So I, and all authors with a new book fighting for space out there, share a moment (a very, very brief moment) of sympathy for the spurned author who decided to make her disappointment known. Few of us, however, would think of handcuffing ourselves to a shopping cart. Joan Rivers wins on imagination there, hands down, as it were.

I hope that she runs up against a judge with equal imagination who is aware that by causing this fuss Joan Rivers has let millions of people know that she has a new book out there. Ideally, Ms. Rivers would be compelled to remain handcuffed to the cart 24 hours a day for six months. That would be the perfect sentence . . . not a phrase usually associated with the books of Joan Rivers.

Moose Jaw Encounters

Aug7 by Douglas Gibson

The Saskatchewan Festival of Words has been held in Moose Jaw for 16 years now, but this was the first year that I was able to attend. Right away I saw why my authors had always enjoyed it so much.

Invited authors/performers are housed at the downtown Spa hotel, built around some natural hot springs full of healing waters. We found that every day had to involve at least one wallow in the soothingly warm pool on the top floor, where people sunbathe then swim, drink cool water, then repeat the dose. I was right at home because the little café beside the pool was named the Morningside Room, recognising the fact that Peter Gzowski (a sentimental graduate of the Moose Jaw Times-Herald) chose to stage his last Morningside broadcast from the hotel, and a photo of my friend Peter hangs on the café wall.

The festival itself is set a short walk away, in the library and the at gallery on the edge of Crescent Park. This is Moose Jaw’s central park (and indeed its Central Park) and is a fine blend of beauty and endless, active variety, which we explored every day.

I gave three readings, adapting my chosen excerpt to fit in with my co-reader. For example, matched with Harold Johnson, a truly impressive Cree-speaker who is a Crown Prosecutor in Laronge and has a Master’s Law Degree from Harvard, I chose to read about Saskatchewan’s own R.D. Symons, my very first author.

I was so impressed by Harold that I bought a copy of his novel, Charlie Muskrat. The trouble with literary festivals is that you hear so many fine readings that you end up buying lots of books. An occupational hazard.

Just Glad to Be Nominated – No, Honestly

Aug2 by Douglas Gibson

On Saturday, July 28, I went to Orillia for the exciting announcement about this year’s winners of the Canadian Authors’ Association prizes. I and Jonathan Vance and Richard Gwyn had been nominated (from among, they told us, countless authors of Canadian non-fiction books) for the Lela Common Prize in Canadian History.

I was, of course, very pleased to have my book nominated for an award, and in such good company. But the “history” designation worried me. So when the local TV station asked me what I planned to do if I won, I said, “Demand a recount!” My objection was that while Richard and Jonathan are real historians (who wear gloves in archives, and get ancient dust up their noses as they research Sir John A, or Canadians in Britain during the First World War) my book was a cheerful personal memoir of working with 20 famous Canadian authors, many of whom are still with us.

I argued, in fact, that while I am certainly a “mature” individual, I am not yet “history,” and I want no part of it. Yet.

As the day wore on, however, and Jonathan and I read from our books, and smiled continuously and were relentlessly charming, my objections to receiving the award weakened. At the evening dinner I was the keynote speaker, and the stars seemed to be aligned for a triumph for Stories About Storytellers. It was not to be. The absent Richard Gwyn received the award, and Jonathan and I consoled ourselves by saying, truthfully, that this was the result that we had expected.

And as the announcement was made, sitting with my game face on, I had just enough of a sniff of the smell of success to realise that while it is very pleasing to be nominated for a book prize, it must be much more pleasing to win one.

Is anybody listening?

The Best Possible Reader Response

Jul12 by Douglas Gibson

My five-year-old grandson, Alistair, has just learned to read. I sat down with him last weekend and showed him my book. He has already received his signed copy of “Granddad’s book,” which will interest him in about 15 years, but it has not so far affected his life one way or another, and has not caused him to go easy on me in street hockey or driveway tennis.

But this time I turned to the last sentence in my chapter on Alistair MacLeod, which speaks of “the latest deeds of my tiny grandchildren, Lindsay and Alistair.”

Alistair read it solemnly, his lips moving. Then he looked up, jumped to his feet, and ran into the kitchen, whooping “Lindsay, Lindsay! We’re in Granddad’s book. We’re famous!”

Words Really Matter

Jun11 by Douglas Gibson

Tourists in Cambodia are likely to find themselves given the chance to buy a jokey T-shirt with the message, “I Survived Cambodia.”

Ho, ho. Very witty.

In fact, it’s about as witty as tourists visiting Nazi death camps being offered amusing souvenirs that play on words like “concentration” or “gas.”
Because in Cambodia, in the memory of half of the population, survival was by no means a given. Millions died at the hands of their fellow-countrymen, during the days of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. To survive was a major achievement.

Most of us in the West are aware, to some extent, of what went on. We saw the movie The Killing Fields with its happy ending. And we know that Pol Pot was a bad guy. But a visit to Cambodia reveals a country that, in the words of one observer, is in the grip of post-traumatic stress. Tourists get more than a hint when they go to Toul Sleng prison, in downtown Phnom Penh (my daughter Katie lives about three blocks away). The site was a high school, and therefore a perfect location for a Khmer Rouge torture prison, since education was a threat to the peasant world the Khmer Rouge were creating. Now stunned tourists file through the cells with bloodstained beds with iron bars and shackles at the foot. After the dozens of silent, stained cells there are whole blocks filled with individual photos (police line-up style) of the men and women , and young teenagers, who were tortured to death there, or executed elsewhere.

Incredibly, in one row of photos of the condemned, one hero is smiling. He’s a dark-haired man in his late 30s, wearing a dark shirt. The smile is a resigned one, and there’s even a hint of a shrug in his pose (“What can you do?”). In the array of hundreds of doomed, grim faces, his resigned heroism stands out.

“I Survived Cambodia” T-shirts, anyone?

Most of the prisoners were shipped, by night, just outside the city to a site that we also visited, known as “The Killing Fields.” It’s a major tourist site, and even giggling school groups are soon stunned into silence as the tour takes you past the scene of so many deaths. To save bullets, many people were bludgeoned to death by the axes and hoes and hammers that are carefully preserved in the attached museum. Worst of all is the tree against which babies were smashed by the young Khmer Rouge soldiers who ran the place. I walked around the tree, to try to absorb the evil, in the vain hope of understanding what happened here. Almost as horrible is the central stupa, or tomb, where a mountain of skulls is arranged in a central case, layered according to the method of death. And the site still has clothes of the dead emerging from the soil, which I tripped over.

Witty T-shirts, get them while you can?

As a finale we arranged to visit the United Nations-supported Genocide Courtroom, where a few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders are being prosecuted. The Court was not in session, but a Canadian friend who works there took us in and allowed us to see the bullet-proof courtroom, walled off from the 400-seat spectator area. It’s an awkward blend of UN-supported international court and a Cambodian Court that is uneasily administered by the Government, which is all too aware of how much of the population was implicated in the Khmer Rouge crimes. When they captured Phnom Penh, for example, they forced the entire population out of the city, directed in different directions to become peasants at work on the land. To have spectacles, or soft hands, was usually enough for summary execution. Roughly three million people died in this internal genocide.

And where were we, concerned Canadians? Because Pol Pot opposed the “Commie” Vietnamese (who eventually marched in and deposed him) the Western powers continued to support the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia’s official government at the United Nations, for many years.

I’m learning more about all this. I have now read a memoir of these days, The Gate, by a French survivor, Francois Bizot, which I recommend, as John le Carré does in his foreword.

And I’m learning the power of the word “survived.”

For the Next Edition, Callaghan and Hemingway

May21 by Douglas Gibson

Usually an author greets the news that his information is out of date with some resentment. Making changes for the next edition is troublesome, and implies at least a hint of error first time around.

That’s not the case with my reaction to the recent Toronto Star articles on what recently discovered letters by Ernest Hemingway tell us about his relationship with young Morley Callaghan. They confirm what I wrote about Hemingway’s support for Morley’s early work. Even better, they reveal that he was willing to invest in Morley’s fiction, literally, offering to put up half of the money it would cost the publisher to bring the book out.

Later in the Star series, we learn more about the boxing match in Paris where Morley knocked the much larger Hemingway down. This event plays a role in my chapter on Morley and is re-enacted in my stage play, but it’s fascinating to find just how long it continued to rankle with Hemingway.

And the Star’s revelations about the theft of Callaghan-Hemingway letters from a Toronto rare book dealer, my friend David Mason, and David’s assertion that the accused thief’s suicide in the Don Jail was actually murder is all wonderful new material, worth preparing for that future edition.

Naturally, I’m still collecting a few corrections from eagle-eyed readers, and welcome more. To some extent.

On the Robertston Davies Trail

May14 by Douglas Gibson

The morning after the Arnprior show, Dave and Alison fed me kippers then took me on a sentimental journey to Renfrew. This was the town, sixty miles northwest of Ottawa, where Robertson Davies (born in 1913) spent the years from 1919 to 1925.

The town (a little larger than its rival, Arnprior, to the east) had a huge influence on Davies during those formative years. As Judith Skelton Grant shows in her expert biography, Davies did not enjoy Renfrew, and he got his revenge with the portrait he painted of “Blairlogie” in What’s Bred in the Bone. “It thought of itself as a thriving town, and for its inhabitants the navel of the universe.” (The physical metaphor could, I suppose, have been worse.)

He wrote about its proud ignorance and its exclusivity (where newcomers were concerned), and commented on the three-layer cake of its inhabitants, with the Scots on top, followed by the French, then with the newer Polish immigrants at the bottom. Even at the age of 70, his feelings about Renfrew were so strong that he felt that he had to write “to get it out of my system.”

We began our tour with a visit to the McDougall Mill Museum, kindly opened for us specially by the very knowledgeable Mr. Gilchrist. The museum building itself is hugely impressive, set beside a fast section of the Bonnechere River. Since Renfrew was at the heart of the timber trade, the museum is rich in examples of the tools of the trade involved in “hurling down the pine.” There are many photographs of the local bands that must have entertained young Rob Davies, and posters for the “O’Brien Opera House,” which we know he attended. For What’s Bred in the Bone he turned Senator O’Brien (who was in fact an important figure not only in the lumber trade, but also in the development of hockey, and the man behind The Renfrew Millionaires) into Senator McRory.

It was notable that the sports teams from the start of the century shown in team photos all featured Scottish and Irish names. By the 1950s there was a fair sprinkling of Polish names on the team.

We tried to trace the three Davies houses in Renfrew. Of the first house Judith Skelton Grant writes that “the Davieses were dismayed to find that the house . . . arranged for them was in the Polish section of town.” We found the house on Cross Avenue, and I roamed around outside, taking in the stark red-brick exterior. As if on cue a young man came out to check the mailbox just by the front door. I greeted him with my usual charm: “Hi there! Did you know that a famous author once lived in this house?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, his name was Robertson Davies, a famous Canadian author. He lived right here when he was a boy, about a hundred years ago.”

If I’d told him that birds sometimes landed on the roof of his house his shrugging reaction would have been the same: “Whauuh,” followed by a determined return to the house and a slamming of the door.

We found the old site of the Renfrew Mercury office, where Davies sometimes helped his father (at the age of nine he even wrote a review of a local lecture, where a lady sang “very acceptably”). It is now a sporting goods store, right next door to the grand central post office on Raglan Street. We failed to find the second house, but did cross the dramatically swaying suspension bridge that he crossed every morning to get to school. And we did find the dramatic final Davies House (now a Doctor’s Surgery) in the best part of town, marking the rise of the Davies family over those Renfrew years.

We did not knock on the doctor’s door. Although the woman who runs the sporting goods store had heard of him.

Politics and the Pen

May7 by Douglas Gibson

For 16 years now, the Writers’ Development Trust has been running a fundraising dinner at Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier Hotel, under the title Politics and the Pen. The theory is that if you offer people the chance to sit at a table with a politician (designated with a medal on a gold ribbon) and a writer (ditto, but with a green ribbon), they will gladly turn out for a good meal in aid of a good cause. The theory really works. This year 500 formally dressed men and women filled the Chateau’s main banquet room, and the Trust raised about $300,000 to distribute among deserving writerly causes.

I’ve attended many of these Ottawa dinners in the past. My book (you know the title) tells the story of how I was assigned to the central table of Prime Minister Paul Martin (whom I had not met) on the grounds that “Oh, Doug can talk with anyone.”

In those days I always attended in my role as publisher of many politically engaged books. Sometimes my role was a triumphant one, as when the Shaughnessy Cohen Award presented at the dinner went to Young Trudeau, by my authors Max and Monique Nemni.

This year I did double duty, because I was the proud Publisher of the Nemnis’ Trudeau Transformed, also nominated for the award. But my special pride was to attend this year as an author, with my green ribbon around my neck. I’m afraid that I was so proud of my new honorary status that I flaunted my medal and ribbon shamelessly to other writing friends . . . Richard Gwyn (this year’s winner), Max and Monique, Denise Chong, Terry Fallis, Graham Fraser, Jeffrey Simpson, Taras Grescoe, George Tombs (translator and author), Ray Robertson, Charlotte Gray, John Ibbitson, Paul Wells, and many, many more.

As for the politicians, our table was graced by my old journalist friend Peter Kent, and in the pre-dinner melee I chatted with old friends like Bob and Arlene Rae, and new friends like Tom Mulcair, Megan Leslie of Halifax (“Do I know Silver Donald Cameron? You should see the sign he puts up on the Arm”) and Peggy Nash (“Your daughter is one of my constituents”) amid others of all parties, all on their best behaviour. A pleasant and inspiring evening.

By way of contrast, I had a sharp dose of reality when I walked that afternoon down Sussex Drive to the site of the old Nicholas Hoare bookshop. It used to be a fine, elegant store, so well-placed and so spacious that I selected it regularly for launch parties and readings for books by important Ottawa authors like Jeffrey Simpson and Graham Fraser. On my retirement Jane and I even held a farewell soiree there for our literary friends.

Now the store is closed, for ever, with a sharply worded sign on the door explaining that the landlord, the National Capital Commission(!) had killed it by demanding a 73% rent increase.

Peering through the streaked windows, I could see that all of the elegant shelves had been pulled down and tossed into a splintered heap, with stray chairs riding on top of the jagged pile.

Is there anything sadder than a deserted, shuttered bookstore?

Arnprior Is a Priority

May7 by Douglas Gibson

The day after my time swanning around the Chateau Laurier as one of the Honoured Guests at Politics and the Pen, I was picked up at the hotel and whisked an hour west to Arnprior. The whiskers were my old friends David Lewis Stein and his wife, Alison. Dave is famous as the author (whom I’m proud to have published) and Toronto Star columnist who dressed like a Damon Runyon character, a fedora always perched on his head. He was also famous as the man who really knew Toronto city politics, inside out, and was the ultimate streetwise, big-city guy. And now he has retired to Arnprior, a little town of about 8,000 in the Ottawa Valley, where Alison’s family has ancient links.

How are they doing? Very well indeed, to judge from my happy stay with them at the big Victorian house that sits about 100 yards away from the distinctive Arnprior Museum, where Alison puts in volunteer time. About fifty yards down the main street is Gwen Storie’s bookstore.That evening the amazing Gwen and her staff rearranged the store to accommodate 40 paying customers ($15.00, including a delicious snack in the bakery next door) and I gave my show.

And we sold 26 copies! If you walk down the street in Arnprior, the odds that the first person you meet has a copy of my book at home are pretty good!

The more serious message is that a good local bookstore can act as an important community centre, and I’m glad to do all I can to help the Gwen Stories of this world.

Douglas Gibson

Editor and Publisher . . . turned Author and Performer

Author Archives: Douglas Gibson