Category Archives: Dispatches from the Road

Words Really Matter

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.”

Cambodia Is Close to Canada (and not just in U.N. seating)

by JK

Almost three weeks in Cambodia brought some unexpected links with Canada. We were visiting my daughter Katie, who has turned her back on a high-flying legal career in Toronto (she was a clerk at both the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court in Ottawa) to do good work among struggling NGO’s in Phnom Penh. Katie took us around the country, including an evening performance of a circus in Battambang that helps to give street kids a profession.

Fresh from my being mistaken as the starter at the Deer Creek Golf Club, I was standing around in my Tilley hat while the milling crowds waited to be told to head for the big top . At this point a French gentleman approached me, the authority figure, to ask loudly if I was in charge. I’m afraid that I missed the opportunity to take charge of a circus, with jugglers, acrobats and tightrope walkers . . . surely the perfect career for a retired publisher.

Later, down in the southwest corner of Cambodia, in a forested natural area with road signs warning of elephants, a more direct Canadian link appeared. We were visiting the Four Rivers Hotel , which consists of private tents set on top of floating docks on a tidal river 15 kilometres in from the Gulf of Thailand. The manager, Francois Lamontagne, revealed himself as a man from Lennoxville!

Excited conversations about Sherbrooke and North Hatley ensued. Yes, he knew Hugh MacLennan! From a later career in film in Montreal he knew my friends who worked on the Trudeau documentary, and he had great tales of Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin, another Eastern Townships man. How on earth did Francois end up running a lodge on a warm Cambodian river, where we could swim to an island where fruit grew wild on every tree? Ah, he told us, it was a long story.

When we were half an hour from departing on the boat (an African Queen lookalike, minus Humphrey Bogart) I strolled into the little library, where previous visitors had bequeathed worthy books to later guests. There, to my delight, among a smorgasbord of books in various languages, I found Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro, with its dedication to her Port Hope son-in-law. To hold Alice’s book — even if it was the U.K. edition – while the sound of the jungle clicked and whirred around us, was almost too much happiness.

On the Robertston Davies Trail

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

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

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.

A Remarkable Book Launch for a Remarkable Book

by Douglas Gibson

On March 18, I went to an event at Ryerson University to celebrate the launch of an important book just published by University of Toronto Press. The book is The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture, and the author is Ruth Panofsky, who is a Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson.

Canadian book publishing has not been a subject well covered in our books. The striking exception is The Perilous Trade, by Roy MacSkimming (which I would praise, even if I had not published it at M&S). Now this fascinating new book by Ruth Panofsky turns a spotlight on this now-disappeared company that for 90 years, from its creation in 1905, was one of Canada’s most important publishers, arguably M&S’s main rival in the great work of creating Canadian Literature.

A warning and a disclaimer: I am hopelessly prejudiced in this matter, because I was Editorial Director and then Publisher at Macmillan from 1974 until I left to set up my own imprint at M&S in 1986. So I am delighted to see attention paid to this vitally important company, and in such a thorough and wide-ranging way as Ruth Panofsky has achieved.

A further disclaimer: Ruth, who interviewed me at length, has chosen to tell the sweeping story in six sections, each attached to a leading figure. The last such figure is me, in a section entitled “Editorial Coda 1974-1986: Douglas Maitland Gibson.” And the portrait painted of me is very, very kind. If I were to quote many of the last 30 pages you might accuse me of being conceited, instead of the true situation, where I am humbled. Here are the last two sentences in the book.

“Moreover, Gibson brought Macmillan’s publishing ethos to McClelland and Stewart where it touched his own imprint, Douglas Gibson Books. In the end, notwithstanding the company’s gradual demise and the eventual disappearance of its imprint, Macmillan’s legacy endured in Gibson’s lasting relationships with writers and the landmark books he edited – many by authors with former ties to the venerable Macmillan Company of Canada.”

What can I say?

Except thank you to Ruth Panofsky to devoting her attention to this now-vanished company, and to U of T Press for bringing it out so expertly, and for staging a launch party where the author and Quill & Quire’s Steven Beattie staged a discussion that was so lively that even retiring members of the audience (that would be me!) felt obliged to get involved. An interesting event, about an interesting book.

“Get the Lead Out” at Massey College

by JK

On Wednesday, March 28, Massey College was the setting for a panel discussion by a number of grand old typesetters/designers/booklovers such as Stan Bevington of Coach House Books, Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press, independent designer Will Reuter, and so on. The thoughtful discussion (dealing with rare topics such as the delights of letterpress printing, and with Andrew’s division of those who bought The Sentimentalists after its Giller Prize win into “readers” and “consumers”) drew a full house, including two veterans of the Canadian publishing mainstream, William Toye of Oxford University Press and yours truly. Photo is by Don McLeod.

Aurora Public Library

by Douglas Gibson

This March event was my first appearance at a library (apart from the Wolf Hall Theatre, in the London library), with the enterprising Blue Heron Books on hand to sell copies. I hope that there will be many other library events around the province and the country.

The talk was held in the Magna Room in the library, which reminded me of just how extensive the impact of Magna is on the community (and have you ever driven around the massive Magna main campus, modelled on Versailles, just east of town?) I did not get around to mentioning Wayne Lilley’s balanced but properly critical book Magna Cum Laude: How Frank Stronach Became Canada’s Best-Paid Man, which I was proud to publish half a dozen years ago. It criticized Frank for excessive interest in his money-losing racetracks, and for corporate governance that neglected share-holders, two themes that were to become headline news in the years after the book was published, when the Magna Chairman, a former politician named Mike Harris, was ridiculed for the rich pay-out granted to his friend Frank.

Ah, well, the Magna Room was a fine space, and I had an enjoyable evening.

There was one uneasy moment, when, in answer to a question, I spoke about Brian Mulroney sympathetically. This provoked the cynical question “Did you pay him in cash?,” which I pretended not to understand.

Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club

by JK

My tour of many clubs as a performer reached new heights here. We had to close the curtains in my lecture hall, otherwise the audience would have been mesmerized, as I was, by the skaters whizzing by to the west, and the curlers scrubbing excitedly to the east. Some of the best figure skaters in the world train here (under staff like Brian Orser) and on a scouting mission before my show I watched a coach use a training harness (like a giant fishing rod dangling above the skater’s head) as the young skater tried a new, tricky, unfamiliar jump.

The evening went well, with Jane selling many copies of my book, some of them via a club chit system swiftly organized by her cousin, the admirable Doug Knights, the club’s manager.

Edmonton

by Douglas Gibson

My time as the invited Corus Lecturer at Grant MacEwan University allowed me to spend an entire day on campus, visiting and chatting with classes. Very interesting, especially the sociology of facing a Media Studies classroom where the 30 students are all hidden behind vertical fixed computer screens, on which they are typing . . . who knows what? I had some success in attracting their attention, since some of them followed me to the John L. Haas theatre that evening, where the audience of about 300 seemed to enjoy the evening. The description (attached elsewhere in this website) by the West Edmonton Local uses nice words like “captivated.”

Roaming around downtown Edmonton next day I came on a fascinating Ukrainian-language bookstore, which I was informed is “the biggest in North America.” Who knew?

Close by, I came on a stretch of Jasper Avenue East made up of interesting old buildings erected around 1912-13. One of them, in the “flatiron” style, was named “The Gibson Block.” I regretted not having a camera with me, because I would have enjoyed posing beside it. Ho, ho.

Not so fast. When I investigated the historic plaque, I learned that the building was erected by one William Gibson (good) who came west from Ontario (good, and no doubt earlier from Scotland, very good) and erected this building, where the street level featured a well-known eating place called “The Gibson Café.” All very good, until I reached the line “with its now-notorious sign outside ‘White Help Only.”

Very, very bad.

I guess if we’re going to take pride in our names, we have to take the rough with the smooth.

— Douglas Gibson