Tom Wolfe at the Door

by Douglas Gibson

I have always been a fan of Tom Wolfe, ever since his first book came out in 1965 with the modest title The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I have followed his work through the years with admiration , as he combined his Yale Ph.D. analytical intelligence with his journalist’s love of getting deep into sweaty crowds, and his shameless . . . Heeeewack! . . . love of dramatic utterances on the page.

It deserved the title, “The New Journalism,” and he was the ultimate master of the form.

I was delighted when after The Right Stuff, in 1979,  he turned his hand to fiction, and was not surprised when his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) was a spectacular success, selling 800,000 copies in hardcover and being hailed (to the rage of the Updike, Mailer, and Irving old guard) as the great American novel of the decade.

When a not very successful movie was made of his fine book, Wolfe was asked, anxiously, how he felt about the movie. His reply was perfect: “I cashed the cheque.”

And of course, he has made a success of his novels since then, turning his laser-like attention to different groups in a variety of American cities. His latest book, set in Florida, is entitled Back to Blood. An unusual title, and it rang faint bells. I went back to my edition of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and started to read the opening scene. The Jewish Mayor of New York is up in Harlem at a public meeting, and is getting a very rough ride from the hostile crowd. As the volume of racial hostility swells, he thinks about how basic all this is:

“Oh, she’s afraid like all the rest! She knows she should stand up against this element! They’ll go after black people like her next! They’ll be happy to do it! She knows that. But the good people are intimidated! They don’t dare do a thing! Back to blood! Them and us!”

Fascinating. That phrase occurs on page 6 of a 659-page novel published  in 1987. In 2012 the phrase Tom Wolfe invented re-appears as the title of his new book. Has he been waiting all those years to use it again, this time as a title?

How authors arrive at titles is often surprising and revealing. Not many people know, for example, that although Two Solitudes seems to be such a perfect title for Hugh Maclennan’s 1945 novel, he only came across it (in a book review!) when the novel was two-thirds written. Surely there must be room for a worthy Ph.D. thesis here . . . did Scott Fitzgerald try the phone book, aware that The Great Smith didn’t really work? Did Morley Callaghan comb through the Bible, rejecting And His Ox and His Ass in favour of More Joy in Heaven? And did some authors fixate on a perfect title, then invent a book to go with it?

Start your engines.

A final Tom Wolfe note. When I was a boy editor, around 1970, my company, Doubleday Canada, distributed Tom Wolfe’s books. So when he came to Toronto to give a speech promoting one of his new books (it may have been Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers) I joined the carload taking him up to York University. In those days York was perched away on the edge of Toronto, more part of the flat hinterlands than of the (now-encroaching) city. As I explained the history of the young university to our visitor, he gazed around at all of the widely spread new buildings. He thought hard, then said: “It’s kind of like Brasilia, isn’t it?”

My York University friends, including my daughter-in-law Lauren, who teaches there, are restrained in their enthusiasm for this comment.

“Apart from the incident, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?”

by Douglas Gibson

It was around 1960, and I was an irreverent kid in high school. Part of the irreverence involved me and a friend in writing comedy sketches for our (very traditional) school pantomime. So I paid keen attention to what was happening in the world of jokes.
In America Mort Sahl was happening, and a great revolution was producing the very first “sick joke” . . . which you can see above. When I first heard it,  I had the “watcher of the skies / when some new planet swims into his ken” feeling — as P.G.Wodehouse, a very different type of humourist, once put it, to describe a sense of discovery of something totally new. The Lincoln joke showed that suddenly nothing was out of bounds. There were no things that you “just couldn’t joke about.” Not anymore.

I rode the new wave enthusiastically. Even in my first university year at St. Andrews, I was involved in writing and performing comedy sketches with a group of friends. There was no money involved, but we got free tickets to the fancy, formal Balls for which we provided the half-time entertainment. By the second year I was the MC of an occasional student night-club in an empty church hall. For reasons hidden in the mists of time we called it GAP (too bad there was no copyright on the commercial use of the title we invented) and although we didn’t bother with a liquor licence, we drew packed crowds to dance and enjoy the music and the unforgettably witty sketches. (We even drew unruly crowds at the door, but that, and the fight with a head-butting sailor, is another story.)

These were the days when “That Was the Week That Was” ruled BBC  TV on Saturday night, and satire was a big part of what we wrote and performed. Sick jokes made an occasional appearance: I remember one “bedtime story for little ones,” read by a leering uncle figure. It was a variant on the traditional story of Greyfriars Bobby, the little dog that charmed all of Edinburgh by his daily trips to sit sadly at his master’s grave. Our variant, I’m sorry to say, involved Bobby (a bone-loving little dog) in seeking daily sustenance at the grave. The howls of outrage as the implications dawned on the crowd were very pleasing to us.

Later in that second year I had a minor role in a real stage performance (Ionesco’s The Leader) which involved me in shouting, “The leader, the leader” very loudly and excitedly. The director was a student friend, Alan Strachan, who in later life went on to be the famous head of The Greenwich Theatre in London. Alan formed a group of us — four men and two women – to produce a comedy revue, a little like “Beyond the Fringe.” We took over the town theatre, The Byre, for a week of evening performances. We even ran matinees of “Six After Eight” on Wednesday and Saturday, when the show proved to be a hit.

I wrote and performed  and even sang! One of the high points was when I appeared, front and centre, to produce a Malcolm-Muggeridge-style lecture on “Trends in Humour.” I told the audience that “Satire has come and gone. Now, many experts in the field are predicting that the new trend will be slapstick.” Before I could continue, a bare arm reached around the curtain and smashed a large cream pie into my face. Blackout and delighted laughter! I had to be led, blinded by banana cream, off-stage by a kind stage manager. Even in the dressing room as I gasped to clear my face to breathe again, I could hear the audience still laughing.

When people who see the current stage show Stories About Storytellers ask if I’ve done much stage work in the past, I tend to say, “Not really, but I did a little back in university.” Now all of the interest in the new movie about Lincoln has brought back memories of the impact of that original Mrs. Lincoln joke. Lincoln may have been involved in things like waging the American Civil War, and freeing the slaves. But, as you can see, he had a continuing role in what we might call my dramatic life.

Editing Tips from Douglas Gibson (#29)

by JK

In this recurring feature, we’re sharing tips for editors from the desk of Douglas Gibson. Good for those starting out or old hands who need a reminder, these guidelines form an engaging guide for sharp-eyed wordsmiths.

Tip #29: Partial to Partial

Because the adjective “partial” implies “fond of” or even “biased towards,” the adverb “partially” should not be used as a synonym for “partly.”

In fact, “partly” should be the editor’s choice every time, unless bias is specifically involved, and implied. So, no more buildings “partially destroyed” by a great wind, please.

Fred Bodsworth

by Douglas Gibson

Reading of Fred Bodsworth’s death reminded me of three occasions when our paths crossed. The first time was when I was being interviewed for my very first job in publishing, as an editor. “What, exactly, does an editor do?” I asked David Manuel, the man who was considering me. By way of an answer he gave me a copy of his edited manuscript of Fred Bodsworth’s The Sparrow’s Fall. The respectful editing suggestions penciled on this fine novel of a native family surviving in the North (through starvation so harsh that the hunter baits a fishing hook with a slice of his own flesh, to catch a life-saving fish through the ice) so impressed me that I decided that this was what I should do with my life.

The next episode marked a tragic failure on my part. I inherited Fred as an author, and in the early 1970s he was at work on a book that would have made him a household name, possibly another Rachel Carson. His background as a student of nature, and as the author of Last of the Curlews, made him aware of just how important what we now call “the environment” is to all of us. In his own words, quoted in the Globe’s fine obituary by Nora Ryell, “man is an inescapable part of all nature . . . he cannot continue acting and regarding himself as a spectator looking on from somewhere outside.”

That was the vitally important theme of the book he was working on forty years ago. Yet he was such a dedicated scientist and research-driven journalist that as new evidence of the growing environmental crisis kept flooding in, Fred tried to keep up with it, and to incorporate it in his new book. In the process, when he suggested that “There is no away!” to which we can consign harmful products, we thought that we had a title; but in the end, as the book, like the subject, kept on growing, there was no book. And the world was left unaware of what a great environmental thinker Fred Bodsworth was.

But he remained a quiet general enthusiast. I remember him, well into his 80s, toting a bird-sighting scope at Ashbridges Bay, his eyes alight at the prospect of seeing a reported Harlequin Duck. I was sorry to have to report that it had just taken off across the lake for parts unknown.

Alice Munro Is Not Often Associated with Disappointment

by Douglas Gibson

As many of you will know, this year’s Toronto International Festival of Authors was supposed to feature an appearance by Alice Munro on October 19. To be more precise, it was supposed to be an on-stage conversation between Alice and me. All of the tickets were sold, the media were panting, the excitement was building . . . and then Alice’s health meant that we had to cancel it.

I tried very hard to make it possible.

But there were warnings. For example, Alice was unable to come, as planned, to my stage show at the Blyth Festival on September 28th.  And can you imagine my anticipated pleasure at presenting my section on “ALICE MUNRO: Not Bad Short Story Writer,” in Blyth, the heart of Alice Munro Country, with Alice herself in the audience?

Blyth, I should explain, played a major role in Alice’s life. Her father, Robert Laidlaw, was born on a Blyth farm, went to school there, and eventually set up his  trap-line along Blyth Creek, to augment his role as a young Huron County farm boy. He went after muskrats, weasels, mink and even foxes, which led him to his life raising foxes for their fur, in nearby Wingham, where Alice grew up.

Alice, too, has strong links with the Blyth Festival Theatre. In the 1990s (as Robert Thacker recounts in his classic biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives) she acted in two theatrical fundraisers there. In her words, quoted by an interviewing journalist, “In one  play – both of them were murder mysteries – I was an aging but still sexually voracious professor of English . . . And in another I played a lady writer who comes into the library and demands to know if any of her books are available. I loved it.”

Thacker continues, “When the journalist asked her why she would do this since she was well known for avoiding publicity connected with her writing, Munro’s response was interesting. “Well, that’s because I have to be me,” she says to explain her dislike of such self-promotion. “With acting, I love the mask.”

It was at a Blyth Theatre fundraising chicken supper that Alice played the mischievous waitressing role recounted by Val Ross in my book, and repeated in my stage show . . . the one that Alice was unable to attend.

But our Alice Munro Country weekend didn’t end after the show, which later featured a very interesting and informative panel discussion of Alice’s work. After spending the night with friends in Stratford, we headed back west to attend an event in Alice’s honour at the Wingham Golf Club, where the winners of a local writing competition were celebrated. The former Bayfield bookseller, Mary Wolfe, gave a fine account of Alice and her work, and Jane and I returned to spend the night at the Ben Miller Inn, on the Maitland River (always a source of unearned pride to a man with my middle name).

Later that week, to leave no stone unturned, I headed back from Toronto to Huron County to chat with Alice, to see if there was any way to salvage the Harbourfront event. I drove west from Stratford, on Highway 8, the old Huron Line that the settlers followed. As usual I found myself contentedly ticking off the familiar towns . . . Sebringville, Mitchell, Dublin (celebrated in my book for the realism of the settlers who named the majestic local waterway, “the Liffey Drain”), Seaforth, Clinton (Alice’s town, though tourists seeking directions to her house will encounter a veil of protective ignorance) and Goderich, where we were to meet for lunch.

I had not seen Goderich since last summer’s tornado tore through, and was shocked by the damage. When Alice and Gerry met me for lunch at the restaurant at the top of the hill going down to the Goderich harbour, I noted that Baillie’s, the restaurant on the “square” where Alice usually liked to meet friends, and where her books were displayed, had been wiped out, almost as if it had been the target of the storm. Alice chose to consider the gloomy possibility that this was the sign of a jealous God at work.

So she was her usual amusing self, but it soon became clear that all of my plans to make her Toronto stage appearance as undemanding — and as untiring — as possible for this 81-year-old were simply not going to work. So we had a nice lunch, and both of her arms remained untwisted. When we hugged goodbye, she noted fondly that we had been through “some interesting times over the years.” I was able to reply that I didn’t regret a moment of those, let’s see, 35 years.

But I do regret the Harbourfront show that we never gave. Speaking selfishly, it would have been a type of pinnacle for me. Speaking for the audience, and for Alice Munro admirers everywhere, I’m convinced it would have been a very memorable evening.