A modern monument to “Extraordinary Canadians”
Penguin Canada launches a landmark undertaking to describe the Canadian soul
Nelly McClung, by Charlotte Gray (Penguin Books), 204 pp
Books: my fun, my schooling, my first, truest and only love. I write often about theatre in this paper, but, in confession, I write theatre from the vantage point of literature. Nothing in life exists until it is articulated to another human. Even the study of history itself is simply the creation of a narrative line sketched between the anchor points of existing facts.
This is what makes the Extraordinary Canadians series of historical biographies from Penguin Canada so compelling. Twenty extraordinary lives culled from diverse walks: from political figures like Tommy Douglas and Big Bear to nation-building philosophers like Marshall McLuhan. Series editor John Ralston Saul understands exactly how the identity of a culture is formed: “Words, words, words – it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.” And fittingly, he continues: “The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists.”
Charlotte Gray’s recounting of the life of Nelly McClung is what you would expect from a historian and fiction writer of her status. It lacks the sheer avalanche of footnoted facts many historical works contain, but crafting the story more as a novel allows a beautiful thickness of description and exploration into McClung’s life. It sums up swaths of history in a sometimes truncated, but never incorrect way (“McClung’s breezy self-assurance and Methodist zeal faltered in the
next few years”). And in tracing her path through history Gray often circles back to probing the feelings behind the action, the family behind the public figure. In treating her as fiction, Gray generates the intimacy with McClung that we can feel for fictional characters.
The same method allows David Adams Richards to tell a truly fascinating version of the life of Lord Beaverbrook. As McClung’s story circled constantly around her family and inner life, so Richards plots the tale of Lord Beaverbrook to always circle back to his namesake river and boyhood home. Through a wild tale of international politics and a world-shaping role in WWII, Richards keeps us focused on the brash, tough maritime boy ostensibly lying at the heart of the man.
Lewis DeSoto’s examination of Emily Carr is probably one of the most easily accessible dips into that incredible painter’s life one can find. The story, however, is fraught with a foreign and alien energy. In this retelling Carr’s essential strangeness is emphasized. Where other historical figures are situated at the centre of a web of people and experience, the story of Emily Carr moves from singular to singular. From one place, one person, to another, always feeling alone and rejected, and always shot through with the urge of her idealistic seeking. It’s a fascinating if somewhat numinously dour tale.
Emily Carr, by Lewis DeSoto (Penguin Books), 185 pp
Finding the fiction in history is a universal experience – we all slide into the future and suddenly find ourselves redrawing our memories of events or relationships past. Was that person really what I remember? What impact did that day have on my life? Sooner or later those dimensions of reality slip into either blackness or stark objectivity, boiled clean by time. But this fragility also happens to be beautiful. If we see ourselves and our culture through the lens of these stories, and learn from the narrative of their lives, then that beauty can become a high and divine form of truth.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Aug 21, 2008
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=15374
